‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I know you aren’t happy either. Without me you’ll have peace.’
This was what he always left out of account - the accuracy of her observation. He had nearly everything, and all he needed was peace. Everything meant work, the daily regular routine in the little bare office, the change of seasons in a place he loved. How often he had been pitied for the austerity of the work, the bareness of the rewards. But Louise knew him better than that. If he had become young again this was the life he would have chosen to live; only this time he would not have expected any other person to share it with him, the rat upon the bath, the lizard on the wall, the tornado blowing open the windows at one in the morning, and the last pink light upon the laterite roads at sundown.
‘You are talking nonsense, dear,’ he said, and went through the doomed motions of mixing another gin and bitters. Again the nerve in his head tightened; unhappiness had uncoiled with its inevitable routine - first her misery and his strained attempts to leave everything unsaid: then her own calm statement of truths much better lied about, and finally the snapping of his own control - truths flung back at her as though she were his enemy. As he embarked on this last stage, crying suddenly and truthfully out at her while the angostura trembled in his hand, ‘You can’t give me peace,’ he already knew what would succeed it, the reconciliation and the easy lies again until the next scene.
‘That’s what I say,’ she said, ‘if I go away, you’ll have your peace.’
‘You haven’t any conception,’ he accused her, ‘of what peace means.’ It was as if she had spoken slightingly of a woman he loved. For he dreamed of peace by day and night. Once in sleep it had appeared to him as the great glowing shoulder of the moon heaving across his window like an iceberg, Arctic and destructive in the moment before the world was struck: by day he tried to win a few moments of its company, crouched under the rusting handcuffs in the locked office, reading the reports from the sub-stations. Peace seemed to him the most beautiful word in the language: My peace I give you, my peace I leave with you: O Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, grant us thy peace. In the Mass he pressed his fingers against his eyes to keep the tears of longing in.
Louise said with the old tenderness, ‘Poor dear, you wish I were dead like Catherine. You want to be alone.’
He replied obstinately, ‘I want you to be happy.’
She said wearily, ‘Just tell me you love me. That helps a little.’ They were through again, on the other side of the scene: he thought coolly and collectedly, this one wasn’t so bad: we shall be able to sleep tonight He said, ‘Of course I love you, darling. And I’ll fix that passage. You’ll see.’
He would still have made the promise even if he could have foreseen all that would come of it He had always been prepared to accept the responsibility for his actions, and he had always been half aware too, from the time he made his terrible private vow that she should be happy, how far this action might carry him. Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim. It is, one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practises. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation.
PART TWO
Chapter One
WILSON stood gloomily by his bed in the Bedford Hotel and contemplated his cummerbund, which lay ruffled like an angry snake; the small room was hot with the conflict between them. Through the wall he could hear Harris cleaning his teeth for the fifth time that day. Harris believed in dental hygiene. ‘It’s cleaning my teeth before and after every meal that’s kept me so well in this bloody climate,’ he would say, raising his pale exhausted face over an orange squash. Now he was gargling: it sounded like a noise in the pipes.
Wilson sat down on the edge of his bed and rested. He had left his door open for coolness, and across the passage he could see into the bathroom. The Indian with the turban was sitting on the side of the bath fully dressed. He stared inscrutably back at Wilson and bowed. ‘Just a moment, sir,’ he called. ‘If you would care to step in here ...’ Wilson angrily shut the door. Then he had another try with the cummerbund.
He had once seen a film - was it Bengal Lancer? - in which the cummerbund was superbly disciplined. A native held the coil and an immaculate officer spun like a top, so that the cummerbund encircled him smoothly, tightly. Another servant stood by with iced drinks, and a punkah swayed in the background. Apparently these things were better managed in India. However, with one more effort, Wilson did get the wretched thing wrapped around him. It was too tight and it was badly creased, and the tuck-in came too near the front, so that it was not hidden by the jacket. He contemplated his image with melancholy in what was left of the mirror. Somebody tapped on the door.
‘Who is it?’ Wilson shouted, imagining for a moment that the Indian had had the cool impertinence to pursue ... but when the door opened, it was only Harris: the Indian was still sitting on the bath across the passage shuffling his testimonials.
‘Going out, old man?’ Harris asked, with disappointment.
‘Yes.’
‘Everybody seems to be going out this evening. I shall have the table all to myself.’ He added with gloom, ‘It’s the curry evening too.’
‘So it is. I’m sorry to miss it.’
‘You haven’t been having it for two years, old man, every Thursday night’ He looked at the cummerbund. ‘That’s not right, old man.’
‘I know it isn’t. It’s the best I can do.’
‘I never wear one. It stands to reason that it’s bad for the stomach. They tell you it absorbs sweat, but that’s not where I sweat, old man. I’d rather wear braces, only the elastic perishes, so a leather belt’s good enough for me. I’m no snob. Where are you dining, old man?’
‘At Tallit’s’
‘How did you meet him?’
‘He came into the office yesterday to pay his account and asked me to dinner.’
‘You don’t have to dress for a Syrian, old man. Take it all off again.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course I am. It wouldn’t do at all. Quite wrong.’ He added, ‘You’ll get a good dinner, but be careful of the sweets. The price of life is eternal vigilance. I wonder what he wants out of you.’ Wilson began to undress again while Harris talked. He was a good listener. His brain was like a sieve through which the rubbish fell all day long. Sitting on the bed in his pants he heard Harris - ‘you have to be careful of the fish: I never touch it’ - but the words left no impression. Drawing up his white drill trousers over his hairless knees he said to himself:
the poor sprite is Imprisoned for some fault of his In a body like a grave.
His belly rumbled and tumbled as it always did a little before the hour of dinner.
From you he only dares to crave, For his service and his sorrow, A smile to-day, a song to-morrow,
Wilson stared into the mirror and passed his fingers over the smooth, too smooth skin. The face looked back at him, pink and healthy, plump and hopeless. Harris went happily on, ‘I said once to Scobie,’ and immediately the clot of words lodged in Wilson’s sieve. He pondered aloud, ‘I wonder how he ever came to marry her.’
‘It’s what we all wonder, old man. Scobie’s not a bad sort’
‘She’s too good for him.’
‘Louise?’ Harris exclaimed.
‘Of course. Who else?
‘There’s no accounting for tastes. Go in and win, old man.’
‘I must be off.’
‘Be careful of the sweets.’ Harris went on with a small spurt of energy, ‘God knows I wouldn’t mind something to be careful of instead of Thursday’s curry. It is Thursday, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
They came out into the passage and into the focus of the Indian eyes. ‘You’ll have to be done sooner or later, old man,’ Harris said. ‘He does everybody once. You’ll never have peace till he does you.’