The End of the Affair (21 page)

That had been one of my own favourite books. It seemed curiously dated now, this heroism with only the ice for enemy, self-sacrifice that involved no deaths beyond one’s own. Two wars stood between us and them. I looked at the photographs: the beards and goggles, the little cairns of snow, the Union Jack, the ponies with their long manes like outdated hairdressings among the striped rocks. Even the deaths were ‘period’, and ‘period’ too was the school girl who marked the pages with lines, exclamation marks, who wrote neatly in the margin of Scott’s last letter home: ‘And what comes next? Is it God? Robert Browning.’ Even then, I thought, He came into her mind. He was as underhand as a lover, taking advantage of a passing mood, like a hero seducing us with his improbabilities and his legends. I put the last book back and turned the key in the lock.

‘Where have you been, Henry?’ I asked. He was usually the first at breakfast and sometimes he had left the house before I came down, but this morning his plate had not been touched and I heard the front door close softly before he appeared.

‘Oh, just down the road,’ he said vaguely.

‘Been out all night?’ I asked.

‘No. Of course not.’ To clear himself of that charge he told me the truth. ‘Father Crompton said Mass today for Sarah.’

‘Is he still at it?’

‘Once a month. I thought it would be polite to look in.’

‘I don’t suppose he’d know you were there.’

‘I saw him afterwards to thank him. As a matter of fact I asked him to dinner.’

‘Then I shall go out.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t, Bendrix. After all, in his way, he was a friend of Sarah’s.’

‘You aren’t turning a believer too, are you, Henry?’

‘Of course I’m not. But they’ve as much right to then-views as we have.’

So he came to dinner. Ugly, haggard, graceless with the Torquemada nose, he was the man who had kept Sarah from me. He had supported her in the absurd vow which ought to have been forgotten in a week. It was to his church that she had walked in the rain seeking a refuge and ‘catching her death’ instead. It was hard for me to show even bare politeness and Henry had to shoulder the burden of the dinner. Father Crompton was not used to dining out. One had the impression that this was a duty on which he found it hard to keep his mind. He had very limited small talk, and his answers fell like trees across the road.

‘You have a good deal of poverty around here, I suppose?’ Henry said, rather tired, over the cheese. He had tried so many things - the influence of books, the cinema, a recent visit to France, the possibility of a third war.

‘That’s not a problem,’ Father Crompton replied.

Henry worked hard. ‘Immorality?’ he asked with the slightly false note we can’t avoid with such a word.

‘That’s never a problem,’ Father Crompton said.

‘I thought perhaps - the Common - one notices at night… ‘

‘You get it happening with any open space. And it’s winter now anyway.’ And that closed that.

‘Some more cheese, father?’

‘No, thank you.’

‘I suppose, in a district like this, you have a good deal of trouble raising money - for charity, I mean?’

‘People give what they can.’

‘Some brandy with your coffee?’

‘No thank you.’

‘You don’t mind if we…’

‘Of course I don’t. I can’t get to sleep on it, that’s all, and I have to get up at six.’

‘Whatever for?’

‘Prayer. You get used to it.’

‘I’m afraid I’ve never been able to pray much,’ Henry said, ‘since I was a boy. I used to pray to get into the second XV.’

‘And did you?’

‘I got into the third. I’m afraid that kind of prayer isn’t much good, is it, father?’

‘Any sort’s better than none. It’s a recognition of God’s power anyway, and that’s a kind of praise, I suppose.’ I hadn’t heard him talk so much since dinner had started.

‘I should have thought,’ I said, ‘it was more like touching wood or avoiding the lines on the pavement. At that age anyway.’

‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘I’m not against a bit of superstition. It gives people the idea that this world’s not everything.’ He scowled at me down his nose. ‘It could be the beginning of wisdom.’

‘Your church certainly goes in for superstition in a big way - St Januarius, bleeding statues, visions of the virgin -that sort of thing.’

‘We try to sort them out. And isn’t it more sensible to believe that anything may happen than…?’

The bell rang. Henry said, ‘I told the maid she could go to bed. Would you excuse me, father?’

‘I’ll go,’ I said. I was glad to get away from that oppressive presence. He had the answers too pat: the amateur could never hope to catch him out, he was like a conjuror who bores one by his very skill. I opened the front door and saw a stout woman in black holding a parcel. For a moment I thought it was our charwoman until she said, ‘Are you Mr Bendrix, sir?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was to give you this,’ and she thrust the parcel quickly into my hand as though it contained something explosive. ‘Who’s it from?’

‘Mr Parkis, sir.’ I turned it over in perplexity. It even occurred to me that he might have mislaid some evidence which now too late he was handing over to me. I wanted to forget Mr Parkis.

‘If you’d give me a receipt, sir? I was to put the parcel into your own hands.’

‘I haven’t a pencil - or paper. I really can’t be bothered.’

‘You know how Mr Parkis is about records, sir. I’ve got a pencil in my bag.’

I wrote the receipt out for her on the back of a used envelope. She stowed it carefully away and then scuttled to the gate as though she wanted to get as far as possible as quickly as she could. I stood in the hall weighing the object in my hand. Henry called out to me from the dining-room, ‘What is it, Bendrix?’

‘A parcel from Parkis,’ I said. The phrase sounded like a tongue twister.

‘I suppose he’s returning the book.’

‘At this hour? And it’s addressed to me.’

‘Well, what is it then?’ I didn’t want to open the parcel: weren’t we both of us engaged in the painful process of forgetting? I felt as though I had been punished enough for my visit to Mr Savage’s agency. I heard Father Crompton’s voice saying, ‘I ought to be off now, Mr Miles.’

‘It’s early yet.’

I thought, if I stay out of the room, I shan’t have to add my politeness to Henry’s, he may go sooner. I opened the parcel.

Henry was right. It was one of the Andrew Lang fairy books, but a piece of folded notepaper stuck out between the leaves. It was a letter from Parkis.

‘Dear Mr Bendrix,’ I read, and thinking it was a note of thanks my eyes impatiently took in the last sentences. ‘So under the circumstances I would rather not have the book in the house and hoping that you will explain to Mr Miles that there is no ingratitude on the part of yours truly, Alfred Parkis.’

I sat down in the hall. I heard Henry say, ‘Don’t think I’ve got a closed mind, Father Crompton…’ and I began to read Parkis’s letter from the beginning: ‘Dear Mr Bendrix, I am writing to you and not Mr Miles being assured of your sympathy due to our close even though sad association and you being a literary gentleman of imagination and accustomed to strange events. You know my boy has been bad lately with awful pains in his stomach and not being due to ice-cream I have been afraid of appendicitis. The doctor said operate, it can’t do any harm, but I have great fear of the knife for my poor boy, his mother having died under it due to negligence I am sure, and what would I do if I lost my boy the same way? I would be quite alone. Forgive all the details, Mr Bendrix, but in my profession we are trained to put things in order and explain first things first, so the judge can’t complain he hasn’t been given the facts plainly. So I said to the doctor on Monday, let’s wait until we are quite certain. Only I think sometimes it was the cold that did it and he waiting and watching outside Mrs Miles’s house, and you will forgive me if I say she was a lady of great kindness who deserved to be left alone. You can’t pick and choose in my job, but ever since that first day in Maiden Lane I wished it was any other lady I had the watching of.

Anyway my boy was upset terribly when he heard how the poor lady had died. She only spoke to him once, but somehow he got the idea, I think, that his mother had been like her, only she wasn’t, though a good true woman in her way too whom I miss every day of my life. Well, when his temperature was 103 which is high for a boy like him, he began to talk to Mrs Miles just the same as he had done in the street, but he told her he was watching her which of course he wouldn’t do, having professional pride even at his age. Then he began to cry when she went away, and then he slept, but when he woke up his temperature being still 102, he asked for the present she had promised him in the dream. So that was why I bothered Mr Miles and deceived him of which I am ashamed there not being a professional reason, only my poor boy.

‘When I got the book and gave it him he became calmer. But I was worried because the doctor said he would not take any more risks and he must go to hospital on Wednesday and if there had been an empty bed he would have sent him that night. So you see I couldn’t sleep for worrying because of my poor wife and my poor boy and being afraid of the knife. I don’t mind telling you, Mr Bendrix, that I prayed very hard. I prayed to God and then I prayed to my wife to do what she could because if there’s anyone in heaven, she’s in heaven now, and I asked Mrs Miles if she was there, to do what she could too. Now if a grown man can do that, Mr Bendrix, you can understand my poor boy imagining things. When I woke up this morning, his temperature was ninety-nine and he hadn’t any pain, and when the doctor came there wasn’t any tenderness left, so he says we can wait a while and he’s been all right all day. Only he told the doctor it was Mrs Miles who came and took away the pain - touching him on the right side of the stomach if you’ll forgive the indelicacy - and she wrote in the book for him. But the doctor says he must be kept very quiet and the book excites him, so under the circumstances I would rather not have the book in the house When I turned the letter over there was a postscript.

‘There is something written in the book, but anyone can see that was many years ago when Mrs Miles was a little girl, only I can’t explain that to my poor boy for fear the pain might return. Respectfully, A. P.’ I turned to the flyleaf and there was the unformed scribble with indelible pencil just as I had seen it before in the other books in which the child Sarah Bertram had composed her mottoes.

‘When I was ill my mother gave me this book by Lang.

If any well person steals it he will get a great bang.

But if you are sick in bed

You can have it to read instead.’

I carried it back with me into the dining-room. ‘What was it?’ Henry asked.

‘The book,’ I said. ‘Did you read what Sarah had written in it before you gave it to Parkis?’

‘No. Why?’

‘A coincidence, that’s all. But it seems you don’t need to belong to Father Crompton’s persuasion to be superstitious.’ I gave Henry the letter: he read it and handed it to Father Crompton.

‘I don’t like it,’ Henry said. ‘Sarah’s dead. I hate to see her being bandied about ‘I know what you mean. I feel it too.’

‘It’s like hearing her discussed by strangers.’

‘They aren’t saying anything ill of her,’ Father Crompton said. He laid the letter down. ‘I must go now.’ But he made no move, looking at the letter on the table. He asked, ‘And the inscription?’

I pushed the book across to him. ‘Oh, it was written years ago. She wrote that kind of thing in a lot of her books like all children.’

‘Time’s a strange thing,’ Father Crompton said.

‘Of course the child wouldn’t understand it was all done in the past.’

‘St Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn’t exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist. I don’t know that we can understand time any better than a child.’

‘I didn’t mean…’

‘Oh well,’ he said, standing up, ‘you mustn’t take this to heart, Mr Miles. It only goes to show what a good woman your wife was.’

‘That’s no help to me, is it? She’s part of the past that has ceased to exist.’

‘The man who wrote that letter had a lot of sense in him. There’s no harm in praying to the dead as well as for them.’ He repeated his phrase, ‘She was a good woman.’

Quite suddenly I lost my temper. I believe I was annoyed chiefly by his complacency, the sense that nothing intellectual could ever trouble him, the assumption of an intimate knowledge of somebody he had only known for a few hours or days, whom we had known for years. I said, ‘She was nothing of the sort.’

‘Bendrix,’ Henry said sharply.

‘She could put blinkers on any man,’ I said, ‘even on a priest. She’s only deceived you, father, as she deceived her husband and me. She was a consummate liar.’

‘She never pretended to be what she wasn’t’

‘I wasn’t her only lover -‘

‘Stop it,’ Henry said. ‘You’ve no right… ‘

‘Let him alone,’ Father Crompton said. ‘Let the poor man rave.’

‘Don’t give me your professional pity, father. Keep it for your penitents.’

‘You can’t dictate to me whom I’m to pity, Mr Bendrix.’

‘Any man could have her.’ I longed to believe what I said, for then there would be nothing to miss or regret. I would no longer be tied to her wherever she was. I would be free.

‘And you can’t teach me anything about penitence, Mr Bendrix. I’ve had twenty-five years of the Confessional. There’s nothing we can do some of the saints haven’t done before us.’

‘I’ve got nothing to repent except failure. Go back to your own people, father, back to your bloody little box and your beads.’

‘You’ll find me there any time you want me.’

‘Me want you, father? Father, I don’t want to be rude, but I’m no Sarah. No Sarah.’

Henry said with embarrassment,’ I’m sorry, father.’

‘You don’t need to be. I know when a man’s in pain.’

I couldn’t get through the tough skin of his complacency. I pushed my chair back and said, ‘You’re wrong, father. This isn’t anything subtle like pain. I’m not in pain, I’m in hate. I hate Sarah because she was a little tart, I hate Henry because she stuck to him, and I hate you and your imaginary God because you took her away from all of us.’