The End of the Affair

4

I had expected to overtake him, or at least to come in sight of him ahead up the long reach of Whitehall, and so I carried his hat with me, but he was nowhere to be seen. I turned back not knowing where to go. That is the worst of time nowadays - there is so much of it. I looked in the small bookshop near Charing Cross underground and wondered whether Sarah at this moment might have laid her hand on the powdered bell in Cedar Road with Mr Parkis waiting round the corner. If I could have turned back time I think I would have done so: I would have let Henry go walking by, blinded by the rain. But I am beginning to doubt whether anything I can do will ever alter the course of events. Henry and I are allies now, in our fashion, but are we allies against an infinite tide?

I went across the road, past the fruit-hawkers, and into the Victoria Gardens. Not many people were sitting on the benches in the grey windy air, and almost at once I saw Henry, but it took me a moment to recognize him. Out of doors, without a hat, he seemed to have joined the anonymous and the dispossessed, the people who come up from the poorer suburbs and nobody knows - the old man feeding sparrows, the woman with a brown-paper parcel marked Swan & Edgar’s. He sat there with his head bent, looking at his shoes. I have been sorry for myself for so long, so exclusively, that it seemed strange to me to feel sorry for my enemy. I put the hat quietly down on the seat beside him and would have walked away, but he looked up and I could see that he had been crying. He must have travelled a very long way. Tears belong to a different world from Royal Commissions.

‘I’m sorry, Henry,’ I said. How easily we believe we can slide out of our guilt by a motion of contrition.

‘Sit down,’ Henry commanded with the authority of his tears, and I obeyed him. He said, ‘I’ve been thinking. Were you two lovers, Bendrix?’

‘Why should you imagine…?’

‘It’s the only explanation.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘It’s the only excuse too, Bendrix. Can’t you see that what you’ve done is - monstrous?’ As he spoke he turned his hat over and checked the maker’s name.

‘I suppose you think I’m an awful fool, Bendrix, not to have guessed. Why didn’t she leave me?’

Had I got to instruct him about the character of his own wife? The poison was beginning to work in me again. I said, ‘You have a good safe income. You’re a habit she’s formed. You’re security.’ He listened seriously and attentively as though I were a witness before the Commission giving evidence on oath. I went sourly on, ‘You were no more trouble to us than you’d been to the others.’

‘There were others too?’

‘Sometimes I thought you knew all about it and didn’t care. Sometimes I longed to have it out with you - like we are doing now when it’s too late. I wanted to tell you what I thought of you.’

‘What did you think?’

‘That you were her pimp. You pimped for me and you pimped for them, and now you are pimping for the latest one. The eternal pimp. Why don’t you get angry, Henry?’

‘I never knew.’

‘You pimped with your ignorance. You pimped by never learning how to make love with her, so she had to look elsewhere. You pimped by giving opportunities… You pimped by being a bore and a fool, so now somebody who isn’t a bore and fool is playing about with her in Cedar Road.’

‘Why did she leave you?’

‘Because I became a bore and a fool too. But I wasn’t born one, Henry. You created me. She wouldn’t leave you, so I became a bore, boring her with complaints and jealousy.’

He said, ‘People have a great opinion of your books.’

‘And they say you’re a first-class chairman. What the hell does our work matter?’

He said sadly, ‘I don’t know anything else that does,’ looking up at the grey cumulus passing above the south bank. The gulls flew low over the barges and the shot-tower stood black in the winter light among the ruined warehouses. The man who fed the sparrows had gone and the woman with the brown-paper parcel, the fruit-sellers cried like animals in the dusk outside the station. It was as if the shutters were going up on the whole world; soon we should all of us be abandoned to our own devices. ‘I wondered why you hadn’t been to see us all that time,’ Henry said.

‘I suppose - in a way - we’d got to the end of love. There was nothing else we could do together. She could shop and cook and fall asleep with you, but she could only make love with me.’

‘She’s very fond of you,’ he said as though it were his job to comfort me, as though my eyes were the ones bruised with tears.

‘One isn’t satisfied with fondness.’

‘I was.’

‘I wanted love to go on and on, never to get less…’ I had never spoken to anyone like this, except Sarah, but Henry’s reply was not Sarah’s. He said, ‘It’s not in human nature. One has to be satisfied…’ but that wasn’t what Sarah had said, and sitting there beside Henry in the Victoria Gardens, watching the day die, I remembered the end of the whole ‘affair’.