Book Two: Chapter 2 - The End of the Affair

'Dear sir,' the letter said, 'I am glad to be able to report that me and my boy have made friendly contact with the domestic at Number 17. This has enabled the investigation to proceed with greater speed because I am sometimes able to take a squint at the party's engagement book and thus obtain movements, also inspect from day to day the contents of the party's waste-paper basket, from which I include herewith an interesting exhibit, which please return with observations. The party in question also keeps a diary and has kept one for some years, but so far the domestic who in future I shall refer to for greater security as my friend has not been able to lay hand on it, being as how the party keeps the same under lock and key, which may or may not be a suspicious circumstance. Apart from the important exhibit attached hereto, the party seems to spend a great deal of time in not keeping the appointments arranged as per her engagement book which has to be regarded as a blind, however personally unwilling to take a low view or cast a bias in an investigation of this order where exact truth is desired for the sake of all parties.'

We are not hurt only by tragedy: the grotesque too carries weapons, undignified, ridiculous weapons. There were times when I wanted to crush Mr Parkis's rambling evasive inefficient reports into his mouth in the presence of that boy of his. It was as if in my attempt to trap Sarah (but for what purpose? To hurt Henry or to hurt myself?) I had let a clown come tumbling into our intimacy. Intimacy. Even that word smacks of Mr Parkis's reports. Didn't he write once, 'Though I have no direct evidence of intimacy having taken place at 16 Cedar Road, the party certainly showed an intent to deceive'? But that was later. In this report of his I learned only that on two occasions when Sarah had written down engagements to visit her dentist and her dressmaker, she had not turned up at her appointments if they had ever existed; she had evaded pursuit.

And then turning over Mr Parkis's crude document, written in mauve ink on cheap notepaper in his thin Waverley handwriting, I saw the bold clean writing of Sarah herself. I had not realized I would recognize it after nearly two years.

It was only a scrap of paper pinned to the back of the report, and it was marked with a big A in red pencil. Under the A, Mr Parkis had written, 'Important in view of possible proceedings that all documentary evidence should be returned for filing.' The scrap had been salvaged from the waste-paper basket and smoothed carefully out as it might have been by a lover's hand. And certainly it must have been addressed to a lover: 'I have no need to write to you or talk to you, you know everything before I can speak, but when one loves, one feels the need to use the same old ways one has always used. I know I am only beginning to love, but already I want to abandon everything, everybody but you: only fear and habit prevent me. Dear...' There was no more. It stared boldly up at me, and I couldn't help thinking how I had forgotten every line of all the notes she had once addressed to me. Wouldn't I have kept them if they had ever confessed so completely to her love, and for fear of my keeping them hadn't she always in those days been careful to write to me, as she put it, 'between the lines'? But this latest love had burst the cage of lines. It had refused to be kept between them out of sight. There was one code word I did remember - 'onions'. That word had been allowed in our correspondence to represent discreetly our passion. Love became 'onions', even the act itself 'onions'. 'Already I want to abandon everything, everybody, but you,' and onions I thought, with hatred, onions - that was the way in my time.

I wrote 'No comment' under the scrap of letter, put it back in an envelope and addressed it to Mr Parkis, but when I woke in the night I could recite the whole thing over to myself, and the word 'abandon' took on many kinds of physical image. I lay there unable to sleep, one memory after another pricking me with hatred and desire: her hair fanning out on the parquet floor and the stair squeaking, a day in the country when we had lain down in a ditch out of view of the road and I could see the sparkle of frost between the fronds of hair on the hard ground and a tractor came pushing by at the moment of crisis and the man never turned his head. Why doesn't hatred kill desire? I would have given anything to sleep. I would have behaved like a schoolboy if I had believed in the possibility of a substitute. But there was a time when I had tried to find a substitute, and it hadn't worked.

I am a jealous man - it seems stupid to write these words in what is, I suppose, a long record of jealousy, jealousy of Henry, jealousy of Sarah and jealousy of that other whom Mr Parkis was so maladroitly pursuing. Now that all this belongs to the past, I feel my jealousy of Henry only when memories become particularly vivid (because I swear that if we had been married, with her loyalty and my desire, we could have been happy for a lifetime), but there still remains jealousy of my rival - a melodramatic word painfully inadequate to express the unbearable complacency, confidence and success he always enjoys. Sometimes I think he wouldn't even recognize me as part of the picture, and I feel an enormous desire to draw attention to myself, to shout in his ear, 'You can't ignore me. Here I am. Whatever happened later, Sarah loved me then.'

Sarah and I used to have long arguments on jealousy. I was jealous even of the past, of which she spoke to me frankly as it came up - the affairs that meant nothing at all (except possibly the unconscious desire to find that final spasm Henry had so woefully failed to evoke). She was as loyal to her lovers as she was to Henry, but what should have provided me with some comfort (for undoubtedly she would be loyal to me too) angered me. There was a time when she would laugh at my anger, simply refusing to believe that it was genuine, just as she refused to believe in her own beauty, and I would be just as angry because she refused to be jealous of my past or my possible future. I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.

The arguments always took the same form and I only describe one particular occasion because on that occasion the argument ended in action - a stupid action leading nowhere, unless eventually to this doubt that always comes when I begin to write, the feeling that after all perhaps she was right and I was wrong.

I remember saying angrily, 'This is just a hang-over from your old frigidity. A frigid woman is never jealous, you simply haven't caught up yet on ordinary human emotions.'

It angered me that she didn't make any claim. 'You may be right. I'm only saying I want you to be happy. I hate your being unhappy. I don't mind anything you do that makes you happy.'

'You just want an excuse. If I sleep with somebody else, you feel you can do the same - any time.'

'That's neither here nor there. I want you to be happy, that's all.'

'You'd make my bed for me?'

'Perhaps.'

Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust. In a closely beleaguered city every sentry is a potential traitor. Even before the days of Mr Parkis I was trying to check on her: I would catch her out in small lies, evasions that meant nothing except her fear of me. For every lie I would magnify into a betrayal, and even in the most open statement I would read hidden meanings. Because I couldn't bear the thought of her so much as touching another man, I feared it all the time, and I saw intimacy in the most casual movement of the hand.

'Wouldn't you want me to be happy, rather than miserable?' she asked with unbearable logic.

'I'd rather be dead or see you dead,' I said, 'than with another man. I'm not eccentric. That's ordinary human love. Ask anybody. They'd all say the same - if they loved at all.' I jibed at her. 'Anyone who loves is jealous.'

We were in my room. We had come there at a safe time of day, the late spring afternoon, in order to make love; for once we had hours of time ahead of us and so I squandered it all in a quarrel and there was no love to make. She sat down on the bed and said, 'I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make you angry. I expect you're right.' But I wouldn't let her alone. I hated her because I wished to think she didn't love me: I wanted to get her out of my system. What grievance, I wonder now, had I got against her, whether she loved me or not? She had been loyal to me for nearly a year, she had given me a great deal of pleasure, she had put up with my moods, and what had I given her in return apart from the momentary pleasure? I had come into this affair with my eyes open, knowing that one day this must end, and yet, when the sense of insecurity, the logical belief in the hopeless future descended like melancholia, I would badger her and badger her, as though I wanted to bring the future in now at the door, an unwanted and premature guest. My love and fear acted like conscience. If we had believed in sin, our behaviour would hardly have differed.

'You'd be jealous of Henry,' I said.

'No. I couldn't be. It's absurd.'

'If you saw your marriage threatened... '

'It never would be,' she said drearily, and I took her words as an insult and walked straight out and down the stairs and into the street. Is this the end, I wondered, playacting to myself? There's no need ever to go back. If I can get her out of my system, can't I find somewhere a quiet friendly marriage that would go on and on? Then perhaps I wouldn't feel jealous because I wouldn't love enough: I would just be secure, and my self-pity and hatred walked hand in hand across the darkening Common like idiots without a keeper.

When I began to write I said this was a story of hatred, but I am not convinced. Perhaps my hatred is really as deficient as my love. I looked up just now from writing and caught sight of my own face in a mirror close to my desk, and I thought, does hatred really look like that? For I was reminded of that face we have all of us seen in childhood, looking back at us from the shop-window, the features blurred with our breath, as we stare with such longing at the bright unobtainable objects within.

It must have been some time in May 1940 when this argument broke out. War had helped us in a good many ways, and that was how I had almost come to regard war as a rather disreputable and unreliable accomplice in my affair. (Deliberately I would put the caustic soda of that word 'affair', with its suggestion of a beginning and an end, upon my tongue.) I suppose Germany by this time had invaded the Low Countries: the spring like a corpse was sweet with the smell of doom, but nothing mattered to me but two practical facts - Henry had been shifted to Home Security and worked late, my landlady had removed to the basement for fear of air-raids, and no longer lurked upon the floor above watching over the banisters for undesirable visitors. My own life had altered not at all, because of my lameness (I have one leg a little shorter than the other, the result of an accident in childhood); only when the air-raids started did I feel it necessary to become a warden. It was for the time being as though I had signed out of the war.

That evening I was still full of my hatred and distrust when I reached Piccadilly. More than anything in the world I wanted to hurt Sarah. I wanted to take a woman back with me and lie with her upon the same bed in which I made love to Sarah; it was as though I knew that the only way to hurt her was to hurt myself. It was dark and quiet by this time in the streets, though up in the moonless sky moved the blobs and beams of the searchlights. You couldn't see faces where the women stood in doorways and at the entrances of the unused shelters. They had to signal with their torches like glow-worms. All the way up Sackville Street the little lights went on and off. I found myself wondering what Sarah was doing now. Had she gone home or was she waiting on the chance of my return?

A woman flashed on her light and said, 'Like to come home with me, dear?' I shook my head and walked on.

Further up the street a girl was talking to a man: as she lit up her face for him, I got a glimpse of something young, dark and happy and not yet spoiled: an animal that didn't yet recognize her captivity. I passed and then came back up the road towards them; as I approached the man left her and I spoke. 'Like a drink?' I said.

'Coming home with me afterwards?'

'Yes.'

'I'll be glad of a quick one.'

We went into the pub at the top of the street and I ordered two whiskies, but as she drank I couldn't see her face for Sarah's. She was younger than Sarah, she couldn't have been more than nineteen, more beautiful, one might even have said less spoiled, but only because there was so much less to spoil: I found I no more wanted her than I wanted the company of a dog or a cat. She was telling me that she had a nice flat on the top floor only a few houses down: she told me what rent she had to pay and what her age was and where she was born and how she had worked for a year in a cafe. She told me she didn't go home with anybody who spoke to her, but she could see at once I was a gentleman. She said she had a canary called Jones named after the gentleman who had given it her. She began to talk of the difficulty of getting groundsel in London. I thought: if Sarah is still in my room I can ring up. I heard the girl asking me whether if I had a garden I would sometimes remember her canary. She said, 'You don't mind me asking, do you?'

Looking at her over my whisky I thought how odd it was that I felt no desire for her at all. It was as if quite suddenly after all the promiscuous years I had grown up. My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust for ever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.

And yet surely it was not love that had brought me into this pub; I had told myself all the way from the Common that it was hate, as I tell myself still, writing this account of her, trying to get her out of my system for ever, for I have always told myself that if she died, I could forget her.

I went out of the pub, leaving the girl with her whisky to finish and a pound-note as a salve to her pride, and walked up New Burlington Street as far as a telephone-box. I had no torch with me and I was forced to strike match after match before I could complete the dialling of my number. Then I heard the ringing tone and I could imagine the telephone where it stood on my desk and I knew exactly how many steps Sarah would have to take to reach it if she were sitting in a chair or lying on the bed. And yet I let it go on ringing in the empty room for half a minute. Then I telephoned to her home and the maid told me she had not yet come in. I thought of her walking about on the Common in the black-out - it wasn't a very safe place in those days, and looking at my watch I thought, if I hadn't been a fool we should still have had three hours together. I went back home alone and tried to read a book, but all the time I was listening for the telephone which never rang. My pride prevented me telephoning her again. At last I went to bed and took a double dose of sleeping-draught, so that the first I knew in the morning was Sarah's voice on the telephone, speaking to me as if nothing had happened. It was like perfect peace again until I put the receiver down, when immediately that devil in my brain prompted the thought that the waste of those three hours meant nothing at all to her.

I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I have known so intimately the way that demon works in my imagination. No statement that Sarah ever made was proof against his cunning doubts, though he would usually wait till she had gone to utter them. He would prompt our quarrels long before they occurred: he was not Sarah's enemy so much as the enemy of love, and isn't that what the devil is supposed to be? I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of that love. Wouldn't he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn't he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love? If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions; he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it