The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [76]
‘But I haven’t got a photograph.’
‘I suppose you think I’d use your letters against you.’ He thought, if I shut my eyes it might almost be Louise speaking - the voice was younger, that was all, and perhaps less capable of giving pain. Standing with the whisky glass in his hand he remembered another night - a hundred yards away - the glass had then contained gin. He said gently, ‘You talk such nonsense.’
‘You think I’m a child. You tiptoe in - bringing me stamps.’
‘I’m trying to protect you.’
‘I don’t care a bloody damn if people talk.’ He recognized the hard swearing of the netball team.
He said, ‘If they talked enough, this would come to an end.’
‘You are not protecting me. You are protecting your wife.’
‘It comes to the same thing.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘to couple me with - that woman.’ He couldn’t prevent the wince. He had underrated her power of giving pain. He could see how she had spotted her success: he had delivered himself into her hands. Now she would always know how to inflict the sharpest stab. She was like a child with a pair of dividers who knows her power to injure. You could never trust a child not to use her advantage.
‘Dear,’ he said, ‘it’s too soon to quarrel.’
‘That woman,’ she repeated, watching his eyes. ‘You’d never leave her, would you?’
‘We are married,’ he said.
‘If she knew of this, you’d go back like a whipped dog.’ He thought with tenderness, she hasn’t read the best books, like Louise.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’ll never marry me.’
‘I can’t. You know that’
‘It’s a wonderful excuse being a Catholic,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t stop you sleeping with me - it only stops you marrying me.’
‘Yes,’ he said. He thought: how much older she is than she was a month ago. She hadn’t been capable of a scene then, but she had been educated by love and secrecy: he was beginning to form her. He wondered whether if this went on long enough, she would be indistinguishable from Louise. In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old.
‘Go on,’ Helen said, ‘justify yourself.’
‘It would take too long,’ he said. ‘One would have to begin with the arguments for a God.’
‘What a twister you are.’
He felt disappointed. He had looked forward to the evening. All day in the office dealing with a rent case and a case of juvenile delinquency he had looked forward to the Nissen hut, the bare room, the junior official’s furniture like his own youth, everything that she had abused. He said, ‘I meant well.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I meant to be your friend. To look after you. To make you happier than you were.’
‘Wasn’t I happy?’ she asked as though she were speaking of years ago.
He said, ‘You were shocked, lonely...’
‘I couldn’t have been as lonely as I am now,’ she said. ‘I go out to the beach with Mrs Carter when the rain stops. Bagster makes a pass, they think I’m frigid. I come back here before the rain starts and wait for you ... we drink a glass of whisky ... you give me some stamps as though I were your small girl...’
‘I’m sorry,’ Scobie said. He put out his hand and covered hers: the knuckles lay under his palm like a small backbone that had been broken. He went slowly and cautiously on, choosing his words carefully, as though he were pursuing a path through an evacuated country sown with booby-traps: every step he took he expected the explosion. ‘I’d do anything - almost anything - to make you happy. I’d stop coming here. I’d go right away - retire...’
‘You’d be so glad to get rid of me,’ she said.
‘It would be like the end of life.’
‘Go away if you want to.’
‘I don’t want to go. I want to do what you want.’
‘You can go if you want to - or you can stay,’ she said with contempt. ‘I can’t move, can I?’
‘If you want it, I’ll get you on the next boat somehow.’
‘Oh, how pleased you’d be if this were over,’ she said and began to weep. When he put out a hand to touch her she screamed at him, ‘Go to hell.