‘You are learning,’ Scobie said. ‘A week ago you were so frightened of him …’ The boy came in with a tray set out with glasses, limes, water, a new gin bottle.
‘This isn’t the boy I talked to,’ Scobie said.
‘No, that one went. You talked to him too fiercely.’
‘And this one came?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s your name, boy?’
‘Vande, sah.’
‘I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?’
‘No, sah.’
‘Who am I?’
‘You big policeman, sah.’
‘Don’t frighten this one away,’ Helen said.
‘Who were you with?’
‘I was with D.C. Pemberton up bush, sah. I was small boy.’
‘Is that where I saw you?’ Scobie said. ‘I suppose I did. You look after this missus well now, and when she goes home, I get you big job. Remember that.’
‘You haven’t looked at the stamps,’ Scobie said.
‘No, I haven’t, have I?’ A spot of gin fell upon one of the stamps and stained it. He watched her pick it out of the pile, taking in the straight hair falling in rats’ tails over the nape as though the Atlantic had taken the strength out of it for ever, the hollowed face. It seemed to him that he had not felt so much at ease with another human being for years—not since Louise was young. But this case was different, he told himself: they were safe with each other. He was more than thirty years the older; his body in this climate had lost the sense of lust; he watched her with sadness and affection and enormous pity because a time would come when he couldn’t show her around in a world where she was at sea. When she turned and the light fell on her face she looked ugly, with the temporary ugliness of a child. The ugliness was like handcuffs on his wrists.
He said, ‘That stamp’s spoilt. I’ll get you another.’
‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘it goes in as it is. I’m not a real collector.’
He had no sense of responsibility towards the beautiful and the graceful and the intelligent. They could find their own way. It was the face for which nobody would go out of his way, the face that would never catch the covert look, the face which would soon be used to rebuffs and indifference that demanded his allegiance. The word ‘pity’ is used as loosely as the word ‘love’: the terrible promiscuous passion which so few experience.
She said, ‘You see, whenever I see that stain I’ll see this room …’
‘Then it’s like a snapshot.’
‘You can pull a stamp out,’ she said with a terrible youthful clarity, ‘and you don’t know that it’s ever been there.’ She turned suddenly to him and said, ‘It’s so good to talk to you. I can say anything I like. I’m not afraid of hurting you. You don’t want anything out of me. I’m safe.’
‘We’re both safe.’ The rain surrounded them, falling regularly on the iron roof.
She said, ‘I have a feeling that you’d never let me down.’ The words came to him like a command he would have to obey however difficult. Her hands were full of the absurd scraps of paper he had brought her. She said, ‘I’ll keep these always. I’ll never have to pull these out.’
Somebody knocked on the door and a voice said, ‘Freddie Bagster. It’s only me. Freddie Bagster,’ cheerily.
‘Don’t answer,’ she whispered, ‘don’t answer.’ She put her arm in his and watched the door with her mouth a little open as though she were out of breath. He had the sense of an animal which had been chased to its hole.
‘Let Freddie in,’ the voice wheedled. ‘Be a sport, Helen. Only Freddie Bagster.’ The man was a little drunk.
She stood pressed against him with her hand on his side. When the sound of Bagster’s feet receded, she raised her mouth and they kissed. What they had both thought was safety proved to have been the camouflage of an enemy who works in terms of friendship, trust and pity.
II
The rain poured steadily down, turning the little patch of reclaimed ground on which his house stood back into swamp again. The window of the room blew to and fro. At some time during the night the catch had been broken by a squall of wind. Now the rain had blown in, his dressing-table was soaking wet, and there was a pool of water on the floor. His alarm clock pointed to 4.25. He felt as though he had returned to a house that had been abandoned years ago. It would not have surprised him to find cobwebs over the mirror, the mosquito-net hanging in shreds and the dirt of mice upon the floor.
He sat down on a chair and the water drained off his trousers and made a second pool around his mosquito-boots. He had left his umbrella behind, setting out on his walk home with an odd jubilation, as though he had rediscovered something he had lost, something which belonged to his youth. In the wet and noisy darkness he had even lifted his voice and tried out a line from Fraser’s song, but his voice was tuneless. Now somewhere between the Nissen hut and home he had mislaid his joy.
At four in the morning he had woken. Her head lay in his side and he could feel her hair against his breast. Putting his hand outside the net he found the light. She lay in the odd cramped attitude of someone who has been shot in escaping. It seemed to him for a moment even then, before his tenderness and pleasure awoke, that he was looking at a bundle of cannon fodder. The first words she said when the light had roused her were, ‘Bagster can go to hell.’
‘Were you dreaming?’
She said, ‘I dreamed I was lost in a marsh and Bagster found me.’
He said, ‘I’ve got to go. If we sleep now, we shan’t wake again till it’s light.’ He began to think for both of them, carefully. Like a criminal he began to fashion in his own mind the undetectable crime: he planned the moves ahead: he embarked for the first time in his life on the long legalistic arguments of deceit. If so-and-so … then that follows. He said, ‘What time does your boy turn up?’
‘About six I think. I don’t know. He calls me at seven.’
‘Ali starts boiling my water about a quarter to six. I’d better go.’ He looked carefully everywhere for signs of his presence: he straightened a mat and hesitated over an ash-tray. Then at the end of it all he had left his umbrella standing against the wall. It seemed to him the typical action of a criminal. When the rain reminded him of it, it was too late to go back. He would have to hammer on her door, and already in one hut a light had gone on. Standing in his own room with a mosquito-boot in his hand, he thought wearily and drearily, In future I must do better than that.
In the future—that was where the sadness lay. Was it the butterfly that died in the act of love? But human beings were condemned to consequences. The responsibility as well as the guilt was his—he was not a Bagster: he knew what he was about. He had sworn to preserve Louise’s happiness, and now he had accepted another and contradictory responsibility. He felt tired by all the lies he would some time have to tell; he felt the wounds of those victims who had not yet bled. Lying back on the pillow he stared sleeplessly out towards the grey early morning tide. Somewhere on the face of those obscure waters moved the sense of yet another wrong and another victim, not Louise, nor Helen.
PART TWO
1
I
‘THERE. WHAT DO you think of it?’ Harris asked with ill-concealed pride. He stood in the doorway of the hut while Wilson moved cautiously forward between the brown sticks of Government furniture like a setter through stubble.
‘Better than the hotel,’ Wilson said cautiously, pointing his muzzle towards a Government easy-chair.
‘I thought I’d give you a surprise when you got back from Lagos.’ Harris had curtained the Nissen hut into three: a bedroom for each of them and a common sitting-room. ‘There’s only one point that worries me. I’m not sure whether there are any cockroaches.’
‘Well, we only played the game to get rid of them.’
‘I know, but it seems almost a pity, doesn’t it?’
‘Who are our neighbours?’
‘There’s Mrs Rolt who was submarined, and there are two chaps in
the Department of Works, and somebody called Clive from the Agricultural Department, Boling, who’s in charge of Sewage—they all seem a nice friendly lot. And Scobie, of course, is just down the road.’
‘Yes.’
Wilson moved restlessly around the hut and came to a stop in front of a photograph which Harris had propped against a Government inkstand. It showed three long rows of boys on a lawn: the first row sitting cross-legged on the grass: the second on chairs, wearing high stiff collars, with an elderly man and two women (one had a squint) in the centre: the third row standing. Wilson said, ‘That woman with a squint—I could swear I’d seen her somewhere before.’
‘Does the name Snakey convey anything to you?’
‘Why, yes, of course.’ He looked closer. ‘So you were at that hole too?’
‘I saw The Downhamian in your room and I fished this out to surprise you. I was in Jagger’s house. Where were you?’
‘I was a Prog,’ Wilson said.
‘Oh well,’ Harris admitted in a tone of disappointment, ‘there were some good chaps among the Progs.’ He laid the photograph flat down again as though it were something that hadn’t quite come off. ‘I was thinking we might have an old Downhamian dinner.’
‘Whatever for?’ Wilson asked. ‘There are only two of us.’
‘We could invite a guest each.’
‘I don’t see the point.’
Harris said bitterly, ‘Well, you are the real Downhamian, not me. I never joined the association. You get the magazine. I thought perhaps you had an interest in the place.’
‘My father made me a life member and he always forwards the bloody paper,’ Wilson said abruptly.
‘It was lying beside your bed. I thought you’d been reading it.’
‘I may have glanced at it.’
‘There was a bit about me in it. They wanted my address.’
‘Oh, but you know why that is?’ Wilson said. ‘They are sending out appeals to any old Downhamian they can rake up. The panelling in the Founders’ Hall is in need of repair. I’d keep your address quiet if I were you.’ He was one of those, it seemed to Harris, who always knew what was on, who gave advance information on extra halves, who knew why old So-and-So had not turned up to school, and what the row brewing at the Head’s special meeting was about. A few weeks ago he had been a new boy whom Harris had been delighted to befriend, to show around. He remembered the evening when Wilson would have put on evening dress for a Syrian’s dinner-party if he hadn’t been warned. But Harris from his first year at school had been fated to see how quickly new boys grew up: one term he was their kindly mentor—the next he was discarded. He could never progress as quickly as the newest unlicked boy. He remembered how even in the cockroach game—that he had invented—his rules had been challenged on the first evening. He said sadly, ‘I expect you are right. Perhaps I won’t send a letter after all.’ He added humbly, ‘I took the bed on this side, but I don’t mind a bit which I have …’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Wilson said.
‘I’ve only engaged one steward. I thought we could save a bit by sharing.’
‘The less boys we have knocking about here the better,’ Wilson said.
That night was the first night of their new comradeship. They sat reading on their twin Government chairs behind the black-out curtains. On the table was a bottle of whisky for Wilson and a bottle of barley-water flavoured with lime for Harris. A sense of extraordinary peace came to Harris while the rain tingled steadily on the roof and Wilson read a Wallace. Occasionally a few drunks from the R.A.F. mess passed by, shouting or revving their cars, but this only enhanced the sense of peace inside the hut. Sometimes his eyes strayed to the walls seeking a cockroach, but you couldn’t have everything.
‘Have you got The Downhamian handy, old man? I wouldn’t mind another glance at it. This book’s so dull.’
‘There’s a new one unopened on the dressing-table.’
‘You don’t mind my opening it?’
‘Why the hell should I?’
Harris turned first to the old Downhamian notes and read again how the whereabouts of H. R. Harris (1917–1921) was still wanted. He wondered whether it was possible that Wilson was wrong: there was no word here about the panelling in Hall. Perhaps after all he would send that letter and he pictured the reply he might receive from the Secretary. My dear Harris, it would go something like that, we were all delighted to receive your letter from those romantic parts. Why not send us a full length contribution to the mag. and while I’m writing to you, what about membership of the Old Downhamian Association? I notice you’ve never joined. I’m speaking for all Old Downhamians when I say that we’ll be glad to welcome you. He tried out ‘proud to welcome you’ on his tongue, but rejected that. He was a realist.
The Downhamians had had a fairly successful Christmas term. They had beaten Harpenden by one goal, Merchant Taylors by two, and had drawn with Lancing. Ducker and Tierney were coming on well as forwards, but the scrum was still slow in getting the ball out. He turned a page and read how the Opera Society had given an excellent rendering of Patience in the Founders’ Hall. F.J.K., who was obviously the English master, wrote: Lane as Bunthorne displayed a degree of aestheticism which surprised all his companions of Vb. We would not hitherto have described his hand as mediaeval or associated him with lilies, but he persuaded us that we had misjudged him. A great performance, Lane.
Harris skimmed through the account of five matches, a fantasy called ‘The Tick of the Clock’ beginning There was once a little old lady whose most beloved possession … The walls of Downham—the red brick laced with yellow, the extraordinary crockets, the mid-Victorian gargoyles—rose around him: boots beat on stone stairs and a cracked dinner-bell rang to rouse him to another miserable day. He felt the loyalty we feel to unhappiness—the sense that that is where we really belong. His eyes filled with tears, he took a sip of his barley-water and thought, ‘I’ll post that letter whatever Wilson says.’ Somebody outside shouted, ‘Bagster. Where are you, Bagster, you sod?’ and stumbled in a ditch. He might have been back at Downham, except of course that they wouldn’t have used that word.
Harris turned a page or two and the title of a poem caught his eye. It was called ‘West Coast’ and it was dedicated to ‘L.S.’. He wasn’t very keen on poetry, but it struck him as interesting that somewhere on this enormous coastline of sand and smells there existed a third old Downhamian.
Another Tristram on this distant coast, he read
Raises the poisoned chalice to his lips,
Another Mark upon the palm-fringed shore
Watches his love’s eclipse.
It seemed to Harris obscure: his eye passed rapidly over the intervening verses to the initials at the foot: E.W. He nearly exclaimed aloud, but he restrained himself in time. In such close quarters as they now shared it was necessary to be circumspect. There wasn’t space to quarrel in. Who is L.S., he wondered, and thought, surely it can’t be … the very idea crinkled his lips in a cruel smile. He said, ‘There’s not much in the mag. We beat Harpenden. There’s a poem called West Coast. Another poor devil out here, I suppose.’
‘Oh.’
‘Lovelorn,’ Harris said. ‘But I don’t read poetry.’
‘Nor do I,’ Wilson lied behind the barrier of the Wallace.
II
It had been a very narrow squeak. Wilson lay on his back in bed and listened to the rain on the roof and the heavy breathing of the old Downhamian beyond the curtain. It was as if the hideous years had extended through the intervening mist to surround him again. What madness had induced him to send that poem to the Downhamian? But it wasn’t madness: he had long since become incapable of anything so honest as madness: he was one of those condemned in childhood to complexity. He knew what he had intended to do: to cut the poem out with no indication of its source and to send it to Louise. It wasn’t quite her sort of poem, he knew, but surely, he had argued, she would be impressed to some extent by the mere fact that
the poem was in print. If she asked him where it had appeared, it would be easy to invent some convincing coterie name. The Downhamian luckily was well printed and on good paper. It was true of course, that he would have to paste the cutting on opaque paper to disguise what was printed on the other side, but it would be easy to think up an explanation of that. It was as if his profession were slowly absorbing his whole life, just as school had done. His profession was to lie, to have the quick story ready, never to give himself away, and his private life was taking the same pattern. He lay on his back in a nausea of self-disgust.
The rain had momentarily stopped. It was one of those cool intervals that were the consolation of the sleepless. In Harris’s heavy dreams the rain went on. Wilson got softly out and mixed himself a bromide; the grains fizzed in the bottom of the glass and Harris spoke hoarsely and turned over behind the curtain. Wilson flashed his torch on his watch and read 2.25. Tiptoeing to the door so as not to waken Harris, he felt the little sting of a jigger under his toe-nail. In the morning he must get his boy to scoop it out. He stood on the small cement pavement above the marshy ground and let the cool air play on him with his pyjama jacket flapping open. All the huts were in darkness, and the moon was patched with the rain-clouds coming up. He was going to turn away when he heard someone stumble a few yards away and he flashed his torch. It lit on a man’s bowed back moving between the huts towards the road. ‘Scobie,’ Wilson exclaimed and the man turned.
‘Hullo, Wilson,’ Scobie said, ‘I didn’t know you lived up here.’
‘I’m sharing with Harris,’ Wilson said, watching the man who had watched his tears.
‘I’ve been taking a walk,’ Scobie said unconvincingly, ‘I couldn’t sleep.’ It seemed to Wilson that Scobie was still a novice in the world of deceit: he hadn’t lived in it since childhood, and he felt an odd elderly envy for Scobie, much as an old lag might envy the young crook serving his first sentence, to whom all this was new.
III
Wilson sat in his little stuffy room in the U.A.C. office. Several of the firm’s journals and day books bound in quarter pigskin formed a barrier between him and the door. Surreptitiously, like a schoolboy using a crib, Wilson behind the barrier worked at his code books, translating a cable. A commercial calendar showed a week old date—June 20, and a motto: The best investments are honesty and enterprise. William P. Cornforth. A clerk knocked and said, ‘There’s a nigger for you, Wilson, with a note.’
The Heart of the Matter Page 18