The End of the Affair

5

It had been a macabre joke of mine when I thought that Henry might ask me to share his house. I had not really expected the offer and when it came I was taken by surprise. Even his visit a week after the funeral was a surprise: he had never been to my house before. I doubt whether he had ever come much nearer to the south side than the night I met him on the Common in the rain. I heard my bell ring and looked out of the window because I didn’t want to see visitors - I had an idea it might be Waterbury with Sylvia. The lamp by the plane-tree on the pavement picked out Henry’s black hat. I went downstairs and opened the door. ‘I was just passing by,’ Henry lied.

‘Come in.’

He stood and dithered awkwardly while I got my drinks out of a cupboard. He said, ‘You seem interested in General Gordon.’

‘They want me to do a Life.’

‘Are you going to do it?’

‘I suppose so. I don’t feel much like work these days.’

‘It’s the same with me,’ Henry said.

‘Is the Royal Commission still sitting?’

‘Yes.’

‘It gives you something to think about.’

‘Does it? Yes, I suppose it does. Until we stop for lunch.’

‘It’s important work anyway. Here’s your sherry.’

‘It won’t make any difference to a single soul.’

What a long way Henry had travelled since the complacent photograph in the Tatler that had so angered me. I had a picture of Sarah, enlarged from a snapshot, facedown on my desk. He turned it over. ‘I remember taking that,’ he said. Sarah had told me the photograph had been taken by a woman-friend. I suppose she had lied to save my feelings. In the picture she looked younger and happier, but not more lovely than in the years I had known her. I wished I had been able to make her look that way, but it is the destiny of a lover to watch unhappiness hardening like a cast around his mistress. Henry said, ‘I was making a fool of myself to make her smile. Is General Gordon an interesting character?’

‘In some ways.’

Henry said, ‘The house feels very queer these days. I try to keep out of it as much as possible. I suppose you aren’t free for dinner at the club?’

‘I’ve got a lot of work I have to finish.’

He looked round my room. He said, ‘You haven’t much space for your books here.’

‘No. I have to keep some of them under the bed.’

He picked up a magazine that Waterbury had sent me before the interview to show an example of his work and said, ‘There’s room in my house. You could have practically a flat to yourself.’ I was too astonished to answer. He went rapidly on, turning over the leaves of the magazine as though he were really uninterested in his own suggestion, ‘Think it over. You mustn’t decide now.’

‘It’s very good of you, Henry.’

‘You’d be doing me a favour, Bendrix.’

I thought, Why not? Writers are regarded as unconventional. Am I more conventional than a senior civil servant?

‘I dreamed last night,’ Henry said, ‘about all of us.’

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t remember much. We were drinking together. We were happy. When I woke up I thought she wasn’t dead.’

‘I don’t dream of her now.’

‘I wish we’d let that priest have his way.’

‘It would have been absurd, Henry. She was no more a Catholic than you or me.’

‘Do you believe in survival, Bendrix?’

‘If you mean personal survival, no.’

‘One can’t disprove it, Bendrix.’

‘It’s almost impossible to disprove anything. I write a story. How can you prove that the events in it never happened, that the characters aren’t real? Listen. I met a man on the Common today with three legs.’

‘How terrible,’ Henry said seriously. ‘An abortion?’

‘And they were covered with fish scales.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘But prove I am, Henry. You can’t disprove my story any more than I can disprove God. But I just know he’s a lie, just as you know my story’s a lie.’

‘Of course there are arguments.’

‘Oh, I could invent a philosophic argument for my story, I daresay, based on Aristotle.’

Henry abruptly changed the subject back. ‘It would save you a bit if you came and stayed with me. Sarah always said your books weren’t as successful as they should be.’

‘Oh, the shadow of success is falling upon them.’ I thought of Waterbury’s article. I said, ‘A moment comes when you can hear the popular reviewers dipping their pens for the plaudits - even before the next book’s written. It’s all a question of time.’ I talked because I hadn’t made up my mind.

Henry said, ‘There’s no ill-feeling left, is there, Bendrix? I got angry with you at your club - about that man. But what does it matter now?’

‘I was wrong. He was only some crazy tub-thumping rationalist who interested her with his theories. Forget it, Henry.’

‘She was good, Bendrix. People talk but she was good. It wasn’t her fault I couldn’t, well, love her properly. You know I’m awfully prudent, cautious. I’m not the sort that makes a lover. She wanted somebody like you.’

‘She left me. She moved on, Henry.’

‘Do you know I read one of your books once - Sarah made me. You described a house after a woman in it had died.’

‘_The Ambitious Host_.’

‘That was the name. It seemed all right at the time. I thought it very plausible, but you got it all wrong, Bendrix. You described how the husband found the house terribly empty: he moved about the rooms, shifting chairs, trying to give an effect of movement, of another being there. Sometimes he’d pour himself drinks in two glasses.’

‘I forget it. It sounds a bit literary.’

‘It’s off the mark, Bendrix. The trouble is, the house doesn’t seem empty. You see, often in the old days I’d come home from the office, and she would be out somewhere - perhaps with you. I’d call and she wouldn’t answer. Then the house was empty. I almost expected to find the furniture gone. You know I did love her in my way, Bendrix. Every time she wasn’t there when I came home those last months I dreaded to see a letter waiting for me. ‘Dear Henry’… you know the kind of thing they write in novels?’

‘Yes.’

‘But now the house never seems empty like that. I don’t know how to express it. Because she’s always away, she’s never away. You see, she’s never anywhere else. She’s not having lunch with anybody, she’s not at a cinema with you. There’s nowhere for her to be but at home.’

‘But where’s her home?’ I said.

‘Oh, you’ve got to forgive me, Bendrix. I’m nervy and tired - I don’t sleep well. You know the next best thing to talking to her is talking about her, and there’s only you.’

‘She had a lot of friends. Sir William Mallock, Dunstan ‘I can’t talk about her to them. Any more than to that man, Parkis.’

‘Parkis!’ I exclaimed. Had he lodged himself in our lives for ever?

‘He told me he’d been at a cocktail party we gave. The strange people Sarah picked up. He said you knew him too.’

‘What on earth did he want with you?’

‘He said she’d been kind to his little boy - God knows when. The boy’s sick. He seemed to want something of hers for a memento. I gave him one or two of her old children’s books. There were a lot of them in her room, all scrawled over in pencil. It was a good way of getting rid of them. One can’t just send them to Foyle’s, can one? I don’t see any harm in it, do you?’

‘No. That was the man I put to watch her, from Savage’s detective agency.’

‘Good God, if I’d known… But he seemed really fond of her.’

‘Parkis is human,’ I said. ‘He’s easily touched.’ I looked around at my room - there wouldn’t be any more of Sarah where Henry came from: less perhaps, for she would be diluted there.

‘I’ll come and stay with you, Henry, but you must let me pay some rent’

‘I’m so glad, Bendrix. But the house is freehold. You can pay your share of the rates.’

‘Three months’ notice to find new digs when you marry again.’

He took me quite seriously. ‘I shall never want to do that. I’m not the marrying kind. It was a great injury I did to Sarah when I married her. I know that now.’