The End of the Affair

by Graham Greene

sherry-bar

had with him a girl much taller and better-looking than he was who wore the same kind of trousers and smoked the same cigarettes. She was very young and she was called Sylvia and one knew that she was on a long course of study that had only begun with Waterbury—she was at the stage of imitating her teacher. I wondered where, with those looks, those alert good-natured eyes and hair the gold of illuminations, she would end. Would she even remember Waterbury in ten years and the bar off Tottenham Court Road? I felt sorry for him. He was so proud now, so patronizing to both of us, but he was on the losing side. Why, I thought, catching her eye over my glass at a particularly fatuous comment of his about the stream of consciousness, even now I could get her from him. His articles were bound in paper, but my books were bound in cloth. She knew she could learn more from me. And yet, poor devil, he had the nerve to snub her when occasionally she made a simple human unintellectual comment. I wanted to warn him of the empty future, but instead I took another glass and said, ‘I can’t stay long. I have to go to a funeral in Golders Green.’

Interesting his thoughts here continue reading here it is very good comical irony

Indifference and pride look very much alike,

Note this phrase good one

burial.

I think that was great .......insightful

From the point of view of forgetting Sarah there was nothing to choose between the two houses: she had belonged to both.

great many people loved her,’ I said. Father Crompton turned his eyes on me like a headmaster who hears an interruption at the back of the class from some snotty youngster. ‘Perhaps not enough,’ he said.

‘There’s the insertion in The Times. We should have to put in a correction. People notice that kind of thing. It would cause comment. After all you aren’t unknown, Henry. Then telegrams would have to be sent. A lot of people will have had wreaths delivered already to the crematorium. You see what I mean, father.’ ‘I can’t say that I do.’ ‘What you ask is not reasonable.’ ‘You seem to have a very strange set of values, Mr Bendrix.’ ‘But surely you don’t believe cremation affects the resurrection of the body, father?’ ‘Of course I don’t. I’ve told you my reasons already. If they don’t seem strong enough to Mr Miles, there’s no more to be said.’ He got up from his chair, and what an ugly man he was. Sitting down he had at least the appearance of power, but his legs were too short for his body, and he rose, unexpectedly small. It was as if he had suddenly moved a long way off. Henry said, ‘If you’d come a little sooner, father. Please don’t think …’ ‘I don’t think anything wrong of you, Mr Miles.’ ‘Of me perhaps, father?’ I asked with deliberate impertinence. ‘Oh, don’t worry, Mr Bendrix. Nothing you can do will affect her now.’ I suppose the Confessional teaches a man to recognize hate. He held his hand out to Henry and turned his back on me. I wanted to say to him, You’re wrong about me. It’s not Sarah I hate. And you are wrong about Henry too. He is the corrupter, not me. I wanted to defend myself, ‘I loved her’, for surely in the Confessional they learn to recognize that e...

This is great

Grief and disappointment are like hate: they make men ugly with self-pity and bitterness.

Good phrase to remember

His sands had already run out.

Good metaphore

The extinction of Sarah had left every wife safer.

My hatred could believe in her survival: it was only my love that knew she existed no more than a dead bird.

Hatred still there love isn't .......interesting thought

Great Missenden

Deauville.

Deauville is Normandy’s answer to the French Riviera, and the beach resort of choice for weekending Parisians. Golden sands and seafront promenades dot the coast, while further inland you’ll find spacious plazas, terrace cafés, designer boutiques, and striking half-timbered buildings. Reviews: 48K

I lay on my back and watched the shadows of the Common trees shift on my ceiling. It’s

All the light went out, darkness was over the bed, and I dreamed I was at a fair with a gun in my hand. I was shooting at bottles that looked as though they were made of glass but my bullets bounded off them as though they were coated with steel. I fired and fired, and not a bottle could I crack, and at five in the morning I woke with exactly the same thought in my head: for those years you were mine, not His.

freehold.

He took me quite seriously. ‘I shall never want to do that. I’m not the marrying kind. It was a great injury I did to Sarah when I married her. I know that now.’

lumber-room

Once when Henry was away for a few days at a conference at Bournemouth, I picked up a girl and brought her back. It wasn’t any good. I knew it at once, I was impotent, and to save her feelings I told her that I had promised a woman I loved never to do this with anyone else. She was very sweet and understanding about it: prostitutes have a great respect for sentiment. This time there had been no revenge in my mind, and I felt only sadness at abandoning for ever something I had enjoyed so much. I dreamed of Sarah afterwards and we were lovers again in my old room on the south side, but again nothing happened, only this time there was no sadness in the fact. We were happy and without regret.

lay on the floor with the books and tried to trace at least a few features in the blank spaces of Sarah’s life. There are times when a lover longs to be also a father and a brother: he is jealous of the years he hasn’t shared. The Golliwog at the North Pole was probably the earliest of Sarah’s books because it had been scrawled all over, this way and that way, meaninglessly, destructively, with coloured chalks. In one of the Beatrix Potters her name had been spelt in pencil, one big capital letter arranged wrongly so that what appeared was SARAH. In The Children of the New Forest she said written very tidily and minutely ‘Sarah Bertram Her Book. Please ask permission to borrow. And if you steal it will be to your sorrow’. 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.

Scott’s Last Expedition.

Scott's Last Expedition: The Journals is the explorer's detailed account of his time in Antarctica.

cairns

cairn n. 1 a mound of rough stones built as a memorial or landmark, typically on a hilltop or skyline. <SPECIAL USAGE> a prehistoric burial mound made of stones. 2 (also cairn ter·ri·er) a small terrier of a breed with short legs, a longish body, and a shaggy coat. <ORIGIN> perhaps so named from being used to hunt among cairns. <ORIGIN> late Middle English: from Scottish Gaelic carn.

Even then, I thought, He came into her mind. He was as underhand as a lover, taking advantage of a passing mood, like a hero seducing us with his improbabilities and his legends.

Father Crompton was not used to dining out. One had the impression that this was a duty on which he found it hard to keep his mind. He had very limited small talk, and his answers fell like trees across the road.

Januarius,

‘St Augustine asked where time came from. He said it came out of the future which didn’t exist yet, into the present that had no duration, and went into the past which had ceased to exist. I don’t know that we can understand time any better than a child.’

St Augutine's definition of time

That might be true of murder and adultery, the spectacular sins, but could a saint ever have been guilty of envy and meanness?