The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [75]
He wrote: My darling - he wanted to put himself entirely in her hands, but to leave her anonymous. He looked at his watch and added in the right-hand corner, as though he were making a police report, 12.35 a.m. Burnside, September 5. He went carefully on, I love you more than myself, more than my wife, more than God I think. I am trying very hard to tell the truth. I want more than anything in the world to make you happy ... The banality of the phrases saddened him; they seemed to have no truth personal to herself: they had been used too often. If I were young, he thought, I would be able to find the right words, the new words, but all this has happened to me before. He wrote again, I love you. Forgive me, signed and folded the paper.
He put on his mackintosh and went out again in the rain. Wounds festered in the damp, they never healed. Scratch your finger and in a few hours there would be a little coating of green skin. He carried a sense of corruption up the hill. A soldier shouted something in his sleep in the transport park -a single word like a hieroglyphic on a wall which Scobie could not interpret - the men were Nigerians. The rain hammered on the Nissen roofs, and he thought, Why did I write that? Why did I write ‘more than God’? she would have been satisfied with ‘more than Louise’. Even if it’s true, why did I write it? The sky wept endlessly around him; he had the sense of wounds that never healed. He whispered, ‘O God, I have deserted you. Do not you desert me.’ When he came to her door he thrust the letter under it; he heard the rustle of the paper on the cement floor but nothing else. Remembering the childish figure carried past him on the stretcher, he was saddened to think how much had happened, how uselessly, to make him now say to himself with resentment: she will never again be able to accuse me of caution.
2
‘I was just passing by,’ Father Rank said, ‘so I thought I’d look in.’ The evening rain fell in grey ecclesiastical folds, and a lorry howled its way towards the hills.
‘Come in,’ Scobie said. ‘I’m out of whisky. But there’s beer - or gin.’
‘I saw you up at the Nissens, so I thought I’d follow you down. You are not busy?’
‘I’m having dinner with the Commissioner, but not for another hour.’
Father Rank moved restlessly around the room, while Scobie took the beer out of the ice-box. ‘Would you have heard from Louise lately?’ he asked.
‘Not for a fortnight,’ Scobie said, ‘but there’ve been more sinkings in the south.’
Father Rank let himself down in the Government armchair with his glass between his knees. There was no sound but the rain scraping on the roof. Scobie cleared his throat and then the silence came back. He had the odd sense that Father Rank, like one of his own junior officers, was waiting there for orders.
‘The rains will soon be over,’ Scobie said.
‘It must be six months now since your wife went.’
‘Seven.’
‘Will you be taking your leave in South Africa?’ Father Rank asked, looking away and taking a draught of his beer,
‘I’ve postponed my leave. The young men need it more.’
‘Everybody needs leave.’
‘You’ve been here twelve years without it, Father.’
‘Ah, but that’s different,’ Father Rank said. He got up again and moved restlessly down one wall and along another. He turned an expression of undefined appeal toward Scobie. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I feel as though I weren’t a working man at all.’ He stopped and stared and half raised his hands, and Scobie remembered Father Clay dodging an unseen figure in his restless walk. He felt as though an appeal were being made to which he couldn’t find an answer. He said weakly, ‘There’s no one works harder than you, Father.’
Father Rank returned draggingly to his chair. He said, ‘It’ll be good when the rains are over.’
‘How’s the mammy out by Congo Creek? I heard she was dying.’
‘Shell be gone this week. She’s a good woman.’ He took another draught of beer and doubled up in the chair with his band on his stomach. ‘The wind,’ he said. ‘I get the wind badly.’
‘You shouldn’t drink bottled beer, Father.’
‘The dying,’ Father Rank said,