The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [85]
‘You’ve had a good trip?’
‘I think we were chased once.’
‘I was very anxious,’ he said and thought: that is the first lie. I may as well take the plunge now. He said, ‘I’ve missed you so much.’
‘I was a fool to go away, darling.’ Through the port-hole the houses sparkled like mica in the haze of heat. The cabin smelt closely of women, of powder, nail-varnish, and nightdresses. He said, ‘Let’s get ashore.’
But she detained him a little while yet ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I’ve made a lot of resolutions while I’ve been away. Everything now is going to be different. I’m not going to rattle you any more.’ She repeated, ‘Everything will be different’ and he thought sadly that that at any rate was the truth, the bleak truth.
Standing at the window of his house while Ali and the small boy carried in the trunks he looked up the hill towards the Nissen huts. It was as if a landslide had suddenly put an immeasurable distance between him and them. They were so distant that at first there was no pain, any more than for an episode of youth remembered with the faintest melancholy. Did my lies really start, he wondered, when I wrote that letter? Can I really love her more than Louise? Do I, in my heart of hearts, love either of them, or is it only that this automatic pity goes out to any human need - and makes it worse? Any victim demands allegiance. Upstairs silence and solitude were being hammered away, tin-tacks were being driven in, weights fell on the floor and shook the ceiling. Louise’s voice was raised in cheerful peremptory commands. There was a rattle of objects on the dressing-table. He went upstairs and from the doorway saw the face in the white communion veil staring back at him again: the dead too had returned. Life was not the same without the dead. The mosquito-net hung, a grey ectoplasm, over the double bed.
‘Well, Ali,’ he said, with the phantom of a smite which was all he could raise at this seance, ‘Missus back. We’re all together again.’ Her rosary lay on the dressing-table, and he thought of the broken one in his pocket. He had always meant to get it mended: now it hardly seemed worth the trouble.
‘Darling,’ Louise said, ‘I’ve finished up here. Ali can do the rest There are so many things I want to speak to you about. ...’ She followed him downstairs and said at once, ‘I must get the curtains washed.’
‘They don’t show the dirt’
‘Poor dear, you wouldn’t notice, but I’ve been away.’ She said, ‘I really want a bigger bookcase now. I’ve brought a lot of books back with me.’
‘You haven’t told me yet what made you...’
‘Darling, you’d laugh at me. It was so silly. But suddenly I saw what a fool I’d been to worry like that about the Commissionership. I’ll tell you one day when I don’t mind your laughing.’ She put her hand out and tentatively touched his arm. ‘You’re really glad...?’
‘So glad,’ he said.
‘Do you know one of the things that worried me? I was afraid you wouldn’t be much of a Catholic without me around, keeping you up to things, poor dear.’
‘I don’t suppose I have been.’
‘Have you missed Mass often?’
He said with forced jocularity, ‘I’ve hardly been at all.’
‘Oh, Ticki.’ She pulled herself quickly up and said, ‘Henry, darling, you’ll think I’m very sentimental, but tomorrow’s Sunday and I want us to go to communion together. A sign that we’ve started again - in the right way.’ It was extraordinary the points in a situation one missed - this he had not considered. He said, ‘Of course,’ but his brain momentarily refused to work.
‘You’ll have to go to confession this afternoon.’
‘I haven’t done anything very terrible.’
‘Missing Mass on Sunday’s a mortal sin, just as much as adultery.’
‘Adultery’s more fun,’ he said with attempted lightness.
‘It’s time I came back.’
‘I’ll go along this afternoon - after lunch. I can’t confess on an empty stomach.’ he said.
‘Darling, you have changed, you know.’
‘I was only joking.’
‘I don’t mind you joking. I like it You didn’t do it much though before.’
‘You don’t come back every day, darling.’ The strained good humour, the jest with dry lips, went on and on: at lunch he kid down his fork for yet another