The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [33]
‘Good-bye, darling.’
‘Good-bye, Ticki.’
‘Look after Wilson. See he has enough to drink. Don’t mope.’
When she kissed Scobie, Wilson stood near the door with a glass in his hand and remembered the disused station on the hill above and the taste of lipstick. For exactly an hour and a half the mark of his mouth had been the last on hers. He felt no jealousy, only the dreariness of a man who tries to write an important letter on a damp sheet and finds the characters blur.
Side by side they watched Scobie cross the road to the police van. He had taken more whisky than he was accustomed to, and perhaps that was what made him stumble. ‘They should have sent a younger man,’ Wilson said.
‘They never do. He’s the only one the Commissioner trusts.’ They watched him climb laboriously in, and she went sadly on, ‘Isn’t he the typical second man? The man who always does the work.’
The black policeman at the wheel started his engine and began to grind into gear before releasing the clutch. ‘They don’t even give him a good driver,’ she said. ‘The good driver will have taken Fraser and the rest to the dance at the Club.’ The van bumped and heaved out of the yard. Louise said, ‘Well, that’s that, Wilson.’
She picked up the note Scobie had intended to leave for her and read it aloud. My dear, I have had to leave for Bamba. Keep this to yourself. A terrible thing has happened. Poor Pemberton ...
‘Poor Pemberton,’ she repeated furiously.
‘Who’s Pemberton?’
‘A little puppy of twenty-five. All spots and bounce. He was assistant D.C. at Bamba, but when Butterworth went sick, they left him in charge. Anybody could have told them there’d be trouble. And when trouble comes it’s Henry, of course, who has to drive all night...’
‘I’d better leave now, hadn’t I?’ Wilson said. ‘You’ll want to change.’
‘Oh yes, you’d better go - before everybody knows he’s gone and that we’ve been alone five minutes in a house with a bed in it. Alone, of course, except for the small boy and the cook and their relations and friends.’
‘I wish I could be of some use.’
‘You could be,’ she said. ‘Would you go upstairs and see whether there’s a rat in the bedroom? I don’t want the small boy to know I’m nervous. And shut the window. They come in that way.’
‘It will be very hot for you,’
‘I don’t mind.’
He stood just inside the door and clapped his hands softly, but no rat moved. Then quickly, surreptitiously, as though he had no right to be there, he crossed to the window and closed it. There was a faint smell of face-powder in the room - it seemed to him the most memorable scent he had ever known. He stood again by the door taking the whole room in - the child’s photograph, the pots of cream, the dress laid out by Ali for the evening. He had been instructed at home how to memorize, pick out the important detail, collect the right evidence, but his employers had never taught him that he would find himself in a country so strange to him as this.
PART THREE
Chapter One
1
THE police van took its place in the long line of army lorries waiting for the ferry. Their headlamps were like a little village in the night. The trees came down on either side smelling of heat and rain, and somewhere at the end of the column a driver sang - the wailing, toneless voice rose and fell like a wind through a keyhole. Scobie slept and woke, slept and woke. When he woke he thought of Pemberton and wondered how he would feel if he were his father - that elderly, retired bank manager whose wife had died in giving birth to Pemberton - but when he slept he went smoothly back into a dream of perfect happiness and freedom. He was walking through a wide cool meadow with Ali at his heels: there was nobody else anywhere in his dream, and Ali never spoke. Birds went by far overhead, and