He drew up outside the church and sat hopelessly at the wheel. Death never comes when one desires it most. He thought: of course there’s the ordinary honest wrong answer, to leave Louise, forget that private vow, resign my job. To abandon Helen to Bagster or Louise to what? I am trapped, he told himself, catching sight of an expressionless stranger’s face in the driving mirror, trapped. Nevertheless he left the car and went into the church. While he was waiting for Father Rank to go into the confessional he knelt and prayed: the only prayer he could rake up. Even the words of the ‘Our Father’ and the ‘Hail Mary’ deserted him. He prayed for a miracle, ‘O God convince me, help me, convince me. Make me feel that I am more important than that girl.’ It was not Helen’s face he saw as he prayed but the dying child who called him father: a face in a photograph staring from the dressing-table: the face of a black girl of twelve a sailor had raped and killed glaring blindly up at him in a yellow paraffin light. ‘Make me put my own soul first. Give me trust in your mercy to the one I abandon.’ He could hear Father Rank close the door of his box and nausea twisted him again on his knees. ‘O God,’ he said, ‘if instead I should abandon you, punish me but let the others get some happiness.’ He went into the box. He thought, a miracle may still happen. Even Father Rank may for once find the word, the right word … Kneeling in the space of an upturned coffin he said, ‘Since my last confession I have committed adultery.’
‘How many times?’
‘I don’t know, Father, many times.’
‘Are you married?’
‘Yes.’ He remembered that evening when Father Rank had nearly broken down before him, admitting his failure to help … Was he, even while he was struggling to retain the complete anonymity of the confessional, remembering it too? He wanted to say, ‘Help me, Father. Convince me that I would do right to abandon her to Bagster. Make me believe in the mercy of God,’ but he knelt silently waiting: he was unaware of the slightest tremor of hope. Father Rank said, ‘Is it one woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘You must avoid seeing her. Is that possible?’
He shook his head.
‘If you must see her, you must never be alone with her. Do you promise to do that, promise God not me?’ He thought: how foolish it was of me to expect the magic word. This is the formula used so many times on so many people. Presumably people promised and went away and came back and confessed again. Did they really believe they were going to try? He thought: I am cheating human beings every day I live, I am not going to try to cheat myself or God. He replied, ‘It would be no good my promising that, Father.’
‘You must promise. You can’t desire the end without desiring the means.’
Ah, but one can, he thought, one can: one can desire the peace of victory without desiring the ravaged towns.
Father Rank said, ‘I don’t need to tell you surely that there’s nothing automatic in the confessional or in absolution. It depends on your state of mind whether you are forgiven. It’s no good coming and kneeling here unprepared. Before you come here you must know the wrong you’ve done.’
‘I do know that.’
‘And you must have a real purpose of amendment. We are told to forgive our brother seventy times seven and we needn’t fear God will be any less forgiving than we are, but nobody can begin to forgive the uncontrite. It’s better to sin seventy times and repent each time than sin once and never repent.’ He could see Father Rank’s hand go up to wipe the sweat out of his eyes: it was like a gesture of weariness. He thought: what is the good of keeping him in this discomfort? He’s right, of course, he’s right. I was a fool to imagine that somehow in this airless box I would find a conviction … He said, ‘I think I was wrong to come, Father.’
‘I don’t want to refuse you absolution, but I think if you would just go away and turn things over in your mind, you’d come back in a better frame of mind.’
‘Yes, Father.’
‘I will pray for you.’
When he came out of the box it seemed to Scobie that for the first time his footsteps had taken him out of sight of hope. There was no hope anywhere he turned his eyes: the dead figure of the God upon the cross, the plaster Virgin, the hideous stations representing a series of events that had happened a long time ago. It seemed to him that he had only left for his exploration the territory of despair.
He drove down to the station, collected a file and returned home. ‘You’ve been a long time,’ Louise said. He didn’t even know the lie he was going to tell before it was on his lips. ‘That pain came back,’ he said, ‘so I waited for a while.’
‘Do you think you ought to have a drink?’
‘Yes, until anybody tells me not to.’
‘And you’ll see a doctor?’
‘Of course.’
That night he dreamed that he was in a boat drifting down just such an underground river as his boyhood hero Allan Quatermain had taken towards the lost city of Milosis. But Quatermain had companions while he was alone, for you couldn’t count the dead body on the stretcher as a companion. He felt a sense of urgency, for he told himself that bodies in this climate kept for a very short time and the smell of decay was already in his nostrils. Then, sitting there guiding the boat down the mid-stream, he realized that it was not the dead body that smelt but his own living one. He felt as though his blood had ceased to run: when he tried to lift his arm it dangled uselessly from his shoulder. He woke and it was Louise who had lifted his arm. She said, ‘Darling, it’s time to be off.’
‘Off?’ he asked.
‘We’re going to Mass,’ and again he was aware of how closely she was watching him. What was the good of yet another delaying lie? He wondered what Wilson had said to her. Could he go on lying week after week, finding some reason of work, of health, of forgetfulness for avoiding the issue at the altar rail? He thought hopelessly: I am damned already—I may as well go the whole length of my chain. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘of course. I’ll get up,’ and was suddenly surprised by her putting the excuse into his mouth, giving him his chance. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘if you aren’t well, stay where you are. I don’t want to drag you to Mass.’
But the excuse it seemed to him was also a trap. He could see where the turf had been replaced over the hidden stakes. If he took the excuse she offered he would have all but confessed his guilt. Once and for all now at whatever eternal cost, he was determined that he would clear himself in her eyes and give her the reassurance she needed. He said, ‘No, no. I will come with you.’ When he walked beside her into the church it was as if he had entered this building for the first time—a stranger. An immeasurable distance already separated him from these people who knelt and prayed and would presently receive God in peace. He knelt and pretended to pray.
The words of the Mass were like an indictment. ‘I will go in unto the altar of God: to God who giveth joy to my youth.’ But there was no joy anywhere. He looked up from between his hands and the plaster images of the Virgin and the saints seemed to be holding out hands to everyone, on either side, beyond him. He was the unknown guest at a party who is introduced to no one. The gentle painted smiles were unbearably directed elsewhere. When the Kyrie Eleison was reached he again tried to pray. ‘Lord have mercy … Christ have mercy … Lord have mercy,’ but the fear and the shame of the act he was going to commit chilled his brain. Those ruined priests who presided at a Black Mass, consecrating the Host over the naked body of a woman, consuming God in an absurd and horrifying ritual, were at least performing the act of damnation with an emotion larger than human love: they were doing it from hate of God or some odd perverse devotion to God’s enemy. But he had no love of evil or hate of God. How was he to hate this God who of His own accord was surrendering Himself into his power? He was desecrating God because he loved a woman—was it even love, or was it just a feeling of pity and responsibility? He tried again to excuse himself: ‘You can look after yourself. You survive the cross every day. You can only suffer. You can never be lost. Admit that you must come
second to these others.’ And myself, he thought, watching the priest pour the wine and water into the chalice, his own damnation being prepared like a meal at the altar, I must come last: I am the Deputy Commissioner of Police: a hundred men serve under me: I am the responsible man. It is my job to look after the others. I am conditioned to serve.
Sanctus. Sanctus. Sanctus. The Canon of the Mass had started: Father Rank’s whisper at the altar hurried remorselessly towards the consecration. ‘To order our days in thy peace … that we be preserved from eternal damnation. …’ Pax, pacis, pacem: all the declinations of the word ‘peace’ drummed on his ears through the Mass. He thought: I have left even the hope of peace for ever. I am the responsible man. I shall soon have gone too far in my design of deception ever to go back. Hoc est enim Corpus: the bell rang, and Father Rank raised God in his fingers—this God as light now as a wafer whose coming lay on Scobie’s heart as heavily as lead. Hic est enim calix sanguinis and the second bell.
Louise touched his hand. ‘Dear, are you well?’ He thought: here is the second chance. The return of my pain. I can go out. But if he went out of church now, he knew that there would be only one thing left to do—to follow Father Rank’s advice, to settle his affairs, to desert, to come back in a few days’ time and take God with a clear conscience and a knowledge that he had pushed innocence back where it properly belonged—under the Atlantic surge. Innocence must die young if it isn’t to kill the souls of men.
‘Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you.’
‘I’m all right,’ he said, the old longing pricking at the eyeballs, and looking up towards the cross on the altar he thought savagely: Take your sponge of gall. You made me what I am. Take the spear thrust. He didn’t need to open his Missal to know how this prayer ended. ‘May the receiving of Thy Body, O Lord Jesus Christ, which I unworthy presume to take, turn not to my judgment and condemnation.’ He shut his eyes and let the darkness in. Mass rushed towards its end: Domine, non sum dignus … Domine, non sum dignus … Domine, non sum dignus. … At the foot of the scaffold he opened his eyes and saw the old black women shuffling up towards the altar rail, a few soldiers, an aircraft mechanic, one of his own policemen, a clerk from the bank: they moved sedately towards peace, and Scobie felt an envy of their simplicity, their goodness. Yes, now at this moment of time they were good.
‘Aren’t you coming, dear?’ Louise asked, and again the hand touched him: the kindly firm detective hand. He rose and followed her and knelt by her side like a spy in a foreign land who has been taught the customs and to speak the language like a native. Only a miracle can save me now, Scobie told himself, watching Father Rank at the altar opening the tabernacle, but God would never work a miracle to save Himself, I am the cross, he thought, He will never speak the word to save Himself from the cross, but if only wood were made so that it didn’t feel, if only the nails were senseless as people believed.
Father Rank came down the steps from the altar bearing the Host. The saliva had dried in Scobie’s mouth: it was as though his veins had dried. He couldn’t look up; he saw only the priest’s skirt like the skirt of the mediaeval war-horse bearing down upon him: the flapping of feet: the charge of God. If only the archers would let fly from ambush, and for a moment he dreamed that the priest’s steps had indeed faltered: perhaps after all something may yet happen before he reaches me: some incredible interposition … But with open mouth (the time had come) he made one last attempt at prayer, ‘O God, I offer up my damnation to you. Take it. Use it for them,’ and was aware of the pale papery taste of an eternal sentence on the tongue.
3
I
THE BANK MANAGER took a sip of iced water and exclaimed with more than professional warmth, ‘How glad you must be to have Mrs Scobie back well in time for Christmas.’
‘Christmas is a long way off still,’ Scobie said.
‘Time flies when the rains are over,’ the bank manager went on with his novel cheerfulness. Scobie had never before heard in his voice this note of optimism. He remembered the storklike figure pacing to and fro, pausing at the medical books, so many hundred times a day.
‘I came along …’ Scobie began.
‘About your life insurance—or an overdraft, would it be?’
‘Well, it wasn’t either this time.’
‘You know I’ll always be glad to help you, Scobie, whatever it is.’ How quietly Robinson sat at his desk. Scobie said with wonder, ‘Have you given up your daily exercise?’
‘Ah, that was all stuff and nonsense,’ the manager said. ‘I had read too many books.’
‘I wanted to look in your medical encyclopaedia,’ Scobie explained.
‘You’d do much better to see a doctor,’ Robinson surprisingly advised him. ‘It’s a doctor who’s put me right, not the books. The time I would have wasted … I tell you, Scobie, the new young fellow they’ve got at the Argyll Hospital’s the best man they’ve sent to this colony since they discovered it.’
‘And he’s put you right?’
‘Go and see him. His name’s Travis. Tell him I sent you.’
‘All the same, if I could just have a look. …’
‘You’ll find it on the shelf. I keep ’em there still because they look important. A bank manager has to be a reading man. People expect him to have solid books around.’
‘I’m glad your stomach’s cured.’
The manager took another sip of water. He said, ‘I’m not bothering about it any more. The truth of the matter is, Scobie, I’m …’
Scobie looked through the encyclopaedia for the word Angina and now he read on: CHARACTER OF THE PAIN. This is usually described as being ‘gripping’, ‘as though the chest were in a vice’. The pain is situated in the middle of the chest and under the sternum. It may run down either arm perhaps more commonly the left, or up into the neck or down into the abdomen. It lasts a few seconds, or at the most a minute or so. THE BEHAVIOUR OF THE PATIENT. This is characteristic. He holds himself absolutely still in whatever circumstances he may find himself. … Scobie’s eye passed rapidly down the crossheadings: CAUSE OF THE PAIN. TREATMENT, TERMINATION OF THE DISEASE. Then he put the book back on the shelf. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘perhaps I’ll drop in on your Dr Travis. I’d rather see him than Dr Sykes. I hope he cheers me up as he’s done you.’
‘Well, my case,’ the manager said evasively, ‘had peculiar features.’
‘Mine looks straightforward enough.’
‘You seem pretty well.’
‘Oh, I’m all right—bar a bit of pain now and then and sleeping badly.’
‘Your responsibilities do that for you.’
‘Perhaps.’
It seemed to Scobie that he had sowed enough—against what harvest? He couldn’t himself have told. He said goodbye and went out into the dazzling street. He carried his helmet and let the sun strike vertically down upon his thin greying hair. He offered himself for punishment all the way to the police station and was rejected. It had seemed to him these last three weeks that the damned must be in a special category; like the young men destined for some unhealthy foreign post in a trading company, they were reserved from their humdrum fellows, protected from the daily task, preserved carefully at special desks, so that the worst might happen later. Nothing now ever seemed to go wrong. The sun would not strike, the Colonial Secretary asked him to dinner … He felt rejected by misfortune.
The Commissioner said, ‘Come in, Scobie. I’ve got good news for you,’ and Scobie prepared himself for yet another rejection.
‘Baker is not coming here. They need him in Palestine. They’ve decided after all to let the right man succeed me.’ Scobie sat down on the window-ledge and watched his hand tremble on his knee. He thought: so all this need not have happened. If Louise had stayed I should never have loved Helen, I would never have been blackmailed by Yusef, never have committed that act of despair. I would have been myself still—the same self that lay stacked in fifteen years of diaries, not this broken cast. But, of c
ourse, he told himself, it’s only because I have done these things that success comes. I am of the devil’s party. He looks after his own in this world. I shall go now from damned success to damned success, he thought with disgust.
‘I think Colonel Wright’s word was the deciding factor. You impressed him, Scobie.’
‘It’s come too late, sir.’
‘Why too late?’
‘I’m too old for the job. It needs a younger man.’
‘Nonsense. You’re only just fifty.’
‘My health’s not good.’
‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it.’
‘I was telling Robinson at the bank today. I’ve been getting pains, and I’m sleeping badly.’ He talked rapidly, beating time on his knee. ‘Robinson swears by Travis. He seems to have worked wonders with him.’
‘Poor Robinson.’
‘Why?’
‘He’s been given two years to live. That’s in confidence, Scobie.’
Human beings never cease to surprise: so it was the death sentence that had cured Robinson of his imaginary ailments, his medical books, his daily walk from wall to wall. I suppose, Scobie thought, that is what comes of knowing the worst—one is left alone with the worst and it’s like peace. He imagined Robinson talking across the desk to his solitary companion. ‘I hope we all die as calmly,’ he said. ‘Is he going home?’
The Heart of the Matter Page 24