Book Five: Chapter 8 - The End of the Affair

My book wasn't going well (what a waste of time the act of writing seemed, but how else could time be spent?) and I took a walk across the Common to listen to the speakers. There was a man I remembered who used to amuse me in the pre-war days and I was glad to see him safely back on his pitch. He had no message to convey like the political and the religious speakers. He was an ex-actor and he just told stories and recited snatches of verse. He would challenge his audience to catch him out by asking for any piece of verse. 'The Ancient Mariner,' somebody would call, and at once, with great emphasis, he would give us a quatrain. One wag said, 'Shakespeare's Thirty-Second Sonnet' and he recited four lines at random and when the wag objected, he said, 'You've got the wrong edition.' I looked around at my fellow listeners and saw Smythe. Perhaps he had seen me first, for he had the handsome side of his face turned towards me, the side Sarah had not kissed, but if so he avoided my eye.

Why did I always wish to speak to anybody whom Sarah had known? I pushed my way to his side and said, 'Hullo, Smythe.' He clamped a handkerchief to the bad side of his face and turned towards me.' Oh, it's Mr Bendrix,' he said.

'I haven't seen you since the funeral.'

'I've been away.'

'Don't you still speak here?'

'No.' He hesitated and then added unwillingly, 'I've given up public speaking.'

'But you still give home-tuition?' I teased him.

'No. I've given that up too.'

'Not changed your views, I hope?'

He said gloomily, 'I don't know what to believe.'

'Nothing. Surely that was the point.'

'It was.' He began to move a little way out of the crowd and I found myself on his bad side. I couldn't resist teasing him a little more.' Have you got toothache?' I asked.

'No. Why?'

'It looked like it. With that handkerchief.'

He didn't reply but took the handkerchief away. There was no ugliness to hide. His skin was quite fresh and young except for one insignificant spot.

He said, 'I get tired of explaining when I meet people I know.'

'You found a cure?'

'Yes. I told you I've been away.'

'To a nursing home?'

'Yes.'

'Operation?'

'Not exactly.' He added unwillingly, 'It was done by touch.'

'Faith-healing?'

'I have no faith. I'd never go to a quack.'

'What was it? Urticaria?'

He said vaguely, to close the subject. 'Modern methods. Electricity.'

I went back home and again I tried to settle to my book. Always I find when I begin to write there is one character who obstinately will not come alive. There is nothing psychologically false about him, but he sticks, he has to be pushed around, words have to be found for him, all the technical skill I have acquired through the laborious years has to be employed in making him appear alive to my readers. Sometimes I get a sour satisfaction when a reviewer praises him as the best-drawn character in the story: if he has not been drawn he has certainly been dragged. He lies heavily on my mind whenever I start to work like an ill-digested meal on the stomach, robbing me of the pleasure of creation in any scene where he is present. He never does the unexpected thing, he never surprises me, he never takes charge. Every other character helps, he only hinders.

And yet one cannot do without him. I can imagine a God feeling in just that way about some of us. The saints, one would suppose, in a sense create themselves. They come alive. They are capable of the surprising act or word, They stand outside the plot, unconditioned by it. But we have to be pushed around. We have the obstinacy of nonexistence. We are inextricably bound to the plot, and wearily God forces us, here and there, according to his intention, characters without poetry, without free will, whose only importance is that somewhere, at some time, we help to furnish the scene in which a living character moves and speaks, providing perhaps the saints with the opportunities for 'their' free will.

I was glad when I heard the door close and Henry's footsteps in the hall. It was an excuse to stop. That character could remain inert now till morning: it was the hour at last for the Pontefract Arms. I waited for him to call up to me (already in a month we were as set in our ways as two bachelors who have lived together for years), but he didn't call and I heard him go into his study. After a while I followed him: I missed my drink.

I was reminded of the occasion when I came back with him first; he sat there, beside the green Discus Thrower, worried and dejected, but now watching him I felt neither envy nor pleasure.

'A drink, Henry?'

'Yes, yes. Of course. I was only going to change my shoes.' He had his town and his country shoes and the Common in his eyes was country. He bent over his laces: there was a knot that he couldn't untie - he was always bad with his fingers. He got tired of struggling and wrenched the shoe off. I picked it up and uncoiled the knot for him.

'Thank you, Bendrix.' Perhaps even so small an act of companionship gave him confidence. 'A very unpleasant thing happened today at the office,' he said.

'Tell me.'

'Mrs Bertram called. I don't think you know Mrs Bertram.'

'Oh yes. I met her the other day.' A curious phrase -the other day, as though all days were the same except that one.

'We've never got on very well together,'

'So she told me.'

'Sarah was always very good about it. She kept her away.'

'Did she come to borrow money?'

'Yes. She wanted ten pounds - her usual story, in town for the day, shopping, run out, banks closed... Bendrix, I'm not a mean man, but I get so irritated by the way she goes on. She has two thousand a year of her own. It's almost as much as I earn.'

'Did you give it her?'

'Oh yes. One always does, but the trouble was I couldn't resist a sermon. That made her furious. I told her how many times she'd done it and how many times she had paid me back - that was easy, the first time. She took out her cheque book and said she was going to write me a cheque for the whole lot there and then. She was so angry that I'm certain she meant it. She'd really forgotten that she had used her last cheque. She had meant to humiliate me and she only succeeded in humiliating herself, poor woman. Of course, that made it worse.'

'What did she do?'

'She accused me of not giving Sarah a proper funeral. She told me a strange story... '

'I know it. She told it to me after a couple of ports.'

'Do you think she's lying?'

'No.'

'It's an extraordinary coincidence, isn't it? Baptized at two years old, and then beginning to go back to what you can't even remember... It's like an infection.'

'It's what you say, an odd coincidence.' Once before I had supplied Henry with the necessary strength; I wasn't going to let him weaken now. 'I've known stranger coincidences,' I went on. 'During the last year, Henry, I've been so bored I've even collected car numbers. That teaches you about coincidences. Ten thousand possible numbers and God knows how many combinations, and yet over and over again I've seen two cars with the same figures side by side in a traffic block.'

'Yes. I suppose it works that way,'

'I'll never lose my faith in coincidence, Henry.'

The telephone was ringing faintly upstairs: we hadn't heard it till now, because the switch was turned off in the study.

'Oh dear, oh dear,' Henry said, 'I wouldn't be a bit surprised if it were that woman again.'

'Let her ring,' and as I spoke the bell stopped.

'It isn't that I'm mean,' Henry said. 'I don't suppose she's borrowed more than a hundred pounds in ten years.'

'Come out and have a drink.'

'Of course. Oh, I haven't put on my shoes.' He bent over them and I could see the bald patch on the crown of his head: it was as though his worries had worn through -I had been one of his worries. He said, 'I don't know what I'd do without you, Bendrix.' I brushed a few grains of scurf off his shoulder. 'Oh well, Henry...' and then before we could move the bell began to ring again.

'Leave it,' I said.

'I'd better answer. You don't know...' He got up with his shoe-laces dangling and came over to his desk. 'Hello,' he said, 'Miles speaking.' He passed the receiver to me and said with relief, 'It's for you.'

'Yes,' I said, 'Bendrix here.'

'Mr Bendrix,' a man's voice said, 'I felt I'd got to ring you. I didn't tell you the truth this afternoon.'

'Who 'are' you?'

'Smythe,' the voice said.

'I don't understand.'

'I told you I'd been to a nursing home. I never went to one.'

'Really it couldn't matter less to me.'

His voice reached for me along the line. 'Of course it matters. You aren't listening to me. Nobody treated my face. It cleared up, suddenly, in a night.'

'How? I still don't...'

He said with an awful air of conspiracy, 'You and I know how. There's no getting round it. It wasn't right of me keeping it dark. It was a...' but I put down the receiver before he could use that foolish newspaper word that was the alternative to 'coincidence'. I remembered his clenched right hand, I remembered my anger that the dead can be so parcelled up, divided like their clothes. I thought, He's so proud that he must always have some kind of revelation. In a week or two he'll be speaking about it on the Common and showing his healed face. It will be in the newspapers: 'Rationalist Speaker Converted by Miraculous Cure.' I tried to summon up all my faith in coincidence, but all I could think of, and that with envy, for I had no relic, was the ruined cheek lying at night on her hair.

'Who is it?' Henry asked. I hesitated a moment whether to tell him, but then I thought, No. I don't trust him. He and Father Crompton will get together.

'Smythe,' I said.

'Smythe? '

'That fellow Sarah used to visit.'

'What did he want?'

'His face has been cured, that's all. I asked him to let me know the name of the specialist. I have a friend...'

'Electric treatment?'

'I'm not sure. I've read somewhere that urticaria is hysterical in origin. A mixture of psychiatry and radium.' It sounded plausible. Perhaps after all it was the truth. Another coincidence, two cars with the same number plate, and I thought with a sense of weariness, how many coincidences are there going to be? Her mother at the funeral, the child's dream. Is this going to continue day by day? I felt like a swimmer who has over-passed his strength and knows the tide is stronger than himself, but if I drowned, I was going to hold Henry up till the last moment. Wasn't it, after all, the duty of a friend, for if this thing were not disproved, if it got into the papers, nobody could tell where it would end? I remembered the roses at Manchester - that fraud had taken a long time to be recognized for what it was. People are so hysterical in these days. There might be relic-hunters, prayers, processions. Henry was not unknown; the scandal would be enormous. And all the journalists asking questions about their life together and digging out that queer story of the baptism near Deauville. The vulgarity of the pious Press. I could imagine the headlines, and the headlines would produce more 'miracles'. We had to kill this thing at the start.

I remembered the journal in my drawer upstairs and I thought, That has to go too, for that could be interpreted in their way. It was as though to save her for ourselves we had to destroy her features one by one. Even her children's books had proved a danger. There were photographs - the one Henry had taken: the Press mustn't have that. Was Maud to be trusted? The two of us had tried to build a makeshift house together, and even that was being broken up.

'What about our drink?' Henry said.

'I'll join you in a minute.'

I went up to my room and took the journal out. I tore the covers off. They were tough: the cotton backing came out like fibres; it was like tearing the limbs off a bird, and there the journal lay on the bed, a pad of paper, wingless and wounded. The last page lay upwards and I read again, 'You were there teaching me to squander, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace - he needs it more.'

I thought, you've failed there, Sarah. One of your prayers at least has not been answered. I have no peace and I have no love, except for you, you. I said to her, I'm a man of hate. But I didn't feel much hatred; I had called other people hysterical, but my own words were overcharged. I could detect their insincerity. What I chiefly felt was less hate than fear. For if this God exists, I thought, and if even you - with your lusts and your adulteries and the timid lies you used to tell - can change like this, we could all be saints by leaping as you leapt, by shutting the eyes and leaping once and for all: if you are a saint, it's not so difficult to be a saint. It's something He can demand of any of us, leap. But I won't leap. I sat on my bed and said to God: You've taken her, but You haven't got me yet. I know Your cunning. It's You who take us up to a high place and offer us the whole universe. You're a devil, God, tempting us to leap. But I don't want Your peace and I don't want Your love. I wanted something very simple and very easy: I wanted Sarah for a lifetime and You took her away. With Your great schemes You ruin our happiness like a harvester ruins a mouse's nest: I hate You, God, I hate You as though You existed.

I looked at the pad of paper. It was more impersonal than a scrap of hair. You can touch hair with your lips and fingers and I was tired to death of the mind. I had lived for her body and I wanted her body. But the journal was all I had, so I shut it back in the cupboard, for wouldn't that have been one more victory for Him, to destroy it and leave myself more completely without her? I said to Sarah, all right, have it 'your' way. I believe you live and that He exists, but it will take more than your prayers to turn this hatred of Him into love. He robbed me and like that king you wrote about I'll rob Him of what he wants in me. Hatred is in my brain, not in my stomach or my skin. It can't be removed like a rash or an ache. Didn't I hate you as well as love you? And don't I hate myself?

I called down to Henry, 'I'm ready,' and we walked side by side over the Common towards the Pontefract Arms; the lights were out, and lovers met where the roads intersected, and on the other side of the grass was the house with the ruined steps where He gave me back this hopeless crippled life.

'I look forward to these evening walks of ours,' Henry said.

'Yes.'

I thought, in the morning I'll ring up a doctor and ask him whether a faith cure is possible. And then I thought, better not; so long as one doesn't know, one can imagine innumerable cures... I put my hand on Henry's arm and held it there; I had to be strong for both of us now, and he wasn't seriously worried yet.

'They are the only things I do look forward to,' Henry said.

I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You've done enough, You've robbed me of enough, I'm too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone for ever.

The End

Graham Greene was born in 1904. On coming down from Balliol College, Oxford, he worked for four years as subeditor on 'The Times'. He established his reputation with his fourth novel, 'Stamboul Train'. In 1935 he made a journey across Liberia, described in 'Journey Without Maps', and on his return was appointed film critic of the 'Spectator'. In 1926 he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church and visited Mexico in 1938 to report on the religious persecution there. As a result he wrote 'The Lawless Roads' and, later, his famous novel 'The Power and the Glory'. 'Brighton Rock' was published in 1938 and in 1940 he became literary editor of the 'Spectator'. The next year he undertook work for the Foreign Office and was stationed in Sierra Leone from 1941 to 1943. This later produced the novel, 'The Heart of the Matter', set in West Africa.

As well as his many novels, Graham Greene wrote several collections of short stories, four travel books, six plays, three books of autobiography - 'A Sort of Life', 'Ways of Escape' and 'A World of My Own' (published posthumously) - two of biography and four books for children. He also contributed hundreds of essays, and film and book reviews, some of which appear in the collections 'Reflections' and 'Mornings in the Dark'. Many of his novels and short stories have been filmed and 'The Third Man' was written as a film treatment. Graham Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour. Graham Greene died in April 1991.