He could tell that Yusef was working late in his office on the quay. The little white two-storeyed building stood beside the wooden jetty on the edge of Africa, just beyond the army dumps of petrol, and a line of light showed under the curtains of the landward window. A policeman saluted Scobie as he picked his way between the crates. ‘All quiet, corporal?’

     ‘All quiet, sah.’

     ‘Have you patrolled at the Kru Town end?’

     ‘Oh yes, sah. All quiet, sah.’ He could tell from the promptitude of the reply how untrue it was.

     ‘The wharf rats out?’

     ‘Oh no, sah. All very quiet like the grave.’ The stale literary phrase showed that the man had been educated at a mission school.

     ‘Well, good night.’

     ‘Good night, sah.’

     Scobie went on. It was many weeks now since he had seen Yusef - not since the night of the blackmail, and now he felt an odd yearning towards his tormentor. The little white building magnetized him, as though concealed there was his only companionship, the only man he could trust At least his blackmailer knew him as no one else did: he could sit opposite that fat absurd figure and tell the whole truth. In this new world of lies his blackmailer was at home: he knew the paths: he could advise: even help ... Round the comer of a crate came Wilson. Scobie’s torch lit his face like a map.

     ‘Why, Wilson,’ Scobie said, ‘you are out late.’

     ‘Yes,’ Wilson said, and Scobie thought uneasily, how he hates me.

     ‘You’ve got a pass for the quay?’

     ‘Yes.’

     ‘Keep away from the Kru Town end. It’s not safe there alone. No more nose bleeding?’

     ‘No,’ Wilson said. He made no attempt to move; it seemed always his way - to stand blocking a path: a man one had to walk round.

     ‘Well, I’ll be saying good night, Wilson. Look in any time. Louise ...’

     Wilson said, ‘I love her, Scobie.’

     ‘I thought you did,’ Scobie said. ‘She likes you, Wilson.’

     ‘I love her,’ Wilson repeated. He plucked at the tarpaulin over the crate and said, ‘You wouldn’t know what that means.’

     ‘What means?’

     ‘Love. You don’t love anybody except yourself, your dirty self.’

     ‘You are overwrought, Wilson. It’s the climate. Go and lie down.’

     ‘You wouldn’t act as you do if you loved her.’ Over the black tide, from an invisible ship, came the sound of a gramophone playing some popular heart-rending tune. A sentry by the Field Security post challenged and somebody replied with a password. Scobie lowered his torch till it lit only Wilson’s mosquito-boots. He said, ‘Love isn’t as simple as you think it is, Wilson. You read too much poetry.’

     ‘What would you do if I told her everything - about Mrs Rolt?’

     ‘But you have told her, Wilson. What you believe. But she prefers my story.’

     ‘One day I’ll ruin you, Scobie.’

     ‘Would that help Louise?’

     ‘I could make her happy,’ Wilson claimed ingenuously, with a breaking voice that took Scobie back over fifteen years - to a much younger man than this soiled specimen who listened to Wilson at the sea’s edge, hearing under the words the low sucking of water against wood. He said gently, ‘You’d try. I know you’d try. Perhaps...’ but he had no idea himself how that sentence was supposed to finish, what vague comfort for Wilson had brushed his mind and gone again. Instead an irritation took him against the gangling romantic figure by the crate who was so ignorant and yet knew so much. He said, ‘I wish meanwhile you’d stop spying on me.’

     ‘It’s my job.’ Wilson admitted, and his boots moved in the torchlight.

     ‘The things you find out are so unimportant.’ He left Wilson beside the petrol dump and walked on. As he climbed the steps to Yusef s office he could see, looking back, an obscure thickening of the darkness where Wilson stood and watched and hated. He would go home and draft a report. ‘At 11.25 I observed Major Scobie going obviously by appointment...’

     Scobie knocked and walked right in where Yusef half lay behind his desk, his legs upon it, dictating to a black clerk. Without breaking his sentence - ‘five hundred rolls matchbox design, seven hundred and fifty bucket and sand, six hundred poker dot artificial silk’ - he looked up at Scobie with hope and apprehension. Then he said sharply to the clerk, ‘Get out. But come back. Tell my boy that I see no one.’ He took his legs from the desk, rose and held out a flabby hand, ‘Welcome, Major Scobie,’ then let it fall like an unwanted piece of material. ‘This is the first time you have ever honoured my office, Major Scobie.’

     ‘I don’t know why I’ve come here now, Yusef.’

     ‘It is a long time since we have seen each other.’ Yusef sat down and rested his great head wearily on a palm like a dish. ‘Time goes so differently for two people - fast or slow. According to their friendship.’

     ‘There’s probably a Syrian poem about that.’

     ‘There is, Major Scobie,’ he said eagerly.

     ‘You should be friends with Wilson, not me, Yusef. He reads poetry. I have a prose mind.’

     ‘A whisky, Major Scobie?’

     ‘I wouldn’t say no.’ He sat down on the other side of the desk and the inevitable blue syphon stood between them.

     ‘And how is Mrs Scobie?’

     ‘Why did you send me that diamond, Yusef?’

     ‘I was in your debt, Major Scobie.’

     ‘Oh no, you weren’t You paid me off in full with a bit of paper.’

     ‘I try so hard to forget that that was the way. I tell myself it was really friendship - at bottom it was friendship.’

     ‘It’s never any good lying to oneself, Yusef. One sees through the lie too easily.’

     ‘Major Scobie, if I saw more of you, I should become a better man.’ The soda hissed in the glasses and Yusef drank greedily. He said, ‘I can feel in my heart, Major Scobie, that you are anxious, depressed ... I have always wished that you would come to me in trouble.’

     Scobie said, ‘I used to laugh at the idea - that I should ever come to you.’

     ‘In Syria we have a story of a lion and a mouse...’

     ‘We have the same story, Yusef. But I’ve never thought of you as a mouse, and I’m no lion. No lion.’

     ‘It is about Mrs Rolt you are troubled. And your wife, Major Scobie?’

     ‘Yes.’

     ‘You do not need to be ashamed with me, Major Scobie. I have had much woman trouble in my life. Now it is better because I have learned the way. The way is not to care a damn. Major Scobie. You say to each of them, ‘I do not care a damn. I sleep with whom I please. You take me or leave me. I do not care a damn.’’ They always take you, Major Scobie.’ He sighed into his whisky. ‘Sometimes I have wished they would not take me.’

     ‘I’ve gone to great lengths, Yusef, to keep things from my wife.’

     ‘I know the lengths you have gone, Major Scobie.’

     ‘Not the whole length. The business with the diamonds was very small compared...’

     ‘Yes?’

     ‘You wouldn’t understand. Anyway somebody else knows now - Ali.’

     ‘But you trust Ali?’

     ‘I think I trust him. But he knows about you too. He came in last night and saw the diamond there. Your boy was very indiscreet.’

     The big broad hand shifted on the table. ‘I will deal with my boy presently.’

     ‘Ali’s half-brother is Wilson’s boy. They see each other.’

     ‘That is certainly bad,’ Yusef said.

     He had told all his worries now - all except the worst. He had the odd sense of having for the first time in his life shifted a burden elsewhere. And Yusef carried it - he obviously carried it He raised himself from his chair and now moved his great haunches to the window, staring at the green black-out curtain as though it were a landscape. A hand went up to his mouth and he began to bite his nails - snip, snip, snip, his teeth closed on each nail in turn. Then he began on the other hand. ‘I don’t suppose it’s anything to worry about really,’ Scobie said. He was touched by uneasiness, as though he had accidentally set in motion a powerful machine he couldn’t control.

     ‘It is a bad thing not to trust,’ Yusef said. ‘One must always have boys one trusts. You must always know more about them than they do about you.’ That, apparently, was his conception of trust. Scobie said, ‘I used to trust him.’

     Yusef looked at his trimmed nails and took another bite. He said, ‘Do not worry. I will not have you worry. Leave everything to me, Major Scobie. I will find out for you whether you can trust him.’ He made the startling claim, ‘I will look after you.’

     ‘How can you do that?’ I feel no resentment, he thought with weary surprise. I am being looked after, and a kind of nursery peace descended.

     ‘You mustn’t ask me questions, Major Scobie. You must leave everything to me just this once. I understand the way.’ Moving from the window Yusef turned on Scobie eyes like closed telescopes, blank and brassy. He said with a soothing nurse’s gesture of the broad wet palm, ‘You will just write a little note to your boy, Major Scobie, asking him to come here. I will talk to him. My boy will take it to him.’

     ‘But Ali can’t read.’

     ‘Better still then. You win send some token with my boy to show that he comes from you. Your signet ring.’

     ‘What are you going to do, Yusef?’

     ‘I am going to help you, Major Scobie. That is all.’ Slowly, reluctantly, Scobie drew at his ring. He said, &ls............