The End of the Affair

5

8 May 1945.

Went down to St James’s Park in the evening to watch them celebrate V. E. day. It was very quiet beside the floodlit water between the Horse Guards and the palace. Nobody shouted or sang or got drunk. People sat on the grass in twos, holding hands. I suppose they were happy because this was peace and there were no more bombs. I said to Henry, ‘I don’t like the peace.’

‘ I’m wondering where I shall be drafted from the Ministry of Home Security.’

‘Ministry of Information?’ I asked, trying to be interested.

‘No, no, I wouldn’t take it. It’s full of temporary civil servants. How would you like the Home Office?’

‘Anything, Henry, that pleased you,’ I said. Then the Royal Family came out on the balcony and the crowd sang very decorously. They weren’t leaders like Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Roosevelt: they were just a family who hadn’t done any harm to anybody. I wanted Maurice beside me. I wanted to begin again. I wanted to be one of a family too.

‘Very moving, isn’t it,’ Henry said. ‘Well, we can all sleep quiet at night now,’ as though we ever did anything else at night but just sleep quiet.

10 September 1945.

I have got to be sensible. Two days ago when I was clearing out my old bag - Henry suddenly gave me a new one as a ‘peace present’ - it must have cost him a lot of money - I found a card saying ‘Richard Smythe 16 Cedar Road 4-6 daily for private advice. Anyone welcome.’ I thought, I have been pulled about long enough. Now I’ll take a different medicine. If he can persuade me that nothing happened, that my promise doesn’t count, I’ll write to Maurice and ask him if he wants to go on again. Perhaps I’ll even leave Henry. I don’t know. But first I’ve got to be sensible. I won’t be hysterical any more. I’ll be reasonable. So I went and rang the bell in Cedar Road.

Now I’m trying to remember what happened. Miss Smythe made tea and after tea she went and left me alone with her brother. He asked me what my difficulties were. I sat on a chintz sofa and he sat on a rather hard chair with a cat on his lap. He stroked the cat and he had beautiful hands and I didn’t like them. I almost liked the spots better, but he chose to sit showing me only his good cheek.

I said, ‘Will you tell me why you are so certain there isn’t a God?’

He watched his own hands stroking the cat, and I felt sorry for him because he was proud of his hands. If his face hadn’t been marked, perhaps he would have had no pride.

‘You’ve listened to me speaking on the Common?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I have to put things very simply there. To sting people into thinking for themselves. You’ve started thinking for yourself?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘What church have you been brought up in?’

‘None.’

‘So you aren’t a Christian?’

‘I may have been christened - it’s a social convention, isn’t it?’

‘If you haven’t any faith, why do you want my help?’

Why indeed? I couldn’t tell him about Maurice under the door and my promise. Not yet I couldn’t. And that wasn’t the whole point, for how many promises I’ve made and broken in a lifetime. Why did this promise stay, like an ugly vase a friend has given and one waits for a maid to break it, and year after year she breaks the things one values and the ugly vase remains? I had never really faced his question, and now he had to repeat it.

I said, ‘I’m not sure that I don’t believe. But I don’t want to.’

‘Tell me,’ he said and because he forgot the beauty of his own hands and turned towards me his ugly cheek, forgetting himself in the desire to help, I found myself talking - about that night and the bomb falling and the stupid vow.

‘And you really believe,’ he said, ‘that perhaps.. ‘Yes.’

‘Think of the thousands of people all over the world praying now, and their prayers aren’t answered.’

‘There were thousands of people dying in Palestine when Lazarus…’

‘We don’t believe that story, do we, you and I?’ he said with a kind of complicity.

‘Of course not, but millions of people have. They must have thought it reasonable… ‘

‘People don’t demand that a thing be reasonable if their emotions are touched. Lovers aren’t reasonable, are they?’

‘Can you explain away love too?’ I asked.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘The desire to possess in some, like avarice: in others the desire to surrender, to lose the sense of responsibility, the wish to be admired. Sometimes just the wish to be able to talk, to unburden yourself to someone who won’t be bored. The desire to find again a father or a mother. And of course under it all the biological motive.’

I thought, it’s all true, but isn’t there something over? I’ve dug up all that in myself, in Maurice too, but still the spade hasn’t touched rock. ‘And the love of God?’ I asked him.

‘It’s all the same. Man made God in his own image, so it’s natural he should love him. You know those distorting mirrors at fairs. Man’s made a beautifying mirror too in which he sees himself lovely and powerful and just and wise. It’s his idea of himself. He recognizes himself easier than in the distorting mirror which only makes him laugh, but how he loves himself in the other.’

When he spoke of distorting and beautifying mirrors, I couldn’t remember what we were talking about for the thought of all those times since adolescence when he had looked in mirrors and tried to make them beautifying and not distorting simply by the way he held his head, I wondered why he hadn’t grown a beard long enough to hide the spots; wouldn’t the hair grow there or was it because he hated deception? I had an idea that he was a man who really loved the truth, but there was that word love again, and it was only too obvious into how many desires his love of truth could be split. A compensation for the injury of his birth, the desire for power, the wish to be admired all the more because the poor haunted face would never cause physical desire. I had an enormous wish to touch it with my hand, to comfort it with words of love as permanent as the wound. It was like when I saw Maurice under the door. I wanted to pray: to offer up some inordinate sacrifice if only he could be healed, but now there was no sacrifice left for me to offer.

‘My dear,’ he said, ‘leave the idea of God out of this. It’s just a question of your lover and your husband. Don’t confuse the thing with phantoms.’

‘But how do I decide - if there’s no such thing as love?’

‘You have to decide what will be the happiest in the long run.’

‘Do you believe in happiness?’

‘I don’t believe in any absolute.’

I thought the only happiness he ever gets is this: the idea that he can comfort, advise, help, the idea that he can, be of use. It drives him every week on to the Common, to talk to people who move away, never asking questions, dropping his cards on the turf. How often does anybody really come as I have come today? I asked him. ‘Do you have many callers?’

‘No,’ he said. His love of truth was greater than his pride. He said, ‘You are the first - for a very long time.’

‘It’s been good to talk to you,’ I said. ‘You’ve cleared my mind quite a lot.’ It was the only comfort one could give him - to feed his illusion.

He said shyly, ‘If you could spare the time, we could really start at the beginning and go to the root of things. I mean, the philosophical arguments and the historical evidence.’

I suppose I must have made some evasive reply for he went on, ‘It’s really important. We mustn’t despise our enemies. They have a case.’

‘They have?’

‘It’s not a sound one, except superficially. It’s specious.’ He watched me with anxiety. I think he was wondering whether I was one of those who walked away. It seemed a little thing to ask when he said nervously, ‘An hour a week. It would help you a great deal,’ and I thought, haven’t I all of time now? I can read a book or go to a cinema, and I don’t read the words or remember the pictures. Myself and my own misery drum in my ear and fill my eyes. For a minute this afternoon I forgot them. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I’ll come. It’s good of you to spare the time,’ I said, shovelling all the hope I could into his lap, praying to the God he was promising to cure me of, ‘Let me be of use to him.’

2 October 1945.

It was very hot today and it dripped with rain. So I went into the dark church at the corner of Park Road to sit down for a while. Henry was at home and I didn’t want to see him. I try to remember to be kind at breakfast, kind at lunch when he’s home, kind at dinner, and sometimes I forget and he’s kind back. Two people being kind to each other for a lifetime. When I came in and sat down and looked round I realized it was a Roman church, full of plaster statues and bad art, realistic art. I hated the statues, the crucifix, all the emphasis on the human body. I was trying to escape from the human body and all it needed. I thought I could believe in some kind of a God that bore no relation to ourselves, something vague, amorphous, cosmic, to which I had promised something and which had given me something in return - stretching out of the vague into the concrete human life, like a powerful vapour moving among the chairs and walls. One day I too would become part of that vapour - I would escape myself for ever. And then I came into that dark church in Park Road and saw the bodies standing around me on all the altars - the hideous plaster statues with their complacent faces, and I remembered that they believed in the resurrection of the body, the body I wanted destroyed for ever. I had done so much injury with this body. How could I want to preserve any of it for eternity, and suddenly I remembered a phrase of Richard’s - about human beings inventing doctrines to satisfy their desires, and I thought how wrong he is. If I were to invent a doctrine it would be that the body was never born again, that it rotted with last year’s vermin. It’s strange how the human mind swings back and forth, from one extreme to another. Does truth lie at some point of the pendulum’s swing, at a point where it never rests, not in the dull perpendicular mean where it dangles in the end like a windless flag, but at an angle, nearer one extreme than another? If only a miracle could stop the pendulum at an angle of sixty degrees, one would believe the truth was there. Well, the pendulum swung today and I thought, instead of my own body, of Maurice’s. I thought of certain lines life had put on his face as personal as a line of his writing: I thought of a new scar on his shoulder that wouldn’t have been there if once he hadn’t tried to protect another man’s body from a falling wall. He didn’t tell me why he was in hospital those three days: Henry told me. That scar was part of his character as much as his jealousy. And so I thought, do I want that body to be vapour (mine yes, but his?), and I knew I wanted that scar to exist through all eternity. But could my vapour love that scar? Then I began to want my body that I hated, but only because it could love that scar. We can love with our minds, but can we love only with our minds? Love extends itself all the time, so that we can even love with our senseless nails: we love even with our clothes, so that a sleeve can feel a sleeve.

Richard’s right, I thought, we have invented the resurrection of the body because we do need our own bodies, and immediately I admitted that he was right and that this was a fairy-tale we tell each other for comfort, I no longer felt any hate of those statues. They were like bad coloured pictures in Hans Andersen: they were like bad poetry, but somebody had needed to write them, somebody who wasn’t so proud that he hid them rather than expose his foolishness. I walked up the church, looking at them one after the other: in front of the worst of all - I don’t know who she was-a middle-aged man was praying. He had put his bowler hat beside him and in the bowler hat, wrapped in newspaper, were some sticks of celery.

And of course on the altar there was a body too - such a familiar body, more familiar than Maurice’s, that it had never struck me before as a body with all the parts of a body, even the parts the loin-cloth concealed. I remembered one in a Spanish church I had visited with Henry, where the blood ran down in scarlet paint from the eyes and the hands. It had sickened me. Henry wanted me to admire the twelfth-century pillars, but I was sick and I wanted to get out into the open air. I thought, these people love cruelty. A vapour couldn’t shock you with blood and cries.

When I came out into the plaza I said to Henry, ‘I can’t bear all these painted wounds.’ Henry was very reasonable - he’s always reasonable. He said, ‘Of course it’s a very materialistic faith. A lot of magic… ‘

‘Is magic materialistic?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Eye of newt and toe of frog, finger of birth-strangled babe. You can’t have anything more materialistic than that. In the Mass they still believe in transubstantiation.’

I knew all about that, but I had an idea that it had more or less died out at the Reformation, except for the poor of course. Henry put me right (how often has Henry rearranged my muddled thoughts). ‘Materialism isn’t only an attitude for the poor,’ he said. ‘Some of the finest brains have been materialist, Pascal, Newman. So subtle in some directions: so crudely superstitious in others. One day we may know why: it may be a glandular deficiency.’

So today I looked at that material body on that material cross, and I wondered, how could the world have nailed a vapour there? A vapour of course felt no pain and no pleasure. It was only my superstition that imagined it could answer my prayers. Dear God, I had said. I should have said, Dear Vapour. I said I hate you, but can one hate a vapour? I could hate that figure on the Cross with its claim to my gratitude - ‘I’ve suffered this for you’, but a vapour… And yet Richard believed in less even than a vapour. He hated a fable, he fought against a fable, he took a fable seriously. I couldn’t hate Hansel and Gretel, I couldn’t hate their sugar house as he hated the legend of heaven. When I was a child I could hate the wicked queen in Snow White, but Richard didn’t hate his fairy-tale Devil. The Devil didn’t exist and God didn’t exist, but all his hatred was for the good fairy-tale, not for the wicked one. Why? I looked up at that over-familiar body, stretched in imaginary pain, the head drooping like a man asleep. I thought, sometimes I’ve hated Maurice, but would I have hated him if I hadn’t loved him too? Oh God, if I could really hate you, what would that mean?

Am I a materialist after all, I wondered? Have I some glandular deficiency that I am so uninterested in the really important unsuperstitious things and causes - like the Charity Commission and the index of living and better calories for the working class? Am I a materialist because I believe in the independent existence of that man with the bowler, the metal of the cross, these hands I can’t pray with? Suppose God did exist, suppose he was a body like that, what’s wrong in believing that his body existed as much as mine? Could anybody love him or hate him if he hadn’t got a body? I can’t love a vapour that was Maurice. That’s coarse, that’s beastly, that’s materialist, I know, but why shouldn’t I be beastly and coarse and materialist. I walked out of the church in a flaming rage, and in defiance of Henry and all the reasonable and the detached I did what I had seen people do in Spanish churches: I dipped my finger in the so-called holy water and made a kind of cross on my forehead.