The End of the Affair (10 page)

‘We’ve trespassed on you enough.’

‘My brother would never forgive me if I didn’t make you stay. He’s very fond of children.’

‘Is your brother in?’

‘I’m expecting him any moment.’

‘Home from work?’

‘Well, his working day is really Sunday.’

‘A clergyman?’ I asked with secret malice and received the puzzling answer, ‘Not exactly.’ A look of worry came down like a curtain between us and she retired behind it with her private troubles. As she got up the hall door opened and there was X. I had an impression, in the dusk of the hall, of a man with a handsome actor’s face - a face that looked at itself too often in mirrors, a taint of vulgarity, and I thought sadly and without satisfaction, I wish she had better taste. Then he came through into the light of the lamps. The gross livid spots which covered his left cheek were almost like marks of distinction - I had maligned him, he could have no satisfaction in looking at himself in any glass.

Miss Smythe said, ‘My brother Richard. Mr Bridges. Mr Bridges’s little boy is not feeling well. I asked them in.’

He shook hands with his eye on the boy: I noticed the dryness and heat of his hands. He said, ‘I’ve seen your boy before.’

‘On the Common?’

‘Perhaps.’

He was too powerful for the room: he didn’t go with the cretonne. Did his sister sit here, while they, in another room… or did they send her out on errands while they made love?

Well, I had seen the man; there wasn’t anything to stay for - except all the other questions that now were released by the sight of him - where had they met? Had she made the first move? What had she seen in him? How long, how often had they been lovers? There were words she had written that I knew by heart: ‘I have no need to write to you or talk to you… I know I am only beginning to love, but already I want to abandon everything, everybody but you,’ and I stared up at the raw spots on his cheek and thought, there is no safety anywhere: a humpback, a cripple - they all have the trigger that sets love off.

‘What was the real purpose of your coming?’ he suddenly broke into my thoughts. ‘I told Miss Smythe - a man called Wilson…’

‘I don’t remember your face, but I remember your son’s.’ He made a short frustrated gesture as though he wanted to touch the boy’s hand: his eyes had a kind of abstract tenderness. He said, ‘You don’t have to be afraid of me. I am used to people coming here. I assure you I only want to be of use.’

Miss Smythe explained, ‘People are often so shy.’ I couldn’t for the life of me think what it was all about.

‘I was just looking for a man called Wilson.’

‘You know that I know there’s no such man.’

‘If you would lend me a telephone directory I could check his address…’

‘Sit down again,’ he said and brooded gloomily over the boy.

‘I must be going. Arthur’s feeling better and Wilson…’ His ambiguity made me ill at ease.

‘You can go if you want to, of course, but can’t you leave the boy here - if only for half an hour? I want to talk to him.’ It occurred to me that he had recognized Parkis’s assistant and was going to cross-question him. I said, ‘Anything you want to ask him you can ask me.’

Every time he turned his unmarked cheek towards me my anger grew: every time I saw the ugly flawed cheek it died away and I couldn’t believe - any more than I could believe that lust existed here among the flowered cretonnes, with Miss Smythe getting tea. But despair can always produce an answer and despair asked me now: Would you so much rather it was love and not lust?

‘You and I are too old,’ he said. ‘But the schoolmasters and the priests - they’ve only just begun to corrupt him with their lies.’

‘I don’t know what the hell you mean,’ I said, and added quickly, ‘I’m sorry,’ to Miss Smythe.

‘There you are, you see,’ he said. ‘Hell, and if I angered you, as like as not you’d say My God.’

It seemed to me that I had shocked him: he might be a Nonconformist minister: Miss Smythe had said he worked on Sundays, but how horribly bizarre that a man like that should be Sarah’s lover. Suddenly it diminished her importance: her love affair became a joke: she herself might be used as a comic anecdote at my next dinner party. For a moment I was free of her. The boy said, ‘I feel sick. Can I have some more orangeade?’

Miss Smythe said, ‘My dear, I think you’d better not.’

‘Really I must be taking him away. It’s been very good of you.’ I tried to keep the spots well in view. I said, ‘I’m very sorry if I offended you at all. It was quite by accident. I don’t happen to share your religious beliefs.’

He looked at me with surprise. ‘But I have none. I believe in nothing.’

‘I thought you objected…’

‘I hate the trappings that are left over. Forgive me. I go too far, Mr Bridges, I know, but I’m sometimes afraid that people will be reminded even by conventional words -good-bye for instance. If only I could believe that my grandson would not even know what a word like god had meant to us any more than a word in Swahili.’

‘Have you a grandson?’

He said gloomily, ‘I have no children. I envy you your boy. It’s a great duty and a great responsibility,’

‘What did you want to ask him?’

‘I wanted him to feel at home here because then he might return. There are so many things one wants to tell a child. How the world came into existence. I wanted to tell him about death. I wanted to rid him of all the lies they inject at school.’

‘Rather a lot to do in half an hour.’

‘One can sow a seed.’

I said maliciously, ‘That comes out of the Gospels.’

‘Oh, I’ve been corrupted too. You don’t need to tell me that.’

‘Do people really come to you - on the quiet?’

‘You’d be surprised,’ Miss Smythe said. ‘People are longing for a message of hope.’

‘Hope?’

‘Yes, hope,’ Smythe said. ‘Can’t you see what hope there’d be, if everybody in the world knew that there was nothing else but what we have here? No future compensation, rewards, punishments.’ His face had a crazy nobility when one cheek was hidden. ‘Then we’d begin to make this world like heaven.’

‘There’s a terrible lot to be explained first,’ I said.

‘Can I show you my library?’

‘It’s the best rationalist library in South London,’ Miss Smythe explained.

‘I don’t need to be converted, Mr Smythe. I believe in nothing as it is. Except now and then.’

‘It’s the now and thens we have to deal with.’

‘The odd thing is that those are the moments of hope.’

‘Pride can masquerade as hope. Or selfishness.’

‘I don’t think that has anything to do with it at all. It happens suddenly, for no reason, a scent… ‘

‘Ah,’ Smythe said, ‘the construction of a flower, the argument from design, all that business about a watch requiring a watchmaker. It’s old-fashioned. Schwenigen answered all that twenty-five years ago. Let me show you… ‘

‘Not today. I must really take the boy home.’

Again he made that gesture of frustrated tenderness, like a lover who has been rejected. I wondered suddenly from how many death-beds he had been excluded. I found I wanted to give him some message of hope too, but then the cheek turned and I saw only the arrogant actor’s face. I preferred him when he was pitiable, inadequate, out of date. Ayer, Russell - they were the fashion today, but I doubted whether there were many logical positivists in his library. He only had the crusaders, not the detached.

At the door - I noticed that he didn’t use that dangerous term good-bye - I shot directly at his handsome cheek, ‘You should meet a friend of mine, Mrs Miles. She’s interested…’ and then I stopped. The shot had gone home. The spots seemed to flush a deeper red and I heard Miss Smythe say, ‘Oh, my dear,’ as he turned abruptly away. There was no doubt that I had given him pain, but the pain was mine as well as his. How I wished my shot had gone astray.

In the gutter outside Parkis’s boy was sick. I let him vomit, standing there wondering, has he lost her too? Is there no end to this? Have I now got to discover Y?

Parkis said, ‘It really was very easy, sir. There was such a crush, and Mrs Miles thought I was one of his friends from the Ministry, and Mr Miles thought I was one of her friends.’

‘Was it a good cocktail party?’ I asked, remembering again that first meeting and the sight of Sarah with the stranger.

‘Highly successful I should say, sir, but Mrs Miles seemed a bit out of sorts. A very nasty cough, she’s got.’ I heard him with pleasure: perhaps at this party there had been no alcove-kissing or touching. He laid a brown-paper parcel on my desk and said with pride, ‘I knew the way to her room from the maid. If anyone had taken notice of me, I should have been looking for the toilet, but nobody did. There it was, out on her desk; she must have worked on it that day. Of course, she may be very cautious, but my experience of diaries is they always give things away. People invent their little codes, but you soon see through them, sir. Or they leave out things, but you soon learn what they leave out.’ While he spoke I unwrapped the book and opened it. ‘It’s human nature, sir, that if you keep a diary, you want to remember things. Why keep it otherwise?’

‘Did you look at this?’ I asked.

‘I ascertained its nature, sir, and from one entry judged she wasn’t of the cautious type.’

‘It’s not this year’s,’ I said. ‘It’s two years old.’

For a moment he was dashed.

‘It will serve my purpose,’ I said.

‘It would do the trick as well, sir - if nothing’s been condoned.’

The journal was written in a big account book, the familiar bold handwriting crossed by the red and blue lines. There were not daily entries and I was able to reassure Parkis - ‘It covers several years.’

‘I suppose something must have made her take it out to read.’ Is it possible, I wondered, that some memory of me, of our affair, had crossed her mind this very day, that something may have troubled her peace? I said to Parkis, ‘I’m glad to have this, very glad. You know, I really think we can close our account now.’

‘I hope you feel satisfied, sir.’

‘Quite satisfied.’

‘And that you’ll so write to Mr Savage, sir. He gets the bad reports from clients, but the good ones never get written. The more a client’s satisfied, the more he wants to forget; to put us right out of mind. You can hardly blame them.’

‘I’ll write.’

‘And thank you, sir, for being kind to the boy. He was a bit upset, but I know how it is - it’s difficult to draw the line over ices with a boy like Lance. He gets them out of you with hardly a word said.’ I longed to read, but Parkis lingered. Perhaps he didn’t really trust me to remember him and wanted to impress more firmly on my memory those hang-dog eyes, that penurious moustache. ‘I’ve enjoyed our association, sir - if one can talk of enjoying under the sad circumstances. We don’t always work for real gentlemen even when they have titles. I had a peer of the realm once, sir, who flew into a rage when I gave him my report as though I were the guilty party myself. It’s a discouraging thing, sir. The more you succeed the more glad they are to see the last of you.’

I was very conscious of wanting to see the last of Parkis and his words woke my sense of guilt. I couldn’t hurry the man away. He said, ‘I’ve been thinking, sir, I’d like to give you a little memento - but then that’s just what you wouldn’t want to receive.’ How strange it is to be liked. It automatically awakens a certain loyalty. So I lied to Parkis, ‘I’ve always enjoyed our talks.’

‘Which started, sir, so inauspiciously. With that silly mistake.’

‘Did you ever tell your boy?’

‘Yes, sir, but only after some days, after the success with the wastepaper basket. That took away the sting.’ I looked down at the book and read: ‘So happy. M. returns tomorrow.’ I wondered for a moment who M. was. How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one’s presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another’s day.

‘But if you really wouldn’t resent a memento, sir…’

‘Of course I wouldn’t, Parkis.’

‘I have something here, sir, that might be of interest and use.’ He took out of his pocket an object wrapped in tissue paper and slid it shyly across the desk towards me. I unwrapped it. It was a cheap ashtray marked Hotel Metropole, Brightlingsea. ‘There’s quite a history, sir, with that. You remember the Bolton case.’

‘I can’t say I do.’

‘It made a great stir, sir, at the time. Lady Bolton, her maid and the man, sir. All discovered together. That ashtray stood beside the bed. On the lady’s side.’

‘You must have collected quite a little museum.’

‘I should have given it to Mr Savage - he took a particular interest - but I’m glad now, sir, I didn’t. I think you’ll find the inscription will evoke comment when your friends put out their cigarettes, and there’s your answer pat - the Bolton Case. They’ll all want to hear more of that.’

‘It sounds sensational.’

‘It’s all human nature, sir, isn’t it, and human love. Though I was surprised. Not having expected the third. And the room not large or fashionable. Mrs Parkis was alive then, but I didn’t like to tell her the details. She got disturbed by things.’

‘I’ll certainly treasure the memento,’ I said.

‘If ashtrays could speak, sir.’

‘Indeed, yes.’

But even Parkis with that profound thought had finished up his words. A last pressure of the hand, a little sticky (perhaps it had been in contact with Lance’s), and he was gone. He was not one of those whom one expects to see again. Then I opened Sarah’s journal. I thought first I would look for that day in June 1944 when everything ended, and after I had discovered the reason for that there were many other dates from which I could learn exactly, checking them with my diary, how it was that her love had petered out. I wanted to treat this as a document in a case - one of Parkis’s cases - should be treated, but I hadn’t that degree of calmness, for what I found when I opened the journal was not what I was expecting. Hate and suspicion and envy had driven me so far away that I read her words like a declaration of love from a stranger. I had expected plenty of evidence against her - hadn’t I so often caught her out in lies? - and now here in writing that I could believe, as I couldn’t believe her voice, was the complete answer. For it was the last couple of pages I read first, and I read them again at the end to make sure. It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved, when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.