The End of the Affair (5 page)

‘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.

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 the 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.

Afterwards - we were back at Rules and they had just fetched our steaks - she said, ‘There was one scene you did write.’

‘About the onions?’

‘Yes.’ And at that very moment a dish of onions was put on the table. I said to her - it hadn’t even crossed my mind that evening to desire her - ‘And does Henry mind onions?’

‘Yes. He can’t bear them. Do you like them?’

‘Yes.’ She helped me to them and then helped herself.

Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions? It seems improbable and yet I could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn’t, of course, simply the onions -it was that sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable. I put my hand under the cloth and laid it on her knee, and her hand came down and held mine in place. I said, ‘It’s a good steak,’ and heard like poetry her reply, ‘It’s the best I’ve ever eaten.’

There was no pursuit and no seduction. We left half the good steak on our plates and a third of the bottle of claret and came out into Maiden Lane with the same intention in both our minds. At exactly the same spot as before, by the doorway and the grill, we kissed. I said, ‘I’m in love.’

‘Me too.’

‘We can’t go home.’

‘No.’

We caught a taxi by Charing Cross station and I told the driver to take us to Arbuckle Avenue - that was the name they had given among themselves to Eastbourne Terrace, the row of hotels that used to stand along the side of Paddington Station with luxury names, Ritz, Carlton, and the like. The doors of these hotels were always open and you could get a room any time of day for an hour or two. A week ago I revisited the terrace. Half of it was gone -the half where the hotels used to stand had been blasted to bits, and the place where we made love that night was a patch of air. It had been the Bristol; there was a potted fern in the hall and we were shown the best room by a manageress with blue hair: a real Edwardian room with a great gilt double bed and red velvet curtains and a full-length mirror. (People who came to Arbuckle Avenue never required twin beds.) I remember the trivial details very well: how the manageress asked me whether we wanted to stay the night: how the room cost fifteen shillings for a short stay: how the electric meter only took shillings and we hadn’t one between us, but I remember nothing else - how Sarah looked the first time or what we did, except that we were both nervous and made love badly. It didn’t matter. We had started - that was the point. There was the whole of life to look forward to then. Oh, and there’s one other thing I always remember. At the door of our room (‘our room’ after half an hour), when I kissed her again and said how I hated the thought of her going home to Henry, she said, ‘Don’t worry. He’s busy on the widows.’

‘I hate even the idea of his kissing you,’ I said. ‘He won’t. There’s nothing he dislikes more than onions.’

I saw her home to her side of the Common. Henry’s light shone below the door of his study, and we went upstairs. In the living-room we held our hands against each other’s bodies, unable to let go. ‘He’ll be coming up,’ I said, ‘any moment.’

‘We can hear him,’ she said, and she added with horrifying lucidity, ‘There’s one stair that always squeaks.’

I hadn’t time to take off my coat. We kissed and heard the squeak of the stair, and I watched sadly the calmness of her face when Henry came in. She said, ‘We were hoping you’d come up and offer us a drink.’

Henry said, ‘Of course. What will you have, Bendrix?’ I said I wouldn’t have a drink; I had work to do.

‘I thought you said you never worked at night.’

‘Oh, this doesn’t count. A review.’

‘Interesting book?’

‘Not very.’

‘I wish I had your power of - putting things down.’

Sarah saw me to the door and we kissed again. At that moment it was Henry I liked, not Sarah. It was as though all the men in the past and all the men in the future cast their shade over the present. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked me. She was always quick to read the meaning behind a kiss, the whisper in the brain.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you in the morning.’

‘It would be better if I called you,’ she told me, and caution, I thought, caution, how well she knows how to conduct an affair like this, and I remembered again the stair that always - ‘always’ was the phrase she had used -squeaked.