The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [80]
‘Oh darling,’ she said, ‘I thought you were never coming. I bitched you so.’
‘I’ll always come if you want me.’
‘Will you?’
‘Always. If I’m alive.’ God can wait, he thought: how can one love God at the expense of one of his creatures? Would a woman accept the love for which a child had to be sacrificed?
Carefully they drew the curtains close before turning up the lamps.
She said, ‘I’ve been afraid all day that you wouldn’t come.’
‘Of course I came.’
‘I told you to go away. Never pay any attention to me when I tell you to go away. Promise.’
‘I promise,’ he said.
‘If you hadn’t come back -...’ she said, and became lost in thought between the lamps. He could see her searching for herself, frowning in the effort to see where she would have been ... ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I’d have slutted with Bagster, or killed myself, or both. I think both.’
He said anxiously, ‘You mustn’t think like that. I’ll always be here if you need me, as long as I’m alive.’
‘Why do you keep on saying as long as I’m alive?’
‘There are thirty years between us.’
For the first time that night they kissed. She said, ‘I can’t feel the years.’
‘Why did you think I wouldn’t come?’ Scobie said. ‘You got my letter.’
‘Your letter?’
‘The one I pushed under your door last night.’
She said with fear, ‘I never saw a letter. What did you say?’
He touched her face and smiled. ‘Everything. I didn’t want to be cautious any longer. I put down everything.’
‘Even your name?’
‘I think so. Anyway, it’s signed with my handwriting.’
‘There’s a that by the door. It must be under the mat’ But they both knew it wouldn’t be there. It was as if all along they had foreseen how disaster would come in by that particular door.
‘Who would have taken it?’
He tried to soothe her nerves. ‘Probably your boy threw it away, thought it was waste paper. It wasn’t in an envelope. Nobody could know whom I was writing to.’
‘As if that mattered. Darling,’ she said, ‘I feel sick. Really sick. Somebody’s getting something on you. I wish I’d died in that boat.’
‘You’re imagining things. Probably I didn’t push the note far enough. When your boy opened the door in the morning it blew away or got trampled in the mud.’ He spoke with all the conviction he could summon: it was just possible.
‘Don’t let me ever do you any harm,’ she implored, and every phrase she used fastened the fetters more firmly round his wrists. He put out his hands to her and lied firmly, ‘You’ll never do me harm. Don’t worry about a lost letter. I exaggerated. It said nothing really - nothing that a stranger would understand. Don’t worry.’
‘Listen, darling. Don’t stay tonight I’m nervous. I feel -watched. Say good night now and go away. But come back. Oh my dear, come back.’
The light was still on in Wilson’s hut as he passed. Opening the door of his own dark house he saw a piece of paper on the floor. It gave him an odd shock as though the missing letter had returned, like a cat, to its old home. But when he picked it up, it wasn’t his letter, though this too was a message of love. It was a telegram addressed to him at police headquarters and the signature written in full for the sake of censorship, Louise Scobie, was like a blow struck by a boxer with a longer reach than he possessed. Have written am on my way home have been a fool stop love - and then that name as formal as a seal.
He sat down. His head swam with nausea. He thought: if I had never written that other letter, if I had taken Helen at her word and gone away, how easily then life could have been arranged again. But he remembered his words in the last ten minutes, ‘I’ll always be here if you need me as long as I’m alive’ - that constituted an oath as ineffaceable as the vow by the Ealing altar. The wind was coming up from the sea - the nuns ended as they began with typhoons. The curtains blew in and