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 gonorrhoea.’ 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 be 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.’