‘I don’t understand. I knew for certain you were dead.’
‘There wasn’t much to pray for then, was there?’ I teased her. ‘Except a miracle.’
‘When you are hopeless enough,’ she said, ‘you can pray for miracles. They happen, don’t they, to the poor, and I was poor.’
‘Stay till the All Clear.’ She shook her head and walked straight out of the room. I followed her down the stairs and began against my will to badger her. ‘Shall I see you this afternoon?’
‘No. I can’t.’
‘Some time tomorrow..
‘Henry’s coming back.’
Henry. Henry. Henry - that name tolled through our relationship, damping every mood of happiness or fun or exhilaration with its reminder that love dies, affection and habit win the day. ‘You needn’t be so scared,’ she said, ‘love doesn’t end…’ and nearly two years passed before that meeting in the hall and, ‘You?’
6
For days after that, of course, I had hope. It was only a coincidence, I thought, that the telephone wasn’t answered, and when after a week I met the maid and inquired about the Mileses and learnt that she was away in the country, I told myself that in war-time letters are lost. Morning after morning I would hear the rattle in the post-box and deliberately I would remain upstairs until my landlady fetched my mail. I wouldn’t look through the letters - disappointment had to be postponed, hope kept alive as long as possible; I would read each letter in turn and only when I reached the bottom of the pile could I be certain that there was nothing from Sarah. Then life withered until the four o’clock post, and after that one had to get through the night again.
For nearly a week I didn’t write to her: pride prevented me, until one morning I abandoned it completely, writing anxiously and bitterly, marking the envelope addressed to the north side, ‘Urgent’ and ‘Please forward’. I got no reply and then I gave up hope and remembered exactly what she had said. ‘People go on loving God, don’t they, all their lives without seeing Him?’ I thought with hatred, she always has to show up well in her own mirror: she mixes religion with desertion to make it sound noble to herself. She won’t admit that now she prefers to go to bed with X.
That was the worst period of alclass="underline" it is my profession to imagine, to think in images: fifty times through the day, and immediately I woke during the night, a curtain would rise and the play would begin: always the same play, Sarah making love, Sarah with X, doing the same things that we had done together, Sarah kissing in her own particular way, arching herself in the act of sex and uttering that cry like pain, Sarah in abandonment. I would take pills at night to make me sleep quickly, but I never found any pills that would keep me asleep till daylight. Only the robots were a distraction during the day: for a few seconds between the silence and the crash my mind would be clear of Sarah. Three weeks passed and the images were as clear and frequent as at first and there seemed no reason why they should ever end, and I began quite seriously to think of suicide. I even set a date, and I saved up my sleeping pills with what was almost a sense of hope. I needn’t after all go on like this indefinitely, I told myself. Then the date came and the play went on and on and I didn’t kill myself. It wasn’t cowardice: it was a memory that stopped me -the memory of the look of disappointment on Sarah’s face when I came into the room after the VI had fallen. Hadn’t she, at heart, hoped for my death, so that her new affair with X would hurt her conscience less, for she had a kind of elementary conscience? If I killed myself now, she wouldn’t have to worry about me at all, and surely after our four years together there would be moments of worry even with X. I wasn’t going to give her that satisfaction. If I had known a way I would have increased her worries to breaking point and my impotence angered me. How I hated her.
Of course there is an end of hate as there is an end of love. After six months I realized that I had not thought of Sarah all one day and that I had been happy. It couldn’t have been quite the end of hate because at once I went into a stationer’s to buy a picture postcard and write a jubilant message on it that might - who knows? - cause a momentary pain, but by the time I had written her address I had lost the desire to hurt and dropped the card into the road. It was strange that hate should have been revived again by that meeting with Henry. I remember thinking, as I opened Mr Parkis’s next report, if only love could revive like that too.
Mr Parkis had done his work welclass="underline" the powder had worked and the flat had been located - the top flat in 16 Cedar Road: the occupant, a Miss Smythe and her brother, Richard. I wondered whether Miss Smythe was as convenient a sister as Henry was a husband, and all my latent snobbery was aroused by the name - that y, the final e. I thought, has she fallen as low as a Smythe in Cedar Road? Was he the end of a long chain of lovers in the last two years, or when I saw him (and I was determined to see him less obscurely than in Mr Parkis’s reports) would I be looking at the man for whom she had deserted me in June 1944?
‘Shall I ring the bell and walk right in and confront him like an injured husband?’ I asked Mr Parkis (who had met me by appointment in an A. B. C. - it was his own suggestion as he had the boy with him and couldn’t take him into a bar).
‘I’m against it, sir,’ Mr Parkis said, adding a third spoonful of sugar to his tea. His son sat at a table out of earshot with a glass of orangeade and a bun. He observed everybody who came in, as they shook the thin watery snow from their hats and coats, watched with his alert brown beady eyes as though he had to make a report later - perhaps he had, part of the Parkis training. ‘You see, sir,’ Mr Parkis said, ‘unless you were willing to give evidence, it complicates things in the Courts.’
‘It will never reach the Courts.’
‘An amicable settlement?’
‘A lack of interest,’ I said. ‘One can’t really make a fuss about a man called Smythe. I’d just like to see him - that’s all.’
‘The safest thing, sir, would be a meter inspector.’
‘I can’t dress up in a peaked cap.’
‘I share your feelings, sir. It’s a thing I try to avoid. And I’d like the boy to avoid it too when the time comes.’ His sad eyes followed every movement his boy made. ‘He wanted an ice, sir, but I said no, not in this weather,’ and he shivered a little as though the thought of the ice had chilled him. For a moment I had no idea of his meaning when he said, ‘Every profession has its dignity, sir.’
I said, ‘Would you lend me your boy?’
‘If you assure me there’ll be nothing unpleasant, sir,’ he said doubtfully.
T don’t want to call when Mrs Miles is there. This scene will have a Universal certificate.’
‘But why the boy, sir?’
‘I’ll say he’s feeling ill. We’ve come to the wrong address. They couldn’t help letting him sit down for a while.’
‘It’s in the boy’s capacity,’ Mr Parkis said with pride, ‘and nobody can resist Lance.’
‘He’s called Lance, is he?’
‘After Sir Lancelot, sir. Of the Round Table.’
‘I’m surprised. That was a rather unpleasant episode, surely.’
‘He found the Holy Grail,’ Mr Parkis said.
‘That was Galahad. Lancelot was found in bed with Guinevere.’ Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy? Mr Parkis said sadly, looking across at his boy as though he had betrayed him, ‘I hadn’t heard.’
7
Next day - to spite his father - I gave the boy an ice in the High Street before we went to Cedar Road. Henry Miles was holding a cocktail party - so Mr Parkis had reported, and the coast was clear. He handed the boy over to me, after twitching his clothes straight. The boy was wearing his best things in honour of his first stage appearance with a client, while I was wearing my worst. Some of the strawberry ice fell from his spoon and made a splash upon his suit. I sat in silence till the last drop was drained. Then I said, ‘Another?’ He nodded. ‘Strawberry again?’