The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [103]
‘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