The Heart of the Matter

by Graham Greene

  ‘To both of you.’

  ‘How has she taken it, Wilson?’

  ‘I saw her on the beach this afternoon with Bagster. And I hear she was a bit pickled last night at the club.’

  ‘She hasn’t any dignity.’

  ‘I never knew what he saw in her. I’d never betray you, Louise.’

  ‘You know he even went up to see her the day he died.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘It’s all written there. In his diary. He never lied in his diary. He never said things he didn’t mean—like love.’

  Three days had passed since Scobie had been hastily buried. Dr Travis had signed the death certificate—angina pectoris. In that climate a post-mortem was difficult, and in any case unnecessary, though Dr Travis had taken the precaution of checking up on the Evipan.

  ‘Do you know.’ Wilson said, ‘when my boy told me he had died suddenly in the night, I thought it was suicide?’

  ‘It’s odd how easily I can talk about him,’ Louise said, ‘now that he’s gone. Yet I did love him, Wilson. I did love him, but he seems so very very gone.’

  It was as if he had left nothing behind him in the house but a few suits of clothes and a Mende grammar: at the police station a drawer full of odds and ends and a pair of rusting handcuffs. And yet the house was no different: the shelves were as full of books; it seemed to Wilson that it must always have been her house, not his. Was it just imagination then that made their voices ring a little hollowly, as though the house were empty?

  ‘Did you know all the time—about her?’ Wilson asked.

  ‘It’s why I came home. Mrs Carter wrote to me. She said everybody was talking. Of course he never realized that. He thought he’d been so clever. And he nearly convinced me—that it was finished. Going to communion the way he did.’

  ‘How did he square that with his conscience?’

  ‘Some Catholics do, I suppose. Go to confession and start over again. I thought he was more honest though. When a man’s dead one begins to find out.’

  ‘He took money from Yusef.’

  ‘I can believe it now.’

  Wilson put his hand on Louise’s shoulder and said, ‘You can trust me, Louise. I love you.’

  ‘I really believe you do.’ They didn’t kiss; it was too soon for that but they sat in the hollow room, holding hands, listening to the vultures clambering on the iron roof.

  ‘So that’s his diary,’ Wilson said.

  ‘He was writing in it when he died—oh nothing interesting, just the temperatures. He always kept the temperatures. He wasn’t romantic. God knows what she saw in him to make it worth while.’

  ‘Would you mind if I looked at it?’

  ‘If you want to,’ she said, ‘poor Ticki, he hasn’t any secrets left.’

  ‘His secrets were never very secret.’ He turned a page and read and turned a page. He said, ‘Had he suffered from sleeplessness very long?’

  ‘I always thought that he slept like a log whatever happened.’

  Wilson said, ‘Have you noticed that he’s written in pieces about sleeplessness—afterwards?’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘You’ve only to compare the colour of the ink. And all these records of taking his Evipan—it’s very studied, very careful. But above all the colour of the ink.’ He said, ‘It makes one think.’

  She interrupted him with horror, ‘Oh no, he couldn’t have done that. After all, in spite of everything, he was a Catholic.’

  II

  ‘Just let me come in for one little drink,’ Bagster pleaded.

  ‘We had four at the beach.’

  ‘Just one little one more.’

  ‘All right,’ Helen said. There seemed to be no reason so far as she could see to deny anyone anything any more for ever.

  Bagster said, ‘You know it’s the first time you’ve let me come in. Charming little place you’ve made of it. Who’d have thought a Nissen hut could be so homey?’ Flushed and smelling of pink gin, both of us, we are a pair, she thought. Bagster kissed her wetly on her upper lip and looked around again. ‘Ha ha,’ he said, ‘the good old bottle.’ When they had drunk one more gin he took off his uniform jacket and hung it carefully on a chair. He said, ‘Let’s take our back hair down and talk of love.’

  ‘Need we?’ Helen said. ‘Yet?’

  ‘Lighting up time,’ Bagster said. ‘The dusk. So we’ll let George take over the controls …’

  ‘Who’s George?’

  ‘The automatic pilot, of course. You’ve got a lot to learn.’

  ‘For God’s sake teach me some other time.’

  ‘There’s no time like the present for a prang,’ Bagster said, moving her firmly towards the bed. Why not? she thought, why not … if he wants it? Bagster is as good as anyone else. There’s nobody in the world I love, and out of it doesn’t count, so why not let them have their prangs (it was Bagster’s phrase) if they want them enough. She lay back mutely on the bed and shut her eyes and was aware in the darkness of nothing at all. I’m alone, she thought without self-pity, stating it as a fact, as an explorer might after his companions have died from exposure.

  ‘By God, you aren’t enthusiastic,’ Bagster said. ‘Don’t you love me a bit, Helen?’ and his ginny breath fanned through her darkness.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t love anyone.’

  He said furiously, ‘You loved Scobie,’ and added quickly, ‘Sorry. Rotten thing to say.’

  ‘I don’t love anyone,’ she repeated. ‘You can’t love the dead, can you? They don’t exist, do they? It would be like loving the dodo, wouldn’t it?’ questioning him as if she expected an answer, even from Bagster. She kept her eyes shut because in the dark she felt nearer to death, the death which had absorbed him. The bed trembled a little as Bagster shuffled his weight from off it, and the chair creaked as he took away his jacket. He said, ‘I’m not all that of a bastard, Helen. You aren’t in the mood. See you tomorrow?’

  ‘I expect so.’ There was no reason to deny anyone anything, but she felt an immense relief because nothing after all had been required.

  ‘Good night, old girl,’ Bagster said, ‘I’ll be seeing you.’

  She opened her eyes and saw a stranger in dusty blue pottering round the door. One can say anything to a stranger—they pass on and forget like beings from another world. She asked, ‘Do you believe in a God?’

  ‘Oh well, I suppose so,’ Bagster said, feeling at his moustache.

  ‘I wish I did,’ she said, ‘I wish I did.’

  ‘Oh well, you know,’ Bagster said ‘a lot of people do. Must be off now. Good night.’

  She was alone again in the darkness behind her lids, and the wish struggled in her body like a child: her lips moved, but all she could think of to say was, ‘For ever and ever, Amen …’ The rest she had forgotten. She put her hand out beside her and touched the other pillow, as though perhaps after all there was one chance in a thousand that she was not alone, and if she were not alone now she would never be alone again.

  III

  ‘I should never have noticed it, Mrs Scobie,’ Father Rank said.

  ‘Wilson did.’

  ‘Somehow I can’t like a man who’s quite so observant.’

  ‘It’s his job.’

  Father Rank took a quick look at her. ‘As an accountant?’

  She said drearily, ‘Father, haven’t you any comfort to give me?’ Oh, the conversations, he thought, that go on in a house after a death, the turnings over, the discussions, the questions, the demands—so much noise round the edge of silence.

  ‘You’ve been given an awful lot of comfort in your life, Mrs Scobie. If what Wilson thinks is true, it’s he who needs our comfort.’

  ‘Do you know all that I know about him?’

  ‘Of course I don’t, Mrs Scobie. You’ve been his wife, haven’t you, for fifteen years. A priest only knows the unimportant things.’

  ‘Unimportant?’

  ‘Oh, I mean the sins,’ he said
impatiently. ‘A man doesn’t come to us and confess his virtues.’

  ‘I expect you know about Mrs Rolt. Most people did.’

  ‘Poor woman.’

  ‘I don’t see why.’

  ‘I’m sorry for anyone happy and ignorant who gets mixed up in that way with one of us.’

  ‘He was a bad Catholic.’

  ‘That’s the silliest phrase in common use,’ Father Rank said.

  ‘And at the end this—horror. He must have known that he was damning himself.’

  ‘Yes, he knew that all right. He never had any trust in mercy—except for other people.’

  ‘It’s no good even praying …’

  Father Rank clapped the cover of the diary to and said furiously, ‘For goodness’ sake, Mrs Scobie, don’t imagine you—or I—know a thing about God’s mercy.’

  ‘The Church says …’

  ‘I know the Church says. The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn’t know what goes on in a single human heart.’

  ‘You think there’s some hope then?’ she wearily asked.

  ‘Are you so bitter against him?’

  ‘I haven’t any bitterness left.’

  ‘And do you think God’s likely to be more bitter than a woman?’ he said with harsh insistence, but she winced away from the arguments of hope.

  ‘Oh, why, why, did he have to make such a mess of things?’

  Father Rank said, ‘It may seem an odd thing to say—when a man’s as wrong as he was—but I think, from what I saw of him, that he really loved God.’

  She had denied just now that she felt any bitterness, but a little more of it drained out now like tears from exhausted ducts. ‘He certainly loved no one else,’ she said.

  ‘And you may be in the right of it there too,’ Father Rank replied.

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  Published by Vintage 2004

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  Copyright © Graham Greene 1948, 1971

  Introduction copyright © James Wood, 2004

  First published in Great Britain by William Heinemann 1948

  First published by Vintage in 2001

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