She wasn’t lying even when she said, ‘Nobody else. Ever again.’ There are contradictions in time, that’s all, that don’t exist on the mathematical point. She had so much more capacity for love than I had - I couldn’t bring down that curtain round the moment, I couldn’t forget and I couldn’t not fear. Even in the moment of love, I was like a police officer gathering evidence of a crime that hadn’t yet been committed, and when more than seven years later I opened Parkis’s letter the evidence was all there in my memory to add to my bitterness.
2
‘Dear sir,’ the letter said, ‘I am glad to be able to report that me and my boy have made friendly contact with the domestic at Number 17. This has enabled the investigation to proceed with greater speed because I am sometimes able to take a squint at the party’s engagement book and thus obtain movements, also inspect from day to day the contents of the party’s wastepaper basket, from which I include herewith an interesting exhibit, which please return with observations. The party in question also keeps a diary and has kept one for some years, but so far the domestic who in future I shall refer to for greater security as my friend has not been able to lay hand on it, being as how the party keeps the same under lock and key, which may or may not be a suspicious circumstance. Apart from the important exhibit attached hereto, the party seems to spend a great deal of time in not keeping the appointments arranged as per her engagement book which has to be regarded as a blind, however personally unwilling to take a low view or cast a bias in an investigation of this order where exact truth is desired for the sake of all parties.’
We are not hurt only by tragedy: the grotesque too carries weapons, undignified, ridiculous weapons. There were times when I wanted to crush Mr Parkis’s rambling evasive inefficient reports into his mouth in the presence of that boy of his. It was as if in my attempt to trap Sarah (but for what purpose? To hurt Henry or to hurt myself?) I had let a clown come tumbling into our intimacy. Intimacy. Even that word smacks of Mr Parkis’s reports. Didn’t he write once, ‘Though I have no direct evidence of intimacy having taken place at 16 Cedar Road, the party certainly showed an intent to deceive’? But that was later. In this report of his I learned only that on two occasions when Sarah had written down engagements to visit her dentist and her dressmaker, she had not turned up at her appointments if they had ever existed; she had evaded pursuit.
And then turning over Mr Parkis’s crude document, written in mauve ink on cheap notepaper in his thin Waverley handwriting, I saw the bold clean writing of Sarah herself. I had not realized I would recognize it after nearly two years.
It was only a scrap of paper pinned to the back of the report, and it was marked with a big A in red pencil. Under the A, Mr Parkis had written, ‘Important in view of possible proceedings that all documentary evidence should be returned for filing.’ The scrap had been salvaged from the wastepaper basket and smoothed carefully out as it might have been by a lover’s hand. And certainly it must have been addressed to a lover: ‘I have no need to write to you or talk to you, you know everything before I can speak, but when one loves, one feels the need to use the same old ways one has always used. I know I am only beginning to love, but already I want to abandon everything, everybody but you: only fear and habit prevent me. Dear…’ There was no more. It stared boldly up at me, and I couldn’t help thinking how I had forgotten every line of all the notes she had once addressed to me. Wouldn’t I have kept them if they had ever confessed so completely to her love, and for fear of my keeping them hadn’t she always in those days been careful to write to me, as she put it, ‘between the lines’? But this latest love had burst the cage of lines. It had refused to be kept between them out of sight. There was one code word I did remember - ‘onions’. That word had been allowed in our correspondence to represent discreetly our passion. Love became ‘onions’, even the act itself ‘onions’. ‘Already I want to abandon everything, everybody, but you,’ and onions I thought, with hatred, onions - that was the way in my time.
I wrote ‘No comment’ under the scrap of letter, put it back in an envelope and addressed it to Mr Parkis, but when I woke in the night I could recite the whole thing over to myself, and the word ‘abandon’ took on many kinds of physical image. I lay there unable to sleep, one memory after another pricking me with hatred and desire: her hair fanning out on the parquet floor and the stair squeaking, a day in the country when we had lain down in a ditch out of view of the road and I could see the sparkle of frost between the fronds of hair on the hard ground and a tractor came pushing by at the moment of crisis and the man never turned his head. Why doesn’t hatred kill desire? I would have given anything to sleep. I would have behaved like a schoolboy if I had believed in the possibility of a substitute. But there was a time when I had tried to find a substitute, and it hadn’t worked.
I am a jealous man - it seems stupid to write these words in what is, I suppose, a long record of jealousy, jealousy of Henry, jealousy of Sarah and jealousy of that other whom Mr Parkis was so maladroitly pursuing. Now that all this belongs to the past, I feel my jealousy of Henry only when memories become particularly vivid (because I swear that if we had been married, with her loyalty and my desire, we could have been happy for a lifetime), but there still remains jealousy of my rival - a melodramatic word painfully inadequate to express the unbearable complacency, confidence and success he always enjoys. Sometimes I think he wouldn’t even recognize me as part of the picture, and I feel an enormous desire to draw attention to myself, to shout in his ear, ‘You can’t ignore me. Here I am. Whatever happened later, Sarah loved me then.’
Sarah and I used to have long arguments on jealousy. I was jealous even of the past, of which she spoke to me frankly as it came up - the affairs that meant nothing at all (except possibly the unconscious desire to find that final spasm Henry had so woefully failed to evoke). She was as loyal to her lovers as she was to Henry, but what should have provided me with some comfort (for undoubtedly she would be loyal to me too) angered me. There was a time when she would laugh at my anger, simply refusing to believe that it was genuine, just as she refused to believe in her own beauty, and I would be just as angry because she refused to be jealous of my past or my possible future. I refused to believe that love could take any other form than mine: I measured love by the extent of my jealousy, and by that standard of course she could not love me at all.
The arguments always took the same form and I only describe one particular occasion because on that occasion the argument ended in action - a stupid action leading nowhere, unless eventually to this doubt that always comes when I begin to write, the feeling that after all perhaps she was right and I was wrong.
I remember saying angrily, ‘This is just a hang-over from your old frigidity. A frigid woman is never jealous, you simply haven’t caught up yet on ordinary human emotions.’