‘I’ve brought you another table and a couple of chairs. Is your boy about?’
‘No, he’s at market.’
They kissed as formally now when they met as a brother and sister. When the damage was done adultery became as unimportant as friendship. The flame had licked them and gone on across the clearing: it had left nothing standing except a sense of responsibility and a sense of loneliness. Only if you trod barefooted did you notice the heat in the grass. Scobie said, ‘I’m interrupting your lunch.’
‘Oh no. I’ve about finished. Have some fruit salad.’
‘It’s time you had a new table. This one wobbles.’ He said, ‘They are making me Commissioner after all.’
‘It will please your wife,’ Helen said.
‘It doesn’t mean a thing to me.’
‘Oh, of course it does,’ she said briskly. This was another convention of hers - that only she suffered. He would for a long tune resist, like Coriolanus, the exhibition of his wounds, but sooner or later he would give way: he would dramatize his pain in words until even to himself it seemed unreal. Perhaps, he would think, she is right after alclass="underline" perhaps I don’t suffer. She said, ‘Of course the Commissioner must be above suspicion, mustn’t he, like Caesar.’ (Her sayings, as well as her spelling, lacked accuracy.) ‘This is the end of us, I suppose.’
‘You know there is no end to us.’
‘Oh, but the Commissioner can’t have a mistress hidden away in a Nissen hut.’ The sting, of course, was in the ‘hidden away’, but how could he allow himself to feel the least irritation, remembering the letter she had written to him, offering herself as a sacrifice any way he liked, to keep or to throw away? Human beings couldn’t be heroic all the time: those who surrendered everything - for God or love - must be allowed sometimes in thought to take back their surrender. So many had never committed the heroic act, however rashly. It was the act that counted. He said, ‘If the Commissioner can’t keep you, then I shan’t be the Commissioner.’
‘Don’t be silly. After all,’ she said with fake reasonableness, and he recognized this as one of her bad days, ‘what do we get out of it?’
‘I get a lot,’ he said, and wondered: is that a lie for the sake of comfort? There were so many lies nowadays he couldn’t keep track of the small, the unimportant ones.
‘An hour or two every other day perhaps when you can slip away. Never so much as a night.’
He said hopelessly,’ Oh, I have plans,’
‘What plans?’
He said, ‘They are too vague still.’
She said with all the acid she could squeeze out, ‘Well, let me know in time. To fall in with your wishes, I mean.’
‘My dear, I haven’t come here to quarrel.’
‘I sometimes wonder what you do come here for.’
‘Well, today I brought some furniture.’
‘Oh yes, the furniture.’
‘I’ve got the car here. Let me take you to the beach.’
‘Oh, we can’t be seen there together.’
‘That’s nonsense. Louise is there now, I think.’
‘For God’s sake,’ Helen said, ‘keep that smug woman out of my sight’
‘All right then. I’ll take you for a run in the car.’
‘That would be safer, wouldn’t it?’
Scobie took her by the shoulders and said, ‘I’m not always thinking of safety.’
‘I thought you were.’
Suddenly he felt his resistance give way and he shouted at her, ‘The sacrifice isn’t all on your side.’ With despair he could see from a distance the scene coming up on both of them: like the tornado before the rains, that wheeling column of blackness which would soon cover the whole sky.
‘Of course work must suffer,’ she said with childish sarcasm. ‘All these snatched half-hours.’
‘I’ve given up hope,’ he said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve given up the future. I’ve damned myself.’
‘Don’t be so melodramatic,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you are talking about. Anyway, you’ve just told me about the future - the Commissionership.’
‘I mean the real future - the future that goes on.’
She said, ‘If there’s one thing I hate it’s your Catholicism. I suppose it comes of having a pious wife. It’s so bogus. If you really believed you wouldn’t be here.’
‘But I do believe and I am here.’ He said with bewilderment, ‘I can’t explain it, but there it is. My eyes are open. I know what I’m doing. When Father Rank came down to the rail carrying the sacrament...’
Helen exclaimed with scorn and impatience, ‘You’ve told me all that before. You are trying to impress me. You don’t believe in Hell any more than I do.’
He took her wrists and held them furiously. He said, ‘You can’t get out of it that way. I believe, I tell you. I believe that I’m damned for all eternity - unless a miracle happens. I’m a policeman. I know what I’m saying. What I’ve done is far worse than murder - that’s an act, a blow, a stab, a shot: it’s over and done, but I’m carrying my corruption around with me. It’s the coating of my stomach.’ He threw her wrists aside like seeds towards the stony floor. ‘Never pretend I haven’t shown my love.’
‘Love for your wife, you mean. You were afraid she’d find out.’
Anger drained out of him. He said, ‘Love for both of you. If it were just for her there’d be an easy straight way.’ He put his hands over his eyes, feeling hysteria beginning to mount again. He said, ‘I can’t bear to see suffering, and I cause it all the time. I want to get out, get out.’
‘Where to?’
Hysteria and honesty receded: cunning came back across the threshold like a mongrel dog. He said, ‘Oh, I just mean take a holiday.’ He added, ‘I’m not sleeping well. And I’ve been getting an odd pain.’
‘Darling, are you I’ll?’ The pillar had wheeled on its course: the storm was involving others now: it had passed beyond them. Helen said, ‘Darling, I’m a bitch. I get tired and fed up with things - but it doesn’t mean anything. Have you seen a doctor?’
‘I’ll see Travis at the Argyll some time soon.’
‘Everybody says Dr Sykes is better.’
‘No, I don’t want to see Dr Sykes.’ Now that the anger and hysteria had passed he could see her exactly as she was that first evening when the sirens blew. He thought, O God, I can’t leave her. Or Louise. You don’t need me as they need me. You have your good people, your saints, all the company of the blessed. You can do without me. He said, ‘I’ll take you for a spin now in the car. It will do us both good.’
In the dusk of the garage he took her hands again and kissed her. He said, ‘There are no eyes here ... Wilson can’t see us. Harris isn’t watching. Yusef’s boys ...’
‘Dear, I’d leave you tomorrow if it would help.’
‘It wouldn’t help.’ He said, ‘You remember when I wrote you a letter - which got lost. I tried to put down everything there, plainly, in black and white. So as not to be cautious any more. I wrote that I loved you more than my wife ...’ As he spoke he heard another’s breath behind his shoulder, beside the car. He said, sharply, ‘Who’s that?’
‘What, dear?’
‘Somebody’s here.’ He came round to the other side of the car and said sharply, ‘Who’s there? Come out’
‘It’s Ali,’ Helen said.
‘What are you doing here. Ali?’
‘Missus sent me,’ Ali said. ‘I wait here for Massa ten him Missus back.’ He was hardly visible in the shadow.