Free The End of the Affair by Graham Greene Page A

stay indoors to prepare their sermons. 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.
    I remember 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. Henry did his best to lend an appearance of Cabinet secrecy to the proceedings of a Royal Commission that were reported daily in the Press. We went into the lounge for coffee and found ourselves entirely alone beside the fire in a waste of black horsehair sofas. I thought how suitable the horns along the walls were to the situation, and putting my feet up on the old-fashioned fender shut Henry firmly into his corner. I stirred my coffee and said, ‘How’s Sarah?’
    ‘Pretty well,’ Henry said evasively. He tasted his port with care and suspicion: he hadn’t forgotten, I suppose, the Vienna steak.
    ‘Are you still worried?’ I asked him.
    He shifted his gaze unhappily. ‘Worried?’
    ‘You were worried. You told me so.’
    ‘I don’t remember. She’s pretty well,’ he explained weakly, as though I had been referring to her health.
    ‘Did you ever consult that detective?’
    ‘I hoped you’d forgotten it. I wasn’t well - you see, there was this Royal Commission brewing. I was overworked.’
    ‘Do you remember I offered to see him for you?’
    ‘We must both have been a bit overwrought.’ He stared up at the old horns overhead, screwing up his eyes in his attempt to read the name of the donor. He said stupidly, ‘You seem to have a lot of heads.’ I wasn’t going to let him off. I said, ‘I went to see him a few days later.’
    He put down his glass and said, ‘Bendrix, you had absolutely no right… ‘
    ‘I’m paying all the charges.’
    ‘It’s infernal cheek.’ He stood up, but I had him penned in where he couldn’t get past without an act of violence, and violence wasn’t in Henry’s character.
    ‘Surely you’d have liked her cleared?’ I said.
    ‘There was nothing to clear. I want to go, please.’
    ‘I think you ought to read the reports.’
    ‘I’ve no intention… ‘
    ‘Then I think I shall have to read you the bit about the surreptitious visits. Her love letter I returned to the detectives for filing. My dear Henry, you’ve been properly led up the garden.’
    I really thought that he was going to hit me. If he had, I would have struck back with pleasure, struck back at this oaf to whom Sarah had remained in her way so stupidly loyal for so many years, but at that moment the secretary of the club came in. He was a man with a long grey beard and a soup-stained waistcoat, who looked like a Victorian poet but in fact wrote little sad reminiscences of the dogs he had once known. (_For Ever Fido_ had been a great success in 1912.) ‘Ah, Bendrix,’ he said, ‘I haven’t seen you here in a long while.’ I introduced him to Henry and he said with the quickness of a hairdresser, ‘I’ve been following the reports every day.’
    ‘What reports?’ For once Henry’s work had not come first to his mind when that word was uttered.
    ‘The Royal Commission.’
    When at last he had gone, Henry said, ‘Now will you please give me the reports and let me pass.’
    I imagined that he had been thinking things over while the secretary was with