The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [21]
‘Ticki, why are you such a coward? Why don’t you tell me it’s all off?’
‘All off?’
‘You know what I mean - the passage. You’ve been talking and talking since you came in about the Esperança. There’s a Portuguese ship in once a fortnight. You don’t talk that way every time. I’m not a child, Ticki. Why don’t you say straight out - ‘you can’t go’?’
He grinned miserably at his glass, twisting it round and round to let the angostura cling along the curve. He said, ‘That wouldn’t be true. I’ll find some way.’ Reluctantly he had recourse to the hated nickname. If that failed, the misery would deepen and go right on through the short night he needed for sleep. ‘Trust Ticki,’ he said. It was as if a ligament tightened in his brain with the suspense. If only I could postpone the misery, he thought, until daylight. Misery is worse in the darkness: there’s nothing to look at except the green black-out curtains, the Government furniture, the flying ants scattering their wings over the table: a hundred yards away the Creoles’ pye-dogs yapped and wailed. ‘Look at that little beggar,’ he said, pointing at the house lizard that always came out upon the wall about this time to hunt for moths and cockroaches. He said, ‘We only got the idea last night. These things take time to fix. Ways and means, ways and means,’ he said with strained humour.
‘Have you been to the bank?’
‘Yes,’ he admitted.
‘And you couldn’t get the money?’
‘No. They couldn’t manage it Have another gin and bitters, darling?’
She held her glass out to him, crying dumbly; her face reddened when she cried - she looked ten years older, a middle-aged and abandoned woman - it was like the terrible breath of the future on his cheek. He went down on one knee beside her and held the pink gin to her lips as though it were medicine. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I’ll find a way. Have a drink.’
‘Ticki, I can’t bear this place any longer. I know I’ve said it before, but I mean it this time. I shall go mad. Ticki, I’m so lonely. I haven’t a friend, Ticki.’
‘Let’s have Wilson up tomorrow.’
‘Ticki, for God’s sake don’t always mention Wilson. Please, please do something.’
‘Of course I will Just be patient a while, dear. These things take time.’
‘What will you do, Ticki?’
‘I’m full of ideas, darling,’ he said wearily. (What a day it had been.) ‘Just let them simmer for a little while.’
‘Tell me one idea. Just one.’
His eyes followed the lizard as it pounced; then he picked an ant wing out of his gin and drank again. He thought to himself: what a fool I really was not to take the hundred pounds. I destroyed the letter for nothing. I took the risk. I might just as well... Louise said, ‘I’ve known it for years. You don’t love me.’ She spoke with calm. He knew that calm - it meant they had reached the quiet centre of the storm: always in this region at about this time they began to speak the truth at each other. The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths. He involved himself in what he always knew was a vain struggle to retain the lies. ‘Don’t be absurd, darling. Who do you mink I love if I don’t love you?’
‘You don’t love anybody.’
‘Is that why I treat you so badly?’ He tried to hit a light note, and it sounded hollowly back at him.
‘That’s your conscience,’ she said, ‘your sense of duty. You’ve never loved anyone since Catherine died.’
‘Except myself, of course. You always say I love myself.’
‘No, I don’t think you do.’
He defended himself by evasions. In this cyclonic centre he was powerless to give the comforting lie. ‘I try all the time to keep you happy. I work hard for that.’
‘Ticki, you won’t even say you love me. Go on. Say it once.’
He eyed her bitterly over the pink gin, the visible sign of his failure: the skin a little yellow with atabrine, the eyes bloodshot with tears. No man could guarantee love for ever, but he had sworn fourteen years ago, at Ealing, silently, during the horrible little elegant ceremony among the lace and candles, that he would at least always see to it that she was happy.