‘I’m afraid not, Yusef.’
‘Listen, Major Scobie. I am not asking you to do anything for me except sometimes -after dark perhaps when nobody can see - to visit me and talk to me. Nothing else. Just that. I will tell you no more tales about Tallit. I will tell you nothing. We will sit here with the syphon and the whisky bottle ...’
‘I’m not a fool, Yusef. I know it would be of great use to you if people believed we were friends. I’m not giving you that help.’
Yusef put a finger in his ear and cleared it of soda water. He looked bleakly and brazenly across at Scobie. This must be how he looks, Scobie thought, at the store manager who has tried to deceive him about the figures he carries in his head. ‘Major Scobie, did you ever tell the Commissioner about our little business arrangement or was that an bluff?’
‘Ask him yourself.’
‘I think I will My heart feels rejected and bitter. It urges me to go to the Commissioner and tell him everything.’
‘Always obey your heart, Yusef.’
‘I will tell him you took my money and together we planned the arrest of Tallit. But you did not fulfil your bargain, so I have come to him in revenge. In revenge,’ Yusef repeated gloomily, his Roman head sunk on his fat chest.
‘Go. ahead. Do what you like, Yusef.’ But he couldn’t believe in any of this scene however hard he played it. It was like a lovers’ quarrel. He couldn’t believe in Yusef s threats and he had no belief in his own calmness: he did not even believe in this good-bye. What had happened in the mauve and orange room had been too important to become part of the enormous equal past. He was not surprised when Yusef, lifting his head, said, ‘Of course I shall not go. One day you will come back and want my friendship. And I shall welcome you.’
Shall I really be so desperate? Scobie wondered, as though in the Syrian’s voice he had heard the genuine accent of prophecy.
5
On his way home Scobie stopped his car outside the Catholic church and went in. It was the first Saturday of the month and he always went to confession on that day. Half a dozen old women, their hair bound like char-women’s in dusters, waited their turn: a nursing sister: a private soldier with a Royal Ordnance insignia. Father Rank’s voice whispered monotonously from the box. Scobie, with his eyes fixed on the cross, prayed - the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Act of Contrition. The awful languor of routine fell on his spirits. He felt like a spectator -one of those many people round the cross over whom the gaze of Christ must have passed, seeking the face of a friend or an enemy. It sometimes seemed to him that his profession and his uniform classed him inexorably with all those anonymous Romans keeping order in the streets a long way off. One by one the old Kru women passed into the box and out again, and Scobie prayed -vaguely and ramblingly - for Louise, that she might be happy now at this moment and so remain, that no evil should ever come to her through him. The soldier came out of .the box and he rose.
‘In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.’ He said, ‘Since my last confession a month ago I have missed one Sunday Mass and one holiday of obligation.’
‘Were you prevented from going?’
‘Yes, but with a little effort I could have arranged my duties better.’
‘Yes?’
‘All through this month I have done the minimum. I’ve been unnecessarily harsh to one of my men ...’ He paused a long time.
‘Is that everything?’
‘I don’t know how to put it, Father, but I feel - tired of my religion. It seems to mean nothing to me. I’ve tried to love God, but -’ he made a gesture which the priest could not see, turned sideways through the grille. ‘I’m not sure that I even believe.’
‘It’s easy,’ the priest said, ‘to worry too much about that. Especially here. The penance I would give to a lot of people if I could is six months’ leave. The climate gets you down. It’s easy to mistake tiredness for - well, disbelief.’
‘I don’t want to keep you, Father. There are other people waiting. I know these are just fancies. But I feel - empty. Empty.’
‘That’s sometimes the moment God chooses,’ the priest said. ‘Now go along with you and say a decade of your rosary.’
‘I haven’t a rosary. At least...’
‘Well, five Our Father’s and five Hail Marys then.’ He began to speak the words of absolution, but the trouble is, Scobie thought, there’s nothing to absolve. The words brought no sense of relief because there was nothing to relieve. They were a formula: the Latin words hustled together -a hocus pocus. He went out of the box and knelt down again, and this too was part of a routine. It seemed to him for a moment that God was too accessible. There was no difficulty in approaching Him. Like a popular demagogue He was open to the least of His followers at any hour. Looking up at the cross he thought. He even suffers in public.
Chapter Three
1
‘I’VE brought you some stamps,’ Scobie said. ‘I’ve been collecting them for a week - from everybody. Even Mrs Carter has contributed a magnificent parrakeet - look
at it - from somewhere in South America. And here’s a complete set of Liberians surcharged for the American occupation. I got those from the Naval Observer.’
They were completely at ease: it seemed to both of them for that very reason they were safe.
‘Why do you collect stamps?’ he asked. ‘It’s an odd thing to do - after sixteen.’
‘I don’t know,’ Helen Rolt said. ‘I don’t really collect. I carry them round. I suppose it’s habit.’ She opened the album and said, ‘No, it’s not just habit. I do love the things. Do you see this green George V halfpenny stamp? It’s the first I ever collected. I was eight. I steamed it off an envelope and stuck it in a notebook. That’s why my father gave me an album. My mother had died, so he gave me a stamp-album.’
She tried to explain more exactly. ‘They are like snapshots. They are so portable. People who collect china - they can’t carry it around with them. Or books. But you don’t have to tear the pages out like you do with snapshots.
‘You’ve never told me about your husband,’ Scobie said.
‘No.’
‘It’s not really much good tearing out a page because you can see the place where it’s been torn?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s easier to get over a thing,’ Scobie said, ‘if you talk about it.’
‘That’s not the trouble,’ she said. ‘The trouble is - it’s so terribly easy to get over.’ She took him by surprise; he hadn’t believed she was old enough to have reached that stage in her lessons, that particular turn of the screw. She said, ‘He’s been dead - how long - is it eight weeks yet? and he’s so dead, so completely dead. What a little bitch I must be.’
Scobie said, ‘You needn’t feel that. It’s the same with everybody, I think. When we say to someone, ‘I can’t live without you,’ what we really mean is, ‘I can’t live feeling you may be in pain, unhappy, in want.’ That’s all it is. When they are dead our responsibility ends. There’s nothing more we can do about it. We can rest in peace.’
‘I didn’t know I was so tough,’ Helen said. ‘Horribly tough.’
‘I had a child,’ Scobie said, ‘who died. I was out here. My wife sent me two cables from Bexhill, one at five in the evening and one at six, but they mixed up the order. You see she meant to break the thing gently. I got one cable just after breakfast. It was eight o’clock in the morning - a dead time of day for any news.’ He had never mentioned this before to anyone, not even to Louise. Now he brought out the exact words of each cable, carefully. ‘The cable said, Catherine died this
afternoon no pain God bless you. The second cable came at lunch-time. It said, Catherine seriously ill. Doctor has hope my diving. That was the one sent off at five.
‘Diving’ was a mutilation - I suppose for ‘darling’. You see there was nothing more hopeless she could have put to break the news than “doctor has hope”.’