The End of the Affair (22 page)

‘You’re a good hater,’ Father Crompton said.

Tears stood in my eyes because I was powerless to hurt any of them. ‘To hell with the lot of you,’ I said.

I slammed the door behind me and shut them in together. Let him spill his holy wisdom to Henry, I thought, I’m alone. I want to be alone. If I can’t have you, I’ll be alone always. Oh, I’m as capable of belief as the next man. I would only have to shut the eyes of my mind for a long enough time, and I could believe that you came to Parkis’s boy in the night with your touch that brings peace. Last month in the crematorium I asked you to save that girl from me and you pushed your mother between us - or so they might say. But if I start believing that, then I have to believe in your God. I’d have to love your God. I’d rather love the men you slept with.

I’ve got to be reasonable, I told myself going upstairs. Sarah has been dead a long time now: one doesn’t go on loving the dead with this intensity, only the living, and she’s not alive, she can’t be alive. I mustn’t believe that she’s alive. I lay down on my bed and closed my eyes and I tried to be reasonable. If I hate her so much as I sometimes do, how can I love her? Can one really hate and love? Or is it only myself that I really hate? I hate the books I write with their trivial unimportant skill, I hate the craftsman’s mind in me so greedy for copy that I set out to seduce a woman I didn’t love for the information she could give me, I hate this body that enjoyed so much but was inadequate to express what the heart felt, and I hate my untrusting mind, that set Parkis on the watch who laid powder on door bells, rifled wastepaper baskets, stole your secrets.

From the drawer of my bedside table I took her journal and opening it at random, under a date last January, I read: ‘O God, if I could really hate you, what would that mean?’ And I thought, hating Sarah is only loving Sarah and hating myself is only loving myself. I’m not worth hating - Maurice Bendrix, author of The Ambitious Host, The Crowned Image, The Grave on the Water-Front, Bendrix the scribbler. Nothing - not even Sarah - is worth our hatred if You exist, except You. And, I thought, sometimes I’ve hated Maurice, but would I have hated him if I hadn’t loved him too? O God, if I could really hate you…

I remembered how Sarah had prayed to the God she didn’t believe in, and now I spoke to the Sarah I didn’t believe in. I said: You sacrificed both of us once to bring me back to life, but what sort of a life is this without you? It’s all very well for you to love God. You are dead. You have him. But I’m sick with life, I’m rotten with health. If I begin to love God, I can’t just die. I’ve got to do something about it. I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue: one can’t love and do nothing. It’s no use your telling me not to worry as you did once in a dream. If I ever loved like that, it would be the end of everything. Loving you I had no appetite for food, I felt no lust for any other woman, but loving him there’d be no pleasure in anything at all with him away. I’d even lose my work, I’d cease to be Bendrix. Sarah, I’m afraid.

That night I came wide-awake at two in the morning. I went down to the larder and got myself some biscuits and a drink of water. I was sorry I had spoken like that about Sarah in front of Henry. The priest had said there was nothing we could do that some saint had not done. That might be true of murder and adultery, the spectacular sins, but could a saint ever have been guilty of envy and meanness? My hate was as petty as my love. I opened the door softly and looked in at Henry. He lay asleep with the light on and his arm shielding his eyes. With the eyes hidden there was an anonymity about the whole body. He was just a man - one of us. He was like the first enemy soldier a man encounters on a battlefield, dead and indistinguishable, not a White or a Red, but just a human being like himself. I put two biscuits by his bed in case he woke and turned the light out 8 My book wasn’t going well (what a waste of time the act of writing seemed, but how else could time be spent?) and I took a walk across the Common to listen to the speakers. There was a man I remembered who used to amuse me in the pre-war days and I was glad to see him safely back on his pitch. He had no message to convey like the political and the religious speakers. He was an ex-actor and he just told stories and recited snatches of verse. He would challenge his audience to catch him out by asking for any piece of verse. ‘The Ancient Mariner,’ somebody would call, and at once, with great emphasis, he would give us a quatrain. One wag said, ‘Shakespeare’s Thirty-Second Sonnet’ and he recited four lines at random and when the wag objected, he said, ‘You’ve got the wrong edition.’ I looked around at my fellow listeners and saw Smythe. Perhaps he had seen me first, for he had the handsome side of his face turned towards me, the side Sarah had not kissed, but if so he avoided my eye.

Why did I always wish to speak to anybody whom Sarah had known? I pushed my way to his side and said, ‘Hullo, Smythe.’ He clamped a handkerchief to the bad side of his face and turned towards me.’ Oh, it’s Mr Bendrix,’ he said.

‘I haven’t seen you since the funeral.’

‘I’ve been away.’

‘Don’t you still speak here?’

‘No.’ He hesitated and then added unwillingly, ‘I’ve given up public speaking.’

‘But you still give home-tuition?’ I teased him.

‘No. I’ve given that up too.’

‘Not changed your views, I hope?’

He said gloomily, ‘I don’t know what to believe.’

‘Nothing. Surely that was the point.’

‘It was.’ He began to move a little way out of the crowd and I found myself on his bad side. I couldn’t resist teasing him a little more.’ Have you got toothache?’ I asked.

‘No. Why?’

‘It looked like it. With that handkerchief.’

He didn’t reply but took the handkerchief away. There was no ugliness to hide. His skin was quite fresh and young except for one insignificant spot.

He said, ‘I get tired of explaining when I meet people I know.’

‘You found a cure?’

‘Yes. I told you I’ve been away.’

‘To a nursing home?’

‘Yes.’

‘Operation?’

‘Not exactly.’ He added unwillingly, ‘It was done by touch.’

‘Faith-healing?’

‘I have no faith. I’d never go to a quack.’

‘What was it? Urticaria?’

He said vaguely, to close the subject. ‘Modern methods. Electricity.’

I went back home and again I tried to settle to my book. Always I find when I begin to write there is one character who obstinately will not come alive. There is nothing psychologically false about him, but he sticks, he has to be pushed around, words have to be found for him, all the technical skill I have acquired through the laborious years has to be employed in making him appear alive to my readers. Sometimes I get a sour satisfaction when a reviewer praises him as the best-drawn character in the story: if he has not been drawn he has certainly been dragged. He lies heavily on my mind whenever I start to work like an ill-digested meal on the stomach, robbing me of the pleasure of creation in any scene where he is present. He never does the unexpected thing, he never surprises me, he never takes charge. Every other character helps, he only hinders.

And yet one cannot do without him. I can imagine a God feeling in just that way about some of us. The saints, one would suppose, in a sense create themselves. They come alive. They are capable of the surprising act or word, They stand outside the plot, unconditioned by it. But we have to be pushed around. We have the obstinacy of non-existence. We are inextricably bound to the plot, and wearily God forces us, here and there, according to his intention, characters without poetry, without free will, whose only importance is that somewhere, at some time, we help to furnish the scene in which a living character moves and speaks, providing perhaps the saints with the opportunities for their free will.

I was glad when I heard the door close and Henry’s footsteps in the hall. It was an excuse to stop. That character could remain inert now till morning: it was the hour at last for the Pontefract Arms. I waited for him to call up to me (already in a month we were as set in our ways as two bachelors who have lived together for years), but he didn’t call and I heard him go into his study. After a while I followed him: I missed my drink.

I was reminded of the occasion when I came back with him first; he sat there, beside the green Discus Thrower, worried and dejected, but now watching him I felt neither envy nor pleasure.

‘A drink, Henry?’

‘Yes, yes. Of course. I was only going to change my shoes.’ He had his town and his country shoes and the Common in his eyes was country. He bent over his laces: there was a knot that he couldn’t untie - he was always bad with his fingers. He got tired of struggling and wrenched the shoe off. I picked it up and uncoiled the knot for him.

‘Thank you, Bendrix.’ Perhaps even so small an act of companionship gave him confidence. ‘A very unpleasant thing happened today at the office,’ he said.

‘Tell me.’

‘Mrs Bertram called. I don’t think you know Mrs Bertram.’

‘Oh yes. I met her the other day.’ A curious phrase -the other day, as though all days were the same except that one.

‘We’ve never got on very well together,’

‘So she told me.’

‘Sarah was always very good about it. She kept her away.’

‘Did she come to borrow money?’

‘Yes. She wanted ten pounds - her usual story, in town for the day, shopping, run out, banks closed… Bendrix, I’m not a mean man, but I get so irritated by the way she goes on. She has two thousand a year of her own. It’s almost as much as I earn.’

‘Did you give it her?’

‘Oh yes. One always does, but the trouble was I couldn’t resist a sermon. That made her furious. I told her how many times she’d done it and how many times she had paid me back - that was easy, the first time. She took out her cheque book and said she was going to write me a cheque for the whole lot there and then. She was so angry that I’m certain she meant it. She’d really forgotten that she had used her last cheque. She had meant to humiliate me and she only succeeded in humiliating herself, poor woman. Of course, that made it worse.’

‘What did she do?’

‘She accused me of not giving Sarah a proper funeral. She told me a strange story… ‘

‘I know it. She told it to me after a couple of ports.’

‘Do you think she’s lying?’

‘No.’

‘It’s an extraordinary coincidence, isn’t it? Baptized at two years old, and then beginning to go back to what you can’t even remember… It’s like an infection.’

‘It’s what you say, an odd coincidence.’ Once before I had supplied Henry with the necessary strength; I wasn’t going to let him weaken now. ‘I’ve known stranger coincidences,’ I went on. ‘During the last year, Henry, I’ve been so bored I’ve even collected car numbers. That teaches you about coincidences. Ten thousand possible numbers and God knows how many combinations, and yet over and over again I’ve seen two cars with the same figures side by side in a traffic block.’

‘Yes. I suppose it works that way,’

‘I’ll never lose my faith in coincidence, Henry.’

The telephone was ringing faintly upstairs: we hadn’t heard it till now, because the switch was turned off in the study.

‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ Henry said, ‘I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it were that woman again.’

‘Let her ring,’ and as I spoke the bell stopped.

‘It isn’t that I’m mean,’ Henry said. ‘I don’t suppose she’s borrowed more than a hundred pounds in ten years.’

‘Come out and have a drink.’

‘Of course. Oh, I haven’t put on my shoes.’ He bent over them and I could see the bald patch on the crown of his head: it was as though his worries had worn through -I had been one of his worries. He said, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Bendrix.’ I brushed a few grains of scurf off his shoulder. ‘Oh well, Henry…’ and then before we could move the bell began to ring again.

‘Leave it,’ I said.

‘I’d better answer. You don’t know…’ He got up with his shoe-laces dangling and came over to his desk. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘Miles speaking.’ He passed the receiver to me and said with relief, ‘It’s for you.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Bendrix here.’

‘Mr Bendrix,’ a man’s voice said, ‘I felt I’d got to ring you. I didn’t tell you the truth this afternoon.’

‘Who are you?’

‘Smythe,’ the voice said.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I told you I’d been to a nursing home. I never went to one.’

‘Really it couldn’t matter less to me.’

His voice reached for me along the line. ‘Of course it matters. You aren’t listening to me. Nobody treated my face. It cleared up, suddenly, in a night.’

‘How? I still don’t…’

He said with an awful air of conspiracy, ‘You and I know how. There’s no getting round it. It wasn’t right of me keeping it dark. It was a…’ but I put down the receiver before he could use that foolish newspaper word that was the alternative to ‘coincidence’. I remembered his clenched right hand, I remembered my anger that the dead can be so parcelled up, divided like their clothes. I thought, He’s so proud that he must always have some kind of revelation. In a week or two he’ll be speaking about it on the Common and showing his healed face. It will be in the newspapers: ‘Rationalist Speaker Converted by Miraculous Cure.’ I tried to summon up all my faith in coincidence, but all I could think of, and that with envy, for I had no relic, was the ruined cheek lying at night on her hair.

‘Who is it?’ Henry asked. I hesitated a moment whether to tell him, but then I thought, No. I don’t trust him. He and Father Crompton will get together.

‘Smythe,’ I said.

‘Smythe? ‘

‘That fellow Sarah used to visit.’

‘What did he want?’

‘His face has been cured, that’s all. I asked him to let me know the name of the specialist. I have a friend…’

‘Electric treatment?’

‘I’m not sure. I’ve read somewhere that urticaria is hysterical in origin. A mixture of psychiatry and radium.’ It sounded plausible. Perhaps after all it was the truth. Another coincidence, two cars with the same number plate, and I thought with a sense of weariness, how many coincidences are there going to be? Her mother at the funeral, the child’s dream. Is this going to continue day by day? I felt like a swimmer who has over-passed his strength and knows the tide is stronger than himself, but if I drowned, I was going to hold Henry up till the last moment. Wasn’t it, after all, the duty of a friend, for if this thing were not disproved, if it got into the papers, nobody could tell where it would end? I remembered the roses at Manchester - that fraud had taken a long time to be recognized for what it was. People are so hysterical in these days. There might be relic-hunters, prayers, processions. Henry was not unknown; the scandal would be enormous. And all the journalists asking questions about their life together and digging out that queer story of the baptism near Deauville. The vulgarity of the pious Press. I could imagine the headlines, and the headlines would produce more ‘miracles’. We had to kill this thing at the start.