7

Before he went indoors he walked round to the seaward side of the house to check the black-out. He could hear the mur­mur of Louise’s voice inside: she was probably reading poetry. He thought: by God, what right has that young fool Fraser to despise her for that? and then his anger moved away again, like a shabby man, when he thought of Fraser’s disappoint­ment in the morning - no Portuguese visit, no present for his best girl, only the hot humdrum office day. Feeling for the handle of the back door to avoid flashing his torch, he tore his right hand on a splinter. He came into the lighted room and saw that his hand was dripping with blood. ‘Oh, darling,’ Louise said, ‘what have you done?’ and covered her face. She couldn’t bear the sight of blood. ‘Can I help you, sir?’ Wilson asked. He tried to rise, but he was sitting in a low chair at Louise’s feet and his knees were piled with books.

       ‘It’s all right,’ Scobie said. ‘It’s only a scratch. I can see to it myself. Just tell Ali to bring a bottle of water.’ Half-way upstairs he heard the voice resume. Louise said, ‘A lovely poem about a pylon.’ Scobie walked into the bathroom, dis­turbing a rat that had been couched on the cool rim of the bath, like a cat on a gravestone.

       Scobie sat down on the edge of the bath and let his hand drip into the lavatory pail among the wood shavings. Just as in his own office the sense of home surrounded him. Louise’s ingenuity had been able to do little with this room: the bath of scratched enamel with a single tap which always ceased to work before the end of the dry season: the tin bucket under the lavatory seat emptied once a day: the fixed basin with another useless tap: bare floorboards: drab green black-out curtains. The only improvements Louise had been able to im­pose were the cork that by the bath, the bright white medicine cabinet.

       The rest of the room was all his own. It was like a relic of his youth carried from house to house. It had been like this years ago in his first house before he married. This was the room in which he had always been alone.

       Ali came in, his pink soles flapping on the floorboards, carrying a bottle of water from the filter. ‘The back door hum­bug me,’ Scobie explained. He held his hand out over the washbasin, while Ali poured the water over the wound. The boy made gentle clucking sounds of commiseration: his hands were as gentle as a girl’s. When Scobie said impatiently, ‘That’s enough,’ Ali paid him no attention. ‘Too much dirt,’ he said.

       ‘Now iodine.’ The smallest scratch in this country turned green if it were neglected for an hour. ‘Again,’ he said, ‘pour it over,’ wincing at the sting. Down below out of the swing of voices the word ‘beauty’ detached itself and sank back into the trough. ‘Now the Elastoplast’

       ‘No,’ Ali said, ‘no. Bandage better.’

       ‘All right. Bandage then.’ Yean ago he had taught Ali to bandage: now he could tie one as expertly as a doctor.

       ‘Good night, Ali. Go to bed. I shan’t want you again.’

       ‘Missus want drinks.’

       ‘No. I’ll attend to the drinks. You can go to bed.’ Alone he sat down again on the edge of the bath. The wound had jarred him a little and anyway he was unwilling to join the two down­stairs, for his presence would embarrass Wilson. A man couldn’t listen to a woman reading poetry in the presence of an outsider. ‘I had rather be a kitten and cry mew ...’ but that wasn’t really his attitude. He did not despise: he just couldn’t understand such bare relations of intimate feeling. And besides he was happy here, sitting where the rat had sat, in his own world. He began to think of the Esperança and of the next day’s work.

       ‘Darling,’ Louise called up the stairs, ‘are you all right? Can you drive Mr Wilson home?’

       ‘I can walk, Mrs Scobie.’

       ‘Nonsense.’

       ‘Yes, really.’

       ‘Coming,’ Scobie called. ‘Of course I’ll drive you back.’ When he joined them Louise took the bandaged hand tenderly in hers. ‘Oh the poor hand,’ she said. ‘Does it hurt?’ She was not afraid of the clean white bandage: it was like a patient in a hospital with the sheets drawn tidily up to the chin. One could bring grapes and never know the details of the scalpel wound out of sight. She put her lips to the bandage and left a little smear of orange lipstick.

       ‘It’s quite all right,’ Scobie said.

       ‘Really, sir. I can walk.’

       ‘Of course you won’t walk. Come along, get in.’

       The light from the dashboard lit up a patch of Wilson’s extraordinary suit. He leant out of the car and cried, ‘Good night, Mrs Scobie. It’s been lovely. I can’t thank you enough.’ The words vibrated with sincerity: it gave them the sound of a foreign language - the sound of English spoken in England. Here intonations changed in the course of a few months, became high-pitched and insincere, or flat and guarded. You could tell that Wilson was fresh from home.

       ‘You must come again soon,’ Scobie said, as they drove down the Burnside road towards the Bedford Hotel, remem­bering Louise’s happy face.