The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [67]
‘Oh yes, of course. He cabled that he’s pulling strings about the passage. I don’t know what strings he can pull from Bury, poor dear. He doesn’t know anybody at all. He cabled too about John, of course.’ She lifted a cushion off the chair and pulled the cable out. ‘Read it. He’s very sweet, but of course he doesn’t know a thing about me.’
Scobie read. Terribly grieved for you, dear child, but remember his happiness, Your loving father. The date stamp with the Bury mark made him aware of the enormous distance between father and child. He said, ‘How do you mean, he doesn’t know a thing?’
‘You see, he believes in God and heaven, all that sort of thing.’
‘You don’t?’
‘I gave up all that when I left school. John used to pull his leg about it, quite gently you know. Father didn’t mind. But he never knew I felt the way John did. If you are a clergyman’s daughter there are a lot of things you have to pretend about. He would have hated knowing that John and I went together, oh, a fortnight before we married.’
Again he had that vision of someone who didn’t know her way around: no wonder Bagster was scared of her. Bagster was not a man to accept responsibility, and how could anyone lay the responsibility for any action, he thought, on this stupid bewildered child? He turned over the little pile of stamps he had accumulated for her and said, ‘I wonder what you’ll do when you get home?’
‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘they’ll conscript me.’
He thought: If my child had lived, she too would have been conscriptable, flung into some grim dormitory, to find her own way. After the Atlantic, the A.T.S. or the W.A.A.F., the blustering sergeant with the big bust, the cook-house and the potato peelings, the Lesbian officer with the thin lips and the tidy gold hair, and the men waiting on the Common outside the camp, among the gorse bushes ... compared to that surely even the Atlantic was more a home. He said, ‘Haven’t you got any shorthand? any languages?’ Only the clever and the astute and the influential escaped in war.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not really any good at anything.’
It was impossible to think of her being saved from the sea and then Sung back like a fish that wasn’t worth catching.
He said, ‘Can you type?’
‘I can get along quite fast with one finger.’
‘You could get a job here, I think. We are very short of secretaries. All the wives, you know, are working in the secretariat, and we still haven’t enough. But it’s a bad climate for a woman.’
‘I’d like to stay. Let’s have a drink on it.’ She called, ‘Boy, boy.’
‘You are learning,’ Scobie said. ‘A week ago you were so frightened of him...’ The boy came in with a tray set out with glasses, limes, water, a new gin bottle.
‘This isn’t the boy I talked to,’ Scobie said.
‘No, that one went. You talked to him too fiercely.’
‘And this one came?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s your name, boy?’
‘Vande, sah.’
‘I’ve seen you before, haven’t I?’
‘No, sah.’
‘Who am I?’
‘You big policeman, sah.’
‘Don’t frighten this one away,’ Helen said.
‘Who were you with?’
‘I was with D.C. Pemberton up bush, sah. I was small boy.’
‘Is that where I saw you?’ Scobie said. ‘I suppose I did. You look after this missus well now, and when she goes home, I get you big job. Remember that.’
‘You haven’t looked at the stamps,’ Scobie said.
‘No, I haven’t, have I?’ A spot of gin fell upon one of the stamps and stained it. He watched her pick it out of the pile, taking in the straight hair falling in rats’ tails over the nape as though the Atlantic had taken the strength out of it for ever, the hollowed