‘Yes. I suppose it works that way.’
‘I’ll never lose my faith in coincidence, Henry.’
The telephone was ringing faintly upstairs: we hadn’t heard it till now, because the switch was turned off in the study.
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ Henry said. ‘I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it were that woman again.’
‘Let her ring,’ and as I spoke the bell stopped.
‘It isn’t that I’m mean,’ Henry said. ‘I don’t suppose she’s borrowed more than a hundred pounds in ten years.’
‘Come out and have a drink.’
‘Of course. Oh, I haven’t put on my shoes.’ He bent over them and I could see the bald patch on the crown of his head: it was as though his worries had worn through—I had been one of his worries. He said, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Bendrix.’ I brushed a few grains of scurf off his shoulder. ‘Oh well, Henry …’ and then before we could move the bell began to ring again.
‘Leave it,’ I said.
‘I’d better answer. You don’t know …’ He got up with his shoe-laces dangling and came over to his desk. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘Miles speaking.’ He passed the receiver to me and said with relief, ‘It’s for you.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Bendrix here.’
‘Mr Bendrix,’ a man’s voice said, ‘I felt I’d got to ring you. I didn’t tell you the truth this afternoon.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Smythe,’ the voice said.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I told you I’d been to a nursing home. I never went to one.’
‘Really it couldn’t matter less to me.’
His voice reached for me along the line. ‘Of course it matters. You aren’t listening to me. Nobody treated my face. It cleared up, suddenly, in a night.’
‘How? I still don’t …’
He said with an awful air of conspiracy, ‘You and I know how. There’s no getting round it. It wasn’t right of me keeping it dark. It was a …’ but I put down the receiver before he could use that foolish newspaper word that was the alternative to ‘coincidence’. I remembered his clenched right hand, I remembered my anger that the dead can be so parcelled up, divided like their clothes. I thought, He’s so proud that he must always have some kind of revelation. In a week or two he’ll be speaking about it on the Common and showing his healed face. It will be in the newspapers: ‘Rationalist Speaker Converted by Miraculous Cure.’ I tried to summon up all my faith in coincidence, but all I could think of, and that with envy, for I had no relic, was the ruined cheek lying at night on her hair.
‘Who is it?’ Henry asked. I hesitated a moment whether to tell him, but then I thought, No. I don’t trust him. He and Father Crompton will get together.
‘Smythe,’ I said.
‘Smythe?’
‘That fellow Sarah used to visit.’
‘What did he want?’
‘His face has been cured, that’s all. I asked him to let me know the name of the specialist. I have a friend …’
‘Electric treatment?’
‘I’m not sure. I’ve read somewhere that urticaria is hysterical in origin. A mixture of psychiatry and radium.’ It sounded plausible. Perhaps after all it was the truth. Another coincidence, two cars with the same number plate, and I thought with a sense of weariness, how many coincidences are there going to be? Her mother at the funeral, the child’s dream. Is this going to continue day by day? I felt like a swimmer who has over-passed his strength and knows the tide is stronger than himself, but if I drowned, I was going to hold Henry up till the last moment. Wasn’t it, after all, the duty of a friend, for if this thing were not disproved, if it got into the papers, nobody could tell where it would end? I remembered the roses at Manchester—that fraud had taken a long time to be recognized for what it was. People are so hysterical in these days. There might be relic-hunters, prayers, processions. Henry was not unknown; the scandal would be enormous. And all the journalists asking questions about their life together and digging out that queer story of the baptism near Deauville. The vulgarity of the pious Press. I could imagine the headlines, and the headlines would produce more ‘miracles’. We had to kill this thing at the start.
I remembered the journal in my drawer upstairs and I thought, That has to go too, for that could be interpreted in their way. It was as though to save her for ourselves we had to destroy her features one by one. Even her children’s books had proved a danger. There were photographs—the one Henry had taken: the Press mustn’t have that. Was Maud to be trusted? The two of us had tried to build a makeshift house together, and even that was being broken up.
‘What about our drink?’ Henry said.
‘I’ll join you in a minute.’
I went up to my room and took the journal out. I tore the covers off. They were tough: the cotton backing came out like fibres; it was like tearing the limbs off a bird, and there the journal lay on the bed, a pad of paper, wingless and wounded. The last page lay upwards and I read again, ‘You were there teaching me to squander, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace—he needs it more.’
I thought, you’ve failed there, Sarah. One of your prayers at least has not been answered. I have no peace and I have no love, except for you, you. I said to her, I’m a man of hate. But I didn’t feel much hatred; I had called other people hysterical, but my own words were overcharged. I could detect their insincerity. What I chiefly felt was less hate than fear. For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you—with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell—can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it’s not so difficult to be a saint. It’s something He can demand of any of us, leap. But I won’t leap. I sat on my bed and said to God: You’ve taken her, but You haven’t got me yet. I know Your cunning. It’s You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You’re a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don’t want Your peace and I don’t want Your love. I wanted something very simple and very easy: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse’s nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.
I looked at the pad of paper. It was more impersonal than a scrap of hair. You can touch hair with your lips and fingers and I was tired to death of the mind. I had lived for her body and I wanted her body. But the journal was all I had, so I shut it back in the cupboard, for wouldn’t that have been one more victory for Him, to destroy it and leave myself more completely without her? I said to Sarah, all right, have it your way. I believe you live and that He exists, but it will take more than your prayers to turn this hatred of Him into love. He robbed me and like that king you wrote about I’ll rob Him of what he wants in me. Hatred is in my brain, not in my stomach or my skin. It can’t be removed like a rash or an ache. Didn’t I hate you as well as love you? And don’t I hate myself?
I called down to Henry, ‘I’m ready,’ and we walked side by side over the Common towards the Pontefract Arms; the lights were out, and lovers met where the roads intersected, and on the other side of the grass was the house with the ruined steps where He gave me back this hopeless crippled life.
‘I look forward to these evening walks of ours,’ Henry said.
‘Yes.’
I thought, in the morning I’ll ring up a doctor and ask him whether a faith cure is possible. And then I thought, better not; so long as one doesn’t know, one can imagine innumerable cures … I put my hand on Henry’s arm and held it there; I had to be strong for both of us now, and he wasn’t seriously worried yet.
‘They are the only things I do look forward to,’ Henry said.
I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the eve
ning glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.
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Graham Greene, The End of the Affair
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