The End of the Affair (19 page)

‘It’s this way,’ Sylvia said.

‘You know the place very well.’

‘Daddy was done here two years ago.’

As we reached the chapel everyone was leaving. Waterbury’s questions about the stream of consciousness had delayed me just too long. I had an odd conventional stab of grief - I hadn’t after all seen the last of Sarah, and I thought dully, so it was her smoke that was blowing over the suburban gardens. Henry came blindly out alone: he had been crying and he didn’t see me. I knew nobody else, except Sir William Mallock, who wore a top hat. He gave me a look of disapproval and hurried on. There were half a dozen men with the air of civil servants. Was Dunstan there? It wasn’t very important. Some wives had accompanied their husbands. They at least were satisfied with the ceremony - you could almost tell it from their hats. The extinction of Sarah had left every wife safer.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sylvia said.

‘It wasn’t your fault.’

I thought, if we could have embalmed her, they would never have been safe. Even her dead body would have provided a standard to judge them by.

Smythe came out and splashed quickly away among the puddles, speaking to nobody. I heard a woman say, ‘The Carters have asked us for the week-end of the tenth.’

‘Would you like me to go?’ Sylvia asked.

‘No, no,’ I said, ‘I like having you around.’

I went to the door of the chapel and looked in. The runway to the furnace was empty for the moment, but as the old wreaths were being carried out, new ones were being carried in. An elderly woman was kneeling incongruously in prayer like an actor from another scene caught by the unexpected raising of a curtain. A familiar voice behind me said, ‘It’s a sad pleasure to see you here, sir, where bygones are always bygones.’

‘You’ve come, Parkis,’ I exclaimed.

‘I saw the announcement in The Times, sir, so I asked Mr Savage’s permission to take the afternoon off.’

‘Do you always follow your people as far as this?’

‘She was a very fine lady, sir,’ he said, reproachfully. ‘She asked me the way once in the street, not knowing, of course, my reason for being around. And at the cocktail party she handed me a glass of sherry.’

‘South African sherry?’ I asked him miserably.

‘I wouldn’t know, sir, but the way she did it - oh, there weren’t many like her. My boy too… He’s always speaking about her.’

‘How is your boy, Parkis?’

‘Not well, sir. Not at all well. Very violent stomach aches.’

‘You’ve seen a doctor?’

‘Not yet, sir. I believe in leaving things to nature. Up to a point’

I looked round at the groups of strangers who had all known Sarah. I said, ‘Who are these people, Parkis?’

‘The young lady I don’t know, sir.’

‘She’s with me.’

‘I beg your pardon. Sir William Mallock is the one on the horizon, sir.’

‘I know him.’

‘The gentleman who’s just avoided a puddle, sir, is the head of Mr Miles’s department.’

‘Dunstan?’

‘That’s the name, sir.’

‘What a lot you know, Parkis.’ I had thought jealousy was quite dead: I had thought myself willing to share her with a world of men if only she could be alive again, but the sight of Dunstan woke for a few seconds the old hatred. ‘Sylvia,’ I called, as though Sarah could hear me, ‘are you dining anywhere tonight?’

‘I promised Peter.,.’

‘Peter?’

‘Waterbury.’

‘Forget him.’

Are you there? I said to Sarah. Are you watching me?

See how I can get on without you. It isn’t so difficult, I said to her. My hatred could believe in her survival: it was only my love that knew she existed no more than a dead bird.

A new funeral was gathering, and the woman by the rail rose in confusion at the sight of the strangers coming in. She had nearly been caught up in the wrong cremation.

‘I suppose I could phone.’

Hate lay like boredom over the evening ahead. I had committed myself: without love I would have to go through the gestures of love. I felt the guilt before I had committed the crime, the crime of drawing the innocent into my own maze. The act of sex may be nothing, but when you reach my age you learn that at any time it may prove to be everything. I was safe, but who could tell to what neurosis in this child I might appeal? At the end of the evening I would make love clumsily, and my very clumsiness, even my impotence if I proved impotent, might do the trick, or I would make love expertly, and my experience too might involve her. I implored Sarah, Get me out of this, get me out of it, for her sake, not mine.

Sylvia said, ‘I could say my mother was ill.’ She was ready to lie: it was the end of Waterbury. Poor Waterbury. With that first lie we should become accomplices. She stood there in her black trousers, among the frozen puddles, and I thought, this is where a whole long future may begin. I implored Sarah, Get me out of it. I don’t want to begin it all again and injure her. I’m incapable of love. Except of you, except of you, and the grey old woman swerved towards me, crackling the thin ice. ‘Are you Mr Bendrix?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Sarah told me,’ she began, and while she hesitated a wild hope came to me that she had a message to deliver; that the dead could speak.

‘You were her best friend - she often told me.’

‘I was one of them.’

‘I’m her mother.’ I hadn’t even remembered her mother was alive: in those years there had always been so much to talk about between us that whole areas of both our lives were blank like an early map, to be filled in later.

She said, ‘You didn’t know about me, did you?’

‘As a matter of fact… ‘

‘Henry didn’t like me. It made it rather awkward, so I kept away.’ She spoke in a calm reasonable way, and yet the tears came out of her eyes with an effect of independence. The men and their wives had all cleared off: the strangers picked their way among the three of us, going into the chapel. Only Parkis lingered, thinking, I suppose, that he might yet be of use to me in supplying further information, but he kept his distance, knowing, as he would have said, his place.

‘I’ve a great favour to ask of you,’ Sarah’s mother said. I tried to remember her name - Cameron, Chandler, it began with a C.’ I came up today from Great Missenden in such a hurry…’ She wiped the tears out of her eyes indifferently as if she were using a washcloth. Bertram, I thought, that was the name, Bertram.

‘Yes, Mrs Bertram,’ I said.

‘And I forgot to change the money into my black bag.’

‘Anything I can do.’

‘If you would lend me a pound, Mr Bendrix. You see, I have to get some dinner in town before I leave. It’s early closing at Great Missenden,’ and she wiped her eyes again as she spoke. Something about her reminded me of Sarah: a matter-of-factness in her grief, perhaps an ambiguity. Had she ‘touched’ Henry once too often? I said, ‘Have an early dinner with me.’

‘You wouldn’t want to be bothered.’

‘I loved Sarah,’ I said.

‘So did I.’

I went back to Sylvia and explained, ‘That’s her mother. I’ll have to give her dinner. I’m sorry. Can I ring you up and make another date?’

‘Of course.’

‘Are you in the book?’

‘Waterbury is,’ she said gloomily, ‘Next week.’

‘I’d love it.’ She put her hand out and said, ‘Good-bye.’ I could tell that she knew it was one of those things that had missed the moment. Thank God, it didn’t matter - a mild regret and curiosity as far as the tube station: a cross word to Waterbury over the Bartok. Turning back to Mrs Bertram, I found myself speaking again to Sarah: You see, I love you. But love had not the same conviction of being heard as hate had.

As we approached the crematorium gates, I noticed that Parkis had slipped away. I hadn’t seen him go. He must have realized that now I had no more need of him.

Mrs Bertram and I had dinner at the Isola Bella. I didn’t want to go anywhere I had ever been with Sarah, and of course at once I began to compare this restaurant with all the others we had visited together. Sarah and I never drank Chianti and now the act of drinking it reminded me of that fact. I might as well have had our favourite claret, I couldn’t have thought of her more. Even vacancy was crowded with her.

‘I didn’t like the service,’ Mrs Bertram said.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It was so inhuman. Like a conveyor belt.’

‘It seemed suitable. There were prayers after all.’

‘That clergyman - was he a clergyman?’

‘I didn’t see him.’

‘He talked about the Great All. I didn’t understand for a long time. I thought he was saying the Great Auk.’ She began to drip again into her soup. She said, ‘I nearly laughed and Henry saw me. I could see that he put that against my account.’

‘You don’t hit it off?’

‘He’s a very mean man,’ she said. She wiped her eyes with her napkin and then she rattled her spoon fiercely in the soup, stirring up the noodles. ‘I once had to borrow ten pounds from him because I’d come to London to stay and forgot my bag. It could happen to anybody.’

‘Of course it could.’

‘I always pride myself on not having a debt in the world.’

Her conversation was like the tube system. It moved in circles and loops. I began by the coffee to notice the recurring stations: Henry’s meanness, her own financial integrity, her love for Sarah, her dissatisfaction with the funeral service, the Great All - that was where certain trains went on to Henry.

‘It was so funny,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to laugh. Nobody loved Sarah more than I did.’ How we all, always, make that claim and are angered when we hear it on another’s tongue. ‘But Henry wouldn’t understand that. He’s a cold man.’

I made a great effort to switch the points. ‘I don’t see what other kind of service we could have had.’

‘Sarah was a Catholic,’ she said. She took her glass of port and swallowed half of it in a gulp.

‘Nonsense,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ Mrs Bertram said, ‘she didn’t know it herself.’

Suddenly, inexplicably, I felt fear, like a man who has committed the all-but-perfect crime and watches the first unexpected crack in the wall of his deception. How deep does the crack go? Can it be plugged in time?

‘I don’t understand a thing you’re saying.’

‘Sarah never told you I was a Catholic - once?’

‘No.’

‘I wasn’t very much of one. You see, my husband hated the whole business. I was his third wife, and when I got cross with him the first year, I used to say we weren’t properly married. He was a mean man,’ she added mechanically.

‘Your being a Catholic doesn’t make Sarah one.’

She took another gulp at her port. She said, ‘I’ve never told another soul. I think I’m a bit tight. Do you think I’m tight, Mr Bendrix?’

‘Of course not. Have another port.’

While we were waiting for it, she tried to switch the conversation, but I brought her relentlessly back. ‘What did you mean - Sarah was a Catholic?’

‘Promise you won’t tell Henry.’

‘I promise,’

‘We were abroad one time in Normandy. Sarah was just over two. My husband used to go to Deauville. So he said, but I knew he was seeing his first wife. I got so cross. Sarah and I went for a walk along the sands. Sarah kept on wanting to sit down, but I’d give her a rest and then we’d walk a little. I said, “This is a secret between you and me, Sarah.” Even then she was good at secrets - if she wanted to be. I was scared I can tell you, but it was a good revenge, wasn’t it?’

‘Revenge? I don’t understand you very well, Mrs Bertram.’

‘On my husband, of course. It wasn’t only because of his first wife. I told you, didn’t I, that he wouldn’t let me be a Catholic? Oh, there were such scenes if I tried to go to Mass, so I thought, Sarah’s going to be a Catholic, and he won’t know and I shan’t tell him unless I get really angry.’

‘And didn’t you?’

‘He went and left me a year after that.’

‘So you were able to be a Catholic again?’

‘Oh, well, I didn’t believe much, you see. And then I married a Jew, and he was difficult too. They tell you Jews are awfully generous. Don’t you believe it. Oh, he was a mean man.’

‘But what happened on the beach?’

‘Of course, it didn’t happen on the beach. I only meant we walked that way. I left Sarah by the door and went to find the priest. I had to tell him a few lies - white ones of course - to explain things. I could put it all on my husband, of course. I said he’d promised before we married, and then he’d broken his promise. It helped a lot not being able to speak much French. You sound awfully truthful if you don’t know the right words. Anyway he did it there and then, and we caught the bus back to lunch.’

‘Did what?’

‘Baptized her a Catholic’

‘Is that all?’ I asked with relief.

‘Well, it’s a sacrament - or so they say.’

‘I thought at first you meant that Sarah was a real Catholic,’

‘Well, you see, she was one, only she didn’t know it. I wish Henry had buried her properly,’ Mrs Bertram said and began again the grotesque drip of tears.

‘You can’t blame him if even Sarah didn’t know.’

‘I always had a wish that it would ‘take’. Like vaccination,’

‘It doesn’t seem to have ‘taken’ much with you,’ I couldn’t resist saying, but she wasn’t offended. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I’ve had a lot of temptations in my life, I expect things will come right in the end. Sarah was very patient with me. She was a good girl. Nobody appreciated her like I did.’ She took some more port and said, ‘If only you’d known her properly. Why, if she’d been brought up in the right way, if I hadn’t always married such mean men, she could have been a saint I truly believe.’

‘But it just didn’t take,’ I said fiercely, and I called the waiter to bring the bill. A wing of those grey geese that fly above our future graves had sent a draught down my back, or else perhaps I had caught a chill in the frozen grounds: if only it could have been a deathly chill like Sarah’s.

It didn’t take, I repeated to myself all the way home in the tube, after depositing Mrs Bertram at Marylebone, and lending her another three pounds ‘because tomorrow’s Wednesday and I have to stay in for the char’. Poor Sarah, what had ‘taken’ had been that string of husbands and step-fathers. Her mother had taught her effectively enough that one man was not enough for a lifetime, but she herself had seen through the pretence of her mother’s marriages. When she married Henry she married for life, as I knew with despair.