The End of the Affair (11 page)

… 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 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.

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 life of which I knew nothing had still the power to hurt.

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. Taxi-man 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 see if I were alive still, but I tore it up with the catalogues.

10 July 1944.

I thought, I shall not be breaking my promise if accidentally on the Common I run into Maurice, and so I went out after breakfast and again after lunch and again in the early evening, walking about and never seeing him. I couldn’t stay out after six because Henry had guests for dinner. The speakers were there again as they were in June, and the man with the spots was still attacking Christianity and nobody was caring. I thought, if only he could convince me that you don’t have to keep a promise to someone you don’t believe in, that miracles don’t happen, and I went and listened to him for a while, but all the time I was looking round in case Maurice might come in sight. He talked about the date of the Gospels and how the earliest one wasn’t written within a hundred years of Christ being born. I had never realized they were as early as that, but I couldn’t see that it mattered much when the legend began. And then he told us that Christ never claimed to be God in the Gospels, but was there such a man as Christ at all and what do the Gospels matter anyway, compared with this pain of waiting around and not seeing Maurice? A woman with grey hair distributed little cards on which his name was printed, Richard Smythe, and his address in Cedar Road, and there was an invitation to anybody to come and talk to him in private. Some people refused to take the cards and walked away as though the woman was asking for a subscription and others dropped them on the grass (I saw her pick some up, for economy’s sake I suppose). It seemed very sad - the horrible spots, and talking about something nobody was interested in, and the cards dropped were like offers of friendship turned down. I put the card in my pocket and hoped he saw me do it.

Sir William Mallock came to dinner. He was one of Lloyd George’s advisers on National Insurance, very old and important. Henry of course has nothing to do with pensions any longer, but he keeps an interest in the subject and likes to recall those days. Wasn’t it widows’ pensions he was working on when Maurice and I had dinner for the first time and everything started? Henry began a long argument with Mallock full of statistics about whether if widows’ pensions were raised another shilling they would reach the same height as ten years ago. They disagreed about the cost of living, and it was a very academic argument because they both said the country couldn’t afford to raise them anyway. I had to talk to Henry’s chief in the Ministry of Home Security, and I couldn’t think of anything to talk about but the V1s, and I longed suddenly to tell everybody about coming downstairs and finding Maurice buried. I wanted to say, I was naked, of course, because I hadn’t had time to dress. Would Sir William Mallock have even turned his head, or would Henry have heard? He has a wonderful knack of hearing nothing but the subject in hand and the subject in hand at that moment was the cost-of-living index for 1943. I was naked, I wanted to say, because Maurice and I had been making love all the evening.