The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [30]
The path wound along the slope of the hill. Down below him Wilson could see the huge harbour spread out. A convoy was gathering inside the boom; tiny boats moved like flies between the ships; above them the ashy trees and the burnt scrubs hid the summit of the ridge. Wilson stumbled once or twice as his toes caught in the ledges left by the sleepers.
Louise Scobie said, ‘This is what I thought it was all going to be like.’
‘Your husband loves the place, doesn’t he?’
‘Oh, I think sometimes he’s got a kind of selective eyesight. He sees what he likes to see. He doesn’t seem to see the snobbery, and he doesn’t hear the gossip.’
‘He sees you,’ Wilson said.
‘Thank God he doesn’t, because I’ve caught the disease.’
‘You aren’t a snob.’
‘Oh yes, I am.’
‘You took me up,’ Wilson said, blushing and contorting his face into a careful careless whistle. But he couldn’t whistle. The plump lips blew empty air, like a fish.
‘For God’s sake,’ Louise said, ‘don’t be humble.’
‘I’m not really humble,’ Wilson said. He stood aside to let a labourer go by. He explained, ‘I’ve got inordinate ambitions.’
‘In two minutes,’ Louise said, ‘we get to the best point of all - where you can’t see a single house.’
‘It’s good of you to show me ...’ Wilson muttered, stumbling on again along the ridge track. He had no small talk: with a woman he could be romantic, but nothing else.
‘There,’ Louise said, but he had hardly time to take the view in - the harsh green slopes falling down towards the great flat glaring bay - when she wanted to be off again, back the way they had come. ‘Henry will be in soon,’ she said.
‘Who’s Henry?’
‘My husband.’
‘I didn’t know his name. I’d heard you call him something else - something like Ticki.’
‘Poor Henry,’ she said. ‘How he hates it. I try not to when other people are there, but I forget. Let’s go.’
‘Can’t we go just a little further - to the railway station?’
‘I’d like to change,’ Louise said, ‘before dark. The rats begin to come in after dark.’
‘Going back will be downhill all the way.’
‘Let’s hurry then,’ Louise said. He followed her. Thin and ungainly, she seemed to him to possess a sort of Undine beauty. She had been kind to him, she bore his company, and automatically at any first kindness from a woman love stirred. He had no capacity for friendship or for equality. In his romantic, humble, ambitious mind he could conceive only a relationship with a waitress, a cinema usherette, a landlady’s daughter in Battersea or with a queen - this was a queen. He began to mutter again at her heels - ‘so good’ - between pants, his plump knees knocking together on the stony path. Quite suddenly the light changed: the laterite soil turned a translucent pink sloping down the hill to the wide flat water of the bay. There was something happily accidental in the evening light as though it hadn’t been planned.
‘This is it,’ Louise said, and they leant and got their breath again against the wooden wall of the small abandoned station, watching the light fade out as quickly as it came.
Through an open door - had it been the waiting room or the station master’s office? - the hens passed in and out. The dust on the windows was like the steam left only a moment ago by a passing train. On the forever-closed guichet somebody had chalked a crude phallic figure. Wilson could see it over her left shoulder as she leant back to get her breath. ‘I used to come here every day,’ Louise said, ‘until they spoilt it for me.’
‘They?’
She said, ‘Thank God, I shall be out of here soon.’
‘Why? You are not going away?’
‘Henry’s sending me to South Africa.’
‘Oh God,’ Wilson exclaimed. The news was so unexpected that it was like a twinge of pain. His face twisted with it.
He tried to cover up the absurd exposure. No one knew better than he did that his face was not made to express agony or passion. He said, ‘What will he do without you?’
‘He’ll manage.’
‘He’ll be terribly lonely,’ Wilson said - he, he, he chiming back in his