The End of the Affair

by Graham Greene

‘She’s a great help to me,’ he said. Poor Henry. But why should I say poor Henry? Didn’t he possess in the end the winning cards—the cards of gentleness, humility and trust?

Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions. If we had not been taught how to interpret the story of the Passion, would we have been able to say from their actions alone whether it was the jealous Judas or the cowardly Peter who loved Christ?

In the days when we were in love, I would try to get her to say more than the truth—that our affair would never end, that one day we should marry. I wouldn’t have believed her, but I would have liked to hear the words on her tongue, perhaps only to give me the satisfaction of rejecting them myself. But she never played that game of make-believe, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, she would shatter my reserve with a statement of such sweetness and amplitude

So long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work.

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.

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.

A week ago I revisited the terrace. Half of it was gone—the half where the hotels used to stand had been blasted to bits, and the place where we made love that night was a patch of air.

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.

If this book of mine fails to take a straight course, it is because I am lost in a strange region: I have no map. I sometimes wonder whether anything that I am putting down here is true.

Eternity is said not to be an extension of time but an absence of time,

Insecurity is the worst sense that lovers feel: sometimes the most humdrum desireless marriage seems better. Insecurity twists meanings and poisons trust.

‘Wouldn’t you want me to be happy, rather than miserable?’ she asked with unbearable logic. ‘I’d rather be dead or see you dead,’ I said, ‘than with another man. I’m not eccentric. That’s ordinary human love. Ask anybody. They’d all say the same—if they loved at all.’ I jibed at her. ‘Anyone who loves is jealous.’

If there is a God who uses us and makes his saints out of such material as we are, the devil too may have his ambitions; he may dream of training even such a person as myself, even poor Parkis, into being his saints, ready with borrowed fanaticism to destroy love wherever we find it.

Suddenly I wanted to put out my hand and touch her, the hair of her head and her secret hair, I wanted her lying beside me, I wanted to be able to turn my head on the pillow and speak to her, I wanted the almost imperceptible smell and taste of her skin, and there was Henry facing the pressman’s camera with the complacency and assurance of a Departmental head.

As for the authors (for whom the club had been founded), nearly all of them are hanging on the wall—Conan Doyle, Charles Garvice, Stanley Weyman, Nat Gould, with an occasional more illustrious and familiar face: the living you can count on the fingers of one hand. I have always felt at home in the club because there is so little likelihood of meeting a fellow writer.

Henry chose a Vienna steak—it was a mark of his innocence. I really believe that he had no idea what he was ordering and expected something like a Wiener Schnitzel. Playing as he was away from the home ground, he was too ill at ease to comment on the dish and somehow he managed to ram the pink soggy mixture down. I remembered that pompous appearance before the flashlights and made no attempt to warn him when he chose Cabinet Pudding. During the hideous meal (the club that day surpassed itself) we talked elaborately about nothing.

‘It’s in the boy’s capacity,’ Mr Parkis said with pride, ‘and nobody can resist Lance.’ ‘He’s called Lance, is he?’ ‘After Sir Lancelot, sir. Of the Round Table.’ ‘I’m surprised. That was a rather unpleasant episode, surely.’ ‘He found the Holy Grail,’ Mr Parkis said. ‘That was Galahad. Lancelot was found in bed with Guinevere.’ Why do we have this desire to tease the innocent? Is it envy? Mr Parkis said sadly, looking across at his boy as though he had betrayed him, ‘I hadn’t heard.’

It’s a strange thing to discover and to believe that you are loved, when you know that there is nothing in you for anybody but a parent or a God to love.

‘Materialism isn’t only an attitude for the poor,’ he said. ‘Some of the finest brains have been materialist, Pascal, Newman. So subtle in some directions: so crudely superstitious in others. One day we may know why: it may be a glandular deficiency.’

Suddenly I realized she was asleep. Exhausted by her flight she had fallen asleep against my shoulder as so many times, in taxis, in buses, on a park-seat. I sat still and let her be. There was nothing to disturb her in the dark church. The candles flapped around the virgin, and there was nobody else there. The slowly growing pain in my upper arm where her weight lay was the greatest pleasure I had ever known.

This is to play act, talking about revenge and jealousy: it’s just something to fill the brain with, so that I can forget the absoluteness of her death. A week ago I had only to say to her ‘Do you remember that first time together and how I hadn’t got a shilling for the meter?’, and the scene would be there for both of us. Now it was there for me only. She had lost all our memories for ever, and it was as though by dying she had robbed me of part of myself. I was losing my individuality. It was the first stage of my own death, the memories dropping off like gangrened limbs.

What a long way Henry had travelled since the complacent photograph in the Tatler that had so angered me. I had a picture of Sarah, enlarged from a snapshot, facedown on my desk. He turned it over. ‘I remember taking that,’ he said. Sarah had told me the photograph had been taken by a woman-friend. I suppose she had lied to save my feelings.

They were the marks of every child who has ever lived: traces as anonymous as the claw marks of birds that one sees in winter. When I closed the book they were covered at once by the drift of time.

I don’t know why another line of hers came into my head when I saw that schoolgirl phrase with all its impatience, its incomprehension and its assurance: ‘I’m a phoney and a fake.’ Here under my hand was innocence. It seemed such a pity that she had lived another twenty years only to feel that about herself. A phoney and a fake.