‘Of course not. Have another port.’
While we were waiting for it, she tried to switch the conversation, but I brought her relentlessly back. ‘What did you mean - Sarah was a Catholic?’
‘Promise you won’t tell Henry.’
‘I promise,’
‘We were abroad one time in Normandy. Sarah was just over two. My husband used to go to Deauville. So he said, but I knew he was seeing his first wife. I got so cross. Sarah and I went for a walk along the sands. Sarah kept on wanting to sit down, but I’d give her a rest and then we’d walk a little. I said, “This is a secret between you and me, Sarah.” Even then she was good at secrets - if she wanted to be. I was scared I can tell you, but it was a good revenge, wasn’t it?’
‘Revenge? I don’t understand you very well, Mrs Bertram.’
‘On my husband, of course. It wasn’t only because of his first wife. I told you, didn’t I, that he wouldn’t let me be a Catholic? Oh, there were such scenes if I tried to go to Mass, so I thought, Sarah’s going to be a Catholic, and he won’t know and I shan’t tell him unless I get really angry.’
‘And didn’t you?’
‘He went and left me a year after that.’
‘So you were able to be a Catholic again?’
‘Oh, well, I didn’t believe much, you see. And then I married a Jew, and he was difficult too. They tell you Jews are awfully generous. Don’t you believe it. Oh, he was a mean man.’
‘But what happened on the beach?’
‘Of course, it didn’t happen on the beach. I only meant we walked that way. I left Sarah by the door and went to find the priest. I had to tell him a few lies - white ones of course - to explain things. I could put it all on my husband, of course. I said he’d promised before we married, and then he’d broken his promise. It helped a lot not being able to speak much French. You sound awfully truthful if you don’t know the right words. Anyway he did it there and then, and we caught the bus back to lunch.’
‘Did what?’
‘Baptized her a Catholic’
‘Is that all?’ I asked with relief.
‘Well, it’s a sacrament - or so they say.’
‘I thought at first you meant that Sarah was a real Catholic,’
‘Well, you see, she was one, only she didn’t know it. I wish Henry had buried her properly,’ Mrs Bertram said and began again the grotesque drip of tears.
‘You can’t blame him if even Sarah didn’t know.’
‘I always had a wish that it would ‘take’. Like vaccination,’
‘It doesn’t seem to have ‘taken’ much with you,’ I couldn’t resist saying, but she wasn’t offended. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’ve had a lot of temptations in my life, I expect things will come right in the end. Sarah was very patient with me. She was a good girl. Nobody appreciated her like I did.’ She took some more port and said, ‘If only you’d known her properly. Why, if she’d been brought up in the right way, if I hadn’t always married such mean men, she could have been a saint I truly believe.’
‘But it just didn’t take,’ I said fiercely, and I called the waiter to bring the bill. A wing of those grey geese that fly above our future graves had sent a draught down my back, or else perhaps I had caught a chill in the frozen grounds: if only it could have been a deathly chill like Sarah’s.
It didn’t take, I repeated to myself all the way home in the tube, after depositing Mrs Bertram at Marylebone, and lending her another three pounds ‘because tomorrow’s Wednesday and I have to stay in for the char’. Poor Sarah, what had ‘taken’ had been that string of husbands and step-fathers. Her mother had taught her effectively enough that one man was not enough for a lifetime, but she herself had seen through the pretence of her mother’s marriages. When she married Henry she married for life, as I knew with despair.
But that wisdom had nothing to do with the shifty ceremony near the beach. It wasn’t You that ‘took’, I told the God I didn’t believe in, that imaginary God whom Sarah thought had saved my life (for what conceivable purpose?) and who had ruined even in his non-existence the only deep happiness I had ever experienced: oh no, it wasn’t You that took, for that would have been magic and I believe in magic even less than I believe in You: magic is your cross, your resurrection of the body, your holy Catholic church, your communion of saints.
I lay on my back and watched the shadows of the Common trees shift on my ceiling. It’s just a coincidence, I thought, a horrible coincidence that nearly brought her back at the end to You. You can’t mark a two-year-old child for life with a bit of water and a prayer. If I began to believe that, I could believe in the body and the blood. You didn’t own her all those years: I owned her. You won in the end, You don’t need to remind me of that, but she wasn’t deceiving me with You when she lay here with me, on this bed, with this pillow under her back. When she slept, I was with her, not You. It was I who penetrated her, not You.
All the light went out, darkness was over the bed, and I dreamed I was at a fair with a gun in my hand. I was shooting at bottles that looked as though they were made of glass but my bullets bounded off them as though they were coated with steel. I fired and fired, and not a bottle could I crack, and at five in the morning I woke with exactly the same thought in my head: for those years you were mine, not His.
5
It had been a macabre joke of mine when I thought that Henry might ask me to share his house. I had not really expected the offer and when it came I was taken by surprise. Even his visit a week after the funeral was a surprise: he had never been to my house before. I doubt whether he had ever come much nearer to the south side than the night I met him on the Common in the rain. I heard my bell ring and looked out of the window because I didn’t want to see visitors - I had an idea it might be Waterbury with Sylvia. The lamp by the plane-tree on the pavement picked out Henry’s black hat. I went downstairs and opened the door. ‘I was just passing by,’ Henry lied.
‘Come in.’
He stood and dithered awkwardly while I got my drinks out of a cupboard. He said, ‘You seem interested in General Gordon.’
‘They want me to do a Life.’
‘Are you going to do it?’
‘I suppose so. I don’t feel much like work these days.’
‘It’s the same with me,’ Henry said.
‘Is the Royal Commission still sitting?’
‘Yes.’
‘It gives you something to think about.’
‘Does it? Yes, I suppose it does. Until we stop for lunch.’
‘It’s important work anyway. Here’s your sherry.’
‘It won’t make any difference to a single soul.’
What a long way Henry had travelled since the complacent photograph in the Tatler that had so angered me. I had a picture of Sarah, enlarged from a snapshot, facedown on my desk. He turned it over. ‘I remember taking that,’ he said. Sarah had told me the photograph had been taken by a woman-friend. I suppose she had lied to save my feelings. In the picture she looked younger and happier, but not more lovely than in the years I had known her. I wished I had been able to make her look that way, but it is the destiny of a lover to watch unhappiness hardening like a cast around his mistress. Henry said, ‘I was making a fool of myself to make her smile. Is General Gordon an interesting character?’
‘In some ways.’
Henry said, ‘The house feels very queer these days. I try to keep out of it as much as possible. I suppose you aren’t free for dinner at the club?’
‘I’ve got a lot of work I have to finish.’
He looked round my room. He said, ‘You haven’t much space for your books here.’
‘No. I have to keep some of them under the bed.’
He picked up a magazine that Waterbury had sent me before the interview to show an example of his work and said, ‘There’s room in my house. You could have practically a flat to yourself.’ I was too astonished to answer. He went rapidly on, turning over the leaves of the magazine as though he were really uninterested in his own suggestion, ‘Think it over. You mustn’t decide now.’