BOOK FIVE
I
I stayed the night with Henry. It was the first time I had slept in Henryâs house. They had only one guest-room and Sarah was there (she had moved into it a week before so as not to disturb Henry with her cough), so I slept on the sofa in the drawing-room where we had made love. I didnât want to stay the night, but he begged me to.
We must have drunk a bottle and a half of whisky between us. I remember Henry saying, âItâs strange, Bendrix, how one canât be jealous about the dead. Sheâs only been dead a few hours, and yet I wanted you with me.â
âYou hadnât so much to be jealous about. It was all over a long time ago.â
âI donât need that kind of comfort now, Bendrix. It was never over with either of you. I was the lucky man. I had her all those years. Do you hate me?â
âI donât know, Henry. I thought I did, but I donât know.â
We sat in his study with no light on. The gas-fire was not turned high enough to see each otherâs faces, so that I could only tell when Henry wept by the tone of his voice. The Discus Thrower aimed at both of us from the darkness. âTell me how it happened, Henry.â
âYou remember that night I met you on the Common? Three weeks ago, or four, was it? She got a bad cold that night. She wouldnât do anything about it. I never even knew it had reached her chest. She never told anybody those sort of thingsââand not even her diary, I thought. There had been no word of sickness there. She hadnât had the time to be ill in.
âShe took to her bed in the end,â Henry said, âbut nobody could have kept her there, and she wouldnât have a doctorâshe never believed in them. She got up and went out a week ago. God knows where or why. She said she needed exercise. I came home first and found her gone. She didnât get in till nine, soaked through worse than the first time. She must have been walking about for hours in the rain. She was feverish all night, talking to somebody, I donât know who: it wasnât you or me, Bendrix. I made her see a doctor after that. He said if sheâd had penicillin a week earlier, heâd have saved her.â
There wasnât anything to do for either of us but pour out more whisky. I thought of the stranger I had paid Parkis to track down: the stranger had certainly won in the end. No, I thought, I donât hate Henry. I hate You if you exist. I remembered what sheâd said to Richard Smythe, that I had taught her to believe. I couldnât for the life of me tell how, but to think of what I had thrown away made me hate myself too. Henry said, âShe died at four this morning. I wasnât there. The nurse didnât call me in time.â
âWhereâs the nurse?â
âShe finished her job off very tidily. She had another urgent case and left before lunch.â
âI wish I could be of use to you.â
âYou are, just sitting here. Itâs been an awful day, Bendrix. You know, Iâve never had a death to deal with. I always assumed Iâd die firstâand Sarah would have known what to do. If sheâd stayed with me that long. In a way itâs a womanâs jobâlike having a baby.â
âI suppose the doctor helped.â
âHeâs awfully rushed this winter. He rang up an undertaker. I wouldnât have known where to go. Weâve never had a trade-directory. But a doctor canât tell me what to do with her clothesâthe cupboards are full of them. Compacts, scentsâone canât just throw things away ⊠If only she had a sister âŠâ He suddenly stopped because the front door opened and closed, just as it had on that other night when he had said, âThe maid,â and I had said, âItâs Sarah.â We listened to the footsteps of the maid going upstairs. Itâs extraordinary how empty a house can be with three people in it. We drank our whisky and I poured another. âIâve got plenty in the house,â Henry said. âSarah found a new source âŠâ and stopped again. She stood at the end of every path. There wasnât any point in trying to avoid her even for a moment. I thought, why did You have to do this to us? If she hadnât believed in You she would be alive now, we should have been lovers still. It was sad and strange to remember that I had been dissatisfied with the situation. I would have shared her now happily with Henry.
I said, âAnd the funeral?â
âBendrix, I donât know what to do. Something very puzzling happened. When she was delirious (of course, she wasnât responsible), the nurse told me that she kept on asking for a priest. At least she kept on saying, Father, Father, and it couldnât have been her own. She never knew him. Of course the nurse knew we werenât Catholics. She was quite sensible. She soothed her down. But Iâm worried, Bendrix.â
I thought with anger and bitterness, You might have left poor Henry alone. We have got on for years without You. Why should You suddenly start intruding into all situations like a strange relation returned from the Antipodes?
Henry said, âIf one lives in London cremationâs the easiest thing. Until the nurse said that to me, Iâd been planning to have it done at Golders Green. The undertaker rang up the crematorium. They can fit Sarah in the day after tomorrow.â
âShe was delirious,â I said, âyou donât have to take what she said into account.â
âI wondered whether I ought to ask a priest about it. She kept so many things quiet. For all I know she may have become a Catholic. Sheâs been so strange lately.â
âOh no, Henry. She didnât believe in anything, any more than you or me.â I wanted her burnt up, I wanted to be able to say, Resurrect that body if you can. My jealousy had not finished, like Henryâs, with her death. It was as if she were alive still, in the company of a lover she had preferred to me. How I wished I could send Parkis after her to interrupt their eternity.
âYou are quite certain?â
âQuite certain, Henry.â I thought, Iâve got to be careful. I mustnât be like Richard Smythe, I mustnât hate, for if I were really to hate I would believe, and if I were to believe, what a triumph for You and her. This is to play act, talking about revenge and jealousy: itâs just something to fill the brain with, so that I can forget the absoluteness of her death. A week ago I had only to say to her âDo you remember that first time together and how I hadnât got a shilling for the meter?â, and the scene would be there for both of us. Now it was there for me only. She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.
âI hate all this fuss of prayers and grave-diggers, but if Sarah wanted it, Iâd try to get it arranged.â
âShe chose her wedding in a registry office,â I said, âshe wouldnât want her funeral to be in a church.â
âNo, I suppose thatâs true, isnât it?â
âRegistration and cremation,â I said, âthey go together,â and in the shadow Henry lifted his head and peered towards me as though he suspected my irony.
âLet me take it all out of your hands,â I suggested, just as in the same room, by the same fire, I had suggested visiting Mr Savage for him.
âItâs good of you, Bendrix.â He drained the last of the whisky into our glasses, very carefully and evenly.
âMidnight,â I said, âyou must get some sleep. If you can.â
âThe doctor left me some pills.â But he didnât want to be alone yet. I knew exactly how he felt, for I too after a day with Sarah would postpone for as long as I could the loneliness of my room.
âI keep on forgetting sheâs dead,â Henry said. And I had experienced that too, all through 1945âthe bad yearâforgetting when I woke that our love-affair was over, that the telephone might carry any voice except hers. She had been as dead then as she was dead now. For a month or two this year a ghost had pained me with hope, but the ghost was laid and the pain would be over soon. I would die a little more every day, but how I longed to retain it. As long as one suffers one lives.
âGo to bed, Henry.â
âIâm afraid of dreaming about her.â
âYou wonât if you take the doctorâs pills.â
âWould you like one, Bendrix?â
âNo.â
âYou wouldnât, would you, stay the night? Itâs filthy outside.â
âI donât mind the weather.â
âYouâd be doing me a great favour.â
âOf course Iâll stay.â
âIâll bring down some sheets and blankets.â
âDonât bother, Henry,â but he was gone. I looked at the parquet floor, and I remembered the exact timbre of her cry. On the desk where she wrote her letters was a clutter of objects, and every object I could interpret like a code. I thought, She hasnât even thrown away that pebble. We laughed at its shape and there it still is, like a paper-weight. What would Henry make of it, and the miniature bottle of a liqueur none of us cared for, and the piece of glass polished by the sea, and the small wooden rabbit I had found in Nottingham? Should I take all these objects away with me? They would go into the waste-paper basket otherwise, when Henry at last got around to clearing up, but could I bear their company?
I was looking at them when Henry came in burdened with blankets. âI had forgotten to say, Bendrix, if thereâs anything you want to take ⊠I donât think sheâs left a will.â
âItâs kind of you.â
âIâm grateful now to anybody who loved her.â
âIâll take this stone if I may.â
âShe kept the oddest things. Iâve brought you a pair of my pyjamas, Bendrix.â
Henry had forgotten to bring a pillow and lying with my head on a cushion I imagined I could smell her scent. I wanted things I should never have againâthere was no substitute. I couldnât sleep. I pressed my nails into my palms as she had done with hers, so that the pain might prevent my brain working, and the pendulum of my desire swung tiringly to and fro, the desire to forget and to remember, to be dead and to keep alive a while longer. And then at last I slept. I was walking up Oxford Street and I was worried because I had to buy a present and all the shops were full of cheap jewellery, glittering under the concealed lighting. Now and then I thought I saw something beautiful and I would approach the glass, but when I saw the jewel close it would be as factitious as all the othersâperhaps a hideous green bird with scarlet eyes meant to give the effect of rubies. Time was short and I hurried from shop to shop. Then out of one of the shops came Sarah and I knew that she would help me. âHave you bought something, Sarah?â
âNot here,â she said, âbut they have some lovely little bottles further on.â
âI havenât time,â I begged her, âhelp me. Iâve got to find something, for tomorrowâs the birthday.â
âDonât worry,â she said. âSomething always turns up. Donât worry,â and suddenly I didnât worry. Oxford Street extended its boundaries into a great grey misty field, my feet were bare, and I was walking in the dew, alone, and stumbling in a shallow rut I woke, still hearing, âDonât worry,â like a whisper lodged in the ear, a summer sound belonging to childhood.
At breakfast time Henry was still asleep, and the maid whom Parkis had suborned brought coffee and toast in to me on a tray. She drew the curtains and the sleet had changed blindingly to snow. I was still bleary with sleep and the contentment of my dream, and I was surprised to see her eyes red with old tears. âIs anything the matter, Maud?â I asked, and it was only when she put the tray down and walked furiously out that I came properly awake to the empty house and the empty world. I went up and looked in at Henry. He was still in the depths of drugged sleep, smiling like a dog, and I envied him. Then I went down and tried to eat my toast.
A bell rang and I heard the maid leading somebody upstairsâthe undertaker, I supposed, because I could hear the door of the guest-room open. He was seeing her dead: I had not, but I had no wish to, any more than I would have wished to see her in another manâs arms. Some men may be stimulated that way: I am not. Nobody was going to make me pimp for death. I drew my mind together, and...