‘Sometimes you are so damnably old,’ Helen said, but immediately she expressed with a motion of her hand towards him that she wasn’t serious. Today, he thought, she can’t afford to quarrel - or so she believes. ‘Darling,’ she added, ‘a penny for your thoughts.’
One ought not to lie to two people if it could be avoided -that way lay complete chaos, but he was tempted terribly to lie as he watched her face on the pillow. She seemed to him like one of those plants in nature films which you watch age under your eye. Already she had the look of the coast about her. She shared it with Louise. He said, ‘It’s just a worry I have to think out for myself. Something I hadn’t considered.’
‘Tell me, darling. Two brains...’ She closed her eyes and he could see her mouth steady for a blow.
He said, ‘Louise wants me to go to Mass with her, to communion. I’m supposed to be on the way to confession now.’
‘Oh, is that all?’ she asked with immense relief, and irritation at her ignorance moved like hatred unfairly in his brain.
‘All?’ he said. ‘All?’ Then justice reclaimed him. He said gently, ‘If I don’t go to communion, you see, shell know there’s something wrong - seriously wrong.’
‘But can’t you simply go?’
He said, ‘To me that means - well, it’s the worst thing I can do.’
‘You don’t really believe in hell?’
‘That was what Fellowes asked me.’
‘But I simply don’t understand. If you believe in hell, why are you with me now?’
How often, he thought, lack of faith helps one to see more clearly than faith. He said, ‘You are right, of course: it ought to prevent all this. But the villagers on the slopes of Vesuvius go on ... And then, against all the teaching of the Church, one has the conviction that love - any kind of love - does deserve a bit of mercy. One will pay, of course, pay terribly, but I don’t believe one will pay for ever. Perhaps one will be given time before one dies ...’
‘A deathbed repentance,’ she said with contempt.
‘It wouldn’t be easy,’ he said, ‘to repent of this.’ He kissed the sweat off her hand. ‘I can regret the lies, the mess, the unhappiness, but if I were dying now I wouldn’t know how to repent the love.’
‘Well,’ she said with the same undertone of contempt that seemed to pull her apart from him, into the safety of the shore, ‘can’t you go and confess everything now? After all it doesn’t mean you won’t do it again.’
‘It’s not much good confessing if I don’t intend to try...’
‘Well then,’ she said triumphantly, ‘be hung for a sheep. You are in - what do you call it - mortal sin? now. What difference does it make?’
He thought: pious people, I suppose, would call this the devil speaking, but he knew that evil never spoke in these crude answerable terms: this was innocence. He said, ‘There is a difference - a big difference. It’s not easy to explain. Now I’m just putting our love above - well, my safety. But the other - the other’s really evil. It’s like the Black Mass, the man who steals the sacrament to desecrate it. It’s striking God when he’s down - in my power.’
She turned her head wearily away and said, ‘I don’t understand a thing you are saying. It’s all hooey to me.’
‘I wish it were to me. But I believe it’
She said sharply, ‘I suppose you do. Or is it just a trick? I didn’t hear so much about God when we began, did I? You aren’t turning pious on me to give you an excuse...?’
‘My dear,’ Scobie said, ‘I’m not leaving you ever. I’ve got to think, that’s all.’
At a quarter-past six next morning Ali called them. Scobie woke at once, but Louise remained sleeping - she had had a long day. Scobie watched her -this was the face he had loved: this was the face he loved. She was terrified of death by sea and yet she had come back, to make him comfortable. She had borne a child by him in one agony, and in another agony had watched the child die. It seemed to him that he had escaped everything. If only, he thought, I could so manage that she never suffers again, but he knew that he had set himself an impossible task. He could delay the suffering, that was all, but he carried it about with him, an infection which sooner or later she must contract Perhaps she was contracting it now, for she turned and whimpered in her sleep. He put his hand against her cheek to soothe her. He thought: if only she will go on sleeping, then I win steep on too, I will oversleep, we shall miss Mass, another problem will be postponed. But as if his thoughts had been an alarm dock she awoke’
‘What time is it, darling?’
‘Nearly half-past six.’
‘We’ll have to hurry.’ He felt as though he were being urged by a kindly and remorseless gaoler to dress for execution. Yet he soil put off the saving lie: there was always the possibility of a miracle. Louise gave a final dab of powder (but the powder caked as it touched the skin) and said, ‘Well be off now.’ Was there the faintest note of triumph in her voice? Years and years ago, in the other life of childhood, someone with his name Henry Scobie had acted in the school play, had
acted Hotspur. He had been chosen for his seniority and his physique, but everyone said that it had been a good performance. Now he had to act again - surely it was as easy as the simple verbal lie?
Scobie suddenly leant back against the wall and put his hand on his chest. He couldn’t make his muscles imitate pain, so he simply closed his eyes. Louise looking in her mirror said, ‘Remind me to tell you about Father Davis in Durban. He was a very good type of priest, much more intellectual than Father Rank.’ It seemed to Scobie that she was never going to look round and notice him. She said, ‘Well, we really must be off,’ and dallied by the mirror. Some sweat-lank hairs were out of place. Through the curtain of his lashes at last he saw her turn and look at him. ‘Come along, dear,’ she said, ‘you look sleepy.’
He kept his eyes shut and stayed where he was. She said sharply, ‘Ticki, what’s the matter?’
‘A little brandy.’
‘Are you ill?’
‘A little brandy,’ he repeated sharply, and when she had fetched it for him and he felt the taste on his tongue he had an immeasurable sense of reprieve. He sighed and relaxed, ‘That’s better.’
‘What was it, Tick!?’
‘Just a pain in my chest. It’s gone now.’
‘Have you had it before?’
‘Once or twice while you’ve been away.’
‘You must see a doctor.’
‘Oh, it’s not worth a fuss. They’ll just say overwork.’
‘I oughtn’t to have dragged you up, but I wanted us to have Communion together.’
‘I’m afraid I’ve ruined that - with the brandy.’
‘Never mind, Ticki.’ Carelessly she sentenced him to eternal death. ‘We can go any day.’
He knelt in his seat and watched Louise kneel with the other communicants at the altar raiclass="underline" he had insisted on coming to the service with her. Father Rank turning from the altar came to them with God in His bands. Scobie thought: God has just escaped me, but will He always escape? Domine non sum dignus ... domine non sum dignus ... domine non sum dignus ... His hand formally, as though he were at drill, beat on a particular button of his uniform. It seemed to him for a moment cruelly unfair of God to have exposed himself in this way, a man, a wafer of bread, first in the Palestinian villages and now here in the hot port, there, everywhere, allowing man to have his will of Him. Christ had told the rich young man to sell all and follow Him, but that was an easy rational step compared with this that God had taken, to put Himself at the mercy of men who hardly knew the meaning of the word. How desperately God must love, he thought with shame. The priest had reached Louise in his slow interrupted patrol, and suddenly Scobie was aware of the sense of exile. Over there, where all these people knelt, was a country to which he would never return. The sense of love stirred in him, the love one always feels for what one has lost, whether a child, a woman, or even pain.