‘Will Sarah be back?’
‘I don’t expect so.’
I paid for the drinks, and that again was a symptom of Henry’s disturbance—he never took other people’s hospitality easily. He was always the one in a taxi to have the money ready in the palm of his hand, while we others fumbled. The avenues of the Common still ran with rain, but it wasn’t far to Henry’s. He let himself in with a latchkey under the Queen Anne fanlight and called, ‘Sarah. Sarah.’ I longed for a reply and dreaded a reply, but nobody answered. He said, ‘She’s out still. Come into the study.’
I had never been in his study before: I had always been Sarah’s friend, and when I met Henry it was on Sarah’s territory, her haphazard living-room where nothing matched, nothing was period or planned, where everything seemed to belong to that very week because nothing was ever allowed to remain as a token of past taste or past sentiment. Everything was used there; just as in Henry’s study I now felt that very little had ever been used. I doubted whether the set of Gibbon had once been opened, and the set of Scott was only there because it had—probably—belonged to his father, like the bronze copy of the Discus Thrower. And yet he was happier in his unused room simply because it was his: his possession. I thought with bitterness and envy: if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it.
‘A whisky?’ Henry asked. I remembered his eyes and wondered if he were drinking more than he had done in the old days. Certainly the whiskies he poured out were generous doubles.
‘What’s troubling you, Henry?’ I had long abandoned that novel about the senior civil servant: I wasn’t looking for copy any longer.
‘Sarah,’ he said.
Would I have been frightened if he had said that, in just that way, two years ago? No, I think I should have been overjoyed—one gets so hopelessly tired of deception. I would have welcomed the open fight if only because there might have been a chance, however small, that through some error of tactics on his side I might have won. And there has never been a time in my life before or since when I have so much wanted to win. I have never had so strong a desire even to write a good book.
He looked up at me with those red-rimmed eyes and said, ‘Bendrix, I’m afraid.’ I could no longer patronize him; he was one of misery’s graduates: he had passed in the same school, and for the first time I thought of him as an equal. I remember there was one of those early brown photographs in an Oxford frame on his desk, the photograph of his father, and looking at it I thought how like the photograph was to Henry (it had been taken at about the same age, the middle forties) and how unlike. It wasn’t the moustache that made it different—it was the Victorian look of confidence, of being at home in the world and knowing the way around, and suddenly I felt again that friendly sense of companionship. I liked him better than I would have liked his father (who had been in the Treasury). We were fellow strangers.
‘What is it you’re afraid of, Henry?’
He sat down in an easy chair as though somebody had pushed him and said with disgust, ‘Bendrix, I’ve always thought the worst things, the very worst, a man could do …’ I should certainly have been on tenterhooks in those other days: strange to me, and how infinitely dreary, the serenity of innocence.
‘You know you can trust me, Henry.’ It was possible, I thought, that she had kept a letter, though I had written so few. It is a professional risk that authors run. Women are apt to exaggerate the importance of their lovers and they never foresee the disappointing day when an indiscreet letter will appear marked ‘Interesting’ in an autograph catalogue priced at five shillings.
‘Take a look at this then,’ Henry said.
He held a letter out to me: it was not in my handwriting. ‘Go on. Read it,’ Henry said. It was from some friend of Henry’s and he wrote, ‘I suggest the man you want to help should apply to a fellow called Savage, 159 Vigo Street. I found him able and discreet, and his employees seemed less nauseous than those chaps usually are.’
‘I don’t understand, Henry.’
‘I wrote to this man and said that an acquaintance of mine had asked my advice about private detective agencies. It’s terrible, Bendrix. He must have seen through the pretence.’
‘You really mean … ?’
‘I haven’t done anything about it, but there the letter sits on my desk reminding me … It seems so silly, doesn’t it, that I can trust her absolutely not to read it though she comes in here a dozen times a day. I don’t even put it away in a drawer. And yet I can’t trust … she’s out for a walk now. A walk, Bendrix.’ The rain had penetrated his guard also and he held the edge of his sleeve towards the gas fire.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You were always a special friend of hers, Bendrix. They always say, don’t they, that a husband is the last person really to know the kind of woman … I thought tonight, when I saw you on the Common, that if I told you, and you laughed at me, I might be able to burn the letter.’
He sat there with his damp arm extended, looking away from me. I had never felt less like laughing, and yet I would have liked to laugh if I had been able.
I said, ‘It’s not the sort of situation one laughs at, even if it is fantastic to think …’
He asked me longingly, ‘It is fantastic. You do think that I’m a fool, don’t you … ?’
I would willingly have laughed a moment before, and yet now, when I only had to lie, all the old jealousies returned. Are husband and wife so much one flesh that if one hates the wife one has to hate the husband too? His question reminded me of how easy he had been to deceive: so easy that he seemed to me almost a conniver at his wife’s unfaithfulness, like the man who leaves loose notes in a hotel bedroom connives at theft, and I hated him for the very quality which had once helped my love.
The sleeve of his jacket steamed away in front of the gas and he repeated, still looking away from me, ‘Of course, I can tell you think me a fool.’
Then the demon spoke, ‘Oh no, I don’t think you a fool, Henry.’
‘You mean, you really think it’s … possible?’
‘Of course it’s possible. Sarah’s human.’
He said indignantly, ‘And I always thought you were her friend,’ as though it was I who had written the letter.
‘Of course,’ I said, ‘you know her so much better than I ever did.’
‘In some ways,’ he said gloomily, and I knew he was thinking of the very ways in which I had known her the best.
‘You asked me, Henry, if I thought you were a fool. I only said there was nothing foolish in the idea. I said nothing against Sarah.’
‘I know, Bendrix. I’m sorry. I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I wake up in the night wondering what to do about this wretched letter.’
‘Burn it.’
‘I wish I could.’ He still had it in his hand and for a moment I really thought he was going to set it alight.
‘Or go and see Mr Savage,’ I said.
‘But I can’t pretend to him that I’m not her husband. Just think, Bendrix, of sitting there in front of a desk in a chair all the other jealous husbands have sat in, telling the same story … Do you think there’s a waiting-room, so that we see each other’s faces as we pass through?’ Strange, I thought, you would almost have taken Henry for an imaginative man. I felt my superiority shaken and the old desire to tease awoke in me again. I said, ‘Why not let me go, Henry?’
‘You?’ I wondered for a moment if I had gone too far, if even Henry might begin to suspect.
‘Yes,’ I said, playing with the danger, for what did it matter now if Henry learnt a little about the past? It would be good for him and perhaps teach him to control his wife better. ‘I could pretend to be a jealous lover,’ I went on. ‘Jealous lovers are more respectable, less ridiculous, than jealous husbands. They are supported by the weight of literature. Betrayed lovers are tragic, never comic. Think of Troilus. I shan’t lose my amour propre when I interview Mr Savage.’ Henry’s sleeve had dried, but he still held it towards the
fire and now the cloth began to scorch. He said, ‘Would you really do that for me, Bendrix?’ and there were tears in his eyes, as though he had never expected or deserved this supreme mark of friendship.
‘Of course I would. Your sleeve’s burning, Henry.’
He looked at it as though it belonged to someone else.
‘But this is fantastic,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what I’ve been thinking about. First to tell you and then to ask you—this. One can’t spy on one’s wife through a friend—and that friend pretend to be her lover.’
‘Oh, it’s not done,’ I said, ‘but neither is adultery or theft or running away from the enemy’s fire. The not done things are done every day, Henry. It’s part of modern life. I’ve done most of them myself.’
He said, ‘You’re a good chap, Bendrix. All I needed was a proper talk—to clear my head,’ and this time he really did hold the letter to the gas flame. When he had laid the last scrap in the ash-tray, I said, ‘The name was Savage and the address either 159 or 169 Vigo Street.’
‘Forget it,’ Henry said. ‘Forget what I’ve told you. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve been getting bad headaches lately. I’ll see a doctor.’
‘That was the door,’ I said. ‘Sarah’s come in.’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that will be the maid. She’s been to the pictures.’
‘No, it was Sarah’s step.’
He went to the door and opened it, and automatically his face fell into the absurd lines of gentleness and affection. I had always been irritated by that mechanical response to her presence because it meant nothing—one cannot always welcome a woman’s presence, even if one is in love, and I believed Sarah when she told me they had never been in love. There was more genuine welcome, I believe, in my moments of hate and distrust. At least to me she was a person in her own right—not part of a house like a bit of porcelain, to be handled with care.
‘Sar-ah,’ he called. ‘Sar-ah,’ spacing the syllables with an unbearable falsity.
How can I make a stranger see her as she stopped in the hall at the foot of the stairs and turned to us? I have never been able to describe even my fictitious characters except by their actions. It has always seemed to me that in a novel the reader should be allowed to imagine a character in any way he chooses: I do not want to supply him with ready-made illustrations. Now I am betrayed by my own technique, for I do not want any other woman substituted for Sarah, I want the reader to see the one broad forehead and bold mouth, the conformation of the skull, but all I can convey is an indeterminate figure turning in the dripping macintosh, saying, ‘Yes, Henry?’ and then ‘You?’ She had always called me ‘you’. ‘Is that you?’ on the telephone, ‘Can you? Will you? Do you?’ so that I imagined, like a fool, for a few minutes at a time, there was only one ‘you’ in the world and that was me.
‘It’s nice to see you,’ I said—this was one of the moments of hate. ‘Been out for a walk?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s a filthy night,’ I said accusingly, and Henry added with apparent anxiety, ‘You’re wet through, Sarah. One day you’ll catch your death of cold.’
A cliché with its popular wisdom can sometimes fall through a conversation like a note of doom, yet even if we had known he spoke the truth, I wonder if either of us would have felt any genuine anxiety for her break through our nerves, distrust, and hate.
II
I cannot say how many days passed. The old disturbance had returned and in that state of blackness one can no more tell the days than a blind man can notice the changes of light. Was it the seventh day or the twenty-first that I decided on my course of action? I have a vague memory now, after three years have passed, of vigils along the edge of the Common, watching their house from a distance, by the pond or under the portico of the eighteenth-century church, on the off-chance that the door would open and Sarah come down those unblasted and well-scoured steps. The right hour never struck. The rainy days were over and the nights were fine with frost, but like a ruined weather-house neither the man nor the woman came out; never again did I see Henry making across the Common after dusk. Perhaps he was ashamed at what he had told me, for he was a very conventional man. I write the adjective with a sneer, and yet if I examine myself I find only admiration and trust for the conventional, like the villages one sees from the high road where the cars pass, looking so peaceful in their thatch and stone, suggesting rest.
I remember I dreamed a lot of Sarah in those obscure days or weeks. Sometimes I would wake with a sense of pain, sometimes with pleasure. If a woman is in one’s thoughts all day, one should not have to dream of her at night. I was trying to write a book that simply would not come. I did my daily five hundred words, but the characters never began to live. So much in writing depends on the superficiality of one’s days. One may be preoccupied with shopping and income tax returns and chance conversations, but the stream of the unconscious continues to flow undisturbed, solving problems, planning ahead: one sits down sterile and dispirited at the desk, and suddenly the words come as though from the air: the situations that seemed blocked in a hopeless impasse move forward: the work has been done while one slept or shopped or talked with friends. But this hate and suspicion, this passion to destroy went deeper than the book—the unconscious worked on it instead, until one morning I woke up and knew, as though I had planned it overnight, that this day I was going to visit Mr Savage.
What an odd collection the trusted professions are. One trusts one’s lawyer, one’s doctor, one’s priest, I suppose, if one is a Catholic, and now I added to the list one’s private detective. Henry’s idea of being scrutinized by the other clients was quite wrong. The office had two waiting-rooms, and I was admitted alone into one. It was curiously unlike what you would expect in Vigo Street—it had something of the musty air in the outer office of a solicitor’s, combined with a voguish choice of reading matter in the waiting-room which was more like a dentist’s—there were Harper’s Bazaar and Life and a number of French fashion periodicals, and the man who showed me in was a little too attentive and well-dressed. He pulled me a chair to the fire and closed the door with great care. I felt like a patient and I suppose I was a patient, sick enough to try the famous shock treatment for jealousy.
The first thing I noticed about Mr Savage was his tie: I suppose it represented some old boys’ association: next how well his face was shaved under the faint brush of powder, and then his forehead, where the pale hair receded, which glistened, a beacon-light of understanding, sympathy, anxiety to be of service. I noticed that when he shook hands he gave my fingers an odd twist. I think he must have been a freemason, and if I had been able to return the pressure, I would probably have received special terms.
‘Mr Bendrix?’ he said. ‘Sit down. I think that is the most comfortable chair.’ He patted a cushion for me and stood solicitously beside me until I had successfully lowered myself into it. Then he drew a straight chair up beside me as though he were going to listen to my pulse. ‘Now just tell me everything in your own words,’ he said. I can’t imagine what other words I could have used but my own. I felt embarrassed and bitter: I had not come here for sympathy, but to pay, if I could afford it, for some practical assistance.
I began, ‘I don’t know what your charges are for watching?’
Mr Savage gently stroked his striped tie. He said, ‘Don’t worry about that now, Mr Bendrix. I charge three guineas for this preliminary consultation, but if you don’t wish to proceed any further I make no charge at all, none at all. The best advertisement, you know,’—he slid the cliché in like a thermometer—‘is a satisfied client.’
In a common situation, I suppose, we all behave much alike and use the same words. I said, ‘This is a very simple case,’ and I was aware with anger that Mr Savage really knew all about it before I began to speak. Nothing that I had to say would be strange to Mr Savage, nothing that he could unearth would not have been dug up so many dozens of times already that year. Even a doctor is sometimes disconcerted b
y a patient, but Mr Savage was a specialist who dealt in only one disease of which he knew every symptom.
He said with a horrible gentleness, ‘Take your time, Mr Bendrix.’
I was becoming confused like all his other patients.
‘There’s really nothing to go on,’ I explained.
‘Ah, that’s my job,’ Mr Savage said. ‘You just give me the mood, the atmosphere. I assume we are discussing Mrs Bendrix?’
‘Not exactly.’
‘But she passes under that name?’
‘No, you are getting this quite wrong. She’s the wife of a friend of mine.’
‘And he’s sent you?’
‘No.’
‘Perhaps you and the lady are—intimate?’
‘No. I’ve only seen her once since 1944.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t quite understand. This is a watching case, you said.’
I hadn’t realized till then that he had angered me so much. ‘Can’t one love or hate,’ I broke out at him, ‘as long as that? Don’t make any mistake. I’m just another of your jealous clients, I don’t claim to be any different from the rest, but there’s been a time-lag in my case.’
Mr Savage laid his hand on my sleeve as though I were a fretful child. ‘There’s nothing discreditable about jealousy, Mr Bendrix. I always salute it as the mark of true love. Now this lady we are discussing, you have reason to suppose that she is now—intimate with another?’
‘Her husband thinks that she’s deceiving him. She has private meetings. She lies about where she’s been. She has—secrets.’
‘Ah, secrets, yes.’
‘There may be nothing in it, of course.’
‘In my long experience, Mr Bendrix, there almost invariably is.’ As though he had sufficiently reassured me now to go ahead with the treatment, Mr Savage returned to his desk and prepared to write. Name. Address. Husband’s occupation. With his pencil poised for a note, Mr Savage asked, ‘Does Mr Miles know of this interview?’