Suddenly she began to cough with her hand pressed to her side. I knew she was in pain and I couldn’t leave her alone in pain. I came and sat beside her and put my hand on her knee while she coughed. I thought, If only one had a touch that could heal. When the fit was over, she said, ‘Please won’t you let me be.’
‘I’ll never let you be,’ I said.
‘What’s come over you, Maurice? You weren’t like that the other day at lunch.’
‘I was bitter. I didn’t know you loved me.’
‘Why do you think I do?’ she asked, but she let my hand rest on her knee. I told her then how Mr Parkis had stolen her diary - I didn’t want any lies between us now.
‘It wasn’t a good thing to do,’ she said.
‘No.’ She began to cough again and afterwards in her exhaustion she leant her shoulder against me.
‘My dear,’ I said, ‘it’s all over now. The waiting, I mean. We’re going away together.’
‘No,’ she said.
I put my arm round her and touched her breast. ‘This is where we begin again,’ I said. ‘I’ve been a bad lover, Sarah. It was the insecurity that did it. I didn’t trust you. I didn’t know enough about you. But I’m secure now.’
She said nothing, but she still leant against me. It was like an assent. I said, ‘I’ll tell you how it had better be. Go back home and lie in bed for a couple of days - you don’t want to travel with a cold like that. I’ll ring up every day and see how you are. When you are well enough, I’ll come over and help you pack. We won’t stay here. I have a cousin in Dorset who has an empty cottage I can use. We’ll stay there a few weeks and rest. I’ll be able to finish my book. We can face the lawyers afterwards. We need a rest, both of us. I’m tired and I’m sick to death of being without you, Sarah.’
‘Me too.’ She spoke so low that I wouldn’t have heard the phrase if I had been a stranger to it, but it was like a signature tune that had echoed through all our relationship, from the first love-making in the Paddington hotel. ‘Me too’ for loneliness, griefs, disappointments, pleasures and despairs, the claim to share everything.
‘Money’s going to be short,’ I said, ‘but not too short. I’ve been commissioned to do a Life of General Gordon and the advance is enough to keep us for three months comfortably. By that time I can hand in the novel and get an advance on that. Both books will be out this year, and they should keep us till another’s ready. I can work, with you there. You know, any moment now I’m going to come through. I’ll be a vulgar success yet, and you’ll hate it and I’ll hate it, but we’ll buy things and be extravagant and it will be fun, because we’ll be together.’
Suddenly I realized she was asleep. Exhausted by her flight she had fallen asleep against my shoulder as so many times, in taxis, in buses, on a park-seat. I sat still and let her be. There was nothing to disturb her in the dark church. The candles napped around the virgin, and there was nobody else there. The slowly growing pain in my upper arm where her weight lay was the greatest pleasure I had ever known.
Children are supposed to be influenced by what you whisper to them in sleep, and I began to whisper to Sarah, not loud enough to wake her, hoping that the words would drop hypnotically into her unconscious mind. ‘I love you, Sarah,’ I whispered. ‘Nobody has ever loved you as much before. We are going to be happy. Henry won’t mind except in his pride, and pride soon heals. Hell find himself a new habit to take your place - perhaps he’ll collect Greek coins. We are going away, Sarah, we are going away. Nobody can stop it now. You love me, Sarah,’ and I fell silent as I began to wonder whether I ought to buy a new suitcase. Then she woke coughing.
‘I’ve been asleep,’ she said.
‘You must go home now, Sarah. You’re cold.’
‘It isn’t home, Maurice,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to go away from here.’
‘It’s cold.’
‘I don’t mind the cold. And it’s dark. I can believe anything in the dark.’
‘Just believe in us.’
‘That’s what I meant.’ She shut her eyes again, and looking up at the altar I thought with triumph, almost as though he were a living rival, You see - these are the arguments that win, and gently moved my fingers across her breast.
‘You’re tired, aren’t you?’ I asked. ‘Very tired.’
‘You shouldn’t have run away from me like that.’
‘It wasn’t you I was running from.’ She moved her shoulder. ‘Please, Maurice, go now.’
‘You ought to be in bed.’
‘I will be soon. I don’t want to go back with you. I just want to say good-bye here.’
‘Promise you won’t stay long.’
‘I promise.’
‘And you’ll telephone to me?’
She nodded, but looking down at her hand where it lay in her lap like something thrown away, I saw that she had her fingers crossed. I asked her with suspicion, ‘You are telling me the truth?’ I uncrossed her fingers with mine and said, ‘You aren’t planning to escape me again?’
‘Maurice, dear Maurice,’ she said, ‘I haven’t got the strength.’ She began to cry, thrusting her fists into her eyes as a child does.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘Just go away. Please, Maurice, have a bit of mercy.’
One gets to the end of badgering and contriving: I couldn’t go on with that appeal in my ears. I kissed her on the tough and knotty hair, and coming away I found her lips, smudgy and salt, on the corner of my mouth. ‘God bless you,’ she said, and I thought, That’s what she crossed out in her letter to Henry. One says good-bye to another’s good-bye unless one is Smythe and it was an involuntary act when I repeated her blessing back to her, but turning as I left the church and seeing her huddled there at the edge of the candle-light, like a beggar come in for warmth, I could imagine a God blessing her: or a God loving her. When I began to write our story down, I thought I was writing a record of hate, but somehow the hate has got mislaid and all I know is that in spite of her mistakes and her unreliability, she was better than most. It’s just as well that one of us should believe in her: she never did in herself.
2
The next few days I had to make a great effort to be sensible. I was working for both of us now. In the morning I set myself a minimum of seven hundred and fifty words on the novel, but usually I managed to get a thousand done by eleven o’clock. It’s astonishing the effect of hope: the novel that had dragged all through the last year ran towards its end. I knew that Henry left for work around nine-thirty, and the most likely hour for her to telephone was between then and twelve-thirty. Henry had started coming home for lunch (so Parkis had told me); there was no chance of her telephoning again before three. I would revise my day’s work and do my letters until twelve-thirty, and then I was released however gloomily from expectation. Until two-thirty I could put in time at the British Museum Reading Room, making notes for the life of General Gordon. I couldn’t absorb myself in reading and note-taking as I could in writing the novel, and the thought of Sarah came between me and the missionary life in China. Why had I been invited to write this biography? I often wondered. They would have done better to have chosen an author who believed in Gordon’s God. I could appreciate the obstinate stand at Khartoum - the hatred of the safe politicians at home, but the Bible on the desk belonged to another world of thought from mine. Perhaps the publisher half hoped that my cynical treatment of Gordon’s Christianity would cause a succčs de scandale. I had no intention of pleasing him: this God was also Sarah’s God, and I was going to throw no stones at any phantom she believed she loved. I hadn’t during that period any hatred of her God, for hadn’t I in the end proved stronger?
One day as I ate my sandwiches, on to which my indelible pencil somehow always got transferred, a familiar voice greeted me from the desk opposite in a tone hushed out of respect for our fellow workers. ‘I hope all goes well now, sir, if you’ll forgive the personal intrusion.’