A Burnt Out Case by Graham Greene Page A

they would see the lights of the bedrooms when they turned.
    She wanted to go straight to her room, the small hot uninviting room where he sometimes allowed her to be alone during her monthly or unsafe periods, but he stopped her with a touch; she hadn’t really expected to get away with it. He said, ‘You aren’t angry with me, Mawie?’ He always lisped her name childishly at the moments when he felt least childish.
    ‘No. It’s only – it wouldn’t be safe.’ Her hope of escape was that he feared a child.
    ‘Oh come. I looked up the calendar before I came out.’
    ‘I’ve been so irregular the last two months.’ Once she had bought a douche, but he had found it and thrown it away and afterwards he had lectured her on the enormity and unnaturalness of her act, speaking so long and emotionally on the subject of Christian marriage that the lecture had ended on the bed.
    He put his hand below her waist and propelled her gently in the direction he required. ‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘we’ll take a risk.’
    ‘But it’s the worst time. I promise . . .’
    ‘The Church doesn’t intend us to avoid all risk. The safe period mustn’t be abused, Mawie.’
    She implored him, ‘Let me go to my room for a moment. I’ve left my things there,’ for she hated undressing in front of his scrutinizing gaze. ‘I won’t be long. I promise I won’t be long.’
    ‘I’ll be waiting for you,’ Rycker promised.
    She undressed as slowly as she dared and took a pyjama jacket from under her pillow. There was no room here for anything but a small iron bed, a chair, a wardrobe, a chest-of-drawers. On the chest was a photograph of her parents – two happy elderly people who had married late and had one child. There was a picture postcard of Bruges sent by a cousin, and an old copy of Time . Underneath the chest she had hidden a key and now she unlocked the bottom drawer. Inside the drawer was her secret museum: a too-clean missal which she had been given at the time of her first communion, a sea-shell, the programme of a concert in Brussels. André Lejeune’s History of Europe in one volume for the use of schools, and an exercise book containing an essay which she had written during her last term (she had received the maximum marks) on the Wars of Religion. Now she added to her collection the old copy of Time . Querry’s face covered Lejeune’s History : it lay, a discord, among the relics of childhood. She remembered Mme Guelle’s words exactly: ‘His reputation in certain ways is very bad.’ She locked the drawer and hid the key – it was unsafe to delay any further. Then she walked along the veranda to their room, where Rycker was stretched naked inside the mosquito tent of the double-bed under the wooden body on the cross. He looked like a drowned man fished up in a net – hair lay like seaweed on his belly and legs; but at her entrance he came immediately to life, lifting the side of the tent. ‘Come, Mawie,’ he said. A Christian marriage, how often she had been told it by her religious instructors, symbolized the marriage of Christ and His Church.

CHAPTER 2
    The Superior with old-fashioned politeness ground out his cheroot, but Mme Rycker was no sooner seated than absent-mindedly he lit another. His desk was littered with hardware catalogues and scraps of paper on which he had made elaborate calculations that always came out differently, for he was a bad mathematician – multiplication with him was an elaborate form of addition and a series of subtractions would take the place of long division. One page of a catalogue was open at the picture of a bidet which the Superior had mistaken for a new kind of foot-bath. When Mme Rycker entered he was trying to calculate whether he could afford to buy three dozen of these for the leproserie: they were just the thing for washing leprous feet.
    ‘Why, Mme Rycker, you are an unexpected visitor. Is your husband . . .’
    ‘No.’
    ‘It’s a long way to come