But I had my answer next morning. A collection of letters came for Graham that had been delayed for more than two months in the national postal strike earlier that year — business letters and bills for the most part, and one from his mother in South Africa. But three of the letters — or rather one long letter in three separate parts — were quite different, from a woman, without signature or address, postmarked Uxbridge, the large sprawling handwriting falling over the pages in a long hurry. These were the real clues I’d been waiting for — something no one could have foreseen. As I began to read them I realised I had left Harper and McCoy well behind now, feeling Graham’s real identity coming over me properly for the first time.
Dear darling — he didn’t find out, he doesn’t know. I’ll write and even if this strike comes on it doesn’t matter — you’ll just have to read these letters like a book later, whenever you get them. I won’t say anything rash — just I must, I want to write. I’ll have to put up with him for the moment, that’s all.
It’s as it was before we met — a terrible depression, living in a continuous drizzle from one day to the next, when I thought it would never happen again — you know, being excited — not knowing that there were even going to be good days again whenever I saw you. And when we loved each other, that it was going to be so easy, willing a thing — that it had nothing to do with disguise and cheating, I mean — with hotel bedrooms and porters in the middle of the night and all that. It wasn’t being in a strange place at all. We made up everything — absolutely — between ourselves.
The point is I won’t be with him for ever, not for any longer than can be helped, he knows that. And that length is for the children, as soon as I can be sure of a proper settlement over them. I hate all this legal business. But having gone through with it in the first place legally I’m determined to get out of it properly in the same way. That’s a habit.
It’s a habit too, the remnants of a stiff background as much as other needs, that makes me write to you in this almost indecipherable way, not giving a name or address and so on. I don’t want you to get involved in some boring divorce case with adultery as the reason. I want the grounds to remain ‘incompatibility’ or whatever — the truth just, of a bad marriage, and not the fact that I met you halfway through it. The facts of us should have no bearing on my failure with him — that you and I were so quickly together in hotels: that shouldn’t come into it legally, or in any way except for us. It was dead with him long before you arrived. I’ll go on with this later.
Who was this woman? How long had she known George Graham? There were no answers to this. One could only imagine. How many months or years had they been slipping in and out of back doors and hotel beds, phoning on the dot at midday, two rings and the next one is from me? How long had there been the business of codes on the telephone, poste-restante addresses, and slipping her letters into the box next Mac Fisheries in Uxbridge on soaking Monday mornings? I hadn’t expected the clandestine everywhere in Graham’s life, with women as well as with Moscow. Couldn’t he do anything straight? But then I supposed, like all such lovers, they would have said it wasn’t their fault.
A married woman, husband, children: Graham hadn’t had much luck — fighting and losing on two fronts, the personal and the professional. And these letters were the only clues to the affair, the only lifelines left, written to a man who was another man now. It was beyond irony.
Wednesday
It’s now six years since that party for the Africans in your office when we met. That man you brought back with you from Kenya working on the film with you, the one who was so keen at being at ease with whites that he did his best to get off with me, while you just stood there. He nearly succeeded too, one of those Belafonte men in a Nehru jacket, you know, without a collar, edged with gilt braid. Pretty handsome. Your secretary brought him over, Sarah something who had such dark eyes and spoke French. And I thought, I was sure, when they came across to me, that she was yours — you know, in that way. And that was the first time, the sense of disappointment. I felt it then before I ever thought of wanting you: a sudden feeling that I’d been caught doing something guilty, I didn’t know what. And then I knew what it was: I wanted to be with you and not Belafonte.
I looked up Graham’s curriculum vitae. He had come back from East Africa in the spring of 1965 — six years of clandestine effort, emotional and sexual. I wondered if the woman was really being true in thinking that hotel bedrooms and hall porters had added nothing to their relationship. Deceit will lend all the more impetus to an affair when we openly admit and discount that element in it from the start, for what we do then is to indulge in a stronger excitement than simply the illicit, which is to anticipate, to visualise, the strange wallpaper above the bed rather than waiting to be surprised by it.
But certainly there was nothing casually indiscreet about it all. Six years of such dissembling was proof of gravity and application at least, and these are real attributes of passion. Graham, of course, hadn’t ever risked a note to her, I thought. It wouldn’t have been in character. But I was wrong: these letters was where his real character lay, reflected back at me now in the daring intimacies of remembered affection. These were Graham’s proper secrets besides which my own and Harper’s inventions paled.
Saturday
… ‘Thank you for your letter’ — I feel like a secretary — ‘of the 17th. inst.’ I picked it up OK. Yes, Africa. Of course it was mostly South Africa for me — he and his parents and the high plainsland before the children came. The Kruger National Park. And the Elephant did all the nutty things then that they did with us on that trip we managed in East Africa — waddling across the road that evening with their great wrinkled backsides, our hearts stopped, the car inches away from them; the leopard with its eyes in the headlights for a second before it disappeared into the long grass; the snake we crunched over later on outside the game lodge — stomach-turning — and the three lionesses creeping round the waterbuck in the mists by the river next morning …
I was reminded of all that — and of some of the happy early years I had with him when we were a good deal more merry than we are now. He was someone in the country then, now just something in this city. He and I so nearly stayed out in Rhodesia there, farming and shooting, an animal life in every sense. And there are regrets, I’d be pretending otherwise — not for the better, because more simple life — it was a pretty mindless sort of existence we had — but regrets for all the horizons of the time. That was 10, 15 years ago, of course, before Sharpeville, before Vorster and the concrete mixers took over, before we knew much about Africa, knew or cared anything about the dark side of it, as we have to now.
We had an unreasoning Arcadia: for you Africa is a laboratory where the whole future of the continent has to be displayed, tested, catalogued. But in fact what you propagandists are doing there is making up the gunpowder, preparing the blood baths. I’m not running away from what will happen in Africa as a result of the old comfortable colonial paternalism and your new ‘development’. Just the opposite: I know what will happen: that when they have finished killing themselves out there as a result of both our efforts, whoever is left afterwards will really start concreting the grass. That’s what ‘progress’ will have amounted to, democracy or whatever other name you give the lie: somebody will be ‘free’ all right: the wrong people, in a world not worth living in.