The End of the Affair Read Online Free PDF Page B

avoid the truth. ‘Are you on a new book?’ she asked. It was like a stranger speaking, the kind of stranger one meets at a cocktail party. She hadn’t committed that remark, even the first time, over the South African sherry.
    ‘Of course.’
    ‘I didn’t like the last one much.’
    ‘It was a struggle to write at all just then - Peace coming…’ And I might just as well have said peace going.
    ‘I sometimes was afraid you’d go back to that old idea -the one I hated. Some men would have done.’
    ‘A book takes me a year to write. It’s too hard work for a revenge.’
    ‘If you knew how little you had to revenge. “,’
    ‘Of course I’m joking. We had a good time together; we’re adults, we knew it had to end some time. Now, you see, we can meet like friends and talk about Henry.’
    I paid the bill and we went out, and twenty yards down the street was the doorway and the grating. I stopped on the pavement and said, ‘I suppose you’re going to the Strand?’
    ‘No, Leicester Square.’
    ‘I’m going to the Strand.’ She stood in the doorway and the street was empty. ‘I’ll say good-bye here. It was nice seeing you.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Call me up any time you are free.’
    I moved towards her: I could feel the grating under my feet. ‘Sarah,’ I said. She turned her head sharply away, as though she were looking to see if anyone were coming, to see if there was time… but when she turned again the cough took her. She doubled up in the doorway and coughed and coughed. Her eyes were red with it. In her fur coat she looked like a small animal cornered.
    ‘I’m sorry.’
    I said with bitterness, as though I had been robbed of something, ‘That needs attending to.’
    ‘It’s only a cough.’ She held her hand out and said, ‘Good-bye - Maurice.’ The name was like an insult. I said ‘Good-bye’, but didn’t take her hand: I walked quickly away without looking round, trying to give the appearance of being busy and relieved to be gone, and when I heard the cough begin again, I wished I had been able to whistle a tune, something jaunty, adventurous, happy, but I have no ear for music.

6
    When young one builds up habits of work that one believes will last a lifetime and withstand any catastrophe. Over twenty years I have probably averaged five hundred words a day for five days a week. I can produce a novel in a year, and that allows time for revision and the correction of the typescript. I have always been very methodical and when my quota of work is done, I break off even in the middle of a scene. Every now and then during the morning’s work I count what I have done and mark off the hundreds on my manuscript. No printer need make a careful cast-off of my work, for there on the front page of my typescript is marked the figure - 83,764. When I was young not even a love affair would alter my schedule. A love affair had to begin after lunch, and however late I might be in getting to bed - so long as I slept in my own bed -I would read the morning’s work over and sleep on it. Even the war hardly affected me. A lame leg kept me out of the Army, and as I was in Civil Defence, my fellow workers were only too glad that I never wanted the quiet morning turns of duty. I got, as a result, a quite false reputation for keenness, but I was keen only for my desk, my sheet of paper, that quota of words dripping slowly, methodically, from the pen. It needed Sarah to upset my self-imposed discipline. The bombs between those first daylight raids and the V1s of 1944 kept their own convenient nocturnal habits, but so often it was only in the mornings that I could see Sarah, for in the afternoon she was never quite secure from friends, who, their shopping done, would want company and gossip before the evening siren. Sometimes she would come in between two queues, and we would make love between the greengrocer’s and the butcher’s.
    But it was quite easy to return to work even under those conditions. So long