The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [88]
‘They don’t show the dirt’
‘Poor dear, you wouldn’t notice, but I’ve been away.’ She said, ‘I really want a bigger bookcase now. I’ve brought a lot of books back with me.’
‘You haven’t told me yet what made you...’
‘Darling, you’d laugh at me. It was so silly. But suddenly I saw what a fool I’d been to worry like that about the Commissionership. I’ll tell you one day when I don’t mind your laughing.’ She put her hand out and tentatively touched his arm. ‘You’re really glad...?’
‘So glad,’ he said.
‘Do you know one of the things that worried me? I was afraid you wouldn’t be much of a Catholic without me around, keeping you up to things, poor dear.’
‘I don’t suppose I have been.’
‘Have you missed Mass often?’
He said with forced jocularity, ‘I’ve hardly been at all.’
‘Oh, Ticki.’ She pulled herself quickly up and said, ‘Henry, darling, you’ll think I’m very sentimental, but tomorrow’s Sunday and I want us to go to communion together. A sign that we’ve started again - in the right way.’ It was extraordinary the points in a situation one missed - this he had not considered. He said, ‘Of course,’ but his brain momentarily refused to work.
‘You’ll have to go to confession this afternoon.’
‘I haven’t done anything very terrible.’
‘Missing Mass on Sunday’s a mortal sin, just as much as adultery.’
‘Adultery’s more fun,’ he said with attempted lightness.
‘It’s time I came back.’
‘I’ll go along this afternoon - after lunch. I can’t confess on an empty stomach.’ he said.
‘Darling, you have changed, you know.’
‘I was only joking.’
‘I don’t mind you joking. I like it You didn’t do it much though before.’
‘You don’t come back every day, darling.’ The strained good humour, the jest with dry lips, went on and on: at lunch he kid down his fork for yet another ‘crack’. ‘Dear Henry,’ she said, ‘I’ve never known you so cheerful’ The ground had given way beneath his feet, and all through the meal he had the sensation of falling, the relaxed stomach, the breathless-ness, the despair - because you couldn’t fall so far as this and survive. His hilarity was like a scream from a crevasse.
When lunch was over (he couldn’t have told what it was he’d eaten) he said, ‘I must be off.’
‘Father Rank?’
‘First I’ve got to look in on Wilson. He’s living in one of the Nissens now. A neighbour.’
‘Wont he be in town?’
‘I think he comes back for lunch.’
He thought as he went up the hill, what a lot of times in future I shall have to call on Wilson. But no - that wasn’t a safe alibi. It would only do this once, because he knew that Wilson lunched in town. None the less, to make sure, he knocked and was taken aback momentarily when Harris opened to him. ‘I didn’t expect to see you.’
‘I bad a touch of fever,’ Harris said. ‘I wondered whether Wilson was in.’
‘He always lunches in town,’ Harris said. ‘I just wanted to tell him he’d be welcome to look in. My wife’s back, you know.’
‘I thought I saw the activity through the window.’
‘You must call on us too.’
‘I’m not much of a calling man,’ Harris said, drooping in the doorway. ‘To tell you the truth women scare me.’
‘You don’t see enough of them, Harris.’
‘I’m not a squire of dames,’ Harris said with a poor attempt at pride, and Scobie was aware of how Harris watched him as he picked his way reluctantly towards a woman’s hut, watched with the ugly asceticism of the unwanted man. He knocked and felt that disapproving gaze boring into his back. He thought: there goes my alibi: he will tell Wilson and Wilson ... He thought: I will say that as I was up here, I called ... and he felt his whole personality crumble with the slow disintegration of lies.
‘Why did you knock?’ Helen asked. She lay on her bed in the dusk of drawn curtains.
‘Harris was watching me.’
‘I didn’t think you’d come today.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Everybody here knows everything - except one thing. How clever you are about that. I suppose it’s because you are a police officer.