The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [89]
‘Yes.’ He sat down on the bed and put his hand on her arm; immediately the sweat began to run between them. He said, ‘What are you doing here? You are not ill?’
‘Just a headache.’
He said mechanically, without even hearing his own words, ‘Take care of yourself.’
‘Something’s worrying you,’ she said. ‘Have things gone - wrong?’
‘Nothing of that kind.’
‘Do you remember the first night you stayed here? We didn’t worry about anything. You even left your umbrella behind. We were happy. Doesn’t it seem odd? - we were happy,’
‘Yes.’
‘Why do we go on like this - being unhappy?’
‘It’s a mistake to mix up the ideas of happiness and love,’ Scobie said with desperate pedantry, as though, if he could turn the whole situation into a textbook case, as they had turned Pemberton, peace might return to both of them, a kind of resignation.
‘Sometimes you are so damnably old,’ Helen said, but immediately she expressed with a motion of her hand towards him that she wasn’t serious. Today, he thought, she can’t afford to quarrel - or so she believes. ‘Darling,’ she added, ‘a penny for your thoughts.’
One ought not to lie to two people if it could be avoided -that way lay complete chaos, but he was tempted terribly to lie as he watched her face on the pillow. She seemed to him like one of those plants in nature films which you watch age under your eye. Already she had the look of the coast about her. She shared it with Louise. He said, ‘It’s just a worry I have to think out for myself. Something I hadn’t considered.’
‘Tell me, darling. Two brains...’ She closed her eyes and he could see her mouth steady for a blow.
He said, ‘Louise wants me to go to Mass with her, to communion. I’m supposed to be on the way to confession now.’
‘Oh, is that all?’ she asked with immense relief, and irritation at her ignorance moved like hatred unfairly in his brain.
‘All?’ he said. ‘All?’ Then justice reclaimed him. He said gently, ‘If I don’t go to communion, you see, shell know there’s something wrong - seriously wrong.’
‘But can’t you simply go?’
He said, ‘To me that means - well, it’s the worst thing I can do.’
‘You don’t really believe in hell?’
‘That was what Fellowes asked me.’
‘But I simply don’t understand. If you believe in hell, why are you with me now?’
How often, he thought, lack of faith helps one to see more clearly than faith. He said, ‘You are right, of course: it ought to prevent all this. But the villagers on the slopes of Vesuvius go on ... And then, against all the teaching of the Church, one has the conviction that love - any kind of love - does deserve a bit of mercy. One will pay, of course, pay terribly, but I don’t believe one will pay for ever. Perhaps one will be given time before one dies ...’
‘A deathbed repentance,’ she said with contempt.
‘It wouldn’t be easy,’ he said, ‘to repent of this.’ He kissed the sweat off her hand. ‘I can regret the lies, the mess, the unhappiness, but if I were dying now I wouldn’t know how to repent the love.’
‘Well,’ she said with the same undertone of contempt that seemed to pull her apart from him, into the safety of the shore, ‘can’t you go and confess everything now? After all it doesn’t mean you won’t do it again.’
‘It’s not much good confessing if I don’t intend to try...’
‘Well then,’ she said triumphantly, ‘be hung for a sheep. You are in - what do you call it - mortal sin? now. What difference does it make?’
He thought: pious people, I suppose, would call this the devil speaking, but he knew that evil never spoke in these crude answerable terms: this was innocence. He said, ‘There is a difference - a big difference. It’s not easy to explain. Now I’m just putting our love above - well, my safety. But the other - the other’s really evil. It’s like the Black Mass, the man who steals the sacrament to desecrate it. It’s striking God when he’s down - in my power.’
She turned her head wearily away and said, ‘I don’t understand a thing you are saying. It’s all hooey to me.’
‘I wish it were to me. But I believe it’
She said sharply, ‘I suppose you do. Or is it just a trick?