‘We must both have been a bit overwrought.’ He stared up at the old horns overhead, screwing up his eyes in his attempt to read the name of the donor. He said stupidly, ‘You seem to have a lot of heads.’ I wasn’t going to let him off. I said, ‘I went to see him a few days later.’
He put down his glass and said, ‘Bendrix, you had absolutely no right… ‘
‘I’m paying all the charges.’
‘It’s infernal cheek.’ He stood up, but I had him penned in where he couldn’t get past without an act of violence, and violence wasn’t in Henry’s character.
‘Surely you’d have liked her cleared?’ I said.
‘There was nothing to clear. I want to go, please.’
‘I think you ought to read the reports.’
‘I’ve no intention… ‘
‘Then I think I shall have to read you the bit about the surreptitious visits. Her love letter I returned to the detectives for filing. My dear Henry, you’ve been properly led up the garden.’
I really thought that he was going to hit me. If he had, I would have struck back with pleasure, struck back at this oaf to whom Sarah had remained in her way so stupidly loyal for so many years, but at that moment the secretary of the club came in. He was a man with a long grey beard and a soup-stained waistcoat, who looked like a Victorian poet but in fact wrote little sad reminiscences of the dogs he had once known. (_For Ever Fido_ had been a great success in 1912.) ‘Ah, Bendrix,’ he said, ‘I haven’t seen you here in a long while.’ I introduced him to Henry and he said with the quickness of a hairdresser, ‘I’ve been following the reports every day.’
‘What reports?’ For once Henry’s work had not come first to his mind when that word was uttered.
‘The Royal Commission.’
When at last he had gone, Henry said, ‘Now will you please give me the reports and let me pass.’
I imagined that he had been thinking things over while the secretary was with us, so I handed him the last report.
He put it straight into the fire and rammed it home with the poker. I couldn’t help thinking that the gesture had dignity. ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.
‘Nothing.’
‘You haven’t got rid of the facts.’
‘To hell with the facts,’ Henry said. I had never heard him swear before.
‘I can always let you have a carbon copy.’
‘Will you let me go now?’ Henry said. The demon had done its work, I felt drained of venom. I took my legs off the fender and let Henry pass. He walked straight out of the club, forgetting his hat, that black superior hat that I had seen come dripping across the Common - it seemed an age and not a matter of weeks ago.
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’.
5
She had said to me - they were nearly the last words I heard from her before she came dripping into the hall from her assignation - ‘You needn’t be so scared. Love doesn’t end. Just because we don’t see each other…’ She had already made her decision, though I didn’t know it till next day, when the telephone presented nothing but the silent open mouth of somebody found dead. She said, ‘My dear, my dear. People go on loving God, don’t they, all their lives without seeing Him?’