Book Five: Chapter 7 - The End of the Affair

'Where have you been, Henry?' I asked. He was usually the first at breakfast and sometimes he had left the house before I came down, but this morning his plate had not been touched and I heard the front door close softly before he appeared.

'Oh, just down the road,' he said vaguely.

'Been out all night?' I asked.

'No. Of course not.' To clear himself of that charge he told me the truth. 'Father Crompton said Mass today for Sarah.'

'Is he still at it?'

'Once a month. I thought it would be polite to look in.'

'I don't suppose he'd know you were there.'

'I saw him afterwards to thank him. As a matter of fact I asked him to dinner.'

'Then I shall go out.'

'I wish you wouldn't, Bendrix. After all, in his way, he was a friend of Sarah's.'

'You aren't turning a believer too, are you, Henry?'

'Of course I'm not. But they've as much right to then-views as we have.'

So he came to dinner. Ugly, haggard, graceless with the Torquemada nose, he was the man who had kept Sarah from me. He had supported her in the absurd vow which ought to have been forgotten in a week. It was to his church that she had walked in the rain seeking a refuge and 'catching her death' instead. It was hard for me to show even bare politeness and Henry had to shoulder the burden of the dinner. Father Crompton was not used to dining out. One had the impression that this was a duty on which he found it hard to keep his mind. He had very limited small talk, and his answers fell like trees across the road.

'You have a good deal of poverty around here, I sup-pose?' Henry said, rather tired, over the cheese. He had tried so many things - the influence of books, the cinema, a recent visit to France, the possibility of a third war.

'That's not a problem,' Father Crompton replied.

Henry worked hard. 'Immorality?' he asked with the slightly false note we can't avoid with such a word.

'That's never a problem,' Father Crompton said.

'I thought perhaps - the Common - one notices at night... '

'You get it happening with any open space. And it's winter now anyway.' And that closed that.

'Some more cheese, father?'

'No, thank you.'

'I suppose, in a district like this, you have a good deal of trouble raising money - for charity, I mean?'

'People give what they can.'

'Some brandy with your coffee?'

'No thank you.'

'You don't mind if we...'

'Of course I don't. I can't get to sleep on it, that's all, and I have to get up at six.'

'Whatever for?'

'Prayer. You get used to it.'

'I'm afraid I've never been able to pray much,' Henry said, 'since I was a boy. I used to pray to get into the second XV.'

'And did you?'

'I got into the third. I'm afraid that kind of prayer isn't much good, is it, father?'

'Any sort's better than none. It's a recognition of God's power anyway, and that's a kind of praise, I suppose.' I hadn't heard him talk so much since dinner had started.

'I should have thought,' I said, 'it was more like touching wood or avoiding the lines on the pavement. At that age anyway.'

'Oh well,' he said, 'I'm not against a bit of superstition. It gives people the idea that this world's not everything.' He scowled at me down his nose. 'It could be the beginning of wisdom.'

'Your church certainly goes in for superstition in a big way - St Januarius, bleeding statues, visions of the virgin -that sort of thing.'

'We try to sort them out. And isn't it more sensible to believe that anything may happen than...?'

The bell rang. Henry said, 'I told the maid she could go to bed. Would you excuse me, father?'

'I'll go,' I said. I was glad to get away from that oppressive presence. He had the answers too pat: the amateur could never hope to catch him out, he was like a conjuror who bores one by his very skill. I opened the front door and saw a stout woman in black holding a parcel. For a moment I thought it was our charwoman until she said, 'Are you Mr Bendrix, sir?'

'Yes.'

'I was to give you this,' and she thrust the parcel quickly into my hand as though it contained something explosive. 'Who's it from?'

'Mr Parkis, sir.' I turned it over in perplexity. It even occurred to me that he might have mislaid some evidence which now too late he was handing over to me. I wanted to forget Mr Parkis.

'If you'd give me a receipt, sir? I was to put the parcel into your own hands.'

'I haven't a pencil - or paper. I really can't be bothered.'

'You know how Mr Parkis is about records, sir. I've got a pencil in my bag.'

I wrote the receipt out for her on the back of a used envelope. She stowed it carefully away and then scuttled to the gate as though she wanted to get as far as possible as quickly as she could. I stood in the hall weighing the object in my hand. Henry called out to me from the dining-room, 'What is it, Bendrix?'

'A parcel from Parkis,' I said. The phrase sounded like a tongue twister.

'I suppose he's returning the book.'

'At this hour? And it's addressed to me.'

'Well, what is it then?' I didn't want to open the parcel: weren't we both of us engaged in the painful process of forgetting? I felt as though I had been punished enough for my visit to Mr Savage's agency. I heard Father Crompton's voice saying, 'I ought to be off now, Mr Miles.'

'It's early yet.'

I thought, if I stay out of the room, I shan't have to add my politeness to Henry's, he may go sooner. I opened the parcel.

Henry was right. It was one of the Andrew Lang fairy books, but a piece of folded notepaper stuck out between the leaves. It was a letter from Parkis.

'Dear Mr Bendrix,' I read, and thinking it was a note of thanks my eyes impatiently took in the last sentences. 'So under the circumstances I would rather not have the book in the house and hoping that you will explain to Mr Miles that there is no ingratitude on the part of yours truly, Alfred Parkis.'

I sat down in the hall. I heard Henry say, 'Don't think I've got a closed mind, Father Crompton...' and I began to read Parkis's letter from the beginning: 'Dear Mr Bendrix, I am writing to you and not Mr Miles being assured of your sympathy due to our close even though sad association and you being a literary gentleman of imagination and accustomed to strange events. You know my boy has been bad lately with awful pains in his stomach and not being due to ice-cream I have been afraid of appendicitis. The doctor said operate, it can't do any harm, but I have great fear of the knife for my poor boy, his mother having died under it due to negligence I am sure, and what would I do if I lost my boy the same way? I would be quite alone. Forgive all the details, Mr Bendrix, but in my profession we are trained to put things in order and explain first things first, so the judge can't complain he hasn't been given the facts plainly. So I said to the doctor on Monday, let's wait until we are quite certain. Only I think sometimes it was the cold that did it and he waiting and watching outside Mrs Miles's house, and you will forgive me if I say she was a lady of great kindness who deserved to be left alone. You can't pick and choose in my job, but ever since that first day in Maiden Lane I wished it was any other lady I had the watching of.

Anyway my boy was upset terribly when he heard how the poor lady had died. She only spoke to him once, but somehow he got the idea, I think, that his mother had been like her, only she wasn't, though a good true woman in her way too whom I miss every day of my life. Well, when his temperature was 103 which is high for a boy like him, he began to talk to Mrs Miles just the same as he had done in the street, but he told her he was watching her which of course he wouldn't do, having professional pride even at his age. Then he began to cry when she went away, and then he slept, but when he woke up his temperature being still 102, he asked for the present she had promised him in the dream. So that was why I bothered Mr Miles and deceived him of which I am ashamed there not being a professional reason, only my poor boy.

'When I got the book and gave it him he became calmer. But I was worried because the doctor said he would not take any more risks and he must go to hospital on Wednesday and if there had been an empty bed he would have sent him that night. So you see I couldn't sleep for worrying because of my poor wife and my poor boy and being afraid of the knife. I don't mind telling you, Mr Bendrix, that I prayed very hard. I prayed to God and then I prayed to my wife to do what she could because if there's anyone in heaven, she's in heaven now, and I asked Mrs Miles if she was there, to do what she could too. Now if a grown man can do that, Mr Bendrix, you can understand my poor boy imagining things. When I woke up this morning, his temperature was ninety-nine and he hadn't any pain, and when the doctor came there wasn't any tenderness left, so he says we can wait a while and he's been all right all day. Only he told the doctor it was Mrs Miles who came and took away the pain - touching him on the right side of the stomach if you'll forgive the indelicacy - and she wrote in the book for him. But the doctor says he must be kept very quiet and the book excites him, so under the circumstances I would rather not have the book in the house When I turned the letter over there was a postscript.

'There is something written in the book, but anyone can see that was many years ago when Mrs Miles was a little girl, only I can't explain that to my poor boy for fear the pain might return. Respectfully, A. P.' I turned to the flyleaf and there was the unformed scribble with indelible pencil just as I had seen it before in the other books in which the child Sarah Bertram had composed her mottoes.

'When I was ill my mother gave me this book by Lang.

If any well person steals it he will get a great bang.

But if you are sick in bed

You can have it to read instead.'

I carried it back with me into the dining-room. 'What was it?' Henry asked.

'The book,' I said. 'Did you read what Sarah had written in it before you gave it to Parkis?'

'No. Why?'

'A coincidence, that's all. But it seems you don't need to belong to Father Crompton's persuasion to be superstitious.' I gave Henry the letter: he read it and handed it to Father Crompton.

'I don't like it,' Henry said. 'Sarah's dead. I hate to see her being bandied about 'I know what you mean. I feel it too.'

'It's like hearing her discussed by strangers.'

'They aren't saying anything ill of her,' Father Crompton said. He laid the letter down. 'I must go now.' But he made no move, looking at the letter on the table. He asked, 'And the inscription?'

I pushed the book across to him. 'Oh, it was written years ago. She wrote that kind of thing in a lot of her books like all children.'

'Time's a strange thing,' Father Crompton said.

'Of course the child wouldn't understand it was all done in the past.'

'St Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn't exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist. I don't know that we can understand time any better than a child.'

'I didn't mean...'

'Oh well,' he said, standing up, 'you mustn't take this to heart, Mr Miles. It only goes to show what a good woman your wife was.'

'That's no help to me, is it? She's part of the past that has ceased to exist.'

'The man who wrote that letter had a lot of sense in him. There's no harm in praying to the dead as well as for them.' He repeated his phrase, 'She was a good woman.'

Quite suddenly I lost my temper. I believe I was annoyed chiefly by his complacency, the sense that nothing intellectual could ever trouble him, the assumption of an intimate knowledge of somebody he had only known for a few hours or days, whom we had known for years. I said, 'She was nothing of the sort.'

'Bendrix,' Henry said sharply.

'She could put blinkers on any man,' I said, 'even on a priest. She's only deceived you, father, as she deceived her husband and me. She was a consummate liar.'

'She never pretended to be what she wasn't'

'I wasn't her only lover -'

'Stop it,' Henry said. 'You've no right... '

'Let him alone,' Father Crompton said. 'Let the poor man rave.'

'Don't give me your professional pity, father. Keep it for your penitents.'

'You can't dictate to me whom I'm to pity, Mr Bendrix.'

'Any man could have her.' I longed to believe what I said, for then there would be nothing to miss or regret. I would no longer be tied to her wherever she was. I would be free.

'And you can't teach me anything about penitence, Mr Bendrix. I've had twenty-five years of the Confessional. There's nothing we can do some of the saints haven't done before us.'

'I've got nothing to repent except failure. Go back to your own people, father, back to your bloody little box and your beads.'

'You'll find me there any time you want me.'

'Me want you, father? Father, I don't want to be rude, but I'm no Sarah. No Sarah.'

Henry said with embarrassment,' I'm sorry, father.'

'You don't need to be. I know when a man's in pain.'

I couldn't get through the tough skin of his complacency. I pushed my chair back and said, 'You're wrong, father. This isn't anything subtle like pain. I'm not in pain, I'm in hate. I hate Sarah because she was a little tart, I hate Henry because she stuck to him, and I hate you and your imaginary God because you took her away from all of us.'

'You're a good hater,' Father Crompton said.

Tears stood in my eyes because I was powerless to hurt any of them. 'To hell with the lot of you,' I said.

I slammed the door behind me and shut them in together. Let him spill his holy wisdom to Henry, I thought, I'm alone. I want to be alone. If I can't have you, I'll be alone always. Oh, I'm as capable of belief as the next man. I would only have to shut the eyes of my mind for a long enough time, and I could believe that you came to Parkis's boy in the night with your touch that brings peace. Last month in the crematorium I asked you to save that girl from me and you pushed your mother between us - or so they might say. But if I start believing that, then I have to believe in your God. I'd have to love your God. I'd rather love the men you slept with.

I've got to be reasonable, I told myself going upstairs. Sarah has been dead a long time now: one doesn't go on loving the dead with this intensity, only the living, and she's not alive, she can't be alive. I mustn't believe that she's alive. I lay down on my bed and closed my eyes and I tried to be reasonable. If I hate her so much as I sometimes do, how can I love her? Can one really hate and love? Or is it only myself that I really hate? I hate the books I write with their trivial unimportant skill, I hate the craftsman's mind in me so greedy for copy that I set out to seduce a woman I didn't love for the information she could give me, I hate this body that enjoyed so much but was inadequate to express what the heart felt, and I hate my untrusting mind, that set Parkis on the watch who laid powder on door bells, rifled wastepaper baskets, stole your secrets.

From the drawer of my bedside table I took her journal and opening it at random, under a date last January, I read: 'O God, if I could really hate you, what would that mean?' And I thought, hating Sarah is only loving Sarah and hating myself is only loving myself. I'm not worth hating - Maurice Bendrix, author of 'The Ambitious Host', 'The Crowned Image', 'The Grave on the Water-Front', Bendrix the scribbler. Nothing - not even Sarah - is worth our hatred if You exist, except You. And, I thought, sometimes I've hated Maurice, but would I have hated him if I hadn't loved him too? O God, if I could really hate you...

I remembered how Sarah had prayed to the God she didn't believe in, and now I spoke to the Sarah I didn't believe in. I said: You sacrificed both of us once to bring me back to life, but what sort of a life is this without you? It's all very well for you to love God. You are dead. You have him. But I'm sick with life, I'm rotten with health. If I begin to love God, I can't just die. I've got to do something about it. I had to touch you with my hands, I had to taste you with my tongue: one can't love and do nothing. It's no use your telling me not to worry as you did once in a dream. If I ever loved like that, it would be the end of everything. Loving you I had no appetite for food, I felt no lust for any other woman, but loving him there'd be no pleasure in anything at all with him away. I'd even lose my work, I'd cease to be Bendrix. Sarah, I'm afraid.

That night I came wide-awake at two in the morning. I went down to the larder and got myself some biscuits and a drink of water. I was sorry I had spoken like that about Sarah in front of Henry. The priest had said there was nothing we could do that some saint had not done. That might be true of murder and adultery, the spectacular sins, but could a saint ever have been guilty of envy and meanness? My hate was as petty as my love. I opened the door softly and looked in at Henry. He lay asleep with the light on and his arm shielding his eyes. With the eyes hidden there was an anonymity about the whole body. He was just a man - one of us. He was like the first enemy soldier a man encounters on a battlefield, dead and indistinguishable, not a White or a Red, but just a human being like himself. I put two biscuits by his bed in case he woke and turned the light out