He picked up a magazine that Waterbury had sent me before the interview to show an example of his work and said, ‘There’s room in my house. You could have practically a flat to yourself.’ I was too astonished to answer. He went rapidly on, turning over the leaves of the magazine as though he were really uninterested in his own suggestion, ‘Think it over. You mustn’t decide now.’
‘It’s very good of you, Henry.’
‘You’d be doing me a favour, Bendrix.’
I thought, Why not? Writers are regarded as unconventional. Am I more conventional than a senior civil servant?
‘I dreamed last night,’ Henry said, ‘about all of us.’
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t remember much. We were drinking together. We were happy. When I woke up I thought she wasn’t dead.’
‘I don’t dream of her now.’
‘I wish we’d let that priest have his way.’
‘It would have been absurd, Henry. She was no more a Catholic than you or me.’
‘Do you believe in survival, Bendrix?’
‘If you mean personal survival, no.’
‘One can’t disprove it, Bendrix.’
‘It’s almost impossible to disprove anything. I write a story. How can you prove that the events in it never happened, that the characters aren’t real? Listen. I met a man on the Common today with three legs.’
‘How terrible,’ Henry said seriously. ‘An abortion?’
‘And they were covered with fish scales.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘But prove I am, Henry. You can’t disprove my story any more than I can disprove God. But I just know he’s a lie, just as you know my story’s a lie.’
‘Of course there are arguments.’
‘Oh, I could invent a philosophic argument for my story, I daresay, based on Aristotle.’
Henry abruptly changed the subject back. ‘It would save you a bit if you came and stayed with me. Sarah always said your books weren’t as successful as they should be.’
‘Oh, the shadow of success is falling upon them.’ I thought of Waterbury’s article. I said, ‘A moment comes when you can hear the popular reviewers dipping their pens for the plaudits—even before the next book’s written. It’s all a question of time.’ I talked because I hadn’t made up my mind.
Henry said, ‘There’s no ill-feeling left, is there, Bendrix? I got angry with you at your club—about that man. But what does it matter now?’
‘I was wrong. He was only some crazy tub-thumping rationalist who interested her with his theories. Forget it, Henry.’
‘She was good, Bendrix. People talk but she was good. It wasn’t her fault I couldn’t, well, love her properly. You know I’m awfully prudent, cautious. I’m not the sort that makes a lover. She wanted somebody like you.’
‘She left me. She moved on, Henry.’
‘Do you know I read one of your books once—Sarah made me. You described a house after a woman in it had died.’
‘The Ambitious Host.’
‘That was the name. It seemed all right at the time. I thought it very plausible, but you got it all wrong, Bendrix. You described how the husband found the house terribly empty: he moved about the rooms, shifting chairs, trying to give an effect of movement, of another being there. Sometimes he’d pour himself drinks in two glasses.’
‘I forget it. It sounds a bit literary.’
‘It’s off the mark, Bendrix. The trouble is, the house doesn’t seem empty. You see, often in the old days I’d come home from the office, and she would be out somewhere—perhaps with you. I’d call and she wouldn’t answer. Then the house was empty. I almost expected to find the furniture gone. You know I did love her in my way, Bendrix. Every time she wasn’t there when I came home those last months I dreaded to see a letter waiting for me. “Dear Henry” … you know the kind of thing they write in novels?’
‘Yes.’
‘But now the house never seems empty like that. I don’t know how to express it. Because she’s always away, she’s never away. You see, she’s never anywhere else. She’s not having lunch with anybody, she’s not at a cinema with you. There’s nowhere for her to be but at home.’
‘But where’s her home?’ I said.
‘Oh, you’ve got to forgive me, Bendrix. I’m nervy and tired—I don’t sleep well. You know the next best thing to talking to her is talking about her, and there’s only you.’
‘She had a lot of friends. Sir William Mallock, Dunstan …’
‘I can’t talk about her to them. Any more than to that man, Parkis.’
‘Parkis!’ I exclaimed. Had he lodged himself in our lives for ever?
‘He told me he’d been at a cocktail party we gave. The strange people Sarah picked up. He said you knew him too.’
‘What on earth did he want with you?’
‘He said she’d been kind to his little boy—God knows when. The boy’s sick. He seemed to want something of hers for a memento. I gave him one or two of her old children’s books. There were a lot of them in her room, all scrawled over in pencil. It was a good way of getting rid of them. One can’t just send them to Foyle’s, can one? I don’t see any harm in it, do you?’
‘No. That was the man I put to watch her, from Savage’s detective agency.’
‘Good God, if I’d known … But he seemed really fond of her.’
‘Parkis is human,’ I said. ‘He’s easily touched.’ I looked around at my room—there wouldn’t be any more of Sarah where Henry came from: less perhaps, for she would be diluted there.
‘I’ll come and stay with you, Henry, but you must let me pay some rent.’
‘I’m so glad, Bendrix. But the house is freehold. You can pay your share of the rates.’
‘Three months’ notice to find new digs when you marry again.’
He took me quite seriously. ‘I shall never want to do that. I’m not the marrying kind. It was a great injury I did to Sarah when I married her. I know that now.’
VI
So I moved to the north side of the Common. I wasted a week’s rent because Henry wanted me to come at once, and I paid five pounds for a van to take my books and clothes across. I had the guest-room and Henry fitted up a lumber-room as a study, and there was a bath on the floor above. Henry had moved into his dressing-room, and the room they had shared with the cold twin beds was left for guests who never came. After a few days I began to see what Henry meant by the house never being empty. I worked at the British Museum until it closed, and then I would go back and wait for Henry, and usually we went out and drank a little at the Pontefract Arms. Once when Henry was away for a few days at a conference at Bournemouth, I picked up a girl and brought her back. It wasn’t any good. I knew it at once, I was impotent, and to save her feelings I told her that I had promised a woman I loved never to do this with anyone else. She was very sweet and understanding about it: prostitutes have a great respect for sentiment. This time there had been no revenge in my mind, and I felt only sadness at abandoning for ever something I had enjoyed so much. I dreamed of Sarah afterwards and we were lovers again in my old room on the south side, but again nothing happened, only this time there was no sadness in the fact. We were happy and without regret.
It was a few days afterwards that I pulled open a cupboard in my bedroom and found a pile of old children’s books. Henry must have looted this cupboard for Parkis’s boy. There were several of Andrew Lang’s fairy books in their coloured covers, many Beatrix Potters, The Children of the New Forest, The Golliwog at the North Pole, and also one or two older books—Captain Scott’s Last Expedition and the Poems of Thomas Hood, the last bound in school leather with a label saying that it had been awarded to Sarah Bertram for proficiency in Algebra. Algebra! How one changes.
I couldn’t work that evening. I lay on the floor with the books and tried to trace at least a few features in the blank spaces of Sarah’s life. There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is j
ealous of the years he hasn’t shared. The Golliwog at the North Pole was probably the earliest of Sarah’s books because it had been scrawled all over, this way and that way, meaninglessly, destructively, with coloured chalks. In one of the Beatrix Potters her name had been spelt in pencil, one big capital letter arranged wrongly so that what appeared was SA.HAH. In The Children of the New Forest she said written very tidily and minutely ‘Sarah Bertram Her Book. Please ask permission to borrow. And if you steal it will be to your sorrow’. They were the marks of every child who has ever lived: traces as anonymous as the claw marks of birds that one sees in winter. When I closed the book they were covered at once by the drift of time.
I doubt whether she had ever read Hood’s poems: the pages were as clean as when the book was handed to her by the headmistress or the distinguished visitor. Indeed as I was about to put it back in the cupboard a leaf of print dropped on the floor—the programme probably of that very prize-giving. In a handwriting I could recognize (but even our handwriting begins young and takes on the tired arabesques of time) was a phrase: ‘What utter piffle’. I could imagine Sarah writing it down and showing it to her neighbour as the headmistress resumed her seat, applauded respectfully by parents. I don’t know why another line of hers came into my head when I saw that schoolgirl phrase with all its impatience, its incomprehension and its assurance: ‘I’m a phoney and a fake.’ Here under my hand was innocence. It seemed such a pity that she had lived another twenty years only to feel that about herself. A phoney and a fake. Was it a description I had used of her in a moment of anger? She always harboured my criticism: it was only praise that slid from her like the snow.
I turned the leaf over and read the programme of 23 July 1926: the Water Music of Handel played by Miss Duncan, R.C.M.: a recitation of ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ by Beatrice Collins: Tudor Ayres by the School Glee Society: Violin Recital of Chopin’s Waltz in A flat by Mary Pippitt. The long summer afternoon of twenty years ago stretched out its shadows towards me, and I hated life that so alters us for the worse. I thought, that summer I had just begun my first novel: there was so much excitement, ambition, hope, when I sat down to work: I wasn’t bitter, I was happy. I put the leaf back in the unread book and thrust the volume to the back of the cupboard under the Golliwog and the Beatrix Potters. We were both happy with only ten years and a few counties between us, who were later to come together for no apparent purpose but to give each other so much pain. I took up Scott’s Last Expedition.
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 out-dated hair-dressings 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.
VII
‘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 their views as we have.’
So he came to dinner. Ugly, haggard, graceless with the Torque-mada 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.