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

kissed and heard the squeak of the stair, and I watched sadly the calmness of her face when Henry came in. She said, ‘We were hoping you’d come up and offer us a drink.’
    Henry said, ‘Of course. What will you have, Bendrix?’ I said I wouldn’t have a drink; I had work to do.
    ‘I thought you said you never worked at night.’
    ‘Oh, this doesn’t count. A review.’
    ‘Interesting book?’
    ‘Not very.’
    ‘I wish I had your power of - putting things down.’
    Sarah saw me to the door and we kissed again. At that moment it was Henry I liked, not Sarah. It was as though all the men in the past and all the men in the future cast their shade over the present. ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked me. She was always quick to read the meaning behind a kiss, the whisper in the brain.
    ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘I’ll call you in the morning.’
    ‘It would be better if I called you,’ she told me, and caution, I thought, caution, how well she knows how to conduct an affair like this, and I remembered again the stair that always - ‘always’ was the phrase she had used -squeaked.

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    The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity. The words of human love have been used by the saints to describe their vision of God, and so, I suppose, we might use the terms of prayer, meditation, contemplation to explain the intensity of the love we feel for a woman. We too surrender memory, intellect, intelligence, and we too experience the deprivation, the noche oscura, and sometimes as a reward a kind of peace. The act of love itself has been described as the little death, and lovers sometimes experience too the little peace. It is odd to find myself writing these phrases as though I loved what in fact I hate. Sometimes I don’t recognize my own thoughts. What do I know of phrases like ‘the dark night’ or of prayer, who have only one prayer? I have inherited them, that is all, like a husband who is left by death in the useless possession of a woman’s clothes, scents, pots of cream… And yet there was this peace…
    That is how I think of those first months of war - was it a phoney peace as well as a phoney war? It seems now to have stretched arms of comfort and reassurance all over those months of dubiety and waiting, but the peace must, I suppose, even at that time have been punctuated by misunderstanding and suspicion. Just as I went home that first evening with no exhilaration but only a sense of sadness and resignation, so again and again I returned home on other days with the certainty that I was only one of many men - the favourite lover for the moment. This woman, whom I loved so obsessively that if I woke in the night I immediately found the thought of her in my brain and abandoned sleep, seemed to give up all her time to me. And yet I could feel no trust: in the act of love I could be arrogant, but alone I had only to look in the mirror to see doubt, in the shape of a lined face and a lame leg -why me? There were always occasions when we couldn’t meet - appointments with a dentist or a hairdresser, occasions when Henry entertained, when they were alone together. It was no good telling myself that in her own home she would have no opportunity to betray me (with the egotism of a lover I was already using that word with its suggestion of a non-existent duty) while Henry worked on the widows’ pensions or - for he was soon shifted from that job - on the distribution of gas-masks and the design of approved cardboard cases, for didn’t I know it was possible to make love in the most dangerous circumstances, if the desire were there? Distrust grows with a lover’s success. Why, the very next time we saw each other it happened in just the way that