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    The End of the Affair
    The End of the Affair
    The End of the Affair
    Ebook239 pages4 hours

    The End of the Affair

    By Graham Greene

    4/5

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    Graham Greene’s masterful novel of love and betrayal in World War II London is “undeniably a major work of art” (The New Yorker).
     
    Maurice Bendrix, a writer in Clapham during the Blitz, develops an acquaintance with Sarah Miles, the bored, beautiful wife of a dull civil servant named Henry. Maurice claims it’s to divine a character for his novel-in-progress. That’s the first deception. What he really wants is Sarah, and what Sarah needs is a man with passion. So begins a series of reckless trysts doomed by Maurice’s increasing romantic demands and Sarah’s tortured sense of guilt. Then, after Maurice miraculously survives a bombing, Sarah ends the affair—quickly, absolutely, and without explanation. It’s only when Maurice crosses paths with Sarah’s husband that he discovers the fallout of their duplicity—and it’s more unexpected than Maurice, Henry, or Sarah herself could have imagined.
     
    Adapted for film in both 1956 and 1999, Greene’s novel of all that inspires love—and all that poisons it—is “singularly moving and beautiful” (Evelyn Waugh).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateMar 13, 2018
    ISBN9781504052474
    The End of the Affair
    Author

    Graham Greene

    Graham Greene (1904–1991) is recognized as one of the most important writers of the twentieth century, achieving both literary acclaim and popular success. His best known works include Brighton Rock, The Heart of the Matter, The Quiet American, and The Power and the Glory. After leaving Oxford, Greene first pursued a career in journalism before dedicating himself full-time to writing with his first big success, Stamboul Train. He became involved in screenwriting and wrote adaptations for the cinema as well as original screenplays, the most successful being The Third Man. Religious, moral, and political themes are at the root of much of his work, and throughout his life he traveled to some of the wildest and most volatile parts of the world, which provided settings for his fiction. Greene was a member of the Order of Merit and a Companion of Honour.  

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    Reviews for The End of the Affair

    4/5

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    • 4/5
      I read this novel because I'm interested in representations of the British experience during World War II. The events here, mostly an extra-marital love affair and its fallout, start during the war and move forward in time, although where the reader comes into it is after the war ends with flashbacks to what's happened before. The basic story is a familiar one, but what I found most compelling is how it seems that the information the characters most need is what the reader gains even though the characters never do. Ultumately, this makes for a very sad ending to a book that asks questions about faith, promises and love.
    • 5/5
      Wonderfully read by Colin Firth.I was interested in reading a second [Graham Greene] novel after finishing both [Seeds of Fiction: Graham Green's Advetures in Haiti and Central America] by [Bernard Diederick] and then [The Comedians] by Greene. After listening to both The Comedians and [The End of The Affair], I think I shall actually read (as opposed to listening) [Our Man in Havana].I am sure one of the other 65+ reviewers have given a synopsis of the book. I will simply say That the book kept my interest for the most part. The ending was believable, though a bit unexpected. Every question wasn't answered, which I like. More to ruminate over. It was a bit dated (mid to late 1940s), as far as relationships went, yet at the same time there was something timeless about them.
    • 3/5
      I thought listening to Colin Firth for six hours would be heavenly. Apparently I'm in the minority but I didn't like his performance.

      The book was interesting, but I found it difficult to like any of the characters except the investigator and his son.
    • 3/5
      This book ended up being something I didn't expect from it. Although I was a little confused by what was going on at the start of the novel, I soon found my footing. Colin Firth's narration is excellent, and really infused with emotion.

      I don't know how I felt about the characters themselves most of the time. I don't know that I found any of them particularly likable, but I did find myself getting interested in their stories and their relationships to one another. I also really liked the unexpected direction the story took in the last quarter or so of the book.
    • 2/5
      First Greene book I have read - not very impressed; characters quite unbelievable (even if it is all based on his own affair with Catherine Walston) I stopped reading toward the end after Sarah had died, becasue she didn't believe in going to a doctor and kept running around in the rain with an awful cough.
    • 4/5
      Colin Firth was PERFECT! I really loved this story. Marcus, is filled with hate thru-out the story which is told in his words on how he meets Sarah, seduces her to get info about her husband Henry for his next book, only he falls in love with her. They have an on-going affair that ends abruptly. Marcus doesn't really understand why, but he gets over her, so he tells himself, until he encounters Sarah's husband and over a drink finds out that Henry suspects Sarah of having an affair. Marcus is obsessed with finding out who Sarah is sleeping with now, despite deceiving Henry, he hires a Private Investigator. Parkus, the detective solves the case, and as an added bonus provides Marcus with Sarah's journal. In it Marcus reads of Sarah's love for him, her reasons for leaving him and the pact she made with God.
    • 5/5
      It's hard to say when my relationship to this novel began. But let's begin with the list. My most recent goodreads project (I always have a project), has been tagging all the books from Bookslut's 100 Best Books of the 20th century. I don't remember how it started -- perhaps a question on Facebook from Bloomsbury Review about how often one read current books versus classics. And now here I am, butting heads agains the Bookslut 100 yet again (Why, oh why, did we ever decide to include plays?). But why did I fixate on this novel in particular? Perhaps it was Michael Schaub's enthusiastic review, it was also partly a residual effect from all those hours I spent pouring over the Eighth Day Books catalog in my early twenties. Whatever the reasons, they were strong enough to send me on a very directed mission to the bookstore in a torrential downpour.

      This book did not disappoint.

      It's one of those books that I have a hard time writing about intelligently. It's just too good. From the very first page I had that sensation of trust that comes from relaxing into a book that has been written by a master of the form. As the narrator, who is also a novelist, sets up the story, it is obvious both that Greene understands people and understands novels. But of course, if he didn't, he wouldn't have the reputation that he does, no would his works appear on so many lists of modern classics.

      So, of course I don't aim to add to the scholarly discourse on this novel. My personal response: it was certainly interesting to read this story of religious conversion (and how religious love is entwined with romantic love) in the midst of my current estrangement from religion. Indeed, any moments of distance from this book I had were the result of trying to insert my current experience into the book to argue, which of course didn't work.

      Despite that small dissonance, I was still blown away by this novel. I want to go to Eighth Day books and buy Greene's complete works. Except I'm not allowed to buy any more books until 2014. Drat.
    • 4/5
      A Greene style love story maybe? Bendrix (an author) and Sarah fall in love with their affair ending quickly. As usual lengthy discussion of the impact of religion on their lives.
    • 2/5
      As our lives progress and experience accumulates, we can find that books we once disliked now to speak to us in powerful ways. Conversely, books we once loved can cease to speak to us at all.

      As a young man I loved the books of Graham Greene. I recall visiting my local bookshop, my pockets jangling with the handful of change I had saved up over weeks, so that I could buy another novel from among Greene?s prolific output. His stories would show me people and places I would never otherwise have known, and states of emotion and intellectual struggle that I would never otherwise have experienced. They helped me mature at a time when maturation was desperately needed. I am tremendously grateful for that.

      Now, however, as I dip in every now and then to one of Greene?s books ? still ranged faithfully on my shelves like old love letters ? I find myself dissatisfied and disappointed. My older self cannot recapture how I must have felt all those years ago.

      The End of the Affair is shot through with Greene?s customary preoccupations ? love and its inevitable disillusionment, the struggles of religious faith, the shabby accommodations and compromises we all must make in order to survive ? but I find there is a forced and redundant air about them now, and they seem irrelevant to the world we inhabit. There is still much to admire in his prose (hence the quote pinned to my Goodreads profile), but these are isolated gems in an otherwise barren desert. I couldn?t help thinking that this novel could so easily have been a fraction of its length and made an excellent short story.

      Times change and we change with them.
    • 2/5
      dark and gritty - masterful writing with a gut wrenching tale
    • 4/5
      This book was mesmerizing in its discussions of love and philosophy and religion. It begins as a story of a jealous ex-lover hiring a private eye to determine whether his beloved has taken up with someone new. However, as Bendrix begins to discover things he didn't know about the woman he loved he begins to contemplate the nature of their love and the nature of both of their relationships with God. As someone who has never though much about God or religion I was astonished at how deeply this book burrowed beneath my cynical shell to cause me to contemplate the importance of having a relationship with God. I would recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a love story that is not only about the obsessive, physical love between a man and a woman, but also the love between a woman and her God.
    • 4/5
      Very good, but full of painful emotional resonances for anyone who has been in a complicated three-way tangle point in a relationship.
    • 5/5
      Acquired via BookCrossing 07 Nov 10 - bought at the Connected shop for BC purposesI picked this up at the charity shop because Matthew and I wanted to catch up with some 20th century classics. He read it first and enjoyed it. A short novel in which we follow the fortunes of Bendrix, Sarah, the woman he once loved but now claims to hate, and her husband, Henry. Narrated in flashbacks, the narrative voice reminded us both of Iris Murdoch, with the London setting adding to that for me. Powerful and perceptive, a close study of one man's state of mind and deeply atmosphericm with moments of pathos and humour - we could see why it's a classic.
    • 5/5
      From the first time I discovered that Graham Greene was a Catholic author, I wanted to check out his work. This was years and years ago, but it wasn't until The End of the Affair was marked down on Audible.com that I finally took the plunge. What a waste of years! The End of the Affair is one of the best books I've ever read.The story of Bendrix's affair with Sarah and its aftermath are so perfect, so true. Bendrix is never quite certain if his story is about love or hate, despair or hope. It is always one extreme or the other. When he believes his competition for Sarah's love is her husband or another man, he hates Sarah in his despair and wants to destroy her. He cannot bare not knowing what took her away. It stifles his art and eats him alive. When he ultimately learns the truth about the ending of their relationship, he is elated and at once certain that he can overcome it all.Michael Kitchen narrated the audio version of this novel and he was no less than superb. This may sound odd (I think it's odd, but I'll share anyway), but the way Kitchen used his breath, particularly in exhaling, made it seem like Bendrix was in my car with me. We were having an intimate conversation. I could almost smell his tobacco. The effect was fantastic and could not have happened had Kitchen not been paired with such a gifted author. It was a wonderful way to first experience Graham Greene. If you've read The End of the Affair before and are hankering for a reread, I cannot recommend this audio version enough.Even though I loved the audio, I found that I had to possess the book as well. A Kindle version just wouldn't do. I immediately turned around and bought the Penguin Classics Deluxe edition of both The End of the Affair and, on Rebecca from The Book Lady's Blog's suggestion, The Quiet American. As soon as they arrived, I hugged them to my chest. It felt so good and was nearly impossible for me to not start rereading The End of the Affair.When I began reading The End of the Affair, I didn't know what to expect. What really surprised me was the ending would have a similar affect on me as Gone With the Wind. It was so open ended and I loved every possibility. I cannot rave about it enough. The End of the Affair has got to be the best book I've read since I started blogging. More Graham Greene, please. Wow!
    • 4/5
      My favourite Graham Green novel.Maurice Bendix and Sarah Miles are in the midst of a passionate love affair in war-torn London, when Sarah suddenly ends the affair, with no explanation.
    • 4/5
      One of Greene's explorations into the morality of choice. Inexplicably spurned by his mistress our tormented lead character delves into the reasons why. A heart-breaking tale of love and obsession.
    • 4/5
      The End of the Affair was just my second book by Graham Greene, and it is so very different from Our Man in Havana, which surprised me. I was not expecting it to be so sad and melancholy, but it is also beautifully told. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Mr. Darcy Colin Firth, who elevates the novel, IMO. It is a perfect blend of story and narrator, which is pure magic when it happens. I read that this story is based on Greene's real life events and is considered one of his "Catholic novels". Although faith definitely plays a part here, I didn't think that the novel was dominated by Catholicism. I liked the internal monologue that we are treated to and the stream of consciousness that explores just how wrongly the main character has interpreted life events. Bittersweet and thoughtful and intelligent, it is also slightly tedious at times, but that might have been because I was expecting more humor, and really, isn't picking apart a relationship and analyzing it from different angles a tedious thing? How could it not be? Anyone who has had a relationship end before they were ready, who didn't understand an abrupt dismissal when they were still fully engaged would keep picking away at events trying to figure out where things went so horrible wrong. The slow unfolding of the story is part of what makes the ending seem so flawless. Definitely one I will listen to again, and I think I will get more out of it the second time around.
    • 2/5
      Zoals altijd bij Greene zeer complexe compositie die de spanning aanhoudt. Ook het hoofdthema is typisch Greene: de relatie tot God in verhouding tot de echte liefde tussen man en vrouw. Goed geschreven, maar qua thema toch echt verouderd
    • 4/5
      Colin Firth narrating this book was a treat! Highly recommend the audiobook. Greene is a very clever and thoughtful author. The topic is not particularly to my liking, so I gave it 4 out of 5.
    • 5/5
      SPOILER On Nov 9, 1952 I said: "Greene's book is well-written and an intriguing story: triangle with new twists." After I finished the book I said: "The End of the Affair is a great book. It tells of an adulterous affair between Sarah and Maurice Bendrix, which ends when Sarah thinks he is dead and vows to God, in Whom she doesn't believe, that if he is all right she won't "make love" to him any more and she keeps her vow. But wants to break it and so goes to Richard Smythe, a crusading atheist, to gain disbelief. But she is dragged to belief in spite of him and her desire to disbelieve. Henry, her husband, gets suspicious of her preoccupation and suspects infidelity and tells Bendrix of it. Bendrix--who hasn't seen her for two years--becomes furiously jealous and sets Perkis, private detective, to watching her. Parkis gets her diary and gives it to Bendrix, and he reads her intense protestations of love for him. He now is sure he can get her to break her vow. But she refuses and dies. Bendrix persuades Henry to cremate her, even though she wanted to be a Catholic. In fact, though she never knew, Sarah was baptized when she was two. Parkis' son is cured after intercession to Sarah, and Smythe's welt clears up after sleeping on a hair of hers. And at the end of the book, Bendrix is obviosuly fighting belief. This is a bare recital of the story, but it is a story I want to remember and writing this is a way to ensure that.
    • 5/5
      I love this book. It tells of an adulterous couple, and the end of their affair because the woman had made such a vow to God if He would preserve her lover. This reminds me of the Hound of Heaven. It is painfully beautiful, in part because the woman wants to break her vow but finds that she cannot. A sentence I found: "A wing of those grey geese that fly above our future graves had sent a draught down my back..." It is also reminiscent of A Severe Mercy. A downside is that all the religious content is Catholic.
    • 4/5
      The story is told on many levels. On surface it is a story of an affair and the love triangle. We have Bendrix the narrator, author, Sarah the wife/lover and Henry the husband. It is also about search for meaning and God as well as a story of being a writer. This story according to the narrator is the story of hate. The narrator is unable to trust and is full of insecurities and I question whether he ever knew love. He knew desire, jealousy and insecurity leading to meanness but he never loved. He never was able to care about anything but himself. Then there is the element of theological debate of the existence of God. I did not know that Graham Greene is considered the Catholic writer but found out when doing research about this novel after reading it. Sarah faces an existential crisis. One of the characters quote, Augustine's dictum that time "came out of the future which didn't exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist." which I really like. There is redemption and existential meaning in the book. The author struggled with his own affair and this book may very well reflect his own experiences and thoughts. Rating: 4.28 I think the book achieved quite a bit even though I didn't especially enjoy it because Bendrix was not a likable character and I disliked his decisions. But when I read reviews of this book, it is obvious a great achievement. I liked that it was about an affair but did not need to use a lot of sex or poor language to tell the story of an affair. Also want to mention that I listened to the audio read by Colin Firth and that he won an audio for his performance.
    • 4/5
      An interesting study of sexual and emotional jealousy and insecurity. The ending is very downbeat and bitter.
    • 5/5
      Every once in a while I come across a book that speaks to what it means to be human, a story that glimpses into the soul. Greene's novel is one of those pieces. The novel is almost autobiographical. It's like Greene wrestled with the darkest and brightest portions of his own nature, and this book resulted. If you like to mix your daily dose of philosophy and religion with fiction, then this book's it. The story captures one man's relationship with the God he wants to deny. It's just brilliant!
    • 5/5
      "I wrote at the start this was a record of hate." Hate, love, God, relationships, are all very much a part of this intensely personal and intriguing book. (The movie with Ralph Fiennes is terrific.) Several sources have suggested that the book is partially autobiographical and that Sarah is loosely based on Greene's affair with Catherine Walston (there is a book entitled The Third Woman about the two of them.)

      Major players:

      Maurice, the narrator, is not very likable, and one cannot help wondering how his viewpoint colors our perception of events. He's insanely jealous of Henry and anyone else Sarah seems to show some interest in. He suspects -- we don't know for sure if this is true or not -- that Sarah is having other affairs. He claims to be atheist, yet blames God for many of the events.

      Sarah is the bored or at least unhappy wife of Henry, a British civil servant, who seems to love Sarah (virtually everyone in the book does). She falls desperately (a very appropriate word) in love with Maurice, a writer, who seems to be equally in love with her. I'm a little unclear as to how much of his love is narcissistic. (I'm still unclear about a lot of this book, but that's what makes it so good.) She makes a vow to God to end the affair if Maurice survives the bombing (I think we are supposed to believe she thinks he's dead, which has resurrection overtones that bugged the hell out of me.) She laterrenegs on the promise and resumes her affair with Maurice. (In the movie they spend a wonderful week in Brighton together.)

      Henry, the aforementioned bureaucrat, may be the least appreciated of the characters. He really wants Sarah to be happy, to the point where he appears (from Maurice's point of view, anyway) to condone her affair with Maurice. He asks Maurice to live with him after Sarah's death, an invitation that strikes me as more than peculiar, but he's a weak individual. If there's an unselfish love, it's Henry's.

      While I very much liked the book, and it reflects perhaps Greene's own struggles with Catholicism, I, unlike most people, I suspect, thought it made a mockery of Sarah's sudden faith. When a bomb strikes the house they are in, she believes Maurice might have been killed and prays to God that if he is allowed to live, she will never see him again. He survives and she breaks off the affair, only to have it resume two years later, just before her death from pneumonia, a death that the doctor says might have been prevented had it been treated sooner. She says at one point "I fell into belief the way I fell into love." Now that to me mocks either belief or love. And since I thought this was one of the great love stories, I chose to believe it's a mockery of belief.

      I was puzzled and left empty by a lack of foreplay, oops, Freudian slip, rather the lack of development of their relationship. It seemed to come from left field, without much preparation. I missed that, but, again, we are viewing the world through limited lenses and from a man who writes that "happiness is boring." All the clues we have about Maurice come from himself and what little we find in Sarah's stolen journal.

      Something I definitely did not like and thought superfluous was the attribution to Sarah of some miracles or sudden cures, as if she somehow were made "holy" by her recognition of her sinful behavior. Fortunately, the movie only touches on these and is the stronger for it. I felt the entire section after her death should have been run through the shredder. Smyth's "cleansing" was a bit much. This attempt to make Sarah saintly was a puzzle. I don't see the point at all. (And now that Benedict is thinking of canonizing Pius XII it really has me confused.).

      There are some really good reviews of this book elsewhere on Goodreads (Jen's is outstanding) but I quibble with one of her comments regarding the characters having their disbelief, if you will, weakened and moved toward some kind of faith. I saw it very differently. Bendrix is angry and his hate is directed toward Sarah's mistaken belief in something that could not exist and which ruined their attempt at happiness. (Bendrix has lots of narcissistic and selfish issues of his own, but aside from that...)

      I continue to wonder if books like this don't reflect an ennui peculiar to the rich middle class. Only they have the time and money to be bored in such an existential way

      Some people, I suspect. might have their faith strengthened by reading this book. My lack of faith was fortified. Bendrix's last line spoken to a God he does not believe in (oh, really?) is "Leave me alone forever."
    • 4/5
      Whereas I really enjoyed the love story from the start with Bendrix's bitterness and undisguised jealousy, I had a hard time believing Sarah's sudden religiousness - it seemed too childish, this funny bargain with God, to be taken seriously. I was disappointed with the ease with which Greene would get away from a real discussion over God and almost gave up at the predictability of Sarah's death.The book, however, really picked up at that point. The unlikely friendship between Henry and Bendrix, the slow influence of the Church over the story and Smythe's curious recovery all culminated to a brilliant finish: as far away from the beginning as could possibly be thought. In the end, atheism and religion come head to head, neither being conclusive, but with a hint of magic which reinforces the question... very adroit.A seemingly simple book, but one whose construction deserve minute attention.
    • 5/5
      I keep thinking about this book--even now, weeks after I read it. I am tempted to bump my review up to five stars. I'm so stingy with five star reviews--I give them out so sparingly, but this book is at least a 4.5. It's lodged itself into my brain.

      Confession: If this is obsession, I have been obsessed fairly often.
    • 3/5
      I can see why some people love this book. But, as a person who reads for entertainment first and growth/reflection/self-improvement second, it was an exercise in endurance. It falls firmly in the literary category of brussels sprouts - good for you but not terribly palatable. What started as somewhat amusing self-awareness, by the end had reached a crescendo of self-pitying, hateful, whining that made me want to beat my head against the wall. Had I been reading a bound copy rather than listening on audio, I almost certainly would have either abandoned it or started skimming the text to get to the end faster. But on audio, Colin Firth's delicious, delicious voice buttered it enough to let me clean my plate.
    • 3/5
      Apparently people take this book to heart and project onto it their own personal turmoils. Nothing wrong with that. Here's my review from the perspective of a happily married man: this is some claustrophobic hot mess, which is a lot more to do with God than it is to do with a lover.
      If you think the Heart of the Matter is incomprehensible to a non-believer - man paralyzed by a conflict between his love for a woman and his faith - this tops it by about three hundred degrees of incomprehensibility. I can't think of any author who so consistently tests my patience without making me lose it altogether, although I actually find it easier to suspend disbelief over Greene's religious books than some of his non-religious books (England Made Me, I'm looking at you). I can't put my finger on why, and it might even make the books more interesting, but there's a point in all his books when I think oh, c'mon now. Isn't it all just a little too pat?
      Anyway, I suggest you read this while in the throes of a passionately failing relationship, with your lady/gentleman friend or the Big Guy Above. Otherwise, I think I'd rather re-read The Quiet American.
    • 5/5
      Love and lust. Love and loss. Love and jealousy. Great short book.

    Book preview

    The End of the Affair - Graham Greene

    BOOK ONE

    I

    A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say ‘one chooses’ with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who—when he has been seriously noted at all—has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, ‘Speak to him: he hasn’t seen you yet.’

    For why should I have spoken to him? If hate is not too large a term to use in relation to any human being, I hated Henry—I hated his wife Sarah too. And he, I suppose, came soon after the events of that evening to hate me: as he surely at times must have hated his wife and that other, in whom in those days we were lucky enough not to believe. So this is a record of hate far more than of love, and if I come to say anything in favour of Henry and Sarah I can be trusted: I am writing against the bias because it is my professional pride to prefer the near-truth, even to the expression of my near-hate.

    It was strange to see Henry out on such a night: he liked his comfort and after all—or so I thought—he had Sarah. To me comfort is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort. There was too much comfort even in the bed sitting-room I had at the wrong—the south—side of the Common, in the relics of other people’s furniture. I thought I would go for a walk through the rain and have a drink at the local. The little crowded hall was full of strangers’ hats and coats and I took somebody else’s umbrella by accident—the man on the second floor had friends in. Then I closed the stained-glass door behind me and made my way carefully down the steps that had been blasted in 1944 and never repaired. I had reason to remember the occasion and how the stained glass, tough and ugly and Victorian, stood up to the shock as our grandfathers themselves would have done.

    Directly I began to cross the Common I realized I had the wrong umbrella, for it sprang a leak and the rain ran down under my macintosh collar, and then it was I saw Henry. I could so easily have avoided him; he had no umbrella and in the light of the lamp I could see his eyes were blinded with the rain. The black leafless trees gave no protection: they stood around like broken waterpipes, and the rain dripped off his stiff dark hat and ran in streams down his black civil servant’s overcoat. If I had walked straight by him, he wouldn’t have seen me, and I could have made certain by stepping two feet off the pavement, but I said, ‘Henry, you are almost a stranger,’ and saw his eyes light up as though we were old friends.

    ‘Bendrix,’ he said with affection, and yet the world would have said he had the reasons for hate, not me.

    ‘What are you up to, Henry, in the rain?’ There are men whom one has an irresistible desire to tease: men whose virtues one doesn’t share. He said evasively, ‘Oh, I wanted a bit of air,’ and during a sudden blast of wind and rain he just caught his hat in time from being whirled away towards the north side.

    ‘How’s Sarah?’ I asked because it might have seemed odd if I hadn’t, though nothing would have delighted me more than to have heard that she was sick, unhappy, dying. I imagined in those days that any suffering she underwent would lighten mine, and if she were dead I could be free: I would no longer imagine all the things one does imagine under my ignoble circumstances. I could even like poor silly Henry, I thought, if Sarah were dead.

    He said, ‘Oh, she’s out for the evening somewhere,’ and set that devil in my mind at work again, remembering other days when Henry must have replied just like that to other inquirers, while I alone knew where Sarah was. ‘A drink?’ I asked, and to my surprise he put himself in step beside me. We had never before drunk together outside his home.

    ‘It’s a long time since we’ve seen you, Bendrix.’ For some reason I am a man known by his surname—I might never have been christened for all the use my friends make of the rather affected Maurice my literary parents gave me.

    ‘A long time.’

    ‘Why, it must be—more than a year.’

    ‘June 1944,’ I said.

    ‘As long as that—well, well.’ The fool, I thought, the fool to see nothing strange in a year and a half’s interval. Less than five hundred yards of flat grass separated our two ‘sides’. Had it never occurred to him to say to Sarah, ‘How’s Bendrix doing? What about asking Bendrix in?’ and hadn’t her replies ever seemed to him … odd, evasive, suspicious? I had fallen out of their sight as completely as a stone in a pond. I suppose the ripples may have disturbed Sarah for a week, a month, but Henry’s blinkers were firmly tied. I had hated his blinkers even when I had benefited from them, knowing that others could benefit too.

    ‘Is she at the cinema?’ I asked.

    ‘Oh no, she hardly ever goes.’

    ‘She used to.’

    The Pontefract Arms was still decorated for Christmas with paper streamers and paper bells, the relics of commercial gaiety, mauve and orange, and the young landlady leant her breasts against the bar with a look of contempt for her customers.

    ‘Pretty,’ Henry said, without meaning it, and stared around with a certain lost air, a shyness, for somewhere to hang his hat. I got the impression that the nearest he had ever before been to a public bar was the chophouse off Northumberland Avenue where he ate lunch with his colleagues from the Ministry.

    ‘What will you have?’

    ‘I wouldn’t mind a whisky.’

    ‘Nor would I, but you’ll have to make do with rum.’

    We sat at a table and fingered our glasses: I had never had much to say to Henry. I doubt whether I should ever have troubled to know Henry or Sarah well if I had not begun in 1939 to write a story with a senior civil servant as the main character. Henry James once, in a discussion with Walter Besant, said that a young woman with sufficient talent need only pass the mess-room windows of a Guards’ barracks and look inside in order to write a novel about the Brigade, but I think at some stage of her book she would have found it necessary to go to bed with a Guardsman if only in order to check on the details. I didn’t exactly go to bed with Henry, but I did the next best thing, and the first night I took Sarah out to dinner I had the cold-blooded intention of picking the brain of a civil servant’s wife. She didn’t know what I was at; she thought, I am sure, I was genuinely interested in her family life, and perhaps that first awakened her liking for me. What time did Henry have breakfast? I asked her. Did he go to the office by tube, bus or taxi? Did he bring his work home at night? Did he have a briefcase with the royal arms on it? Our friendship blossomed under my interest: she was so pleased that anybody should take Henry seriously. Henry was important, but important rather as an elephant is important, from the size of his department; there are some kinds of importance that remain hopelessly damned to unseriousness. Henry was an important assistant secretary in the Ministry of Pensions—later it was to be the Ministry of Home Security. Home Security—I used to laugh at that later in those moments when you hate your companion and look for any weapon … A time came when I deliberately told Sarah that I had only taken Henry up for the purpose of copy, copy too for a character who was the ridiculous, the comic element in my book. It was then she began to dislike my novel. She had an enormous loyalty to Henry (I could never deny that), and in those clouded hours when the demon took charge of my brain and I resented even harmless Henry, I would use the novel and invent episodes too crude to write … Once when Sarah had spent a whole night with me (I had looked forward to it as a writer looks forward to the last word of his book) I had spoilt the occasion suddenly by a chance word which broke the mood of what sometimes seemed for hours at a time a complete love. I had fallen sullenly asleep about two and woke at three, and putting my hand on her arm woke Sarah. I think I had meant to make everything well again, until my victim turned her face, bleary and beautiful with sleep and full of trust, towards me. She had forgotten the quarrel, and I found even in her forgetfulness a new cause. How twisted we humans are, and yet they say a God made us; but I find it hard to conceive of any God who is not as simple as a perfect equation, as clear as air. I said to her, ‘I’ve lain awake thinking of Chapter Five. Does Henry ever eat coffee beans to clear his breath before an important conference?’ She shook her head and began to cry silently, and I of course pretended not to understand the reason—a simple question, it had been worrying me about my character, this was not an attack on Henry, the nicest people sometimes eat coffee beans … So I went on. She wept awhile and went to sleep. She was a good sleeper, and I took even her power to sleep as an added offence.

    Henry drank his rum quickly, his gaze wandering miserably among the mauve and orange streamers. I asked, ‘Had a good Christmas?’

    ‘Very nice. Very nice,’ he said.

    ‘At home?’ Henry looked up at me as though my inflection of the word sounded strange.

    ‘Home? Yes, of course.’

    ‘And Sarah’s well?’

    ‘Yes.’

    ‘Have another rum?’

    ‘It’s my turn.’

    While Henry fetched the drinks I went into the lavatory. The walls were scrawled with phrases: ‘Damn you, landlord, and your breasty wife.’ ‘To all pimps and whores a merry syphilis and a happy gonorrhea.’ I went quickly out again to the cheery paper streamers and the clink of glass. Sometimes I see myself reflected too closely in other men for comfort, and then I have an enormous wish to believe in the saints, in heroic virtue.

    I repeated to Henry the two lines I had seen. I wanted to shock him, and it surprised me when he said simply, ‘Jealousy’s an awful thing.’

    ‘You mean the bit about the breasty wife?’

    ‘Both of them. When you are miserable, you envy other people’s happiness.’ It wasn’t what I had ever expected him to learn in the Ministry of Home Security. And there—in the phrase—the bitterness leaks again out of my pen. What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is. If I could I would write with love, but if I could write with love, I would be another man: I would never have lost love. Yet suddenly across the shiny tiled surface of the bar-table I felt something, nothing so extreme as love, perhaps nothing more than a companionship in misfortune. I said to Henry, ‘Are you miserable?’

    ‘Bendrix, I’m worried.’

    ‘Tell me.’

    I expect it was the rum that made him speak, or was he partly aware of how much I knew about him? Sarah was loyal, but in a relationship such as ours had been you can’t help picking up a thing or two … I knew he had a mole on the left of his navel because a birthmark of my own had once reminded Sarah of it: I knew he suffered from short sight, but wouldn’t wear glasses with strangers (and I was still enough of a stranger never to have seen him in them): I knew his liking for tea at ten: I even knew his sleeping habits. Was he conscious that I knew so much already, that one more fact would not alter our relation? He said, ‘I’m worried about Sarah, Bendrix.’

    The door of the bar opened and I could see the rain lashing down against the light. A little hilarious man darted in and called out, ‘Wot cher, everybody,’ and nobody answered.

    ‘Is she ill? I thought you said …’

    ‘No. Not ill. I don’t think so.’ He looked miserably around—this was not his milieu. I noticed that the whites of his eyes were bloodshot; perhaps he hadn’t been wearing his glasses enough—there are always so many strangers, or it might have been the after-effect of tears. He said, ‘Bendrix, I can’t talk here,’ as though he had once been in the habit of talking somewhere. ‘Come home with me.’

    ‘Will Sarah be back?’

    ‘I don’t expect so.’

    I paid for the drinks, and that again was a symptom of Henry’s disturbance—he never took other people’s hospitality easily. He was always the one in a taxi to have the money ready in the palm of his hand, while we others fumbled. The avenues of the Common still ran with rain, but it wasn’t far to Henry’s. He let himself in with a latchkey under the Queen Anne fanlight and called, ‘Sarah. Sarah.’ I longed for a reply and dreaded a reply, but nobody answered. He said, ‘She’s out still. Come into the study.’

    I had never been in his study before: I had always been Sarah’s friend, and when I met Henry it was on Sarah’s territory, her haphazard living-room where nothing matched, nothing was period or planned, where everything seemed to belong to that very week because nothing was ever allowed to remain as a token of past taste or past sentiment. Everything was used there; just as in Henry’s study I now felt that very little had ever been used. I doubted whether the set of Gibbon had once been opened, and the set of Scott was only there because it had—probably—belonged to his father, like the bronze copy of the Discus Thrower. And yet he was happier in his unused room simply because it was his: his possession. I thought with bitterness and envy: if one possesses a thing securely, one need never use it.

    ‘A whisky?’ Henry asked. I remembered his eyes and wondered if he were drinking more than he had done in the old days. Certainly the whiskies he poured out were generous doubles.

    ‘What’s troubling you, Henry?’ I had long abandoned that novel about the senior civil servant: I wasn’t looking for copy any longer.

    ‘Sarah,’ he said.

    Would I have been frightened if he had said that, in just that way, two years ago? No, I think I should have been overjoyed—one gets so hopelessly tired of deception. I would have welcomed the open fight if only because there might have been a chance, however small, that through some error of tactics on his side I might have won. And there has never been a time in my life before or since when I have so much wanted to win. I have never had so strong a desire even to write a good book.

    He looked up at me with those red-rimmed eyes and said, ‘Bendrix, I’m afraid.’ I could no longer patronize him; he was one of misery’s graduates: he had passed in the same school, and for the first time I thought of him as an equal. I remember there was one of those early brown photographs in an Oxford frame on his desk, the photograph of his father, and looking at it I thought how like the photograph was to Henry (it had been taken at about the same age, the middle forties) and how unlike. It wasn’t the moustache that made it different—it was the Victorian look of confidence, of being at home in the world and knowing the way around, and suddenly I felt again that friendly sense of companionship. I liked him better than I would have liked his father (who had been in the Treasury). We were fellow strangers.

    ‘What is it you’re afraid of, Henry?’

    He sat down in an easy chair as though somebody had pushed him and said with disgust, ‘Bendrix, I’ve always thought the worst things, the very worst, a man could do …’ I should certainly have been on tenterhooks in those other days: strange to me, and how infinitely dreary, the serenity of innocence.

    ‘You know you can trust me, Henry.’ It was possible, I thought, that she had kept a letter, though I had written so few. It is a professional risk that authors run. Women are apt to exaggerate the importance of their lovers and they never foresee the disappointing day when an indiscreet letter will appear marked ‘Interesting’ in an autograph catalogue priced at five shillings.

    ‘Take a look at this then,’ Henry said.

    He held a letter out to me: it was not in my handwriting. ‘Go on. Read it,’ Henry said. It was from some friend of Henry’s and he wrote, ‘I suggest the man you want to help should apply to a fellow called Savage, 159 Vigo Street. I found him able and discreet, and his employees seemed less nauseous than those chaps usually are.’

    ‘I don’t understand, Henry.’

    ‘I wrote to this man and said that an acquaintance of mine had asked my advice about private detective agencies. It’s terrible, Bendrix. He must have seen through the pretence.’

    ‘You really mean …?’

    ‘I haven’t done anything about it, but there the letter sits on my desk reminding me … It seems so silly, doesn’t it, that I can trust her absolutely not to read it though she comes in here

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