The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [96]
‘I’ve brought you another table and a couple of chairs. Is your boy about?’
‘No, he’s at market.’
They kissed as formally now when they met as a brother and sister. When the damage was done adultery became as unimportant as friendship. The flame had licked them and gone on across the clearing: it had left nothing standing except a sense of responsibility and a sense of loneliness. Only if you trod barefooted did you notice the heat in the grass. Scobie said, ‘I’m interrupting your lunch.’
‘Oh no. I’ve about finished. Have some fruit salad.’
‘It’s time you had a new table. This one wobbles.’ He said, ‘They are making me Commissioner after all.’
‘It will please your wife,’ Helen said.
‘It doesn’t mean a thing to me.’
‘Oh, of course it does,’ she said briskly. This was another convention of hers - that only she suffered. He would for a long tune resist, like Coriolanus, the exhibition of his wounds, but sooner or later he would give way: he would dramatize his pain in words until even to himself it seemed unreal. Perhaps, he would think, she is right after all: perhaps I don’t suffer. She said, ‘Of course the Commissioner must be above suspicion, mustn’t he, like Caesar.’ (Her sayings, as well as her spelling, lacked accuracy.) ‘This is the end of us, I suppose.’
‘You know there is no end to us.’
‘Oh, but the Commissioner can’t have a mistress hidden away in a Nissen hut.’ The sting, of course, was in the ‘hidden away’, but how could he allow himself to feel the least irritation, remembering the letter she had written to him, offering herself as a sacrifice any way he liked, to keep or to throw away? Human beings couldn’t be heroic all the time: those who surrendered everything - for God or love - must be allowed sometimes in thought to take back their surrender. So many had never committed the heroic act, however rashly. It was the act that counted. He said, ‘If the Commissioner can’t keep you, then I shan’t be the Commissioner.’
‘Don’t be silly. After all,’ she said with fake reasonableness, and he recognized this as one of her bad days, ‘what do we get out of it?’
‘I get a lot,’ he said, and wondered: is that a lie for the sake of comfort? There were so many lies nowadays he couldn’t keep track of the small, the unimportant ones.
‘An hour or two every other day perhaps when you can slip away. Never so much as a night.’
He said hopelessly,’ Oh, I have plans,’
‘What plans?’
He said, ‘They are too vague still.’
She said with all the acid she could squeeze out, ‘Well, let me know in time. To fall in with your wishes, I mean.’
‘My dear, I haven’t come here to quarrel.’
‘I sometimes wonder what you do come here for.’
‘Well, today I brought some furniture.’
‘Oh yes, the furniture.’
‘I’ve got the car here. Let me take you to the beach.’
‘Oh, we can’t be seen there together.’
‘That’s nonsense. Louise is there now, I think.’
‘For God’s sake,’ Helen said, ‘keep that smug woman out of my sight’
‘All right then. I’ll take you for a run in the car.’
‘That would be safer, wouldn’t it?’
Scobie took her by the shoulders and said, ‘I’m not always thinking of safety.’
‘I thought you were.’
Suddenly he felt his resistance give way and he shouted at her, ‘The sacrifice isn’t all on your side.’ With despair he could see from a distance the scene coming up on both of them: like the tornado before the rains, that wheeling column of blackness which would soon cover the whole sky.
‘Of course work must suffer,’ she said with childish sarcasm. ‘All these snatched half-hours.’
‘I’ve given up hope,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve given up the future. I’ve damned myself.’
‘Don’t be so melodramatic,