The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [89]
‘What, you, Wilson?’
He said furiously, ‘Yes, me, Wilson. Why not? And it’s been published.’
‘I wasn’t laughing. I was just surprised. Who published it?’
‘A new paper called The Circle. Of course they don’t pay much.’
‘Can I see it?’
Wilson said breathlessly, ‘I’ve got it here.’ He explained, ‘There was something on the other side I couldn’t stand. It was just too modern for me.’ He watched her with hungry embarrassment.
‘It’s quite pretty,’ she said weakly.
‘You see the initials?’
‘I’ve never had a poem dedicated to me before.’
Wilson felt sick; he wanted to sit down. Why, he wondered, does one ever begin this humiliating process: why does one imagine that one is in love? He had read somewhere that love had been invented in the eleventh century by the troubadours. Why had they not left us with lust? He said with hopeless venom, ‘I love you.’ He thought: it’s a lie, the word means nothing off the printed page. He waited for her laughter.
‘Oh, no, Wilson,’ she said, ‘no. You don’t. It’s just Coast fever.’
He plunged blindly, ‘More than anything in the world.’
She said gently, ‘No one loves like that, Wilson.’
He walked restlessly up and down, his shorts flapping, waving the bit of paper from The Downhamian. ‘You ought to believe in love. You’re a Catholic. Didn’t God love the world?’
‘Oh yes,’ she said, ‘He’s capable of it But not many of us are.’
‘You love your husband. You told me so. And it’s brought you back.’
Louise said sadly, ‘I suppose I do. All I can. But it’s not the kind of love you want to imagine you feel. No poisoned chalices, eternal doom, black sails. We don’t die for love, Wilson - except, of course, in books. And sometimes a boy play-acting. Don’t let’s play-act, Wilson - it’s no fun at our age.’
‘I’m not play-acting,’ he said with a fury in which he could hear too easily the histrionic accent. He confronted her bookcase as though it were a witness she had forgotten. ‘Do they play-act?’
‘Not much,’ she said. ‘That’s why I like them better than your poets.’
‘All the same you came back.’ His face lit up with wicked inspiration. ‘Or was that just jealousy?’
She said, ‘Jealousy? What on earth have I got to be jealous about?’
‘They’ve been careful,’ Wilson said, ‘but not as careful as all that.’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘Your Ticki and Helen Rolt.’
Louise struck at his cheek and missing got his nose, which began to bleed copiously. She said, ‘That’s for calling him Ticki. Nobody’s going to do that except me. You know he hates it. Here, take my handkerchief if you haven’t got one of your own.’
Wilson said, ‘I bleed awfully easily. Do you mind if I lie on my back?’ He stretched himself on the floor between the table and the meat safe, among the ants. First there had been Scobie watching his tears at Pende, and now - this.
‘You wouldn’t like me to put a key down your back?’ Louise asked.
‘No. No thank you.’ The blood had stained the Downhamian page.
‘I really am sorry. I’ve got a vile temper. This will cure you, Wilson.’ But if romance is what one lives by, one must never be cured of it. The world has too many spoilt priests of this faith or that: better surely to pretend a belief than wander in that vicious vacuum of cruelty and despair. He said obstinately, ‘Nothing will cure me, Louise. I love you. Nothing,’ bleeding into her handkerchief.
‘How strange,’ she said, ‘it would be if it were true.’
He grunted a query from the ground.
‘I mean,’ she explained, ‘if you were one of those people who really love. I thought Henry was. It would be strange if really it was you all the time.’ He felt an odd fear that after all he was going to be accepted at his own valuation, rather as a minor staff officer might feel during a rout when he finds that his claim to know the handling of the tanks will be accepted. It is too late to admit that he knows nothing but what he has read in the technical journals - ‘O lyric love, half angel and half bird.’ Bleeding into the handkerchief, he formed his lips carefully round a generous phrase,