WILSON sat on the balcony of the Bedford Hotel with his bald pink knees thrust against the ironwork. It was Sunday and the Cathedral bell clanged for matins. On the other side of Bond street, in the windows of the High School, sat the young neGREsses in dark-blue gym smocks engaged on, the interminable task of trying to wave their wirespring hair. Wilson stroked his very young moustache and dreamed, waiting for his gin-and-bitters.
Sitting there, facing Bond Street, he had his face turned to the sea. His pallor showed how recently he had emerged from it into the port: so did his lack of interest in the schoolgirls opposite. He was like the lagging finger of the barometer, still pointing to Fair long after its companion has moved to Stormy. Below him the black clerks moved churchward, but their wives in brilliant afternoon dresses of blue and cerise aroused no interest in Wilson. He was alone on the balcony except for one bearded Indian in a turban who had already tried to tell his fortune: this was not the hour or the day for white men - they would be at the beach five miles away, but Wilson had no car. He felt almost intolerably lonely. On either side of the school the tin roofs sloped towards the sea, and the corrugated iron above his head clanged and clattered as a vulture alighted.
Three merchant officers from the convoy in the harbour came into view, walking up from the quay. They were surrounded immediately by small boys wearing school caps. The boys’ refrain came faintly up to Wilson like a nursery rhyme: ‘Captain want jig jig, my sister pretty girl school-teacher, captain want jig jig.’ The bearded Indian frowned over intricate calculations on the back of an envelope - a horoscope, the cost of living? When Wilson looked down into the street again the officers had fought their way free, and the schoolboys had swarmed again round a single able-seaman: they led him triumphantly away towards the brothel near the police station, as though to the nursery.
A black boy brought Wilson’s gin and he sipped it very slowly because he had nothing else to do except to return to his hot and squalid room and read a novel - or a poem. Wilson liked poetry, but he absorbed it secretly, like a drug. The Golden Treasury accompanied him wherever he went, but it was taken at night in small doses - a finger of Longfellow, Macaulay, Mangan: ‘Go on to tell how, with genius wasted, Betrayed in friendship, befooled in love ...’ His taste was romantic. For public exhibition he had his Wallace. He wanted passionately to be indistinguishable on the surface from other men: he wore his moustache like a club tie - it was his highest common factor, but his eyes betrayed him - brown dog’s eyes, a setter’s eyes, pointing mournfully towards Bond Street.
‘Excuse me,’ a voice said, ‘aren’t you Wilson?’
He looked up at a middle-aged man in the inevitable khaki shorts with a drawn face the colour of hay.
‘Yes, that’s me.’
‘May I join you? My name’s Harris.’
‘Delighted, Mr Harris.’
‘You’re the new accountant at the U.A.C.?’
‘That’s me. Have a drink?’
‘I’ll have a lemon squash if you don’t mind. Can’t drink in the middle of the day.’
The Indian rose from his table and approached with deference, ‘You remember me, Mr Harris. Perhaps you would tell your friend, Mr Harris, of my talents. Perhaps he would like to read my letters of recommendation ...’ The grubby sheaf of envelopes was always in his hand. ‘The leaders of society.’
‘Be off. Beat it, you old scoundrel,’ Harris said.
‘How did you know my name?’ Wilson asked.
‘Saw it on a cable. I’m a cable censor,’ Harris said. ‘What a job! What a place!’
‘I can see from here, Mr Harris, that your fortune has changed considerably. If you would step with me for a moment into the bathroom...’
‘Beat it, Gunga Din.’
‘Why the bathroom?’ Wilson asked.
‘He always tells fortunes there. I suppose it’s the only private room available. I never thought of asking why.’
‘Been here long?’
‘Eighteen bloody months.’
‘Going Home soon?’
Harris stared over the tin roofs towards the harbour. He said, ‘The ships all go the wrong way. But when I do get Home you’ll never see me here again.’ He lowered his voice and said with venom over his lemon squash, ‘I hate the place. I hate the people. I hate the bloody niggers. Mustn’t call ‘em that you know.’
‘My boy seems all right’
‘A man’s boy’s always all right. He’s a real nigger - but these, look at ‘em, look at that one with a feather boa down there. They aren’t even real niggers. Just West Indians and they rule the coast Clerks in the stores, city council, magistrates, lawyers - my God. It’s all right up in the Protectorate. I haven’t anything to say against a real nigger. God made our colours. But these - my God! The Government’s afraid of them. The police are afraid of them. Look down there,’ Harris said, ‘look at Scobie.’
A vulture flapped and shifted on the iron roof and Wilson looked at Scobie. He looked without interest in obedience to a stranger’s direction, and it seemed to him that no particular interest attached to the squat GREy-haired man walking alone up Bond Street. He couldn’t tell that this was one of those occasions a man never forgets: a small cicatrice had been made on the memory, a wound that would ache whenever certain things combined - the taste of gin at mid-day, the smell of flowers under a balcony, the clang of corrugated iron, an ugly bird flopping from perch to perch.
‘He loves ‘em so much,’ Harris said, ‘he sleeps with ‘em.’
‘Is that the police uniform?’
‘It is. Our GREat police force. A lost thing will they never find - you know the poem.’
‘I don’t read poetry,’ Wilson said. His eyes followed Scobie up the sun-drowned street. Scobie stopped and had a word with a black man in a white panama: a black policeman passed by, saluting smartly. Scobie went on.
‘Probably in the pay of the Syrians too if the truth were known.’
‘The Syrians?’
‘This is the original Tower of Babel,’ Harris said. ‘West Indians, Africans, real Indians, Syrians, Englishmen, Scotsmen in the Office of Works, Irish priests, French priests, Alsatian priests.
‘What do the Syrians do?’
‘Make money. They run an the stores up country and most of the stores here. Run diamonds too.’
‘I suppose there’s a lot of that’
‘The Germans pay a high price.’
‘Hasn’t he got a wife here?’
‘Who? Oh, Scobie. Rather. He’s got a wife. Perhaps if I had a wife like that, I’d sleep with niggers too. You’ll meet her soon. She’s the city intellectual. She likes art, poetry. Got up an exhibition of arts for the shipwrecked seamen. You know the kind of thing - poems on exile by aircraftsmen, water-colours by stokers, pokerwork from the mission schools. Poor old Scobie. Have another gin?’
‘I think I will,’ said Wilson,
2
Scobie turned up James Street past the Secretariat. With its long balconies it had always reminded him of a hospital. For fifteen years he had watched the arrival of a succession of patients; periodically at the end of eighteen months certain patients were sent Home, yellow and nervy, and others took their place - Colonial Secretaries, Secretaries of Agriculture, Treasurers and Directors of Public Works. He watched their temperature charts every one - the first outbreak of unreasonable temper, the drink too many, the sudden stand for principle after a year of acquiescence. The black clerks carried their bedside manner like doctors down the corridors; cheerful and respectful they put up with any insult. The patient was always right.
Round the corner, in front of the old cotton tree, where the earliest settlers had garnered their first day on the unfriendly shore, stood the law courts and police station, a GREat stone building like the grandiloquent boast of weak men. Inside that massive frame the human being rattled in the corridors like a dry kernel. No one could have been adequate to so rhetorical a conception. But the idea in any case was only one room deep. In the dark narrow passage behind, in the charge-room and the cells, Scobie could always detect the odour of human meanness and injustice - it was the smell of a zoo, of sawdust, excrement, ammonia, and lack of liberty. The place was scrubbed daily, but you could never eliminate the smell. Prisoners and policemen carried it in their clothing like cigarette smoke.
Scobie climbed the GREat steps and turned to his right along the shaded outside corridor to his room: a table, two kitchen chairs, a cupboard, some rusty handcuffs hanging on a nail like an old hat, a filing cabinet: to a stranger it would have appeared a bare uncomfortable room but to Scobie it was home. Other men slowly build up the sense of home by accumulation - a new picture, more and more books, an odd-shaped paper-weight, the ash-tray bought for a forgotten reason on a forgotten holiday; Scobie built his Home by a process of reduction. He had started out fifteen years ago with far more than this. There had been a photograph of his wife, bright leather cushions from the market an easy-chair, a large coloured map of the port on the wall. The map had been borrowed by younger men: it was of no more use to him; he carried the whole coastline of the colony in his mind’s eye: from Kufa Bay to Medley was his beat. As for the cushions and the easy-chair, he had soon discovered how comfort of that kind down in the airless town meant heat. Where the body was touched or enclosed it sweated. Last of all his wife’s photograph had been made unnecessary by her presence. She had joined him the first year of the phoney war and now she couldn’t get away: the danger of submarines had made her as much a fixture as the handcuffs on the nail. Besides, it had been a very early photograph, and he no longer cared to be reminded of the unformed face, the expression calm and gentle with lack of knowledge, the lips parted obediently in the smile the photographer had demanded. Fifteen years form a face, gentleness ebbs with experience, and he was always aware of his own responsibility. He had led the way: the experience that had come to her was the experience selected by himself. He had formed her face.
He sat down at his bare table and almost immediately his Mende sergeant clicked his heels in the doorway. ‘Sah?’
‘Anything to report?’
‘The Commissioner want to see you, sah.’
‘Anything on the charge sheet?’
‘Two black men fight in the market, sah,’
‘Mammy trouble?’
‘Yes, sah,’
‘Anything else?’
‘Miss Wilberforce want to see you, sah, I tell her you was at church and she got to come back by-and-by, but she stick. She say she no budge.’
‘Which Miss Wilberforce is that, sergeant?’
‘I don’t know, sah. She come from Sharp Town, sah.’
‘Well, I’ll see her after the Commissioner. But no one else, mind.’
‘Very good, sah.’
Scobie, passing down the passage to the Commissioner’s room, saw the girl sitting alone on a bench against the wall: he didn’t look twice: he caught only the vague impression of a young black African face, a bright cotton frock, and then she was already out of his mind, and he was wondering what he should say to the Commissioner. It had been on his mind all that week.
‘Sit down, Scobie.’ The Commissioner was an old man of fifty-three - one counted age by the years a man had served in the colony. The Commissioner with twenty-two years’ service was the oldest man there, just as the Governor was a stripling of sixty compared with any district officer who had five years’ knowledge behind him.
‘I’m retiring, Scobie,’ the Commissioner said, ‘after this tour.’
‘I know.’
‘I suppose everyone knows.’
‘I’ve heard the men talking about it.’
‘And yet you are the second man I’ve told. Do they say who’s taking my place?’
Scobie said, ‘They know who isn’t.’
‘It’s damned unfair,’ the Commissioner said. ‘I can do nothing more than I have done, Scobie. You are a wonderful man for picking up enemies. Like Aristides the Just’
‘I don’t think I’m as just as all that’
‘The question is what do you want to do? They are sending a man called Baker from Gambia. He’s younger than you are. Do you want to resign, retire, transfer, Scobie?’
‘I want to stay,’ Scobie said,
‘Your wife won’t like it’
‘I’ve been here too long to go.’ He thought to himself, poor Louise, if I had left it to her, where should we be now? and he admitted straight away that they wouldn’t be here - somewhere far better, better climate, better pay, better position. She would have taken every opening for improvement: she would have steered agilely up the ladders and left the snakes alone. I’ve landed her here, he thought, with the odd premonitory sense of guilt he always felt as though he were responsible for something in the future he couldn’t even foresee. He said aloud, ‘You know I like the place.’
‘I believe you do. I wonder why.’
‘It’s pretty in the evening,’ Scobie said vaguely.
‘Do you know the latest story they are using against you at the Secretariat?’
‘I suppose I’m in the Syrians’ pay?’
‘They haven’t got that far yet That’s the next stage. No, you steep with black girls. You know what it is, Scobie, you ought to have flirted with one of their wives. They feel insulted.’
‘Perhaps I ought to sleep with a black girl Then they won’t have to think up anything else.’
‘The man before you slept with dozens,’ the Commissioner said, ‘but it never bothered anyone. They thought up something different for him. They said he drank secretly. It made them feel better drinking publicly. What a lot of swine they are, Scobie.’
‘The Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary’s not a bad chap.’
‘No, the Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary’s all right’ The Commissioner laughed. ‘You’re a terrible fellow, Scobie. Scobie the Just.’
Scobie returned down the passage; the girl sat in the dusk. Her feet were bare: they stood side by side like casts in a museum: they didn’t belong to the bright smart cotton frock. ‘Are you Miss Wilberforce?’ Scobie asked.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You don’t live here, do you?’
‘No! I live in Sharp Town, sir.’
‘Well, come in.’ He led the way into his office and sat down at his desk. There was no pencil laid out and he opened his drawer. Here and here only had objects accumulated: letters, india-rubbers, a broken rosary - no pencil. ‘What’s the trouble, Miss Wilberforce?’ His eye caught a snapshot of a bathing party at Medley Beach: his wife, the Colonial Secretary’s wife, the Director of Education holding up what looked like a dead fish, the Colonial Treasurer’s wife. The expanse of white flesh made them look like a gathering of albinos, and all the mouths gaped with laughter.
The girl said, ‘My landlady - she broke up my Home last night She come in when it was dark, and she pull down all the partition, an’ she thieve my chest with all my belongings.’
‘You got plenty lodgers?’
‘Only three, sir.’
He knew exactly how it all was: a lodger would take a one-roomed shack for five shillings a week, stick up a few thin partitions and let the so-called rooms for half a crown a piece - a horizontal tenement. Each room would be furnished with a box containing a little china and glass ‘dashed’ by an employer or stolen from an employer, a bed made out of old packing-cases, and a hurricane lamp. The glass of these lamps did not long survive, and the little open flames were always ready to catch some spilt paraffin; they licked at the plywood partitions and caused innumerable fires. Sometimes a landlady would thrust her way into her house and pull down the dangerous partitions, sometimes she would steal the lamps of her tenants, and the ripple of her theft would go out in widening rings of lamp thefts until they touched the European quarter and became a subject of gossip at the club. ‘Can’t keep a lamp for love or money.’
‘Your landlady,’ Scobie told the girl sharply, ‘she say you make plenty trouble: too many lodgers: too many lamps.’
‘No, sir. No lamp palaver.’
‘Mammy palaver, eh? You bad girl?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Why you come here? Why you not call Corporal Laminah In Sharp Town?’
‘He my landlady’s brother, sir.’
‘He is, is he? Same father same mother?’
‘No, sir. Same father.’
The interview was like a ritual between priest and server. He knew exactly what would happen when one of his men investigated the affair. The landlady would say that she had told her tenant to pull down the partitions and when that failed she had taken action herself. She would deny that there had ever been a chest of china. The corporal would confirm this. He would turn out not to be the landlady’s brother, but some other unspecified relation - probably disreputable. Bribes - which were known respectably as dashes - would pass to and fro, the storm of indignation and anger that had sounded so genuine would subside, the partitions would go up again, nobody would hear any more about the chest, and several policemen would be a shilling or two the richer. At the beginning of his service Scobie had flung himself into these investigations; he had found himself over and over again in the position of a partisan, supporting as he believed the poor and innocent tenant against the wealthy and guilty house-owner. But he soon discovered that the guilt and innocence were as relative as the wealth. The wronged tenant turned out to be also the wealthy capitalist, making a profit of five shillings a week on a single room, living rent free herself. After that he had tried to kill these cases at birth: he would reason with the complainant and point out that the investigation would do no good and undoubtedly cost her time and money; he would sometimes even refuse to investigate. The result of that inaction had been stones flung at his car window, slashed tyres, the nickname of the Bad Man that had stuck to him through all one long sad tour - it worried him unreasonably in the heat and damp; he couldn’t take it lightly. Already he had begun to desire these people’s trust and affection. That year he had blackwater fever and was nearly invalided from the service altogether.
The girl waited patiently for his decision. They had an infinite capacity for patience when patience was required - just as their impatience knew no bounds of propriety when they had anything to gain by it. They would sit quietly all day in a white man’s backyard in order to beg for something he hadn’t the power to grant, or they would shriek and fight and abuse to get served in a store before their neighbour. He thought: how beautiful she is. It was strange to think that fifteen years ago he would not have noticed her beauty - the small high breasts, the tiny wrists, the thrust of the young buttocks, she would have been indistinguishable from her fellows - a black. In those days he had thought his wife beautiful. A white skin had not then reminded him of an albino. Poor Louise. He said, ‘Give this chit to the sergeant at the desk.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘That’s all right.’ He smiled. ‘Try to tell him the truth.’
He watched her go out of the dark office like fifteen wasted years.
3
Scobie had been out-manoeuvred in the interminable war over housing. During his last leave he had lost his bungalow in Cape Station, the main European quarter, to a senior sanitary inspector called Fellowes, and had found himself relegated to a square two-storeyed house built originally for a Syrian trader on the flats below - a piece of reclaimed swamp which would return to swamp as soon as the nuns set in. From the windows he looked directly out to sea over a line of Creole houses; on the other side of the road lorries backed and churned in a military transport camp and vultures strolled like domestic turkeys in the regimental refuse. On the low ridge of hills behind him the bungalows of the station lay among the low clouds; lamps burned all day in the cupboards, mould gathered on the boots - nevertheless these were the houses for men of his rank. Women depended so much on pride, pride in themselves, their husbands, their surroundings. They were seldom proud, it seemed to him, of the invisible.
‘Louise,’ he called, ‘Louise.’ There was no reason to call: if she wasn’t in the living-room there was nowhere else for her to be but the bedroom (the kitchen was simply a shed in the yard opposite the back door), yet it was his habit to cry her name, a habit he had formed in the days of anxiety and love. The less he needed Louise the more conscious he became of his responsibility for her Happiness. When he called her name he was crying like Canute against a tide - the tide of her melancholy and disappointment.
In the old days she had replied, but she was not such a creature of habit as he was - nor so false, he sometimes told himself. Kindness and pity had no power with her; she would never have pretended an emotion she didn’t feel, and like an animal she gave way completely to the momentary sickness and recovered as suddenly. When he found her in the bedroom under the mosquito-net she reminded him of a dog or a cat, she was so completely ‘out’. Her hair was matted, her eyes closed. He stood very still like a spy in foreign territory, and indeed he was in foreign territory now. If home for him meant the reduction of things to a friendly unchanging minimum, Home to her was accumulation. The dressing-table was crammed with pots and photographs - himself as a young man in the curiously dated officer’s uniform of the last war: the Chief Justice’s wife whom for the moment she counted as her friend: their only child who had died at school in England three years ago - a little pious nine-year-old girl’s face in the white muslin of first communion: innumerable photographs of Louise herself, in groups with nursing sisters, with the Admiral’s party at Medley Beach, on a Yorkshire moor with Teddy Bromley and his wife. It was as if she were accumulating evidence that she had friends like other people. He watched her through the muslin net Her face had the ivory tinge of atabrine: her hair which had once been the colour of bottled honey was dark and stringy with sweat. These were the times of ugliness when he loved her, when pity and responsibility reached the intensity of a passion. It was pity that told him to go: he wouldn’t have woken his worst enemy from sleep, leave alone Louise. He tiptoed out and down the stairs. (The inside stairs could be found nowhere else in this bungalow city except in Government House, and she had tried to make them an object of pride with stair-carpets and pictures on the wall.) In the living-room there was a bookcase full of her books, rugs on the floor, a native mask from Nigeria, more photographs. The books had to be wiped daily to remove the damp, and she had not succeeded very well in disguising with flowery curtains the food safe which stood with each foot in a little enamel basin of water to keep the ants out The boy was laying a single place for lunch.
The boy was short and squat with the broad ugly pleasant face of a Temne. His bare feet flapped like empty gloves across the floor.
‘What’s wrong with Missus?’ Scobie asked.
‘Belly humbug,’ Ali said.
Scobie took a Mende grammar from the bookcase: it was tucked away in the bottom shelf where its old untidy cover was least conspicuous. In the upper shelves were the flimsy rows of Louise’s authors - not so young modern poets and the novels of Virginia Woolf. He couldn’t concentrate: it was too hot and his wife’s absence was like a garrulous companion in the room reminding him of his responsibility. A fork fell on the floor and he watched Ali surreptitiously wipe it on his sleeve, watched him with affection. They had been together fifteen years - a year longer than his marriage - a long time to keep a servant He had been ‘small boy’ first then assistant steward in the days when one kept four servants, now he was plain steward. After each leave Ali would be on the landing-stage waiting to organize his luggage with three or four ragged carriers. In the intervals of leave many people tried to steal Ali’s services, but he had never yet failed to be waiting - except once when he had been in prison. There was no disgrace about prison; it was an obstacle that no one could avoid for ever.
‘Ticki,’ a voice wailed, and Scobie rose at once. ‘Ticki.’ He went upstairs.
His wife was sitting up under the mosquito-net and for a moment he had the impression of a joint under a meat-cover. But pity trod on the heels of the cruel image and hustled it away. ‘Are you feeling better, darling?’
Louise said, ‘Mrs Castle’s been in.’
‘Enough to make anyone ill,’ Scobie said.
‘She’s been telling me about you,’
‘What about me?’ He gave her a bright fake smile; so much of life was a putting off of unHappiness for another time. Nothing was ever lost by delay. He had a dim idea that perhaps if one delayed long enough, things were taken out of one’s hands altogether by death,
‘She says the Commissioner’s retiring, and they’ve passed you over.’
‘Her husband talks too much in his sleep.’
‘Is it true?’
‘Yes, I’ve known it for weeks. It doesn’t matter, dear, really.’
Louise said, ‘I’ll never be able to show my face at the club again.’
‘It s not as bad as that. These things happen, you know.’
‘You’ll resign, won’t you, Ticki?’
‘I don’t think I can do that, dear.’
‘Mrs Castle’s on our side. She’s furious. She says everyone’s talking about it and saying things. Darling, you aren’t in the pay of the Syrians, are you?’
‘No, dear.’
‘I was so upset I came out of Mass before the end. It’s so mean of them, Ticki. You can’t take it lying down. You’ve got to think of me.’
‘Yes, I do. All the time.’ He sat down on the bed and put his hand under the net and touched hers. Little beads of sweat started where their skins touched. He said, ‘I do think of you, dear. But I’ve been fifteen years in this place. I’d be lost anywhere else, even if they gave me another job. It isn’t much of a recommendation, you know, being passed over,’
‘We could retire.’
‘The pension isn’t much to live on.’
‘I’m sure I could make a little money writing. Mrs Castle says I ought to be a professional. With all this experience,’ Louise said, gazing through the white muslin tent as far as her dressing-table: there another face in white muslin stared back and she looked away. She said, ‘If only we could go to South Africa. I can’t bear the people here.’
‘Perhaps I could arrange a passage for you. There haven’t been many sinkings that way lately. You ought to have a holiday.’
‘There was a time when you wanted to retire too. You used to count the years. You made plans - for all of us.’
‘Oh well, one changes,’ he said.
She said mercilessly, ‘You didn’t think you’d be alone with me then.’
He pressed his sweating hand against hers. ‘What nonsense you talk, dear. You must get up and have some food...’
‘Do you love anyone, Ticki, except yourself?’
‘No, I just love myself, that’s all. And Ali. I forgot Ali. Of course I love him too. But not you,’ he ran on with worn mechanical raillery, stroking her hand, smiling, soothing. . .
‘And Ali’s sister?’
‘Has he got a sister?’
‘They’ve an got sisters, haven’t they? Why didn’t you go to Mass today?’
‘It was my morning on duty, dear. You know that’
‘You could have changed it. You haven’t got much faith, have you, Ticki?’
‘You’ve got enough for both of us, dear. Come and have some food.’
‘Ticki, I sometimes think you just became a Catholic to marry me. It doesn’t mean a thing to you, does it?’
‘Listen, darling, you want to come down and eat a bit Then you want to take the car along to the beach and have some fresh air.’
‘How different the whole day would have been,’ she said, staring out of her net, ‘if you’d come Home and said, ‘Darling, I’m going to be the Commissioner.’’
Scobie said slowly, ‘You know, dear, in a place like this in war-time - an important harbour - the Vichy French just across the border - all this diamond smuggling from the Protectorate, they need a younger man.’ He didn’t believe a word he was saying.
‘I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘That’s the only reason. You can’t blame anyone. It’s the war.’
‘The war does spoil everything, doesn’t it?’
‘It gives the younger men a chance.’
‘Darling, perhaps I’ll come down and just pick at a little cold meat’
‘That’s right dear.’ He withdrew his hand: it was dripping with sweat. ‘I’ll tell Ali.’
Downstairs he shouted ‘Ali’ out of the back door.
‘Massa?’
‘Lay two places. Missus better.’
The first faint breeze of the day came off the sea, blowing up over the bushes and between the Creole huts. A vulture flapped heavily upwards from the iron roof and down again in me yard next door. Scobie drew a deep breath; he felt exhausted and victorious: he had persuaded Louise to pick a little meat. It had always been his responsibility to maintain Happiness in those he loved. One was safe now, for ever, and the other was going to eat her lunch.
4
In the evening the port became beautiful for perhaps five minutes. The laterite roads that were so ugly and clay-heavy by day became a delicate flower-like pink. It was the hour of content. Men who had left the port for ever would sometimes remember on a GREy wet London evening the bloom and glow that faded as soon as it was seen: they would wonder why they had hated the coast and for a space of a drink they would long to return.
Scobie stopped his Morris at one of the GREat loops of the climbing road and looked back. He was just too late. The flower had withered upwards from the town; the white stones that marked the edge of the precipitous hill shone like candles in the new dusk.
‘I wonder if anybody will be there, Ticki.’
‘Sure to be. It’s library night.’
‘Do hurry up, dear. It’s so hot in the car. I’ll be glad when the rains come.’
‘Will you?’
‘If only they just went on for a month or two and men stopped.’
Scobie made the right reply. He never listened while his wife talked. He worked steadily to the even current of sound, but if a note of distress were struck he was aware of it at once. Like a wireless operator with a novel open in front of him, he could disregard every signal except the ship’s symbol and the SOS. He could even work better while she talked than when she was silent for so long as his ear-drum registered those tranquil sounds - the gossip of the club, comments on the sermons preached by Father Rank, the plot of a new novel, even complaints about the weather - he knew that all was well. It was silence that stopped him working - silence in which he might look up and see tears waiting in the eyes for his attention.
‘There’s a rumour going round that the refrigerators were all sunk last week.’
He considered, while she talked, his line of action with the Portuguese ship that was due in as soon as the boom opened in the morning. The fortnightly arrival of a neutral ship provided an outing for the junior officers: a change of food, a few glasses of real wine, even the opportunity of buying some small decorative object in the ship’s store for a girl. In return they had only to help the Field Security Police in the examination of passports, the searching of the suspects’ cabins: all the hard and disaGREeable work was done by the F.S.P., in the hold, sifting sacks of rice for commercial diamonds, or in the heat of the kitchen, plunging the hand into tins of lard, disembowelling the stuffed turkeys. To try to find a few diamonds in a liner of fifteen thousand tons was absurd: no malign tyrant in a fairy-story had ever set a goose girl a more impossible task, and yet as regularly as the ships called the cypher telegrams came in - ‘So and so travelling first class suspected of carrying diamonds. The following members of the ship’s crew suspected ...’ Nobody ever found anything. He thought: it’s Harris’s turn to go on board, and Eraser can go with him. I’m too old for these excursions. Let the boys have a little fun.
‘Last time half the books arrived damaged.’
‘Did they?’
Judging from the number of cars, he thought, there were not many people at the club yet. He switched off his lights, and waited for Louise to move, but she just sat there with a clenched fist showing in the switchboard light ‘Well, dear, here we are,’ he said in the hearty voice that strangers took as a mark of stupidity. Louise said, ‘Do you think they all know by this time?’
‘Know what?’
‘That you’ve been passed over.’
‘My dear, I thought we’d finished with all that. Look at all the generals who’ve been passed over since 1940. They won’t bother about a deputy-commissioner.’
She said, ‘But they don’t like me.’
Poor Louise, he thought, it is terrible not to be liked, and his mind went back to his own experience in that early tour when the blacks had slashed his tyres and written insults on his car. ‘Dear, how absurd you are. I’ve never known anyone with so many friends.’ He ran unconvincingly on. ‘Mrs Halifax, Mrs Castle ...’ and then decided it was better after all not to list them.
‘They’ll all be waiting there,’ she said, ‘ just waiting for me to walk in ... I never wanted to come to the club tonight. Let’s go Home.’
‘We can’t. Here’s Mrs Castle’s car arriving.’ He tried to laugh. ‘We’re trapped, Louise.’ He saw the fist open and close, the damp inefficient powder lying like snow in the ridges of the knuckles. ‘Oh, Ticki, Ticki,’ she said, ‘you won’t leave me ever, will you? I haven’t got any friends - not since the Tom Barlows went away.’ He lifted the moist hand and kissed the palm: he was bound by the pathos of her unattractiveness.
They walked side by side like a couple of policemen on duty into the lounge where Mrs Halifax was dealing out the library books. It is seldom that anything is quite so bad as one fears: there was no reason to believe that they had been the subject of conversation. ‘Goody, goody,’ Mrs Halifax called to them, ‘the new Clemence Dane’s arrived.’ She was the most inoffensive woman in the station; she had long untidy hair, and one found hairpins inside the library books where she had marked her place. Scobie felt it quite safe to leave his wife in her company, for Mrs Halifax had no malice and no capacity for gossip; her memory was too bad for anything to lodge there for long: she read the same novels over and over again without knowing it.
Scobie joined a group on the verandah. Fellowes, the sanitary inspector, was talking fiercely to Reith, the Chief Assistant Colonial Secretary, and a naval officer called Brigstock. ‘After all this is a club,’ he was saying, ‘not a railway refreshment-room.’ Ever since Fellowes had snatched his house, Scobie had done his best to like the man - it was one of the rules by which he set his life, to be a good loser. But sometimes he found it very hard to like Fellowes. The hot evening had not been good to him: the thin damp ginger hair, the small prickly moustache, the goosegog eyes, the scarlet cheeks, and the old Lancing tie. ‘Quite,’ said Brigstock, swaying slightly.
‘What’s the trouble?’ Scobie asked.
Reith said, ‘He thinks we are not exclusive enough.’ He spoke with the comfortable irony of a man who had in his time been completely exclusive, who had in fact excluded from his solitary table in the Protectorate everyone but himself. Fellowes said hotly, ‘There are limits,’ fingering for confidence the Lancing tie.
‘Tha’s so,’ said Brigstock.
‘I knew it would happen,’ Fellowes said, ‘as soon as we made every officer in the place an honorary member. Sooner or later they would begin to bring in undesirables. I’m not a snob, but in a place like this you’ve got to draw lines - for the sake of the women. It’s not like it is at Home.’
‘But what’s the trouble?’ Scobie asked.
‘Honorary members,’ Fellowes said, ‘should not be allowed to introduce guests. Only the other day we had a private brought in. The army can be democratic if it likes, but not at our expense. That’s another thing, there’s not enough drink to go round as it is without these fellows.’
‘Tha’s a point,’ Brigstock said, swaying more violently.
‘I wish I knew what it was all about,’ Scobie said.
‘The dentist from the 49th has brought in a civilian called Wilson, and this man Wilson wants to join the club. It puts everybody in a very embarrassing position.’
‘What’s wrong with him?’
‘He’s one of the U.A.C. clerks. He can join the club in Sharp Town. What does he want to come up here for?’
‘That club’s not functioning,’ Reith said.
‘Well, that’s their fault, isn’t it?’ Over the sanitary inspector’s shoulder Scobie could see the enormous range of the night. The fireflies signalled to and fro along the edge of the hill and the lamp of a patrol-boat moving on the bay could be distinguished only by its steadiness. ‘Black-out time,’ Reith said. ‘We’d better go in.’
‘Which is Wilson?’ Scobie asked him.
‘That’s him over there. The poor devil looks lonely. He’s only been out a few days.’
Wilson stood uncomfortably alone in a Wilderness of armchairs, pretending to look at a map on the wall. His pale face shone and trickled like plaster. He had obviously bought his tropical suit from a shipper who had worked off on him an unwanted line: it was oddly striped and liverish in colour. ‘You’re Wilson, aren’t you?’ Reith said. ‘I saw your name in Col. Sec.’s book today.’
‘Yes, that’s me,’ Wilson said.
‘My name’s Reith. I’m Chief Assistant Col. Sec. This is Scobie, the deputy-commissioner.’
‘I saw you this morning outside the Bedford Hotel, sir,’ Wilson said. There was something defenceless, it seemed to Scobie, in his whole attitude: he stood there waiting for people to be friendly or unfriendly - he didn’t seem to expect one reaction more than another. He was like a dog. Nobody had yet drawn on his face the lines that make a human being.
‘Have a drink, Wilson.’
‘I don’t mind if I do, sir.’
‘Here’s my wife,’ Scobie said. ‘Louise, this is Mr Wilson.’
‘I’ve heard a lot about Mr Wilson already,’ Louise said stiffly.
‘You see, you’re famous, Wilson,’ Scobie said. ‘You’re a man from the town and you’ve gate-crashed Cape Station Club.’
‘I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong. Major Cooper invited me.’
‘That reminds me,’ Reith said, ‘I must make an appointment with Cooper. I think I’ve got an abscess.’ He slid away.
‘Cooper was telling me about the library,’ Wilson said, ‘and I thought perhaps ...’
‘Do you like reading?’ Louise asked, and Scobie realized with relief that she was going to be kind to the poor devil. It was always a bit of a toss-up with Louise. Sometimes she could be the worst snob in the station, and it occurred to him with pity that perhaps now she believed she couldn’t afford to be snobbish. Any new face that didn’t ‘know’ was welcome.
‘Well,’ Wilson said, and fingered desperately at his thin moustache, ‘well...’ It was as if he were gathering strength for a GREat confession or a great evasion.
‘Detective stories?’ Louise asked.
‘I don’t mind detective stories,’ Wilson said uneasily. ‘Some detective stories.’
‘Personally,’ Louise said, ‘I like poetry.’
‘Poetry,’ Wilson said, ‘yes.’ He took his fingers reluctantly away from his moustache, and something in his dog-like look of gratitude and hope made Scobie think with Happiness: have I really found her a friend?
‘I like poetry myself,’ Wilson said.
Scobie moved away towards the bar: once again a load was lifted from his mind. The evening was not spoilt: she would come Home happy, go to bed happy. During one night a mood did not change, and Happiness would survive until he left to go on duty. He could sleep...
He saw a gathering of his junior officers in the bar. Fraser was there and Tod and a new man from Palestine with the extraordinary name of Thimblerigg. Scobie hesitated to go in. They were enjoying themselves, and they would not want a senior officer with them. ‘Infernal cheek,’ Tod was saying. They were probably talking about poor Wilson. Then before he could move away he heard Eraser’s voice. ‘He’s punished for it. Literary Louise has got him.’ Thimblerigg gave a small gurgling laugh, a bubble of gin forming on a plump lip.
Scobie walked rapidly back into the lounge. He went full tilt into an arm-chair and came to a halt. His vision moved jerkily back into focus, but sweat dripped into his right eye. The fingers that wiped it free shook like a drunkard’s. He told himself: Be careful. This isn’t a climate for emotion. It’s a climate for meanness, malice, snobbery, but anything like hate or love drives a man off his head. He remembered Bowers sent Home for punching the Governor’s A.D.C. at a party, Makin the missionary who ended in an asylum at Chislehurst.
‘It’s damned hot,’ he said to someone who loomed vaguely beside him.
‘You look bad, Scobie. Have a drink.’
‘No, thank you. Got to drive round on inspection.’ Beside the bookshelves Louise was talking happily to Wilson, but he could feel the malice and snobbery of the world padding up like wolves around her. They wouldn’t even let her enjoy her books, he thought, and his hand began to shake again. Approaching, he heard her say in her kindly Lady Bountiful manner, ‘You must come and have dinner with us one day. I’ve got a lot of books that might interest you,’
‘ I’d love to,’ Wilson said. ‘Just ring us up and take pot luck.’
Scobie thought: What are those others worth that they have the nerve to sneer at any human being? He knew every one of her faults. How often he had winced at her patronage of strangers. He knew each phrase, each intonation that alienated others. Sometimes he longed to warn her - don’t wear that dress, don’t say that again, as a mother might teach a daughter, but he had to remain silent, aching with the foreknowledge of her loss of friends. The worst was when he detected in his colleagues an extra warmth of friendliness towards himself, as though they pitied him. What right have you, he longed to exclaim, to criticize her? This is my doing. This is what I’ve made of her. She wasn’t always like this.
He came abruptly up to them and said, ‘My dear, I’ve got to go round the beats,’
‘Already?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’ll stay, dear. Mrs Halifax win run me Home.’
‘I wish you’d come with me.’
‘What? Round the beats? It’s ages since I’ve been.’
‘That’s why I’d like you to come.’ He lifted her hand and kissed it: it was a challenge. He proclaimed to the whole club that he was not to be pitied, that he loved his wife, that they were happy. But nobody that mattered saw - Mrs Halifax was busy with the books, Reith had gone long ago, Brigstock was in the bar, Fellowes talked too busily to Mrs Castle to notice any dung-nobody saw except Wilson. Louise said, ‘I’ll come another time, dear. But Mrs Halifax has just promised to run Mr Wilson Home by our house. There’s a book I want to tend him.’
Scobie felt an immense gratitude to Wilson. ‘That’s fine,’ he said, ‘fine. But stay and have a drink till I get back. I’ll run you Home to the Bedford. I shan’t be late.’ He put a hand on Wilson’s shoulder and prayed silently: Don’t let her patronize him too far: don’t let her be absurd: let her keep this friend at least. ‘I won’t say good night,’ he said, ‘I’ll expect to see you when I get back.’
‘It’s very kind of you, sir.’
‘You mustn’t sir me. You’re not a policeman, Wilson. Thank your stars for that.’
5
Scobie was later than he expected. It was the encounter with Yusef that delayed him. Half-way down the hill he found Yusef ‘s car stuck by the roadside, with Yusef sleeping quietly in the back: the light from Scobie’s car lit up the large pasty face, the lick of his white hair falling over the forehead, and just touched the beginning of the huge thighs in their tight white drill. Yusef’s shirt was open at the neck and tendrils of black breast-hair coiled around the buttons.
‘Can I help you?’ Scobie unwillingly asked, and Yusef opened his eyes: the gold teeth fitted by his brother, the dentist, FLASHed instantaneously like a torch. If Fellowes drives by now, what a story, Scobie thought. The deputy-commissioner meeting Yusef, the store-keeper, clandestinely at night. To give help to a Syrian was only a deGREe less dangerous than to receive help.
‘Ah, Major Scobie,’ Yusef said, ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed.’
‘Can I do anything for you?’
‘We have been stranded a half hour,’ Yusef said. ‘The cars have gone by, and I have thought - when will a Good Samaritan appear?’
‘I haven’t any spare oil to pour into your wounds, Yusef.’
‘Ha, ha, Major Scobie. That is very good. But if you would just give me a lift into town...’
Yusef settled himself into the Morris, easing a large thigh against the brakes.
‘Your boy had better come in at the back.’
‘Let him stay here,’ Yusef said. ‘He will mend the car if he knows it is the only way he can get to bed.’ He folded his large fat hands over his knee and said, ‘You have a very fine car, Major Scobie. You must have paid four hundred pounds for if
‘One hundred and fifty,’ Scobie said.
‘I would pay you four hundred.’
‘It isn’t for sale, Yusef. Where would I get another?’
‘Not now, but maybe when you leave.’
‘I’m not leaving.’
‘Oh, I had heard that you were resigning, Major Scobie.’
‘No.’
‘We shopkeepers hear so much - but all of it is unreliable gossip.’
‘How’s Business?’
‘Oh, not bad. Not good.’
‘What I hear is that you’ve made several fortunes since the war. Unreliable gossip of course.’
‘Well, Major Scobie. you know how it is. My store in Sharp Town, that does fine because I am there to keep an eye on it. My store in Macaulay Street - that does not bad because my sister is there. But my store? in Durban Street and Bond Street they do badly. I am cheated all the time. Like all my countrymen, I cannot read or write, and everyone cheats me.’
‘Gossip says you can keep all your stocks in all your stores in your head.’
Yusef chuckled and beamed. ‘My memory is not bad. But it keeps me awake at night, Major Scobie. Unless I take a lot of whisky I keep thinking about Durban Street and Bond Street and Macaulay Street’
‘Which shall I drop you at now?’
‘Oh, now I go Home to bed, Major Scobie. My house in Sharp Town, if you please. Wont you come in and have a little whisky?’
‘Sorry. I’m on duty, Yusef.’
‘It is very kind of you, Major Scobie, to give me this lift. Would you let me show my gratitude by sending Mrs Scobie a roll of silk?’
‘Just what I wouldn’t like, Yusef.’
‘Yes, yes, I knew. It’s very hard, all this gossip. Just because there are some Syrians like Tallit’
‘You would like Tallit out of your way, wouldn’t you, Yusef?’
‘Yes, Major Scobie. It would be for my good, but it would also be for your good.’
‘You sold him some of those fake diamonds last year, didn’t you?’
‘Oh, Major Scobie, you don’t really believe I’d get the better of anyone like that. Some of the poor Syrians suffered a GREat deal over those diamonds, Major Scobie. It would be a shame to deceive your own people like that.’
‘They shouldn’t have broken the law by buying diamonds. Some of them even had the nerve to complain to the police.’
‘They are very ignorant, poor fellows.’
‘You weren’t as ignorant as all that were you, Yusef?’
‘If you ask me, Major Scobie, it was Tallit. Otherwise, why does he pretend I sold him the diamonds?’
Scobie drove slowly. The rough street was crowded. Thin black bodies weaved like daddy-long-legs in the dimmed headlights. ‘How long will the rice shortage go on, Yusef?’
‘You know as much about that as I do, Major Scobie.’
‘I know these poor devils can’t get rice at the controlled price.’
‘I’ve heard. Major Scobie, that they can’t get their share of the free distribution unless they tip the policeman at the gate.’
It was quite true. There was a retort in this colony to every accusation. There was always a blacker corruption elsewhere to be pointed at. The scandalmongers of the secretariat fulfilled a useful purpose - they kept alive the idea that no one was to be trusted. That was better than complacence. Why, he wondered, swerving the car to avoid a dead pye-dog, do I love this place so much? Is it because here human nature hasn’t had time to disguise itself? Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn’t love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed. He felt a sudden affection for Yusef. He said, ‘Two wrongs don’t make a right. One day, Yusef, you’ll find my foot under your fat arse.’
‘Maybe, Major Scobie, or maybe well be friends together. That is what I should like more than anything in the world.’
They drew up outside the Sharp Town house and Yusef s steward ran out with a torch to light him in. ‘Major Scobie,’ Yusef said, ‘it would give me such pleasure to give you a glass of whisky. I think I could help you a lot. I am very patriotic, Major Scobie.’
‘That’s why you are hoarding your cottons against a Vichy invasion, isn’t it? They will be worth more than English pounds.’
‘The Esperança is in tomorrow, isn’t she?’
‘Probably.’
‘What a waste of time it is searching a big ship like that for diamonds. Unless you know beforehand exactly where they are. You know that when the ship returns to Angola a seaman reports where you looked. You will sift all the sugar in the hold. You will search the lard in the kitchens because someone once told Captain Druce that a diamond can be heated and dropped in the middle of a tin of lard. Of course the cabins and the ventilators and the lockers. Tubes of toothpaste. Do you think one day you will find one little diamond?’
‘No.’
‘I don’t either.’
6
A hurricane-lamp burned at each corner of the wooden pyramids of crates. Across the black slow water he could just make out the naval depot ship, a disused liner, where she lay, so it was believed, on a reef of empty whisky bottles. He stood quietly for a while breathing in the heavy smell of the sea. Within half a mile of him a whole convoy lay at anchor, but all he could detect were the long shadow of the depot ship and a scatter of small red lights as though a street were up: he could hear nothing from the water but the water itself, slapping against the jetties. The magic of this place never failed him: here he kept his foothold on the very edge of a strange continent.
Somewhere in the darkness two rats scuffled. These waterside rats were the size of rabbits. The natives called them pigs and ate them roasted; the name helped to distinguish them from the wharf rats, who were a human breed. Walking along a light railway Scobie made in the direction of the markets. At the corner of a warehouse he came on two policemen.
‘Anything to report?’
‘No, sah.’
‘Been along this way?’
‘Oh yes, sah, we just come from there.’
He knew that they were lying: they would never go alone to that end of the wharf, the playground of the human rats, unless they had a white officer to guard them. The rats were cowards but dangerous - boys of sixteen or so, armed with razors or bits of broken bottle, they swarmed in groups around the warehouses, pilfering if they found an easily-opened case, settling like flies around any drunken sailor who stumbled their way, occasionally slashing a policeman who had made himself unpopular with one of their innumerable relatives. Gates couldn’t keep them off the wharf: they swam round from Kru Town or the Fishing beaches.
‘Come on,’ Scobie said, ‘we’ll have another look.’
With weary patience the policemen trailed behind him, half a mile one way, half a mile the other. Only the pigs moved on the wharf, and the water slapped. One of the policemen said self-righteously, ‘Quiet night, sah.’ They shone their torches with self-conscious assiduity from one side to another, lighting the abandoned chassis of a car, an empty truck, the corner of a tarpaulin, a bottle standing at the corner of a warehouse with palm leaves stuffed in for a cork. Scobie said, ‘What’s that?’ One of his official nightmares was an incendiary bomb: it was so easy to prepare: every day men from Vichy territory came into town with smuggled cattle - they were encouraged to come in for the sake of the meat supply. On this side of the border native saboteurs were being trained in case of invasion : why not on the other side?
‘Let me see it,’ he said, but neither of the policemen moved to touch it.
‘Only native Medicine, sah,’ one of them said with a skin-deep sneer.
Scobie picked the bottle up. It was a dimpled Haig, and when he drew out the palm leaves the stench of dog’s pizzle and nameless decay blew out like a gas escape. A nerve in his head beat with sudden irritation. For no reason at all he remembered Fraser’s flushed face and Thimblerigg’s giggle. The stench from the bottle moved him with nausea, and he felt his fingers polluted by the palm leaves. He threw the bottle over the wharf, and the hungry mouth of the water received it with a single belch, but the contents were scattered on the air, and the whole windless place smelt sour and ammoniac. The policemen were silent: Scobie was aware of their mute disapproval. He should have left the bottle where it stood: it had been placed there for one purpose, directed at one person, but now that its contents had been released, it was as if the evil thought were left to wander blindly through the air, to settle maybe on the innocent.
‘Good night,’ Scobie said and turned abruptly on his heel. He had not gone twenty yards before he heard their boots scuffling rapidly away from the dangerous area.
Scobie drove up to the police station by way of Pitt Street. Outside the brothel on the left-hand side the girls were sitting along the pavement taking a bit of air. Within the police station behind the black-out blinds the scent of a monkey house thickened for the night. The sergeant on duty took his legs off the table in the charge-room and stood to attention.
‘Anything to report?’
‘Five drunk and disorderly, sah. I lock them in the big cell.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Two Frenchmen, sah, with no passes.’
‘Black?’
‘Yes, sah.’
‘Where were they found?’
‘In Pitt Street, sah.’
‘I’ll see them in the morning. What about the launch? Is it running all right? I shall want to go out to the Esperança.’
‘It’s broken, sah. Mr Fraser he try to mend it, sah, but it humbug all the time.’
‘What time does Mr Fraser come on duty?’
‘Seven, sah.’
‘Tell him I shan’t want him to go out to the Esperança. I’m going out myself. If the launch isn’t ready, I’ll go with the F.S.P.’
‘Yes, sah.’
Climbing again into his car, pushing at the sluggish starter, Scobie thought that a man was surely entitled to that much revenge. Revenge was good for the character: out of revenge GREw forgiveness. He began to whistle, driving back through Km Town. He was almost happy: he only needed to be quite certain that nothing had happened at the club after he left, that at this moment, 10.55 p.m., Louise was at ease, content He could face the next hour when the next hour arrived.
7
Before he went indoors he walked round to the seaward side of the house to check the black-out. He could hear the murmur of Louise’s voice inside: she was probably reading poetry. He thought: by God, what right has that young fool Fraser to despise her for that? and then his anger moved away again, like a shabby man, when he thought of Fraser’s disappointment in the morning - no Portuguese visit, no present for his best girl, only the hot humdrum office day. Feeling for the handle of the back door to avoid FLASHing his torch, he tore his right hand on a splinter. He came into the lighted room and saw that his hand was dripping with blood. ‘Oh, darling,’ Louise said, ‘what have you done?’ and covered her face. She couldn’t bear the sight of blood. ‘Can I help you, sir?’ Wilson asked. He tried to rise, but he was sitting in a low chair at Louise’s feet and his knees were piled with books.
‘It’s all right,’ Scobie said. ‘It’s only a scratch. I can see to it myself. Just tell Ali to bring a bottle of water.’ Half-way upstairs he heard the voice resume. Louise said, ‘A lovely poem about a pylon.’ Scobie walked into the bathroom, disturbing a rat that had been couched on the cool rim of the bath, like a cat on a gravestone.
Scobie sat down on the edge of the bath and let his hand drip into the lavatory pail among the wood shavings. Just as in his own office the sense of Home surrounded him. Louise’s ingenuity had been able to do little with this room: the bath of scratched enamel with a single tap which always ceased to work before the end of the dry season: the tin bucket under the lavatory seat emptied once a day: the fixed basin with another useless tap: bare floorboards: drab GREen black-out curtains. The only improvements Louise had been able to impose were the cork that by the bath, the bright white Medicine cabinet.
The rest of the room was all his own. It was like a relic of his youth carried from house to house. It had been like this years ago in his first house before he married. This was the room in which he had always been alone.
Ali came in, his pink soles flapping on the floorboards, carrying a bottle of water from the filter. ‘The back door humbug me,’ Scobie explained. He held his hand out over the washbasin, while Ali poured the water over the wound. The boy made gentle clucking sounds of commiseration: his hands were as gentle as a girl’s. When Scobie said impatiently, ‘That’s enough,’ Ali paid him no attention. ‘Too much dirt,’ he said.
‘Now iodine.’ The smallest scratch in this country turned GREen if it were neglected for an hour. ‘Again,’ he said, ‘pour it over,’ wincing at the sting. Down below out of the swing of voices the word ‘beauty’ detached itself and sank back into the trough. ‘Now the Elastoplast’
‘No,’ Ali said, ‘no. Bandage better.’
‘All right. Bandage then.’ Yean ago he had taught Ali to bandage: now he could tie one as expertly as a doctor.
‘Good night, Ali. Go to bed. I shan’t want you again.’
‘Missus want drinks.’
‘No. I’ll attend to the drinks. You can go to bed.’ Alone he sat down again on the edge of the bath. The wound had jarred him a little and anyway he was unwilling to join the two downstairs, for his presence would embarrass Wilson. A man couldn’t listen to a woman reading poetry in the presence of an outsider. ‘I had rather be a kitten and cry mew ...’ but that wasn’t really his attitude. He did not despise: he just couldn’t understand such bare relations of intimate feeling. And besides he was happy here, sitting where the rat had sat, in his own world. He began to think of the Esperança and of the next day’s work.
‘Darling,’ Louise called up the stairs, ‘are you all right? Can you drive Mr Wilson Home?’
‘I can walk, Mrs Scobie.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘Yes, really.’
‘Coming,’ Scobie called. ‘Of course I’ll drive you back.’ When he joined them Louise took the bandaged hand tenderly in hers. ‘Oh the poor hand,’ she said. ‘Does it hurt?’ She was not afraid of the clean white bandage: it was like a patient in a hospital with the sheets drawn tidily up to the chin. One could bring grapes and never know the details of the scalpel wound out of sight. She put her lips to the bandage and left a little smear of orange lipstick.
‘It’s quite all right,’ Scobie said.
‘Really, sir. I can walk.’
‘Of course you won’t walk. Come along, get in.’
The light from the dashboard lit up a patch of Wilson’s extraordinary suit. He leant out of the car and cried, ‘Good night, Mrs Scobie. It’s been lovely. I can’t thank you enough.’ The words vibrated with sincerity: it gave them the sound of a foreign language - the sound of English spoken in England. Here intonations changed in the course of a few months, became high-pitched and insincere, or flat and guarded. You could tell that Wilson was fresh from Home.
‘You must come again soon,’ Scobie said, as they drove down the Burnside road towards the Bedford Hotel, remembering Louise’s happy face.
8
The smart of his wounded hand woke Scobie at two in the morning. He lay coiled like a watch-spring on the outside of the bed, trying to keep his body away from Louise’s: wherever they touched - if it were only a finger lying against a finger -sweat started. Even when they were separated the heat trembled between them. The moonlight lay on the dressing-table like coolness and lit the bottles of lotion, the little pots of cream, the edge of a photograph frame. At once he began to listen for Louise’s breathing.
It came irregularly in jerks. She was awake. He put his hand up and touched the hot moist hair: she lay stiffly, as though she were guarding a secret. Sick at heart, knowing what he would find, he moved his fingers down until they touched her lids. She was crying. He felt an enormous tiredness, bracing himself to comfort her. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘I love you.’ It was how he always began. Comfort, like the act of sex, developed a routine.
‘I know,’ she said, ‘I know.’ It was how she always answered. He blamed himself for being heartless because the idea occurred to him that it was two o’clock: this might go on for hours, and at six the day’s work began. He moved the hair away from her forehead and said, ‘The rains will soon be here. You’ll feel better then.’
‘I feel all right,’ she said and began to sob.
‘What is it, darling? Tell me.’ He swallowed. ‘Tell Ticki.’ He hated the name she had given him, but it always worked. She said, ‘Oh Ticki, Ticki. I can’t go on.’
‘I thought you were happy tonight’
‘I was - but think of being happy because a U.A.C. clerk was nice to me. Ticki, why won’t they like me?’
‘Don’t be silly, darling. It’s just the heat: it makes you fancy things. They all like you.’
‘Only Wilson,’ she repeated with despair and shame and began to sob again.
‘Wilson’s all right.’
‘They won’t have him at the club. He gate-crashed with the dentist They’ll be laughing about him and me. Oh Ticki, Ticki, please let me go away and begin again.’
‘Of course, darling,’ he said, ‘of course,’ staring out through the net and through the window to the quiet flat infested sea. ‘Where to?’
‘I could go to South Africa and wait until you have leave. Ticki, you’ll be retiring soon. I’ll get a Home ready for you, Ticki.’
He flinched a little away from her, and then hurriedly in case she had noticed, lifted her damp hand and kissed the palm. ‘It will cost a lot, darling.’ The thought of retirement set his nerves twitching and straining: he always prayed that death would come first He had prepared his life insurance in that hope: it was payable only on death. He thought of a home, a permanent home: the gay artistic curtains, the bookshelves full of Louise’s books, a pretty tiled bathroom, no office anywhere - a Home for two until death, no change any more before eternity settled in.
‘Ticki, I can’t bear it any longer here.’
‘I’ll have to figure it out, darling.’
‘Ethel Maybury’s in South Africa, and the Collinses. We’ve got friends in South Africa.’
‘Prices are high.’
‘You could drop some of your silly old life insurances, Ticki. And, Ticki, you could economize here without me. You could have your meals at the mess and do without the cook.’
‘He doesn’t cost much.’
‘Every little helps, Ticki.’
‘I’d miss you,’ he said.
‘No, Ticki, you wouldn’t,’ she said, and surprised him by the range of her sad spasmodic understanding. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘there’s nobody to save for.’
He said gently, ‘I’ll try and work something out You know if it’s possible I’d do anything for you - anything.’
‘This isn’t just two in the morning comfort, Ticki, is it? You will do something?’
‘Yes, dear. I’ll manage somehow.’ He was surprised how quickly she went to sleep: she was like a tired carrier who has slipped his load. She was asleep before he had finished his sentence, clutching one of his fingers like a child, breathing as easily. The load lay beside him now, and he prepared to lift it.
