The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair Plot Summary

Introduction

London, 1946. Through the sleet-darkened streets of Clapham Common, two figures cross paths in the rain—one a successful novelist consumed by hatred, the other a mild civil servant drowning in suspicion. Their collision that winter night would resurrect a love affair that had seemingly died in the rubble of war, and expose a promise so desperate it had been whispered to a God neither believed in. Maurice Bendrix had loved Sarah Miles with the consuming obsession of a man who knew he was unworthy of what he possessed. For four years she had been his mistress, meeting him in rented rooms while her husband Henry worked late at the Ministry. But in June 1944, when a flying bomb destroyed Bendrix's flat, Sarah vanished from his life as suddenly as she had entered it. No explanation, no farewell—just silence where passion had once burned. Now, eighteen months later, a chance encounter with Henry would drag all three of them back into the wreckage of what they had lost, toward a truth none of them was prepared to face.

Chapter 1: A Chance Encounter in the Rain

The rain fell like judgment across Clapham Common that January evening, turning the familiar paths into rivers of doubt. Maurice Bendrix stepped into the storm not from any destination in mind, but from the restless energy that had plagued him since his return from lunch. The manuscript on his desk lay unfinished, another novel about people who felt nothing as deeply as he had once felt everything. Through the downpour, he recognized the familiar silhouette of Henry Miles, Sarah's husband, stumbling blindly through the deluge without an umbrella. The black government-issue overcoat hung sodden from his shoulders, and his civil servant's hat dripped steadily onto his pale face. Bendrix could have walked past unseen, but something—curiosity, perhaps, or the cruel instinct of a hunter—made him call out. "Henry, you are almost a stranger." The relief that flooded Henry's features at the sound of a familiar voice was almost embarrassing to witness. This was not the composed bureaucrat Bendrix remembered from their dinner parties, but a man adrift in his own life. They had not spoken since June 1944, since Sarah had made her choice to stay with security rather than risk everything for love. "How's Sarah?" Bendrix asked, the question bitter as medicine on his tongue. "Oh, she's out for the evening somewhere," Henry replied with the vague air of a man accustomed to his wife's absences. The answer should have satisfied Bendrix, but instead it awakened something poisonous in his chest. Out where? With whom? Had she simply replaced one lover with another? In the warm fugue of the Pontefract Arms, over rum that burned like regret, Henry Miles began to unravel. The composed facade of the successful civil servant cracked like ice in spring, revealing the frightened husband beneath. Sarah had grown distant, secretive. She disappeared for hours with explanations that didn't quite satisfy. She no longer met his eyes when she spoke. "Bendrix, I'm afraid," Henry confessed, his voice barely audible above the pub's chatter. The words hung between them like a confession of murder. Fear from Henry Miles—who had navigated wartime bureaucracy with unshakeable calm—was somehow more disturbing than rage would have been. From his jacket, Henry withdrew a letter. The paper was cream-colored, expensive, and bore the letterhead of a private detective agency. "I wrote asking about... about professional services," he whispered. "God help me, I'm considering having my own wife watched." Bendrix read the letter with the detached interest of a craftsman examining another's work. The firm came recommended for discretion and efficiency. Their clients, the letter implied, were gentlemen who preferred their domestic troubles handled quietly. "Let me go for you," Bendrix heard himself say. The offer surprised him as much as it did Henry. But wasn't this perfect? Who better to investigate Sarah's infidelity than her former lover? The irony was too exquisite to resist. Henry's gratitude was painful to witness. Here was a man so desperate for help that he would accept it from the very source of his cuckolding, if only he had known. They parted that night as conspirators, bound together by shared suspicion and the bitter knowledge that love, once poisoned by doubt, becomes indistinguishable from hate.

Chapter 2: The Passionate Affair and Its Demons

The Savage Detective Agency occupied a discreet office in Vigo Street, its waiting room furnished like a dentist's surgery—anonymous, comfortable, designed to put nervous clients at ease. Mr. Savage himself was a man who had perfected the art of professional sympathy, his pale hair and knowing eyes speaking of a thousand domestic tragedies witnessed without judgment. "Mr. Bendrix," he said, settling into his chair like a priest preparing for confession. "Now tell me everything in your own words." Bendrix found himself weaving a careful fiction—he was concerned for his friend Henry Miles, whose wife had grown mysteriously distant. The lies came easily, seasoned with enough truth to make them believable. Sarah's beauty, her secretiveness, the hours she spent away from home without adequate explanation. Mr. Savage took notes with the practiced efficiency of a man who had heard every variation of marital disaster. His fee was reasonable—three guineas a day plus expenses—and he assigned the case to his most experienced operative, a melancholy man named Parkis whose sad eyes had seen too much of human weakness. But as Bendrix signed the agreement, he felt the first stirring of something deeper than curiosity. The clinical discussion of surveillance and evidence had awakened memories he had tried to bury. The first time he had seen Sarah at Henry's party in 1939, radiant with happiness that seemed impossible in those dark days. The evening they had gone to see the film adaptation of his novel, and how her casual order of steak and onions had become the moment he fell irretrievably in love. The affair had consumed them both with a hunger that neither had expected. Sarah would slip away from Henry's house to meet him in his cramped flat south of the Common, where they made love with the desperate intensity of people who knew their time was borrowed. She moved through his life like a flame, transforming everything she touched while leaving him constantly afraid that she would be extinguished. For four years they had stolen moments between Henry's meetings and ministry dinners. Four years of lies and evasions, of elaborate alibis and careful planning. But underneath the deception had been a love so absolute that it sometimes frightened them both. They would lie in his narrow bed after making love and speak of impossible futures—marriage, children, a life together in the open. Yet neither could imagine Sarah actually leaving Henry, abandoning the security of her marriage for the uncertain prospects of a novelist whose books sold modestly and whose future remained perpetually in doubt. The demons of jealousy had tormented Bendrix from the beginning. Every night Sarah returned to Henry's bed was a small death. Every social obligation that took her away from him became evidence of her divided loyalties. He would question her obsessively about her past lovers, her feelings for Henry, her commitment to their future together. The more desperately he loved her, the more convinced he became that she would eventually leave him. "You don't trust me," she would say, and he would deny it even as he searched her face for signs of deception. Trust was a luxury he could not afford. Love had made him vulnerable in ways he had never imagined possible, and vulnerability bred suspicion like a fever in the blood.

Chapter 3: The Bombing and the Desperate Vow

June 1944 brought London's second blitz in the form of the flying bombs—Hitler's vengeance weapons that droned across the city like mechanical harbingers of death. The V-1s came day and night, their engines cutting out moments before impact, leaving the city suspended in terrible anticipation between silence and destruction. On the night that would end everything between them, Sarah had come to Bendrix's flat as Big Ben chimed the evening hour. They had learned to ignore the air raid sirens, to make love while the city burned around them. Death had become so common that it no longer seemed real, merely another inconvenience of wartime life. They lay entwined on his narrow bed when the first robot passed overhead, its engine stuttering like a broken heart. Through the blackout curtains they could see the orange glow of its exhaust, and Bendrix found himself thinking how beautiful destruction could be when viewed from a safe distance. "I should check the basement," he murmured against her shoulder, but Sarah pulled him closer. "Don't go. Please don't go." But domestic duty called, even in wartime. Bendrix slipped on his dressing gown and made his way downstairs to ensure his landlady had taken shelter. The halls were empty, the basement doors locked. As he turned to return to Sarah, the world exploded. The flying bomb struck the house across the street with the force of divine retribution. The blast picked up Bendrix like a rag doll and hurled him against the front door, which collapsed upon him in a rain of splintered wood and broken glass. For a moment that stretched into eternity, consciousness abandoned him completely. When awareness returned, he found himself trapped beneath the door in a landscape transformed beyond recognition. The familiar hall had become a cavern of debris. Through the gaping hole where the front wall had been, he could see dawn breaking over a street scoured clean of trees, of cars, of every familiar landmark save destruction itself. Upstairs, Sarah knelt beside his empty bed and made the desperate bargain that would destroy them both. She had seen his arm protruding from beneath the fallen door and known with absolute certainty that he was dead. The hand she touched was cold, lifeless—or so her panic convinced her. Kneeling on the floor in her nakedness, she addressed a God she had never believed in with the fervor of the utterly desperate. "Let him be alive," she whispered, her nails digging crescents into her palms until the blood came. "Let him be alive and I will believe. I will give him up forever, only let him have his chance." When Bendrix appeared in the doorway moments later, bloodied but breathing, Sarah's relief was matched only by her horror. The prayer had been answered, but the price demanded was beyond bearing. She had promised to abandon the only happiness she had ever known, and God—if God existed—would surely collect his debt. The change in her was immediate and inexplicable. Where once she had clung to him with desperate passion, now she seemed to slip away even as he held her. When he spoke of their future together, her eyes grew distant. When he reached for her, she submitted with the resignation of a woman fulfilling a duty rather than expressing desire. Within days she had stopped answering his telephone calls. Within weeks she had vanished from his life as completely as if the bomb had claimed her instead of sparing them both. Bendrix was left to struggle with abandonment so absolute it felt like death itself, never knowing that Sarah's disappearance was not betrayal but sacrifice—the keeping of a promise made in desperation to a God she was only beginning to fear she might actually love.

Chapter 4: Uncovering the Truth Through a Detective's Eyes

Mr. Parkis proved himself a detective of unexpected competence, despite his apologetic manner and his habit of bringing his twelve-year-old son Lance along on surveillance operations. The boy had inherited his father's talent for invisibility, moving through the world with the casual confidence of youth while his sharp eyes catalogued every detail of the adult mysteries unfolding around him. Their first reports arrived within days, written in Parkis's careful schoolboy script and supplemented by Lance's observations. Mrs. Sarah Miles, they confirmed, was indeed conducting a clandestine relationship, but not of the sort her husband suspected. Her secret meetings took her not to hotel rooms but to a modest house on Cedar Road, where she spent hours in conversation with a man whose face was disfigured by livid birthmarks. Richard Smythe was a rationalist, a public speaker who held forth on Clapham Common every Sunday afternoon, preaching the gospel of atheism to small, indifferent crowds. His sister kept house for him in genteel poverty, and together they maintained a lending library of freethought literature that gathered dust in their sitting room. It was there that Sarah came, week after week, not for passion but for argument. The irony was exquisite and bitter: while Henry feared his wife was betraying him with a lover, she was actually wrestling with questions of faith that neither man in her life could have imagined her capable of considering. Smythe, unaware that his visitor was anything more than another seeker after rational truth, found himself drawn into debates that grew increasingly personal with each meeting. But Parkis's most disturbing discovery came not from observation but from archaeology—fragments of Sarah's private thoughts salvaged from wastebaskets and pieced together like evidence of an ancient civilization. The letter he forwarded to Bendrix was incomplete but devastating in its implications: "I have no need to write to you or talk to you, you know everything before I can speak, but when one loves, one feels the need to use the same old ways... I know I am only beginning to love, but already I want to abandon everything, everybody but you..." The words were addressed to no earthly correspondent that Bendrix could identify. Their passion transcended anything Sarah had ever written to him, suggesting a love affair of an entirely different order. As he read and reread the fragment, a terrible suspicion began to form in his mind—a possibility so outrageous and yet so perfectly consistent with Sarah's recent behavior that it left him reeling with a jealousy beyond anything he had previously experienced. His rival, it seemed, was not another man but something far more threatening: a God he didn't believe in, demanding a fidelity he could never match. If Sarah had indeed surrendered her heart to the divine, then no merely human love could ever reclaim her. The battle was lost before it had begun, and the field belonged entirely to an adversary who played by no rules Bendrix could understand or counter. The investigation that had begun as an act of friendship for Henry had become a journey into the depths of his own despair. Every report from Parkis brought fresh evidence of a transformation he was powerless to reverse. The woman he had loved with such desperate intensity was disappearing before his eyes, replacing earthly passion with something that left no room for merely mortal lovers. And yet the more impossible his situation became, the more fiercely his love burned. If God had indeed stolen Sarah's heart, then Bendrix would fight heaven itself to win her back. The affair that had begun with stolen afternoons and whispered promises would end in a confrontation between human love and divine calling—a battle that could only destroy everyone it touched.

Chapter 5: The Final Meeting and Sarah's Death

Two years of silence stretched between them before Bendrix finally found the courage to telephone. Sarah's voice on the line was unchanged—still warm, still capable of stopping his breath—but something fundamental had altered in the spaces between her words. When she agreed to meet him for lunch at Rules, their old restaurant, he sensed both eagerness and reluctance in her acceptance. She arrived ten minutes late, apologizing for the buses, but Bendrix suspected she had walked slowly on purpose, steeling herself for what was to come. The years had refined her beauty rather than diminished it, but there was something fragile about her now, like porcelain that had been cracked and carefully mended. Over their meal, she spoke carefully of Henry's loneliness, suggesting that Bendrix might visit more often. The suggestion puzzled him until he realized she was trying to arrange care for her husband after she was gone. Not gone from London or gone from marriage, but gone in the absolute sense—a departure she seemed to anticipate with the calm resignation of someone who had already made her peace with mortality. "You look tired," he told her, noting the shadows beneath her eyes, the way she held herself as if breathing required conscious effort. "I'm all right," she said, but her voice carried the hollow ring of someone trying to convince herself as much as him. When she began coughing, pressing her hand to her side as if to contain some internal rebellion, he saw how she had been slowly consuming herself in service to a love that demanded everything and offered no earthly comfort in return. Walking back along Maiden Lane after lunch, they came to the doorway where they had first kissed years before. Bendrix stopped, overwhelmed by memory and the terrible knowledge that this might be their final goodbye. Sarah turned toward him, and for a moment he thought she might surrender to the past that still burned between them. Instead, another fit of coughing seized her, doubling her over with its violence. When it passed, her eyes were bright with tears and something that might have been relief. The moment had been stolen from them by the very weakness that would soon claim her entirely. "I have to go," she whispered, but her words were lost in the echo of her cough. That night, caught in the rain while walking aimlessly through London, Sarah felt the fever take hold with a finality that surprised her with its mercy. She had been tired for so long, carrying the weight of a love that demanded everything while offering no earthly rest. Now, as the cold soaked through her clothes and into her bones, she felt something like gratitude for the permission to stop fighting. By morning, the pneumonia had settled into her chest with the authority of a final judgment. Henry called a doctor, but Sarah refused treatment with the gentle stubbornness of someone who had already made her choice. When delirium came, she spoke to visitors no one else could see, her voice carrying on conversations that seemed to comfort her even as they frightened those who listened. She died at four in the morning on a Tuesday in February, alone except for the night nurse who later reported that her last conscious words had been a simple "thank you" spoken to the empty air. Henry, sleeping under sedation in the next room, missed her departure by mere minutes—though those who knew her best might have said she had been leaving gradually for years, called away by a love that brooked no earthly rivals.

Chapter 6: Unexplained Miracles and Reluctant Faith

The funeral at Golders Green was a sparse, efficient affair—Sarah reduced to smoke and memory in twenty minutes of prayer and bureaucracy. Henry, devastated by grief and guilt, accepted Bendrix's offer to move into the house they had all three shared in their different ways. Two widowers, both mourning the same woman, found unexpected comfort in their mutual loss. But death, it seemed, was not the end of Sarah's influence. Strange reports began to filter back to them, carried by visitors whose intentions were impossible to dismiss despite their apparent impossibility. First came Richard Smythe, the rationalist speaker whose face had been cleared overnight of the birthmarks that had disfigured him since childhood. He arrived at the house with his damaged cheek smooth as a child's, speaking of miracles with the bewildered air of a man whose lifelong convictions had been shattered by inexplicable grace. "You don't understand," Smythe insisted when Bendrix suggested medical explanations. "I've had these marks since birth. No treatment, no medicine—they simply vanished in a single night. The night she died." Then came Parkis, the detective, with tales of his son Lance's recovery from what doctors had diagnosed as acute appendicitis. The boy's fever had broken suddenly, his pain disappearing with a completeness that left the medical staff baffled. In his delirium, young Lance claimed to have been visited by "the lady from the Common"—Sarah, who had spoken to him kindly during one of Parkis's surveillance operations. Most disturbing of all was the discovery, among Sarah's childhood books, of a verse she had written in indelible pencil decades before: "When I was ill my mother gave me this book by Lang. If any well person steals it he will get a great bang, But if you are sick in bed You can have it to read instead." The child's rhyme, scrawled carelessly in a fairy tale book, had somehow become prophecy. Lance Parkis, burning with fever and crying for comfort, had clutched that same volume to his chest as his temperature broke and his pain vanished. The coincidence was too perfect to dismiss, too strange to explain. Father Crompton, the priest who had tried unsuccessfully to arrange Sarah's Catholic burial, began saying masses for her soul with the devotion usually reserved for certified saints. When Henry and Bendrix attended one of these services, they found themselves swept up in prayers for a woman they thought they had known completely, only to discover that her spiritual life had been as hidden from them as her most private thoughts. "She was becoming Catholic," Father Crompton explained after the service. "She had begun instruction. It was only a matter of time before her formal conversion." The revelation hit both men like a physical blow. Sarah, who had seemed so worldly, so grounded in earthly pleasures, had apparently been nurturing a secret relationship with the divine that neither husband nor lover had suspected. Her disappearance from Bendrix's life, her growing distance from Henry, her hours of absence—all of it suddenly made terrible sense. She had not left them for another man but for something far more absolute: a God who demanded everything and left no room for earthly competitors. The woman they had both loved had been slowly surrendering herself to a force neither of them believed in, transforming herself into something neither could have imagined or understood. And now, it seemed, that transformation was continuing beyond death. The miracles—if miracles they were—suggested that Sarah's influence had not ended with her physical departure but had somehow expanded, reaching into lives she had barely touched with healing power that defied explanation.

Chapter 7: Living with Loss in the House of Memory

The house on the north side of Clapham Common had become a shrine to absence, every room haunted by the woman who no longer occupied it. Henry moved through the familiar spaces like a man navigating by memory, touching objects Sarah had touched, sitting in chairs that still seemed to hold the shape of her body. Bendrix found himself studying the artifacts of her presence—photographs, books, the small accumulation of possessions that had survived her. But it was Sarah's journal, stolen during the investigation and now hidden in Bendrix's room, that revealed the true depth of her transformation. Page by page, entry by entry, it documented her slow surrender to a love that had gradually consumed every other attachment in her life. The early entries spoke of her affair with Bendrix in language that burned with earthly passion. The later ones addressed themselves to a different beloved entirely: "You were there, teaching us to squander, like You taught the rich man, so that one day we might have nothing left except this love of You. But You are too good to me. When I ask You for pain, You give me peace. Give it him too. Give him my peace—he needs it more." The words were addressed to God with an intimacy that made Bendrix's own relationship with Sarah seem shallow by comparison. She had found something in her faith that neither husband nor lover had been able to provide—a love that asked everything and gave everything in return, leaving no room for the jealousy and insecurity that had poisoned her earthly relationships. Reading her private thoughts, Bendrix felt the familiar rage rising in his chest, but now it was directed not at human rivals but at the divine competitor who had stolen her heart so completely. How could he fight an adversary he didn't believe in? How could he reclaim a woman who had surrendered herself to something beyond his reach or understanding? Henry, meanwhile, struggled with guilt that was perhaps even more devastating than grief. He had failed Sarah as a husband, failing to recognize the spiritual hunger that had driven her to seek fulfillment elsewhere. His comfortable agnosticism, his assumption that their conventional marriage would be sufficient, had left her vulnerable to the appeal of something far more demanding and transformative. "I should have seen it," he told Bendrix one evening as they sat drinking in his study. "The signs were all there—her absences, her questions about faith, the way she looked sometimes as if she were listening to something I couldn't hear. I thought she was simply growing away from me. I never imagined she was growing toward something else entirely." The irony was not lost on either man. They had both loved Sarah possessively, jealously, demanding her exclusive attention while failing to recognize that her heart was large enough to encompass loves they could not imagine or compete with. Her affairs—first with Bendrix, then with God—had been attempts to find something neither husband nor conventional lover could provide: a love absolute enough to match her own capacity for surrender. Now they were left to construct a life around her absence, two men bound together by shared loss and the gradual understanding that they had never really known the woman they had both claimed to possess. The reports of miracles continued to filter back to them, carried by visitors whose lives Sarah had touched in ways too strange to dismiss or explain. Each new account was a reminder that her influence had not ended with death but had somehow expanded, reaching into corners of existence that neither love nor loss could illuminate. In the end, they were forced to accept that Sarah had found what she was looking for—not in the arms of earthly lovers but in surrender to something that demanded everything and left nothing behind except the promise of transformation. Whether that something was God or delusion, mercy or madness, was a question neither man could answer. All they could do was tend the shrine of memory she had left behind and wonder whether the love that had claimed her so completely might someday reach for them as well.

Summary

The promises we make in desperation echo longest in the silence they leave behind. Sarah Miles had whispered her vow in the rubble of a bombed London house, trading earthly love for divine mercy in a moment of absolute terror. What followed was not betrayal but transformation—the slow, agonizing process of learning to love something that could never be possessed, never be doubted, never be lost to the jealousies and insecurities that had poisoned every human relationship she had known. Maurice Bendrix and Henry Miles were left to grapple with the implications of a love they had never understood and could not compete with. The woman they thought they had shared between them had been slowly disappearing into something larger than either could comprehend, leaving behind only the mysterious evidence of grace working through the most unlikely vessels. The miracles that followed her death—if miracles they were—served as reminders that love itself might be far stranger and more transformative than any of them had dared to imagine. In the end, Sarah's greatest gift to the men who loved her was not her presence but her absence, forcing them to confront the possibility that human love, however passionate, might be only a pale reflection of something infinitely more demanding and more complete. The house on Clapham Common stands empty now of her laughter and her tears, but full of the questions she left behind: What do we do with love that demands everything? How do we live with grace we cannot earn or understand? And in a world where promises made to unknown gods can reshape the heart beyond recognition, who among us is safe from the terrible mercy of answered prayers?

About Author

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Graham Greene

Greene delves into the intricate moral landscapes of the 20th century through his writing, challenging readers with tales that navigate the interplay of faith, doubt, and political turmoil. His books, such as "The Power and the Glory" and "The Heart of the Matter," highlight the tension between religious conviction and existential uncertainty, offering readers a deep dive into the psyche of characters caught in ethically ambiguous situations. Whereas Greene’s literary works are marked by their intellectual depth, they are also infused with the suspenseful elements of thrillers, which he referred to as “entertainments.” This dual approach allows him to connect with a broad audience, blending literary exploration with gripping narratives.\n\nBeyond thematic exploration, Greene's method of combining personal beliefs with narrative complexity provides a unique lens through which readers can examine their own moral compasses. His novel "The Quiet American," set against a backdrop of international conflict, encourages reflection on the broader implications of personal actions within political frameworks. Meanwhile, Greene’s own life experiences, including his conversion to Catholicism and work with British intelligence, imbue his characters with authenticity and depth. This multifaceted storytelling invites readers to interrogate the moral dilemmas that pervade their own lives, ensuring his work remains relevant.\n\nGreene’s impact extends beyond literature into film, with several novels adapted into acclaimed movies like "The Third Man." The author’s insightful portrayal of political and existential themes has solidified his place as a pivotal figure in literary history. His awards, including the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, underscore his contributions to both literature and broader cultural conversations. Therefore, this bio provides a snapshot of Greene’s enduring influence, highlighting how his works continue to challenge and inspire new generations of readers.

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