A Severed Head

I looked at her harsh and melancholy profile. I said, 'I don't imagine that you ever let people off, do you, Dr Klein?'

She turned towards me and suddenly smiled, revealing strong white teeth, her eyes narrowing further to two black luminous slits. She said, 'With me people pay as they earn. You have been patient. Good morning, Mr Lynch-Gibbon.' She opened the door.

Ten

'Now you're in a fix, aren't you, you old double-dealer?' said Georgie.

I could have wept with relief. I loved her so much at that moment that I nearly knelt down then and there and proposed. I kissed her hands humbly. 'Yes, I am in a fix,' I said, 'but you'll be kind to me, won't you? You'll let me off?'

'I love you, Martin,' said Georgie. 'You never seem to get this simple point into your old head.'

'And you don't mind if we keep our thing secret still? I just can't cope otherwise, my darling.'

'I don't understand why,' said Georgie. 'But if you want to. For myself, I'd like to publish our liaison in The Times!'

'It would hurt Antonia so if she knew,' I said. 'And the least I can do is make things easy for her. The way we've managed it all is really a remarkable achievement. Without bitterness, I mean. I don't want to add any more strains at present.'

'This «without bitterness» idea seems to me rather obscene,' said Georgie. 'And I suspect you of wanting to play the virtuous aggrieved husband so as to keep Palmer and Antonia in your power. But perhaps I underrate your goodness!'

'In my power!' I said. 'I'm in their power, it seems. No, it's all much simpler. I just want to finish the thing off perfectly without any more complications. If Antonia knew, she'd want long intimate talks about it. She'd want to understand. And I couldn't bear that. Don't you see, little imbecile?'

'You speak of «the thing» as if it were a work of art,' said Georgie. 'Sometimes I think you're a very odd fish, Martin. However, I do see, about the intimate talks. Promise you'll never have an intimate talk about me with Antonia?'

'I promise, my darling, I promise!'

'Anyhow, don't worry,' said Georgie. 'You don't have to do anything special, here I mean. It's only me.'

'Thank God it's only you,' I said, 'and thank God for you, Georgie. You save my sanity. I knew you would.'

'Well now stop looking so tall,' said Georgie. She stroked down the tip of her nose. The action and the words were beautifully familiar. I blessed her in my heart and sat down at her feet.

Georgie was sitting back in the shabby green armchair in her lodgings. A cold staring afternoon light revealed the room, the humpy half-made bed, the bowl of cigarette ends, the table strewn with opened letters and dirty glasses and half-eaten biscuits and books on economics. She was wearing very tight oatmeal-coloured trousers and a white shirt, and had her hair in a chaotic bun. Her face was pale, and in the creamy transparent pallor of her skin the rose of her cheek glowed faint and deep. A few golden freckles, revealed in the cold light, were scattered on the bridge of her uptilted nose, which she was still absently mauling. Her large blue-grey eyes, lucid with intelligence and honesty, held my gaze steadily. She was wearing no make-up. Yet even as I adored her, looking to see in those eyes which held nothing but good will, beyond the granular iris some more distant shapes of my destiny, I realized that I did not desire her.

I was intensely grateful to her. It now seemed absurd to imagine that, being herself, she could have reacted otherwise, less humanely, with less sheer sense and kindness. I must have been in some irrational state of fear to have been so nervous about Georgie's reactions. I had feared some persecution of her love, the exaction now of pledges half given. But she was all gentleness and filled with so genuine a concern to save me here and now from distress and anxiety; and as I thanked her from my heart I reflected a little guiltily that after all there was nothing very much that Georgie could do to me. Her power was limited. Here at least I was free.

'Because of something craven and disloyal in these thoughts, and because of a strange sense of guilt because I did not at that moment desire her, I wished to do after all something significant which would please her. I said suddenly, 'Georgie, I want to take you to Hereford Square.'

Georgie sat up straight and put her hands on my shoulders. She studied me, grave and intent. 'Surely that is not wise.'

'If you're thinking of Antonia, she's gone to the country with Palmer. There's not the slightest chance of her turning up.'

'It's not exactly that,' said Georgie. 'Do you really want to see me there, so soon?'

We looked at each other, trying to guess at thoughts.

Georgie added, 'Don't misunderstand me, Martin.' She meant that her words held no implied expectation of ever living at Hereford Square.

'I don't misunderstand you,' I said. 'You mean it may upset me to see you there. On the contrary. It will be good and liberating and somehow natural. It will break down some of the doubleness.'

'You don't think you will just feel resentment?' said Georgie. 'I can see that all this has made you fall in love again with Antonia.'

'You're a clever girl,' I said. 'But no, no resentment. I want to give you something, Georgie. I want to give you that.'

'You want to do something hostile to Antonia.'

'No, no, no!' I said. 'I'm not in that sort of emotional state about Antonia. I just want to break an obsession. I want you to know that Hereford Square really exists.' Georgie had never questioned me about my home, and I knew how carefully she had averted her thoughts from all my life away from her.

'Yes,' said Georgie softly. She stroked my nose now. 'I do want to know that it exists. But not yet, Martin. I'm frightened. You will see me there as an intruder. As for breaking down the doubleness, we can't really do that until we stop telling lies.'

I didn't want this argument. I said, 'It will symbolize breaking down the doubleness. I want to see you there, Georgie. It will do something very important for me to see you there.'

'It's odd,' said Georgie. 'I'm not usually superstitious. But I feel that something disastrous will happen if we go to Hereford Square.'

'You make me all the more determined to take you, primitive child,' I said. 'I tell you, it will help me. I need air, Georgie. I need to recover a sense of freedom. Seeing you there will open up a new world.' Even as I spoke I realized more fully that what I had thought of as a somewhat bizarre treat for Georgie was in fact, as she had immediately seen, a move of great importance: not something I would give her, but something she would do for me, would do to me; and I conjectured, with a thrill both of joy and of fear, that what I had just said might indeed prove true.

The drawing-room seemed mysteriously untouched since the evening of Antonia's declaration, as if a drowsy spell had been put on it at that moment. The Christmas decorations and the cards were still there, covered now with the dust which, since the departure of the daily help whom, contrary to Antonia's wishes, I had turned away, had rained down quietly, a grey sleeping-powder, to dull the glow everywhere. I noticed that the silver was tarnished. Outside the French windows, in the yellowish overcast afternoon, the great magnolia grandiflora which occupied most of the small garden drooped, its leaves still pinched and edged by last night's frost. The room felt damp and very cold, and we kept our coats on. My copy of Napier was still on the sofa.

Georgie came in slowly. I could see in her the counterpart of my own emotion. She stared at me, her lips parted, frowning, as if to see whether the power of the room had given me a different face. Then she looked very carefully around, nodding her head as she did so, seeming to count the objects. I was absorbed in watching her, and in the spreading throughout my whole being of the extraordinary experience of seeing her there. I had spoken of 'breaking down the doubleness'. With what a rush it was being broken down, and what a vista of open spaces, I felt in those instants, were not now being opened to my astounded gaze. My instinct in bringing Georgie here, and at once, had been a sound one: and what I most apprehended, in the mixture of feelings that possessed me, was the very possibility of loving Georgie more, of loving her better.

I felt this: but felt it in the midst of a considerable and more immediate pain at seeing, in the circumstances of a sort of treachery, the well-loved room again. To lose somebody is to lose not only their person but all those modes and manifestations into which their person has flowed outwards; so that in losing a beloved one may find so many things, pictures, poems, melodies, places lost too: Dante, Avignon, a song of Shakespeare's, the Cornish sea. The room was Antonia. It breathed the rich emphasis of her personality. The rose smell was there, barely perceptible, waiting in vain to be warmed to a full fragrance by the blaze of a wood fire. All these things were her, the silky rugs, the plump cushions, especially the mantelpiece, her little shrine; the Meissen cockatoos, the Italian silver cup, the Waterford glass, the snuff-box, which I had given her when we were engaged, with the legend: Friendship without Interest and Love without Deceit. It was a new and fierce pain to look on all this and see it as something mortal, indeed as something already perished, disintegrated, meaningless, and waiting to be taken away. Tomorrow Antonia and I would be dividing up these objects as so mush dreary loot, to be stored away in cupboards like guilty secrets or desecrated by the labels of the auctioneer. I touched the Waterford glass with my finger: and in its ring I heard the echo of a voice saying You do not really want your wife back after all. I answered the voice in my heart: a bond of this kind is deeper and stronger than wanting or not wanting. Wherever I am in the world and whenever I am I shall always be Antonia.