The End of the Affair

by Graham Greene

I am a jealous man—it seems stupid to write these words in what is, I suppose, a long record of jealousy, jealousy of Henry, jealousy of Sarah and jealousy of that other whom Mr Parkis was so maladroitly pursuing. Now that all this belongs to the past, I feel my jealousy of Henry only when memories become particularly vivid (because I swear that if we had been married, with her loyalty and my desire, we could have been happy for a lifetime), but there still remains jealousy of my rival—a melodramatic word painfully inadequate to express the unbearable complacency, confidence and success he always enjoys. Sometimes I think he wouldn’t even recognize me as part of the picture, and I feel an enormous desire to draw attention to myself, to shout in his ear, ‘You can’t ignore me. Here I am. Whatever happened later, Sarah loved me then.’