‘I’m very tired after the beach. I’ll be off.’
When she’s gone, be thought, I shall be alone for ever. His heart beat and he was held in the nausea of an awful unreality. I can’t believe that I’m going to do this. Presently I shall get up and go to bed, and life will begin again. Nothing, nobody, can force me to die. Though the voice was no longer speaking from the cave of his belly, it was as though fingers touched him, signalled their mute messages of distress, tried to hold him...
‘What is it, Ticki? You look I’ll. Come to bed too.’
‘I wouldn’t sleep,’ he said obstinately.
‘Is there nothing I can do?’ Louise asked. ‘Dear, I’d do anything...’ Her love was like a death sentence.
‘There’s nothing, dear,’ he said. ‘I mustn’t keep you up.’ But so soon as she turned towards the stairs he spoke again. ‘Read me something,’ he said, ‘you got a new book today. Read me something.’
‘You wouldn’t like it, Ticki. It’s poetry.’
‘Never mind. It may send me to sleep.’ He hardly listened while she read. People said you couldn’t love two women, but what was this emotion if it were not love? This hungry absorption of what he was never going to see again? The greying hair, the line of nerves upon the face, the thickening body held him as her beauty never had. She hadn’t put on her mosquito-boots, and her slippers were badly in need of mending. It isn’t beauty that we love, he thought, it’s failure - the failure to stay young for ever, the failure of nerves, the failure of the body. Beauty is like success: we can’t love it for long. He felt a terrible desire to protect - but that’s what I’m going to do, I am going to protect her from myself for ever. Some words she was reading momentarily caught his attention:
We are all falling. This hand’s falling too - all have this falling sickness none withstands.
And yet there’s always One whose gentle hands this universal falling can’t fall through.
They sounded like truth, but he rejected them - comfort can come too easily. He thought, those hands will never hold my falclass="underline" I slip between the fingers, I’m greased
with falsehood, treachery. Trust was a dead language of which he had forgotten the grammar.
‘Dear, you are half asleep.’
‘For a moment.’
‘I’ll go up now. Don’t stay long. Perhaps you won’t need your Evipan tonight’
He watched her go. The lizard lay still upon the wall. Before she had reached the stairs he called her back. ‘Say good night, Louise, before you go. You may be asleep.’
She kissed him perfunctorily on the forehead and he gave her hand a casual caress. There must be nothing strange on this last night, and nothing she would remember with regret. ‘Good night, Louise. You know I love you,’ he said with careful lightness.
‘Of course and I love you.’
‘Yes. Good night. Louise.’
‘Good night, Tick!.’ It was the best he could do with safety.
As soon as he heard the door close, he took out the cigarette carton in which he kept the ten doses of Evipan. He added two more doses for greater certainty
- to have exceeded by two doses in ten days could not, surely, be regarded as suspicious. After that he took a long drink of whisky and sat still and waited for courage with the tablets in the palm of his hand. Now, he thought, I am absolutely alone: this was freezing-point. But he was wrong. Solitude itself has a voice. It said to him. Throw away those tablets. You’ll never be able to collect enough again. You’ll be saved. Give up play-acting. Mount the stairs to bed and have a good night’s sleep. In the morning you’ll be woken by your boy, and you’ll drive down to the police station for a day’s ordinary work. The voice dwelt on the word ‘ordinary’ as it might have dwelt on the word ‘happy’ or ‘peaceful’.
‘No,’ Scobie said aloud, ‘no.’ He pushed the tablets in his mouth six at a time, and drank them down in two draughts. Then he opened his diary and wrote against November 12, Called on H.R., out; temperature at 2 p.m. and broke abruptly off as though at that moment he had been gripped by the final pain. Afterwards he sat bolt upright and waited what seemed a long while for any indication at all of approaching death; he had no idea how it would come to him. He tried to pray, but the Hail Mary evaded his memory, and he was aware of his heartbeats like a clock striking the hour. He tried out an act of contrition, but when he reached, ‘I am sorry and beg pardon’, a cloud formed over the door and drifted down over the whole room and he couldn’t remember what it was that he had to be sorry for. He had to hold himself upright with both hands, but he had forgotten the reason why he so held himself. Somewhere far away he thought he heard the sounds of pain. ‘A storm,’ he said aloud, ‘there’s going to be a storm,’ as the clouds grew, and he tried to get up to close the windows. ‘Ali,’ he called, ‘Ali.’ It seemed to him as though someone outside the room were seeking him, calling him, and he made a last effort to indicate that he was here. He got to his feet and heard the hammer of his heart beating out a reply. He had a message to convey, but the darkness and the storm drove it back within the case of his breast, and all the time outside the house, outside the world that drummed like hammer blows within his ear, someone wandered, seeking to get in, someone appealing for help, someone in need of nun. And automatically at the call of need, at the cry of a victim, Scobie strung himself to act He dredged his consciousness up from an infinite distance in order to make some reply. He said aloud, ‘Dear God, I love...’ but the effort was too great and he did not feel his body when it struck the floor or hear the small tinkle of the medal as it span like a coin under the icebox - the saint whose name nobody could remember.
PART THREE
Chapter One
Wilson said, ‘I have kept away as long as I could, but I thought perhaps I could be of some help.’
‘Everybody,’ Louise said, ‘has been very kind,’
‘I had no idea that he was so ill.’
‘Your spying didn’t help you there, did it?’
‘That was my job,’ Wilson said, ‘and I love you.’
‘How glibly you use that word, Wilson.’
‘You don’t believe me?’
‘I don’t believe in anybody who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.’
‘You won’t marry me then?’
‘It doesn’t seem likely, does it, but I might, in time. I don’t know what loneliness may do. But don’t let’s talk about love any more. It was his favourite lie.’
‘To both of you.’
‘How has she taken it, Wilson?’
‘I saw her on the beach this afternoon with Bagster. And I hear she was a bit pickled last night at the club.’
‘She hasn’t any dignity.’
‘I never knew what he saw in her. I’d never betray you, Louise.’
‘You know he even went up to see her the day he died.’
‘How do you know?’
‘It’s all written there. In his diary. He never lied in his diary. He never said things he didn’t mean - like love.’
Three days had passed since Scobie had been hastily buried. Dr Travis had signed the death certificate - angina pectoris. In that climate a post-mortem was difficult, and in any case unnecessary, though Dr Travis had taken the precaution of checking up on the Evipan.
‘Do you know,’ Wilson said, ‘when my boy told me he had died suddenly in the night, I thought it was suicide?’
‘It’s odd how easily I can talk about him,’ Louise said, ‘now that he’s gone. Yet I did love him, Wilson. I did love him, but he seems so very very gone.’
It was as if he had left nothing behind him in the house but a few suits of clothes and a Mende grammar: at the police station a drawer full of odds and ends and a pair of rusting handcuffs. And yet the house was no different: the shelves were as full of books; it seemed to Wilson that it must always have been her house, not his. Was it just imagination then that made their voices ring a little hollowly, as though the house were empty?