‘Oh, only that we’ve got so much to celebrate tomorrow. Being together and the Commissionership. Life is so happy, Ticki.’ And that, he told his loneliness with defiance, is my reward, splashing the whisky across the table, defying the ghosts to do their worst, watching God bleed.
4
I
HE COULD TELL that Yusef was working late in his office on the quay. The little white two-storeyed building stood beside the wooden jetty on the edge of Africa, just beyond the army dumps of petrol, and a line of light showed under the curtains of the landward window. A policeman saluted Scobie as he picked his way between the crates. ‘All quiet, corporal?’
‘All quiet, sah.’
‘Have you patrolled at the Kru Town end?’
‘Oh yes, sah. All quiet, sah.’ He could tell from the promptitude of the reply how untrue it was.
‘The wharf rats out?’
‘Oh no, sah. All very quiet like the grave.’ The stale literary phrase showed that the man had been educated at a mission school.
‘Well, good night.’
‘Good night, sah.’
Scobie went on. It was many weeks now since he had seen Yusef—not since the night of the blackmail, and now he felt an odd yearning towards his tormentor. The little white building magnetized him, as though concealed there was his only companionship, the only man he could trust. At least his blackmailer knew him as no one else did: he could sit opposite that fat absurd figure and tell the whole truth. In this new world of lies his blackmailer was at home: he knew the paths: he could advise: even help … Round the corner of a crate came Wilson. Scobie’s torch lit his face like a map.
‘Why, Wilson,’ Scobie said, ‘you are out late.’
‘Yes,’ Wilson said, and Scobie thought uneasily, how he hates me.
‘You’ve got a pass for the quay?’
‘Yes.’
‘Keep away from the Kru Town end. It’s not safe there alone. No more nose bleeding?’
‘No,’ Wilson said. He made no attempt to move; it seemed always his way—to stand blocking a path: a man one had to walk round.
‘Well, I’ll be saying good night, Wilson. Look in any time. Louise …’
Wilson said, ‘I love her, Scobie.’
‘I thought you did,’ Scobie said. ‘She likes you, Wilson.’
‘I love her,’ Wilson repeated. He plucked at the tarpaulin over the crate and said, ‘You wouldn’t know what that means.’
‘What means?’
‘Love. You don’t love anybody except yourself, your dirty self.’
‘You are overwrought, Wilson. It’s the climate. Go and lie down.’
‘You wouldn’t act as you do if you loved her.’ Over the black tide, from an invisible ship, came the sound of a gramophone playing some popular heart-rending tune. A sentry by the Field Security post challenged and somebody replied with a password. Scobie lowered his torch till it lit only Wilson’s mosquito-boots. He said, ‘Love isn’t as simple as you think it is, Wilson. You read too much poetry.’
‘What would you do if I told her everything—about Mrs Rolt?’
‘But you have told her, Wilson. What you believe. But she prefers my story.’
‘One day I’ll ruin you, Scobie.’
‘Would that help Louise?’
‘I could make her happy,’ Wilson claimed ingenuously, with a breaking voice that took Scobie back over fifteen years—to a much younger man than this soiled specimen who listened to Wilson at the sea’s edge, hearing under the words the low sucking of water against wood. He said gently, ‘You’d try. I know you’d try. Perhaps …’ but he had no idea himself how that sentence was supposed to finish, what vague comfort for Wilson had brushed his mind and gone again. Instead an irritation took him against the gangling romantic figure by the crate who was so ignorant and yet knew so much. He said, ‘I wish meanwhile you’d stop spying on me.’
‘It’s my job.’ Wilson admitted, and his boots moved in the torchlight.
‘The things you find out are so unimportant.’ He left Wilson beside the petrol dump and walked on. As he climbed the steps to Yusef’s office he could see, looking back, an obscure thickening of the darkness where Wilson stood and watched and hated. He would go home and draft a report. ‘At 11.25 I observed Major Scobie going obviously by appointment …’
Scobie knocked and walked right in where Yusef half lay behind his desk, his legs upon it, dictating to a black clerk. Without breaking his sentence—‘five hundred rolls matchbox design, seven hundred and fifty bucket and sand, six hundred poker dot artificial silk’—he looked up at Scobie with hope and apprehension. Then he said sharply to the clerk, ‘Get out. But come back. Tell my boy that I see no one.’ He took his legs from the desk, rose and held out a flabby hand, ‘Welcome, Major Scobie,’ then let it fall like an unwanted piece of material. ‘This is the first time you have ever honoured my office, Major Scobie.’
‘I don’t know why I’ve come here now, Yusef.’
‘It is a long time since we have seen each other.’ Yusef sat down and rested his great head wearily on a palm like a dish. ‘Time goes so differently for two people—fast or slow. According to their friendship.’
‘There’s probably a Syrian poem about that.’
‘There is, Major Scobie,’ he said eagerly.
‘You should be friends with Wilson, not me, Yusef. He reads poetry. I have a prose mind.’
‘A whisky, Major Scobie?’
‘I wouldn’t say no.’ He sat down on the other side of the desk and the inevitable blue syphon stood between them.
‘And how is Mrs Scobie?’
‘Why did you send me that diamond, Yusef?’
‘I was in your debt, Major Scobie.’
‘Oh no, you weren’t. You paid me off in full with a bit of paper.’
‘I try so hard to forget that that was the way. I tell myself it was really friendship—at bottom it was friendship.’
‘It’s never any good lying to oneself, Yusef. One sees through the lie too easily.’
‘Major Scobie, if I saw more of you, I should become a better man.’ The soda hissed in the glasses and Yusef drank greedily. He said, ‘I can feel in my heart, Major Scobie, that you are anxious, depressed … I have always wished that you would come to me in trouble.’
Scobie said, ‘I used to laugh at the idea—that I should ever come to you.’
‘In Syria we have a story of a lion and a mouse …’
‘We have the same story, Yusef. But I’ve never thought of you as a mouse, and I’m no lion. No lion.’
‘It is about Mrs Rolt you are troubled. And your wife, Major Scobie?’
‘Yes.’
‘You do not need to be ashamed with me, Major Scobie. I have had much woman trouble in my life. Now it is better because I have learned the way. The way is not to care a damn, Major Scobie. You say to each of them, “I do not care a damn. I sleep with whom I please. You take me or leave me. I do not care a damn.” They always take you, Major Scobie.’ He sighed into his whisky. ‘Sometimes I have wished they would not take me.’
‘I’ve gone to great lengths, Yusef, to keep things from my wife.’
‘I know the lengths you have gone, Major Scobie.’
‘Not the whole length. The business with the diamonds was very small compared …’
‘Yes?’
‘You wouldn’t understand. Anyway somebody else knows now—Ali.’
‘But you trust Ali?’
‘I think I trust him. But he knows about you too. He came in last night and saw the diamond there. Your boy was very indiscreet.’
The big broad hand shifted on the table. ‘I will deal with my boy presently.’
‘Ali’s half-brother is Wilson’s boy. They see each other.’
‘That is certainly bad,’ Yusef said.
He had told all his worries now—all except the worst. He had the odd sense of having for the first time in his life shifted a burden elsewhere. And Yusef carried
it—he obviously carried it. He raised himself from his chair and now moved his great haunches to the window, staring at the green black-out curtain as though it were a landscape. A hand went up to his mouth and he began to bite his nails—snip, snip, snip, his teeth closed on each nail in turn. Then he began on the other hand. ‘I don’t suppose it’s anything to worry about really,’ Scobie said. He was touched by uneasiness, as though he had accidentally set in motion a powerful machine he couldn’t control.
‘It is a bad thing not to trust,’ Yusef said. ‘One must always have boys one trusts. You must always know more about them than they do about you.’ That, apparently, was his conception of trust. Scobie said, ‘I used to trust him.’
Yusef looked at his trimmed nails and took another bite. He said, ‘Do not worry. I will not have you worry. Leave everything to me, Major Scobie. I will find out for you whether you can trust him.’ He made the startling claim, ‘I will look after you.’
‘How can you do that?’ I feel no resentment, he thought with weary surprise. I am being looked after, and a kind of nursery peace descended.
‘You mustn’t ask me questions, Major Scobie. You must leave everything to me just this once. I understand the way.’ Moving from the window Yusef turned on Scobie eyes like closed telescopes, blank and brassy. He said with a soothing nurse’s gesture of the broad wet palm, ‘You will just write a little note to your boy, Major Scobie. asking him to come here. I will talk to him. My boy will take it to him.’
‘But Ali can’t read.’
‘Better still then. You will send some token with my boy to show that he comes from you. Your signet ring.’
‘What are you going to do, Yusef?’
‘I am going to help you, Major Scobie. That is all.’ Slowly, reluctantly, Scobie drew at his ring. He said, ‘He’s been with me fifteen years. I always have trusted him until now.’
‘You will see,’ Yusef said. ‘Everything will be all right.’ He spread out his palm to receive the ring and their hands touched: it was like a pledge between conspirators. ‘Just a few words.’
‘The ring won’t come off,’ Scobie said. He felt an odd unwillingness. ‘It’s not necessary, anyway. He’ll come if your boy tells him that I want him.’
‘I do not think so. They do not like to come to the wharf at night.’
‘He will be all right. He won’t be alone. Your boy will be with him.’
‘Oh yes, yes, of course. But I still think—if you would just send something to show—well, that it is not a trap. Yusef’s boy is no more trusted, you see, than Yusef.’
‘Let him come tomorrow, then.’
‘Tonight is better,’ Yusef said.
Scobie felt in his pockets: the broken rosary grated on his nails. He said, ‘Let him take this, but it’s not necessary …’ and fell silent, staring back at those blank eyes.
‘Thank you,’ Yusef said. ‘This is most suitable.’ At the door he said, ‘Make yourself at home, Major Scobie. Pour yourself another drink. I must give my boy instructions. …’
He was away a very long time. Scobie poured himself a third whisky and then, because the little office was so airless, he drew the seaward curtains after turning out the light and let what wind there was trickle in from the bay. The moon was rising and the naval depot ship glittered like grey ice. Restlessly he made his way to the other window that looked up the quay towards the sheds and lumber of the native town. He saw Yusef’s clerk coming back from there, and he thought how Yusef must have the wharf rats well under control if his clerk could pass alone through their quarters. I came for help, he told himself, and I am being looked after—how, and at whose cost? This was the day of All Saints and he remembered how mechanically, almost without fear or shame, he had knelt at the rail this second time and watched the priest come. Even that act of damnation could become as unimportant as a habit. He thought: my heart has hardened, and he pictured the fossilized shells one picks up on a beach: the stony convolutions like arteries. One can strike God once too often. After that does one care what happens? It seemed to him that he had rotted so far that it was useless to make any effort. God was lodged in his body and his body was corrupting outwards from that seed.
‘It was too hot?’ Yusef’s voice said. ‘Let us leave the room dark. With a friend the darkness is kind.’
‘You have been a very long time.’
Yusef said with what must have been deliberate vagueness, ‘There was much to see to.’ It seemed to Scobie that now or never he must ask what was Yusef’s plan, but the weariness of his corruption halted his tongue. ‘Yes, it’s hot,’ he said, ‘let’s try and get a cross-draught,’ and he opened the side window on to the quay. ‘I wonder if Wilson has gone home.’
‘Wilson?’
‘He watched me come here.’
‘You must not worry, Major Scobie. I think your boy can be made quite trustworthy.’
He said with relief and hope, ‘You mean you have a hold on him?’
‘Don’t ask questions. You will see.’ The hope and the relief both wilted. He said, ‘Yusef, I must know …’ but Yusef said, ‘I have always dreamed of an evening just like this with two glasses by our side and darkness and time to talk about important things, Major Scobie. God. The family. Poetry. I have great appreciation of Shakespeare. The Royal Ordnance Corps have very fine actors and they have made me appreciate the gems of English literature. I am crazy about Shakespeare. Sometimes because of Shakespeare I would like to be able to read, but I am too old to learn. And I think perhaps I would lose my memory. That would be bad for business, and though I do not live for business I must do business to live. There are so many subjects I would like to talk to you about. I should like to hear the philosophy of your life.’
‘I have none.’
‘The piece of cotton you hold in your hand in the forest.’
‘I’ve lost my way.’
‘Not a man like you, Major Scobie. I have such an admiration for your character. You are a just man.’
‘I never was, Yusef. I didn’t know myself that’s all. There’s a proverb, you know, about in the end is the beginning. When I was born I was sitting here with you drinking whisky, knowing …’
‘Knowing what, Major Scobie?’
Scobie emptied his glass. He said, ‘Surely your boy must have got to my house now.’
‘He has a bicycle.’
‘Then they should be on their way back.’
‘We must not be impatient. We may have to sit a long time, Major Scobie. You know what boys are.’
‘I thought I did.’ He found his left hand was trembling on the desk and he put it between his knees to hold it still. He remembered the long trek beside the border: innumerable lunches in the forest shade, with Ali cooking in an old sardine-tin, and again that last drive to Bamba came to mind—the long wait at the ferry, the fever coming down on him, and Ali always at hand. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and he thought for a moment: This is just a sickness, a fever, I shall wake soon. The record of the last six months—the first night in the Nissen hut, the letter which said too much, the smuggled diamonds, the lies, the sacrament taken to put a woman’s mind at ease—seemed as insubstantial as shadows over a bed cast by a hurricane-lamp. He said to himself: I am waking up, and heard the sirens blowing the alert just as on that night, that night … He shook his head and came awake to Yusef sitting in the dark on the other side of the desk, to the taste of the whisky, and the knowledge that everything was the same. He said wearily, ‘They ought to be here by now.’
Yusef said, ‘You know what boys are. They get scared by the siren and they take shelter. We must sit here and talk to each other, Major Scobie. It is a great opportunity for me. I do not want the morning ever to come.’
‘The morning? I am not going to wait till morning for Ali.’
‘Perhaps he will be frightened. He will know you have found him out and he will run away. Sometimes boys go back to bush …’
‘You are talking nonsense, Yusef.’<
br />
‘Another whisky, Major Scobie?’
‘All right. All right.’ He thought: am I taking to drink too? It seemed to him that he had no shape left, nothing you could touch and say: this is Scobie.
‘Major Scobie, there are rumours that after all justice is to be done and that you are to be Commissioner.’
He said with care, ‘I don’t think it will ever come to that.’
‘I just wanted to say, Major Scobie, that you need not worry about me. I want your good, nothing so much as that. I will slip out of your life, Major Scobie. I will not be a millstone. It is enough for me to have had tonight—this long talk in the dark on all sorts of subjects. I will remember tonight always. You will not have to worry. I will see to that.’ Through the window behind Yusef’s head, from somewhere among the jumble of huts and warehouses, a cry came: pain and fear: it swam up like a drowning animal for air, and fell again into the darkness of the room, into the whisky, under the desk, into the basket of wastepaper, a discarded finished cry.
Yusef said too quickly, ‘A drunk man.’ He yelped apprehensively, ‘Where are you going, Major Scobie? It’s not safe—alone.’ That was the last Scobie ever saw of Yusef, a silhouette stuck stiffly and crookedly on the wall, with the moonlight shining on the syphon and the two drained glasses. At the bottom of the stairs the clerk stood, staring down the wharf. The moonlight caught his eyes: like road studs they showed the way to turn.
There was no movement in the empty warehouses on either side or among the sacks and crates as he moved his torch: if the wharf rats had been out, that cry had driven them back to their holes. His footsteps echoed between the sheds, and somewhere a pye-dog wailed. It would have been quite possible to have searched in vain in this wilderness of litter until morning: what was it that brought him so quickly and unhesitatingly to the body, as though he had himself chosen the scene of the crime? Turning this way and that down the avenues of tarpaulin and wood, he was aware of a nerve in his forehead that beat out the whereabouts of Ali.
The Heart of the Matter Page 26
