The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [113]
The door was not locked and he went in. Years had passed in his brain, but here time had stood still. It might have been the same bottle of gin from which the boy had stolen - how long ago? The junior official’s chairs stood stiffly around, as though on a film set: he couldn’t believe they had ever moved, any more than the pouf presented by - was it Mrs Carter? On the bed the pillow had not been shaken after the siesta, and he laid his hand on the warm mould of a skull. O God, he prayed, I’m going away from all of you for ever: let her come back in time: let me see her once more, but the hot day cooled around him and nobody came. At 6.30 Louise would be back from the beach. He couldn’t wait any longer.
I must leave some kind of a message, he thought, and perhaps before I have written it she will have come. He felt a constriction in his breast worse than any pain he had ever invented to Travis. I shall never touch her again. I shall leave her mouth to others for the next twenty years. Most lovers deceived themselves with the idea of an eternal union beyond the grave, but he knew all the answers: he went to an eternity of deprivation. He looked for paper and couldn’t find so much as a torn envelope; he thought he saw a writing-case, but it was the stamp-album that he unearthed, and opening it at random for no reason, he felt fate throw another shaft, for he remembered that particular stamp and how it came to be stained with gin. She will have to tear it out, he thought, but that won’t matter: she had told him that you can’t see where a stamp has been torn out. There was no scrap of paper even in his pockets, and in a sudden rush of jealousy he lifted up the little green image of George V and wrote in ink beneath it: I love you. She can’t take that out, he thought with cruelty and disappointment, that’s indelible. For a moment he felt as though he had laid a mine for an enemy, but this was no enemy. Wasn’t he clearing himself out of her path like a piece of dangerous wreckage? He shut the door behind him and walked slowly down the hill - she might yet come. Everything he did now was for the last time - an odd sensation. He would never come this way again, and five minutes later taking a new bottle of gin from his cupboard, he thought: I shall never open another bottle. The actions which could be repeated became fewer and fewer. Presently there would be only one unrepeatable action left, the act of swallowing. He stood with the gin bottle poised and thought: then Hell will begin, and they’ll be safe from me, Helen, Louise, and You.
At dinner he talked deliberately of the week to come; he blamed himself for accepting Fellowes’s invitation and explained that dinner with the Commissioner the next day was unavoidable - there was much to discuss.
‘Is there no hope, Ticki, that after a rest, a long rest...?’
‘It wouldn’t be fair to carry on - to them or you. I might break down at any moment.’
‘It’s really retirement?’
‘Yes.’
She began to discuss where they were to live. He felt tired to death, and it needed all his will to show interest in this fictitious village or that, in the kind of house he knew they would never inhabit. ‘I don’t want a suburb,’ Louise said. ‘What I’d really like would be a weather-board house in Kent, so that one can get up to town quite easily.’
He said, ‘Of course it will depend on what we can afford. My pension won’t be very large.’
‘I shall work,’ Louise said.’ It will be easy in wartime.’
‘I hope we shall be able to manage without that.’
‘I wouldn’t mind.’
Bed-time came, and he felt a terrible unwillingness to let her go. There was nothing to do when she had once gone but die. He didn’t know how to keep her - they had talked about all the subjects they had in common. He said, ‘I shall sit here a while. Perhaps I shall feel sleepy if I stay up half an hour longer. I don’t want to take the Evipan if I can help it.’
‘I’m very tired after the beach. I’ll be off.’
When she’s gone, be thought, I shall be alone for ever. His heart beat and he was held in the nausea of an awful unreality. I can’t