The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [7]
4
In the evening the port became beautiful for perhaps five minutes. The laterite roads that were so ugly and clay-heavy by day became a delicate flower-like pink. It was the hour of content. Men who had left the port for ever would sometimes remember on a grey wet London evening the bloom and glow that faded as soon as it was seen: they would wonder why they had hated the coast and for a space of a drink they would long to return.
Scobie stopped his Morris at one of the great loops of the climbing road and looked back. He was just too late. The flower had withered upwards from the town; the white stones that marked the edge of the precipitous hill shone like candles in the new dusk.
‘I wonder if anybody will be there, Ticki.’
‘Sure to be. It’s library night.’
‘Do hurry up, dear. It’s so hot in the car. I’ll be glad when the rains come.’
‘Will you?’
‘If only they just went on for a month or two and men stopped.’
Scobie made the right reply. He never listened while his wife talked. He worked steadily to the even current of sound, but if a note of distress were struck he was aware of it at once. Like a wireless operator with a novel open in front of him, he could disregard every signal except the ship’s symbol and the SOS. He could even work better while she talked than when she was silent for so long as his ear-drum registered those tranquil sounds - the gossip of the club, comments on the sermons preached by Father Rank, the plot of a new novel, even complaints about the weather - he knew that all was well. It was silence that stopped him working - silence in which he might look up and see tears waiting in the eyes for his attention.
‘There’s a rumour going round that the refrigerators were all sunk last week.’
He considered, while she talked, his line of action with the Portuguese ship that was due in as soon as the boom opened in the morning. The fortnightly arrival of a neutral ship provided an outing for the junior officers: a change of food, a few glasses of real wine, even the opportunity of buying some small decorative object in the ship’s store for a girl. In return they had only to help the Field Security Police in the examination of passports, the searching of the suspects’ cabins: all the hard and disagreeable work was done by the F.S.P., in the hold, sifting sacks of rice for commercial diamonds, or in the heat of the kitchen, plunging the hand into tins of lard, disembowelling the stuffed turkeys. To try to find a few diamonds in a liner of fifteen thousand tons was absurd: no malign tyrant in a fairy-story had ever set a goose girl a more impossible task, and yet as regularly as the ships called the cypher telegrams came in - ‘So and so travelling first class suspected of carrying diamonds. The following members of the ship’s crew suspected ...’ Nobody ever found anything. He thought: it’s Harris’s turn to go on board, and Eraser can go with him. I’m too old for these excursions. Let the boys have a little fun.
‘Last time half the books arrived damaged.’
‘Did they?’
Judging from the number of cars, he thought, there were not many people at the club yet. He switched off his lights, and waited for Louise to move, but she just sat there with a clenched fist showing in the switchboard light ‘Well, dear, here we are,’ he said in the hearty voice that strangers took as a mark of stupidity. Louise said, ‘Do you think they all know by this time?’
‘Know what?’
‘That you’ve been passed over.’
‘My dear, I thought we’d finished with all that. Look at all the generals who’ve been passed over since 1940. They won’t bother about a deputy-commissioner.’
She said, ‘But they don’t like me.’
Poor Louise, he thought, it is terrible not to be liked, and his mind went back to his own experience in that early tour when the blacks had slashed his tyres and written insults on his car. ‘Dear, how absurd you are. I’ve never