‘What sort of day, sir?’ Fraser asked, staring at the small pile of ash. Perhaps he was thinking that it should have been his day.
‘The usual kind of a day,’ Scobie said.
‘How about the captain?’ Fraser asked, looking down into the petrol-tin, beginning to hum again his languid tune.
‘The captain?’ Scobie said.
‘Oh, Druce told me some fellow informed on him.’
‘Just the usual thing,’ Scobie said. ‘A dismissed steward with a grudge. Didn’t Druce tell you we found nothing?’
‘No,’ Fraser said, ‘he didn’t seem to be sure. Good night, sir. I must be pushing off to the mess.’
‘Thimblerigg on duty?’
‘Yes, sir.’
Scobie watched him go. The back was as vacuous as the face: one could read nothing there. Scobie thought, what a fool I have been. What a fool. He owed his duty to Louise, not to a fat sentimental Portuguese skipper who had broken the rules of his own company for the sake of a daughter equally unattractive. That had been the turning point, the daughter. And now, Scobie thought, I must return home: I shall put the car away in the garage, and Ali will come forward with his torch to light me to the door. She will be sitting there between two draughts for coolness, and I shall read on her face the story of what she has been thinking all day. She will have been hoping that everything is fixed, that I shall say, ‘I’ve put your name down at the agent’s for South Africa.’ but she’ll be afraid that nothing so good as that will ever happen to us. She’ll wait for me to speak, and I shall try to talk about anything under the sun to postpone seeing her misery (it would be waiting at the corners of her mouth to take possession of her whole face). He knew exactly how things would go: it had happened so often before. He rehearsed every word, going back into his office, locking his desk, going down to his car. People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person’s habitual misery. He forgot Fraser: he forgot everything but the scene ahead: I shall go in and say,
‘Good evening, sweet’ heart,’ and shell say, ‘Good evening, darling. What kind of a day?’ and I’ll talk and talk, but all the time I shall know I’m coming nearer to the moment when I shall say, ‘What about you, darling?’ and let the misery in.
‘What about you, darling?’ He turned quickly away from her and began to fix two more pink gins. There was a tacit understanding between them that ‘liquor helped’; growing more miserable with every glass one hoped for the moment of relief.
‘You don’t really want to know about me.’
‘Of course I do, darling. What sort of a day have you had?’
‘Ticki, why are you such a coward? Why don’t you tell me it’s all off?’
‘All off?’
‘You know what I mean - the passage. You’ve been talking and talking since you came in about the Esperança. There’s a Portuguese ship in once a fortnight. You don’t talk that way every time. I’m not a child, Ticki. Why don’t you say straight out - ‘you can’t go’?’
He grinned miserably at his glass, twisting it round and round to let the angostura cling along the curve. He said, ‘That wouldn’t be true. I’ll find some way.’ Reluctantly he had recourse to the hated nickname. If that failed, the misery would deepen and go right on through the short night he needed for sleep. ‘Trust Ticki,’ he said. It was as if a ligament tightened in his brain with the suspense. If only I could postpone the misery, he thought, until daylight. Misery is worse in the darkness: there’s nothing to look at except the green black-out curtains, the Government furniture, the flying ants scattering their wings over the table: a hundred yards away the Creoles’ pye-dogs yapped and wailed. ‘Look at that little beggar,’ he said, pointing at the house lizard that always came out upon the wall about this time to hunt for moths and cockroaches. He said, ‘We only got the idea last night. These things take time to fix. Ways and means, ways and means,’ he said with strained humour.
‘Have you been to the bank?’
‘Yes,’ he admitted.
‘And you couldn’t get the money?’
‘No. They couldn’t manage it Have another gin and bitters, darling?’
She held her glass out to him, crying dumbly; her face reddened when she cried - she looked ten years older, a middle-aged and abandoned woman - it was like the terrible breath of the future on his cheek. He went down on one knee beside her and held the pink gin to her lips as though it were medicine. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘I’ll find a way. Have a drink.’
‘Ticki, I can’t bear this place any longer. I know I’ve said it before, but I mean it this time. I shall go mad. Ticki, I’m so lonely. I haven’t a friend, Ticki.’
‘Let’s have Wilson up tomorrow.’
‘Ticki, for God’s sake don’t always mention Wilson. Please, please do something.’
‘Of course I will Just be patient a while, dear. These things take time.’
‘What will you do, Ticki?’
‘I’m full of ideas, darling,’ he said wearily. (What a day it had been.) ‘Just let them simmer for a little while.’
‘Tell me one idea. Just one.’
His eyes followed the lizard as it pounced; then he picked an ant wing out of his gin and drank again. He thought to himself: what a fool I really was not to take the hundred pounds. I destroyed the letter for nothing. I took the risk. I might just as well... Louise said, ‘I’ve known it for years. You don’t love me.’ She spoke with calm. He knew that calm - it meant they had reached the quiet centre of the storm: always in this region at about this time they began to speak the truth at each other. The truth, he thought, has never been of any real value to any human being - it is a symbol for mathematicians and philosophers to pursue. In human relations kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths. He involved himself in what he always knew was a vain struggle to retain the lies. ‘Don’t be absurd, darling. Who do you mink I love if I don’t love you?’
‘You don’t love anybody.’
‘Is that why I treat you so badly?’ He tried to hit a light note, and it sounded hollowly back at him.
‘That’s your conscience,’ she said, ‘your sense of duty. You’ve never loved anyone since Catherine died.’
‘Except myself, of course. You always say I love myself.’
‘No, I don’t think you do.’
He defended himself by evasions. In this cyclonic centre he was powerless to give the comforting lie. ‘I try all the time to keep you happy. I work hard for that.’
‘Ticki, you won’t even say you love me. Go on. Say it once.’
He eyed her bitterly over the pink gin, the visible sign of his failure: the skin a little yellow with atabrine, the eyes bloodshot with tears. No man could guarantee love for ever, but he had sworn fourteen years ago, at Ealing, silently, during the horrible little elegant ceremony among the lace and candles, that he would at least always see to it that she was happy. ‘Ticki, I’ve got nothing except you, and you’ve got - nearly everything.’ The lizard flicked across the wall and came to rest again, the wings of a moth in his small crocodile jaws. The ants struck tiny muffled blows at the electric globe.
‘And yet you want to go away from me,’ he said.