3

On his way to the Commissioner’s bungalow, Scobie looked in at his office. A message was written in pencil on his pad. I looked in to see you. Nothing important. Wilson. It struck him as odd: he had not seen Wilson for some weeks, and if his visit had no importance why had he so carefully recorded it? He opened the drawer of his desk to find a packet of cigarettes and noticed at once that something was out of order: he considered the contents carefully: his indelible pencil was missing. Obviously Wilson had looked for a pencil with which to write his message and had forgotten to put it back. But why the message?

       In the charge-room the sergeant said, ‘Mr Wilson come to see you, sah.’

       ‘Yes, he left a message.’

       So that was it, he thought: I would have known anyway, so he considered it best to let me know himself. He returned to his office and looked again at his desk. It seemed to him that a file had been shifted, but he couldn’t be sure. He opened his drawer, but there was nothing there which would interest a soul. Only the broken rosary caught his eye - something which should have been mended a long while ago. He took it out and put it in his pocket.

       ‘Whisky?’ the Commissioner asked.

       ‘Thank you,’ Scobie said, holding the glass up between himself and the Commissioner. ‘Do you trust me?’

       ‘Yes.’

       ‘Am I the only one who doesn’t know about Wilson?’

       The Commissioner smiled, lying back at ease, unembarrassed. ‘Nobody knows officially - except myself and the manager of the U.A.C. - that was essential of course. The Governor too and whoever deals with the cables marked Most Secret. I’m glad you’ve tumbled to it.’

       ‘I wanted you to know that - up to date of course - I’ve been trustworthy.’

       ‘You don’t need to tell me, Scobie.’

       ‘In the case of Tallit’s cousin we couldn’t have done anything different.’

       ‘Of course not.’

       Scobie said, ‘There is one thing you don’t know though. I borrowed two hundred pounds from Yusef so that I could send Louise to South Africa. I pay him four per cent interest. The arrangement is purely commercial, but if you want my head for it...’

       ‘I’m glad you told me,’ the Commissioner said. ‘You see Wilson got the idea that you were being blackmailed. He must have dug up those payments somehow.’

       ‘Yusef wouldn’t blackmail for money.’

       ‘I told him that.’

       ‘Do you want my head?’

       ‘I need your head, Scobie. You’re the only officer I really trust,’

       Scobie stretched out a hand with an empty glass in it: it was like a handclasp.

       ‘Say when.’

       ‘When.’

       Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.

       ‘Derry reports there’ve been some big thefts from the mines.’

       ‘Commercial?’

       ‘Gem stones. Is it Yusef - or Tallit?’

       ‘It might be Yusef,’ Scobie said. ‘I don’t think he deals in industrial diamonds. He calls them gravel. But of course one can’t be sure.’

       ‘The Esperança will be in in a few days. We’ve got to be careful,’

       ‘What does Wilson say?’

       ‘He swears by Tallit. Yusef is the villain of his piece - and you, Scobie.’

       ‘I haven’t seen Yusef for a long while.’ «I know.’

       ‘I begin to know what these Syrians feel - watched and reported on.’

       ‘Wilson reports on all of us, Scobie. Fraser, Tod, Thimblerigg, myself. He thinks I’m too easy-going. It doesn’t matter though. Wright tears up his reports, and of course Wilson reports on him.’

       ‘I suppose so.’

       He walked up, at midnight, to the Nissen huts. In the blackout he felt momentarily safe, unwatched, unreported on; in the soggy ground his footsteps made the smallest sounds, but as he passed Wilson’s hut he was aware again of the deep necessity for caution. An awful weariness touched him, and he thought: I will go home: I won’t creep by to her tonight: her last words had been ‘don’t come back’. Couldn’t one, for once, take somebody at their word? He stood twenty yards from Wilson’s hut, watching the crack of light between the curtains. A drunken voice shouted somewhere up the hill and the first spatter of the returning rain licked his face. He thought: I’ll go back and go to bed, in the morning I’ll write to Louise and in the evening go to Confession: the day after that God will return to me in a priest’s hands: life will be simple again. Virtue, the good life, tempted him in the dark like a sin. The rain blurred his eyes, the’ ground sucked at his feet as they trod reluctantly towards the Nissen hut.

       He knocked twice and the door immediately opened. He had prayed between the two knocks that anger might still be there behind the door, that he wouldn’t be wanted. He couldn’t shut his eyes or his ears to any human need of him; he was not the centurion, but a man in the ranks who had to do the bidding of a hundred centurions, and when the door opened, he could tell the command was going to be given again - the command to stay, to love, to accept responsibility, to lie.

       ‘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 he ran to the windows and pulled them shut. Upstairs the bedroom windows clattered to and fro, tearing at hinges. Turning from closing them he looked at the bare dressing-table where soon the photographs and the pots would be back again - one photograph in particular. The happy Scobie, he thought, my one success. A child in hospital said ‘Father’ as the shadow of a rabbit shifted on the pillow: a girl went by on a stretcher clutching a stamp-album - why me, he thought, why do they need me, a dull middle-aged police officer who had failed for promotion? I’ve got nothing to give them that they can’t get elsewhere: why can’t they leave me in peace? Elsewhere there was a younger and better love, more security. It sometimes seemed to him that all he could share with them was his despair.

       Leaning back against the dressing-table, he tried to pray. The Lord’s Prayer lay as dead on his tongue as a legal document: it wasn’t his daily bread that he wanted but so much more. He wanted happiness for others and solitude and peace for himself. ‘I don’t want to plan any more,’ he said suddenly aloud. ‘They wouldn’t need me if I were dead. No one need’ the dead. The dead can be forgotten. O God, give me death before I give them unhappiness.’ But the words sounded melodramatically in his own ears. He told himself that he mustn’t get hysterical: there was far too much planning to do for an hysterical man, and going downstairs again he thought three aspirins or perhaps four were what he required in this situation - this banal situation. He took a bottle of filtered water out of the ice-box and dissolved the aspirin. He wondered how it would feel to drain death as simply as these aspirin’ which now stuck sourly in his throat The priests told one it was the unforgivable sin, the final expression of an unrepentent despair, and of course one accepted the Church’s teaching. But they taught also that God had sometimes broken his own laws, and was it less possible for him to put out a hand of forgiveness into the suicidal darkness than to have woken himself in the tomb, behind the stone? Christ had not been murdered - you couldn’t murder God. Christ had killed himself: he had hung himself on the Cross as surely as Pemberton from the picture-rail.

       He put his glass down and thought again, I must not get hysterical. Two people’s happiness was in his hands and he must learn to juggle with strong nerves. Calmness was everything. He took out his diary and began to write against the date, Wednesday, September 6. Dinner with the Commissioner. Satisfactory talk about W. Ceiled on Helen for a few minutes. Telegram from Louise that she is on the way home.

       He hesitated for a moment and then wrote: Father Rank called in for drink before dinner. A little overwrought. He needs leave. He read this over and scored out the last two sentences. It was seldom in this record that he allowed himself an expression of opinion.