The End of the Affair (9 page)

But when memory did return it was not in that way. I realized first that I was lying on my back and that what balanced over me, shutting out the light, was the front door: some other debris had caught it and suspended it a few inches above my body, though the odd thing was that later I found myself bruised from the shoulders to the knees as if by its shadow. The fist that fitted into my cheek was the china handle of the door, and it had knocked out a couple of my teeth. After that, of course, I remembered Sarah and Henry and the dread of love ending.

I got out from under the door and dusted myself down. I called to the basement but there was nobody there. Through the blasted doorway I could see the grey morning light and I had a sense of great emptiness stretching out from the ruined hall: I realized that a tree which had blocked the light had simply ceased to exist - there was no sign of even a fallen trunk. A long way off wardens were blowing whistles. I went upstairs. The first flight had lost its banisters and was a foot deep in plaster, but the house hadn’t really, by the standard of those days, suffered badly: it was our neighbours who had caught the full blast. The door of my room was open and coming along the passage I could see Sarah; she had got off the bed and was crouched on the floor - from fear, I supposed. She looked absurdly young, like a naked child. I said, ‘That was a close one.’

She turned quickly and stared at me with fear. I hadn’t realized that my dressing-gown was torn and dusted all over with plaster; my hair was white with it, and there was blood on my mouth and cheeks. ‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘you’re alive.’

‘You sound disappointed.’

She got up from the floor and reached for her clothes. I told her, ‘There’s no point in your going yet. There must be an All Clear soon.’

‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.

‘Two bombs don’t fall in one place,’ I said, but automatically, for that was a piece of folklore that had often proved false.

‘You’re hurt.’

‘I’ve lost two teeth, that’s all.’

‘Come over here, let me wash your face.’ She had finished dressing before I had time to make another protest -no woman I have ever known could dress as quickly. She bathed my face very slowly and carefully.

‘What were you doing on the floor?’ I asked.

‘Praying.’

‘Who to?’

‘To anything that might exist.’

‘It would have been more practical to come downstairs.’ Her seriousness frightened me. I wanted to tease her out of it.

‘I did,’ she said, ‘I didn’t hear you.’

‘There was nobody there. I couldn’t see you until I saw your arm stretching out from under the door. I thought you were dead.’

‘You might have come and tried.’

‘I did. I couldn’t lift the door.’

‘There was room to move me. The door wasn’t holding me. I’d have woken up.’

‘I don’t understand. I knew for certain you were dead.’

‘There wasn’t much to pray for then, was there?’ I teased her. ‘Except a miracle.’

‘When you are hopeless enough,’ she said, ‘you can pray for miracles. They happen, don’t they, to the poor, and I was poor.’

‘Stay till the All Clear.’ She shook her head and walked straight out of the room. I followed her down the stairs and began against my will to badger her. ‘Shall I see you this afternoon?’

‘No. I can’t.’

‘Some time tomorrow..

‘Henry’s coming back.’

Henry. Henry. Henry - that name tolled through our relationship, damping every mood of happiness or fun or exhilaration with its reminder that love dies, affection and habit win the day. ‘You needn’t be so scared,’ she said, ‘love doesn’t end…’ and nearly two years passed before that meeting in the hall and, ‘You?’

For days after that, of course, I had hope. It was only a coincidence, I thought, that the telephone wasn’t answered, and when after a week I met the maid and inquired about the Mileses and learnt that she was away in the country, I told myself that in war-time letters are lost. Morning after morning I would hear the rattle in the post-box and deliberately I would remain upstairs until my landlady fetched my mail. I wouldn’t look through the letters - disappointment had to be postponed, hope kept alive as long as possible; I would read each letter in turn and only when I reached the bottom of the pile could I be certain that there was nothing from Sarah. Then life withered until the four o’clock post, and after that one had to get through the night again.

For nearly a week I didn’t write to her: pride prevented me, until one morning I abandoned it completely, writing anxiously and bitterly, marking the envelope addressed to the north side, ‘Urgent’ and ‘Please forward’. I got no reply and then I gave up hope and remembered exactly what she had said. ‘People go on loving God, don’t they, all their lives without seeing Him?’ I thought with hatred, she always has to show up well in her own mirror: she mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble to herself. She won’t admit that now she prefers to go to bed with X.

That was the worst period of all: it is my profession to imagine, to think in images: fifty times through the day, and immediately I woke during the night, a curtain would rise and the play would begin: always the same play, Sarah making love, Sarah with X, doing the same things that we had done together, Sarah kissing in her own particular way, arching herself in the act of sex and uttering that cry like pain, Sarah in abandonment. I would take pills at night to make me sleep quickly, but I never found any pills that would keep me asleep till daylight. Only the robots were a distraction during the day: for a few seconds between the silence and the crash my mind would be clear of Sarah. Three weeks passed and the images were as clear and frequent as at first and there seemed no reason why they should ever end, and I began quite seriously to think of suicide. I even set a date, and I saved up my sleeping pills with what was almost a sense of hope. I needn’t after all go on like this indefinitely, I told myself. Then the date came and the play went on and on and I didn’t kill myself. It wasn’t cowardice: it was a memory that stopped me -the memory of the look of disappointment on Sarah’s face when I came into the room after the VI had fallen. Hadn’t she, at heart, hoped for my death, so that her new affair with X would hurt her conscience less, for she had a kind of elementary conscience? If I killed myself now, she wouldn’t have to worry about me at all, and surely after our four years together there would be moments of worry even with X. I wasn’t going to give her that satisfaction. If I had known a way I would have increased her worries to breaking point and my impotence angered me. How I hated her.

Of course there is an end of hate as there is an end of love. After six months I realized that I had not thought of Sarah all one day and that I had been happy. It couldn’t have been quite the end of hate because at once I went into a stationer’s to buy a picture postcard and write a jubilant message on it that might - who knows? - cause a momentary pain, but by the time I had written her address I had lost the desire to hurt and dropped the card into the road. It was strange that hate should have been revived again by that meeting with Henry. I remember thinking, as I opened Mr Parkis’s next report, if only love could revive like that too.

Mr Parkis had done his work well: the powder had worked and the flat had been located - the top flat in 16 Cedar Road: the occupant, a Miss Smythe and her brother, Richard. I wondered whether Miss Smythe was as convenient a sister as Henry was a husband, and all my latent snobbery was aroused by the name - that y, the final e. I thought, has she fallen as low as a Smythe in Cedar Road? Was he the end of a long chain of lovers in the last two years, or when I saw him (and I was determined to see him less obscurely than in Mr Parkis’s reports) would I be looking at the man for whom she had deserted me in June 1944?

‘Shall I ring the bell and walk right in and confront him like an injured husband?’ I asked Mr Parkis (who had met me by appointment in an A. B. C. - it was his own suggestion as he had the boy with him and couldn’t take him into a bar).

‘I’m against it, sir,’ Mr Parkis said, adding a third spoonful of sugar to his tea. His son sat at a table out of earshot with a glass of orangeade and a bun. He observed everybody who came in, as they shook the thin watery snow from their hats and coats, watched with his alert brown beady eyes as though he had to make a report later - perhaps he had, part of the Parkis training. ‘You see, sir,’ Mr Parkis said, ‘unless you were willing to give evidence, it complicates things in the Courts.’

‘It will never reach the Courts.’

‘An amicable settlement?’

‘A lack of interest,’ I said. ‘One can’t really make a fuss about a man called Smythe. I’d just like to see him - that’s all.’

‘The safest thing, sir, would be a meter inspector.’

‘I can’t dress up in a peaked cap.’

‘I share your feelings, sir. It’s a thing I try to avoid. And I’d like the boy to avoid it too when the time comes.’ His sad eyes followed every movement his boy made. ‘He wanted an ice, sir, but I said no, not in this weather,’ and he shivered a little as though the thought of the ice had chilled him. For a moment I had no idea of his meaning when he said, ‘Every profession has its dignity, sir.’

I said, ‘Would you lend me your boy?’

‘If you assure me there’ll be nothing unpleasant, sir,’ he said doubtfully.

T don’t want to call when Mrs Miles is there. This scene will have a Universal certificate.’

‘But why the boy, sir?’

‘I’ll say he’s feeling ill. We’ve come to the wrong address. They couldn’t help letting him sit down for a while.’

‘It’s in the boy’s capacity,’ Mr Parkis said with pride, ‘and nobody can resist Lance.’

‘He’s called Lance, is he?’

‘After Sir Lancelot, sir. Of the Round Table.’

‘I’m surprised. That was a rather unpleasant episode, surely.’

‘He found the Holy Grail,’ Mr Parkis said.

‘That was Galahad. Lancelot was found in bed with Guinevere.’ Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy? Mr Parkis said sadly, looking across at his boy as though he had betrayed him, ‘I hadn’t heard.’

Next day - to spite his father - I gave the boy an ice in the High Street before we went to Cedar Road. Henry Miles was holding a cocktail party - so Mr Parkis had reported, and the coast was clear. He handed the boy over to me, after twitching his clothes straight. The boy was wearing his best things in honour of his first stage appearance with a client, while I was wearing my worst. Some of the strawberry ice fell from his spoon and made a splash upon his suit. I sat in silence till the last drop was drained. Then I said, ‘Another?’ He nodded. ‘Strawberry again?’

He said, ‘Vanilla,’ and added a long while after, ‘Please.’

He ate the second ice with great deliberation, carefully licking the spoon as though he were removing fingerprints. Then we went hand in hand across the Common to Cedar Road like a father and son. Sarah and I are both childless, I thought. Wouldn’t there have been more sense in marrying and having children and living quietly together in a sweet and dull peace than in this furtive business of lust and jealousy and the reports of Parkis?

I rang the bell on the top floor of Cedar Road. I said to the boy, ‘Remember. You’re feeling ill.’

‘If they give me an ice…’ he began: Parkis had trained him to be prepared.

‘They won’t.’

I assumed it was Miss Smythe who opened the door -a middle-aged woman with the grey tired hair of charity-, bazaars. I said, ‘Does Mr Wilson live here?’

‘No. I’m afraid… ‘

‘You don’t happen to know if he’s in the flat below?’

‘There’s nobody called Wilson in this house.’

‘Oh dear,’ I said. ‘I’ve brought the boy all this way, and now he’s feeling ill… ‘

I dared not look at the boy, but from the way in which Miss Smythe gazed at him, I felt sure he was silently and efficiently carrying out his part: Mr Savage would have been proud to acknowledge him as a member of his team.

‘Do let him come in and sit down,’ Miss Smythe said.

‘It’s very kind of you.’

I wondered how often Sarah had passed through this door into the little cluttered hall. Here I was in the home of X. Presumably the brown soft hat on the hook belonged to him. The fingers of my successor - the fingers that touched Sarah - daily turned the handle of this door which opened now on the yellow flame of the gas-fire, pink-shaded lamps burning through the snow-grey afternoon, a waste of cretonne loose covers. ‘Can I fetch your little boy a glass of water?’

‘It’s very kind of you.’ I remembered I had said that before.

‘ Or some orange-squash.’

‘You mustn’t bother.’

‘Orange-squash,’ the boy said firmly: again the long pause and ‘please’ as she went through the door. Now we were alone I looked at him: he really did look ill, crouching back on the cretonne. If he had not winked at me, I would have wondered whether perhaps… Miss Smythe returned, carrying the orange-squash, and I said, ‘Say thank you, Arthur.’

‘Is his name Arthur?’

‘Arthur James,’ I said.

‘It’s quite an old-fashioned name.’

‘We’re an old-fashioned family. His mother was fond of Tennyson.’

‘She’s…?’

‘Yes,’ I said and she looked at the child with commiseration.

‘He must be a comfort to you.’

‘And an anxiety,’ I said. I began to feel shame: she was so unsuspicious, and what good was I doing here? I was no nearer meeting X, and would I be any happier for giving a face to the man upon the bed? I altered my tactics. I said, ‘I ought to introduce myself. My name is Bridges.’

‘And mine is Smythe.’

‘I have a strong feeling I have met you somewhere before.’

‘I don’t think so. I have a very good memory for faces.’

‘Perhaps I have seen you on the Common.’

‘I go there sometimes with my brother.’

‘Not by any chance a John Smythe?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘Richard. How is the little boy feeling?’

‘Worse,’ said Parkis’s son.

‘Do you think we ought to take his temperature?’

‘Can I have some more orange-squash?’

‘It can do no harm, can it?’ Miss Smythe wondered. ‘Poor child. Perhaps he has a fever.’