‘Do you remember I offered to see him for you?’
‘We must both have been a bit overwrought.’ He stared up at the old horns overhead, screwing up his eyes in his attempt to read the name of the donor. He said stupidly, ‘You seem to have a lot of heads.’ I wasn’t going to let him off. I said, ‘I went to see him a few days later.’
He put down his glass and said, ‘Bendrix, you had absolutely no right…’
‘I’m paying all the charges.’
‘It’s infernal cheek.’ He stood up, but I had him penned in where he couldn’t get past without an act of violence, and violence wasn’t in Henry’s character.
‘Surely you’d have liked her cleared?’ I said.
‘There was nothing to clear. I want to go, please.’
‘I think you ought to read the reports.’
‘I’ve no intention …’
‘Then I think I shall have to read you the bit about the surreptitious visits. Her love letter I returned to the detectives for filing. My dear Henry, you’ve been properly led up the garden.’
I really thought that he was going to hit me. If he had, I would have struck back with pleasure, struck back at this oaf to whom Sarah had remained in her way so stupidly loyal for so many years, but at that moment the secretary of the club came in. He was a man with a long grey beard and a soup-stained waistcoat, who looked like a Victorian poet but in fact wrote little sad reminiscences of the dogs he had once known. (For Ever Fido had been a great success in 1912.) ‘Ah, Bendrix,’ he said, ‘I haven’t seen you here in a long while.’ I introduced him to Henry and he said with the quickness of a hairdresser, ‘I’ve been following the reports every day.’
‘What reports?’ For once Henry’s work had not come first to his mind when that word was uttered.
‘The Royal Commission.’
When at last he had gone, Henry said, ‘Now will you please give me the reports and let me pass.’
I imagined that he had been thinking things over while the secretary was with us, so I handed him the last report. He put it straight into the fire and rammed it home with the poker. I couldn’t help thinking that the gesture had dignity. ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘You haven’t got rid of the facts.’
‘To hell with the facts,’ Henry said. I had never heard him swear before.
‘I can always let you have a carbon copy.’
‘Will you let me go now?’ Henry said. The demon had done its work, I felt drained of venom. I took my legs off the fender and let Henry pass. He walked straight out of the club, forgetting his hat, that black superior hat that I had seen come dripping across the Common—it seemed an age and not a matter of weeks ago.
IV
I had expected to overtake him, or at least to come in sight of him ahead up the long reach of Whitehall, and so I carried his hat with me, but he was nowhere to be seen. I turned back not knowing where to go. That is the worst of time nowadays—there is so much of it. I looked in the small bookshop near Charing Cross underground and wondered whether Sarah at this moment might have laid her hand on the powdered bell in Cedar Road with Mr Parkis waiting round the corner. If I could have turned back time I think I would have done so: I would have let Henry go walking by, blinded by the rain. But I am beginning to doubt whether anything I can do will ever alter the course of events. Henry and I are allies now, in our fashion, but are we allies against an infinite tide?
I went across the road, past the fruit-hawkers, and into the Victoria Gardens. Not many people were sitting on the benches in the grey windy air, and almost at once I saw Henry, but it took me a moment to recognize him. Out of doors, without a hat, he seemed to have joined the anonymous and the dispossessed, the people who come up from the poorer suburbs and nobody knows—the old man feeding sparrows, the woman with a brown-paper parcel marked Swan & Edgar’s. He sat there with his head bent, looking at his shoes. I have been sorry for myself for so long, so exclusively, that it seemed strange to me to feel sorry for my enemy. I put the hat quietly down on the seat beside him and would have walked away, but he looked up and I could see that he had been crying. He must have travelled a very long way. Tears belong to a different world from Royal Commissions.
‘I’m sorry, Henry,’ I said. How easily we believe we can slide out of our guilt by a motion of contrition.
‘Sit down,’ Henry commanded with the authority of his tears, and I obeyed him. He said, ‘I’ve been thinking. Were you two lovers, Bendrix?’
‘Why should you imagine … ?’
‘It’s the only explanation.’
‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’
‘It’s the only excuse too, Bendrix. Can’t you see that what you’ve done is—monstrous?’ As he spoke he turned his hat over and checked the maker’s name.
‘I suppose you think I’m an awful fool, Bendrix, not to have guessed. Why didn’t she leave me?’
Had I got to instruct him about the character of his own wife? The poison was beginning to work in me again. I said, ‘You have a good safe income. You’re a habit she’s formed. You’re security.’ He listened seriously and attentively as though I were a witness before the Commission giving evidence on oath. I went sourly on, ‘You were no more trouble to us than you’d been to the others.’
‘There were others too?’
‘Sometimes I thought you knew all about it and didn’t care. Sometimes I longed to have it out with you—like we are doing now when it’s too late. I wanted to tell you what I thought of you.’
‘What did you think?’
‘That you were her pimp. You pimped for me and you pimped for them, and now you are pimping for the latest one. The eternal pimp. Why don’t you get angry, Henry?’
‘I never knew.’
‘You pimped with your ignorance. You pimped by never learning how to make love with her, so she had to look elsewhere. You pimped by giving opportunities … You pimped by being a bore and a fool, so now somebody who isn’t a bore and fool is playing about with her in Cedar Road.’
‘Why did she leave you?’
‘Because I became a bore and a fool too. But I wasn’t born one, Henry. You created me. She wouldn’t leave you, so I became a bore, boring her with complaints and jealousy.’
He said, ‘People have a great opinion of your books.’
‘And they say you’re a first-class chairman. What the hell does our work matter?’
He said sadly, ‘I don’t know anything else that does,’ looking up at the grey cumulus passing above the south bank. The gulls flew low over the barges and the shot-tower stood black in the winter light among the ruined warehouses. The man who fed the sparrows had gone and the woman with the brown-paper parcel, the fruit-sellers cried like animals in the dusk outside the station. It was as if the shutters were going up on the whole world; soon we should all of us be abandoned to our own devices. ‘I wondered why you hadn’t been to see us all that time,’ Henry said.
‘I suppose—in a way—we’d got to the end of love. There was nothing else we could do together. She could shop and cook and fall asleep with you, but she could only make love with me.’
‘She’s very fond of you,’ he said as though it were his job to comfort me, as though my eyes were the ones bruised with tears.
‘One isn’t satisfied with fondness.’
‘I was.’
‘I wanted love to go on and on, never to get less …’ I had never spoken to anyone like this, except Sarah, but Henry’s reply was not Sarah’s. He said, ‘It’s not in human nature. One has to be satisfied …’ but that wasn’t what Sarah had said, and sitting there beside Henry in the Victoria Gardens, watching the day die, I remembered the end of the whole ‘affair’.
V
She had said to me—they were nearly the last words I heard from her before she came dripping into the hall from her assignation—‘You needn’t be so scared. Love doesn’t end. Just because we don’t see e
ach other …’ She had already made her decision, though I didn’t know it till next day, when the telephone presented nothing but the silent open mouth of somebody found dead. She said, ‘My dear, my dear. People go on loving God, don’t they, all their lives without seeing Him?’
‘That’s not our kind of love.’
‘I sometimes don’t believe there’s any other kind.’ I suppose I should have recognized that she was already under a stranger’s influence—she had never spoken like that when we were first together. We had agreed so happily to eliminate God from our world. As I shone the torch carefully to light her way across the devastated hall, she said again, ‘Everything must be all right. If we love enough.’
‘I can’t turn on any more,’ I said. ‘You’ve got everything.’
‘You don’t know,’ she said. ‘You don’t know.’
The glass from the windows crumbled under our feet. Only the old Victorian stained glass above the door had stood firm. The glass turned white where it powdered like the ice children have broken in wet fields or along the side of roads. She told me again, ‘Don’t be scared.’ I knew she wasn’t referring to those strange new weapons that still, after five hours, droned steadily up from the south like bees.
It was the first night of what were later called the VIS in June 1944. We had become unused to air-raids. Apart from the short spell in February 1944, there had been nothing since the blitz petered out with the great final raids of 1941. When the sirens went and the first robots came over, we assumed that a few planes had broken through our night defence. One felt a sense of grievance when the All Clear had still not sounded after an hour. I remember saying to Sarah, ‘They must have got slack. Too little to do,’ and at that moment, lying in the dark on my bed, we saw our first robot. It passed low across the Common and we took it for a plane on fire and its odd deep bumble for the sound of an engine out of control. A second came and then a third. We changed our minds then about our defences. ‘They are shooting them like pigeons,’ I said, ‘they must be crazy to go on.’ But go on they did, hour after hour, even after the dawn had begun to break, until even we realized that this was something new.
We had only just lain down on the bed when the raid started. It made no difference. Death never mattered at those times—in the early days I even used to pray for it: the shattering annihilation that would prevent for ever the getting up, the putting on of clothes, the watching her torch trail across to the opposite side of the Common like the tail-light of a slow car driving away. I have wondered sometimes whether eternity might not after all exist as the endless prolongation of the moment of death, and that was the moment I would have chosen, that I would still choose if she were alive, the moment of absolute trust and absolute pleasure, the moment when it was impossible to quarrel because it was impossible to think. I have complained of her caution, and bitterly compared our use of the word ‘onions’ with the scrap of her writing Mr Parkis had salvaged, but reading her message to my unknown successor would have hurt less if I hadn’t known how capable she was of abandonment. No, the VIS didn’t affect us until the act of love was over. I had spent everything I had, and was lying back with my head on her stomach and her taste—as thin and elusive as water—in my mouth, when one of the robots crashed down on to the Common and we could hear the glass breaking further down the south side.
‘I suppose we ought to go to the basement,’ I said.
‘Your landlady will be there. I can’t face other people.’
After possession comes the tenderness of responsibility when one forgets one is only a lover, responsible for nothing. I said, ‘She may be away. I’ll go down and see.’
‘Don’t go. Please don’t go.’
‘I won’t be a moment.’ It was a phrase one continued to use, although one knew in those days that a moment might well be eternity long. I put on my dressing-gown and found my torch. I hardly needed it: the sky was grey now and in the unlit room I could see the outline of her face.
She said, ‘Be quick.’
As I ran down the stairs I heard the next robot coming over, and then the sudden waiting silence when the engine cut out. We hadn’t yet had time to learn that that was the moment of risk, to get out of the line of glass, to lie flat. I never heard the explosion, and I woke after five seconds or five minutes in a changed world. I thought I was still on my feet and I was puzzled by the darkness: somebody seemed to be pressing a cold fist into my cheek and my mouth was salty with blood. My mind for a few moments was clear of everything except a sense of tiredness as though I had been on a long journey. I had no memory at all of Sarah and I was completely free from anxiety, jealousy, insecurity, hate: my mind was a blank sheet on which somebody had just been on the point of writing a message of happiness. I felt sure that when my memory came back, the writing would continue and that I should be happy.
But when memory did return it was not in that way. I realized first that I was lying on my back and that what balanced over me, shutting out the light, was the front door: some other debris had caught it and suspended it a few inches above my body, though the odd thing was that later I found myself bruised from the shoulders to the knees as if by its shadow. The fist that fitted into my cheek was the china handle of the door, and it had knocked out a couple of my teeth. After that, of course, I remembered Sarah and Henry and the dread of love ending.
I got out from under the door and dusted myself down. I called to the basement but there was nobody there. Through the blasted doorway I could see the grey morning light and I had a sense of great emptiness stretching out from the ruined hall: I realized that a tree which had blocked the light had simply ceased to exist—there was no sign of even a fallen trunk. A long way off wardens were blowing whistles. I went upstairs. The first flight had lost its banisters and was a foot deep in plaster, but the house hadn’t really, by the standard of those days, suffered badly: it was our neighbours who had caught the full blast. The door of my room was open and coming along the passage I could see Sarah; she had got off the bed and was crouched on the floor—from fear, I supposed. She looked absurdly young, like a naked child. I said, ‘That was a close one.’
She turned quickly and stared at me with fear. I hadn’t realized that my dressing-gown was torn and dusted all over with plaster; my hair was white with it, and there was blood on my mouth and cheeks. ‘Oh, God,’ she said, ‘you’re alive.’
‘You sound disappointed.’
She got up from the floor and reached for her clothes. I told her, ‘There’s no point in your going yet. There must be an All Clear soon.’
‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.
‘Two bombs don’t fall in one place,’ I said, but automatically, for that was a piece of folklore that had often proved false.
‘You’re hurt.’
‘I’ve lost two teeth, that’s all.’
‘Come over here, let me wash your face.’ She had finished dressing before I had time to make another protest—no woman I have ever known could dress as quickly. She bathed my face very slowly and carefully.
‘What were you doing on the floor?’ I asked.
‘Praying.’
‘Who to?’
‘To anything that might exist.’
‘It would have been more practical to come downstairs.’ Her seriousness frightened me. I wanted to tease her out of it.
‘I did,’ she said.
‘I didn’t hear you.’
‘There was nobody there. I couldn’t see you, until I saw your arm stretching out from under the door. I thought you were dead.’
‘You might have come and tried.’
‘I did. I couldn’t lift the door.’
‘There was room to move me. The door wasn’t holding me. I’d have woken up.’
‘I don’t understand. I knew for certain you were dead.’
‘There wasn’t much to pray for then, was there?’ I teased her. ‘Except a miracle.’
‘When you are hopeless enough,’ she said, ‘you can pray
for miracles. They happen, don’t they, to the poor, and I was poor.’
‘Stay till the All Clear.’ She shook her head and walked straight out of the room. I followed her down the stairs and began against my will to badger her. ‘Shall I see you this afternoon?’
‘No. I can’t.’
‘Some time tomorrow …’
‘Henry’s coming back.’
Henry. Henry. Henry—that name tolled through our relationship, damping every mood of happiness or fun or exhilaration with its reminder that love dies, affection and habit win the day. ‘You needn’t be so scared,’ she said, ‘love doesn’t end …’ and nearly two years passed before that meeting in the hall and, ‘You?’
VI
For days after that, of course, I had hope. It was only a coincidence, I thought, that the telephone wasn’t answered, and when after a week I met the maid and inquired about the Mileses and learnt that she was away in the country, I told myself that in wartime letters are lost. Morning after morning I would hear the rattle in the post-box and deliberately I would remain upstairs until my landlady fetched my mail. I wouldn’t look through the letters—disappointment had to be postponed, hope kept alive as long as possible; I would read each letter in turn and only when I reached the bottom of the pile could I be certain that there was nothing from Sarah. Then life withered until the four o’clock post, and after that one had to get through the night again.
For nearly a week I didn’t write to her: pride prevented me, until one morning I abandoned it completely, writing anxiously and bitterly, marking the envelope addressed to the north side, ‘Urgent’ and ‘Please forward’. I got no reply and then I gave up hope and remembered exactly what she had said. ‘People go on loving God, don’t they, all their lives without seeing Him?’ I thought with hatred, she always has to show up well in her own mirror: she mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble to herself. She won’t admit that now she prefers to go to bed with X.