The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [58]
He listened with the intense interest one feels in a stranger’s life, the interest the young mistake for love. He felt the security of his age sitting there listening with a glass of gin in his hand and the rain coming down. She told him her school was on the downs just behind Seaport: they had a French mistress called Mile Dupont who had a vile temper. The headmistress could read Greek just like English - Virgil...
‘I always thought Virgil was Latin.’
‘Oh yes. I meant Homer. I wasn’t any good at Classics.’
‘Were you good at anything besides netball?’
‘I think I was next best at maths, but I was never any good at trigonometry.’ In summer they went into Seaport and bathed, and every Saturday they had a picnic on the downs -sometimes a paper-chase on ponies, and once a disastrous affair on bicycles which spread out over the whole country, and two girls didn’t return till one in the morning. He listened fascinated, revolving the heavy gin in his glass without drinking. The sirens squealed the All Clear through the rain, but neither of them paid any attention. He said, ‘And then in the holidays you went back to Bury?’
Apparently her mother had died ten years ago, and her father was a clergyman attached in some way to the Cathedral. They had a very small house on Angel Hill. Perhaps she had not been as happy at Bury as at school, for she tacked back at the first opportunity to discuss the games mistress whose name was the same as her own - Helen, and for whom the whole of her year had an enormous schwarmerei. She laughed now at this passion in a superior way: it was the only indication she gave him that she was grown-up, that she was - or rather had been - a married woman.
She broke suddenly off and said. ‘What nonsense it is telling you all this.’
‘I like it.’
‘You haven’t once asked me about - you know -’
He did know, for he had read the report. He knew exactly the water ration for each person in the boat - a cupful twice a day, which had been reduced after twenty-one days to half a cupful. That had been maintained until within twenty-four hours of the rescue mainly because the deaths had left a small surplus. Behind the school buildings of Seaport, the totem-pole of the netball game, he was aware of the intolerable surge, lifting the boat and dropping it again, lifting it and dropping it. ‘I was miserable when I left - it was the end of July. I cried in the taxi all the way to the station.’ Scobie counted the months - July to April: nine months: the period of gestation, and what had been born was a husband’s death and the Atlantic pushing them like wreckage towards the long flat African beach and the sailor throwing himself over the side. He said, ‘This is more interesting. I can guess the other.’
‘What a lot I’ve talked. Do you know, I think I shall sleep tonight.’
‘Haven’t you been sleeping?’
‘It was the breathing all round me at the hospital. People turning and breathing and muttering. When the light was out, it was just like - you know.’
‘You’ll sleep quietly here. No need to be afraid of anything. There’s a watchman always on duty. I’ll have a word with him.’
‘You’ve been so kind,’ she said. ‘Mrs Carter and the others - they’ve all been kind.’ She lifted her worn, frank, childish face and said, ‘I like you so much.’
‘I like you too,’ he said gravely. They both had an immense sense of security: they were friends who could never be anything else than friends - they