The End of the Affair (20 page)

But that wisdom had nothing to do with the shifty ceremony near the beach. It wasn’t You that ‘took’, I told the God I didn’t believe in, that imaginary God whom Sarah thought had saved my life (for what conceivable purpose?) and who had ruined even in his non-existence the only deep happiness I had ever experienced: oh no, it wasn’t You that took, for that would have been magic and I believe in magic even less than I believe in You: magic is your cross, your resurrection of the body, your holy Catholic church, your communion of saints.

I lay on my back and watched the shadows of the Common trees shift on my ceiling. It’s just a coincidence, I thought, a horrible coincidence that nearly brought her back at the end to You. You can’t mark a two-year-old child for life with a bit of water and a prayer. If I began to believe that, I could believe in the body and the blood. You didn’t own her all those years: I owned her. You won in the end, You don’t need to remind me of that, but she wasn’t deceiving me with You when she lay here with me, on this bed, with this pillow under her back. When she slept, I was with her, not You. It was I who penetrated her, not You.

All the light went out, darkness was over the bed, and I dreamed I was at a fair with a gun in my hand. I was shooting at bottles that looked as though they were made of glass but my bullets bounded off them as though they were coated with steel. I fired and fired, and not a bottle could I crack, and at five in the morning I woke with exactly the same thought in my head: for those years you were mine, not His.

It had been a macabre joke of mine when I thought that Henry might ask me to share his house. I had not really expected the offer and when it came I was taken by surprise. Even his visit a week after the funeral was a surprise: he had never been to my house before. I doubt whether he had ever come much nearer to the south side than the night I met him on the Common in the rain. I heard my bell ring and looked out of the window because I didn’t want to see visitors - I had an idea it might be Waterbury with Sylvia. The lamp by the plane-tree on the pavement picked out Henry’s black hat. I went downstairs and opened the door. ‘I was just passing by,’ Henry lied.

‘Come in.’

He stood and dithered awkwardly while I got my drinks out of a cupboard. He said, ‘You seem interested in General Gordon.’

‘They want me to do a Life.’

‘Are you going to do it?’

‘I suppose so. I don’t feel much like work these days.’

‘It’s the same with me,’ Henry said.

‘Is the Royal Commission still sitting?’

‘Yes.’

‘It gives you something to think about.’

‘Does it? Yes, I suppose it does. Until we stop for lunch.’

‘It’s important work anyway. Here’s your sherry.’

‘It won’t make any difference to a single soul.’

What a long way Henry had travelled since the complacent photograph in the Tatler that had so angered me. I had a picture of Sarah, enlarged from a snapshot, facedown on my desk. He turned it over. ‘I remember taking that,’ he said. Sarah had told me the photograph had been taken by a woman-friend. I suppose she had lied to save my feelings. In the picture she looked younger and happier, but not more lovely than in the years I had known her. I wished I had been able to make her look that way, but it is the destiny of a lover to watch unhappiness hardening like a cast around his mistress. Henry said, ‘I was making a fool of myself to make her smile. Is General Gordon an interesting character?’

‘In some ways.’

Henry said, ‘The house feels very queer these days. I try to keep out of it as much as possible. I suppose you aren’t free for dinner at the club?’

‘I’ve got a lot of work I have to finish.’

He looked round my room. He said, ‘You haven’t much space for your books here.’

‘No. I have to keep some of them under the bed.’

He picked up a magazine that Waterbury had sent me before the interview to show an example of his work and said, ‘There’s room in my house. You could have practically a flat to yourself.’ I was too astonished to answer. He went rapidly on, turning over the leaves of the magazine as though he were really uninterested in his own suggestion, ‘Think it over. You mustn’t decide now.’

‘It’s very good of you, Henry.’

‘You’d be doing me a favour, Bendrix.’

I thought, Why not? Writers are regarded as unconventional. Am I more conventional than a senior civil servant?

‘I dreamed last night,’ Henry said, ‘about all of us.’

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t remember much. We were drinking together. We were happy. When I woke up I thought she wasn’t dead.’

‘I don’t dream of her now.’

‘I wish we’d let that priest have his way.’

‘It would have been absurd, Henry. She was no more a Catholic than you or me.’

‘Do you believe in survival, Bendrix?’

‘If you mean personal survival, no.’

‘One can’t disprove it, Bendrix.’

‘It’s almost impossible to disprove anything. I write a story. How can you prove that the events in it never happened, that the characters aren’t real? Listen. I met a man on the Common today with three legs.’

‘How terrible,’ Henry said seriously. ‘An abortion?’

‘And they were covered with fish scales.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘But prove I am, Henry. You can’t disprove my story any more than I can disprove God. But I just know he’s a lie, just as you know my story’s a lie.’

‘Of course there are arguments.’

‘Oh, I could invent a philosophic argument for my story, I daresay, based on Aristotle.’

Henry abruptly changed the subject back. ‘It would save you a bit if you came and stayed with me. Sarah always said your books weren’t as successful as they should be.’

‘Oh, the shadow of success is falling upon them.’ I thought of Waterbury’s article. I said, ‘A moment comes when you can hear the popular reviewers dipping their pens for the plaudits - even before the next book’s written. It’s all a question of time.’ I talked because I hadn’t made up my mind.

Henry said, ‘There’s no ill-feeling left, is there, Bendrix? I got angry with you at your club - about that man. But what does it matter now?’

‘I was wrong. He was only some crazy tub-thumping rationalist who interested her with his theories. Forget it, Henry.’

‘She was good, Bendrix. People talk but she was good. It wasn’t her fault I couldn’t, well, love her properly. You know I’m awfully prudent, cautious. I’m not the sort that makes a lover. She wanted somebody like you.’

‘She left me. She moved on, Henry.’

‘Do you know I read one of your books once - Sarah made me. You described a house after a woman in it had died.’

‘
The Ambitious Host
.’

‘That was the name. It seemed all right at the time. I thought it very plausible, but you got it all wrong, Bendrix. You described how the husband found the house terribly empty: he moved about the rooms, shifting chairs, trying to give an effect of movement, of another being there. Sometimes he’d pour himself drinks in two glasses.’

‘I forget it. It sounds a bit literary.’

‘It’s off the mark, Bendrix. The trouble is, the house doesn’t seem empty. You see, often in the old days I’d come home from the office, and she would be out somewhere - perhaps with you. I’d call and she wouldn’t answer. Then the house was empty. I almost expected to find the furniture gone. You know I did love her in my way, Bendrix. Every time she wasn’t there when I came home those last months I dreaded to see a letter waiting for me. ‘Dear Henry’… you know the kind of thing they write in novels?’

‘Yes.’

‘But now the house never seems empty like that. I don’t know how to express it. Because she’s always away, she’s never away. You see, she’s never anywhere else. She’s not having lunch with anybody, she’s not at a cinema with you. There’s nowhere for her to be but at home.’

‘But where’s her home?’ I said.

‘Oh, you’ve got to forgive me, Bendrix. I’m nervy and tired - I don’t sleep well. You know the next best thing to talking to her is talking about her, and there’s only you.’

‘She had a lot of friends. Sir William Mallock, Dunstan ‘I can’t talk about her to them. Any more than to that man, Parkis.’

‘Parkis!’ I exclaimed. Had he lodged himself in our lives for ever?

‘He told me he’d been at a cocktail party we gave. The strange people Sarah picked up. He said you knew him too.’

‘What on earth did he want with you?’

‘He said she’d been kind to his little boy - God knows when. The boy’s sick. He seemed to want something of hers for a memento. I gave him one or two of her old children’s books. There were a lot of them in her room, all scrawled over in pencil. It was a good way of getting rid of them. One can’t just send them to Foyle’s, can one? I don’t see any harm in it, do you?’

‘No. That was the man I put to watch her, from Savage’s detective agency.’

‘Good God, if I’d known… But he seemed really fond of her.’

‘Parkis is human,’ I said. ‘He’s easily touched.’ I looked around at my room - there wouldn’t be any more of Sarah where Henry came from: less perhaps, for she would be diluted there.

‘I’ll come and stay with you, Henry, but you must let me pay some rent’

‘I’m so glad, Bendrix. But the house is freehold. You can pay your share of the rates.’

‘Three months’ notice to find new digs when you marry again.’

He took me quite seriously. ‘I shall never want to do that. I’m not the marrying kind. It was a great injury I did to Sarah when I married her. I know that now.’

So I moved to the north side of the Common. I wasted a week’s rent because Henry wanted me to come at once, and I paid five pounds for a van to take my books and clothes across. I had the guest-room and Henry fitted up a lumber-room as a study, and there was a bath on the floor above. Henry had moved into his dressing-room, and the room they had shared with the cold twin beds was left for guests who never came. After a few days I began to see what Henry meant by the house never being empty. I worked at the British Museum until it closed, and then I would go back and wait for Henry, and usually we went out and drank a little at the Pontefract Arms. Once when Henry was away for a few days at a conference at Bournemouth, I picked up a girl and brought her back. It wasn’t any good. I knew it at once, I was impotent, and to save her feelings I told her that I had promised a woman I loved never to do this with anyone else. She was very sweet and understanding about it: prostitutes have a great respect for sentiment. This time there had been no revenge in my mind, and I felt only sadness at abandoning for ever something I had enjoyed so much. I dreamed of Sarah afterwards and we were lovers again in my old room on the south side, but again nothing happened, only this time there was no sadness in the fact. We were happy and without regret.

It was a few days afterwards that I pulled open a cupboard in my bedroom and found a pile of old children’s books. Henry must have looted this cupboard for Parkis’s boy. There were several of Andrew Lang’s fairy books in their coloured covers, many Beatrix Potters, The Children of the New Forest, The Golliwog at the North Pole, and also one or two older books - Captain Scott’s Last Expedition and the Poems of Thomas Hood, the last bound in school leather with a label saying that it had been awarded to Sarah Bertram for proficiency in Algebra. Algebra! How one changes.

I couldn’t work that evening. I lay on the floor with the books and tried to trace at least a few features in the blank spaces of Sarah’s life. There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn’t shared. The Golliwog at the North Pole was probably the earliest of Sarah’s books because it had been scrawled all over, this way and that way, meaninglessly, destructively, with coloured chalks. In one of the Beatrix Potters her name had been spelt in pencil, one big capital letter arranged wrongly so that what appeared was SA? AH. In The Children of the New Forest she said written very tidily and minutely ‘Sarah Bertram Her Book. Please ask permission to borrow. And if you steal it will be to your sorrow’. They were the marks of every child who has ever lived: traces as anonymous as the claw marks of birds that one sees in winter. When I closed the book they were covered at once by the drift of time.

I doubt whether she had ever read Hood’s poems: the pages were as clean as when the book was handed to her by the headmistress or the distinguished visitor. Indeed as I was about to put it back in the cupboard a leaf of print dropped on the floor - the programme probably of that very prize-giving. In a handwriting I could recognize (but even our handwriting begins young and takes on the tired arabesques of time) was a phrase: ‘What utter piffle’. I could imagine Sarah writing it down and showing it to her neighbour as the headmistress resumed her seat, applauded respectfully by parents. I don’t know why another line of hers came into my head when I saw that schoolgirl phrase with all its impatience, its incomprehension and its assurance: ‘I’m a phoney and a fake.’ Here under my hand was innocence. It seemed such a pity that she had lived another twenty years only to feel that about herself. A phoney and a fake. Was it a description I had used of her in a moment of anger? She always harboured my criticism: it was only praise that slid from her like the snow.

I turned the leaf over and read the programme of 23 July 1926: the Water Music of Handel played by Miss Duncan, R.C.M.: a recitation of ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ by Beatrice Collins: Tudor Ayres by the School Glee Society: Violin Recital of Chopin’s Waltz in A flat by Mary Pippitt. The long summer afternoon of twenty years ago stretched out its shadows towards me, and I hated life that so alters us for the worse. I thought, that summer I had just begun my first novel: there was so much excitement, ambition, hope, when I sat down to work: I wasn’t bitter, I was happy. I put the leaf back in the unread book and thrust the volume to the back of the cupboard under the Golliwog and the Beatrix Potters. We were both happy with only ten years and a few counties between us, who were later to come together for no apparent purpose but to give each other so much pain. I took up Scott’s Last Expedition.