At the end of the perjury case Fellowes, the notary Inspector, caught him at the door. ‘Come to chop tonight, Scobie. We’ve got a bit of real Argentine beef.’ It was too much of an effort in this dream world to refuse an invitation. ‘Wilson’s coming,’ Fellowes said. ‘To tell you the truth, be helped us with the beef. You like him, don’t you?’
‘Yes. I thought it was you who didn’t’
‘Oh, the club’s got to move with the times, and all sorts of people go into trade nowadays. I admit I was hasty. Bit bound up, I wouldn’t be surprised. He was at Downham: we used to play them when I was at Lancing.’
Driving out to the familiar house he had once occupied himself on the hills, Scobie thought listlessly, I must speak to Helen soon. She mustn’t learn this from someone else. Life always repeated the same pattern; there was always, sooner or later, bad news that had to be broken, comforting lies to be uttered, pink gins to be consumed to keep misery away.
He came to the long bungalow living-room and there at the end of it was Helen. With a sense of shock he realized that never before had he seen her like a stranger in another man’s house, never before dressed for an evening’s party. ‘You know Mrs Rolt, don’t you?’ Fellowes asked. There was no irony in his voice. Scobie thought with a tremor of self-disgust, how clever we’ve been: how successfully we’ve deceived the gossipers of a small colony. It oughtn’t to be possible for lovers to deceive so well. Wasn’t love supposed to be spontaneous, reckless ...?
‘Yes,’ he said, I’m an old friend of Mrs Rolt. I was at Pende when she was brought across.’ He stood by the table a dozen feet away while Fellowes mixed the drinks and watched her while she talked to Mrs Fellowes, talked easily, naturally. Would I, he wondered, if I had come in tonight and seen her for the first time ever have felt any love at all?
‘Now which was yours, Mrs Rolt?’
‘A pink gin.’
‘I wish I could get my wife to drink them. I can’t bear her gin and orange.’
Scobie said, ‘If I’d known you were going to be here, I’d have called for you.’
‘I wish you had,’ Helen said. ‘You never come and see me.’ She turned to Fellowes and said with an ease that horrified him, ‘He was so kind to me in hospital at Pende, but I think he only likes the sick.’
Fellowes stroked his little ginger moustache, poured himself out some more gin and said, ‘He’s scared of you, Mrs Rolt. All we married men are.’
She said with false blandness, ‘Do you think I could have one more without getting tight?’
‘Ah, here’s Wilson,’ Fellowes said, and there he was with his pink, innocent, self-distrustful face and his badly tied cummerbund. ‘You know everybody, don’t you? You and Mrs Rolt are neighbours.’
‘We haven’t met though,’ Wilson said, and began automatically to blush.
‘I don’t know what’s come over the men in this place,’ said Fellowes. ‘You and Scobie both neighbours and neither of you see anything of Mrs Rolt,’ and Scobie was immediately aware of Wilson’s gaze speculatively turned upon him. ‘I wouldn’t be so bashful,’ Fellowes said, pouring out the pink gins.
‘Dr Sykes late as usual,’ Mrs Fellowes commented from the end of the room but at that moment treading heavily up the outside stairs, sensible in a dark dress and mosquito-boots, came Dr Sykes. ‘Just in time for a drink, Jessie,’ Fellowes said. ‘What’s it to be?’
‘Double Scotch,’ Dr Sykes said. She glared around through her thick glasses and added, ‘Evening all.’
As they went in to dinner, Scobie said, ‘I’ve got to see you,’ but catching Wilson’s eye he added, ‘about your furniture.’
‘My furniture?’
‘I think I could get you some extra chairs.’ As conspirators they were much too young; they had not yet absorbed a whole code book into their memory and he was uncertain whether she had understood the mutilated phrase. All through dinner he sat silent, dreading the time when he would be alone with her, afraid to lose the least opportunity; when he put his hand in his pocket for a handkerchief the telegram crumpled in his fingers... have been a fool stop love.
‘Of course you know more about it than we do, Major Scobie,’ Dr Sykes said.
‘I’m sorry. I missed ...’
‘We were talking about the Pemberton case.’ So already in a few months it had become a case. When something became a case it no longer seemed to concern a human being: there was no shame or suffering in a case. The boy on the bed was cleaned and tidied, laid out for the test-book of psychology.
‘I was saying,’ Wilson said, ‘that Pemberton chose an odd way to kill himself. I would have chosen a sleeping-draught.’
‘It wouldn’t be easy to get a sleeping-draught in Bamba,’ Dr Sykes said. ‘It was probably a sudden decision.’
‘I wouldn’t have caused all that fuss,’ said Fellowes. ‘A chap’s got the right to take his own life, of course, but there’s no need for fuss. An overdose of sleeping-draught - I agree with Wilson - that’s the way.’
‘You still have to get your prescription,’ Dr Sykes said.
Scobie with his fingers on the telegram remembered the letter signed ‘Dicky’, the immature handwriting, the marks of cigarettes on the chairs, the novels of Wallace, the stigmata of loneliness. Through two thousand years, he thought, we have discussed Christ’s agony in just this disinterested way.
‘Pemberton was always a bit of a fool,’ Fellowes said.
‘A sleeping-draught is invariably tricky,’ Dr Sykes said. Her big lenses reflected the electric globe as she turned them like a lighthouse in Scobie’s direction. ‘Your experience will tell you how tricky. Insurance companies never like sleeping-draughts, and no coroner could tend himself to a deliberate fraud.’
‘How can they tell ?’ Wilson asked.
‘Take luminal, for instance. Nobody could really take enough luminal by accident ...’ Scobie looked across the table at Helen. She ate slowly, without appetite, her eyes on her plate. Their silences seemed to isolate them: this was a subject the unhappy could never discuss impersonally. Again he was aware of Wilson looking from one to another of them, and Scobie drew desperately at his mind for any phrase that would end their dangerous solitude. They could not even be silent together with safety.
He said, ‘What’s the way out you’d recommend, Dr Sykes?’
‘Well, there are bathing accidents - but even they need a good deal of explanation. If a man’s brave enough to step in front of a car, but it’s too uncertain ...’
‘And involves somebody else,’ Scobie said. ‘Personally,’ Dr Sykes said, grinning under her glasses, ‘I should have no difficulties. In my position, I should classify myself as an angina case and then get one of my colleagues to prescribe.. .’
Helen said with sudden violence, ‘What a beastly talk this is. You’ve got no business to tell...’
‘My dear,’ Dr Sykes said, revolving her malevolent beams, ‘when you’ve been a doctor as long as I have been you know your company. I don’t think any of us are likely...’
Mrs Fellowes said, ‘Have another helping of fruit salad, Mrs Rolt.’
‘Are you a Catholic, Mrs Rolt?’ Fellowes asked. ‘Of course they take very strong views.’