‘Major Scobie, there are rumours that after all justice is to be done and that you are to be Commissioner.’
He said with care,’ I don’t think it will ever come to that’
‘I just wanted to say, Major Scobie, that you need not worry about me. I want your good, nothing so much as that. I will slip out of your life, Major Scobie. I will not be a millstone. It is enough for me to have had tonight - this long talk in the dark on all sorts of subjects. I will remember tonight always. You will not have to worry. I will see to that’ Through the window behind Yusef’s head, from somewhere among the jumble of huts and warehouses, a cry came: pain and fear: it swam up like a drowning animal for air, and fell again into the darkness of the room, into the whisky, under the desk, into the basket of wastepaper, a discarded finished cry.
Yusef said too quickly, ‘A drunk man.’ He yelped apprehensively, ‘Where are you going, Major Scobie? It’s not safe -alone.’ That was the last Scobie ever saw of Yusef, a silhouette stuck stiffly and crookedly on the wall, with the moonlight shining on the syphon and the two drained glasses. At the bottom of the stairs the clerk stood, staring down the wharf. The moonlight caught his eyes: like road studs they showed the way to turn.
There was no movement in the empty warehouses on either side or among the sacks and crates as he moved his torch: if the wharf rats had been out, that cry had driven them back to their holes. His footsteps echoed between the sheds, and somewhere a pye-dog wailed. It would have been quite possible to have searched in vain in this wilderness of litter until morning: what was it that brought him so quickly and unhesitatingly to the body, as though he had himself chosen the scene of the crime? Turning this way and that down the avenues of tarpaulin and wood, he was aware of a nerve in his forehead that beat out the whereabouts of Ali.
The body lay coiled and unimportant like a broken watch-spring under a pile of empty petrol drums: it looked as though it had been shovelled there to wait for morning and the scavenger birds. Scobie had a moment of hope before he turned the shoulder over, for after all two boys had been together on the road. The seal grey neck had been slashed and slashed again. Yes, he thought, I can trust him now. The yellow eyeballs stared up at him like a stranger’s, flecked with red. It was as if this body had cast him off, disowned him - ‘I know you not’. He swore aloud, hysterically. ‘By God, I’ll get the man who did this,’ but under that anonymous stare insincerity withered. He thought: I am the man. Didn’t I know all the time in Yusef s room that something was planned? Couldn’t I have pressed for an answer? A voice said, ‘Sah?’
‘Who’s that?’
‘Corporal Laminah, sah..’
‘Can you see a broken rosary anywhere around? Look care’ fully.’
‘I can see nothing, sah..’
Scobie thought: if only I could weep, if only I could feel pain; have I really become so evil? Unwillingly he looked down at the body. The fumes of petrol lay all around in the heavy night and for a moment he saw the body as something very small and dark and a long way away - like a broken piece of the rosary he looked for: a couple of black beads and the image of God coiled at the end of it Oh God, he thought, I’ve killed you: you’ve served me all these years and I’ve killed you at the end of them. God lay there under the petrol drums and Scobie felt the tears in his mouth, salt in the cracks of his lips. You served me and I did this to you. You were faithful to me, and I wouldn’t trust you.
‘What is it, sah?’ the corporal whispered, kneeling by the body.
‘I loved him,’ Scobie said,
PART TWO
Chapter One
AS soon as he had handed over his work to Frazer and closed his office for the day, Scobie started out for the Nissen. He drove with his eyes half-closed, looking straight ahead: he told himself, now, today, I am going to clean up, whatever the cost. Life is going to start again: this nightmare of love is finished. It seemed to him that it had died for ever the previous night under the petrol drums. The sun blazed down on his hands, which were stuck to the wheel by sweat
His mind was so concentrated on what had to come - the opening of a door, a few words, and closing a door again for ever - that he nearly passed Helen on the road. She was walking down the hill towards him, hatless. She didn’t even see the car. He had to run after her and catch her up. When she turned it was the face he had seen at Pende carried past him - defeated, broken, as ageless as a smashed glass.
‘What are you doing here? In the sun, without a hat.’
She said vaguely, ‘I was looking for you,’ standing there, dithering on the laterite.
‘Come back to the car. You’ll get sunstroke.’ A look of cunning came into her eyes. ‘Is it as easy as all that?’ she asked, but she obeyed him.
They sat side by side in the car. There seemed to be no object in driving farther: one could say good-bye here as easily as there. She said, ‘I heard this morning about Ali. Did you do it?’
‘I didn’t cut his throat myself,’ he said. ‘But he died because I existed.’
‘Do you know who did?’
‘I don’t know who held the knife. A wharf rat, I suppose,
Yusef s boy who was with him has disappeared. Perhaps he did it or perhaps he’s dead too. We will never prove anything, I doubt if Yusef intended it’
‘You know,’ she said, ‘this is the end for us. I can’t go on ruining you any more. Don’t speak. Let me speak. I never thought it would be like this. Other people seem to have love affairs which start and end and are happy, but with us it doesn’t work. It seems to be all or nothing. So it’s got to be nothing. Please don’t speak. I’ve been thinking about this for weeks. I’m going to go away - right right away.’
‘Where to?’
‘I told you not to speak. Don’t ask questions.’ He could see in the windscreen a pale reflection of her desperation. It seemed to him as though he were being torn apart. ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘don’t think it’s easy. I’ve never done anything so hard. It would be so much easier to die. You come into every’ thing. I can never again see a Nissen hut - or a Morris car. Or taste a pink gin. See a black face. Even a bed ... one has to steep in a bed. I don’t know where I’ll get away from you. It’s no use saying in a year it will be all right It’s a year I’ve got to get through. All the time knowing you are somewhere. I could send a telegram or a letter and you’d have to read it, even if you didn’t reply.’ He thought: how much easier it would be for her if I were dead. ‘But I mustn’t write,’ she said. She wasn’t crying: her eyes when he took a quick glance were dry and red, as he remembered them in hospital, exhausted. ‘Waking up will be the worst. There’s always a moment when one forgets that everything’s different.’
He said, ‘I came up here to say good-bye too. But there are things I can’t do.’
‘Don’t talk, darling. Dm being good. Can’t you see I’m being good? You don’t have to go away from me - I’m going away from you. You won’t ever know where to. I hope I won’t be too much of a slut’
‘No,’ he said, ‘no.’
‘Be quiet darling. You are going to be all right you’ll see. You’ll be able to clean up. You’ll be a Catholic again - that’s what you really want, isn’t it, not a pack of women?’
‘I want to stop giving pain,’ he said.
‘You want peace, dear. You’ll have peace. You’ll see. Everything will be all right.’ She put her hand on his knee and began at last to weep in this effort to comfort him. He thought: where did she pick up this heartbreaking tenderness? Where do they learn to be so old so quickly?
‘Look, dear. Don’t come up to the hut. Open the car door for me. It’s stiff. Well say good-bye here, and you’ll just drive home - or to the office if you’d rather. That’s so much easier. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right’ He thought I missed that one death and now I’m having them all. He leant over her and wrenched at the car door: her tears touched his cheek. He could feel the mark like a burn. ‘There’s no objection to a farewell kiss. We haven’t quarrelled. There hasn’t been a scene. There’s no bitterness.’ As they kissed he was aware of pain under his mouth like the beating of a bird’s heart. They sat still, silent and the door of the car lay open. A few black labourers passing down the hill looked curiously hi.