‘It’s very good of you, Henry.’
‘You’d be doing me a favour, Bendrix.’
I thought, Why not? Writers are regarded as unconventional. Am I more conventional than a senior civil servant?
‘I dreamed last night,’ Henry said, ‘about all of us.’
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t remember much. We were drinking together. We were happy. When I woke up I thought she wasn’t dead.’
‘I don’t dream of her now.’
‘I wish we’d let that priest have his way.’
‘It would have been absurd, Henry. She was no more a Catholic than you or me.’
‘Do you believe in survival, Bendrix?’
‘If you mean personal survival, no.’
‘One can’t disprove it, Bendrix.’
‘It’s almost impossible to disprove anything. I write a story. How can you prove that the events in it never happened, that the characters aren’t real? Listen. I met a man on the Common today with three legs.’
‘How terrible,’ Henry said seriously. ‘An abortion?’
‘And they were covered with fish scales.’
‘You’re joking.’
‘But prove I am, Henry. You can’t disprove my story any more than I can disprove God. But I just know he’s a lie, just as you know my story’s a lie.’
‘Of course there are arguments.’
‘Oh, I could invent a philosophic argument for my story, I daresay, based on Aristotle.’
Henry abruptly changed the subject back. ‘It would save you a bit if you came and stayed with me. Sarah always said your books weren’t as successful as they should be.’
‘Oh, the shadow of success is falling upon them.’ I thought of Waterbury’s article. I said, ‘A moment comes when you can hear the popular reviewers dipping their pens for the plaudits - even before the next book’s written. It’s all a question of time.’ I talked because I hadn’t made up my mind.
Henry said, ‘There’s no ill-feeling left, is there, Bendrix? I got angry with you at your club - about that man. But what does it matter now?’
‘I was wrong. He was only some crazy tub-thumping rationalist who interested her with his theories. Forget it, Henry.’
‘She was good, Bendrix. People talk but she was good. It wasn’t her fault I couldn’t, well, love her properly. You know I’m awfully prudent, cautious. I’m not the sort that makes a lover. She wanted somebody like you.’
‘She left me. She moved on, Henry.’
‘Do you know I read one of your books once - Sarah made me. You described a house after a woman in it had died.’
‘_The Ambitious Host_.’
‘That was the name. It seemed all right at the time. I thought it very plausible, but you got it all wrong, Bendrix. You described how the husband found the house terribly empty: he moved about the rooms, shifting chairs, trying to give an effect of movement, of another being there. Sometimes he’d pour himself drinks in two glasses.’
‘I forget it. It sounds a bit literary.’
‘It’s off the mark, Bendrix. The trouble is, the house doesn’t seem empty. You see, often in the old days I’d come home from the office, and she would be out somewhere - perhaps with you. I’d call and she wouldn’t answer. Then the house was empty. I almost expected to find the furniture gone. You know I did love her in my way, Bendrix. Every time she wasn’t there when I came home those last months I dreaded to see a letter waiting for me. ‘Dear Henry’… you know the kind of thing they write in novels?’
‘Yes.’
‘But now the house never seems empty like that. I don’t know how to express it. Because she’s always away, she’s never away. You see, she’s never anywhere else. She’s not having lunch with anybody, she’s not at a cinema with you. There’s nowhere for her to be but at home.’
‘But where’s her home?’ I said.
‘Oh, you’ve got to forgive me, Bendrix. I’m nervy and tired - I don’t sleep well. You know the next best thing to talking to her is talking about her, and there’s only you.’
‘She had a lot of friends. Sir William Mallock, Dunstan ‘I can’t talk about her to them. Any more than to that man, Parkis.’
‘Parkis!’ I exclaimed. Had he lodged himself in our lives for ever?
‘He told me he’d been at a cocktail party we gave. The strange people Sarah picked up. He said you knew him too.’
‘What on earth did he want with you?’
‘He said she’d been kind to his little boy - God knows when. The boy’s sick. He seemed to want something of hers for a memento. I gave him one or two of her old children’s books. There were a lot of them in her room, all scrawled over in pencil. It was a good way of getting rid of them. One can’t just send them to Foyle’s, can one? I don’t see any harm in it, do you?’
‘No. That was the man I put to watch her, from Savage’s detective agency.’
‘Good God, if I’d known… But he seemed really fond of her.’
‘Parkis is human,’ I said. ‘He’s easily touched.’ I looked around at my room - there wouldn’t be any more of Sarah where Henry came from: less perhaps, for she would be diluted there.
‘I’ll come and stay with you, Henry, but you must let me pay some rent’
‘I’m so glad, Bendrix. But the house is freehold. You can pay your share of the rates.’
‘Three months’ notice to find new digs when you marry again.’
He took me quite seriously. ‘I shall never want to do that. I’m not the marrying kind. It was a great injury I did to Sarah when I married her. I know that now.’
6
So I moved to the north side of the Common. I wasted a week’s rent because Henry wanted me to come at once, and I paid five pounds for a van to take my books and clothes across. I had the guest-room and Henry fitted up a lumber-room as a study, and there was a bath on the floor above. Henry had moved into his dressing-room, and the room they had shared with the cold twin beds was left for guests who never came. After a few days I began to see what Henry meant by the house never being empty. I worked at the British Museum until it closed, and then I would go back and wait for Henry, and usually we went out and drank a little at the Pontefract Arms. Once when Henry was away for a few days at a conference at Bournemouth, I picked up a girl and brought her back. It wasn’t any good. I knew it at once, I was impotent, and to save her feelings I told her that I had promised a woman I loved never to do this with anyone else. She was very sweet and understanding about it: prostitutes have a great respect for sentiment. This time there had been no revenge in my mind, and I felt only sadness at abandoning for ever something I had enjoyed so much. I dreamed of Sarah afterwards and we were lovers again in my old room on the south side, but again nothing happened, only this time there was no sadness in the fact. We were happy and without regret.
It was a few days afterwards that I pulled open a cupboard in my bedroom and found a pile of old children’s books. Henry must have looted this cupboard for Parkis’s boy. There were several of Andrew Lang’s fairy books in their coloured covers, many Beatrix Potters, The Children of the New Forest, The Golliwog at the North Pole, and also one or two older books - Captain Scott’s Last Expedition and the Poems of Thomas Hood, the last bound in school leather with a label saying that it had been awarded to Sarah Bertram for proficiency in Algebra. Algebra! How one changes.
I couldn’t work that evening. I lay on the floor with the books and tried to trace at least a few features in the blank spaces of Sarah’s life. There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn’t shared. The Golliwog at the North Pole was probably the earliest of Sarah’s books because it had been scrawled all over, this way and that way, meaninglessly, destructively, with coloured chalks. In one of the Beatrix Potters her name had been spelt in pencil, one big capital letter arranged wrongly so that what appeared was SA? AH. In The Children of the New Forest she said written very tidily and minutely ‘Sarah Bertram Her Book. Please ask permission to borrow. And if you steal it will be to your sorrow’. They were the marks of every child who has ever lived: traces as anonymous as the claw marks of birds that one sees in winter. When I closed the book they were covered at once by the drift of time.