He knocked twice and the door immediately opened. He had prayed between the two knocks that anger might still be there behind the door, that he wouldn’t be wanted. He couldn’t shut his eyes or his ears to any human need of him; he was not the centurion, but a man in the ranks who had to do the bidding of a hundred centurions, and when the door opened, he could tell the command was going to be given again - the command to stay, to love, to accept responsibility, to lie.
‘Oh darling,’ she said, ‘I thought you were never coming. I bitched you so.’
‘I’ll always come if you want me.’
‘Will you?’
‘Always. If I’m alive.’ God can wait, he thought: how can one love God at the expense of one of his creatures? Would a woman accept the love for which a child had to be sacrificed?
Carefully they drew the curtains close before turning up the lamps.
She said, ‘I’ve been afraid all day that you wouldn’t come.’
‘Of course I came.’
‘I told you to go away. Never pay any attention to me when I tell you to go away. Promise.’
‘I promise,’ he said.
‘If you hadn’t come back -...’ she said, and became lost in thought between the lamps. He could see her searching for herself, frowning in the effort to see where she would have been ... ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I’d have slutted with Bagster, or killed myself, or both. I think both.’
He said anxiously, ‘You mustn’t think like that. I’ll always be here if you need me, as long as I’m alive.’
‘Why do you keep on saying as long as I’m alive?’
‘There are thirty years between us.’
For the first time that night they kissed. She said, ‘I can’t feel the years.’
‘Why did you think I wouldn’t come?’ Scobie said. ‘You got my letter.’
‘Your letter?’
‘The one I pushed under your door last night.’
She said with fear, ‘I never saw a letter. What did you say?’
He touched her face and smiled. ‘Everything. I didn’t want to be cautious any longer. I put down everything.’
‘Even your name?’
‘I think so. Anyway, it’s signed with my handwriting.’
‘There’s a that by the door. It must be under the mat’ But they both knew it wouldn’t be there. It was as if all along they had foreseen how disaster would come in by that particular door.
‘Who would have taken it?’
He tried to soothe her nerves. ‘Probably your boy threw it away, thought it was waste paper. It wasn’t in an envelope. Nobody could know whom I was writing to.’
‘As if that mattered. Darling,’ she said, ‘I feel sick. Really sick. Somebody’s getting something on you. I wish I’d died in that boat.’
‘You’re imagining things. Probably I didn’t push the note far enough. When your boy opened the door in the morning it blew away or got trampled in the mud.’ He spoke with all the conviction he could summon: it was just possible.
‘Don’t let me ever do you any harm,’ she implored, and every phrase she used fastened the fetters more firmly round his wrists. He put out his hands to her and lied firmly, ‘You’ll never do me harm. Don’t worry about a lost letter. I exaggerated. It said nothing really - nothing that a stranger would understand. Don’t worry.’
‘Listen, darling. Don’t stay tonight I’m nervous. I feel -watched. Say good night now and go away. But come back. Oh my dear, come back.’
The light was still on in Wilson’s hut as he passed. Opening the door of his own dark house he saw a piece of paper on the floor. It gave him an odd shock as though the missing letter had returned, like a cat, to its old home. But when he picked it up, it wasn’t his letter, though this too was a message of love. It was a telegram addressed to him at police headquarters and the signature written in full for the sake of censorship, Louise Scobie, was like a blow struck by a boxer with a longer reach than he possessed. Have written am on my way home have been a fool stop love -and then that name as formal as a seal.
He sat down. His head swam with nausea. He thought: if I had never written that other letter, if I had taken Helen at her word and gone away, how easily then life could have been arranged again. But he remembered his words in the last ten minutes, ‘I’ll always be here if you need me as long as I’m alive’ - that constituted an oath as ineffaceable as the vow by the Ealing altar. The wind was coming up from the sea - the nuns ended as they began with typhoons. The curtains blew in and he ran to the windows and pulled them shut. Upstairs the bedroom windows clattered to and fro, tearing at hinges. Turning from closing them he looked at the bare dressing-table where soon the photographs and the pots would be back again - one photograph in particular. The happy Scobie, he thought, my one success. A child in hospital said ‘Father’ as the shadow of a rabbit shifted on the pillow: a girl went by on a stretcher clutching a stamp-album - why me, he thought, why do they need me, a dull middle-aged police officer who had failed for promotion? I’ve got nothing to give them that they can’t get elsewhere: why can’t they leave me in peace? Elsewhere there was a younger and better love, more security. It sometimes seemed to him that all he could share with them was his despair.
Leaning back against the dressing-table, he tried to pray. The Lord’s Prayer lay as dead on his tongue as a legal document: it wasn’t his daily bread that he wanted but so much more. He wanted happiness for others and solitude and peace for himself. ‘I don’t want to plan any more,’ he said suddenly aloud. ‘They wouldn’t need me if I were dead. No one need’ the dead. The dead can be forgotten. O God, give me death before I give them unhappiness.’ But the words sounded melodramatically in his own ears. He told himself that he mustn’t get hystericaclass="underline" there was far too much planning to do for an hysterical man, and going downstairs again he thought three aspirins or perhaps four were what he required in this situation - this banal situation. He took a bottle of filtered water out of the ice-box and dissolved the aspirin. He wondered how it would feel to drain death as simply as these aspirin’ which now stuck sourly in his throat The priests told one it was the unforgivable sin, the final expression of an unrepentent despair, and of course one accepted the Church’s teaching. But they taught also that God had sometimes broken his own laws, and was it less possible for him to put out a hand of forgiveness into the suicidal darkness than to have woken himself in the tomb, behind the stone? Christ had not been murdered -you couldn’t murder God. Christ had killed himself: he had hung himself on the Cross as surely as Pemberton from the picture-rail.
He put his glass down and thought again, I must not get hysterical. Two people’s happiness was in his hands and he must learn to juggle with strong nerves. Calmness was everything. He took out his diary and began to write against the date, Wednesday, September 6. Dinner with the Commissioner. Satisfactory talk about
W. Ceiled on Helen for a few minutes. Telegram from Louise that she is on the way home. He hesitated for a moment and then wrote: Father Rank called in for drink before dinner. A little overwrought. He needs leave. He read this over and scored out the last two sentences. It was seldom in this record that he allowed himself an expression of opinion.
Chapter Two
THE telegram lay on his mind all day: ordinary life - the two hours in court on a perjury case - had the unreality of a country one is leaving for ever. One thinks, At this hour, in that village, these people I once knew are sitting down at table just as they did a year ago ‘when I was there, but one is not convinced that any life goes on the same as ever outside the consciousness. All Scobie’s consciousness was on the telegram, on that nameless boat edging its way now up the African coastline from the south. God forgive me, he thought, when his mind lit for a moment on the possibility that it might never arrive. In our hearts men is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.