The Heart of the Matter Read Online Free PDF Page A

at his car window, slashed tyres, the nickname of the Bad Man that had stuck to him through all one long sad tour—it worried him unreasonably in the heat and damp; he couldn’t take it lightly. Already he had begun to desire these people’s trust and affection. That year he had blackwater fever and was nearly invalided from the service altogether.
    The girl waited patiently for his decision. They had an infinite capacity for patience when patience was required—just as their impatience knew no bounds of propriety when they had anything to gain by it. They would sit quietly all day in a white man’s backyard in order to beg for something he hadn’t the power to grant, or they would shriek and fight and abuse to get served in a store before their neighbour. He thought: how beautiful she is. It was strange to think that fifteen years ago he would not have noticed her beauty—the small high breasts, the tiny wrists, the thrust of the young buttocks, she would have been indistinguishable from her fellows—a black. In those days he had thought his wife beautiful. A white skin had not then reminded him of an albino. Poor Louise. He said, ‘Give this chit to the sergeant at the desk.’
    ‘Thank you, sir.’
    ‘That’s all right.’ He smiled. ‘Try to tell him the truth.’
    He watched her go out of the dark office like fifteen wasted years.
    III
    Scobie had been out-manoeuvred in the interminable war over housing. During his last leave he had lost his bungalow in Cape Station, the main European quarter, to a senior sanitary inspector called Fellowes, and had found himself relegated to a square two-storeyed house built originally for a Syrian trader on the flats below—a piece of reclaimed swamp which would return to swamp as soon as the rains set in. From the windows he looked directly out to sea over a line of Creole houses; on the other side of the road lorries backed and churned in a military transport camp and vultures strolled like domestic turkeys in the regimental refuse. On the low ridge of hills behind him the bungalows of the station lay among the low clouds; lamps burned all day in the cupboards, mould gathered on the boots—nevertheless these were the houses for men of his rank. Women depended so much on pride, pride in themselves, their husbands, their surroundings. They were seldom proud, it seemed to him, of the invisible.
    ‘Louise,’ he called, ‘Louise.’ There was no reason to call: if she wasn’t in the living-room there was nowhere else for her to be but the bedroom (the kitchen was simply a shed in the yard opposite the back door), yet it was his habit to cry her name, a habit he had formed in the days of anxiety and love. The less he needed Louise the more conscious he became of his responsibility for her happiness. When he called her name he was crying like Canute against a tide—the tide of her melancholy and disappointment.
    In the old days she had replied, but she was not such a creature of habit as he was—nor so false, he sometimes told himself. Kindness and pity had no power with her; she would never have pretended an emotion she didn’t feel, and like an animal she gave way completely to the momentary sickness and recovered as suddenly. When he found her in the bedroom under the mosquito-net she reminded him of a dog or a cat, she was so completely ‘out’. Her hair was matted, her eyes closed. He stood very still like a spy in foreign territory, and indeed he was in foreign territory now. If home for him meant the reduction of things to a friendly unchanging minimum, home to her was accumulation. The dressing-table was crammed with pots and photographs—himself as a young man in the curiously dated officer’s uniform of the last war: the Chief Justice’s wife whom for the moment she counted as her friend: their only child who had died at school in England three years ago—a little pious nine-year-old girl’s face in the white muslin of first communion: innumerable