Summary

Book 1, Chapter 1: Across a rainy square, Bendrix sees Henry Miles, and he invites him for a drink at a bar, even though he says he hates Henry and once hated his wife as well. He inquires politely about Henry’s wife Sarah, and hopes to hear she is ill, as he still harbors some bitterness about how their affair had ended more than a year earlier, in June 1944.

Bendrix recalls he had met Sarah through his interest in Henry himself: Bendrix was writing a novel with a civil servant main character, and he was researching the life of a civil servant. At first, he merely asked Sarah about Henry, who was Minister of Pensions at the time, but then he and Sarah developed an interest in each other. Bendrix says that Sarah felt enormously loyal to her husband, and this made him resent Henry...