The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [97]
‘I mean the real future - the future that goes on.’
She said, ‘If there’s one thing I hate it’s your Catholicism. I suppose it comes of having a pious wife. It’s so bogus. If you really believed you wouldn’t be here.’
‘But I do believe and I am here.’ He said with bewilderment, ‘I can’t explain it, but there it is. My eyes are open. I know what I’m doing. When Father Rank came down to the rail carrying the sacrament...’
Helen exclaimed with scorn and impatience, ‘You’ve told me all that before. You are trying to impress me. You don’t believe in Hell any more than I do.’
He took her wrists and held them furiously. He said, ‘You can’t get out of it that way. I believe, I tell you. I believe that I’m damned for all eternity - unless a miracle happens. I’m a policeman. I know what I’m saying. What I’ve done is far worse than murder - that’s an act, a blow, a stab, a shot: it’s over and done, but I’m carrying my corruption around with me. It’s the coating of my stomach.’ He threw her wrists aside like seeds towards the stony floor. ‘Never pretend I haven’t shown my love.’
‘Love for your wife, you mean. You were afraid she’d find out.’
Anger drained out of him. He said, ‘Love for both of you. If it were just for her there’d be an easy straight way.’ He put his hands over his eyes, feeling hysteria beginning to mount again. He said, ‘I can’t bear to see suffering, and I cause it all the time. I want to get out, get out.’
‘Where to?’
Hysteria and honesty receded: cunning came back across the threshold like a mongrel dog. He said, ‘Oh, I just mean take a holiday.’ He added, ‘I’m not sleeping well. And I’ve been getting an odd pain.’
‘Darling, are you I’ll?’ The pillar had wheeled on its course: the storm was involving others now: it had passed beyond them. Helen said, ‘Darling, I’m a bitch. I get tired and fed up with things - but it doesn’t mean anything. Have you seen a doctor?’
‘I’ll see Travis at the Argyll some time soon.’
‘Everybody says Dr Sykes is better.’
‘No, I don’t want to see Dr Sykes.’ Now that the anger and hysteria had passed he could see her exactly as she was that first evening when the sirens blew. He thought, O God, I can’t leave her. Or Louise. You don’t need me as they need me. You have your good people, your saints, all the company of the blessed. You can do without me. He said, ‘I’ll take you for a spin now in the car. It will do us both good.’
In the dusk of the garage he took her hands again and kissed her. He said, ‘There are no eyes here ... Wilson can’t see us. Harris isn’t watching. Yusef’s boys ...’
‘Dear, I’d leave you tomorrow if it would help.’
‘It wouldn’t help.’ He said, ‘You remember when I wrote you a letter - which got lost. I tried to put down everything there, plainly, in black and white. So as not to be cautious any more. I wrote that I loved you more than my wife ...’ As he spoke he heard another’s breath behind his shoulder, beside the car. He said, sharply, ‘Who’s that?’
‘What, dear?’
‘Somebody’s here.’ He came round to the other side of the car and said sharply, ‘Who’s there? Come out’
‘It’s Ali,’ Helen said.
‘What are you doing here. Ali?’
‘Missus sent me,’ Ali said. ‘I wait here for Massa ten him Missus back.’ He was hardly visible in the shadow.
‘Why were you waiting here?’
‘My head humbug me,’ Ali said. ‘I go for sleep, small, small sleep.’
‘Don’t frighten him,’ Helen said. ‘He’s telling the truth.’
‘Go along home, Ali,’ Scobie told him, ‘and tell Missus I come straight down.’ He watched him pad out into the hard sunlight between the Nissen huts. He never looked back.
‘Don’t worry about him,’ Helen said. ‘He didn’t understand a thing.’
‘I’ve had Ali for fifteen years,’ Scobie said. It was the first time he had been ashamed before him in all those years. He remembered Ali the night after Pemberton’s death, cup of tea in hand, holding him up against the shaking lorry, and then he remembered Wilson’s boy slinking off along the wall by the police station.