The End of the Affair

3

‘And if there’s anything more you could tell me that would be relevant?’ I remember Mr Savage had said - a detective must find it as important as a novelist to amass his trivial material before picking out the right clue. But how difficult that picking out is - the release of the real subject. The enormous pressure of the outside world weighs on us like a peine forte et dure. Now that I come to write my own story the problem is still the same, but worse - there are so many more facts, now that I have not to invent them. How can I disinter the human character from the heavy scene - the daily newspaper, the daily meal, the traffic grinding towards Battersea, the gulls coming up from the Thames looking for bread, and the early summer of 1939 glinting on the park where the children sailed their boats - one of those bright condemned pre-war summers? I wondered whether, if I thought long enough, I could detect, at the party Henry had given, her future lover. We saw each other for the first time, drinking bad South African sherry because of the war in Spain. I noticed Sarah, I think, because she was happy: in those years the sense of happiness had been a long while dying under the coming storm. One detected it in drunken people, in children, seldom elsewhere. I liked her at once because she said she had read my books and left the subject there - I found myself treated at once as a human being rather than as an author. I had no idea whatever of falling in love with her. For one thing, she was beautiful, and beautiful women, especially if they are intelligent also, stir some deep feeling of inferiority in me. I don’t know whether psychologists have yet named the Cophetua complex, but I have always found it hard to feel sexual desire without some sense of superiority, mental or physical. All I noticed about her that first time was her beauty and her happiness and her way of touching people with her hands, as though she loved them. I can only recall one thing she said to me, apart from that statement with which she began - ‘You do seem to dislike a lot of people.’ Perhaps I had been talking smartly about my fellow writers. I don’t remember.

What a summer it was. I am not going to try and name the month exactly - I should have to go back to it through so much pain, but I remember leaving the hot and crowded room, after drinking too much bad sherry, and walking on the Common with Henry. The sun was falling flat across the Common and the grass was pale with it. In the distance the houses were the houses in a Victorian print, small and precisely drawn and quiet: only one child cried a long way off. The eighteenth-century church stood like a toy in an island of grass - the toy could be left outside in the dark, in the dry unbreakable weather. It was the hour when you make confidences to a stranger.

Henry said, ‘How happy we could all be.’

‘Yes.’

I felt an enormous liking for him, standing there on the Common, away from his own party, with tears in his eyes. I said, ‘You’ve got a lovely house.’

‘My wife found it’

I had met him only a week ago - at another party: he was in the Ministry of Pensions in those days, and I had buttonholed him for the sake of my material. Two days later came the card. I learned later that Sarah had got him to send it. ‘Have you been married long?’ I asked him.

‘Ten years.’

‘I thought your wife was charming.’

‘She’s a great help to me,’ he said. Poor Henry. But why should I say poor Henry? Didn’t he possess in the end the winning cards - the cards of gentleness, humility and trust?

‘I must be going back,’ he said. ‘I mustn’t leave it all to her, Bendrix,’ and he laid his hand on my arm as though we’d known each other a year. Had he learnt the gesture from her? Married people grow like each other. We walked back side by side, and as we opened the hall-door, I saw reflected in a mirror from an alcove two people separating as though from a kiss - one was Sarah. I looked at Henry.

Either he had not seen or he did not care - or else, I thought, what an unhappy man he must be.

Would Mr Savage have considered that scene relevant? It was not, I learnt later, a lover who was kissing her; it was one of Henry’s colleagues at the Ministry of Pensions whose wife had run away with an able seaman a week before. She had met him for the first time that day, and it seems unlikely that he would still be part of the scene from which I had been so firmly excluded. Love doesn’t take as long as that to work itself out.

I would have liked to have left that past time alone, for as I write of 1939 I feel all my hatred returning. Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?