The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [100]
‘Where to?’
Hysteria and honesty receded: cunning came back across the threshold like a mongrel dog. He said, ‘Oh, I just mean take a holiday.’ He added, ‘I’m not sleeping well. And I’ve been getting an odd pain.’
‘Darling, are you I’ll?’ The pillar had wheeled on its course: the storm was involving others now: it had passed beyond them. Helen said, ‘Darling, I’m a bitch. I get tired and fed up with things - but it doesn’t mean anything. Have you seen a doctor?’
‘I’ll see Travis at the Argyll some time soon.’
‘Everybody says Dr Sykes is better.’
‘No, I don’t want to see Dr Sykes.’ Now that the anger and hysteria had passed he could see her exactly as she was that first evening when the sirens blew. He thought, O God, I can’t leave her. Or Louise. You don’t need me as they need me. You have your good people, your saints, all the company of the blessed. You can do without me. He said, ‘I’ll take you for a spin now in the car. It will do us both good.’
In the dusk of the garage he took her hands again and kissed her. He said, ‘There are no eyes here ... Wilson can’t see us. Harris isn’t watching. Yusef’s boys ...’
‘Dear, I’d leave you tomorrow if it would help.’
‘It wouldn’t help.’ He said, ‘You remember when I wrote you a letter - which got lost. I tried to put down everything there, plainly, in black and white. So as not to be cautious any more. I wrote that I loved you more than my wife ...’ As he spoke he heard another’s breath behind his shoulder, beside the car. He said, sharply, ‘Who’s that?’
‘What, dear?’
‘Somebody’s here.’ He came round to the other side of the car and said sharply, ‘Who’s there? Come out’
‘It’s Ali,’ Helen said.
‘What are you doing here. Ali?’
‘Missus sent me,’ Ali said. ‘I wait here for Massa ten him Missus back.’ He was hardly visible in the shadow.
‘Why were you waiting here?’
‘My head humbug me,’ Ali said. ‘I go for sleep, small, small sleep.’
‘Don’t frighten him,’ Helen said. ‘He’s telling the truth.’
‘Go along home, Ali,’ Scobie told him, ‘and tell Missus I come straight down.’ He watched him pad out into the hard sunlight between the Nissen huts. He never looked back.
‘Don’t worry about him,’ Helen said. ‘He didn’t understand a thing.’
‘I’ve had Ali for fifteen years,’ Scobie said. It was the first time he had been ashamed before him in all those years. He remembered Ali the night after Pemberton’s death, cup of tea in hand, holding him up against the shaking lorry, and then he remembered Wilson’s boy slinking off along the wall by the police station.
‘You can trust him, anyway.’
‘I don’t know how,’ Scobie said. ‘I’ve lost the trick of trust.’
2
Louise was asleep upstairs, and Scobie sat at the table with his diary open. He had written down against the date October 31: Commissioner told me this morning I am to succeed him. Took some furniture to H.R. Told Louise news, which pleased her. The other life - bare and undisturbed and built of facts - lay like Roman foundations under his hand. This was the life he was supposed to lead; no one reading this record would visualize the obscure shameful scene in the garage, the interview with the Portuguese captain, Louise striking out blindly with the painful truth, Helen accusing him of hypocrisy ... He thought: this is how it ought to be. I am too old for emotion. I am too old to be a cheat. Lies are for the young. They have a lifetime of truth to recover in. He looked at his watch, 11.45, and wrote: Temperature at 2 p.m. 92°. The lizard pounced upon the wall, the tiny jaws clamping on a moth. Something scratched outside the door - a pye-dog? He laid his pen down again and loneliness sat across the table opposite him. No man surely was less alone with his wife upstairs and his mistress little more than five hundred yards away up the hill, and yet it was loneliness that seated itself like a companion who doesn