I paid the bill and we went out, and twenty yards down the street was the doorway and the grating. I stopped on the pavement and said, ‘I suppose you’re going to the Strand?’
‘No, Leicester Square.’
‘I’m going to the Strand.’ She stood in the doorway and the street was empty. ‘I’ll say good-bye here. It was nice seeing you.’
‘Yes.’
‘Call me up any time you are free.’
I moved towards her: I could feel the grating under my feet. ‘Sarah,’ I said. She turned her head sharply away, as though she were looking to see if anyone were coming, to see if there was time… but when she turned again the cough took her. She doubled up in the doorway and coughed and coughed. Her eyes were red with it. In her fur coat she looked like a small animal cornered.
‘I’m sorry.’
I said with bitterness, as though I had been robbed of something, ‘That needs attending to.’
‘It’s only a cough.’ She held her hand out and said, ‘Good-bye - Maurice.’ The name was like an insult. I said ‘Good-bye’, but didn’t take her hand: I walked quickly away without looking round, trying to give the appearance of being busy and relieved to be gone, and when I heard the cough begin again, I wished I had been able to whistle a tune, something jaunty, adventurous, happy, but I have no ear for music.
6
When young one builds up habits of work that one believes will last a lifetime and withstand any catastrophe. Over twenty years I have probably averaged five hundred words a day for five days a week. I can produce a novel in a year, and that allows time for revision and the correction of the typescript. I have always been very methodical and when my quota of work is done, I break off even in the middle of a scene. Every now and then during the morning’s work I count what I have done and mark off the hundreds on my manuscript. No printer need make a careful cast-off of my work, for there on the front page of my typescript is marked the figure - 83,764. When I was young not even a love affair would alter my schedule. A love affair had to begin after lunch, and however late I might be in getting to bed - so long as I slept in my own bed -I would read the morning’s work over and sleep on it. Even the war hardly affected me. A lame leg kept me out of the Army, and as I was in Civil Defence, my fellow workers were only too glad that I never wanted the quiet morning turns of duty. I got, as a result, a quite false reputation for keenness, but I was keen only for my desk, my sheet of paper, that quota of words dripping slowly, methodically, from the pen. It needed Sarah to upset my self-imposed discipline. The bombs between those first daylight raids and the V1s of 1944 kept their own convenient nocturnal habits, but so often it was only in the mornings that I could see Sarah, for in the afternoon she was never quite secure from friends, who, their shopping done, would want company and gossip before the evening siren. Sometimes she would come in between two queues, and we would make love between the greengrocer’s and the butcher’s.
But it was quite easy to return to work even under those conditions. So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work. When I began to realize how often we quarrelled, how often I picked on her with nervous irritation, I became aware that our love was doomed: love had turned into a love-affair with a beginning and an end. I could name the very moment when it had begun, and one day I knew I should be able to name the final hour. When she left the house I couldn’t settle to work: I would reconstruct what we had said to each other: I would fan myself into anger or remorse. And all the time I knew I was forcing the pace. I was pushing, pushing the only thing I loved out of my life. As long as I could make-believe that love lasted, I was happy - I think I was even good to live with, and so love did last. But if love had to die, I wanted it to die quickly. It was as though our love were a small creature caught in a trap and bleeding to death: I had to shut my eyes and wring its neck.
And all that time I couldn’t work. So much of a novelist’s writing, as I have said, takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them. War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but now there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel - the end of love. That was being worked out now, like a story: the pointed word that set her crying, that seemed to have come so spontaneously to the lips, had been sharpened in those underwater caverns. My novel lagged, but my love hurried like inspiration to the end.
I don’t wonder that she hadn’t liked my last book. It was written all the time against the grain, without help, for no reason but that one had to go on living. The reviewers said it was the work of a craftsman: that was all that was left me of what had been a passion. I thought perhaps with the next novel the passion would return, the excitement would wake again of remembering what one had never consciously known, but for a week after lunching with Sarah at Rules I could do no work at all. There it goes again - the I, I, I, as though this were my story, and not the story of Sarah, Henry, and of course, that third, whom I hated without yet knowing him, or even believing in him.
I had tried to work in the morning and failed: I drank too much with my lunch so the afternoon was wasted: after dark I stood at the window with the lights turned off and could see across the flat dark Common the lit windows of the north side. It was very cold and my gas fire only warmed me if I huddled close, and then it scorched. A few flakes of snow drifted across the lamps of the south side and touched the pane with thick damp fingers. I didn’t hear the bell ring. My landlady knocked on the door and said, ‘A Mr Parkis to see you,’ thus indicating by a grammatical article the social status of my caller. I had never heard the name, but I told her to show him in.
I wondered where I had seen before those gentle apologetic eyes, that long outdated moustache damp with the climate? I had only turned on my reading lamp and he came towards it, peering short-sightedly; he couldn’t make me out in the shadows. He said, ‘Mr Bendrix, sir?’
‘Yes.’
He said, ‘The name’s Parkis,’ as though that might mean something to me. He added, ‘Mr Savage’s man, sir.’
‘Oh yes. Sit down. Have a cigarette.’
‘Oh no, sir,’ he said, ‘not on duty - except of course, for purposes of concealment.’
‘But you aren’t on duty now?’
‘In a manner, sir, yes. I’ve just been relieved, sir, for half an hour while I make my report. Mr Savage said as how you’d like it weekly - with expenses.’
‘There is something to report?’ I wasn’t sure whether it was disappointment I felt or excitement.
‘It’s not quite a blank sheet, sir,’ he remarked complacently, and took an extraordinary number of papers and envelopes from his pocket in searching for the right one.
‘Do sit down. You make me uncomfortable.’
‘As you please, sir.’ Sitting down he could see me a little more closely. ‘Haven’t I met you somewhere before, sir?’ I had taken the first sheet out of the envelope: it was the expenses account, written in a very neat script as though by a schoolboy. I said, ‘You write very clearly.’
‘That’s my boy. I’m training him in the business.’ He added hastily, ‘I don’t put anything down for him, sir, unless I leave him in charge, like now.’
‘He’s in charge, is he?’
‘Only while I make my report, sir.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Gone twelve,’ he said as though his boy were a clock. ‘A youngster can be useful and costs nothing except a comic now and then. And nobody notices him. Boys are born lingerers.’
‘It seems odd work for a boy.’