‘Highly successful I should say, sir, but Mrs Miles seemed a bit out of sorts. A very nasty cough, she’s got.’ I heard him with pleasure: perhaps at this party there had been no alcove-kissing or touching. He laid a brown-paper parcel on my desk and said with pride, ‘I knew the way to her room from the maid. If anyone had taken notice of me, I should have been looking for the toilet, but nobody did. There it was, out on her desk; she must have worked on it that day. Of course, she may be very cautious, but my experience of diaries is they always give things away. People invent their little codes, but you soon see through them, sir. Or they leave out things, but you soon learn what they leave out.’ While he spoke I unwrapped the book and opened it. ‘It’s human nature, sir, that if you keep a diary, you want to remember things. Why keep it otherwise?’
‘Did you look at this?’ I asked.
‘I ascertained its nature, sir, and from one entry judged she wasn’t of the cautious type.’
‘It’s not this year’s,’ I said. ‘It’s two years old.’
For a moment he was dashed.
‘It will serve my purpose,’ I said.
‘It would do the trick as well, sir—if nothing’s been condoned.’
The journal was written in a big account book, the familiar bold handwriting crossed by the red and blue lines. There were not daily entries and I was able to reassure Parkis—‘It covers several years.’
‘I suppose something must have made her take it out to read.’ Is it possible, I wondered, that some memory of me, of our affair, had crossed her mind this very day, that something may have troubled her peace? I said to Parkis, ‘I’m glad to have this, very glad. You know, I really think we can close our account now.’
‘I hope you feel satisfied, sir.’
‘Quite satisfied.’
‘And that you’ll so write to Mr Savage, sir. He gets the bad reports from clients, but the good ones never get written. The more a client’s satisfied, the more he wants to forget; to put us right out of mind. You can hardly blame them.’
‘I’ll write.’
‘And thank you, sir, for being kind to the boy. He was a bit upset, but I know how it is—it’s difficult to draw the line over ices with a boy like Lance. He gets them out of you with hardly a word said.’ I longed to read, but Parkis lingered. Perhaps he didn’t really trust me to remember him and wanted to impress more firmly on my memory those hang-dog eyes, that penurious moustache. ‘I’ve enjoyed our association, sir—if one can talk of enjoying under the sad circumstances. We don’t always work for real gentlemen even when they have titles. I had a peer of the realm once, sir, who flew into a rage when I gave him my report as though I were the guilty party myself. It’s a discouraging thing, sir. The more you succeed the more glad they are to see the last of you.’
I was very conscious of wanting to see the last of Parkis and his words woke my sense of guilt. I couldn’t hurry the man away. He said, ‘I’ve been thinking, sir, I’d like to give you a little memento—but then that’s just what you wouldn’t want to receive.’ How strange it is to be liked. It automatically awakens a certain loyalty. So I lied to Parkis. ‘I’ve always enjoyed our talks.’
‘Which started, sir, so inauspiciously. With that silly mistake.’
‘Did you ever tell your boy?’
‘Yes, sir, but only after some days, after the success with the waste-paper basket. That took away the sting.’
I looked down at the book and read: ‘So happy. M. returns tomorrow.’ I wondered for a moment who M. was. How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one’s presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another’s day.
‘But if you really wouldn’t resent a memento, sir …’
‘Of course I wouldn’t, Parkis.’
‘I have something here, sir, that might be of interest and use.’ He took out of his pocket an object wrapped in tissue paper and slid it shyly across the desk towards me. I unwrapped it. It was a cheap ash-tray marked Hotel Metropole, Brightlingsea. ‘There’s quite a history, sir, with that. You remember the Bolton case.’
‘I can’t say I do.’
‘It made a great stir, sir, at the time. Lady Bolton, her maid and the man, sir. All discovered together. That ash-tray stood beside the bed. On the lady’s side.’
‘You must have collected quite a little museum.’
‘I should have given it to Mr Savage—he took a particular interest—but I’m glad now, sir, I didn’t. I think you’ll find the inscription will evoke comment when your friends put out their cigarettes, and there’s your answer pat—the Bolton Case. They’ll all want to hear more of that.’
‘It sounds sensational.’
‘It’s all human nature, sir, isn’t it, and human love. Though I was surprised. Not having expected the third. And the room not large or fashionable. Mrs Parkis was alive then, but I didn’t like to tell her the details. She got disturbed by things.’
‘I’ll certainly treasure the memento,’ I said.
‘If ash-trays could speak, sir.’
‘Indeed, yes.’
But even Parkis with that profound thought had finished up his words. A last pressure of the hand, a little sticky (perhaps it had been in contact with Lance’s), and he was gone. He was not one of those whom one expects to see again. Then I opened Sarah’s journal. I thought first I would look for that day in June 1944 when everything ended, and after I had discovered the reason for that there were many other dates from which I could learn exactly, checking them with my diary, how it was that her love had petered out. I wanted to treat this as a document in a case—one of Parkis’s cases—should be treated, but I hadn’t that degree of calmness, for what I found when I opened the journal was not what I was expecting. Hate and suspicion and envy had driven me so far away that I read her words like a declaration of love from a stranger. I had expected plenty of evidence against her—hadn’t I so often caught her out in lies?—and now here in writing that I could believe, as I couldn’t believe her voice, was the complete answer. For it was the last couple of pages I read first, and I read them again at the end to make sure. It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved, when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.
BOOK THREE
I
… anything left, when we’d finished, but You. For either of us. I might have taken a lifetime spending a little love at a time, eking it out here and there, on this man and that. But even the first time, in the hotel near Paddington, we spent all we had. You were there, teaching us to squander, like you taught the rich man, 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.
12 February 1946.
Two days ago I had such a sense of peace and quiet and love. Life was going to be happy again, but last night I dreamed I was walking up a long staircase to meet Maurice at the top. I was still happy because when I reached the top of the staircase we were going to make love. I called to him that I was coming, but it wasn’t Maurice’s voice that answered; it was a stranger’s that boomed like a fog-horn warning lost ships, and scared me. I thought, he’s let his flat and gone away and I don’t know where he is, and going down the stairs again the water rose beyond my waist and the hall was thick with mist. Then I woke up. I’m not at peace any more. I just want him like I used to in the old days. I want to be eating sandwiches with him. I want to be drinking with him in a bar. I’m tired and I don’t want any more pain. I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love. Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain, but I don’t want it now. Take it away for a while and give it me another time.
After that I started the book from the beginning. She hadn’t entered the journal every day, and I had no wish to read every entry. The theatres she had been to with Henry, the restaurants, the parties—all that lif
e of which I knew nothing had still the power to hurt.
II
12 June 1944.
Sometimes I get so tired of trying to convince him that I love him and shall love him for ever. He pounces on my words like a barrister and twists them. I know he is afraid of that desert which would be around him if our love were to end, but he can’t realize that I feel exactly the same. What he says aloud, I say to myself silently and write it here. What can one build in the desert? Sometimes after a day when we have made love many times, I wonder whether it isn’t possible to come to an end of sex, and I know that he is wondering too and is afraid of that point where the desert begins. What do we do in the desert if we lose each other? How does one go on living after that?
He is jealous of the past and the present and the future. His love is like a medieval chastity belt: only when he is there with me, in me, does he feel safe. If only I could make him feel secure, then we could love peacefully, happily, not savagely, inordinately, and the desert would recede out of sight. For a lifetime perhaps.
If one could believe in God, would he fill the desert?
I have always wanted to be liked or admired. I feel a terrible insecurity if a man turns on me, if I lose a friend. I don’t even want to lose a husband. I want everything, all the time, everywhere. I’m afraid of the desert. God loves you, they say in the churches, God is everything. People who believe that don’t need admiration, they don’t need to sleep with a man, they feel safe. But I can’t invent a belief.
All today Maurice has been sweet to me. He tells me often that he has never loved another woman so much. He thinks that by saying it often, he will make me believe it. But I believe it simply because I love him in exactly the same way. If I stopped loving him, I would cease to believe in his love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. It’s not enough to need it. We have to love first, and I don’t know how. But I need it, how I need it.
All day he was sweet. Only once, when a man’s name was mentioned, I saw his eyes move away. He thinks I still sleep with other men, and if I did, would it matter so much? If sometimes he has a woman, do I complain? I wouldn’t rob him of some small companionship in the desert if we can’t have each other there. Sometimes I think that if the time came he would refuse me even a glass of water; he would drive me into such complete isolation that I would be alone with nothing and nobody—like a hermit, but they were never alone, or so they say. I am so muddled. What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness. It’s as if we were working together on the same statue, cutting it out of each other’s misery. But I don’t even know the design.
17 June 1944.
Yesterday I went home with him and we did the usual things. I haven’t the nerve to put them down, but I’d like to, because now when I’m writing it’s already tomorrow and I’m afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together.
While I waited for him yesterday there were speakers out on the Common: the I.L.P. and the Communist Party, and the man who just tells jokes, and there was a man attacking Christianity. The Rationalist Society of South London or some name like that. He would have been good-looking if it hadn’t been for the spots which covered one cheek. There were very few people in his audience and no hecklers. He was attacking something dead already, and I wondered why he took the trouble. I stayed and listened for a few minutes: he was arguing against the arguments for a God. I hadn’t really known there were any—except this cowardly need I feel of not being alone.
I had a sudden fear that Henry might have changed his mind and sent a telegram to say that he would be home. I never know what I fear most—my disappointment or Maurice’s disappointment. It works the same way with both of us: we pick quarrels. I am angry with myself and he is angry with me. I went home and there was no telegram, and I was ten minutes late in meeting Maurice and began to be angry so as to meet his anger and then unexpectedly he was sweet to me.
We had never before had quite so long a day, and there was all the night to follow. We bought lettuce and rolls and the butter-ration—we didn’t want much to eat and it was very warm. It’s warm now too: everybody will say, what a lovely summer, and I’m in a train going into the country to join Henry, and everything’s over for ever. I’m scared: this is the desert, and there’s nobody, nothing, for miles and miles around. If I were in London, I might be killed quickly, but if I were in London I’d go to the telephone and ring the only number I know by heart. I often forget my own: I suppose Freud would say that I want to forget it because it’s Henry’s number too. But I love Henry: I want him to be happy. I only hate him today because he is happy, and I am not and Maurice is not, and he won’t know a thing. He’ll say I look tired and think it’s the curse—he no longer bothers to keep the count of those days.
This evening the sirens went—I mean last evening of course, but what does it matter? In the desert there’s no time. But I can come out of the desert when I want to. I can catch a train home tomorrow and ring him up on the telephone. Henry will be still in the country perhaps, and we can spend the night together. A vow’s not all that important—a vow to somebody I’ve never known, to somebody I don’t really believe in. Nobody will know that I’ve broken a vow, except me and Him—and He doesn’t exist, does he? He can’t exist. You can’t have a merciful God and this despair.
If I went back, where would we be? Where we were yesterday before the sirens went, and the year before that. Angry with each other for fear of the end, wondering what we should do with life when there was nothing left. I needn’t wonder any more—there’s nothing to fear any more. This is the end. But, dear God, what shall I do with this desire to love?
Why do I write ‘dear God’? He isn’t dear—not to me he isn’t. If he exists, then he put the thought of this vow into my mind and I hate him for it. I hate. Every few minutes a grey stone church and a public-house run backwards down the line: the desert is full of churches and public-houses. And multiple stores, and men on bicycles, and grass and cows, and factory chimneys. You see them through the sand like fish through the water in a tank. And Henry waits too in the tank, raising his muzzle for my kiss.
We paid no attention to the sirens. They didn’t matter. We weren’t afraid of dying that way. But then the raid went on and on. It wasn’t an ordinary raid: the papers aren’t allowed to say yet, but everybody knows. This was the new thing we had been warned about. Maurice went downstairs to see if there was anyone in the basement—he was afraid about me and I was afraid about him. I knew something was going to happen.
He hadn’t been gone two minutes when there was an explosion in the street. His room was at the back and nothing happened except that the door was sucked open and some plaster fell, but I knew that he was at the front of the house when the bomb fell. I went down the stairs: they were cluttered with rubbish and broken banisters, and the hall was in an awful mess. I didn’t see Maurice at first, and then I saw his arm coming out from under the door. I touched his hand: I could have sworn it was a dead hand. When two people have loved each other, they can’t disguise a lack of tenderness in a kiss, and wouldn’t I have recognized life if there was any of it left in touching his hand? I knew that if I took his hand and pulled it towards me, it would come away, all by itself, from under the door. Now, of course, I know that this was hysteria. I was cheated. He wasn’t dead. Is one responsible for what one promises in hysteria? Or what promises one breaks? I’m hysterical now, writing all this down. But there’s not a single person anywhere to whom I can even say I’m unhappy because they would ask me why and the questions would begin and I would break down. I mustn’t break down because I must protect Henry. Oh, to hell with Henry, to hell with Henry. I want somebody who’ll accept the truth about me and doesn’t need protection. If I’m a bitch and a fake, is there nobody who will love a bitch and a fake?
/> I knelt down on the floor: I was mad to do such a thing: I never even had to do it as a child—my parents never believed in prayer, any more than I do. I hadn’t any idea what to say. Maurice was dead. Extinct. There wasn’t such a thing as a soul. Even the half-happiness I gave him was drained out of him like blood. He would never have the chance to be happy again. With anybody I thought: somebody else could have loved him and made him happier than I could, but now he won’t have that chance. I knelt and put my head on the bed and wished I could believe. Dear God, I said—why dear, why dear?—make me believe. I can’t believe. Make me. I said, I’m a bitch and a fake and I hate myself. I can’t do anything of myself. Make me believe. I shut my eyes tight and I pressed my nails into the palms of my hands until I could feel nothing but the pain, and I said, I will believe. Let him be alive, and I will believe. Give him a chance. Let him have his happiness. Do this and I’ll believe. But that wasn’t enough. It doesn’t hurt to believe. So I said, I love him and I’ll do anything if you’ll make him alive, I said very slowly, I’ll give him up for ever, only let him be alive with a chance, and I pressed and pressed and I could feel the skin break, and I said, People can love without seeing each other, can’t they, they love You all their lives without seeing You, and then he came in at the door, and he was alive, and I thought now the agony of being without him starts, and I wished he was safely back dead again under the door.
9 July 1944.
Caught the 8.30 with Henry. Empty first-class carriage. Henry read aloud the Proceedings of the Royal Commission. Caught taxi at Paddington and dropped Henry at the Ministry. Made him promise to be home tonight. Taximan made mistake and drove me to the south side, past Number 14. Door mended and front windows boarded. It is horrible feeling dead. One wants to feel alive again in any way. When I got to the north side there were old letters that hadn’t been forwarded because I told them ‘forward nothing’. Old book catalogues, old bills, a letter marked ‘Urgent. Please forward’. I wanted to open it and so if I were alive still, but I tore it up with the catalogues.