The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene [98]
‘You can trust him, anyway.’
‘I don’t know how,’ Scobie said. ‘I’ve lost the trick of trust.’
2
Louise was asleep upstairs, and Scobie sat at the table with his diary open. He had written down against the date October 31: Commissioner told me this morning I am to succeed him. Took some furniture to H.R. Told Louise news, which pleased her. The other life - bare and undisturbed and built of facts - lay like Roman foundations under his hand. This was the life he was supposed to lead; no one reading this record would visualize the obscure shameful scene in the garage, the interview with the Portuguese captain, Louise striking out blindly with the painful truth, Helen accusing him of hypocrisy ... He thought: this is how it ought to be. I am too old for emotion. I am too old to be a cheat. Lies are for the young. They have a lifetime of truth to recover in. He looked at his watch, 11.45, and wrote: Temperature at 2 p.m. 92°. The lizard pounced upon the wall, the tiny jaws clamping on a moth. Something scratched outside the door - a pye-dog? He laid his pen down again and loneliness sat across the table opposite him. No man surely was less alone with his wife upstairs and his mistress little more than five hundred yards away up the hill, and yet it was loneliness that seated itself like a companion who doesn’t need to speak. It seemed to him that he had never been so alone before.
There was nobody now to whom he could speak the truth. There were things the Commissioner must not know, Louise must not know, there were even limits to what he could tell Helen, for what was the use, when he had sacrificed so much in order to avoid pain, of inflicting it needlessly? As for God he could speak to Him only as one speaks to an enemy - there was bitterness between them. He moved his hand on the table, and it was as though his loneliness moved too and touched the tips of his fingers. ‘You and I,’ his loneliness said, ‘you and I.’ It occurred to him that the outside world if they knew the facts might envy him: Bagster would envy him Helen, and Wilson Louise. What a hell of a quiet dog, Fraser would exclaim with a lick of the lips. They would imagine, he thought with amazement, that I get something out of it, but it seemed to him that no man had ever got less. Even self-pity was denied him because he knew so exactly the extent of his guilt. He felt as though he had exiled himself so deeply in the desert that his skin had taken on the colour of the sand.
The door creaked gently open behind him. Scobie did not move. The spies, he thought, are creeping in. Is this Wilson, Harris, Pemberton’s boy, Ali...? ‘Massa,’ a voice whispered, and a bare foot slapped the concrete floor.
‘Who are you?’ Scobie asked not turning round. A pink palm dropped a small ball of paper on the table and went out of sight again. The voice said, ‘Yusef say come very quiet nobody see.’
‘What does Yusef want now?’
‘He send you dash - small small dash.’ Then the door closed again and silence was back. Loneliness said, ‘Let us open this together, you and I.’
Scobie picked up the ball of paper: it was light, but it had a small hard centre. At first he didn’t realize what it was: he thought it was a pebble put in to keep the paper steady and he looked for writing which, of course, was not there, for whom would Yusef trust to write for him? Then he realized what it was - a diamond, a gem stone. He knew nothing about diamonds, but it seemed to him that it was probably worth at least as much as his debt to Yusef. Presumably Yusef had information that the stones he had sent by the Esperança had reached their destination safely. This was a mark of gratitude - not a bribe, Yusef would explain, the fat hand upon his sincere and shallow heart.
The door burst open and there was Ali. He had a boy by the arm who whimpered. Ali said, ‘This stinking Mende boy he go all round the house. He try doors.’
‘Who are you?’ Scobie said.
The boy broke out in a mixture of fear and rage, ‘I Yusef s boy. I bring Massa letter,’ and he pointed at the table where the pebble lay in the screw of paper. Ali