Luncheon at Rules

How could we end it -- in person -- anywhere else
Than at Rules? Haunted by Betjeman himself:
Nestled off Covent Garden,
Opened the year Wordsworth penned Lyrical Ballads;
Every Georgian brick weathered with the Romantic.

You suggested it, of course.
We’d always felt, since it began,
That our lives had become a novel;
The novel, it turned out, that you happened to find
In a sandstone second hand bookshop
That drizzle-December day in Chipping Norton
After you’d Mr Hyde-ed on me, as you too often did.
The writer of ours, I knew,
Was planning as symbolic an ending
As any of Graham Greene’s tomes.

The moment you arrived,
Your nose bled
As if to match those garish, time-warp-coloured chairs
And the time-warp waiters couldn’t bring you
Enough napkins to hide it all.

It was time for Sarah to marry the man she didn’t love
But to see Bendrix, the man she did, that final time:
The guilt, the dissonance, the pressure;
That sense of being torn apart,
Between chubby, reliable, but unfamiliar,
The doting pug who knows no evil,
And your own Paradise-Inferno
Embodied in another who alone
Flashes upon that inward eye.

It was time for Bendrix to let Sarah die,
As she did in The End of the Affair;
To pretend, like Greene, that she wasn’t quite real,
To tell himself that they were too similar.
If she destroyed her Henry Miles,
He couldn’t afford to care;
Duty and habit and history books
Called him home, like warm-hearted
But monotonous whines.