‘I hate all this fuss of prayers and grave-diggers, but if Sarah wanted it, I’d try to get it arranged.’
‘She chose her wedding in a registry office,’ I said, ‘she wouldn’t want her funeral to be in a church.’
‘No, I suppose that’s true, isn’t it?’
‘Registration and cremation,’ I said, ‘they go together,’ and in the shadow Henry lifted his head and peered towards me as though he suspected my irony.
‘Let me take it all out of your hands,’ I suggested, just as in the same room, by the same fire, I had suggested visiting Mr Savage for him.
‘It’s good of you, Bendrix.’ He drained the last of the whisky into our glasses, very carefully and evenly.
‘Midnight,’ I said, ‘you must get some sleep. If you can.’
‘The doctor left me some pills.’ But he didn’t want to be alone yet. I knew exactly how he felt, for I too after a day with Sarah would postpone for as long as I could the loneliness of my room.
‘I keep on forgetting she’s dead,’ Henry said. And I had experienced that too, all through 1945—the bad year—forgetting when I woke that our love-affair was over, that the telephone might carry any voice except hers. She had been as dead then as she was dead now. For a month or two this year a ghost had pained me with hope, but the ghost was laid and the pain would be over soon. I would die a little more every day, but how I longed to retain it. As long as one suffers one lives.
‘Go to bed, Henry.’
‘I’m afraid of dreaming about her.’
‘You won’t if you take the doctor’s pills.’
‘Would you like one, Bendrix?’
‘No.’
‘You wouldn’t, would you, stay the night? It’s filthy outside.’
‘I don’t mind the weather.’
‘You’d be doing me a great favour.’
‘Of course I’ll stay.’
‘I’ll bring down some sheets and blankets.’
‘Don’t bother, Henry,’ but he was gone. I looked at the parquet floor, and I remembered the exact timbre of her cry. On the desk where she wrote her letters was a clutter of objects, and every object I could interpret like a code. I thought, She hasn’t even thrown away that pebble. We laughed at its shape and there it still is, like a paper-weight. What would Henry make of it, and the miniature bottle of a liqueur none of us cared for, and the piece of glass polished by the sea, and the small wooden rabbit I had found in Nottingham? Should I take all these objects away with me? They would go into the waste-paper basket otherwise, when Henry at last got around to clearing up, but could I bear their company?
I was looking at them when Henry came in burdened with blankets. ‘I had forgotten to say, Bendrix, if there’s anything you want to take … I don’t think she’s left a will.’
‘It’s kind of you.’
‘I’m grateful now to anybody who loved her.’
‘I’ll take this stone if I may.’
‘She kept the oddest things. I’ve brought you a pair of my pyjamas, Bendrix.’
Henry had forgotten to bring a pillow and lying with my head on a cushion I imagined I could smell her scent. I wanted things I should never have again—there was no substitute. I couldn’t sleep. I pressed my nails into my palms as she had done with hers, so that the pain might prevent my brain working, and the pendulum of my desire swung tiringly to and fro, the desire to forget and to remember, to be dead and to keep alive a while longer. And then at last I slept. I was walking up Oxford Street and I was worried because I had to buy a present and all the shops were full of cheap jewellery, glittering under the concealed lighting. Now and then I thought I saw something beautiful and I would approach the glass, but when I saw the jewel close it would be as factitious as all the others—perhaps a hideous green bird with scarlet eyes meant to give the effect of rubies. Time was short and I hurried from shop to shop. Then out of one of the shops came Sarah and I knew that she would help me. ‘Have you bought something, Sarah?’ ‘Not here,’ she said, ‘but they have some lovely little bottles further on.’
‘I haven’t time,’ I begged her, ‘help me. I’ve got to find something, for tomorrow’s the birthday.’
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Something always turns up. Don’t worry,’ and suddenly I didn’t worry. Oxford Street extended its boundaries into a great grey misty field, my feet were bare, and I was walking in the dew, alone, and stumbling in a shallow rut I woke, still hearing, ‘Don’t worry,’ like a whisper lodged in the ear, a summer sound belonging to childhood.
At breakfast time Henry was still asleep, and the maid whom Parkis had suborned brought coffee and toast in to me on a tray. She drew the curtains and the sleet had changed blindingly to snow. I was still bleary with sleep and the contentment of my dream, and I was surprised to see her eyes red with old tears. ‘Is anything the matter, Maud?’ I asked, and it was only when she put the tray down and walked furiously out that I came properly awake to the empty house and the empty world. I went up and looked in at Henry. He was still in the depths of drugged sleep, smiling like a dog, and I envied him. Then I went down and tried to eat my toast.
A bell rang and I heard the maid leading somebody upstairs—the undertaker, I supposed, because I could hear the door of the guest-room open. He was seeing her dead: I had not, but I had no wish to, any more than I would have wished to see her in another man’s arms. Some men may be stimulated that way: I am not. Nobody was going to make me pimp for death. I drew my mind together, and I thought, Now that everything is really over, I have got to begin again. I have fallen in love once: it can be done again. But I was unconvinced: it seemed to me that I had given all the sex I had away.
Another bell. What a lot of business was going on in the house while Henry slept. This time Maud came to me. She said, ‘There’s a gentleman below asking for Mr Miles, but I don’t like to wake him.’
‘Who is he?’
‘He’s that friend of Mrs Miles,’ she said and for the only time admitted her share in our shabby collaboration.
‘You’d better show him up,’ I said. I felt very superior to Smythe now, sitting in Sarah’s drawing-room, wearing Henry’s pyjamas, knowing so much about him while he knew nothing about me. He looked at me with confusion and dripped snow on to the parquet. I said, ‘We met once. I’m a friend of Mrs Miles.’
‘You had a small boy with you.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I came to see Mr Miles,’ he said.
‘You’ve heard the news?’
‘That’s why I came.’
‘He’s asleep. The doctor gave him pills. It’s been a bad shock to all of us,’ I added foolishly. He was staring round the room: in Cedar Road, coming out of nowhere, she had been as dimensionless, I suppose, as a dream. But this room gave her thickness: it was Sarah too. The snow mounted slowly on the sill like mould from a spade. The room was being buried like Sarah.
He said, ‘I’ll come back,’ and turned drearily away, so that his bad cheek was turned on me. I thought: that was where her lips rested. She could always be snared by pity.
He repeated stupidly, ‘I came to see Mr Miles and say how sorry …’
‘It’s more usual on these occasions to write.’
‘I thought I might be of some use,’ he said weakly.
‘You don’t have to convert Mr Miles.’
‘Convert?’ he asked, ill at ease and bewildered.
‘To the fact that there’s nothing left of her. The end. Annihilation.’
He broke suddenly out, ‘I wanted to see her, that’s all.’
‘Mr Miles doesn’t even know you exist. It’s not very considerate of you, Smythe, to come here.’
‘When is the funeral?’
‘Tomorrow at Golders Green.’
‘She wouldn’t have wanted that,’ he said and took me by surprise.
‘She didn’t believe in anything, any more than you claim you do.’
He said, ‘Don’t any of you know? She w
as becoming a Catholic.’
‘Nonsense.’
‘She wrote to me. She’d made up her mind. Nothing I could have said would have done any good. She was beginning—instruction. Isn’t that the word they use?’ So she still had secrets, I thought. She had never put that in her journal, any more than she had put her sickness. How much more was there to discover? The thought was like despair.
‘That was a shock for you, wasn’t it?’ I jeered at him, trying to transfer my pain.
‘Oh, I was angry of course. But we can’t all believe the same things.’
‘That’s not what you used to claim.’
He looked at me, as though he were puzzled by my enmity. He said, ‘Is your name Maurice by any chance?’
‘It is.’
‘She told me about you.’
‘And I read about you. She made fools of us both.’
‘I was unreasonable.’ He said, ‘Don’t you think I could see her?’ and I heard the heavy boots of the undertaker coming down, and I heard the same stair creak.
‘She’s lying upstairs. The first door on the left.’
‘If Mr Miles …’
‘You won’t wake him.’
I had put on my clothes by the time he came down again. He said, ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me. I don’t own her any more than you do.’
‘I’ve got no right to ask,’ he said, ‘but I wish you’d—you loved her, I know.’ He added as though he were swallowing a bitter medicine, ‘She loved you.’
‘What are you trying to say?’
‘I wish you’d do something for her.’
‘For her?’
‘Let her have her Catholic funeral. She would have liked it.’
‘What earthly difference does it make?’
‘I don’t suppose any for her. But it always pays us to be generous.’
‘And what have I to do with it?’
‘She always said that her husband had a great respect for you.’
He was turning the screw of absurdity too far. I wished to shatter the deadness of this buried room with laughter. I sat down on the sofa and began to shake with it. I thought of Sarah dead upstairs and Henry asleep with a silly smile on his face, and the lover with the spots discussing the funeral with the lover who had employed Mr Parkis to sprinkle his door-bell with powder. The tears ran down my cheeks as I laughed. Once in the blitz I saw a man laughing outside his house where his wife and child were buried.
‘I don’t understand,’ Smythe said. He held his right fist closed as though he were prepared to defend himself. There was so much that neither of us understood. Pain was like an inexplicable explosion throwing us together. ‘I’ll be going,’ he said and reached for the door-knob with his left hand. A strange idea occurred to me because I had no reason to believe he was left-handed.
‘You must forgive me,’ I said. ‘I’m rattled. We’re all rattled.’ I held out my hand to him: he hesitated and touched it with his left. ‘Smythe,’ I said, ‘what have you got there? Did you take anything from her room?’ He opened his hand and showed a scrap of hair. ‘That’s all,’ he said.
‘You hadn’t any right.’
‘Oh, she doesn’t belong to anybody now,’ he said, and suddenly I saw her for what she was—a piece of refuse waiting to be cleared away: if you needed a bit of hair you could take it, or trim her nails if nail trimmings had value to you. Like a saint’s her bones could be divided up—if anybody required them. She was going to be burnt soon, so why shouldn’t everybody have what he wanted first? What a fool I had been during three years to imagine that in any way I had possessed her. We are possessed by nobody, not even by ourselves.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Do you know what she wrote to me?’ Smythe asked. ‘It was only four days ago,’ and I thought with sadness that she had had time to write to him but not to telephone to me. ‘She wrote—pray for me. Doesn’t it seem odd, asking me to pray for her?’
‘What did you do?’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘when I heard she was dead, I prayed.’
‘Did you know any prayers?’
‘No.’
‘It doesn’t seem right praying to a God you don’t believe in.’
I followed him out of the house; there was no point in remaining till Henry woke. Sooner or later he had to face being on his own, just as I had. I watched Smythe jerking his way across the Common ahead of me, and I thought, An hysterical type. Disbelief could be a product of hysteria just as much as belief. The wet of the snow, where the passage of many people had melted it, worked through my soles and reminded me of the dew of my dream, but when I tried to remember her voice saying, ‘Don’t worry,’ I found I had no memory for sounds. I couldn’t imitate her voice. I couldn’t even caricature it: when I tried to remember it, it was anonymous—just any woman’s voice. The process of forgetting her had set in. We should keep gramophone records as we keep photographs.
I came up the broken steps into the hall. Nothing but the stained glass was the same as that night in 1944. Nobody knows the beginning of anything. Sarah had really believed that the end began when she saw my body. She would never have admitted that the end had started long before: the fewer telephone calls for this or that inadequate reason, the quarrels I began with her because I had realized the danger of love ending. We had begun to look beyond love, but it was only I who was aware of the way we were being driven. If the bomb had fallen a year earlier, she wouldn’t have made that promise. She would have torn her nails trying to release me. When we get to the end of human beings we have to delude ourselves into a belief in God, like a gourmet who demands more complex sauces with his food. I looked at the hall, clear as a cell, hideous with green paint, and I thought, she wanted me to have a second chance and here it is: the empty life, odourless, antiseptic, the life of a prison, and I accused her as though her prayers had really worked the change: what did I do to you that you had to condemn me to life? The stairs and banisters creaked with newness all the way upstairs. She had never walked up them. Even the repairs to the house were part of the process of forgetting. It needs a God outside time to remember when everything changes. Did I still love or did I only regret love?
I came into my room and on the desk lay a letter from Sarah.
She had been dead for twenty-four hours and unconscious for longer than that. How could a letter take so long across a strip of common? Then I saw that she had put my number wrong, and a little of the old bitterness seeped out. She wouldn’t have forgotten my number two years ago.
There was so much pain at the idea of seeing her writing that I nearly held the letter to the gas-fire, but curiosity can be stronger than pain. It was written in pencil, I suppose because she was writing in bed.
‘Dearest Maurice,’ she wrote, ‘I meant to write to you the other night after you had gone away, but I felt rather sick when I got home and Henry fussed about me. I’m writing instead of telephoning. I can’t telephone and hear your voice go queer when I say I’m not going to come away with you. Because I’m not going to come away with you Maurice, dearest Maurice. I love you but I can’t see you again. I don’t know how I’m going to live in this pain and longing and I’m praying to God all the time that he won’t be hard on me, that he won’t keep me alive. Dear Maurice, I want to have my cake and eat it like everybody else. I went to a priest two days ago before you rang me up and I told him I wanted to be a Catholic. I told him about my promise and about you. I said, I’m not really married to Henry any more. We don’t sleep together—not since the first year with you. And it wasn’t really a marriage, I said, you couldn’t call a registry office a wedding. I asked him couldn’t I be a Catholic and marry you? I knew you wouldn’t mind going through a service. Every time I asked him a question I had such hope; it was like opening the shutters of a new house and looking for the view, and every window just faced a blank wall. No, no, no, he said, I couldn’t marry you, I couldn’t go on seeing you, not if I was going to be a Catholic.
I thought, to hell with the whole lot of them and I walked out of the room where I was seeing him, and I slammed the door to show what I thought of priests. They are between us and God, I thought; God has more mercy, and then I came out of the church and saw the crucifix they have there, and I thought, of course, he’s got mercy, only it’s such an odd sort of mercy, it sometimes looks like punishment. Maurice, my dearest, I’ve got a foul headache, and I feel like death. I wish I weren’t as strong as a horse. I don’t want to live without you, and I know one day I shall meet you on the Common and then I won’t care a damn about Henry or God or anything. But what’s the good, Maurice? I believe there’s a God—I believe the whole bag of tricks, there’s nothing I don’t believe, they could subdivide the Trinity into a dozen parts and I’d believe. They could dig up records that proved Christ had been invented by Pilate to get himself promoted and I’d believe just the same. I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love. I’ve never loved before as I love you, and I’ve never believed in anything before as I believe now. I’m sure. I’ve never been sure before about anything. When you came in at the door with the blood on your face, I became sure. Once and for all. Even though I didn’t know it at the time. I fought belief for longer than I fought love, but I haven’t any fight left.
‘Maurice, dear, don’t be angry. Be sorry for me, but don’t be angry. I’m a phoney and a fake, but this isn’t phoney or fake. I used to think I was sure about myself and what was right and wrong, and you taught me not to be sure. You took away all my lies and self-deceptions like they clear a road of rubble for somebody to come along it, somebody of importance, and now he’s come, but you cleared the way yourself. When you write you try to be exact and you taught me to want the truth, and you told me when I wasn’t telling the truth. Do you really think that, you’d say, or do you only think you think it? So you see it’s all your fault, Maurice, it’s all your fault. I pray to God He won’t keep me alive like this.’