Father Rank let himself down in the Government armchair with his glass between his knees. There was no sound but the rain scraping on the roof. Scobie cleared his throat and then the silence came back. He had the odd sense that Father Rank, like one of his own junior officers, was waiting there for orders.
‘The rains will soon be over,’ Scobie said.
‘It must be six months now since your wife went.’
‘Seven.’
‘Will you be taking your leave in South Africa?’ Father Rank asked, looking away and taking a draught of his beer,
‘I’ve postponed my leave. The young men need it more.’
‘Everybody needs leave.’
‘You’ve been here twelve years without it, Father.’
‘Ah, but that’s different,’ Father Rank said. He got up again and moved restlessly down one wall and along another. He turned an expression of undefined appeal toward Scobie. ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I feel as though I weren’t a working man at all.’ He stopped and stared and half raised his hands, and Scobie remembered Father Clay dodging an unseen figure in his restless walk. He felt as though an appeal were being made to which he couldn’t find an answer. He said weakly, ‘There’s no one works harder than you, Father.’
Father Rank returned draggingly to his chair. He said, ‘It’ll be good when the rains are over.’
‘How’s the mammy out by Congo Creek? I heard she was dying.’
‘Shell be gone this week. She’s a good woman.’ He took another draught of beer and doubled up in the chair with his band on his stomach. ‘The wind,’ he said. ‘I get the wind badly.’
‘You shouldn’t drink bottled beer, Father.’
‘The dying,’ Father Rank said, ‘that’s what I’m here for. They send for me when they are dying.’ He raised eyes bleary with too much quinine and said harshly and hopelessly, ‘I’ve never been any good to the living, Scobie.’
‘You are talking nonsense, Father.’
‘When I was a novice, I thought that people talked to their priests, and I thought God somehow gave the right words. Don’t mind me, Scobie, don’t listen to me. It’s the rains -they always get me down about this time. God doesn’t give the right words, Scobie. I had a parish once in Northampton. They make boots there. They used to ask me out to tea, and I’d sit and watch their hands pouring out, and we’d talk of the Children of Mary and repairs to the church roof. They were very generous in Northampton. I only had to ask and they’d give. I wasn’t of any use to a single living soul, Scobie. I thought, in Africa things will be different. You see I’m not a reading man, Scobie. I never had much talent for loving God as some people do. I wanted to be of use, that’s all. Don’t listen to me. It’s the rains. I haven’t talked like this for five years. Except to the mirror. If people are in trouble they’d go to you, Scobie, not to me. They ask me to dinner to hear the gossip. And if you were in trouble where would you go?’ And Scobie was again aware of those bleary and appealing eyes, waiting through the dry seasons and the rains, for something that never happened. Could I shift my burden mere, he wondered: could I tell him that I love two women: that I don’t know what to do? What would be the use? I know the answers as well as he does. One should look after one’s own soul at whatever cost to another, and that’s what I can’t do, what I shall never be able to do. It wasn’t he who required the magic word, it was the priest, and he couldn’t give it.
‘I’m not the kind of man to get into trouble, Father. I’m dull and middle aged,’ and looking away, unwilling to see distress, he heard Father Rank’s clapper miserably sounding, ‘Ho! ho ho!’
On his way to the Commissioner’s bungalow, Scobie looked in at his office. A message was written in pencil on his pad. I looked in to see you. Nothing important. Wilson. It struck him as odd: he had not seen Wilson for some weeks, and if his visit had no importance why had he so carefully recorded it? He opened the drawer of his desk to find a packet of cigarettes and noticed at once that something was out of order: he considered the contents carefully: his indelible pencil was missing. Obviously Wilson had looked for a pencil with which to write his message and had forgotten to put it back. But why the message?
In the charge-room the sergeant said, ‘Mr Wilson come to see you, sah.’
‘Yes, he left a message.’
So that was it, he thought: I would have known anyway, so he considered it best to let me know himself. He returned to his office and looked again at his desk. It seemed to him that a file had been shifted, but he couldn’t be sure. He opened his drawer, but there was nothing there which would interest a soul. Only the broken rosary caught his eye - something which should have been mended a long while ago. He took it out and put it in his pocket.
‘Whisky?’ the Commissioner asked.
‘Thank you,’ Scobie said, holding the glass up between himself and the Commissioner. ‘Do you trust me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Am I the only one who doesn’t know about Wilson?’
The Commissioner smiled, lying back at ease, unembarrassed. ‘Nobody knows officially -except myself and the manager of the U.A.C. - that was essential of course. The Governor too and whoever deals with the cables marked Most Secret. I’m glad you’ve tumbled to it.’
‘I wanted you to know that - up to date of course - I’ve been trustworthy.’
‘You don’t need to tell me, Scobie.’
‘In the case of Tallit’s cousin we couldn’t have done anything different.’
‘Of course not.’
Scobie said, ‘There is one thing you don’t know though. I borrowed two hundred pounds from Yusef so that I could send Louise to South Africa. I pay him four per cent interest. The arrangement is purely commercial, but if you want my head for it...’
‘I’m glad you told me,’ the Commissioner said. ‘You see Wilson got the idea that you were being blackmailed. He must have dug up those payments somehow.’
‘Yusef wouldn’t blackmail for money.’
‘I told him that.’
‘Do you want my head?’
‘I need your head, Scobie. You’re the only officer I really trust,’
Scobie stretched out a hand with an empty glass in it: it was like a handclasp.
‘Say when.’
‘When.’
Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.
‘Derry reports there’ve been some big thefts from the mines.’
‘Commercial?’
‘Gem stones. Is it Yusef - or Tallit?’
‘It might be Yusef,’ Scobie said. ‘I don’t think he deals in industrial diamonds. He calls them gravel. But of course one can’t be sure.’
‘The Esperança will be in in a few days. We’ve got to be careful,’
‘What does Wilson say?’
‘He swears by Tallit. Yusef is the villain of his piece -and you, Scobie.’
‘I haven’t seen Yusef for a long while.’ «I know.’
‘I begin to know what these Syrians feel - watched and reported on.’
‘Wilson reports on all of us, Scobie. Fraser, Tod, Thimblerigg, myself. He thinks I’m too easy-going. It doesn’t matter though. Wright tears up his reports, and of course Wilson reports on him.’
‘I suppose so.’
He walked up, at midnight, to the Nissen huts. In the blackout he felt momentarily safe, unwatched, unreported on; in the soggy ground his footsteps made the smallest sounds, but as he passed Wilson’s hut he was aware again of the deep necessity for caution. An awful weariness touched him, and he thought: I will go home: I won’t creep by to her tonight: her last words had been ‘don’t come back’. Couldn’t one, for once, take somebody at their word? He stood twenty yards from Wilson’s hut, watching the crack of light between the curtains. A drunken voice shouted somewhere up the hill and the first spatter of the returning rain licked his face. He thought: I’ll go back and go to bed, in the morning I’ll write to Louise and in the evening go to Confession: the day after that God will return to me in a priest’s hands: life will be simple again. Virtue, the good life, tempted him in the dark like a sin. The rain blurred his eyes, the’ ground sucked at his feet as they trod reluctantly towards the Nissen hut.