THE sirens were wailing for a total black-out, wailing through the rain which fell interminably; the boys scrambled into the kitchen quarters, and bolted the door as though to protect themselves from some devil of the bush. Without pause the hundred and forty-four inches of water continued their steady and ponderous descent upon the roofs of the port. It was incredible to imagine that any human beings, let alone the dispirited fever-soaked defeated of Vichy territory, would open an assault at this time of the year, and yet of course one remembered the Heights of Abraham ... A single feat of daring can alter the whole conception of what is possible.

     Scobie went out into the dripping darkness holding his big striped umbrella: a mackintosh was too hot to wear. He walked all round his quarters; not a light showed, the shutters of the kitchen were closed, and the Creole houses were invisible behind the rain. A torch gleamed momentarily in the transport park across the road, but, when he shouted, it went out: a coincidence: no one there could have heard his voice above the hammering of the water on the roof. Up in Cape Station the officers’ mess was shining wetly towards the sea, but that was not his responsibility. The headlamps of the military lorries ran like a chain of beads along the edge of the hills, but that too was someone else’s affair.

     Up the road behind the transport park a light went suddenly on in one of the Nissen huts where the minor officials lived; it was a hut that had been unoccupied the day before and presumably some visitor had just moved in. Scobie considered getting his car from the garage, but the hut was only a couple of hundred yards away, and he walked. Except for the sound of the rain, on the road, on the roofs, on the umbrella, there was absolute silence: only the dying moan of the sirens continued for a moment or two to vibrate within the ear. It seemed to Scobie later that this was the ultimate border he had reached in happiness: being in darkness, alone, with the rain falling, without love or pity.

     He knocked on the door of the Nissen hut, loudly because of the blows of the rain on the black roof like a tunnel. He had to knock twice before the door opened. The light for a moment blinded him. He said, ‘I’m sorry to bother you. One of your lights is showing.’

     A woman’s voice said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. It was careless ...’ His eyes cleared, but for a moment he couldn’t put a name to the intensely remembered features. He knew everyone in the colony. This was something that had come from outside ... a river ... early morning ... a dying child. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘it’s Mrs Rolt, isn’t it? I thought you were in hospital?’

     ‘Yes. Who are you? Do I know you?’

     ‘I’m Major Scobie of the police. I saw you at Pende.’

     ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t remember a thing that happened there.’

     ‘Can I fix your light?’

     ‘Of course. Please.’ He came in and drew the curtains close and shifted a table lamp. The hut was divided in two by a curtain: on one side a bed, a makeshift dressing-table: on the other a table, a couple of chairs - the few sticks of furniture of the pattern allowed to junior officials with salaries under ￡500 a year. He said, ‘They haven’t done you very proud, have they? I wish I’d known. I could have helped.’ He took her in closely now: the young worn-out face, with the hair gone dead ... The pyjamas she was wearing were too large for her: the body was lost in them: they fell in ugly folds. He looked to see whether the ring was still loose upon her finger, but it had gone altogether.

     ‘Everybody’s been very kind,’ she said. ‘Mrs Carter gave me a lovely pouf.’

     His eyes wandered: there was nothing personal anywhere: no photographs, no books, no trinkets of any kind, but then he remembered that she had brought nothing out of the sea except herself and a stamp-album.

     ‘Is there any danger?’ she asked anxiously,

     ‘Danger?’

     ‘The sirens.’

     ‘Oh, none at all. These are just alarms. We get about one a month. Nothing ever happens.’ He took another long look at her. ‘They oughtn’t to have let you out of hospital so soon. It’s not six weeks ...’

     ‘I wanted to go. I wanted to be alone. People kept on coming to see me.’

     ‘Well, I’ll be going now myself. Remember if you ever want anything I’m just down the road. The two-storeyed white house beyond the transport park sitting in a swamp.’

     ‘Won’t you stay till the rain stops?’ she asked.

     ‘I don’t think I’d better,’ he said. ‘You see, it goes on until September,’ and won out of her a stiff unused smile.

     ‘The noise is awful.’

     ‘You get used to it in a few weeks. Like living beside a railway. But you won’t have to. They’ll be sending you home very soon. There’s a boat in a fortnight.’

     ‘Would you like a drink? Mrs Carter gave me a bottle of gin as well as the pouf.’

     ‘I’d better help you to drink it then.’ He noticed when she produced the bottle that nearly half had gone. ‘Have you any limes?’

     ‘No.’

     ‘They’ve given you a boy, I suppose?’

     ‘Yes, but I don’t know what to ask him for. And he never seems to be around.’

     ‘You’ve been drinking it neat?’

     ‘Oh no, I haven’t touched it. The boy upset it - that was his story.’

     ‘I’ll talk to your boy in the morning,’ Scobie said. ‘Got an ice-box?’

     ‘Yes, but the boy can’t get me any ice.’ She sat weakly down in a chair. ‘Don’t think me a fool. I just don’t know where I am. I’ve never been anywhere like this.’

     ‘Where do you come from?’

     ‘Bury St Edmunds. In Suffolk. I was there eight weeks ago.’

     ‘Oh no, you weren’t. You were in that boat.’

     ‘Yes. I forgot the boat.’

     ‘They oughtn’t to have pushed you out of the hospital all alone like this.’

     ‘I’m all right. They had to have my bed. Mrs Carter said she’d find room for me, but I wanted to be alone. The doctor told them to do what I wanted.’

     Scobie said, ‘I can understand you wouldn’t want to be with Mrs Carter, and you’ve only got to say the word and I’ll be off too.’

     ‘I’d rather you waited till the All Clear. I’m a bit rattled, you know.’ The stamina of women had always amazed Scobie. This one had survived forty days in an open boat and she talked about being rattled. He remembered the casualties in the report the chief engineer had made: the third officer and two seamen who had died, and the stoker who had gone off his head as a result of drinking sea water and drowned himself. When it came to strain it was always a man who broke. Now she lay back on her weakness as on a pillow.

     He said, ‘Have you thought out things? Shall you go back to Bury?’

     ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll get a job.’

     ‘Have you had any experience?’

     ‘No,’ she confessed, looking away from him. ‘You see, I only left school a year ago.’

     ‘Did they teach you anything?’ It seemed to him that what she needed more than anything else was just talk, silly aimless talk. She thought that she wanted to be alone, but what she was afraid of was the awful responsibility of receiving sympathy. How could a child like that act the part of a woman whose husband had been drowned more or less before her eyes? As well expect her to act Lady Macbeth. Mrs Carter would have had no sympathy with her inadequacy. Mrs Carter, of course, would have known how to behave, having buried one husband and three children.

     She said, ‘I was best at netball,’ breaking in on his thoughts.

     ‘Well,’ he said, ‘you haven’t quite the figure for a gym instructor. Or have you, when you are well?’

    Suddenly and without warning she began to talk. It was as if by the inadvertent use of a password he had induced a door to open: he couldn’t tell now which word he had used. Perhaps it was ‘gym instructor’, for she began rapidly to tell him about the netball (Mrs Carter, he thought, had probably talked about forty days in an open boat and a three-weeks’-old husband). She said, ‘I was in the school team for two years,’ leaning forward excitedly with her chin on her hand and one bony elbow upon a bony knee. With her white skin -unyellowed yet by atabrine or sunlight - he was reminded of a bone the sea has washed and cast up. ‘A year before that I was in the second team. I would have been captain if I’d stayed another year. In 1940 we beat Roedean and tied with Cheltenham.’

     He listened with the intense interest one feels in a stranger’s life, the interest the young mistake for love. He felt the security of his age sitting there listening with a glass of gin in his hand and the rain coming down. She told him her school was on the downs just behind Seaport: they had a French mistress called Mile Dupont who had a vile temper. The headmistress could read Greek just like English - Virgil...

     ‘I always thought Virgil was Latin.’

     ‘Oh yes. I meant Homer. I wasn’t any good at Classics.’

     ‘Were you good at anything besides netball?’

     ‘I think I was next best at maths, but I was never any good at trigonometry.’ In summer they went into Seaport and bathed, and every Saturday they had a picnic on the downs -sometimes a paper-chase on ponies, and once a disastrous affair on bicycles which spread out over the whole country, and two girls didn’t return till one in the morning. He listened fascinated, revolving the heavy gin in his glass without drinking. The sirens squealed the All Clear through the rain, but neither of them paid any attention. He said, ‘And then in the holidays you went back to Bury?’

     Apparently her mother had died ten years ago, and her father was a clergyman attached in some way to the Cathedral. They had a very small house on Angel Hill. Perhaps she had not been as happy at Bury as at school, for she tacked back at the first opportunity to discuss the games mistress whose name was the same as her own - Helen, and for whom the whole of her year had an enormous schwarmerei. She laughed now at this passion in a superior way: it was the only indication she gave him that she was grown-up, that she was - or rather had been - a married woman.

     She broke suddenly off and said. ‘What nonsense it is telling you all this.’

     ‘I like it.’

     ‘You haven’t once asked me about - you know -’

     He did know, for he had read the report. He knew exactly the water ration for each person in the boat - a cupful twice a day, which had been reduced after twenty-one days to half a cupful. That had been maintained until within twenty-four hours of the rescue mainly because the deaths had left a small surplus. Behind the school buildings of Seaport, the totem-pole of the netball game, he was aware of the intolerable surge, lifting the boat and dropping it again, lifting it and dropping it. ‘I was miserable when I left - it was the end of July. I cried in the taxi all the way to the station.’ Scobie counted the months - July to April: nine months: the period of gestation, and what had been born was a husband’s death and the Atlantic pushing them like wreckage towards the long flat African beach and the sailor throwing himself over the side. He said, ‘This is more interesting. I can guess the other.’

     ‘What a lot I’ve talked. Do you know, I think I shall sleep tonight.’

     ‘Haven’t you been sleeping?’

     ‘It was the breathing all round me at the hospital. People turning and breathing and muttering. When the light was out, it was just like - you know.’

     ‘You’ll sleep quietly here. No need to be afraid of anything. There’s a watchman always on duty. I’ll have a word with him.’

     ‘You’ve been so kind,’ she said. ‘Mrs Carter and the others - they’ve all been kind.’ She lifted her worn, frank, childish face and said, ‘I like you so much.’

     ‘I like you too,’ he said gravely. They both had an immense sense of security: they were friends who could never be anything else than friends - they were safely divided by a dead husband, a living wife, a father who was a clergyman, a games mistress called Helen, and years and years of experience. They hadn’t got to worry about what they should say to each other.

     He said, ‘Good night. Tomorrow I’m going to bring you some stamps for your album.’

     ‘How did you know about my album?’

     ‘That’s my job. I’m a policeman.’

     ‘Good night.’

     He walked away, feeling an extraordinary happiness, but this he would not remember as happiness, as he would remember setting out in the darkness, in the rain, alone.

 

 

2

 

From eight-thirty in the morning until eleven he dealt with a case of petty larceny; there were six witnesses to examine, and he didn’t believe a word that any of them said. In European cases there are words one believes and words one distrusts: it is possible to draw a speculative line between the truth and the lies; at least the cui bono principle to some extent operates, and it is usually safe to assume, if the accusation is theft and there is no question of insurance, that something has at least been stolen. But here one could make no such assumption: one could draw no lines. He had known police officers whose nerves broke down in the effort to separate a single grain of incontestable truth; they ended, some of them, by striking a witness, they were pilloried in the local Creole papers and were invalided home or transferred. It woke in some men a virulent hatred of a black skin, but Scobie had long ago, during his fifteen years, passed through the dangerous stages; now lost in the tangle of lies he felt an extraordinary affection for these people who paralysed an alien form of justice by so simple a method.

     At last the office was clear again. There was nothing further on the charge-sheet, and taking out a pad and placing some blotting-paper under his wrist to catch the sweat, he prepared to write to Louise. Letter-writing never came easily to him. Perhaps because of his police training, he could never put even a comforting lie upon paper over his signature. He had to be accurate: he could comfort only by omission. So now, writing the two words My dear upon the paper, he prepared to omit He wouldn’t write that he missed her, but he would leave out any phrase that told unmistakably that he was content. My dear, you must forgive a short letter again. You know I’m not much of a hand at letter writing. I got your third letter yesterday, the one telling me that you were staying -with Mrs Halifax’s friend for a week outside Durban. Here everything is quiet. We had an alarm last night, but it turned out that an American pilot had mistaken a school of porpoises for submarines. The rains have started, of course. The Mrs Rolt I told you about in my last letter is out of hospital and they’ve put her to wait for a boat in one of the Nissen huts behind the transport park, I’ll do what I can to make her comfortable. The boy is still in hospital, but all right. I natty think that’s about all the news. The Tallit affair drags on - I don’t think anything will come of it in the end. Ali had to go and have a couple of teeth out the other day. What a fuss he made! I had to drive him to the hospital or he’d never have gone. He paused: he hated the idea of the censors - who happened to be Mrs Carter and Galloway - reading these last phrases of affection. Look after yourself, my dear, and don’t worry about me. As long as you are happy, I’m happy. In another nine months I can take my leave and we’ll be together. He was going to write, ‘You are in my mind always,’ but that was not a statement he could sign. He wrote instead, you are in my mind so often during the day, and then pondered the signature. Reluctantly, because he believed it would please her, he wrote Your Ticki. For a moment he was reminded of that other letter signed ‘Dicky’ which had come back to him two or three times in dreams.

     The sergeant entered, marched to the middle of the floor, turned smartly to face him, saluted. He had time to address the envelope while all this was going on. ‘Yes, sergeant?’

     ‘The Commissioner, sah, he ask you to see him.’

     ‘Right.’

     The Commissioner was not alone. The Colonial Secretary’s face shone gently with sweat in the dusky room, and beside him sat a tall bony man Scobie had not seen before - he must have arrived by air, for there had been no ship in during the last ten days. He wore a colonel’s badges as though they didn’t belong to him on his loose untidy uniform.

     ‘This is Major Scobie, Colonel Wright.’ He could tell the Commissioner was worried and irritated. He said, ‘Sit down, Scobie. It’s about this Tallit business.’ The rain darkened the room and kept out the air. ‘Colonel Wright has come up from Cape Town to hear about it.’

     ‘From Cape Town, sir?’

     The Commissioner moved his legs, playing with a pen-knife. He said, ‘Colonel Wright is the M.I.5 representative.’

     The Colonial Secretary said softly, so that everybody had to bend their heads to hear him, ‘The whole thing’s been unfortunate.’ The Commissioner began to whittle the corner of his desk, ostentatiously not listening. ‘I don’t think the police should have acted - quite in the way they did - not without consultation.’

     Scobie said, ‘I’ve always understood it was our duty to stop diamond smuggling.’

     In his soft obscure voice the Colonial Secretary said, ‘There weren’t a hundred pounds’ worth of diamonds found.’

     ‘They are the only diamonds that have ever been found.’

     ‘The evidence against Tallit, Scobie, was too slender for an arrest.’

     ‘He wasn’t arrested. He was interrogated.’

     ‘His lawyers say he was brought forcibly to the police station.’

     ‘His lawyers are lying. You surely realize that much.’

     The Colonial Secretary said to Colonel Wright, ‘You see the kind of difficulty we are up against. The Roman Catholic Syrians are claiming they are a persecuted minority and that the police are in the pay of the Moslem Syrians.’

     Scobie said, ‘The same thing would have happened the other way round - only it would have been worse. Parliament has more affection for Moslems than Catholics.’ He had a sense that no one had mentioned the real purpose of this meeting. The Commissioner flaked chip after chip off his desk, disowning everything, and Colonel Wright sat back on his shoulder-blades saying nothing at all.

     ‘Personally,’ the Colonial Secretary said, ‘I would always ...’ and the soft voice faded off into inscrutable murmurs which Wright, stuffing his fingers into one ear, leaning his head sideways as though he were trying to hear something through a defective telephone, might possibly have caught.

     Scobie said, ‘I couldn’t hear what you said.’

     ‘I said personally I’d always take Tallit’s word against Yusef’s.’

     ‘That,’ Scobie said, ‘is because you have only been in this colony five years.’

     Colonel Wright suddenly interjected, ‘How many years have you been here, Major Scobie?’

     ‘Fifteen.’

     Colonel Wright grunted non-committally.

     The Commissioner stopped whittling the corner of his desk and drove his knife viciously into the top. He said, ‘Colonel Wright wants to know the source of your information, Scobie.’

    ‘You know that, sir. Yusef.’ Wright and the Colonial Secretary sat side by side watching him. He stood back with lowered head, waiting for the next move, but no move came. He knew they were waiting for him to amplify his bald reply, and he knew too that they would take it for a confession of weakness if he did. The silence became more and more intolerable: it was like an accusation. Weeks ago he had told Yusef that he intended to let the Commissioner know the details of his loan; perhaps he had really had that intention, perhaps he had been bluffing; he couldn’t remember now. He only knew that now it was too late. That information should have been given before taking action against Tallit: it could not be an afterthought. In the corridor behind the office Fraser passed whistling his favourite tune; he opened the door of the office, said, ‘Sorry, sir,’ and retreated again, leaving a whiff of warm Zoo smell behind him. The murmur of the rain went on and on. The Commissioner took the knife out of the table and began to whittle again; it was as if, for a second time, he were deliberately disowning the whole business. The Colonial Secretary cleared his throat’ Yusef,’ he repeated.

     Scobie nodded.

     Colonel Wright said, ‘Do you consider Yusef trustworthy?’

     ‘Of course not, sir. But one has to act on what information is available - and this information proved correct up to a point.’

     ‘Up to what point?’

     ‘The diamonds were there.’

     The Colonial Secretary said, ‘Do you get much information from Yusef?’

     ‘This is the first time I’ve had any at all.’

     He couldn’t catch what the Colonial Secretary said beyond the word ‘Yusef’.

     ‘I can’t hear what you say, sir.’

     ‘I said are you in touch with Yusef?’

     ‘I don’t know what you mean by that’

     ‘Do you see him often?’

     ‘I think in the last three months I have seen him three - no, four times.’

     ‘On business?’

     ‘Not necessarily. Once I gave him a lift home when his car had broken down. Once he came to see me when I had fever at Bamba. Once ...’

     ‘We are not cross-examining you, Scobie,’ the Commissioner said.

     ‘I had an idea, sir, that these gentlemen were.’

     Colonel Wright uncrossed his long legs and said, ‘Let’s boil it down to one question. Tallit, Major Scobie, has made counter-accusations - against the police, against you. He says in effect that Yusef has given you money. Has he?’

     ‘No, sir. Yusef has given me nothing.’ He felt an odd relief that he had not yet been called upon to lie.

     The Colonial Secretary said, ‘Naturally sending your wife to South Africa was well within your private means.’ Scobie sat back in his chair, saying nothing. Again he was aware of the hungry silence waiting for his words.

     ‘You don’t answer?’ the Colonial Secretary said impatiently.

     ‘I didn’t know you had asked a question. I repeat - Yusef has given me nothing.’

     ‘He’s a man to beware of, Scobie.’

     ‘Perhaps when you have been here as long as I have you’ll realize the police are meant to deal with people who are not received at the Secretariat.’

     ‘We don’t want our tempers to get warm, do we?’

     Scobie stood up. ‘Can I go, sir? If these gentlemen have finished with me ... I have an appointment.’ The sweat stood on his forehead; his heart jumped with fury. This should be the moment of caution, when the blood runs down the flanks and the red cloth waves.

     ‘That’s all right, Scobie,’ the Commissioner said.

     Colonel Wright said, ‘You must forgive me for bothering you. I received a report. I had to take the matter up officially. I’m quite satisfied.’

     ‘Thank you, sir.’ But the soothing words came too late: the damp face of the Colonial Secretary filled his field of vision. The Colonial Secretary said softly, ‘It’s just a matter of discretion, that’s all.’

     ‘If I’m wanted for the next half an hour, sir,’ Scobie said to the Commissioner, ‘I shall be at Yusef’s’

 

 

3

 

After all they had forced him to tell a kind of lie: he had no appointment with Yusef. All the same he wanted a few words with Yusef; it was just possible that he might yet clear up, for his own satisfaction, if not legally, the Tallit affair. Driving slowly through the rain - his windscreen wiper had long ceased to function - he saw Harris struggling with his umbrella outside the Bedford Hotel.

     ‘Can I give you a lift? I’m going your way.’

     ‘The most exciting things have been happening,’ Harris said. His hollow face shone with rain and enthusiasm. ‘I’ve got a house at last.’

     ‘Congratulations.’

     ‘At least it’s not a house: it’s one of the huts up your way. But it’s a home.’ Harris said. ‘I’ll have to share it, but it’s a home.’

     ‘Who’s sharing it with you?’

     ‘I’m asking Wilson, but he’s gone away - to Lagos for a week or two. The damned elusive Pimpernel. Just when I wanted him. And that brings me to the second exciting thing. Do you know I’ve discovered we were both at Downham?’

     ‘Downham?’

     ‘The school, of course. I went into his room to borrow his ink while he was away, and there on his table I saw a copy of the old Downhamian.’

     ‘What a coincidence,’ Scobie said.

     ‘And do you know - it’s really been a day of extraordinary happenings - I was looking through the magazine and there at the end was a page which said, ‘The Secretary of the old Downhamian Association would like to get in touch with the following old boys with whom we have lost touch’ - and mere half-way down was my own name, in print, large as life. What do you think of that?’

     ‘What did you do?’

     ‘Directly I got to the office I sat down and wrote - before I touched a cable, except of course “the most immediates”, but then I found I’d forgotten to put down the secretary’s address, so back I had to go for the paper. You wouldn’t care to come in, would you, and see what I’ve written?’

     ‘I can’t stay long.’ Harris had been given an office in a small unwanted room in the Elder Dempster Company’s premises. It was the size of an old-fashioned servant’s bedroom and this appearance was enhanced by a primitive washbasin with one cold tap and a gas-ring. A table littered with cable forms was squashed between the washbasin and a window no larger than a port-hole which looked straight out on to the water-front and the grey creased bay. An abridged version of Ivanhoe for the use of schools, and half a loaf of bread stood in an out-tray. ‘Excuse the muddle,’ Harris said. ‘Take a chair,’ but there was no spare chair.

     ‘Where’ve I put it?’ Harris wondered aloud, turning over the cables on his desk. ‘Ah, I remember.’ He opened Ivanhoe and fished out a folded sheet. ‘It’s only a rough draft,’ he said with anxiety. ‘Of course I’ve got to pull it together. I think I’d better keep it back till Wilson comes. You see I’ve mentioned him.’

     Scobie read, Dear Secretary, - It was just by chance I came on a copy of the ‘Old Downhamian’ which another old Downhamian, E. Wilson (1923-1928), had in his room. I’m afraid I’ve been out of touch with the old place for a great many years and I was very pleased and a bit guilty to see that you have been trying to get into touch with me. Perhaps you’d like to know a bit about what I’m doing in ‘the white man’s grave’, but as I’m a cable censor you will understand that I can’t tell you much about my work. That will have to wait till we’ve won the war. We are in the middle of the rains now - and how it does rain. There’s a lot of fever about, but I’ve only had one dose and E. Wilson has so far escaped altogether. We are sharing a little house together, so that you can feel that old Downhamians even in this wild and distant part stick together. We’ve got an old Downhamian team of two and go out hunting together but only cockroaches {Ha! Ha!). Well, I must stop now and get on with winning the war. Cheerio to all old Downhamians from quite an old Coaster.

     Scobie looking up met Harris’s anxious and embarrassed gaze. ‘Do you think it’s on the right lines?’ he asked. ‘I was a bit doubtful about “Dear Secretary”.’

     ‘I think you’ve caught the tone admirably.’

     ‘Of course you know it wasn’t a very good school, and I wasn’t very happy there. In fact I ran away once.’

     ‘And now they’ve caught up with you.’

     ‘It makes you think, doesn’t it?’ said Harris. He stared out over the grey water with tears in his bloodshot eyes. ‘I’ve always envied people who were happy there,’ he said.

     Scobie said consolingly, ‘I didn’t much care for school myself.’

     ‘To start off happy,’ Harris said. ‘It must make an awful difference afterwards. Why, it might become a habit, mightn’t it?’ He took the piece of bread out of the out-tray and dropped it into the wastepaper-basket. ‘I always mean to get this place tidied up,’ he said.

     ‘Well, I must be going, Harris. I’m glad about the house -and the old Downhamian.’

     ‘I wonder if Wilson was happy there,’ Harris brooded. He took Ivanhoe out of the out-tray and looked around for somewhere to put it, but there wasn’t any place. He put it back again. ‘I don’t suppose he was,’ he said, ‘or why should he have turned up here?’

 

 

4

 

Scobie left his car immediately outside Yusef’s door: it was like a gesture of contempt in the face of the Colonial Secretary. He said to the steward, ‘I want to see your master. I know the way.’

     ‘Massa out.’

     ‘Then I’ll wait for him.’ He pushed the steward to one side and walked in. The bungalow was divided into a succession of small rooms identically furnished with sofas and cushions and low tables for drinks like the rooms in a brothel. He passed from one to another, pulling the curtains aside, till he reached the little room where nearly two months ago now he had lost his integrity. On the sofa Yusef lay asleep.

     He lay on his back in his white duck trousers with his mouth open, breathing heavily. A glass was on a table at his side, and Scobie noticed the small white grains at the bottom. Yusef had taken a bromide. Scobie sat down at his side and waited. The window was open, but the rain shut out the air as effectively as a curtain. Perhaps it was merely the want of air that caused the depression which now fell on his spirits, perhaps it was because he had returned to the scene of a crime. Useless to tell himself that he had committed no offence. Like a woman who has made a loveless marriage he recognized in the room as anonymous as an hotel bedroom the memory of an adultery.

     Just over the window there was a defective gutter which emptied itself like a tap, so that all the time you could hear the two sounds of the rain - the murmur and the gush. Scobie lit a cigarette, watching Yusef. He couldn’t feel any hatred of the man. He had trapped Yusef as consciously and as effectively as Yusef had trapped him. The marriage had been made by both of them. Perhaps the intensity of the watch he kept broke through the fog of bromide: the fat thighs shifted on the sofa. Yusef grunted, murmured, ‘dear chap’ in his deep sleep, and turned on his side, facing Scobie. Scobie stared again round the room, but he had examined it already thoroughly enough when he came here to arrange his loan: there was no change - the same hideous mauve silk cushions, the threads showing where the damp was rotting the covers, the tangerine curtains. Even the blue syphon of soda was in the same place: they had an eternal air like the furnishings of hell. There were no bookshelves, for Yusef couldn’t read: no desk because he couldn’t write. It would have been useless to search for papers - papers were useless to Yusef. Everything was inside that large Roman head.

     ‘Why ... Major Scobie ...’ The eyes were open and sought his; blurred with bromide they found it difficult to focus.

     ‘Good morning, Yusef.’ For once Scobie had him at a disadvantage. For a moment Yusef seemed about to sink again into drugged sleep; then with an effort he got on an elbow.

     ‘I wanted to have a word about Tallit, Yusef.’

     ‘Tallit... forgive me, Major Scobie .. .’

     ‘And the diamonds.’

     ‘Crazy about diamonds,’ Yusef brought out with difficulty in a voice half-way to sleep. He shook his head, so that the white lick of hair flapped; then putting out a vague hand he stretched for the syphon.

     ‘Did you frame Tallit, Yusef?’

     Yusef dragged the syphon towards him across the table knocking over the bromide glass; he turned the nozzle towards his face and pulled the trigger. The soda water broke on his face and splashed all round him on the mauve silk. He gave a sigh of relief and satisfaction, like a man under a shower on a hot day. ‘What is it, Major Scobie, is anything wrong?’

     ‘Tallit is not going to be prosecuted.’

     He was like a tired man dragging himself out of the sea: the tide followed him. He said, ‘You must forgive me, Major Scobie. I have not been sleeping well.’ He shook his head up and down thoughtfully, as a man might shake a box to see whether anything rattles. ‘You were saying something about Tallit, Major Scobie,’ and he explained again, ‘It is the stocktaking. All the figures. Three four stores. They try to cheat me because it’s all in my head.’

     ‘Tallit,’ Scobie repeated, ‘won’t be prosecuted.’

     ‘Never mind. One day he will go too far.’

     ‘Were they your diamonds, Yusef?’

     ‘My diamonds? They have made you suspicious of me, Major Scobie.’

     ‘Was the small boy in your pay?’

     Yusef mopped the soda water off his face with the back of his hand. ‘Of course he was, Major Scobie. That was where I got my information.’

     The moment of inferiority had passed; the great head had shaken itself free of the bromide, even though the limbs still lay sluggishly spread over the sofa. ‘Yusef, I’m not your enemy. I have a liking for you.’

     ‘When you say that, Major Scobie, how my heart beats.’ He pulled his shirt wider, as though to show the actual movement of the heart and little streams of soda water irrigated the black bush on his chest. ‘I am too fat,’ he said.

     ‘I would like to trust you, Yusef. Tell me the truth. Were the diamonds yours or Tallit’s?’

     ‘I always want to speak the truth to you, Major Scobie. I never told you the diamonds were Tallit’s.’

     ‘They were yours?’

     ‘Yes, Major Scobie.’

     ‘What a fool you have made of me, Yusef. If only I had a witness here, I’d run you in.’

     ‘I didn’t mean to make a fool of you, Major Scobie. I wanted Tallit sent away. It would be for the good of everybody if he was sent away. It is no good the Syrians being in two parties. If they were in one party you would be able to come to me and say, ‘Yusef, the Government wants the Syrians to do this or that,’ and I should be able to answer, “It shall be so.”’

     ‘And the diamond smuggling would be in one pair of hands.’

     ‘Oh, the diamonds, diamonds, diamonds,’ Yusef wearily complained. ‘I tell you, Major Scobie, that I make more money in one year from my smallest store than I would make in three years from diamonds. You cannot understand how many bribes are necessary.’

     ‘Well, Yusef, I’m taking no more information from you. This ends our relationship. Every month, of course, I shall send you the interest.’ He felt a strange unreality in his own words: the tangerine curtains hung there immovably. There are certain places one never leaves behind; the curtains and cushions of this room joined an attic bedroom, an ink-stained desk, a lacy altar in Haling - they would be there so long as consciousness lasted.

     Yusef put his feet on the floor and sat bolt upright. He said, ‘Major Scobie, you have taken my little joke too much to heart.’

     ‘Good-bye, Yusef, you aren’t a bad chap, but good-bye.’

     ‘You are wrong, Major Scobie. I am a bad chap.’ He said earnestly, ‘My friendship for you is the only good thing in this black heart. I cannot give it up. We must stay friends always.’

     ‘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.