He said vaguely, to close the subject. ‘Modern methods. Electricity.’
I went back home and again I tried to settle to my book. Always I find when I begin to write there is one character who obstinately will not come alive. There is nothing psychologically false about him, but he sticks, he has to be pushed around, words have to be found for him, all the technical skill I have acquired through the laborious years has to be employed in making him appear alive to my readers. Sometimes I get a sour satisfaction when a reviewer praises him as the best-drawn character in the story: if he has not been drawn he has certainly been dragged. He lies heavily on my mind whenever I start to work like an ill-digested meal on the stomach, robbing me of the pleasure of creation in any scene where he is present. He never does the unexpected thing, he never surprises me, he never takes charge. Every other character helps, he only hinders.
And yet one cannot do without him. I can imagine a God feeling in just that way about some of us. The saints, one would suppose, in a sense create themselves. They come alive. They are capable of the surprising act or word, They stand outside the plot, unconditioned by it. But we have to be pushed around. We have the obstinacy of non-existence. We are inextricably bound to the plot, and wearily God forces us, here and there, according to his intention, characters without poetry, without free will, whose only importance is that somewhere, at some time, we help to furnish the scene in which a living character moves and speaks, providing perhaps the saints with the opportunities for their free will.
I was glad when I heard the door close and Henry’s footsteps in the hall. It was an excuse to stop. That character could remain inert now till morning: it was the hour at last for the Pontefract Arms. I waited for him to call up to me (already in a month we were as set in our ways as two bachelors who have lived together for years), but he didn’t call and I heard him go into his study. After a while I followed him: I missed my drink.
I was reminded of the occasion when I came back with him first; he sat there, beside the green Discus Thrower, worried and dejected, but now watching him I felt neither envy nor pleasure.
‘A drink, Henry?’
‘Yes, yes. Of course. I was only going to change my shoes.’ He had his town and his country shoes and the Common in his eyes was country. He bent over his laces: there was a knot that he couldn’t untie - he was always bad with his fingers. He got tired of struggling and wrenched the shoe off. I picked it up and uncoiled the knot for him.
‘Thank you, Bendrix.’ Perhaps even so small an act of companionship gave him confidence. ‘A very unpleasant thing happened today at the office,’ he said.
‘Tell me.’
‘Mrs Bertram called. I don’t think you know Mrs Bertram.’
‘Oh yes. I met her the other day.’ A curious phrase -the other day, as though all days were the same except that one.
‘We’ve never got on very well together,’
‘So she told me.’
‘Sarah was always very good about it. She kept her away.’
‘Did she come to borrow money?’
‘Yes. She wanted ten pounds - her usual story, in town for the day, shopping, run out, banks closed… Bendrix, I’m not a mean man, but I get so irritated by the way she goes on. She has two thousand a year of her own. It’s almost as much as I earn.’
‘Did you give it her?’
‘Oh yes. One always does, but the trouble was I couldn’t resist a sermon. That made her furious. I told her how many times she’d done it and how many times she had paid me back - that was easy, the first time. She took out her cheque book and said she was going to write me a cheque for the whole lot there and then. She was so angry that I’m certain she meant it. She’d really forgotten that she had used her last cheque. She had meant to humiliate me and she only succeeded in humiliating herself, poor woman. Of course, that made it worse.’
‘What did she do?’
‘She accused me of not giving Sarah a proper funeral. She told me a strange story… ‘
‘I know it. She told it to me after a couple of ports.’
‘Do you think she’s lying?’
‘No.’
‘It’s an extraordinary coincidence, isn’t it? Baptized at two years old, and then beginning to go back to what you can’t even remember… It’s like an infection.’
‘It’s what you say, an odd coincidence.’ Once before I had supplied Henry with the necessary strength; I wasn’t going to let him weaken now. ‘I’ve known stranger coincidences,’ I went on. ‘During the last year, Henry, I’ve been so bored I’ve even collected car numbers. That teaches you about coincidences. Ten thousand possible numbers and God knows how many combinations, and yet over and over again I’ve seen two cars with the same figures side by side in a traffic block.’
‘Yes. I suppose it works that way,’
‘I’ll never lose my faith in coincidence, Henry.’
The telephone was ringing faintly upstairs: we hadn’t heard it till now, because the switch was turned off in the study.
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ Henry said, ‘I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it were that woman again.’
‘Let her ring,’ and as I spoke the bell stopped.
‘It isn’t that I’m mean,’ Henry said. ‘I don’t suppose she’s borrowed more than a hundred pounds in ten years.’
‘Come out and have a drink.’
‘Of course. Oh, I haven’t put on my shoes.’ He bent over them and I could see the bald patch on the crown of his head: it was as though his worries had worn through -I had been one of his worries. He said, ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you, Bendrix.’ I brushed a few grains of scurf off his shoulder. ‘Oh well, Henry…’ and then before we could move the bell began to ring again.
‘Leave it,’ I said.
‘I’d better answer. You don’t know…’ He got up with his shoe-laces dangling and came over to his desk. ‘Hello,’ he said, ‘Miles speaking.’ He passed the receiver to me and said with relief, ‘It’s for you.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Bendrix here.’
‘Mr Bendrix,’ a man’s voice said, ‘I felt I’d got to ring you. I didn’t tell you the truth this afternoon.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Smythe,’ the voice said.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I told you I’d been to a nursing home. I never went to one.’
‘Really it couldn’t matter less to me.’
His voice reached for me along the line. ‘Of course it matters. You aren’t listening to me. Nobody treated my face. It cleared up, suddenly, in a night.’
‘How? I still don’t…’
He said with an awful air of conspiracy, ‘You and I know how. There’s no getting round it. It wasn’t right of me keeping it dark. It was a…’ but I put down the receiver before he could use that foolish newspaper word that was the alternative to ‘coincidence’. I remembered his clenched right hand, I remembered my anger that the dead can be so parcelled up, divided like their clothes. I thought, He’s so proud that he must always have some kind of revelation. In a week or two he’ll be speaking about it on the Common and showing his healed face. It will be in the newspapers: ‘Rationalist Speaker Converted by Miraculous Cure.’ I tried to summon up all my faith in coincidence, but all I could think of, and that with envy, for I had no relic, was the ruined cheek lying at night on her hair.
‘Who is it?’ Henry asked. I hesitated a moment whether to tell him, but then I thought, No. I don’t trust him. He and Father Crompton will get together.
‘Smythe,’ I said.
‘Smythe? ‘
‘That fellow Sarah used to visit.’
‘What did he want?’
‘His face has been cured, that’s all. I asked him to let me know the name of the specialist. I have a friend…’
‘Electric treatment?’
‘I’m not sure. I’ve read somewhere that urticaria is hysterical in origin. A mixture of psychiatry and radium.’ It sounded plausible. Perhaps after all it was the truth. Another coincidence, two cars with the same number plate, and I thought with a sense of weariness, how many coincidences are there going to be? Her mother at the funeral, the child’s dream. Is this going to continue day by day? I felt like a swimmer who has over-passed his strength and knows the tide is stronger than himself, but if I drowned, I was going to hold Henry up till the last moment. Wasn’t it, after all, the duty of a friend, for if this thing were not disproved, if it got into the papers, nobody could tell where it would end? I remembered the roses at Manchester - that fraud had taken a long time to be recognized for what it was. People are so hysterical in these days. There might be relic-hunters, prayers, processions. Henry was not unknown; the scandal would be enormous. And all the journalists asking questions about their life together and digging out that queer story of the baptism near Deauville. The vulgarity of the pious Press. I could imagine the headlines, and the headlines would produce more ‘miracles’. We had to kill this thing at the start.