Free The End of the Affair by Graham Greene Page B

us, so I handed him the last report.
    He put it straight into the fire and rammed it home with the poker. I couldn’t help thinking that the gesture had dignity. ‘What are you going to do?’ I asked.
    ‘Nothing.’
    ‘You haven’t got rid of the facts.’
    ‘To hell with the facts,’ Henry said. I had never heard him swear before.
    ‘I can always let you have a carbon copy.’
    ‘Will you let me go now?’ Henry said. The demon had done its work, I felt drained of venom. I took my legs off the fender and let Henry pass. He walked straight out of the club, forgetting his hat, that black superior hat that I had seen come dripping across the Common - it seemed an age and not a matter of weeks ago.

4
    I had expected to overtake him, or at least to come in sight of him ahead up the long reach of Whitehall, and so I carried his hat with me, but he was nowhere to be seen. I turned back not knowing where to go. That is the worst of time nowadays - there is so much of it. I looked in the small bookshop near Charing Cross underground and wondered whether Sarah at this moment might have laid her hand on the powdered bell in Cedar Road with Mr Parkis waiting round the corner. If I could have turned back time I think I would have done so: I would have let Henry go walking by, blinded by the rain. But I am beginning to doubt whether anything I can do will ever alter the course of events. Henry and I are allies now, in our fashion, but are we allies against an infinite tide?
    I went across the road, past the fruit-hawkers, and into the Victoria Gardens. Not many people were sitting on the benches in the grey windy air, and almost at once I saw Henry, but it took me a moment to recognize him. Out of doors, without a hat, he seemed to have joined the anonymous and the dispossessed, the people who come up from the poorer suburbs and nobody knows - the old man feeding sparrows, the woman with a brown-paper parcel marked Swan & Edgar’s. He sat there with his head bent, looking at his shoes. I have been sorry for myself for so long, so exclusively, that it seemed strange to me to feel sorry for my enemy. I put the hat quietly down on the seat beside him and would have walked away, but he looked up and I could see that he had been crying. He must have travelled a very long way. Tears belong to a different world from Royal Commissions.
    ‘I’m sorry, Henry,’ I said. How easily we believe we can slide out of our guilt by a motion of contrition.
    ‘Sit down,’ Henry commanded with the authority of his tears, and I obeyed him. He said, ‘I’ve been thinking. Were you two lovers, Bendrix?’
    ‘Why should you imagine…?’
    ‘It’s the only explanation.’
    ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’
    ‘It’s the only excuse too, Bendrix. Can’t you see that what you’ve done is - monstrous?’ As he spoke he turned his hat over and checked the maker’s name.
    ‘I suppose you think I’m an awful fool, Bendrix, not to have guessed. Why didn’t she leave me?’
    Had I got to instruct him about the character of his own wife? The poison was beginning to work in me again. I said, ‘You have a good safe income. You’re a habit she’s formed. You’re security.’ He listened seriously and attentively as though I were a witness before the Commission giving evidence on oath. I went sourly on, ‘You were no more trouble to us than you’d been to the others.’
    ‘There were others too?’
    ‘Sometimes I thought you knew all about it and didn’t care. Sometimes I longed to have it out with you - like we are doing now when it’s too late. I wanted to tell you what I thought of you.’
    ‘What did you think?’
    ‘That you were her pimp. You pimped for me and you pimped for them, and now you are pimping for the latest one. The eternal pimp. Why don’t you get angry, Henry?’
    ‘I never knew.’
    ‘You pimped with your ignorance. You pimped by never learning how to make love with her, so she had to look