There was an A.B.C. in the High Street and I tried that. She wasn’t there. Then I remembered the church at the corner of Park Road, and I knew at once that she had gone there. I followed, and sure enough there she was sitting in one of the side aisles close to a pillar and a hideous statue of the virgin. She wasn’t praying. She was just sitting there with her eyes closed. I only saw her by the light of the candles before the statue, for the whole place was very dark. I sat down behind her like Mr Parkis and waited. I could have waited years now that I knew the end of the story. I was cold and wet and very happy. I could even look with charity towards the altar and the figure dangling there. She loves us both, I thought, but if there is to be a conflict between an image and a man, I know who will win. I could put my hand on her thigh or my mouth on her breast: he was imprisoned behind the altar and couldn’t move to plead his cause.
Suddenly she began to cough with her hand pressed to her side. I knew she was in pain and I couldn’t leave her alone in pain. I came and sat beside her and put my hand on her knee while she coughed. I thought, If only one had a touch that could heal. When the fit was over, she said, ‘Please won’t you let me be.’
‘I’ll never let you be,’ I said.
‘What’s come over you, Maurice? You weren’t like that the other day at lunch.’
‘I was bitter. I didn’t know you loved me.’
‘Why do you think I do?’ she asked, but she let my hand rest on her knee. I told her then how Mr Parkis had stolen her diary—I didn’t want any lies between us now.
‘It wasn’t a good thing to do,’ she said.
‘No.’ She began to cough again and afterwards in her exhaustion she leant her shoulder against me.
‘My dear,’ I said, ‘it’s all over now. The waiting, I mean. We’re going away together.’
‘No,’ she said.
I put my arm round her and touched her breast. ‘This is where we begin again,’ I said. ‘I’ve been a bad lover, Sarah. It was the insecurity that did it. I didn’t trust you. I didn’t know enough about you. But I’m secure now.’
She said nothing, but she still leant against me. It was like an assent. I said, ‘I’ll tell you how it had better be. Go back home and lie in bed for a couple of days—you don’t want to travel with a cold like that. I’ll ring up every day and see how you are. When you are well enough, I’ll come over and help you pack. We won’t stay here. I have a cousin in Dorset who has an empty cottage I can use. We’ll stay there a few weeks and rest. I’ll be able to finish my book. We can face the lawyers afterwards. We need a rest, both of us. I’m tired and I’m sick to death of being without you, Sarah.’
‘Me too.’ She spoke so low that I wouldn’t have heard the phrase if I had been a stranger to it, but it was like a signature tune that had echoed through all our relationship, from the first love-making in the Paddington hotel. ‘Me too’ for loneliness, griefs, disappointments, pleasures and despairs, the claim to share everything.
‘Money’s going to be short,’ I said, ‘but not too short. I’ve been commissioned to do a Life of General Gordon and the advance is enough to keep us for three months comfortably. By that time I can hand in the novel and get an advance on that. Both books will be out this year, and they should keep us till another’s ready. I can work, with you there. You know, any moment now I’m going to come through. I’ll be a vulgar success yet, and you’ll hate it and I’ll hate it, but we’ll buy things and be extravagant and it will be fun, because we’ll be together.’
Suddenly I realized she was asleep. Exhausted by her flight she had fallen asleep against my shoulder as so many times, in taxis, in buses, on a park-seat. I sat still and let her be. There was nothing to disturb her in the dark church. The candles flapped around the virgin, and there was nobody else there. The slowly growing pain in my upper arm where her weight lay was the greatest pleasure I had ever known.
Children are supposed to be influenced by what you whisper to them in sleep, and I began to whisper to Sarah, not loud enough to wake her, hoping that the words would drop hypnotically into her unconscious mind. ‘I love you, Sarah,’ I whispered. ‘Nobody has ever loved you as much before. We are going to be happy. Henry won’t mind except in his pride, and pride soon heals. He’ll find himself a new habit to take your place—perhaps he’ll collect Greek coins. We are going away, Sarah, we are going away. Nobody can stop it now. You love me, Sarah,’ and I fell silent as I began to wonder whether I ought to buy a new suitcase. Then she woke coughing.
‘I’ve been asleep,’ she said.
‘You must go home now, Sarah. You’re cold.’
‘It isn’t home, Maurice,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to go away from here.’
‘It’s cold.’
‘I don’t mind the cold. And it’s dark. I can believe anything in the dark.’
‘Just believe in us.’
‘That’s what I meant.’ She shut her eyes again, and looking up at the altar I thought with triumph, almost as though he were a living rival, You see—these are the arguments that win, and gently moved my fingers across her breast.
‘You’re tired, aren’t you?’ I asked.
‘Very tired.’
‘You shouldn’t have ran away from me like that.’
‘It wasn’t you I was running from.’ She moved her shoulder. ‘Please, Maurice, go now.’
‘You ought to be in bed.’
‘I will be soon. I don’t want to go back with you. I just want to say good-bye here.’
‘Promise you won’t stay long.’
‘I promise.’
‘And you’ll telephone to me?’
She nodded, but looking down at her hand where it lay in her lap like something thrown away, I saw that she had her fingers crossed. I asked her with suspicion, ‘You are telling me the truth?’ I uncrossed her fingers with mine and said, ‘You aren’t planning to escape me again?’
‘Maurice, dear Maurice,’ she said, ‘I haven’t got the strength.’ She began to cry, thrusting her fists into her eyes as a child does.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Just go away. Please, Maurice, have a bit of mercy.’
One gets to the end of badgering and contriving: I couldn’t go on with that appeal in my ears. I kissed her on the tough and knotty hair, and coming away I found her lips, smudgy and salt, on the corner of my mouth. ‘God bless you,’ she said, and I thought, That’s what she crossed out in her letter to Henry. One says good-bye to another’s good-bye unless one is Smythe and it was an involuntary act when I repeated her blessing back to her, but turning as I left the church and seeing her huddled there at the edge of the candlelight, like a beggar come in for warmth, I could imagine a God blessing her: or a God loving her. When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It’s just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.
II
The next few days I had to make a great effort to be sensible. I was working for both of us now. In the morning I set myself a minimum of seven hundred and fifty words on the novel, but usually I managed to get a thousand done by eleven o’clock. It’s astonishing the effect of hope: the novel that had dragged all through the last year ran towards its end. I knew that Henry left for work around nine-thirty, and the most likely hour for her to telephone was between then and twelve-thirty. Henry had started coming home for lunch (so Parkis had told me); there was no chance of her telephoning again before three. I would revise my day’s work and do my letters until twelve-thirty, and then I was released however gloomily from expectation. Until two-thirty I could put in time at the British Museum Reading Room, making notes for the life of General Gordon. I couldn’t absorb myself in reading and note-taking as I could in writing the novel, and the thought of Sarah came between me and the missionary life in China. Why had I been invited to write this biography? I often wond
ered. They would have done better to have chosen an author who believed in Gordon’s God. I could appreciate the obstinate stand at Khartoum—the hatred of the safe politicians at home, but the Bible on the desk belonged to another world of thought from mine. Perhaps the publisher half hoped that my cynical treatment of Gordon’s Christianity would cause a succès de scandale. I had no intention of pleasing him: this God was also Sarah’s God, and I was going to throw no stones at any phantom she believed she loved. I hadn’t during that period any hatred of her God, for hadn’t I in the end proved stronger?
One day as I ate my sandwiches, on to which my indelible pencil somehow always got transferred, a familiar voice greeted me from the desk opposite in a tone hushed out of respect for our fellow workers. ‘I hope all goes well now, sir, if you’ll forgive the personal intrusion.’
I looked over the back of my desk at the unforgettable moustache. ‘Very well, Parkis, thank you. Have an illicit sandwich?’
‘Oh no, sir, I couldn’t possibly …’
‘Come now. Imagine it’s on expenses.’ Reluctantly he took one and opening it up remarked with a kind of horror, as though he had accepted a coin and found it gold, ‘It’s real ham.’
‘My publisher sent me a tin from America.’
‘It’s too good of you, sir.’
‘I still have your ash-tray, Parkis,’ I whispered, because my neighbour had looked angrily up at me.
‘It’s of sentimental value only,’ he whispered back.
‘How’s your boy?’
‘A little bilious, sir.’
‘I’m surprised to find you here. Work? You aren’t watching one of us, surely?’ I couldn’t imagine that any of the dusty inmates of the reading-room—the men who wore hats and scarves indoors for warmth, the Indian who was painfully studying the complete works of George Eliot, or the man who slept every day with his head laid beside the same pile of books—could be concerned in any drama of sexual jealousy.
‘Oh no, sir. This isn’t work. It’s my day off, and the boy’s back at school today.’
‘What are you reading?’
‘The Times Law Reports, sir. Today I’m on the Russell case. They give a kind of background to one’s work, sir. Open up vistas. They take one away from the daily petty detail. I knew one of the witnesses in this case, sir. We were in the same office once. Well, he’s gone down to history as I never shall now.’
‘Oh, you never know, Parkis.’
‘One does know, sir. That’s the discouraging thing. The Bolton case was as far as I’ll ever get. The law that forbade the evidence in divorce cases being published was a blow to men of my calling. The judge, sir, never mentions us by name, and he’s very often prejudiced against the profession.’
‘It had never struck me,’ I said with sympathy.
Even Parkis could awake a longing. I could never see him without the thought of Sarah. I went home in the tube with hope for company, and sitting at home, in dying expectation of the telephone-bell ringing, I saw my companion depart again: it wouldn’t be today. At five o’clock I dialled the number, but as soon as I heard the ringing-tone I replaced the receiver: perhaps Henry was back early and I couldn’t speak to Henry now, for I was the victor, since Sarah loved me and Sarah wanted to leave him. But a delayed victory can strain the nerves as much as a prolonged defeat.
Eight days passed before the telephone rang. It wasn’t the time of day I expected, for it was before nine o’clock in the morning, and when I said, ‘Hullo,’ it was Henry who answered.
‘Is that Bendrix?’ he asked. There was something very queer about his voice, and I wondered, has she told him?
‘Yes. Speaking.’
‘An awful thing’s happened. You ought to know. Sarah’s dead.’
How conventionally we behave at such moments. I said, ‘I’m terribly sorry, Henry.’
‘Are you doing anything tonight?’
‘No.’
‘I wish you’d come over for a drink, I don’t fancy being alone.’
BOOK FIVE
I
I stayed the night with Henry. It was the first time I had slept in Henry’s house. They had only one guest-room and Sarah was there (she had moved into it a week before so as not to disturb Henry with her cough), so I slept on the sofa in the drawing-room where we had made love. I didn’t want to stay the night, but he begged me to.
We must have drunk a bottle and a half of whisky between us. I remember Henry saying, ‘It’s strange, Bendrix, how one can’t be jealous about the dead. She’s only been dead a few hours, and yet I wanted you with me.’
‘You hadn’t so much to be jealous about. It was all over a long time ago.’
‘I don’t need that kind of comfort now, Bendrix. It was never over with either of you. I was the lucky man. I had her all those years. Do you hate me?’
‘I don’t know, Henry. I thought I did, but I don’t know.’
We sat in his study with no light on. The gas-fire was not turned high enough to see each other’s faces, so that I could only tell when Henry wept by the tone of his voice. The Discus Thrower aimed at both of us from the darkness. ‘Tell me how it happened, Henry.’
‘You remember that night I met you on the Common? Three weeks ago, or four, was it? She got a bad cold that night. She wouldn’t do anything about it. I never even knew it had reached her chest. She never told anybody those sort of things’—and not even her diary, I thought. There had been no word of sickness there. She hadn’t had the time to be ill in.
‘She took to her bed in the end,’ Henry said, ‘but nobody could have kept her there, and she wouldn’t have a doctor—she never believed in them. She got up and went out a week ago. God knows where or why. She said she needed exercise. I came home first and found her gone. She didn’t get in till nine, soaked through worse than the first time. She must have been walking about for hours in the rain. She was feverish all night, talking to somebody, I don’t know who: it wasn’t you or me, Bendrix. I made her see a doctor after that. He said if she’d had penicillin a week earlier, he’d have saved her.’
There wasn’t anything to do for either of us but pour out more whisky. I thought of the stranger I had paid Parkis to track down: the stranger had certainly won in the end. No, I thought, I don’t hate Henry. I hate You if you exist. I remembered what she’d said to Richard Smythe, that I had taught her to believe. I couldn’t for the life of me tell how, but to think of what I had thrown away made me hate myself too. Henry said, ‘She died at four this morning. I wasn’t there. The nurse didn’t call me in time.’
‘Where’s the nurse?’
‘She finished her job off very tidily. She had another urgent case and left before lunch.’
‘I wish I could be of use to you.’
‘You are, just sitting here. It’s been an awful day, Bendrix. You know, I’ve never had a death to deal with. I always assumed I’d die first—and Sarah would have known what to do. If she’d stayed with me that long. In a way it’s a woman’s job—like having a baby.’
‘I suppose the doctor helped.’
‘He’s awfully rushed this winter. He rang up an undertaker. I wouldn’t have known where to go. We’ve never had a trade-directory. But a doctor can’t tell me what to do with her clothes—the cupboards are full of them. Compacts, scents—one can’t just throw things away… If only she had a sister …’ He suddenly stopped because the front door opened and closed, just as it had on that other night when he had said, ‘The maid,’ and I had said, ‘It’s Sarah.’ We listened to the footsteps of the maid going upstairs. It’s extraordinary how empty a house can be with three people in it. We drank our whisky and I poured another. ‘I’ve got plenty in the house,’ Henry said. ‘Sarah found a new source …’ and stopped again. She stood at the end of every path. There wasn’t any point in trying to avoid her even for a moment. I thought, why did You have to do this to us? If she hadn’t believed in You she would be alive now, we should have been lovers still. It was sad and stra
nge to remember that I had been dissatisfied with the situation. I would have shared her now happily with Henry.
I said, ‘And the funeral?’
‘Bendrix, I don’t know what to do. Something very puzzling happened. When she was delirious (of course, she wasn’t responsible), the nurse told me that she kept on asking for a priest. At least she kept on saying, Father, Father, and it couldn’t have been her own. She never knew him. Of course the nurse knew we weren’t Catholics. She was quite sensible. She soothed her down. But I’m worried, Bendrix.’
I thought with anger and bitterness, You might have left poor Henry alone. We have got on for years without You. Why should You suddenly start intruding into all situations like a strange relation returned from the Antipodes?
Henry said, ‘If one lives in London cremation’s the easiest thing. Until the nurse said that to me, I’d been planning to have it done at Golders Green. The undertaker rang up the crematorium. They can fit Sarah in the day after tomorrow.’
‘She was delirious,’ I said, ‘you don’t have to take what she said into account.’
‘I wondered whether I ought to ask a priest about it. She kept so many things quiet. For all I know she may have become a Catholic. She’s been so strange lately.’
‘Oh no, Henry. She didn’t believe in anything, any more than you or me.’ I wanted her burnt up, I wanted to be able to say, Resurrect that body if you can. My jealousy had not finished, like Henry’s, with her death. It was as if she were alive still, in the company of a lover she had preferred to me. How I wished I could send Parkis after her to interrupt their eternity.
‘You are quite certain?’
‘Quite certain, Henry.’ I thought, I’ve got to be careful. I mustn’t be like Richard Smythe, I mustn’t hate, for if I were really to hate I would believe, and if I were to believe, what a triumph for You and her. This is to play act, talking about revenge and jealousy: it’s just something to fill the brain with, so that I can forget the absoluteness of her death. A week ago I had only to say to her ‘Do you remember that first time together and how I hadn’t got a shilling for the meter?’, and the scene would be there for both of us. Now it was there for me only. She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.