I came into my room and on the desk lay a letter from Sarah.
She had been dead for twenty-four hours and unconscious for longer than that. How could a letter take so long across a strip of common? Then I saw that she had put my number wrong, and a little of the old bitterness seeped out. She wouldn’t have forgotten my number two years ago.
There was so much pain at the idea of seeing her writing that I nearly held the letter to the gas-fire, but curiosity can be stronger than pain. It was written in pencil, I suppose because she was writing in bed.
‘Dearest Maurice,’ she wrote, ‘I meant to write to you the other night after you had gone away, but I felt rather sick when I got home and Henry fussed about me. I’m writing instead of telephoning. I can’t telephone and hear your voice go queer when I say I’m not going to come away with you. Because I’m not going to come away with you Maurice, dearest Maurice. I love you but I can’t see you again. I don’t know how I’m going to live in this pain and longing and I’m praying to God all the time that he won’t be hard on me, that he won’t keep me alive. Dear Maurice, I want to have my cake and eat it like everybody else. I went to a priest two days ago before you rang me up and I told him I wanted to be a Catholic. I told him about my promise and about you. I said, I’m not really married to Henry any more. We don’t sleep together - not since the first year with you. And it wasn’t really a marriage, I said, you couldn’t call a registry office a wedding. I asked him couldn’t I be a Catholic and marry you? I knew you wouldn’t mind going through a service. Every time I asked him a question I had such hope; it was like opening the shutters of a new house and looking for the view, and every window just faced a blank wall. No, no, no, he said, I couldn’t marry you, I couldn’t go on seeing you, not if I was going to be a Catholic. I thought, to hell with the whole lot of them and I walked out of the room where I was seeing him, and I slammed the door to show what I thought of priests. They are between us and God, I thought; God has more mercy, and then I came out of the church and saw the crucifix they have there, and I thought, of course, he’s got mercy, only it’s such an odd sort of mercy, it sometimes looks like punishment. Maurice, my dearest, I’ve got a foul headache, and I feel like death. I wish I weren’t as strong as a horse. I don’t want to live without you, and I know one day I shall meet you on the Common and then I won’t care a damn about Henry or God or anything. But what’s the good, Maurice? I believe there’s a God - I believe the whole bag of tricks, there’s nothing I don’t believe, they could subdivide the Trinity into a dozen parts and I’d believe. They could dig up records that proved Christ had been invented by Pilate to get himself promoted and I’d believe just the same. I’ve caught belief like a disease. I’ve fallen into belief like I fell in love. I’ve never loved before as I love you, and I’ve never believed in anything before as I believe now. I’m sure. I’ve never been sure before about anything. When you came in at the door with the blood on your face, I became sure. Once and for all. Even though I didn’t know it at the time. I fought belief for longer than I fought love, but I haven’t any fight left.
‘Maurice, dear, don’t be angry. Be sorry for me, but don’t be angry. I’m a phoney and a fake, but this isn’t phoney or fake. I used to think I was sure about myself and what was right and wrong, and you taught me not to be sure. You took away all my lies and self-deceptions like they clear a road of rubble for somebody to come along it, somebody of importance, and now he’s come, but you cleared the way yourself. When you write you try to be exact and you taught me to want the truth, and you told me when I wasn’t telling the truth. Do you really think that, you’d say, or do you only think you think it? So you see it’s all your fault, Maurice, it’s all your fault. I pray to God He won’t keep me alive like this.’
There wasn’t any more. She seemed to have had a knack of getting her prayers answered even before they were spoken, because hadn’t she started dying that night when she came in out of the rain and found me with Henry? If I were writing a novel I would end it here: a novel, I used to think, has to end somewhere, but I’m beginning to believe my realism has been at fault all these years, for nothing in life now ever seems to end. Chemists tell you matter is never completely destroyed, and mathematicians tell you that if you halve each pace in crossing a room, you will never reach the opposite wall, so what an optimist I would be if I thought that this story ended here. Only, like Sarah, I wish I weren’t as strong as a horse.
2
I was late for the funeral. I had gone into town to meet a man called Waterbury who was going to write an article on my work in one of the little reviews. I tossed up whether I’d see him or not: I knew too well the pompous phrases of his article, the buried significance he would discover of which I was unaware and the faults I was tired of facing. Patronizingly in the end he would place me - probably a little above Maugham because Maugham is popular and I have not yet committed that crime - not yet, but although I retain a little of the exclusiveness of unsuccess, the little reviews, like wise detectives, can scent it on its way.
Why did I ever trouble to toss up? I didn’t want to meet Waterbury, and certainly I didn’t want to be written about. For I have come to an end of my interest in work now: no one can please me much with praise or hurt me with blame. When I began that novel about the civil servant I was still interested, but when Sarah left me, I recognized my work for what it was - as unimportant a drug as cigarettes to get one through the weeks and years. If we are extinguished by death, as I still try to believe, what point is there in leaving some books behind any more than bottles, clothes or cheap jewellery? and if Sarah is right, how unimportant all the importance of art is. I tossed up, I think, simply from loneliness. I hadn’t anything to do before the funeraclass="underline" I wanted to fortify myself with a drink or two (one may cease to care about one’s work, but one never ceases to care about conventions, and a man must not break down in public).
Waterbury was waiting in a sherry-bar off Tottenham Court Road. He wore black corduroy trousers and smoked cheap cigarettes, and he had with him a girl much taller and better-looking than he was who wore the same kind of trousers and smoked the same cigarettes. She was very young and she was called Sylvia and one knew that she was on a long course of study that had only begun with Waterbury - she was at the stage of imitating her teacher. I wondered where, with those looks, those alert good-natured eyes and hair the gold of illuminations, she would end. Would she even remember Waterbury in ten years and the bar off Tottenham Court Road? I felt sorry for him. He was so proud now, so patronizing to both of us, but he was on the losing side. Why, I thought, catching her eye over my glass at a particularly fatuous comment of his about the stream of consciousness, even now I could get her from him. His articles were bound in paper, but my books were bound in cloth. She knew she could learn more from me. And yet, poor devil, he had the nerve to snub her when occasionally she made a simple human unintellectual comment. I wanted to warn him of the empty future, but instead I took another glass and said, ‘I can’t stay long. I have to go to a funeral in Golders Green.’
‘A funeral in Golders Green,’ Waterbury exclaimed. ‘How like one of your own characters. It would have to be Golders Green, wouldn’t it?’
‘I didn’t choose the spot.’
‘Life imitating art.’
‘Is it a friend?’ Sylvia asked with sympathy and Waterbury glared at her for her irrelevance. ‘Yes.’
I could see that she was speculating - man? woman? what kind of a friend? and it pleased me. For I was a human being to her and not a writer: a man whose friends died and who attended their funerals, who felt pleasure and pain, who might even need comfort, not just a skilled craftsman whose work has greater sympathy perhaps than Mr Maugham’s, though of course we cannot rank it as high as…