The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [86]
When lunch was over (he couldn’t have told what it was he’d eaten) he said, ‘I must be off.’
‘Father Rank?’
‘First I’ve got to look in on Wilson. He’s living in one of the Nissens now. A neighbour.’
‘Wont he be in town?’
‘I think he comes back for lunch.’
He thought as he went up the hill, what a lot of times in future I shall have to call on Wilson. But no - that wasn’t a safe alibi. It would only do this once, because he knew that Wilson lunched in town. None the less, to make sure, he knocked and was taken aback momentarily when Harris opened to him. ‘I didn’t expect to see you.’
‘I bad a touch of fever,’ Harris said. ‘I wondered whether Wilson was in.’
‘He always lunches in town,’ Harris said. ‘I just wanted to tell him he’d be welcome to look in. My wife’s back, you know.’
‘I thought I saw the activity through the window.’
‘You must call on us too.’
‘I’m not much of a calling man,’ Harris said, drooping in the doorway. ‘To tell you the truth women scare me.’
‘You don’t see enough of them, Harris.’
‘I’m not a squire of dames,’ Harris said with a poor attempt at pride, and Scobie was aware of how Harris watched him as he picked his way reluctantly towards a woman’s hut, watched with the ugly asceticism of the unwanted man. He knocked and felt that disapproving gaze boring into his back. He thought: there goes my alibi: he will tell Wilson and Wilson ... He thought: I will say that as I was up here, I called ... and he felt his whole personality crumble with the slow disintegration of lies.
‘Why did you knock?’ Helen asked. She lay on her bed in the dusk of drawn curtains.
‘Harris was watching me.’
‘I didn’t think you’d come today.’
‘How did you know?’
‘Everybody here knows everything - except one thing. How clever you are about that. I suppose it’s because you are a police officer.’
‘Yes.’ He sat down on the bed and put his hand on her arm; immediately the sweat began to run between them. He said, ‘What are you doing here? You are not ill?’
‘Just a headache.’
He said mechanically, without even hearing his own words, ‘Take care of yourself.’
‘Something’s worrying you,’ she said. ‘Have things gone - wrong?’
‘Nothing of that kind.’
‘Do you remember the first night you stayed here? We didn’t worry about anything. You even left your umbrella behind. We were happy. Doesn’t it seem odd? - we were happy,’
‘Yes.’
‘Why do we go on like this - being unhappy?’
‘It’s a mistake to mix up the ideas of happiness and love,’ Scobie said with desperate pedantry, as though, if he could turn the whole situation into a textbook case, as they had turned Pemberton, peace might return to both of them, a kind of resignation.
‘Sometimes you are so damnably old,’ Helen said, but immediately she expressed with a motion of her hand towards him that she wasn’t serious. Today, he thought, she can’t afford to quarrel - or so she believes. ‘Darling,’ she added, ‘a penny for your thoughts.’
One ought not to lie to two people if it could be avoided -that way lay complete chaos, but he was tempted terribly to lie as he watched her face on the pillow. She seemed to him like one of those plants in nature films which you watch age under your eye. Already she had the look of the coast about her. She shared it with Louise. He said, ‘It’s just a worry I have to think out for myself. Something I hadn’t considered.’
‘Tell me, darling. Two brains...’ She closed her eyes and he could see her mouth steady for a blow.
He said, ‘Louise wants me to go to Mass with her, to communion. I’m supposed to be on the way to confession now.’
‘Oh, is that all?’ she asked with immense relief, and irritation at her ignorance moved like hatred unfairly in his brain.
‘All?’ he said. ‘All?’ Then justice reclaimed him. He said gently,