2

Scobie watched the small boy as he cleared away the evening meal, watched him come in and go out, watched the bare feet flap the floor. Louise said, ‘I know it’s a terrible thing, dear, but you’ve got to put it behind you. You can’t help Ali now.’ A new parcel of books had come from England and he watched her cutting the leaves of a volume of verse. There was more grey in her hair than when she had left for South Africa, but she looked, it seemed to him, yean younger because she was paying more attention to make-up: her dressing-table was Uttered with the pots and bottles and tubes she had brought back from the south. Ali’s death meant little to her: why should it? It was the sense of guilt that made it so important. Otherwise one didn’t grieve for a death. When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity ... She sat there, reading poetry, and she was a thousand miles away from the torment that shook his hand and dried his mouth. She would understand, he thought, if I were in a book, but would I understand her if she were just a character? I don’t read that sort of book.

       ‘Haven’t you anything to read, dear?’

       ‘I’m sorry. I don’t feel much like reading.’

       She closed her book, and it occurred to him that after all she had her own effort to make: she tried to help. Sometimes he wondered with horror whether perhaps she knew everything, whether that complacent face which she had worn since her return masked misery. She said, ‘Let’s talk about Christmas.’

       ‘It’s still a long way off,’ he said quickly.

       ‘Before you know it will be on us. I was wondering whether we could give a party. We’ve always been out to dinner: it ‘would be fun to have people here. Perhaps on Christmas Eve.’

       ‘Just what you like.’

       ‘We could all go on then to Midnight Mass. Of course you and I would have to remember to drink nothing after ten - but the others could do as they pleased.’

       He looked up at her with momentary hatred as she sat so cheerfully there, so smugly, it seemed to him, arranging his further damnation. He was going to be Commissioner. She had what she wanted - her sort of success, everything was all right with her now. He thought: it was the hysterical woman who felt the world laughing behind her back that I loved. I love failure: I can’t love success. And how successful she looks, sitting there, one of the saved, and he saw laid across that wide face like a news-screen the body of Ali under the black drums, the exhausted eyes of Helen, and an the faces of the lost, his companions in exile, the unrepentant thief, the soldier with the sponge. Thinking of what he had done and was going to do, he thought, even God is a failure. ‘What is it, Ticki? Are you still worrying...?’ But he couldn’t tell her the entreaty that was on his lips: let me pity you again, be disappointed, unattractive, be a failure so that I can love you once more without this bitter gap between us. Time is short. I want to love you too at the end. He said slowly, ‘It’s the pain. It’s over now. When it comes -’ he remembered the phrase of the textbook - ‘it’s like a vice.’

       ‘You must see the doctor, Ticki.’

       ‘I’ll see him tomorrow. I was going to anyway because of my sleeplessness.’

       ‘Your sleeplessness? But, Ticki, you sleep like a log.’

       ‘Not the last week.’

       ‘You’re imagining it.’

       ‘No. I wake up about two and can’t sleep again - till just before we are called. Don’t worry. I’ll get some tablets.’

       ‘I hate drugs.’

       ‘I won’t go on long enough to form a habit’

       ‘We must get you right for Christmas, Ticki.’

       ‘I’ll be all right by Christmas.’ He came stiffly across the room to her, imitating the bearing of a man who fears that pain may return again, and put his hand against her breast. ‘Don’t worry.’ Hatred went out of him at the touch - she wasn’t as successful as all that: she would never be married to the Commissioner of Police.

       After she had gone to bed he took out his diary. In this record at least he had never lied. At the worst he had omitted. He had checked his temperatures as carefully as a sea captain making up his log. He had never exaggerated or minimized, and he had never indulged in speculation. All he had written here was fact. November 1, Early Mass with Louise. Spent morning on larceny case at Mrs Onoko’s. Temperature 91° at 2. Saw Y. at his office. Ali found murdered. The statement was as plain and simple as that other time when he had written: C. died.

       ‘November 2.’ He sat a long while with that date in front of him, so long that presently Louise called down to him. He replied carefully, ‘Go to sleep, dear. If I sit up late, I may be able to steep properly.’ But already, exhausted by the day and by all the plans that had to be laid, he was near to nodding at the table. He went to his ice-box and wrapping a piece of ice in his handkerchief rested it against his forehead until sleep receded. November 2. Again he picked up his pen: this was his death-warrant he was signing. He wrote: Saw Helen for a few minutes. (It was always safer to leave no facts for anyone else to unearth.) Temperature at 2, 92°. In the evening return of pain. Fear angina. He looked up the pages of the entries for a week back and added an occasional note. Slept very badly. Bad night. Sleeplessness continues. He read the entries over carefully: they would be read later by the coroner, by the insurance inspectors. They seemed to him to be in his usual manner. Then he put the ice back on his forehead to drive sleep away. It was still only half after midnight: it would be better not to go to bed before two.