The End of the Affair (4 page)

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 wanted 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.

‘I’m sorry.’

I said with bitterness, as though I had been robbed of something, ‘That needs attending to.’

‘It’s only a cough.’ She held her hand out and said, ‘Good-bye - Maurice.’ The name was like an insult. I said ‘Good-bye’, but didn’t take her hand: I walked quickly away without looking round, trying to give the appearance of being busy and relieved to be gone, and when I heard the cough begin again, I wished I had been able to whistle a tune, something jaunty, adventurous, happy, but I have no ear for music.

When young one builds up habits of work that one believes will last a lifetime and withstand any catastrophe. Over twenty years I have probably averaged five hundred words a day for five days a week. I can produce a novel in a year, and that allows time for revision and the correction of the typescript. I have always been very methodical and when my quota of work is done, I break off even in the middle of a scene. Every now and then during the morning’s work I count what I have done and mark off the hundreds on my manuscript. No printer need make a careful cast-off of my work, for there on the front page of my typescript is marked the figure - 83,764. When I was young not even a love affair would alter my schedule. A love affair had to begin after lunch, and however late I might be in getting to bed - so long as I slept in my own bed -I would read the morning’s work over and sleep on it. Even the war hardly affected me. A lame leg kept me out of the Army, and as I was in Civil Defence, my fellow workers were only too glad that I never wanted the quiet morning turns of duty. I got, as a result, a quite false reputation for keenness, but I was keen only for my desk, my sheet of paper, that quota of words dripping slowly, methodically, from the pen. It needed Sarah to upset my self-imposed discipline. The bombs between those first daylight raids and the V1s of 1944 kept their own convenient nocturnal habits, but so often it was only in the mornings that I could see Sarah, for in the afternoon she was never quite secure from friends, who, their shopping done, would want company and gossip before the evening siren. Sometimes she would come in between two queues, and we would make love between the greengrocer’s and the butcher’s.

But it was quite easy to return to work even under those conditions. So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work. When I began to realize how often we quarrelled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed: love had turned into a love-affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn’t settle to work: I would reconstruct what we had said to each other: I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forcing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make-believe that love lasted, I was happy - I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.

And all that time I couldn’t work. So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but now there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel - the end of love. That was being worked out now, like a story: the pointed word that set her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips, had been sharpened in those underwater caverns. My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end.

I don’t wonder that she hadn’t liked my last book. It was written all the time against the grain, without help, for no reason but that one had to go on living. The reviewers said it was the work of a craftsman: that was all that was left me of what had been a passion. I thought perhaps with the next novel the passion would return, the excitement would wake again of remembering what one had never consciously known, but for a week after lunching with Sarah at Rules I could do no work at all. There it goes again - the I, I, I, as though this were my story, and not the story of Sarah, Henry, and of course, that third, whom I hated without yet knowing him, or even believing in him.

I had tried to work in the morning and failed: I drank too much with my lunch so the afternoon was wasted: after dark I stood at the window with the lights turned off and could see across the flat dark Common the lit windows of the north side. It was very cold and my gas fire only warmed me if I huddled close, and then it scorched. A few flakes of snow drifted across the lamps of the south side and touched the pane with thick damp fingers. I didn’t hear the bell ring. My landlady knocked on the door and said, ‘A Mr Parkis to see you,’ thus indicating by a grammatical article the social status of my caller. I had never heard the name, but I told her to show him in.

I wondered where I had seen before those gentle apologetic eyes, that long outdated moustache damp with the climate? I had only turned on my reading lamp and he came towards it, peering short-sightedly; he couldn’t make me out in the shadows. He said, ‘Mr Bendrix, sir?’

‘Yes.’

He said, ‘The name’s Parkis,’ as though that might mean something to me. He added, ‘Mr Savage’s man, sir.’

‘Oh yes. Sit down. Have a cigarette.’

‘Oh no, sir,’ he said, ‘not on duty - except of course, for purposes of concealment.’

‘But you aren’t on duty now?’

‘In a manner, sir, yes. I’ve just been relieved, sir, for half an hour while I make my report. Mr Savage said as how you’d like it weekly - with expenses.’

‘There is something to report?’ I wasn’t sure whether it was disappointment I felt or excitement.

‘It’s not quite a blank sheet, sir,’ he remarked complacently, and took an extraordinary number of papers and envelopes from his pocket in searching for the right one.

‘Do sit down. You make me uncomfortable.’

‘As you please, sir.’ Sitting down he could see me a little more closely. ‘Haven’t I met you somewhere before, sir?’ I had taken the first sheet out of the envelope: it was the expenses account, written in a very neat script as though by a schoolboy. I said, ‘You write very clearly.’

‘That’s my boy. I’m training him in the business.’ He added hastily, ‘I don’t put anything down for him, sir, unless I leave him in charge, like now.’

‘He’s in charge, is he?’

‘Only while I make my report, sir.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Gone twelve,’ he said as though his boy were a clock. ‘A youngster can be useful and costs nothing except a comic now and then. And nobody notices him. Boys are born lingerers.’

‘It seems odd work for a boy.’

‘Well, sir, he doesn’t understand the real significance. If it came to breaking into a bedroom, I’d leave him behind.’ I read: January 18 Two evening papers 2d.

Tube return l/8d.

Coffee. Gunters 2/-

He was watching me closely as I read. ‘The coffee place was more expensive than I cared for,’ he said, ‘but it was the least I could take without drawing attention.’

January 19

Tubes 2/4d.

Bottled Beers 3/-

Cocktail 2/6d.

Pint of Bitter 1/6d.

He interrupted my reading again. ‘The beer’s a bit on my conscience, sir, because I upset a glass owing to carelessness. But I was a little on edge, there being something to report. You know, sir, there’s sometimes weeks of disappointment, but this time on the second day… ‘

Of course I remembered him, and his embarrassed boy. I read under January 19 (I could see at a glance that on January 18 there was only a record of insignificant movements): ‘The party in question went by bus to Piccadilly Circus. She seemed agitated. She proceeded up Air Street to the Cafe Royal, where a gentleman was waiting for her. Me and my boy… ‘

He wouldn’t leave me alone. ‘You’ll notice, sir, it’s in a different hand. I never let my boy write the reports in case there’s anything of an intimate character.’

‘You take good care of him,’ I said.