7
Jealousy, or so I have always believed, exists only with desire. The Old Testament writers were fond of using the words ‘a jealous God’, and perhaps it was their rough and oblique way of expressing belief in the love of God for man. But I suppose there are different kinds of desire. My desire now was nearer hatred than love, and Henry I had reason to believe, from what Sarah once told me, had long ceased to feel any physical desire for her. And yet, I think, in those days he was as jealous as I was. His desire was simply for companionship: he felt for the first time excluded from Sarah’s confidence: he was worried and despairing - he didn’t know what was going on or what was going to happen. He was living in a terrible insecurity. To that extent his plight was worse than mine. I had the security of possessing nothing. I could have no more than I had lost, while he still owned her presence at the table, the sound of her feet on the stairs, the opening and closing of doors, the kiss on the cheek - I doubt if there was much else now, but what a lot to a starving man is just that much. And perhaps what made it worse, he had once enjoyed the sense of security as I never had. Why, at the moment when Mr Parkis returned across the Common, he didn’t even know that Sarah and I had once been lovers. And when I write that word my brain against my will travels irresistibly back to the point where pain began.
A whole week went by after the fumbling kiss in Maiden Lane before I rang Sarah up. She had mentioned at dinner that Henry didn’t like the cinema and so she rarely went. They were showing a film of one of my books at Warner’s and. so, partly to ‘show off’, partly because I felt that kiss must somehow be followed up for courtesy’s sake, partly too because I was still interested in the married life of a civil servant, I asked Sarah to come with me. ‘I suppose it’s no good asking Henry?’
‘Not a bit,’ she said, ‘He could join us for dinner afterwards?’
‘He’s bringing a lot of work back with him. Some wretched Liberal is asking a question next week in the House about widows.’ So you might say that the Liberal -I believe he was a Welshman called Lewis - made our bed for us that night.
The film was not a good film, and at moments it was acutely painful to see situations that had been so real to me twisted into the stock clichés of the screen. I wished I had gone to something else with Sarah. At first I had said to her, ‘That’s not what I wrote, you know,’ but I couldn’t keep on saying that. She touched me sympathetically with her hand, and from then on we sat there with our hands in the innocent embrace that children and lovers use. Suddenly and unexpectedly, for a few minutes only, the film came to life. I forgot that this was my story, and that for once this was my dialogue, and was genuinely moved by a small scene in a cheap restaurant. The lover had ordered steak and onions, the girl hesitated for a moment to take the onions because her husband didn’t like the smell, the lover was hurt and angry because he realized what was behind her hesitation, which brought to his mind the inevitable embrace on her return home. The scene was a success: I had wanted to convey the sense of passion through some common simple episode without any rhetoric in words or action, and it worked. For a few seconds I was happy - this was writing: I wasn’t interested in anything else in the world. I wanted to go home and read the scene over: I wanted to work at something new: I wished, how I wished, that I hadn’t invited Sarah Miles to dinner.
Afterwards - we were back at Rules and they had just fetched our steaks - she said, ‘There was one scene you did write.’
‘About the onions?’
‘Yes.’ And at that very moment a dish of onions was put on the table. I said to her - it hadn’t even crossed my mind that evening to desire her - ‘And does Henry mind onions?’
‘Yes. He can’t bear them. Do you like them?’
‘Yes.’ She helped me to them and then helped herself.
Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions? It seems improbable and yet I could swear it was just then that I fell in love. It wasn’t, of course, simply the onions -it was that sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable. I put my hand under the cloth and laid it on her knee, and her hand came down and held mine in place. I said, ‘It’s a good steak,’ and heard like poetry her reply, ‘It’s the best I’ve ever eaten.’
There was no pursuit and no seduction. We left half the good steak on our plates and a third of the bottle of claret and came out into Maiden Lane with the same intention in both our minds. At exactly the same spot as before, by the doorway and the grill, we kissed. I said, ‘I’m in love.’
‘Me too.’
‘We can’t go home.’
‘No.’
We caught a taxi by Charing Cross station and I told the driver to take us to Arbuckle Avenue - that was the name they had given among themselves to Eastbourne Terrace, the row of hotels that used to stand along the side of Paddington Station with luxury names, Ritz, Carlton, and the like. The doors of these hotels were always open and you could get a room any time of day for an hour or two. A week ago I revisited the terrace. Half of it was gone -the half where the hotels used to stand had been blasted to bits, and the place where we made love that night was a patch of air. It had been the Bristol; there was a potted fern in the hall and we were shown the best room by a manageress with blue hair: a real Edwardian room with a great gilt double bed and red velvet curtains and a full-length mirror. (People who came to Arbuckle Avenue never required twin beds.) I remember the trivial details very welclass="underline" how the manageress asked me whether we wanted to stay the night: how the room cost fifteen shillings for a short stay: how the electric meter only took shillings and we hadn’t one between us, but I remember nothing else - how Sarah looked the first time or what we did, except that we were both nervous and made love badly. It didn’t matter. We had started - that was the point. There was the whole of life to look forward to then. Oh, and there’s one other thing I always remember. At the door of our room (‘our room’ after half an hour), when I kissed her again and said how I hated the thought of her going home to Henry, she said, ‘Don’t worry. He’s busy on the widows.’
‘I hate even the idea of his kissing you,’ I said. ‘He won’t. There’s nothing he dislikes more than onions.’
I saw her home to her side of the Common. Henry’s light shone below the door of his study, and we went upstairs. In the living-room we held our hands against each other’s bodies, unable to let go. ‘He’ll be coming up,’ I said, ‘any moment.’
‘We can hear him,’ she said, and she added with horrifying lucidity, ‘There’s one stair that always squeaks.’
I hadn’t time to take off my coat. We kissed and heard the squeak of the stair, and I watched sadly the calmness of her face when Henry came in. She said, ‘We were hoping you’d come up and offer us a drink.’
Henry said, ‘Of course. What will you have, Bendrix?’ I said I wouldn’t have a drink; I had work to do.
‘I thought you said you never worked at night.’
‘Oh, this doesn’t count. A review.’
‘Interesting book?’
‘Not very.’
‘I wish I had your power of - putting things down.’
Sarah saw me to the door and we kissed again. At that moment it was Henry I liked, not Sarah. It was as though all the men in the past and all the men in the future cast their shade over the present. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked me. She was always quick to read the meaning behind a kiss, the whisper in the brain.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you in the morning.’
‘It would be better if I called you,’ she told me, and caution, I thought, caution, how well she knows how to conduct an affair like this, and I remembered again the stair that always - ‘always’ was the phrase she had used -squeaked.