She turned abruptly towards me and the hem of her coat fell across my hand on the gear lever. Before she had time to reply a large lorry suddenly appeared a foot away on my right. I must have wandered over the centre of the road. I braked violently and swerved and must have shaved the lorry by an inch. I said 'Sorry.' She turned back, gathering her coat about her legs. The apology might have covered either thing.
I turned southward down what I took to be Shaftesbury Avenue. The windscreen was becoming opaque and frosted; I Wound down the window on my side and the cold choking air came in. My nose was beginning to drop moisture. I said to her, 'Would you mind opening your window and keeping a look-out on that side?' She opened the window in silence and we proceeded thus for a while with our heads hanging out on opposite sides. Honor Klein's body sagged and jolted beside me like a headless sack, and I could feel again the rough material of her coat grazing my hand. Great orange flares at Hyde Park Corner showed us the way into Knightsbridge, and by their light I stole a glance at my companion. I saw only her hunched shoulders; and then, revealed momentarily, the back of her leg, turned and braced, a stout crepe-soled shoe, and the plump curve of her calf clad in a thick brown and white knitted stocking traversed by a dark seam. I returned my attention to the road. That curving seam reminded me just for an instant that she was a woman.
By the time we reached Pelham Crescent the fog had lifted a little. I opened Palmer's big close-fitting hall door, which is always unlocked, and ushered Dr Klein inside. I felt a bond with her now because of our ordeal. The hall was warm and deeply carpeted and after the vapours outside it smelt sweet, a smell of polished wood and new textiles. Breathing was suddenly a luxury. I paused while she took off her coat, and saw above her head the huge tasselled Samurai sword which Palmer had inconsequently suspended above a little rosewood chiffonier which Antonia and I had once greatly coveted.
I wondered if Palmer and Antonia were indeed here, since we were much earlier than the time I had predicted. I said in a friendly manner, 'Would you like to go upstairs first? I'll go and see if Palmer and Antonia are in the drawing-room. Of course you know your way about.'
Dr Klein gave me her unsmiling stare. She said, 'You are very hospitable, Mr Lynch-Gibbon, but I have been in this house before.' She marched past me and threw open the drawing-room door.
The drawing-room was full of golden firelight and there was a strong resinous smell of burning logs. The black-shaded lamps had been extinguished and the dark furry wallpaper glowed reddish and soft in the moving light. I saw at once and painfully that Palmer and Antonia were indeed not expecting us. They were sitting side by side in two upright chairs by the fire. Palmer had his arm round my wife and their faces, turned tenderly full towards each other were seen clearly in profile, each outlined with a pencil of gold. They seemed in that momentary vision of them like deities upon an Indian frieze, enthroned, inhumanly beautiful, a pair of sovereigns, distant and serene. They turned towards us, startled but not yet risen, still gracious in their arrested communion. I came up beside Honor Klein.
Something strange happened in that instant. As I turned to look at her she seemed transfigured. Divested of her shapeless coat she seemed taller and more dignified. But it was her expression that struck me. She stood there in the doorway, her gaze fixed upon the golden pair by the fire, her head thrown back, her face exceedingly pale; and she appeared to me for a second like some insolent and powerful captain, returning booted and spurred from a field of triumph, the dust of battle yet upon him, confronting the sovereign powers whom he was now ready if need be to bend to his will.
The impression was momentary. Antonia leapt up and came forward with cries of welcome. Palmer began hastily turning on the lamps. Honor Klein gave her attention to Antonia, answering her questions about the journey and about the fog in a slow way which seemed at last, in its very laboriousness a little Germanic.
Nine
I had an infernal headache. I had left them early, declining a pressing invitation to dinner, and then had stayed up half the night drinking whisky, and I still felt, as I prepared to leave the office, rather sick and giddy. Last night, strangely enough, I had not felt too dejected; but this, I reasoned out, was because of a particular illusion which had been fostered by the whisky, an illusion to the effect that I was shortly going to do something remarkable which would miraculously alter the situation. It was unclear what this remarkable action would be; but as the night proceeded I more and more sensed its magnificent veiled presence. I had not, it seemed, after all been cheated of my moment of power.
Today, however, I could see only too clearly the emptiness of this dream which was but the hollow correlate of my role of total victim. There was nothing I could do; nothing, that is, except act out with dignity my appointed task of being rational and charitable: a task whose charms, never many, were likely to diminish as my charitableness and rationality came to be, by all concerned, increasingly taken for granted. More precisely, there was nothing to be done in the near future except to make sensible arrangements with Antonia about the furniture, write a number of letters about the Lowndes Square flat, and see my solicitor about the divorce proceedings: that, and see Georgie.
I was sorry that I had made myself so drunk last night, not only because of the hideous depression of the hangover, but because I felt it would make me stupid in dealing with Georgie. I still had mixed feelings about seeing her, and indeed my opposite wishes had both increased in intensity. On the one hand I felt more than ever absorbed into the idea of Antonia. I wanted to think about her all the time, although this activity was entirely painful. In an obsessed way, what I most desired was to be talking over 'the situation' with Antonia and Palmer, and if either of them had had the time to indulge me that is what I would have been continually doing. On the other hand, the image of Georgie, moved by some pure power of its own, was active within me, and made in my tormented thoughts a cool and even authoritative place for itself. Thither I did feel drawn. Georgie's robust cheerfulness, her good sense, her lucid toughness were perhaps just what I required to pull me out of the region of fantasy which I was increasingly inhabiting and return me to the real world. Yet could I, as things were, rely on Georgie to be cheerful and lucid? What demands might she not now, especially finding me in this weakened state, make upon me? I unutterably wanted some simplicity of consolation. But Georgie too was a person capable of being in torment.
I locked up my desk and put into my brief-case the list of clients whom I had promised to visit in January and the draft of my chapter on the tactics of Gustavus Adolphus at the battle of Leuthen. I had made arrangements so as not to have to come to the office again for a little while. The clients would receive a note to the effect that Mr Mytten, my young assistant, would visit them instead, as I was indisposed. Mytten was at present still in Bordeaux, where it was dangerous to send him since he prolonged his visits so unconscionably, conducting some negotiations with a small house with which we had newly begun to do some business. Mytten was a Roman Catholic, a sybarite and an ass, but he was loyal and a decent judge of wine, and went down splendidly with my more snobbish clientele. I could trust him with the visiting, though not of course with the tasting, and I noted that my next essential engagement was to taste hock, of which we still handled a little, on 30 January. Of course I always politely consulted Mytten and very occasionally listened to his advice on what to buy, but a director of a small wine firm tends to become an omnipotent and jealous deity, and it was on my palate alone that the firm of Lynch-Gibbon depended; and as I had no paternal feelings towards Mytten and did not believe that I could train him to be a second me, the little firm would doubtless perish with me, and the particular piece of reality represented by the discerning taste which my father had so carefully trained and fostered in his son would vanish away for ever.