‘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.
VI
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 VIs 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
1/8d.
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 gla
nce 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 Café 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.
‘Me and my boy sat down on a proximate couch,’ I read. ‘The party and the gentleman were obviously very close, treating each other with affectionate lack of ceremony, and I think on one occasion holding hands below the table. I could not be certain of this, but the party’s left hand was out of sight and the gentleman’s right hand too which generally indicates a squeeze of that nature. After a short and intimate conversation they proceeded on foot to a quiet and secluded restaurant known to its customers as Rules and choosing a couch rather than a table they ordered two pork chops.’
‘Are the pork chops important?’
‘They might be marks of identification, sir, if frequently indulged in.’
‘You didn’t identify the man, then?’
‘You will see, sir, if you read on.’
‘I drank a cocktail at the bar when I observed this order of the pork chops, but I was unable to elicit from any of the waiters or from the lady behind the bar the identity of the gentleman. Although I couched my questions in a vague and nonchalant manner they obviously aroused curiosity, and I thought it better to leave. However by striking up an acquaintance with the stage doorkeeper of the Vaudeville Theatre I was able to keep the restaurant under observation.’
‘How,’ I asked, ‘did you strike up the acquaintance?’
‘At the bar of the “Bedford Head”, sir, seeing as the parties were safely occupied with the order for chops, and afterwards accompanied him back to the theatre, where the stage door …’
‘I know the place.’
‘I have tried to compress my report, sir, to essentials.’
‘Quite right.’
The report continued: ‘After lunch the parties proceeded together up Maiden Lane and parted outside a general grocery. I had the impression they were labouring under great emotion, and it occurred to me that they might be parting for good, a happy ending if I may say so to this investigation.’
Again he interrupted me anxiously, ‘You’ll forgive the personal touch?’
‘Of course.’
‘Even in my profession, sir, we sometimes find our emotions touched, and I liked the lady—the party in question, that is.’
‘I hesitated whether to follow the gentleman or the party in question, but I decided my instructions would not permit the former. I followed the latter therefore. She walked a little way towards Charing Cross Road, appearing much agitated. Then she turned into the National Portrait Gallery but only stayed a few minutes …’
‘Is there anything more of importance?’
‘No, sir. I think really she was just looking for a place to sit down because next thing she turned into a church.’
‘A church?’
‘A Roman church, sir, in Maiden Lane. You’ll find it all there. But not to pray, sir. Just to sit.’
‘You know even that much, do you?’
‘Naturally I followed the party in. I knelt down a few pews behind so as to appear a bona fide worshipper, and I can assure you, sir, she didn’t pray. She’s not a Roman, is she, sir?’
‘No.’
‘It was to sit in the dark, sir, till she calmed down.’
‘Perhaps she was meeting someone?’
‘No, sir. She only stayed three minutes and she didn’t speak to anyone. If you ask me, she wanted a good cry.’
‘Possibly. But you are wrong about the hands, Mr Parkis.’
‘The hands, sir?’
I moved so that the light caught my face more fully.
‘We never so much as touched hands.’
I felt sorry for him now that I had had my joke—I felt sorry to have scared yet further someone already so timid. He watched me with his mouth a little open, as though he had received a sudden hurt and was now waiting paralysed for the next stab. I said, ‘I expect that sort of mistake often happens, Mr Parkis. Mr Savage ought to have introduced us.’
‘Oh no, sir,’ he said miserably, ‘it was up to me.’ Then he bent his head and sat there, looking into his hat that lay on his knees. I tried to cheer him up. ‘It’s not serious,’ I said. ‘If you look at it from the outside, it’s really quite funny.’
‘But I’m on the inside, sir,’ he said. He turned his hat round and went on in a voice as damp and dreary as the common outside, ‘It’s not Mr Savage I mind about, sir. He’s as understanding a man as you’ll meet in the profession—it’s my boy. He started with great ideas about me.’ He fished from the depths of his misery a deprecating and frightened smile. ‘You know the kind of reading they do, sir. Nick Carters and the like.’
‘Why should he ever know about this?’
‘You’ve got to play straight with a child, sir, and he’s sure to ask questions. He’ll want to know how I followed up—that’s the thing he’s learning, to follow up.’
‘Couldn’t you tell him that I’d been able to identify the man—just that, and I wasn’t interested?’
‘It’s kind of you to suggest it, sir, but you have to look at this all round. I don’t say I wouldn’t do it even to my boy, but what’s he going to think if he ever comes across you—in the course of the investigation?’
‘That’s not necessary.’
‘But it might well happen, sir.’
‘Why not leave him at home this time?’
‘It’s just making matters worse, sir. He hasn’t got a mother, and it’s his school holidays and I’ve always gone on the lines of educating him in his holidays—with Mr Savage’s full approval. No. I made a fool of myself that time, and I’ve got to face it. If only he weren’t quite so serious, sir, but he does take it to heart when I make a floater. One day Mr Prentice—that’s Mr Savage’s assistant, a rather hard man, sir—said, “Another of your floaters, Parkis,” in the boy’s hearing. That’s what opened his eyes first.’ He stood up with an air of enormous resolution (who are we to measure another man’s courage?) and said, ‘I’ve been keeping you, sir, talking about my problems.’
‘I’ve enjoyed it, Mr Parkis,’ I said without irony. ‘Try not to worry. Your boy must take after you.’
‘He has his mother’s brains, sir,’ he said sadly. ‘I must hurry. It’s cold out, though I found him a nice sheltered spot before I came away. But he’s so keen I don’t trust him to keep dry. Would you mind initialling the expenses, sir, if you approve them?’
I watched him from my window with his thin macintosh turned up and his old hat turned down; the snow had increased and already under the third lamp he looked like a small snowman with the mud showing through. It occurred to me with amazement that for ten minutes I had not thought of Sarah or of my jealousy; I had become nearly human enough to think of another person’s trouble.
VII
Jealousy, or so I have always believed, exists only with desire. The Old Testament writers were fond of using the words ‘a jealous God’, and perhaps it was their rough and oblique way of expressing belief in the love of God for man. But I suppose there are different kinds of desire. My desire now was nearer hatred than love, and Henry I had reason to believe, from what Sarah once told me, had long ceased to feel any physical desire for her. And yet, I think, in those days he was as jealous as I was. His desire was simply for companionship: he felt for the first time excluded from Sarah’s confidence: he was worried and despairing—he didn’t know what was going on or what was going to happen. He was living in a terrible insecurity. To that extent his plight was worse than mine. I had the security of possessing nothing. I could have no more than I had lost, while he still owned her presence at the table, the sound of her feet on t
he stairs, the opening and closing of doors, the kiss on the cheek—I doubt if there was much else now, but what a lot to a starving man is just that much. And perhaps what made it worse, he had once enjoyed the sense of security as I never had. Why, at the moment when Mr Parkis returned across the Common, he didn’t even know that Sarah and I had once been lovers. And when I write that word my brain against my will travels irresistibly back to the point where pain began.
A whole week went by after the fumbling kiss in Maiden Lane before I rang Sarah up. She had mentioned at dinner that Henry didn’t like the cinema and so she rarely went. They were showing a film of one of my books at Warner’s and so, partly to ‘show off’, partly because I felt that kiss must somehow be followed up for courtesy’s sake, partly too because I was still interested in the married life of a civil servant, I asked Sarah to come with me. ‘I suppose it’s no good asking Henry?’
‘Not a bit,’ she said.
‘He could join us for dinner afterwards?’
‘He’s bringing a lot of work back with him. Some wretched Liberal is asking a question next week in the House about widows.’ So you might say that the Liberal—I believe he was a Welshman called Lewis—made our bed for us that night.
The film was not a good film, and at moments it was acutely painful to see situations that had been so real to me twisted into the stock clichés of the screen. I wished I had gone to something else with Sarah. At first I had said to her, ‘That’s not what I wrote, you know,’ but I couldn’t keep on saying that. She touched me sympathetically with her hand, and from then on we sat there with our hands in the innocent embrace that children and lovers use. Suddenly and unexpectedly, for a few minutes only, the film came to life. I forgot that this was my story, and that for once this was my dialogue, and was genuinely moved by a small scene in a cheap restaurant. The lover had ordered steak and onions, the girl hesitated for a moment to take the onions because her husband didn’t like the smell, the lover was hurt and angry because he realized what was behind her hesitation, which brought to his mind the inevitable embrace on her return home. The scene was a success: I had wanted to convey the sense of passion through some common simple episode without any rhetoric in words or action, and it worked. For a few seconds I was happy—this was writing: I wasn’t interested in anything else in the world. I wanted to go home and read the scene over: I wanted to work at something new: I wished, how I wished, that I hadn’t invited Sarah Miles to dinner.