‘But if you really wouldn’t resent a memento, sir…’
‘Of course I wouldn’t, Parkis.’
‘I have something here, sir, that might be of interest and use.’ He took out of his pocket an object wrapped in tissue paper and slid it shyly across the desk towards me. I unwrapped it. It was a cheap ashtray marked Hotel Metropole, Brightlingsea. ‘There’s quite a history, sir, with that. You remember the Bolton case.’
‘I can’t say I do.’
‘It made a great stir, sir, at the time. Lady Bolton, her maid and the man, sir. All discovered together. That ashtray stood beside the bed. On the lady’s side.’
‘You must have collected quite a little museum.’
‘I should have given it to Mr Savage - he took a particular interest - but I’m glad now, sir, I didn’t. I think you’ll find the inscription will evoke comment when your friends put out their cigarettes, and there’s your answer pat - the Bolton Case. They’ll all want to hear more of that.’
‘It sounds sensational.’
‘It’s all human nature, sir, isn’t it, and human love. Though I was surprised. Not having expected the third. And the room not large or fashionable. Mrs Parkis was alive then, but I didn’t like to tell her the details. She got disturbed by things.’
‘I’ll certainly treasure the memento,’ I said.
‘If ashtrays could speak, sir.’
‘Indeed, yes.’
But even Parkis with that profound thought had finished up his words. A last pressure of the hand, a little sticky (perhaps it had been in contact with Lance’s), and he was gone. He was not one of those whom one expects to see again. Then I opened Sarah’s journal. I thought first I would look for that day in June 1944 when everything ended, and after I had discovered the reason for that there were many other dates from which I could learn exactly, checking them with my diary, how it was that her love had petered out. I wanted to treat this as a document in a case - one of Parkis’s cases - should be treated, but I hadn’t that degree of calmness, for what I found when I opened the journal was not what I was expecting. Hate and suspicion and envy had driven me so far away that I read her words like a declaration of love from a stranger. I had expected plenty of evidence against her - hadn’t I so often caught her out in lies? - and now here in writing that I could believe, as I couldn’t believe her voice, was the complete answer. For it was the last couple of pages I read first, and I read them again at the end to make sure. It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved, when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.
1
… anything left, when we’d finished, but You. For either of us. I might have taken a lifetime spending a little love at a time, eking it out here and there, on this man and that. But even the first time, in the hotel near Paddington, we spent all we had. You were there, teaching us to squander, like you taught the rich man, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for pain. You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace - he needs it more.
12 February 1946.
Two days ago I had such a sense of peace and quiet and love. Life was going to be happy again, but last night I dreamed I was walking up a long staircase to meet Maurice at the top. I was still happy because when I reached the top of the staircase we were going to make love. I called to him that I was coming, but it wasn’t Maurice’s voice that answered; it was a stranger’s that boomed like a foghorn warning lost ships, and scared me. I thought, he’s let his flat and gone away and I don’t know where he is, and going down the stairs again the water rose beyond my waist and the hall was thick with mist. Then I woke up. I’m not at peace any more. I just want him like I used to in the old days. I want to be eating sandwiches with him. I want to be drinking with him in a bar. I’m tired and I don’t want any more pain. I want Maurice. I want ordinary corrupt human love. Dear God, you know I want to want Your pain, but I don’t want it now. Take it away for a while and give it me another time.
After that I started the book from the beginning. She hadn’t entered the journal every day, and I had no wish to read every entry. The theatres she had been to with Henry, the restaurants, the parties - all that life of which I knew nothing had still the power to hurt.
2
12 June 1944.
Sometimes I get so tired of trying to convince him that I love him and shall love him for ever. He pounces on my words like a barrister and twists them. I know he is afraid of that desert which would be around him if our love were to end, but he can’t realize that I feel exactly the same. What he says aloud, I say to myself silently and write it here. What can one build in the desert? Sometimes after a day when we have made love many times, I wonder whether it isn’t possible to come to an end of sex, and I know that he is wondering too and is afraid of that point where the desert begins. What do we do in the desert if we lose each other? How does one go on living after that?
He is jealous of the past and the present and the future. His love is like a medieval chastity belt: only when he is there, with me, in me, does he feel safe. If only I could make him feel secure, then we could love peacefully, happily, not savagely, inordinately, and the desert would recede out of sight. For a lifetime perhaps.
If one could believe in God, would he fill the desert? I have always wanted to be liked or admired. I feel a terrible insecurity if a man turns on me, if I lose a friend. I don’t even want to lose a husband. I want everything, all the time, everywhere. I’m afraid of the desert. God loves you, they say in the churches, God is everything. People who believe that don’t need admiration, they don’t need to sleep with a man, they feel safe. But I can’t invent a belief.
All today Maurice has been sweet to me. He tells me often that he has never loved another woman so much. He thinks that by saying it often, he will make me believe it. But I believe it simply because I love him in exactly the same way. If I stopped loving him, I would cease to believe in his love. If I loved God, then I would believe in His love for me. It’s not enough to need it We have to love first, and I don’t know how. But I need it, how I need it.
All day he was sweet. Only once, when a man’s name was mentioned, I saw his eyes move away. He thinks I still sleep with other men, and if I did, would it matter so much? If sometimes he has a woman, do I complain? I wouldn’t rob him of some small companionship in the desert if we can’t have each other there. Sometimes I think that if the time came he would refuse me even a glass of water; he would drive me into such complete isolation that I would be alone with nothing and nobody - like a hermit, but they were never alone, or so they say. I am so muddled. What are we doing to each other? Because I know that I am doing to him exactly what he is doing to me. We are sometimes so happy, and never in our lives have we known more unhappiness. It’s as if we were working together on the same statue, cutting it out of each other’s misery. But I don’t even know the design.
17 June 1944.
Yesterday I went home with him and we did the usual things. I haven’t the nerve to put them down, but I’d like to, because now when I’m writing it’s already tomorrow and I’m afraid of getting to the end of yesterday. As long as I go on writing, yesterday is today and we are still together.
While I waited for him yesterday there were speakers out on the Common: the I. L. P. and the Communist Party, and the man who just tells jokes, and there was a man attacking Christianity. The Rationalist Society of South London or some name like that. He would have been good-looking if it hadn’t been for the spots which covered one cheek. There were very few people in his audience and no hecklers. He was attacking something dead already, and I wondered why he took the trouble. I stayed and listened for a few minutes: he was arguing against the arguments for a God. I hadn’t really known there were any - except this cowardly need I feel of not being alone.