‘But I haven’t got a photograph.’
‘I suppose you think I’d use your letters against you.’ He thought, if I shut my eyes it might almost be Louise speaking - the voice was younger, that was all, and perhaps less capable of giving pain. Standing with the whisky glass in his hand he remembered another night - a hundred yards away - the glass had then contained gin. He said gently, ‘You talk such nonsense.’
‘You think I’m a child. You tiptoe in - bringing me stamps.’
‘I’m trying to protect you.’
‘I don’t care a bloody damn if people talk.’ He recognized the hard swearing of the netball team.
He said, ‘If they talked enough, this would come to an end.’
‘You are not protecting me. You are protecting your wife.’
‘It comes to the same thing.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘to couple me with - that woman.’ He couldn’t prevent the wince. He had underrated her power of giving pain. He could see how she had spotted her success: he had delivered himself into her hands. Now she would always know how to inflict the sharpest stab. She was like a child with a pair of dividers who knows her power to injure. You could never trust a child not to use her advantage.
‘Dear,’ he said, ‘it’s too soon to quarrel.’
‘That woman,’ she repeated, watching his eyes. ‘You’d never leave her, would you?’
‘We are married,’ he said.
‘If she knew of this, you’d go back like a whipped dog.’ He thought with tenderness, she hasn’t read the best books, like Louise.
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’ll never marry me.’
‘I can’t. You know that’
‘It’s a wonderful excuse being a Catholic,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t stop you sleeping with me - it only stops you marrying me.’
‘Yes,’ he said. He thought: how much older she is than she was a month ago. She hadn’t been capable of a scene then, but she had been educated by love and secrecy: he was beginning to form her. He wondered whether if this went on long enough, she would be indistinguishable from Louise. In my school, he thought, they learn bitterness and frustration and how to grow old.
‘Go on,’ Helen said, ‘justify yourself.’
‘It would take too long,’ he said. ‘One would have to begin with the arguments for a God.’
‘What a twister you are.’
He felt disappointed. He had looked forward to the evening. All day in the office dealing with a rent case and a case of juvenile delinquency he had looked forward to the Nissen hut, the bare room, the junior official’s furniture like his own youth, everything that she had abused. He said, ‘I meant well.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I meant to be your friend. To look after you. To make you happier than you were.’
‘Wasn’t I happy?’ she asked as though she were speaking of years ago.
He said, ‘You were shocked, lonely...’
‘I couldn’t have been as lonely as I am now,’ she said. ‘I go out to the beach with Mrs Carter when the rain stops. Bagster makes a pass, they think I’m frigid. I come back here before the rain starts and wait for you ... we drink a glass of whisky ... you give me some stamps as though I were your small girl...’
‘I’m sorry,’ Scobie said. He put out his hand and covered hers: the knuckles lay under his palm like a small backbone that had been broken. He went slowly and cautiously on, choosing his words carefully, as though he were pursuing a path through an evacuated country sown with booby-traps: every step he took he expected the explosion. ‘I’d do anything - almost anything - to make you happy. I’d stop coming here. I’d go right away - retire...’
‘You’d be so glad to get rid of me,’ she said.
‘It would be like the end of life.’
‘Go away if you want to.’
‘I don’t want to go. I want to do what you want.’
‘You can go if you want to - or you can stay,’ she said with contempt. ‘I can’t move, can I?’
‘If you want it, I’ll get you on the next boat somehow.’
‘Oh, how pleased you’d be if this were over,’ she said and began to weep. When he put out a hand to touch her she screamed at him, ‘Go to hell. Go to hell. Clear out.’
‘I’ll go,’ he said.
‘Yes, go and don’t come back.’
Outside the door, with the rain cooling his face, running down his hands, it occurred to him how much easier life might be if he took her at her word. He would go into his house and close the door and be alone again; he would write a letter to Louise without a sense of deceit and sleep as he hadn’t slept for weeks, dreamlessly. Next day the office, the quiet going home, the evening meal, the locked door ... But down the hill, past the transport park, where the lorries crouched under the dripping tarpaulins, the rain fell like tears. He thought of her alone in the but, wondering whether the irrevocable words had been spoken, if all the tomorrows would consist of Mrs Carter and Bagster until the boat came, and she went home with nothing to remember but misery. Inexorably another’s point of view rose on the path like a murdered innocent.
As he opened his door a rat that had been nosing at the food-safe retreated without haste up the stairs. This was what Louise had hated and feared; he had at least made her happy, and now ponderously, with planned and careful recklessness, he set about trying to make things right for Helen. He sat down at his table and taking a sheet of typewriting paper -official paper stamped with the Government watermark - he began to compose a letter.
He wrote: My darling - he wanted to put himself entirely in her hands, but to leave her anonymous. He looked at his watch and added in the right-hand corner, as though he were making a police report, 12.35 a.m. Burnside, September 5. He went carefully on, I love you more than myself, more than my wife, more than God I think. I am trying very hard to tell the truth. I want more than anything in the world to make you happy ... The banality of the phrases saddened him; they seemed to have no truth personal to herself: they had been used too often. If I were young, he thought, I would be able to find the right words, the new words, but all this has happened to me before. He wrote again, I love you. Forgive me, signed and folded the paper.
He put on his mackintosh and went out again in the rain. Wounds festered in the damp, they never healed. Scratch your finger and in a few hours there would be a little coating of green skin. He carried a sense of corruption up the hill. A soldier shouted something in his sleep in the transport park -a single word like a hieroglyphic on a wall which Scobie could not interpret - the men were Nigerians. The rain hammered on the Nissen roofs, and he thought, Why did I write that? Why did I write ‘more than God’? she would have been satisfied with ‘more than Louise’. Even if it’s true, why did I write it? The sky wept endlessly around him; he had the sense of wounds that never healed. He whispered, ‘O God, I have deserted you. Do not you desert me.’ When he came to her door he thrust the letter under it; he heard the rustle of the paper on the cement floor but nothing else. Remembering the childish figure carried past him on the stretcher, he was saddened to think how much had happened, how uselessly, to make him now say to himself with resentment: she will never again be able to accuse me of caution.
‘I was just passing by,’ Father Rank said, ‘so I thought I’d look in.’ The evening rain fell in grey ecclesiastical folds, and a lorry howled its way towards the hills. ‘Come in,’ Scobie said. ‘I’m out of whisky. But there’s beer - or gin.’
‘I saw you up at the Nissens, so I thought I’d follow you down. You are not busy?’
‘I’m having dinner with the Commissioner, but not for another hour.’
Father Rank moved restlessly around the room, while Scobie took the beer out of the ice-box. ‘Would you have heard from Louise lately?’ he asked.
‘Not for a fortnight,’ Scobie said, ‘but there’ve been more sinkings in the south.’