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By Root 2636 0

that seemed to Scobie obviously foreign. He ground it out of existence with a stick and looked up at Fraser to see whether he could detect any surprise or suspicion. There was nothing to be read in the vacuous face, blank as a school notice-board out of term. Only his own heart-beats told him he was guilty -that he had joined the ranks of the corrupt police officers -Bailey who had kept a safe deposit in another city, Crayshaw who had been found with diamonds, Boyston against whom nothing had been definitely proved and who had been invalided out. They had been corrupted by money, and he had been corrupted by sentiment. Sentiment was the more dangerous, because you couldn’t name its price. A man open to bribes was to be relied upon below a certain figure, but sentiment might uncoil in the heart at a name, a photograph, even a smell remembered.

‘What sort of day, sir?’ Fraser asked, staring at the small pile of ash. Perhaps he was thinking that it should have been his day.

‘The usual kind of a day,’ Scobie said.

‘How about the captain?’ Fraser asked, looking down into the petrol-tin, beginning to hum again his languid tune.

‘The captain?’ Scobie said.

‘Oh, Druce told me some fellow informed on him.’

‘Just the usual thing,’ Scobie said. ‘A dismissed steward with a grudge. Didn’t Druce tell you we found nothing?’

‘No,’ Fraser said, ‘he didn’t seem to be sure. Good night, sir. I must be pushing off to the mess.’

‘Thimblerigg on duty?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Scobie watched him go. The back was as vacuous as the face: one could read nothing there. Scobie thought, what a fool I have been. What a fool. He owed his duty to Louise, not to a fat sentimental Portuguese skipper who had broken the rules of his own company for the sake of a daughter equally unattractive. That had been the turning point, the daughter. And now, Scobie thought, I must return home: I shall put the car away in the garage, and Ali will come forward with his torch to light me to the door. She will be sitting there between two draughts for coolness, and I shall read on her face the story of what she has been thinking all day. She will have been hoping that everything is fixed, that I shall say, ‘I’ve put your name down at the agent’s for South Africa.’ but she’ll be afraid that nothing so good as that will ever happen to us. She’ll wait for me to speak, and I shall try to talk about anything under the sun to postpone seeing her misery (it would be waiting at the corners of her mouth to take possession of her whole face). He knew exactly how things would go: it had happened so often before. He rehearsed every word, going back into his office, locking his desk, going down to his car. People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person’s habitual misery. He forgot Fraser: he forgot everything but the scene ahead: I shall go in and say, ‘Good evening, sweet’ heart,’ and shell say, ‘Good evening, darling. What kind of a day?’ and I’ll talk and talk, but all the time I shall know I’m coming nearer to the moment when I shall say, ‘What about you, darling?’ and let the misery in.

‘What about you, darling?’ He turned quickly away from her and began to fix two more pink gins. There was a tacit understanding between them that ‘liquor helped’; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.

‘You don’t really want to know about me.’

‘Of course I do, darling. What sort of a day have you had?’

‘Ticki, why are you such a coward? Why don’t you tell me it’s all off?’

‘All off?’

‘You know what I mean - the passage. You’ve been talking and talking since you came in about the Esperança. There’s a Portuguese ship in once a fortnight. You don’t talk that way every time. I’m not a child, Ticki. Why don’t you say straight out - ‘you can’t go’?’

He grinned miserably at his glass, twisting it round and round to let the angostura cling along the curve. He said, ‘That wouldn’t be true. I’ll find some way.’ Reluctantly he had recourse to