The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [67]
‘Ali starts boiling my water about a quarter to six. I’d better go.’ He looked carefully everywhere for signs of his presence: he straightened a that and hesitated over an ash-tray. Then at the end of it all he had left his umbrella standing against the wall. It seemed to him the typical action of a criminal. When the rain reminded him of it, it was too late to go back. He would have to hammer on her door, and already in one hut a light had gone on. Standing in his own room with a mosquito-boot in his hand, he thought wearily and drearily, In future I must do better than that.
In the future - that was where the sadness lay. Was it the butterfly that died in the act of love? But human beings were condemned to consequences. The responsibility as well as the guilt was his - he was not a Bagster: he knew what he was about. He had sworn to preserve Louise’s happiness, and now he had accepted another and contradictory responsibility. He felt tired by all the lies he would some time have to tell; he felt the wounds of those victims who had not yet bled. Lying back on the pillow he stared sleeplessly out towards the grey early morning tide. Somewhere on the face of those obscure waters moved the sense of yet another wrong and another victim, not Louise, nor Helen.
PART TWO
Chapter One
1
‘THERE. What do you think of it?’ Harris asked with I’ll-concealed pride. He stood in the doorway of the hut while Wilson moved cautiously forward between the brown sticks of Government furniture like a setter through stubble.
‘Better than the hotel,’ Wilson said cautiously, pointing his muzzle towards a Government easy-chair.
‘I thought I’d give you a surprise when you got back from Lagos.’ Harris had curtained the Nissen hut into three: a bedroom for each of them and a common sitting-room. ‘There’s only one point that worries me. I’m not sure whether there are any cockroaches.’
‘Well, we only played the game to get rid of them.’
‘I know, but it seems almost a pity, doesn’t it?’
‘Who are our neighbours?’
‘There’s Mrs Rolt who was submarined, and there are two chaps in the Department of Works, and somebody called Clive from the Agricultural Department, Boling, who’s in charge of Sewage - they all seem a nice friendly lot. And Scobie, of course, is just down the road.’
‘Yes.’
Wilson moved restlessly around the hut and came to a stop in front of a photograph which Harris had propped against a Government inkstand. It showed three long rows of boys on a lawn: the first row sitting cross-legged on the grass: the second on chairs, wearing high stiff collars, with an elderly man and two women (one had a squint) in the centre: the third row standing. Wilson said, ‘That woman with a squint - I could swear I’d seen her somewhere before.’
‘Does the name Snakey convey anything to you?’
‘Why, yes, of course.’ He looked closer. ‘So you were at that hole too?’
‘I saw The Downhamian in your room and I fished this out to surprise you. I was in Jagger’s house. Where were you?’
‘I was a Prog,’ Wilson said.
‘Oh well,’ Harris admitted in a tone of disappointment, ‘there were some good chaps among the Progs.’ He laid the photograph flat down again as though it were something that hadn’t quite come off. ‘I was thinking we might have an old Downhamian dinner.’
‘Whatever for?’ Wilson asked. ‘There are only two of us.’
‘We could invite a guest each.’
‘I don’t see the point.’
Harris said bitterly, ‘Well, you are the real Downhamian, not me. I never joined the association. You get the magazine. I thought perhaps you had an interest in the place.’
‘My father made me a life member and he always forwards the bloody paper,’ Wilson said abruptly.
‘It was lying beside your bed. I thought you’d been reading it.’
‘I may have glanced at it’
‘There was a bit about me in it. They wanted my address.’
‘Oh, but you know why that is?’ Wilson said. ‘They are sending out appeals to any old Downhamian they can rake up. The panelling in the Founders’ Hall is in need of repair. I’d keep your address quiet if I were you.’ He was one of those, it seemed to Harris, who always knew what was on, who gave advance information on extra halves, who knew why old So-and-So had not turned up to school, and what the row brewing at the Head