The End of the Affair

  ‘When I got the book and gave it him he became calmer. But I was worried because the doctor said he would not take any more risks and he must go to hospital on Wednesday and if there had been an empty bed he would have sent him that night. So you see I couldn’t sleep for worrying because of my poor wife and my poor boy and being afraid of the knife. I don’t mind telling you, Mr Bendrix, that I prayed very hard. I prayed to God and then I prayed to my wife to do what she could because if there’s anyone in heaven, she’s in heaven now, and I asked Mrs Miles if she was there, to do what she could too. Now if a grown man can do that, Mr Bendrix, you can understand my poor boy imagining things. When I woke up this morning, his temperature was ninety-nine and he hadn’t any pain, and when the doctor came there wasn’t any tenderness left, so he says we can wait a while and he’s been all right all day. Only he told the doctor it was Mrs Miles who came and took away the pain—touching him on the right side of the stomach if you’ll forgive the indelicacy—and she wrote in the book for him. But the doctor says he must be kept very quiet and the book excites him, so under the circumstances I would rather not have the book in the house …’

  When I turned the letter over there was a postscript. ‘There is something written in the book, but anyone can see that was many years ago when Mrs Miles was a little girl, only I can’t explain that to my poor boy for fear the pain might return. Respectfully, A.P.’ I turned to the flyleaf and there was the unformed scribble with indelible pencil just as I had seen it before in the other books in which the child Sarah Bertram had composed her mottoes.

  ‘When I was ill my mother gave me this book by Lang.

  If any well person steals it he will get a great bang,

  But if you are sick in bed

  You can have it to read instead.’

  I carried it back with me into the dining-room. ‘What was it?’ Henry asked.

  ‘The book,’ I said. ‘Did you read what Sarah had written in it before you gave it to Parkis?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘A coincidence, that’s all. But it seems you don’t need to belong to Father Crompton’s persuasion to be superstitious.’ I gave Henry the letter: he read it and handed it to Father Crompton.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ Henry said. ‘Sarah’s dead. I hate to see her being bandied about…’

  ‘I know what you mean. I feel it too.’

  ‘It’s like hearing her discussed by strangers.’

  ‘They aren’t saying anything ill of her,’ Father Crompton said. He laid the letter down. ‘I must go now.’ But he made no move, looking at the letter on the table. He asked, ‘And the inscription?’

  I pushed the book across to him. ‘Oh, it was written years ago. She wrote that kind of thing in a lot of her books like all children.’

  ‘Time’s a strange thing,’ Father Crompton said.

  ‘Of course the child wouldn’t understand it was all done in the past.’

  ‘St Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn’t exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist. I don’t know that we can understand time any better than a child.’

  ‘I didn’t mean …’

  ‘Oh well,’ he said, standing up, ‘you mustn’t take this to heart, Mr Miles. It only goes to show what a good woman your wife was.’

  ‘That’s no help to me, is it? She’s part of the past that has ceased to exist.’

  ‘The man who wrote that letter had a lot of sense in him. There’s no harm in praying to the dead as well as for them.’ He repeated his phrase, ‘She was a good woman.’

  Quite suddenly I lost my temper. I believe I was annoyed chiefly by his complacency, the sense that nothing intellectual could ever trouble him, the assumption of an intimate knowledge of somebody he had only known for a few hours or days, whom we had known for years. I said, ‘She was nothing of the sort.’

  ‘Bendrix,’ Henry said sharply.

  ‘She could put blinkers on any man,’ I said, ‘even on a priest. She’s only deceived you, father, as she deceived her husband and me. She was a consummate liar.’

  ‘She never pretended to be what she wasn’t.’

  ‘I wasn’t her only lover—’

  ‘Stop it,’ Henry said. ‘You’ve no right…’

  ‘Let him alone,’ Father Crompton said. ‘Let the poor man rave.’

  ‘Don’t give me your professional pity, father. Keep it for your penitents.’

  ‘You can’t dictate to me whom I’m to pity, Mr Bendrix.

  ‘Any man could have her.’ I longed to believe what I said, for then there would be nothing to miss or regret. I would no longer be tied to her wherever she was. I would be free.

  ‘And you can’t teach me anything about penitence, Mr Bendrix. I’ve had twenty-five years of the Confessional. There’s nothing we can do some of the saints haven’t done before us.’

  ‘I’ve got nothing to repent except failure. Go back to your own people, father, back to your bloody little box and your beads.’

  ‘You’ll find me there any time you want me.’

  ‘Me want you, father? Father, I don’t want to be rude, but I’m no Sarah. No Sarah.’

  Henry said with embarrassment, ‘I’m sorry, father.’

  ‘You don’t need to be. I know when a man’s in pain.’

  I couldn’t get through the tough skin of his complacency. I pushed my chair back and said, ‘You’re wrong, father. This isn’t anything subtle like pain. I’m not in pain, I’m in hate. I hate Sarah because she was a little tart, I hate Henry because she stuck to him, and I hate you and your imaginary God because you took her away from all of us.’

  ‘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.

  VIII

  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 exactor 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 nonexistence. 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.’