The End of the Affair

6

So I moved to the north side of the Common. I wasted a week’s rent because Henry wanted me to come at once, and I paid five pounds for a van to take my books and clothes across. I had the guest-room and Henry fitted up a lumber-room as a study, and there was a bath on the floor above. Henry had moved into his dressing-room, and the room they had shared with the cold twin beds was left for guests who never came. After a few days I began to see what Henry meant by the house never being empty. I worked at the British Museum until it closed, and then I would go back and wait for Henry, and usually we went out and drank a little at the Pontefract Arms. Once when Henry was away for a few days at a conference at Bournemouth, I picked up a girl and brought her back. It wasn’t any good. I knew it at once, I was impotent, and to save her feelings I told her that I had promised a woman I loved never to do this with anyone else. She was very sweet and understanding about it: prostitutes have a great respect for sentiment. This time there had been no revenge in my mind, and I felt only sadness at abandoning for ever something I had enjoyed so much. I dreamed of Sarah afterwards and we were lovers again in my old room on the south side, but again nothing happened, only this time there was no sadness in the fact. We were happy and without regret.

It was a few days afterwards that I pulled open a cupboard in my bedroom and found a pile of old children’s books. Henry must have looted this cupboard for Parkis’s boy. There were several of Andrew Lang’s fairy books in their coloured covers, many Beatrix Potters, The Children of the New Forest, The Golliwog at the North Pole, and also one or two older books - Captain Scott’s Last Expedition and the Poems of Thomas Hood, the last bound in school leather with a label saying that it had been awarded to Sarah Bertram for proficiency in Algebra. Algebra! How one changes.

I couldn’t work that evening. I lay on the floor with the books and tried to trace at least a few features in the blank spaces of Sarah’s life. There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn’t shared. The Golliwog at the North Pole was probably the earliest of Sarah’s books because it had been scrawled all over, this way and that way, meaninglessly, destructively, with coloured chalks. In one of the Beatrix Potters her name had been spelt in pencil, one big capital letter arranged wrongly so that what appeared was SA? AH. In The Children of the New Forest she said written very tidily and minutely ‘Sarah Bertram Her Book. Please ask permission to borrow. And if you steal it will be to your sorrow’. They were the marks of every child who has ever lived: traces as anonymous as the claw marks of birds that one sees in winter. When I closed the book they were covered at once by the drift of time.

I doubt whether she had ever read Hood’s poems: the pages were as clean as when the book was handed to her by the headmistress or the distinguished visitor. Indeed as I was about to put it back in the cupboard a leaf of print dropped on the floor - the programme probably of that very prize-giving. In a handwriting I could recognize (but even our handwriting begins young and takes on the tired arabesques of time) was a phrase: ‘What utter piffle’. I could imagine Sarah writing it down and showing it to her neighbour as the headmistress resumed her seat, applauded respectfully by parents. I don’t know why another line of hers came into my head when I saw that schoolgirl phrase with all its impatience, its incomprehension and its assurance: ‘I’m a phoney and a fake.’ Here under my hand was innocence. It seemed such a pity that she had lived another twenty years only to feel that about herself. A phoney and a fake. Was it a description I had used of her in a moment of anger? She always harboured my criticism: it was only praise that slid from her like the snow.

I turned the leaf over and read the programme of 23 July 1926: the Water Music of Handel played by Miss Duncan, R.C.M.: a recitation of ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ by Beatrice Collins: Tudor Ayres by the School Glee Society: Violin Recital of Chopin’s Waltz in A flat by Mary Pippitt. The long summer afternoon of twenty years ago stretched out its shadows towards me, and I hated life that so alters us for the worse. I thought, that summer I had just begun my first novel: there was so much excitement, ambition, hope, when I sat down to work: I wasn’t bitter, I was happy. I put the leaf back in the unread book and thrust the volume to the back of the cupboard under the Golliwog and the Beatrix Potters. We were both happy with only ten years and a few counties between us, who were later to come together for no apparent purpose but to give each other so much pain. I took up Scott’s Last Expedition.

That had been one of my own favourite books. It seemed curiously dated now, this heroism with only the ice for enemy, self-sacrifice that involved no deaths beyond one’s own. Two wars stood between us and them. I looked at the photographs: the beards and goggles, the little cairns of snow, the Union Jack, the ponies with their long manes like outdated hairdressings among the striped rocks. Even the deaths were ‘period’, and ‘period’ too was the school girl who marked the pages with lines, exclamation marks, who wrote neatly in the margin of Scott’s last letter home: ‘And what comes next? Is it God? Robert Browning.’ Even then, I thought, He came into her mind. He was as underhand as a lover, taking advantage of a passing mood, like a hero seducing us with his improbabilities and his legends. I put the last book back and turned the key in the lock.