‘No.’
‘Our man mustn’t be observed by Mr Miles?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘It adds a complication.’
‘I may show him your reports later. I don’t know.’
‘Can you give me any facts about the household? Is there a maid?’
‘Yes.’
‘Her age?’
‘I wouldn’t know. Thirty-eight?’
‘You don’t know if she has any followers?’
‘No. And I don’t know her grandmother’s name.’
Mr Savage gave me a patient smile: I thought for a moment that he planned to leave his desk and pat me down again. ‘I can see, Mr Bendrix, that you haven’t had experience of inquiries. A maid’s very relevant. She can tell us so much about her mistress’s habits—if she is willing. You’d be surprised what a lot is relevant to even the simplest inquiry.’ He certainly that morning proved his point: he covered pages with his small scratchy handwriting. Once he broke off his questions to ask me, ‘Would you object, if it was urgently necessary, to my man coming to your house?’ I told him I didn’t mind and immediately felt as though I were admitting some infection to my own room. ‘If it could be avoided …’
‘Of course. Of course. I understand,’ and I really believe he did understand. I could have told him that his man’s presence would be like dust over the furniture and stain my books like soot, and he would have felt no surprise or irritation. I have a passion for writing on clean single-lined foolscap: a smear, a tea-mark, on a page makes it unusable, and a fantastic notion took me that I must keep my paper locked up in case of an unsavoury visitor. I said, ‘It would be easier if he gave me warning …’
‘Certainly, but it’s not always possible. Your address, Mr Bendrix, and your telephone number?’
‘It’s not a private line. My landlady has an extension.’
‘All my men use great discretion. Would you want the reports weekly or would you prefer only to receive the finished inquiry?’
‘Weekly. It may never be finished. There’s probably nothing to find out.’
‘Have you often been to your doctor and found nothing wrong? You know, Mr Bendrix, the fact that a man feels the need of our services almost invariably means that there is something to report.’
I suppose I was lucky to have Mr Savage to deal with. He had been recommended as being less disagreeable than men of his profession usually are, but nevertheless I found his assurance detestable. It isn’t, when you come to think of it, a quite respectable trade, the detection of the innocent, for aren’t lovers nearly always innocent? They have committed no crime, they are certain in their own minds that they have done no wrong, ‘as long as no one but myself is hurt’, the old tag is ready on their lips, and love, of course, excuses everything—so they believe, and so I used to believe in the days when I loved.
And when we came to the charges, Mr Savage was surprisingly moderate: three guineas a day, and expenses, ‘which must be approved of course’. He explained them to me as ‘the odd coffee, you know, and sometimes our man has to stand a drink’. I made a feeble joke about not approving whisky, but Mr Savage didn’t detect the humour. ‘I knew a case,’ he told me, ‘when a month’s inquiry was saved by a double at the proper time—the cheapest whisky my client ever paid for.’ He explained that some of his clients liked to have a daily account, but I told him I would be satisfied with a weekly one.
The whole affair had gone very briskly: he had almost convinced me by the time I came out into Vigo Street that this was the kind of interview which happened to all men sooner or later.
III
‘And if there’s anything more you could tell me that would be relevant?’ I remember Mr Savage had said—a detective must find it as important as a novelist to amass his trivial material before picking out the right clue. But how difficult that picking out is—the release of the real subject. The enormous pressure of the outside world weighs on us like a peine forte et dure. Now that I come to write my own story the problem is still the same, but worse—there are so many more facts, now that I have not to invent them. How can I disinter the human character from the heavy scene—the daily newspaper, the daily meal, the traffic grinding towards Battersea, the gulls coming up from the Thames looking for bread, and the early summer of 1939 glinting on the park where the children sailed their boats—one of those bright condemned pre-war summers? I wondered whether, if I thought long enough, I could detect, at the party Henry had given, her future lover. We saw each other for the first time, drinking bad South African sherry because of the war in Spain. I noticed Sarah, I think, because she was happy: in those years the sense of happiness had been a long while dying under the coming storm. One detected it in drunken people, in children, seldom elsewhere. I liked her at once because she said she had read my books and left the subject there—I found myself treated at once as a human being rather than as an author. I had no idea whatever of falling in love with her. For one thing, she was beautiful, and beautiful women, especially if they are intelligent also, stir some deep feeling of inferiority in me. I don’t know whether psychologists have yet named the Cophetua complex, but I have always found it hard to feel sexual desire without some sense of superiority, mental or physical. All I noticed about her that first time was her beauty and her happiness and her way of touching people with her hands, as though she loved them. I can only recall one thing she said to me, apart from that statement with which she began—‘You do seem to dislike a lot of people.’ Perhaps I had been talking smartly about my fellow writers. I don’t remember.
What a summer it was. I am not going to try and name the month exactly—I should have to go back to it through so much pain, but I remember leaving the hot and crowded room, after drinking too much bad sherry, and walking on the Common with Henry. The sun was falling flat across the Common and the grass was pale with it. In the distance the houses were the houses in a Victorian print, small and precisely drawn and quiet: only one child cried a long way off. The eighteenth-century church stood like a toy in an island of grass—the toy could be left outside in the dark, in the dry unbreakable weather. It was the hour when you make confidences to a stranger.
Henry said, ‘How happy we could all be.’
‘Yes.’
I felt an enormous liking for him, standing there on the Common, away from his own party, with tears in his eyes. I said, ‘You’ve got a lovely house.’
‘My wife found it.’
I had met him only a week ago—at another party: he was in the Ministry of Pensions in those days, and I had buttonholed him for the sake of my material. Two days later came the card. I learned later that Sarah had got him to send it. ‘Have you been married long?’ I asked him.
‘Ten years.’
‘I thought your wife was charming.’
‘She’s a great help to me,’ he said. Poor Henry. But why should I say poor Henry? Didn’t he possess in the end the winning cards—the cards of gentleness, humility and trust?
‘I must be going back,’ he said. ‘I mustn’t leave it all to her, Bendrix,’ and he laid his hand on my arm as though we’d known each other a year. Had he learnt the gesture from her? Married people grow like each other. We walked back side by side, and as we opened the hall-door, I saw reflected in a mirror from an alcove two people separating as though from a kiss—one was Sarah. I looked at Henry.
Either he had not seen or he did not care—or else, I thought, what an unhappy man he must be.
Would Mr Savage have considered that scene relevant? It was not, I learnt later, a lover who was kissing her; it was one of Henry’s colleagues at the Ministry of Pensions whose wife had run away with an able seaman a week before. She had met him for the first time that day, and it seems unlikely that he would still be part of the scene from which I had been so firmly excluded. Love doesn’t take as long as that to work itself out.
I would have liked to have left that past time alone, for as I write of 1939 I feel all my hatr
ed returning. Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?
IV
When I got home from Mr Savage’s and my landlady told me that Mrs Miles had been on the telephone, I felt the elation I used to feel when I heard the front door close and her step in the hall. I had a wild hope that the sight of me a few days before had woken not love, of course, but a sentiment, a memory which I might work on. At the time it seemed to me that if I could have her once more—however quickly and crudely and unsatisfactorily—I would be at peace again: I would have washed her out of my system, and afterwards I would leave her, not she me.
It was odd after eighteen months’ silence dialling that number: Macaulay 7753, and odder still that I had to look it up in my address book because I was uncertain of the last digit. I sat listening to the ringing tone, and I wondered whether Henry was back yet from the Ministry and what I should say if he answered. Then I realized that there was nothing wrong any more with the truth. Lies had deserted me, and I felt as lonely as though they had been my only friends.
The voice of a highly-trained maid repeated the number into my ear-drum. I said, ‘Is Mrs Miles in?’
‘Mrs Miles?’
‘Isn’t that Macaulay 7753’
‘Yes.’
‘I want to speak to Mrs Miles.’
‘You’ve got the wrong number,’ and she rang off. It had never occurred to me that the small things alter too with time.
I looked Miles up in the directory, but the old number was still there: the directory was more than a year out of date. I was just going to dial Inquiries when the telephone rang again, and it was Sarah herself. She said with some embarrassment, ‘Is that you?’ She had never called me by any name, and now without her old terms of affection she was at a loss. I said, ‘Bendrix speaking.’
‘This is Sarah. Didn’t you get my message?’
‘Oh, I was going to ring you, but I had to finish an article. By the way, I don’t think I’ve got your number now. It’s in the book, I suppose?’
‘No. Not yet. We’ve changed. It’s Macaulay 6204. I wanted to ask you something.’
‘Yes?’
‘Nothing very dreadful. I wanted to have lunch with you, that’s all.’
‘Of course. I’d be delighted. When?’
‘You couldn’t manage tomorrow?’
‘No. Not tomorrow. You see, I’ve simply got to get this article …’
‘Wednesday?’
‘Would Thursday do?’
‘Yes,’ she said, and I could almost imagine disappointment in a monosyllable—so our pride deceives us.
‘Then I’ll meet you at the Café Royal at one.’
‘It’s good of you,’ she said, and I could tell from her voice that she meant it. ‘Until Thursday.’
‘Until Thursday.’
I sat with the telephone receiver in my hand and I looked at hate like an ugly and foolish man whom one did not want to know. I dialled her number, I must have caught her before she had time to leave the telephone, and said, ‘Sarah. Tomorrow’s all right. I’d forgotten something. Same place. Same time,’ and sitting there, my fingers on the quiet instrument, with something to look forward to. I thought to myself: I remember. This is what hope feels like.
V
I laid the newspaper flat on the table and read the same page over and over again because I wouldn’t look at the doorway. People were continually coming in, and I wouldn’t be one of those who by moving their heads up and down betray a foolish expectation. What have we all got to expect that we allow ourselves to be so lined with disappointment? There was the usual murder in the evening paper and a Parliamentary squabble about sweet-rationing, and she was now five minutes late. It was my bad luck that she caught me looking at my watch. I heard her voice say, ‘I’m sorry. I came by bus and the traffic was bad.’
I said, ‘The tube’s quicker.’
‘I know, but I didn’t want to be quick.’
She had often disconcerted me by the truth. In the days when we were in love, I would try to get her to say more than the truth—that our affair would never end, that one day we should marry. I wouldn’t have believed her, but I would have liked to hear the words on her tongue, perhaps only to give me the satisfaction of rejecting them myself. But she never played that game of make-believe, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, she would shatter my reserve with a statement of such sweetness and amplitude … I remember once when I was miserable at her calm assumption that one day our relations would be over, hearing with incredulous happiness, ‘I have never, never loved a man as I love you, and I never shall again.’ Well, she hadn’t known it, I thought, but she too played the same game of make-believe.
She sat down beside me and asked for a glass of lager. ‘I’ve booked a table at Rules,’ I said.
‘Can’t we stay here?’
‘It’s where we always used to go.’
‘Yes.’
Perhaps we were looking strained in our manner, because I noticed we had attracted the attention of a little man who sat on a sofa not far off. I tried to outstare him and that was easy. He had a long moustache and fawn-like eyes and he looked hurriedly away: his elbow caught his glass of beer and spun it on to the floor, so that he was overcome with confusion. I was sorry then because it occurred to me that he might have recognized me from my photographs: he might even be one of my few readers. He had a small boy sitting with him, and what a cruel thing it is to humiliate a father in the presence of his son. The boy blushed scarlet when the waiter hurried forward, and his father began to apologize with unnecessary vehemence.
I said to Sarah, ‘Of course you must lunch wherever you like.’
‘You see, I’ve never been back there.’
‘Well, it was never your restaurant, was it?’
‘Do you go there often?’
‘It’s convenient for me. Two or three times a week.’
She stood up abruptly and said, ‘Let’s go,’ and was suddenly taken with a fit of coughing. It seemed too big a cough for her small body: her forehead sweated with its expulsion.
‘That’s nasty.’
‘Oh, it’s nothing. I’m sorry.’
‘Taxi?’
‘I’d rather walk.’
As you go up Maiden Lane on the left-hand side there is a doorway and a grating that we passed without a word to each other. After the first dinner, when I had questioned her about Henry’s habits and she had warmed to my interest, I had kissed her there rather fumblingly on the way to the tube. I don’t know why I did it, unless perhaps that image in the mirror had come into my mind, for I had no intention of making love to her: I had no particular intention even of looking her up again. She was too beautiful to excite me with the idea of accessibility.
When we sat down, one of the old waiters said to me, ‘It’s a very long time since you’ve been here, sir,’ and I wished I hadn’t made my false claim to Sarah.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I lunch upstairs nowadays.’
‘And you, Ma’am, it’s a long time too …’
‘Nearly two years,’ she said with the accuracy I sometimes hated.
‘But I remember it was a big lager you used to like.’
‘You’ve got a good memory, Alfred,’ and he beamed with pleasure at the memory. She had always had the trick of getting on well with waiters.
Food interrupted our dreary small-talk, and only when we had finished the meal did she give any indication of why she was there. ‘I wanted you to lunch with me,’ she said, ‘I wanted to ask you about Henry.’
‘Henry?’ I repeated, trying to keep disappointment out of my voice.
‘I’m worried about him. How did you find him the other night? Was he strange at all?’
‘I didn’t notice anything wrong,’ I said.
‘I wante
d to ask you—oh, I know you’re very busy—whether you could look him up occasionally. I think he’s lonely.’
‘With you?’
‘You know he’s never really noticed me. Not for years.’
‘Perhaps he’s begun to notice you when you aren’t there.’
‘I’m not out much,’ she said, ‘nowadays,’ and her cough conveniently broke that line of talk. By the time the fit was over, she had thought out her gambits, though it wasn’t like her to avoid the truth. ‘Are you on a new book?’ she asked. It was like a stranger speaking, the kind of stranger one meets at a cocktail party. She hadn’t committed that remark, even the first time, over the South African sherry.
‘Of course.’
‘I didn’t like the last one much.’
‘It was a struggle to write at all just then—Peace coming …’ And I might just as well have said peace going.
‘I sometimes was afraid you’d go back to that old idea—the one I hated. Some men would have done.’
‘A book takes me a year to write. It’s too hard work for a revenge.’
‘If you knew how little you had to revenge …’
‘Of course I’m joking. We had a good time together; we’re adults, we knew it had to end some time. Now, you see, we can meet like friends and talk about Henry.’
I paid the bill and we went out, and twenty yards down the street was the doorway and the grating. I stopped on the pavement and said, ‘I suppose you’re going to the Strand?’
‘No, Leicester Square.’
‘I’m going to the Strand.’ She stood in the doorway and the street was empty. ‘I’ll say good-bye here. It was nice seeing you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Call me up any time you are free.’
I moved towards her: I could feel the grating under my feet. ‘Sarah,’ I said. She turned her head sharply away, as though she were looking to see if anyone were coming, to see if there was time … but when she turned again the cough took her. She doubled up in the doorway and coughed and coughed. Her eyes were red with it. In her fur coat she looked like a small animal cornered.