The End of the Affair by Graham Greene Read Free Book Online

enormous resolution (who are we to measure another man’s courage?) and said, ‘I’ve been keeping you, sir, talking about my problems.’
    ‘I’ve enjoyed it, Mr Parkis,’ I said without irony. ‘Try not to worry. Your boy must take after you.’
    ‘He has his mother’s brains, sir,’ he said sadly. ‘I must hurry. It’s cold out, though I found him a nice sheltered spot before I came away. But he’s so keen I don’t trust him to keep dry. Would you mind initialling the expenses, sir, if you approve them?’
    I watched him from my window with his thin macintosh turned up and his old hat turned down; the snow had increased and already under the third lamp he looked like a small snowman with the mud showing through. It occurred to me with amazement that for ten minutes I had not thought of Sarah or of my jealousy; I had become nearly human enough to think of another person’s trouble.

7
    Jealousy, or so I have always believed, exists only with desire. The Old Testament writers were fond of using the words ‘a jealous God’, and perhaps it was their rough and oblique way of expressing belief in the love of God for man. But I suppose there are different kinds of desire. My desire now was nearer hatred than love, and Henry I had reason to believe, from what Sarah once told me, had long ceased to feel any physical desire for her. And yet, I think, in those days he was as jealous as I was. His desire was simply for companionship: he felt for the first time excluded from Sarah’s confidence: he was worried and despairing - he didn’t know what was going on or what was going to happen. He was living in a terrible insecurity. To that extent his plight was worse than mine. I had the security of possessing nothing. I could have no more than I had lost, while he still owned her presence at the table, the sound of her feet on the stairs, the opening and closing of doors, the kiss on the cheek - I doubt if there was much else now, but what a lot to a starving man is just that much. And perhaps what made it worse, he had once enjoyed the sense of security as I never had. Why, at the moment when Mr Parkis returned across the Common, he didn’t even know that Sarah and I had once been lovers. And when I write that word my brain against my will travels irresistibly back to the point where pain began.
    A whole week went by after the fumbling kiss in Maiden Lane before I rang Sarah up. She had mentioned at dinner that Henry didn’t like the cinema and so she rarely went. They were showing a film of one of my books at Warner’s and. so, partly to ‘show off’, partly because I felt that kiss must somehow be followed up for courtesy’s sake, partly too because I was still interested in the married life of a civil servant, I asked Sarah to come with me. ‘I suppose it’s no good asking Henry?’
    ‘Not a bit,’ she said, ‘He could join us for dinner afterwards?’
    ‘He’s bringing a lot of work back with him. Some wretched Liberal is asking a question next week in the House about widows.’ So you might say that the Liberal -I believe he was a Welshman called Lewis - made our bed for us that night.
    The film was not a good film, and at moments it was acutely painful to see situations that had been so real to me twisted into the stock clichés of the screen. I wished I had gone to something else with Sarah. At first I had said to her, ‘That’s not what I wrote, you know,’ but I couldn’t keep on saying that. She touched me sympathetically with her hand, and from then on we sat there with our hands in the innocent embrace that children and lovers use. Suddenly and unexpectedly, for a few minutes only, the film came to life. I forgot that this was my story, and that for once this was my dialogue, and was genuinely moved by a small scene in a cheap restaurant. The lover had ordered steak and onions, the girl hesitated for a moment to take the onions because her husband didn’t like the smell, the lover was hurt