Afterwards—we were back at Rules and they had just fetched our steaks—she said, ‘There was one scene you did write.’
‘About the onions?’
‘Yes.’ And at that very moment a dish of onions was put on the table. I said to her—it hadn’t even crossed my mind that evening to desire her—‘And does Henry mind onions?’
‘Yes. He can’t bear them. Do you like them?’
‘Yes.’ She helped me to them and then helped herself.
Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions? It seems improbable and yet I could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn’t, of course, simply the onions—it was that sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable. I put my hand under the cloth and laid it on her knee, and her hand came down and held mine in place. I said, ‘It’s a good steak,’ and heard like poetry her reply, ‘It’s the best I’ve ever eaten.’
There was no pursuit and no seduction. We left half the good steak on our plates and a third of the bottle of claret and came out into Maiden Lane with the same intention in both our minds. At exactly the same spot as before, by the doorway and the grill, we kissed. I said, ‘I’m in love.’
‘Me too.’
‘We can’t go home.’
‘No.’
We caught a taxi by Charing Cross station and I told the driver to take us to Arbuckle Avenue—that was the name they had given among themselves to Eastbourne Terrace, the row of hotels that used to stand along the side of Paddington Station with luxury names, Ritz, Carlton, and the like. The doors of these hotels were always open and you could get a room any time of day for an hour or two. A week ago I revisited the terrace. Half of it was gone—the half where the hotels used to stand had been blasted to bits, and the place where we made love that night was a patch of air. It had been the Bristol; there was a potted fern in the hall and we were shown the best room by a manageress with blue hair: a real Edwardian room with a great gilt double bed and red velvet curtains and a full-length mirror. (People who came to Arbuckle Avenue never required twin beds.) I remember the trivial details very well: how the manageress asked me whether we wanted to stay the night: how the room cost fifteen shillings for a short stay: how the electric meter only took shillings and we hadn’t one between us, but I remember nothing else—how Sarah looked the first time or what we did, except that we were both nervous and made love badly. It didn’t matter. We had started—that was the point. There was the whole of life to look forward to then. Oh, and there’s one other thing I always remember. At the door of our room (‘our room’ after half an hour), when I kissed her again and said how I hated the thought of her going home to Henry, she said, ‘Don’t worry. He’s busy on the widows.’
‘I hate even the idea of his kissing you,’ I said.
‘He won’t. There’s nothing he dislikes more than onions.’
I saw her home to her side of the Common. Henry’s light shone below the door of his study, and we went upstairs. In the living-room we held our hands against each other’s bodies, unable to let go. ‘He’ll be coming up,’ I said, ‘any moment.’
‘We can hear him,’ she said, and she added with horrifying lucidity, ‘There’s one stair that always squeaks.’
I hadn’t time to take off my coat. We kissed and heard the squeak of the stair, and I watched sadly the calmness of her face when Henry came in. She said, ‘We were hoping you’d come up and offer us a drink.’
Henry said, ‘Of course. What will you have, Bendrix?’ I said I wouldn’t have a drink; I had work to do.
‘I thought you said you never worked at night.’
‘Oh, this doesn’t count. A review.’
‘Interesting book?’
‘Not very.’
‘I wish I had your power of—putting things down.’
Sarah saw me to the door and we kissed again. At that moment it was Henry I liked, not Sarah. It was as though all the men in the past and all the men in the future cast their shade over the present. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked me. She was always quick to read the meaning behind a kiss, the whisper in the brain.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you in the morning.’
‘It would be better if I called you,’ she told me, and caution, I thought, caution, how well she knows how to conduct an affair like this, and I remembered again the stair that always—‘always’ was the phrase she had used—squeaked.
BOOK TWO
I
The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity. The words of human love have been used by the saints to describe their vision of God, and so, I suppose, we might use the terms of prayer, meditation, contemplation to explain the intensity of the love we feel for a woman. We too surrender memory, intellect, intelligence, and we too experience the deprivation, the noche oscura, and sometimes as a reward a kind of peace. The act of love itself has been described as the little death, and lovers sometimes experience too the little peace. It is odd to find myself writing these phrases as though I loved what in fact I hate. Sometimes I don’t recognize my own thoughts. What do I know of phrases like ‘the dark night’ or of prayer, who have only one prayer? I have inherited them, that is all, like a husband who is left by death in the useless possession of a woman’s clothes, scents, pots of cream … And yet there was this peace …
That is how I think of those first months of war—was it a phoney peace as well as a phoney war? It seems now to have stretched arms of comfort and reassurance all over those months of dubiety and waiting, but the peace must, I suppose, even at that time have been punctuated by misunderstanding and suspicion. Just as I went home that first evening with no exhilaration but only a sense of sadness and resignation, so again and again I returned home on other days with the certainty that I was only one of many men—the favourite lover for the moment. This woman, whom I loved so obsessively that if I woke in the night I immediately found the thought of her in my brain and abandoned sleep, seemed to give up all her time to me. And yet I could feel no trust: in the act of love I could be arrogant, but alone I had only to look in the mirror to see doubt, in the shape of a lined face and a lame leg—why me? There were always occasions when we couldn’t meet—appointments with a dentist or a hairdresser, occasions when Henry entertained, when they were alone together. It was no good telling myself that in her own home she would have no opportunity to betray me (with the egotism of a lover I was already using that word with its suggestion of a non-existent duty) while Henry worked on the widows’ pensions or—for he was soon shifted from that job—on the distribution of gas-masks and the design of approved cardboard cases, for didn’t I know it was possible to make love in the most dangerous circumstances, if the desire were there? Distrust grows with a lover’s success. Why, the very next time we saw each other it happened in just the way that I should have called impossible.
I woke with the sadness of her last cautious advice still resting on my mind, and within three minutes of waking her voice on the telephone dispelled it. I have never known a woman before or since so able to alter a whole mood by simply speaking on the telephone, and when she came into a room or put her hand on my side she created at once the absolute trust I lost with every separation.
‘Hello,’ she said, ‘are you asleep?’
‘No. When can I see you? This morning?’
‘Henry’s got a cold. He’s staying at home.’
‘If only you could come here …’
‘I’ve got to stay in to answer the telephone.’
‘Just because he’s got a cold?’
Last night I had felt friendship and sympathy for Henry, but already he had become an enemy, to be mocked and resented and covertly run down.
 
; ‘He’s lost his voice completely.’
I felt a malicious delight at the absurdity of his sickness: a civil servant without a voice whispering hoarsely and ineffectively about widows’ pensions. I said, ‘Isn’t there any way to see you?’
‘But of course.’
There was silence for a moment on the line and I thought we had been cut off. I said, ‘Hello. Hello.’ But she had been thinking, that was all, carefully, collectedly, quickly, so that she could give me straightaway the correct answer. ‘I’m giving Henry a tray in bed at one. We could have sandwiches ourselves in the living-room. I’ll tell him you want to talk over the film—or that story of yours’, and immediately she rang off the sense of trust was disconnected and I thought, how many times before has she planned in just this way? When I went to her house and rang the bell, I felt like an enemy—or a detective, watching her words as Parkis and his son were to watch her movements a few years later. And then the door opened and trust came back.
There was never any question in those days of who wanted whom—we were together in desire. Henry had his tray, sitting up against two pillows in his green woollen dressing-gown, and in the room below, on the hardwood floor, with a single cushion for support and the door ajar, we made love. When the moment came, I had to put my hand gently over her mouth to deaden that strange sad angry cry of abandonment, for fear Henry should hear it overhead.
To think I had intended just to pick her brain. I crouched on the floor beside her and watched and watched, as though I might never see this again—the brown indeterminate-coloured hair like a pool of liquor on the parquet, the sweat on her forehead, the heavy breathing as though she had run a race and now like a young athlete lay in the exhaustion of victory.
And then the stair squeaked. For a moment we neither of us moved. The sandwiches were stacked uneaten on the table, the glasses had not been filled. She said in a whisper, ‘He went downstairs.’ She sat in a chair and put a plate in her lap and a glass beside her.
‘Suppose he heard,’ I said, ‘as he passed.’
‘He wouldn’t have known what it was.’
I must have looked incredulous, for she explained with dreary tenderness, ‘Poor Henry. It’s never happened—not in the whole ten years,’ but all the same we weren’t so sure of our safety: we sat there silently listening until the stair squeaked again. My voice sounded to myself cracked and false as I said rather too loudly, ‘I’m glad you like that scene with the onions,’ and Henry pushed open the door and looked in. He was carrying a hot-water-bottle in a grey flannel cover. ‘Hello, Bendrix,’ he whispered.
‘You shouldn’t have fetched that yourself,’ she said.
‘Didn’t want to disturb you.’
‘We were talking about the film last night.’
‘Hope you’ve got everything you want,’ he whispered to me. He took a look at the claret Sarah had put out for me. ‘Should have given him the ’29,’ he breathed in his undimensional voice and drifted out again, clasping the hot-water-bottle in its flannel cover, and again we were alone.
‘Do you mind?’ I asked her, and she shook her head. I didn’t really know what I meant—I think I had an idea that the sight of Henry might have roused remorse, but she had a wonderful way of eliminating remorse. Unlike the rest of us she was unhaunted by guilt. In her view when a thing was done, it was done: remorse died with the act. She would have thought it unreasonable of Henry, if he had caught us, to be angry for more than a moment. Catholics are always said to be freed in the confessional from the mortmain of the past—certainly in that respect you could have called her a born Catholic, although she believed in God as little as I did. Or so I thought then and wonder now.
If this book of mine fails to take a straight course, it is because I am lost in a strange region: I have no map. I sometimes wonder whether anything that I am putting down here is true. I felt that afternoon such complete trust when she said to me suddenly, without being questioned, ‘I’ve never loved anybody or anything as I do you.’ It was as if, sitting there in the chair with a half-eaten sandwich in her hand, she was abandoning herself as completely as she had done, five minutes back, on the hardwood floor. We most of us hesitate to make so complete a statement—we remember and we foresee and we doubt. She had no doubts. The moment only mattered. Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time, and sometimes it seemed to me that her abandonment touched that strange mathematical point of endlessness, a point with no width, occupying no space. What did time matter—all the past and the other men she may from time to time (there is that word again) have known, or all the future in which she might be making the same statement with the same sense of truth? When I replied that I loved her too in that way, I was the liar, not she, for I never lose the consciousness of time: to me the present is never here: it is always last year or next week.
She wasn’t lying even when she said, ‘Nobody else. Ever again.’ There are contradictions in time, that’s all, that don’t exist on the mathematical point. She had so much more capacity for love than I had—I couldn’t bring down that curtain round the moment, I couldn’t forget and I couldn’t not fear. Even in the moment of love, I was like a police officer gathering evidence of a crime that hadn’t yet been committed, and when more than seven years later I opened Parkis’s letter the evidence was all there in my memory to add to my bitterness.
II
‘Dear sir,’ the letter said, ‘I am glad to be able to report that me and my boy have made friendly contact with the domestic at Number 17. This has enabled the investigation to proceed with greater speed because I am sometimes able to take a squint at the party’s engagement book and thus obtain movements, also inspect from day to day the contents of the party’s waste-paper basket, from which I include herewith an interesting exhibit, which please return with observations. The party in question also keeps a diary and has kept one for some years, but so far the domestic who in future I shall refer to for greater security as my friend has not been able to lay hand on it, being as how the party keeps the same under lock and key, which may or may not be a suspicious circumstance. Apart from the important exhibit attached hereto, the party seems to spend a great deal of time in not keeping the appointments arranged as per her engagement book which has to be regarded as a blind, however personally unwilling to take a low view or cast a bias in an investigation of this order where exact truth is desired for the sake of all parties.’
We are not hurt only by tragedy: the grotesque too carries weapons, undignified, ridiculous weapons. There were times when I wanted to crush Mr Parkis’s rambling evasive inefficient reports into his mouth in the presence of that boy of his. It was as if in my attempt to trap Sarah (but for what purpose? To hurt Henry or to hurt myself?) I had let a clown come tumbling into our intimacy. Intimacy. Even that word smacks of Mr Parkis’s reports. Didn’t he write once, ‘Though I have no direct evidence of intimacy having taken place at 16 Cedar Road, the party certainly showed an intent to deceive’? But that was later. In this report of his I learned only that on two occasions when Sarah had written down engagements to visit her dentist and her dressmaker, she had not turned up at her appointments if they had ever existed; she had evaded pursuit. And then turning over Mr Parkis’s crude document, written in mauve ink on cheap notepaper in his thin Waverley handwriting, I saw the bold clean writing of Sarah herself. I had not realized I would recognize it after nearly two years.
It was only a scrap of paper pinned to the back of the report, and it was marked with a big A in red pencil. Under the A, Mr Parkis had written, ‘Important in view of possible proceedings that all documentary evidence should be returned for filing.’ The scrap had been salvaged from the waste-paper basket and smoothed carefully out as it might have been by a lover’s hand. And certainly it must have been addressed to a lover: ‘I have no need to write to you or talk to you, you know everything before I can speak, but when one loves, one feels the need to use the same old ways one has always used. I know I am
only beginning to love, but already I want to abandon everything, everybody but you: only fear and habit prevent me. Dear …’ There was no more. It stared boldly up at me, and I couldn’t help thinking how I had forgotten every line of all the notes she had once addressed to me. Wouldn’t I have kept them if they had ever confessed so completely to her love, and for fear of my keeping them hadn’t she always in those days been careful to write to me, as she put it, ‘between the lines’? But this latest love had burst the cage of lines. It had refused to be kept between them out of sight. There was one code word I did remember—‘onions’. That word had been allowed in our correspondence to represent discreetly our passion. Love became ‘onions’, even the act itself ‘onions’. ‘Already I want to abandon everything, everybody, but you,’ and onions I thought, with hatred, onions—that was the way in my time.
I wrote ‘No comment’ under the scrap of letter, put it back in an envelope and addressed it to Mr Parkis, but when I woke in the night I could recite the whole thing over to myself, and the word ‘abandon’ took on many kinds of physical image. I lay there unable to sleep, one memory after another pricking me with hatred and desire: her hair fanning out on the parquet floor and the stair squeaking, a day in the country when we had lain down in a ditch out of view of the road and I could see the sparkle of frost between the fronds of hair on the hard ground and a tractor came pushing by at the moment of crisis and the man never turned his head. Why doesn’t hatred kill desire? I would have given anything to sleep. I would have behaved like a schoolboy if I had believed in the possibility of a substitute. But there was a time when I had tried to find a substitute, and it hadn’t worked.