THE rains were over and the earth steamed. Flies everywhere settled in clouds, and the hospital was full of malaria patients. Farther up the coast they were dying of blackwater, and yet for a while there was a sense of relief. It was as if the world had become quiet again, now that the drumming on the iron roofs was over. In the town the deep scent of flowers modified the Zoo smell in the corridors of the police station. An hour after the boom was opened the liner moved in from the south unescorted.

     Scobie went out in the police boat as soon as the liner anchored. His mouth felt stiff with welcome; he practised on his tongue phrases which would seem warm and unaffected, and he thought: what a long way I have travelled to make me rehearse a welcome. He hoped he would find Louise in one of the public rooms; it would be easier to greet her in front of strangers, but there was no sign of her anywhere. He had to ask at the purser’s office for her cabin number.

     Even then, of course, there was the hope that it would be shared. No cabin nowadays held less than six passengers.

     But when he knocked and the door was opened, nobody was there but Louise. He felt like a caller at a strange house with something to sell. There was a question-mark at the end of his voice when he said, ‘Louise?’

     ‘Henry.’ She added, ‘Come inside.’ When once he was with’ in the cabin there was nothing to do but kiss. He avoided her mouth - the mouth reveals so much, but she wouldn’t be content until she had pulled his face round and left the seal of her return on his lips. ‘Oh my dear, here I am.’

     ‘Here you are,’ he said, seeking desperately for the phrases he had rehearsed.

     ‘They’ve all been so sweet,’ she explained. They are keeping away, so that I can see you alone.’

     ‘You’ve had a good trip?’

     ‘I think we were chased once.’

     ‘I was very anxious,’ he said and thought: that is the first lie. I may as well take the plunge now. He said, ‘I’ve missed you so much.’

     ‘I was a fool to go away, darling.’ Through the port-hole the houses sparkled like mica in the haze of heat. The cabin smelt closely of women, of powder, nail-varnish, and nightdresses. He said, ‘Let’s get ashore.’

     But she detained him a little while yet ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I’ve made a lot of resolutions while I’ve been away. Everything now is going to be different. I’m not going to rattle you any more.’ She repeated, ‘Everything will be different’ and he thought sadly that that at any rate was the truth, the bleak truth.

     Standing at the window of his house while Ali and the small boy carried in the trunks he looked up the hill towards the Nissen huts. It was as if a landslide had suddenly put an immeasurable distance between him and them. They were so distant that at first there was no pain, any more than for an episode of youth remembered with the faintest melancholy. Did my lies really start, he wondered, when I wrote that letter? Can I really love her more than Louise? Do I, in my heart of hearts, love either of them, or is it only that this automatic pity goes out to any human need - and makes it worse? Any victim demands allegiance. Upstairs silence and solitude were being hammered away, tin-tacks were being driven in, weights fell on the floor and shook the ceiling. Louise’s voice was raised in cheerful peremptory commands. There was a rattle of objects on the dressing-table. He went upstairs and from the doorway saw the face in the white communion veil staring back at him again: the dead too had returned. Life was not the same without the dead. The mosquito-net hung, a grey ectoplasm, over the double bed.

     ‘Well, Ali,’ he said, with the phantom of a smite which was all he could raise at this seance, ‘Missus back. We’re all together again.’ Her rosary lay on the dressing-table, and he thought of the broken one in his pocket. He had always meant to get it mended: now it hardly seemed worth the trouble.

     ‘Darling,’ Louise said, ‘I’ve finished up here. Ali can do the rest There are so many things I want to speak to you about. ...’ She followed him downstairs and said at once, ‘I must get the curtains washed.’

     ‘They don’t show the dirt’

     ‘Poor dear, you wouldn’t notice, but I’ve been away.’ She said, ‘I really want a bigger bookcase now. I’ve brought a lot of books back with me.’

     ‘You haven’t told me yet what made you...’

     ‘Darling, you’d laugh at me. It was so silly. But suddenly I saw what a fool I’d been to worry like that about the Commissionership. I’ll tell you one day when I don’t mind your laughing.’ She put her hand out and tentatively touched his arm. ‘You’re really glad...?’

     ‘So glad,’ he said.

     ‘Do you know one of the things that worried me? I was afraid you wouldn’t be much of a Catholic without me around, keeping you up to things, poor dear.’

     ‘I don’t suppose I have been.’

     ‘Have you missed Mass often?’

     He said with forced jocularity, ‘I’ve hardly been at all.’

     ‘Oh, Ticki.’ She pulled herself quickly up and said, ‘Henry, darling, you’ll think I’m very sentimental, but tomorrow’s Sunday and I want us to go to communion together. A sign that we’ve started again - in the right way.’ It was extraordinary the points in a situation one missed - this he had not considered. He said, ‘Of course,’ but his brain momentarily refused to work.

     ‘You’ll have to go to confession this afternoon.’

     ‘I haven’t done anything very terrible.’

     ‘Missing Mass on Sunday’s a mortal sin, just as much as adultery.’

     ‘Adultery’s more fun,’ he said with attempted lightness.

     ‘It’s time I came back.’

     ‘I’ll go along this afternoon - after lunch. I can’t confess on an empty stomach.’ he said.

     ‘Darling, you have changed, you know.’

     ‘I was only joking.’

     ‘I don’t mind you joking. I like it You didn’t do it much though before.’

     ‘You don’t come back every day, darling.’ The strained good humour, the jest with dry lips, went on and on: at lunch he kid down his fork for yet another ‘crack’. ‘Dear Henry,’ she said, ‘I’ve never known you so cheerful’ The ground had given way beneath his feet, and all through the meal he had the sensation of falling, the relaxed stomach, the breathless-ness, the despair - because you couldn’t fall so far as this and survive. His hilarity was like a scream from a crevasse.

     When lunch was over (he couldn’t have told what it was he’d eaten) he said, ‘I must be off.’

     ‘Father Rank?’

     ‘First I’ve got to look in on Wilson. He’s living in one of the Nissens now. A neighbour.’

     ‘Wont he be in town?’

     ‘I think he comes back for lunch.’

     He thought as he went up the hill, what a lot of times in future I shall have to call on Wilson. But no - that wasn’t a safe alibi. It would only do this once, because he knew that Wilson lunched in town. None the less, to make sure, he knocked and was taken aback momentarily when Harris opened to him. ‘I didn’t expect to see you.’

     ‘I bad a touch of fever,’ Harris said. ‘I wondered whether Wilson was in.’

     ‘He always lunches in town,’ Harris said. ‘I just wanted to tell him he’d be welcome to look in. My wife’s back, you know.’

     ‘I thought I saw the activity through the window.’

‘You must call on us too.’

     ‘I’m not much of a calling man,’ Harris said, drooping in the doorway. ‘To tell you the truth women scare me.’

     ‘You don’t see enough of them, Harris.’

     ‘I’m not a squire of dames,’ Harris said with a poor attempt at pride, and Scobie was aware of how Harris watched him as he picked his way reluctantly towards a woman’s hut, watched with the ugly asceticism of the unwanted man. He knocked and felt that disapproving gaze boring into his back. He thought: there goes my alibi: he will tell Wilson and Wilson ... He thought: I will say that as I was up here, I called ... and he felt his whole personality crumble with the slow disintegration of lies.

     ‘Why did you knock?’ Helen asked. She lay on her bed in the dusk of drawn curtains.

     ‘Harris was watching me.’

     ‘I didn’t think you’d come today.’

     ‘How did you know?’

     ‘Everybody here knows everything - except one thing. How clever you are about that. I suppose it’s because you are a police officer.’

     ‘Yes.’ He sat down on the bed and put his hand on her arm; immediately the sweat began to run between them. He said, ‘What are you doing here? You are not ill?’

     ‘Just a headache.&r............