The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [114]
‘What is it, Ticki? You look I’ll. Come to bed too.’
‘I wouldn’t sleep,’ he said obstinately.
‘Is there nothing I can do?’ Louise asked. ‘Dear, I’d do anything...’ Her love was like a death sentence.
‘There’s nothing, dear,’ he said. ‘I mustn’t keep you up.’ But so soon as she turned towards the stairs he spoke again. ‘Read me something,’ he said, ‘you got a new book today. Read me something.’
‘You wouldn’t like it, Ticki. It’s poetry.’
‘Never mind. It may send me to sleep.’ He hardly listened while she read. People said you couldn’t love two women, but what was this emotion if it were not love? This hungry absorption of what he was never going to see again? The greying hair, the line of nerves upon the face, the thickening body held him as her beauty never had. She hadn’t put on her mosquito-boots, and her slippers were badly in need of mending. It isn’t beauty that we love, he thought, it’s failure - the failure to stay young for ever, the failure of nerves, the failure of the body. Beauty is like success: we can’t love it for long. He felt a terrible desire to protect - but that’s what I’m going to do, I am going to protect her from myself for ever. Some words she was reading momentarily caught his attention:
We are all falling. This hand’s falling too -
all have this falling sickness none withstands.
And yet there’s always One whose gentle hands
this universal falling can’t fall through.
They sounded like truth, but he rejected them - comfort can come too easily. He thought, those hands will never hold my fall: I slip between the fingers, I’m greased with falsehood, treachery. Trust was a dead language of which he had forgotten the grammar.
‘Dear, you are half asleep.’
‘For a moment.’
‘I’ll go up now. Don’t stay long. Perhaps you won’t need your Evipan tonight’
He watched her go. The lizard lay still upon the wall. Before she had reached the stairs he called her back. ‘Say good night, Louise, before you go. You may be asleep.’
She kissed him perfunctorily on the forehead and he gave her hand a casual caress. There must be nothing strange on this last night, and nothing she would remember with regret. ‘Good night, Louise. You know I love you,’ he said with careful lightness.
‘Of course and I love you.’
‘Yes. Good night. Louise.’
‘Good night, Tick!.’ It was the best he could do with safety.
As soon as he heard the door close, he took out the cigarette carton in which he kept the ten doses of Evipan. He added two more doses for greater certainty - to have exceeded by two doses in ten days could not, surely, be regarded as suspicious. After that he took a long drink of whisky and sat still and waited for courage with the tablets in the palm of his hand. Now, he thought, I am absolutely alone: this was freezing-point.
But he was wrong. Solitude itself has a voice. It said to him. Throw away those tablets. You’ll never be able to collect enough again. You’ll be saved. Give up play-acting. Mount the stairs to bed and have a good night’s sleep. In the morning you’ll be woken by your boy, and you’ll drive down to the police station for a day’s ordinary work. The voice dwelt on the word ‘ordinary’ as it might have dwelt on the word ‘happy’ or ‘peaceful’.
‘No,’ Scobie said aloud, ‘no.’ He pushed the tablets in his mouth six at a time, and drank them down in two draughts. Then he opened his diary and wrote against November 12, Called on H.R., out; temperature at 2 p.m. and broke abruptly off as though at that moment he had been gripped by the final pain. Afterwards he sat bolt upright and waited what seemed a long while for any indication at all of approaching death; he had no idea how it would come to him. He tried to pray, but the Hail Mary evaded his memory, and he was aware of his heartbeats like a