The End of the Affair (15 page)

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 foghorn 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.

I couldn’t read any more. Over and over again I had skipped when a passage hurt me too much. I had wanted to discover about Dunstan, though I hadn’t wanted to discover that much, but now I had read on, it slipped far back in time, like a dull date in history. It wasn’t of present importance. The entry I was left with was an entry only one week old. ‘I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love.’

It’s all I can give you, I thought. I don’t know about any other kind of love, but if you think I’ve squandered all of that you’re wrong. There’s enough left for our two lives, and I thought of that day when she had packed her suitcase and I sat working here, not knowing that happiness was so close. I was glad that I hadn’t known and I was glad that I knew. I could act now. Dunstan didn’t matter. The air-raid warden didn’t matter. I went to the telephone and dialled her number.

The maid answered. I said, ‘This is Mr Bendrix. I want to speak to Mrs Miles.’ She told me to hold on. I felt breathless as though I were at the end of a long race as I waited for Sarah’s voice, but the voice that came was the maid’s telling me that Mrs Miles was out. I don’t know why I didn’t believe her. I waited five minutes and then with my handkerchief stretched tight over the mouthpiece I rang again.

‘Is Mr Miles in?’

‘No, sir.’

‘Could I speak to Mrs Miles then? This is Sir William Mallock.’

There was only a very short pause before Sarah replied, ‘Good evening. This is Mrs Miles.’

‘I know,’ I said, ‘I know your voice, Sarah.’

‘You… I thought…’

‘Sarah,’ I said, ‘I’m coming to see you.’

‘No, please no. Listen, Maurice. I’m in bed. I’m speaking from there now.’

‘All the better.’

‘Don’t be a fool, Maurice. I mean I’m ill.’

‘Then you’ll have to see me. What’s the matter, Sarah?’

‘Oh, nothing. A bad cold. Listen, Maurice.’ She spaced her words slowly like a governess and it angered me. ‘Please don’t come I can’t see you.’

‘I love you, Sarah, and I’m coming.’

‘I won’t be here. I’ll get up.’ I thought, If I run, it will only take me four minutes across the Common; she can’t dress in that time.’ I’ll tell the maid not to let anybody in.’

‘She’s not got the build of a chucker-out. And I’d have to be chucked out, Sarah.’

‘Please, Maurice… I’m asking you. I haven’t asked anything of you for a long time.’

‘Except one lunch.’

‘Maurice, I’m not awfully fit. I just can’t see you today. Next week… ‘

‘There’ve been a terrible lot of weeks. I want to see you now. This evening.’

‘Why, Maurice?’

‘You love me.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Never mind. I want to ask you to come away with me.’

‘But, Maurice, I can answer you on the phone just as well. The answer’s no.’

‘I can’t touch you by telephone, Sarah.’

‘Maurice, my dear, please. Promise you won’t come’

‘I’m coming.’

‘Listen, Maurice. I’m feeling awfully sick. And the pain’s bad tonight. I don’t want to get up.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘I swear I’ll get up and dress and leave the house, unless you promise… ‘

‘This is more important to both of us, Sarah, than a cold.’

‘Please, Maurice, please. Henry will be home soon’

‘Let him be.’ I rang off.

It was a worse night than the one when I met Henry a month before. This time it was sleet instead of rain: it was half-way to snow and the edged drops seemed to slash their way in through the buttonholes of one’s raincoat: they obscured the lamps on the Common, so that it was impossible to run, and I can’t run fast anyway because of my leg. I wished I had brought my war-time torch with me, for it must have taken eight minutes for me to reach the house on north side. I was just stepping off the pavement to cross when the door opened and Sarah came out. I thought with happiness, I have her now. I knew with absolute certainty that before the night was out we should have slept together again. And once that had been renewed, anything might happen. I had never known her before and I had never loved her so much. The more we know the more we love, I thought. I was back in the territory of trust.

She was in too much of a hurry to see me across the wide roadway through the sleet. She turned to the left and walked rapidly away. I thought, she will need somewhere to sit down and then I have her trapped. I followed twenty yards behind, but she never looked back. She skirted the Common, past the pond and the bombed bookshop, as though she were making for the tube. Well, if it were necessary, I was prepared to talk to her even in a crowded train. She went down the tube-stairs and up to the booking-office, but she had no bag with her and when she felt in her pockets no loose money either - not even the three halfpence that would have enabled her to travel up and down till midnight. Up the stairs again, and across the road where the trams run. One earth had been stopped, but another had obviously come to mind. I was triumphant. She was afraid, but she wasn’t afraid of me, she was afraid of herself and what was going to happen when we met. I felt I had won the game already, and I could afford to feel a certain pity for my victim. I wanted to say to her, Don’t worry, there’s nothing to fear, we’ll both be happy soon, the nightmare’s nearly over.

And then I lost her. I had been too confident and I had allowed her too big a start. She had crossed the road twenty yards ahead of me (I was delayed again by my bad leg coming up the stairs), a tram ran between, and she was gone. She might have turned left down the High Street or gone straight ahead down Park Road, but I couldn’t see her. I wasn’t very worried - if I didn’t find her today, I would the next. Now I knew the whole absurd story of the vow, now I was certain of her love, I was assured of her. If two people loved, they slept together; it was a mathematical formula, tested and proved by human experience.

There was an A. B. C. in the High Street and I tried that. She wasn’t there. Then I remembered the church at the corner of Park Road, and I knew at once that she had gone there. I followed, and sure enough there she was sitting in one of the side aisles close to a pillar and a hideous statue of the virgin. She wasn’t praying. She was just sitting there with her eyes closed. I only saw her by the light of the candles before the statue, for the whole place was very dark. I sat down behind her like Mr Parkis and waited. I could have waited years now that I knew the end of the story. I was cold and wet and very happy. I could even look with charity towards the altar and the figure dangling there. She loves us both, I thought, but if there is to be a conflict between an image and a man, I know who will win. I could put my hand on her thigh or my mouth on her breast: he was imprisoned behind the altar and couldn’t move to plead his cause.

Suddenly she began to cough with her hand pressed to her side. I knew she was in pain and I couldn’t leave her alone in pain. I came and sat beside her and put my hand on her knee while she coughed. I thought, If only one had a touch that could heal. When the fit was over, she said, ‘Please won’t you let me be.’

‘I’ll never let you be,’ I said.

‘What’s come over you, Maurice? You weren’t like that the other day at lunch.’

‘I was bitter. I didn’t know you loved me.’

‘Why do you think I do?’ she asked, but she let my hand rest on her knee. I told her then how Mr Parkis had stolen her diary - I didn’t want any lies between us now.

‘It wasn’t a good thing to do,’ she said.

‘No.’ She began to cough again and afterwards in her exhaustion she leant her shoulder against me.

‘My dear,’ I said, ‘it’s all over now. The waiting, I mean. We’re going away together.’

‘No,’ she said.

I put my arm round her and touched her breast. ‘This is where we begin again,’ I said. ‘I’ve been a bad lover, Sarah. It was the insecurity that did it. I didn’t trust you. I didn’t know enough about you. But I’m secure now.’

She said nothing, but she still leant against me. It was like an assent. I said, ‘I’ll tell you how it had better be. Go back home and lie in bed for a couple of days - you don’t want to travel with a cold like that. I’ll ring up every day and see how you are. When you are well enough, I’ll come over and help you pack. We won’t stay here. I have a cousin in Dorset who has an empty cottage I can use. We’ll stay there a few weeks and rest. I’ll be able to finish my book. We can face the lawyers afterwards. We need a rest, both of us. I’m tired and I’m sick to death of being without you, Sarah.’

‘Me too.’ She spoke so low that I wouldn’t have heard the phrase if I had been a stranger to it, but it was like a signature tune that had echoed through all our relationship, from the first love-making in the Paddington hotel. ‘Me too’ for loneliness, griefs, disappointments, pleasures and despairs, the claim to share everything.

‘Money’s going to be short,’ I said, ‘but not too short. I’ve been commissioned to do a Life of General Gordon and the advance is enough to keep us for three months comfortably. By that time I can hand in the novel and get an advance on that. Both books will be out this year, and they should keep us till another’s ready. I can work, with you there. You know, any moment now I’m going to come through. I’ll be a vulgar success yet, and you’ll hate it and I’ll hate it, but we’ll buy things and be extravagant and it will be fun, because we’ll be together.’

Suddenly I realized she was asleep. Exhausted by her flight she had fallen asleep against my shoulder as so many times, in taxis, in buses, on a park-seat. I sat still and let her be. There was nothing to disturb her in the dark church. The candles napped around the virgin, and there was nobody else there. The slowly growing pain in my upper arm where her weight lay was the greatest pleasure I had ever known.

Children are supposed to be influenced by what you whisper to them in sleep, and I began to whisper to Sarah, not loud enough to wake her, hoping that the words would drop hypnotically into her unconscious mind. ‘I love you, Sarah,’ I whispered. ‘Nobody has ever loved you as much before. We are going to be happy. Henry won’t mind except in his pride, and pride soon heals. Hell find himself a new habit to take your place - perhaps he’ll collect Greek coins. We are going away, Sarah, we are going away. Nobody can stop it now. You love me, Sarah,’ and I fell silent as I began to wonder whether I ought to buy a new suitcase. Then she woke coughing.

‘I’ve been asleep,’ she said.

‘You must go home now, Sarah. You’re cold.’

‘It isn’t home, Maurice,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to go away from here.’

‘It’s cold.’

‘I don’t mind the cold. And it’s dark. I can believe anything in the dark.’

‘Just believe in us.’

‘That’s what I meant.’ She shut her eyes again, and looking up at the altar I thought with triumph, almost as though he were a living rival, You see - these are the arguments that win, and gently moved my fingers across her breast.

‘You’re tired, aren’t you?’ I asked. ‘Very tired.’

‘You shouldn’t have run away from me like that.’

‘It wasn’t you I was running from.’ She moved her shoulder. ‘Please, Maurice, go now.’

‘You ought to be in bed.’

‘I will be soon. I don’t want to go back with you. I just want to say good-bye here.’

‘Promise you won’t stay long.’

‘I promise.’

‘And you’ll telephone to me?’

She nodded, but looking down at her hand where it lay in her lap like something thrown away, I saw that she had her fingers crossed. I asked her with suspicion, ‘You are telling me the truth?’ I uncrossed her fingers with mine and said, ‘You aren’t planning to escape me again?’

‘Maurice, dear Maurice,’ she said, ‘I haven’t got the strength.’ She began to cry, thrusting her fists into her eyes as a child does.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Just go away. Please, Maurice, have a bit of mercy.’

One gets to the end of badgering and contriving: I couldn’t go on with that appeal in my ears. I kissed her on the tough and knotty hair, and coming away I found her lips, smudgy and salt, on the corner of my mouth. ‘God bless you,’ she said, and I thought, That’s what she crossed out in her letter to Henry. One says good-bye to another’s good-bye unless one is Smythe and it was an involuntary act when I repeated her blessing back to her, but turning as I left the church and seeing her huddled there at the edge of the candle-light, like a beggar come in for warmth, I could imagine a God blessing her: or a God loving her. When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It’s just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.

The next few days I had to make a great effort to be sensible. I was working for both of us now. In the morning I set myself a minimum of seven hundred and fifty words on the novel, but usually I managed to get a thousand done by eleven o’clock. It’s astonishing the effect of hope: the novel that had dragged all through the last year ran towards its end. I knew that Henry left for work around nine-thirty, and the most likely hour for her to telephone was between then and twelve-thirty. Henry had started coming home for lunch (so Parkis had told me); there was no chance of her telephoning again before three. I would revise my day’s work and do my letters until twelve-thirty, and then I was released however gloomily from expectation. Until two-thirty I could put in time at the British Museum Reading Room, making notes for the life of General Gordon. I couldn’t absorb myself in reading and note-taking as I could in writing the novel, and the thought of Sarah came between me and the missionary life in China. Why had I been invited to write this biography? I often wondered. They would have done better to have chosen an author who believed in Gordon’s God. I could appreciate the obstinate stand at Khartoum - the hatred of the safe politicians at home, but the Bible on the desk belonged to another world of thought from mine. Perhaps the publisher half hoped that my cynical treatment of Gordon’s Christianity would cause a succčs de scandale. I had no intention of pleasing him: this God was also Sarah’s God, and I was going to throw no stones at any phantom she believed she loved. I hadn’t during that period any hatred of her God, for hadn’t I in the end proved stronger?