Read Online The End of the Affair by Graham Greene - Free Book Online Page B

I no more wanted her than I wanted the company of a dog or a cat. She was telling me that she had a nice flat on the top floor only a few houses down: she told me what rent she had to pay and what her age was and where she was born and how she had worked for a year in a cafe. She told me she didn’t go home with anybody who spoke to her, but she could see at once I was a gentleman. She said she had a canary called Jones named after the gentleman who had given it her. She began to talk of the difficulty of getting groundsel in London. I thought: if Sarah is still in my room I can ring up. I heard the girl asking me whether if I had a garden I would sometimes remember her canary. She said, ‘You don’t mind me asking, do you?’
    Looking at her over my whisky I thought how odd it was that I felt no desire for her at all. It was as if quite suddenly after all the promiscuous years I had grown up. My passion for Sarah had killed simple lust for ever. Never again would I be able to enjoy a woman without love.
    And yet surely it was not love that had brought me into this pub; I had told myself all the way from the Common that it was hate, as I tell myself still, writing this account of her, trying to get her out of my system for ever, for I have always told myself that if she died, I could forget her.
    I went out of the pub, leaving the girl with her whisky to finish and a pound-note as a salve to her pride, and walked up New Burlington Street as far as a telephone-box. I had no torch with me and I was forced to strike match after match before I could complete the dialling of my number. Then I heard the ringing tone and I could imagine the telephone where it stood on my desk and I knew exactly how many steps Sarah would have to take to reach it if she were sitting in a chair or lying on the bed. And yet I let it go on ringing in the empty room for half a minute. Then I telephoned to her home and the maid told me she had not yet come in. I thought of her walking about on the Common in the black-out - it wasn’t a very safe place in those days, and looking at my watch I thought, if I hadn’t been a fool we should still have had three hours together. I went back home alone and tried to read a book, but all the time I was listening for the telephone which never rang. My pride prevented me telephoning her again. At last I went to bed and took a double dose of sleeping-draught, so that the first I knew in the morning was Sarah’s voice on the telephone, speaking to me as if nothing had happened. It was like perfect peace again until I put the receiver down, when immediately that devil in my brain prompted the thought that the waste of those three hours meant nothing at all to her.
    I have never understood why people who can swallow the enormous improbability of a personal God boggle at a personal Devil. I have known so intimately the way that demon works in my imagination. No statement that Sarah ever made was proof against his cunning doubts, though he would usually wait till she had gone to utter them. He would prompt our quarrels long before they occurred: he was not Sarah’s enemy so much as the enemy of love, and isn’t that what the devil is supposed to be? I can imagine that if there existed a God who loved, the devil would be driven to destroy even the weakest, the most faulty imitation of that love. Wouldn’t he be afraid that the habit of love might grow, and wouldn’t he try to trap us all into being traitors, into helping him extinguish love? 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 3 For I thought I could detect in Parkis’s next report a genuine enthusiasm for the devil’s game. At last he had really scented love and now he stalked it, his boy at his heels like a retriever.