The Heart of the Matter (Vintage classics)

by Graham Greene

The rain hammered on the Nissen roofs, and he thought, Why did I write that? Why did I write ‘more than God’? she would have been satisfied with ‘more than Louise’. Even if it’s true, why did I write it? The sky wept endlessly around him; he had the sense of wounds that never healed. He whispered, ‘O God, I have deserted you. Do not you desert me.’

Men can become twins with age. The past was their common womb; the six months of rain and the six months of sun was the period of their common gestation. They needed only a few words and a few gestures to convey their meaning. They had graduated through the same fevers, they were moved by the same love and contempt.

The light was still on in Wilson’s hut as he passed. Opening the door of his own dark house he saw a piece of paper on the floor. It gave him an odd shock as though the missing letter had returned, like a cat, to its old home. But when he picked it up, it wasn’t his letter, though this too was a message of love. It was a telegram addressed to him at police headquarters and the signature written in full for the sake of censorship, Louise Scobie, was like a blow struck by a boxer with a longer reach than he possessed.

Have written am on my way home have been a fool stop love—and then that name as formal as a seal. He sat down. His head swam with nausea. He thought: if I had never written that other letter, If I had taken Helen at her word and gone away, how easily then life could have been arranged again. But he remembered his words in the last ten minutes, ‘I’ll always be here if you need me as long as I’m alive’—that constituted an oath as ineffaceable as the vow by the Ealing altar. The wind was coming up from the sea—the rains ended as they began with typhoons. The curtains blew in and he ran to the windows and pulled them shut. Upstairs the bedroom windows clattered to and fro, tearing at hinges.

Leaning back against the dressing-table, he tried to pray. The Lord’s Prayer lay as dead on his tongue as a legal document: it wasn’t his daily bread that he wanted but so much more. He wanted happiness for others and solitude and peace for himself. ‘I don’t want to plan any more,’ he said suddenly aloud. ‘They wouldn’t need me if I were dead. No one needs the dead. The dead can be forgotten. O God, give me death before I give them unhappiness.’ But the words sounded melodramatically in his own ears. He told himself that he mustn’t get hysterical: there was far too much planning to do for an hysterical man, and going downstairs again he thought three aspirins or perhaps four were what he required in this situation—this banal situation. He took a bottle of filtered water out of the ice-box and dissolved the aspirin. He wondered how it would feel to drain death as simply as these aspirins which now stuck sourly in his throat. The priests told one it was the unforgivable sin, the final expression of an unrepentent despair, and of course one accepted the Church’s teaching. But they taught also that God had sometimes broken his own laws, and was it less possible for him to put out a hand of forgiveness into the suicidal darkness than to have woken himself in the tomb, behind the stone? Christ had not been murdered—you couldn’t murder God. Christ had killed himself: he had hung himself on the Cross as surely as Pemberton from the picture-rail.

He put his glass down and thought again, I must not get hysterical. Two people’s happiness was in his hands and he must learn to juggle with strong nerves. Calmness was everything. He took out his diary and began to write against the date, Wednesday, September 6. Dinner with the Commissioner. Satisfactory talk about W. Called on Helen for a few minutes. Telegram from Louise that she is on the way home. He hesitated for a moment and then wrote: Father Rank called in for drink before dinner. A little overwrought. He needs leave. He read this over and scored out the last two sentences. It was seldom in this record that he allowed himself an expression of opinion.

In our hearts there is a ruthless dictator, ready to contemplate the misery of a thousand strangers if it will ensure the happiness of the few we love.

Driving out to the familiar house he had once occupied himself on the hills, Scobie thought listlessly, I must speak to Helen soon. She mustn’t learn this from someone else. Life always repeated the same pattern; there was always, sooner or later, bad news that had to be broken, comforting lies to be uttered, pink gins to be consumed to keep misery away.

‘You know Mrs Rolt, don’t you?’ Fellowes asked. There was no irony in his voice. Scobie thought with a tremor of self-disgust, how clever we’ve been: how successfully we’ve deceived the gossipers of a small colony. It oughtn’t to be possible for lovers to deceive so well. Wasn’t love supposed to be spontaneous, reckless …?

Scobie said, ‘If I’d known you were going to be here, I’d have called for you.’ ‘I wish you had,’ Helen said. ‘You never come and see me.’ She turned to Fellowes and said with an ease that horrified him, ‘He was so kind to me in hospital at Pende, but I think he only likes the sick.’ Fellowes stroked his little ginger moustache, poured himself out some more gin and said, ‘He’s scared of you, Mrs Rolt. All we married men are.’ She said with false blandness, ‘Do you think I could have one more without getting tight?’

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 within 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.

How often, he thought, lack of faith helps one to see more clearly than faith.

‘You love your husband. You told me so. And it’s brought you back.’ Louise said sadly, ‘I suppose I do. All I can. But it’s not the kind of love you want to imagine you feel. No poisoned chalices, eternal doom, black sails. We don’t die for love, Wilson—except, of course, in books. And sometimes a boy play-acting. Don’t let’s play-act, Wilson—it’s no fun at our age.’ ‘I’m not play-acting,’ he said with a fury in which he could hear too easily the histrionic accent.

He drove unsteadily down the road, his eyes blurred with nausea. O God, he thought, the decisions you force on people, suddenly, with no time to consider. I am too tired to think: this ought to be worked out on paper like a problem in mathematics, and the answer arrived at without pain. But the pain made him physically sick, so that he retched over the wheel. The trouble is, he thought, we know the answers—we Catholics are damned by our knowledge. There’s no need for me to work anything out—there is only one answer: to kneel down in the confessional and say, ‘Since my last confession I have committed adultery so many times etcetera etcetera’;

Robinson was exhibiting the most enviable possession a man can own—a happy death.

and then he drove up alone to the Nissen huts through the bleak empty middle day. Only the vultures were about—gathering round a dead chicken at the edge of the road, stooping their old men’s necks over the carrion, their wings like broken umbrellas sticking out this way and that.

They kissed as formally now when they met as a brother and sister. When the damage was done adultery became as unimportant as friendship. The flame had licked them and gone on across the clearing: it had left nothing standing except a sense of responsibility and a sense of loneliness. Only if you trod barefooted did you notice the heat in the grass.

Helen exclaimed with scorn and impatience, ‘You’ve told me all that before. You are trying to impress me. You don’t believe in Hell any more than I do.’ He took her wrists and held them furiously. He said, ‘You can’t get out of it that way. I believe, I tell you. I believe that I’m damned for all eternity—unless a miracle happens. I’m a policeman. I know what I’m saying. What I’ve done is far worse than murder—that’s an act, a blow, a stab, a shot: it’s over and done, but I’m carrying my corruption around with me. It’s the coating of my stomach.’ He threw her wrists aside like seeds towards the stony floor. ‘Never pretend I haven’t shown my love.’

He saw Yusef’s clerk coming back from there, and he thought how Yusef must have the wharf rats well under control if his clerk could pass alone through their quarters. I came for help, he told himself, and I am being looked after—how, and at whose cost? This was the day of All Saints and he remembered how mechanically, almost without fear or shame, he had knelt at the rail this second time and watched the priest come. Even that act of damnation could become as unimportant as a habit. He thought: my heart has hardened, and he pictured the fossilized shells one picks up on a beach: the stony convolutions like arteries. One can strike God once too often. After that does one care what happens? It seemed to him that he had rotted so far that it was useless to make any effort. God was lodged in his body and his body was corrupting outwards from that seed.

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 everything. 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 sleep 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.’

‘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?

When he was young, he had thought love had something to do with understanding, but with age he knew that no human being understood another. Love was the wish to understand, and presently with constant failure the wish died, and love died too perhaps or changed into this painful affection, loyalty, pity …

She sat there, reading poetry, and she was a thousand miles away from the torment that shook his hand and dried his mouth. She would understand, he thought, if I were in a book, but would I understand her if she were just a character? I don’t read that sort of book.

He looked up at her with momentary hatred as she sat so cheerfully there, so smugly, it seemed to him, arranging his further damnation. He was going to be Commissioner. She had what she wanted—her sort of success, everything was all right with her now. He thought: It was the hysterical woman who felt the world laughing behind her back that I loved. I love failure: I can’t love success. And how successful she looks, sitting there, one of the saved, and he saw laid across that wide face like a news-screen the body of Ali under the black drums, the exhausted eyes of Helen, and all the faces of the lost, his companions in exile, the unrepentant thief, the soldier with the sponge. Thinking of what he had done and was going to do, he thought, even God is a failure.

After she had gone to bed he took out his diary. In this record at least he had never lied. At the worst he had omitted. He had checked his temperatures as carefully as a sea captain making up his log. He had never exaggerated or minimized, and he had never indulged in speculation. All he had written here was fact. November 1. Early Mass with Louise. Spent morning on larceny case at Mrs Onoko’s. Temperature 91º at 2. Saw Y. at his office. Ali found murdered. The statement was as plain and simple as that other time when he had written: C. died.

He unsealed the package and studied the directions. He had no knowledge of what a fatal dose might be, but surely if he took ten times the correct amount he would be safe. That meant every night for nine nights removing a dose and keeping it secretly for use on the tenth night. More evidence must be invented in his diary which had to be written right up to the end—November 12. He must make engagements for the following week. In his behaviour there must be no hint of farewells. This was the worst crime a Catholic could commit—it must be a perfect one.

The solemnity of the crime lay over his mind almost like happiness: it was action at last—he had fumbled and muddled too long. He put the package for safekeeping into his pocket and went in, carrying his death.

I must leave some kind of a message, he thought, and perhaps before I have written it she will have come. He felt a constriction in his breast worse than any pain he had ever invented to Travis. I shall never touch her again. I shall leave her mouth to others for the next twenty years. Most lovers deceived themselves with the idea of an eternal union beyond the grave, but he knew all the answers: he went to an eternity of deprivation.

Everything he did now was for the last time—an odd sensation. He would never come this way again, and five minutes later taking a new bottle of gin from his cupboard, he thought: I shall never open another bottle. The actions which could be repeated became fewer and fewer. Presently there would be only one unrepeatable action left, the act of swallowing.

When she’s gone, he thought, I shall be alone for ever. His heart beat and he was held in the nausea of an awful unreality. I can’t believe that I’m going to do this. Presently I shall get up and go to bed, and life will begin again. Nothing, nobody, can force me to die. Though the voice was no longer speaking from the cave of his belly, it was as though fingers touched him, signalled their mute messages of distress, tried to hold him …

People said you couldn’t love two women, but what was this emotion if it were not love? This hungry absorption of what he was never going to see again? The greying hair, the line of nerves upon the face, the thickening body held him as her beauty never had. She hadn’t put on her mosquito-boots, and her slippers were badly in need of mending. It isn’t beauty that we love, he thought, it’s failure—the failure to stay young for ever, the failure of nerves, the failure of the body. Beauty is like success: we can’t love it for long. He felt a terrible desire to protect—but that’s what I’m going to do, I am going to protect her from myself for ever.

‘I don’t believe in anybody who says love, love, love. It means self, self, self.’ ‘You won’t marry me then?’ ‘It doesn’t seem likely, does it, but I might, in time. I don’t know what loneliness may do. But don’t let’s talk about love any more. It was his favourite lie.’

‘Did you know all the time—about her?’ Wilson asked. ‘It’s why I came home. Mrs Carter wrote to me. She said everybody was talking. Of course he never realized that. He thought he’d been so clever. And he nearly convinced me—that it was finished. Going to communion the way he did.’ ‘How did he square that with his conscience?’ ‘Some Catholics do, I suppose. Go to confession and start over again. I thought he was more honest though. When a man’s dead one begins to find out.’ ‘He took money from Yusef.’ ‘I can believe it now.’ Wilson put his hand on Louise’s shoulder and said, ‘You can trust me, Louise. I love you.’

She was alone again in the darkness behind her lids, and the wish struggled in her body like a child: her lips moved, but all she could think of to say was, ‘For ever and ever, Amen …’ The rest she had forgotten. She put her hand out beside her and touched the other pillow, as though perhaps after all there was one chance in a thousand that she was not alone, and if she were not alone now she would never be alone again.

She said drearily, ‘Father, haven’t you any comfort to give me?’ Oh, the conversations, he thought, that go on in a house after a death, the turnings over, the discussions, the questions, the demands—so much noise round the edge of silence.

‘It’s no good even praying …’ Father Rank clapped the cover of the diary to and said furiously, ‘For goodness’ sake, Mrs Scobie, don’t imagine you—or I—know a thing about God’s mercy.’ ‘The Church says …’ ‘I know the Church says. The Church knows all the rules. But it doesn’t know what goes on in a single human heart.’

‘Oh, why, why, did he have to make such a mess of things?’ Father Rank said, ‘It may seem an odd thing to say—when a man’s as wrong as he was—but I think, from what I saw of him, that he really loved God.’ She had denied just now that she felt any bitterness, but a little more of it drained out now like tears from exhausted ducts. ‘He certainly loved no one else,’ she said. ‘And you may be in the right of it there too,’ Father Rank replied.