The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [73]
Down the passage the girl came carrying a vinegar bottle filled with palm wine, and with a sigh of reluctance Wilson surrendered. The heat between the walls of rain, the musty smell of his companion, the dim and wayward light of the kerosene lamp reminded him of a vault newly opened for another body to be let down upon its floor. A grievance stirred in him, a hatred of those who had brought him here. In their presence he felt as though his dead veins would bleed again.
PART THREE
Chapter One
1
HELEN said, ‘I saw you on the beach this afternoon.’ Scobie looked up from the glass of whisky he was measuring. Something in her voice reminded him oddly of Louise. He said, ‘I had to find Rees - the Naval Intelligence man.’
‘You didn’t even speak to me.’
‘I was in a hurry.’
‘You are so careful, always,’ she said, and now he realized what was happening and why he had thought of Louise. He wondered sadly whether love always inevitably took the same road. It was not only the act of love itself that was the same. ... How often in the last two years he had tried to turn away at the critical moment from just such a scene - to save himself but also to save the other victim. He laughed with half a heart and said, ‘For once I wasn’t thinking of you. I had other things in mind.’
‘What other things?’
‘Oh, diamonds ...’
‘Your work is much more important to you than I am,’ Helen said, and the banality of the phrase, read in how many bad novels, wrung his heart.
‘Yes,’ he said gravely, ‘but I’d sacrifice it for you.’
‘Why?’
‘I suppose because you are a human being. Somebody may love a dog more than any other possession, but he wouldn’t run down even a strange child to save it’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘why do you always tell me the truth? I don’t want the truth all the time.’
He put the whisky glass in her hand and said, ‘Dear, you are unlucky. You are tied up with a middle-aged man. We can’t be bothered to lie all the time like the young.’
‘If you knew,’ she said, ‘how tired I get of all your caution. You come here after dark and you go after dark. It’s so-so ignoble.’
‘Yes.’
‘We always make love - here. Among the junior official’s furniture. I don’t believe we’d know how to do it anywhere else.’
‘Poor you,’ he said.
She said furiously, ‘I don’t want your pity.’ But it was not a question of whether she wanted it - she had it. Pity smouldered like decay at his heart. He would never rid himself of it. He knew from experience how passion died away and how love went, but pity always stayed. Nothing ever diminished pity. The conditions of life nurtured it. There was only a single person in the world who was unpitiable, oneself.
‘Can’t you ever risk anything?’ she asked. ‘You never even write a line to me. You go away on trek for days, but you won’t leave anything behind. I can’t even have a photograph to make this place human.’
‘But I haven’t got a photograph.’
‘I suppose you think I’d use your letters against you.’ He thought, if I shut my eyes it might almost be Louise speaking - the voice was younger, that was all, and perhaps less capable of giving pain. Standing with the whisky glass in his hand he remembered another night - a hundred yards away - the glass had then contained gin. He said gently, ‘You talk such nonsense.’
‘You think I’m a child. You tiptoe in - bringing me stamps.’
‘I’m trying to protect you.’
‘I don’t care a bloody damn if people talk.’ He recognized the hard swearing of the netball team.
He said, ‘If they talked enough, this would come to an end.’
‘You are not protecting me. You are protecting your wife.’
‘It comes to the same thing.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘to couple me with - that woman.’ He couldn’t prevent the wince. He had underrated her power of giving pain. He could see how she had spotted her success: he had delivered himself into her hands. Now she would always know how to inflict the sharpest stab. She was like a child with a pair of dividers who knows her power to injure. You could never trust a child not to use her advantage.