The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [3]
‘I believe you do. I wonder why.’
‘It’s pretty in the evening,’ Scobie said vaguely.
‘Do you know the latest story they are using against you at the Secretariat?’
‘I suppose I’m in the Syrians’ pay?’
‘They haven’t got that far yet That’s the next stage. No, you steep with black girls. You know what it is, Scobie, you ought to have flirted with one of their wives. They feel insulted.’
‘Perhaps I ought to sleep with a black girl Then they won’t have to think up anything else.’
‘The man before you slept with dozens,’ the Commissioner said, ‘but it never bothered anyone. They thought up something different for him. They said he drank secretly. It made them feel better drinking publicly. What a lot of swine they are, Scobie.’
‘The Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary’s not a bad chap.’
‘No, the Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary’s all right’ The Commissioner laughed. ‘You’re a terrible fellow, Scobie. Scobie the Just.’
Scobie returned down the passage; the girl sat in the dusk. Her feet were bare: they stood side by side like casts in a museum: they didn’t belong to the bright smart cotton frock. ‘Are you Miss Wilberforce?’ Scobie asked.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You don’t live here, do you?’
‘No! I live in Sharp Town, sir.’
‘Well, come in.’ He led the way into his office and sat down at his desk. There was no pencil laid out and he opened his drawer. Here and here only had objects accumulated: letters, india-rubbers, a broken rosary - no pencil. ‘What’s the trouble, Miss Wilberforce?’ His eye caught a snapshot of a bathing party at Medley Beach: his wife, the Colonial Secretary’s wife, the Director of Education holding up what looked like a dead fish, the Colonial Treasurer’s wife. The expanse of white flesh made them look like a gathering of albinos, and all the mouths gaped with laughter.
The girl said, ‘My landlady - she broke up my home last night She come in when it was dark, and she pull down all the partition, an’ she thieve my chest with all my belongings.’
‘You got plenty lodgers?’
‘Only three, sir.’
He knew exactly how it all was: a lodger would take a one-roomed shack for five shillings a week, stick up a few thin partitions and let the so-called rooms for half a crown a piece - a horizontal tenement. Each room would be furnished with a box containing a little china and glass ‘dashed’ by an employer or stolen from an employer, a bed made out of old packing-cases, and a hurricane lamp. The glass of these lamps did not long survive, and the little open flames were always ready to catch some spilt paraffin; they licked at the plywood partitions and caused innumerable fires. Sometimes a landlady would thrust her way into her house and pull down the dangerous partitions, sometimes she would steal the lamps of her tenants, and the ripple of her theft would go out in widening rings of lamp thefts until they touched the European quarter and became a subject of gossip at the club. ‘Can’t keep a lamp for love or money.’
‘Your landlady,’ Scobie told the girl sharply, ‘she say you make plenty trouble: too many lodgers: too many lamps.’
‘No, sir. No lamp palaver.’
‘Mammy palaver, eh? You bad girl?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Why you come here? Why you not call Corporal Laminah In Sharp Town?’
‘He my landlady’s brother, sir.’
‘He is, is he? Same father same mother?’
‘No, sir. Same father.’
The interview was like a ritual between priest and server. He knew exactly what would happen when one of his men investigated the affair. The landlady would say that she had told her tenant to pull down the partitions and when that