The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [77]
‘Yusef wouldn’t blackmail for money.’
‘I told him that.’
‘Do you want my head?’
‘I need your head, Scobie. You’re the only officer I really trust,’
Scobie stretched out a hand with an empty glass in it: it was like a handclasp.
‘Say when.’
‘When.’
Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.
‘Derry reports there’ve been some big thefts from the mines.’
‘Commercial?’
‘Gem stones. Is it Yusef - or Tallit?’
‘It might be Yusef,’ Scobie said. ‘I don’t think he deals in industrial diamonds. He calls them gravel. But of course one can’t be sure.’
‘The Esperança will be in in a few days. We’ve got to be careful,’
‘What does Wilson say?’
‘He swears by Tallit. Yusef is the villain of his piece - and you, Scobie.’
‘I haven’t seen Yusef for a long while.’ «I know.’
‘I begin to know what these Syrians feel - watched and reported on.’
‘Wilson reports on all of us, Scobie. Fraser, Tod, Thimblerigg, myself. He thinks I’m too easy-going. It doesn’t matter though. Wright tears up his reports, and of course Wilson reports on him.’
‘I suppose so.’
He walked up, at midnight, to the Nissen huts. In the blackout he felt momentarily safe, unwatched, unreported on; in the soggy ground his footsteps made the smallest sounds, but as he passed Wilson’s hut he was aware again of the deep necessity for caution. An awful weariness touched him, and he thought: I will go home: I won’t creep by to her tonight: her last words had been ‘don’t come back’. Couldn’t one, for once, take somebody at their word? He stood twenty yards from Wilson’s hut, watching the crack of light between the curtains. A drunken voice shouted somewhere up the hill and the first spatter of the returning rain licked his face. He thought: I’ll go back and go to bed, in the morning I’ll write to Louise and in the evening go to Confession: the day after that God will return to me in a priest’s hands: life will be simple again. Virtue, the good life, tempted him in the dark like a sin. The rain blurred his eyes, the’ ground sucked at his feet as they trod reluctantly towards the Nissen hut.
He knocked twice and the door immediately opened. He had prayed between the two knocks that anger might still be there behind the door, that he wouldn’t be wanted. He couldn’t shut his eyes or his ears to any human need of him; he was not the centurion, but a man in the ranks who had to do the bidding of a hundred centurions, and when the door opened, he could tell the command was going to be given again - the command to stay, to love, to accept responsibility, to lie.
‘Oh darling,’ she said, ‘I thought you were never coming. I bitched you so.’
‘I’ll always come if you want me.’
‘Will you?’
‘Always. If I’m alive.’ God can wait, he thought: how can one love God at the expense of one of his creatures? Would a woman accept the love for which a child had to be sacrificed?
Carefully they drew the curtains close before turning up the lamps.
She said, ‘I’ve been afraid all day that you wouldn’t come.’
‘Of course I came.’
‘I told you to go away. Never pay any attention to me when I tell you to go away. Promise.’
‘I promise,’ he said.
‘If you hadn’t come back -...’ she said, and became lost in thought between the lamps. He could see her searching for herself, frowning in the effort to see where she would have been ... ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I’d have slutted with Bagster, or killed myself, or both. I think both.’
He said anxiously, ‘You mustn’t think like that. I’ll always be here if you need me, as long as I’m alive.’
‘Why do you keep on saying as long as I’m alive?’
‘There are thirty years between us.’
For the first time that night they kissed. She said, ‘I can’t feel the years.