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The love affair between Sarah Miles and Maurice Bendrix began ordinarily enough. He was a coldblooded, middling English novelist, she the warm-blooded wife of a dull, preoccupied, middling civil servant. Thanks to husband Henry's preoccupations, the Miles marriage had come to a physical standstill. When Sarah met Bendrix at a London cocktail party, she thought him, by contrast to her husband, excitingly alive. The third time they met, they went to bed in a cheap hotel. Bendrix, who was writing a novel in which a civil servant figured, had merely intended to quiz Sarah for some facts about her husband's habits. Before he knew it, he was in love with her—insofar as he was capable of love. For him the affair became a sexual obsession, a jealous appetite. For Sarah, a simple, faithless woman, it was honest love, marred by Bendrix' jealous rages. Both of them tried to think of Henry Miles as merely a tiresome inconvenience who sometimes upset their lovers' schedule.
The year was 1944. It was during a bombing raid on London that Sarah Miles first called on God. A near hit blasted the house of their assignation, and after the explosion Sarah found Bendrix' body pinned under the blown-in door. She was sure he was dead (and perhaps he was). She went back to her room, fell on her knees and prayed that he might live. If God would answer her prayer, she promised, she would give him up forever. Before she had risen from her knees, Bendrix, only stunned, walked in. At the sight of him, Sarah realized the meaning of the hard bargain God had driven with her: "I thought now the agony of being without him starts, and I wished he was safely back dead again under the door."
Like the gentleman she fundamentally was, Sarah kept her promise, and with no explanations to anybody. Bendrix could only believe that she was tired of him, and had taken another lover. He began to hate her and torture himself with jealous fantasies. When her husband became suspicious of her odd behavior, and ironically turned to Bendrix for help, it was Bendrix who hired a detective to watch her. But Sarah was beyond the scope of detectives. Starting from her hysterical bargain with God, she had gone on through the loneliness of suffering, through the conviction that she was a "bitch and a fake," to find that she not only believed in God but loved Him—even more than she loved her lover. "I believe there's a God—I believe the whole bag of tricks; there's nothing I don't believe, they could subdivide the Trinity into a dozen parts and I'd believe. They could dig up records that proved Christ had been invented by Pilate to get himself promoted and I'd believe just the same. I've caught belief like a disease. I've fallen into belief like I fell in love."
When she took a fever and died, it became plain to Bendrix from her diary (which he stole) that a rival had ousted him. All Bendrix would admit was that he had at last found who his rival was—and transferred his hatred from an unknown man to an unknown God.