The End of the Affair Read Free

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.’
    T 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…?’
    T 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 a dozen times a day. I don’t even put it away in a drawer. And yet I can’t trust… she’s out for a walk now. A walk, Bendrix.’ The rain had penetrated his guard also and he held the edge of his sleeve towards the gas fire.
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    ‘You were always a special friend of hers, Bendrix. They always say, don’t they, that a husband is the last person really to know the kind of woman… I thought tonight, when I saw you on the Common, that if I told you, and you laughed at me, I might be able to burn the letter.’
    He sat there with his damp arm extended, looking away from me. I had never felt less like laughing, and yet I would have liked to laugh if I had been able.
    I said, ‘It’s not the sort of situation one laughs at, even if it is fantastic to think… ‘
    He asked me longingly, ‘It is fantastic. You do think that I’m a fool, don’t you…?’
    I would willingly have laughed a moment before, and yet now, when I only had to lie, all the old jealousies returned. Are husband and wife so much one flesh that if one hates the wife one has to hate the husband too? His question reminded me of ‘how easy he had been to deceive: so easy that he seemed to me almost a conniver at his wife’s unfaithfulness, like the man who leaves loose notes in a hotel bedroom connives at theft, and I hated him for the very quality which had once helped my love.
    The sleeve of his jacket steamed away in front of the gas and he repeated, still looking away from me, ‘Of course, I can tell you think me a fool.’
    Then the demon spoke, ‘Oh no, I don’t think you a fool, Henry.’
    ‘You mean, you really think it’s… possible?’
    ‘Of course it’s possible. Sarah’s human.’
    He said indignantly, ‘And I always thought you were her friend,’ as though it was I who had written the letter.
    ‘Of course,’ I said, ‘you know her so much better than I ever did.’
    ‘In some ways,’ he said gloomily, and I knew he was thinking of the very ways in which I had known her the best.
    ‘You asked me, Henry, if I thought you were a fool. I only said there was nothing foolish in the idea. I said nothing against Sarah.’
    ‘I know, Bendrix. I’m sorry. I haven’t been sleeping well lately. I wake up in the night wondering what to do about this wretched letter.’
    ‘Burn it.’
    ‘I wish I could.’ He still had it in his hand and for a moment I really thought he was going to set it alight.
    ‘Or go and see Mr Savage,’ I said.
    ‘But I can’t pretend to him that I’m not her husband. Just think, Bendrix, of sitting there in front of a desk in a chair all the other jealous husbands have sat in, telling the same story… Do you think there’s a waiting-room, so that we see each other’s faces as we pass through?’ Strange, I thought, you would almost have taken Henry for an imaginative man. I felt my