Sometimes the beginning of a novel can strike you in a way that you can’t quite explain, even to the point that you can remember the exact moment when you read it. The opening of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair crossed my path in the staffroom of Barnhill Community College when a teacher whose name I forget told me that I must read this novel. I borrowed the book and read it continuously from the moment I got on a bus with the typically cold London rain drizzling down the windows.
The novel as a whole is moving, but it is the opening pages that have stayed with me. Greene’s narrator, Bendrix, a jilted lover, is flawed to the point of being reprehensible, yet there is something about him that I identified with. Perhaps it was his flaws with which I connected. I often wonder if women read the novel in the same way, or do they connect with plight of Sarah, the wife stuck in an unhappy middle-class marriage?
The opening of this novel represents for me what storytelling is about. Well, here it is:
A STORY has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses that moment of experience from which to look back or from which to look ahead. I say ‘one chooses’ with the inaccurate pride of a professional writer who —when he has been seriously noted at all — has been praised for his technical ability, but do I in fact of my own will choose that black wet January night on the Common, in 1946, the sight of Henry Miles slanting across the wide river of rain, or did these images choose me? It is convenient, it is correct according to the rules of my craft to begin just there, but if I had believed then in a God, I could also ‘have believed in a hand, plucking at my elbow, a suggestion, ‘Speak to him: he hasn’t seen you yet’
For why should I have spoken to him? If hate is not too large a term to use in relation to any human being, I hated Henry — I hated his wife Sarah too. And he, I suppose, came soon after the events of that evening to hate me: as he surely at times must have hated his wife and that other, in whom in those days we were lucky enough not to believe. So this is a record of hate far more than of love, and if I come to say anything in favour of Henry and Sarah I can be trusted: I am writing against the bias because it is my professional pride to prefer the near-truth, even to the expression of my near-hate.
It was strange to see Henry out on such a night: be liked his comfort and after all — or so I thought — he had Sarah. To me comfort is like the wrong memory at the wrong place or time: if one is lonely one prefers discomfort. There was too much comfort even in the bed sitting-room I had at the wrong — the south — side of the Common, in the relics of other people’s furniture. I thought I would go for a walk through the rain and have a drink at the local The little crowded hall was full of strangers’ hats and coats and I took somebody else’s umbrella by accident — the man on the second floor had friends in. Then I closed the stained-glass door behind me and made my way carefully down the steps that had been blasted in 1944 and never repaired. I had reason to remember the occasion and how the stained glass, tough and ugly and Victorian, stood up to the shock as our grandfathers themselves would have done.
Bruce Derby
