A Sort of Life by Graham Greene

would imagine meeting Watson at a cocktail party and in some way humiliating him in public. Nothing could have been more public than the Cold Storage Company of Kuala Lumpur during the Christmas rush, but all I could find to say was, ‘I didn’t think I was any good at Latin.’
    ‘Better than we were anyway.’
    I said, ‘What are you doing now?’
    ‘Customs and excise. Do you play polo?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Come along and see me play one evening.’
    ‘I’m just off to Malacca.’
    ‘When you get back. Talk over old times. What inseparables we were – you and me and old Carter.’ It was obvious that his memory held a quite different impression from mine.
    ‘What’s happened to Carter?’
    ‘He went into Cables and died.’
    I said, ‘When I get back from Malacca …’ and went thoughtfully out.
    What an anti-climax the meeting had been. I wondered all the way back to my hotel if I would ever have written a book had it not been for Watson and the dead Carter, if those years of humiliation had not given me an excessive desire to prove that I was good at something, however long the effort might prove. Was that a reason to be grateful to Watson or the reverse? I remembered another ambition – to be a consul in the Levant: I had got so far as sitting successfully for the viva . If it had not beenfor Watson … So speculating, I felt Watson sliding out of mind, and when I came back from Malacca I had forgotten him.
    Indeed it was only many months later, after I had left Malaya, as I thought, for good, that I remembered I had never rung him up, had never watched him play polo, nor exchanged memories of the three inseparables. Perhaps, unconsciously, that was my revenge – to have forgotten him so easily. Now that I had raised the stone again, I knew that nothing lived beneath it.
3
    The last footsteps had receded a long time ago, and I had put away the penknife. If the knife had been less blunt or my nerve had not failed, I wonder how I would have explained the cut knee. But perhaps unconsciously the whole point for me was that the act was inexplicable, like a would-be suicide’s uncertain overdose of sleeping pills, something which demands prompt action from outside. Successful suicide is often only a cry for help which hasn’t been heard in time.
    After a long interval the matron came up to inspect the dormitories and found me in bed. I invented reasons – a feeling of sickness, a headache – which she accepted readily. She was a young woman – though to me then she seemed like all my elders fixed in a kind of static middle-age – who radiated a sense of calm friendliness. The thermometer might accuse me of malingering, but not she. She knew that even a child reaches at a certain moment a psychological limit. I was to stay in bed until after lunch and then take tea in her room. Thus she postponed for another year or more the final act of rebellion. Kindness alas! is often false kindness, enabling one to endure a little longer an almost unbearable situation.
    It was on that day that the rain came down in torrents, postponing what I had perhaps stayed in bed to avoid, the weekly parade of the O.T.C . I hated that uniform with the puttees I could never learn to tie with any security or neatness and I dreaded the parades where I always fumbled fixing bayonets or strayed forming fours, under the ironic eyes of Watson and Carter. There was a deadly gravity about these parades because the years of Passchendaele and Gallipoli were only just over; outside the school chapel there was the list of old boys killed, plaque after plaque in double column, to remind us of the recent years. Most of us were shocked when the Eton O.T.C . arrived for a joint field-day with grey uniforms in place of the sacred khaki and with an undisciplined frivolity, which seemed in our over-serious eyes to deny the virtues of the dead. 2
    The water flowed in torrents down the hill; the gutters overflowed, and now it was a flood which I feared,