A Severed Head

A SEVERED HEAD

1961

One

'You're sure she doesn't know,' said Georgie.

'Antonia? About us? Certain.'

Georgie was silent for a moment and then said, 'Good.' That curt 'Good' was characteristic of her, typical of a toughness which had, to my mind, more to do with honesty than with ruthlessness. I liked the dry way in which she accepted our relationship. Only with a person so eminently sensible could I have deceived my wife.

We lay half embraced in front of Georgie's gas fire. She reclined against my shoulder while I examined a tress of her dark hair, surprised again to find in it so many threads of a pure reddish gold. Her hair was as straight as a horse's tail, almost as coarse, and very long. Georgie's room was obscure now except for the light of the fire and a trio of red candles burning upon the mantelpiece. The candles, together with a few scraggy bits of holly dotted about at random, were as near as Georgie, whose 'effects' were always a little ramshackle, could get to Christmas decorations, yet the room had a glitter all the same as of some half descried treasure cavern. In front of the candles, as at an altar, stood one of my presents to her, a pair of Chinese incense holders in the form of little bronze warriors, who held aloft as spears the glowing sticks of incense. Their grey fumes drifted hazily to and fro until sent by the warmth of the candle flames to circle suddenly dervish-like upward to the darkness above. The room was heavy with a stifling smell of Kashmir poppy and sandalwood. Bright wrapping-paper from our exchange of presents lay all about, and pushed into a corner was the table which still bore the remains of our meal and the empty bottle of Chateau Sancy de Parabere 1955. I had been with Georgie since lunchtime. Outside the window and curtained away was the end of the cold raw misty London afternoon now turned to an evening which still contained in a kind of faintly luminous haze what had never, even at midday, really been daylight.

Georgie sighed and rolled over with her head in my lap. She was dressed now except for her shoes and stockings. 'When must you go?'

'About five.'

'Don't let me catch you being mean with time.'

Such remarks were as near as I ever got to feeling the sharper edge of her love. I could not have wished for a more tactful mistress.

'Antonia's session ends at five,' I said. 'I should be back at Hereford Square soon after that. She always wants to discuss it. And we have a dinner engagement.' I lifted Georgie's head a little and drew her hair forward, spreading it over her breasts. Rodin would have liked that.

'How is Antonia's analysis going?'

'Fizzingly. She enjoys it disgracefully. Of course, it's all for fun anyhow. She's got a tremendous transference.'

'Palmer Anderson,' said George, naming Antonia's psychoanalyst, who was also a close friend of Antonia and myself. 'Yes, I can imagine becoming addicted to him. He has a clever face. I imagine he's good at his trade.'

'I don't know,' I said. 'I dislike what you call his trade. But he's certainly good at something. Perhaps he's just good. He's not simply sweet and polite and gentle as only Americans can be sweet and polite and gentle, though he is that. He has real power in him.'

'You sound rather carried away by him yourself!» said Georgie. She edged into a more comfortable position, her head in the crook of my knee.

'Perhaps I am,' I said. 'Knowing him has made a lot of difference to me.'

'In what way?'

'I can't say exactly. Perhaps he has made me worry less about the rules!'

'The rules!' Georgie laughed. 'Darling, surely you became indifferent to the rules long ago.'

'Good heavens, no!' I said. 'I'm not indifferent to them now. I'm not a Child of Nature like you. No, it's not exactly that. But Palmer is good at setting people free.'

'If you think I don't worry – but never mind. As for setting people free, I don't trust these professional liberators. Anyone who is good at setting people free is also good at enslaving them, if we are to believe Plato. The trouble with you, Martin, is that you are always looking for a master.'

I laughed. 'Now that I have a mistress I don't want a master! But how did you come across Palmer? Oh, of course, through the sister.'

'The sister,' said Georgie. 'Yes, the curious Honor Klein. I saw him at a party she gave for her pupils once. But she didn't introduce him.'

'Is she any good?'

'Honor? You mean as an anthropologist? She's quite well thought of in Cambridge. She never actually taught me, of course. Anyway, she was usually away visiting one of her savage tribes. She was supposed to organize and help me with my moral problems. God!'

'She's Palmer's half-sister, isn't she? How does it work? They seem to be several nationalities between them.'

'I think this is it,' said Georgie. 'They share a Scottish mother who married Anderson first and then Klein when Anderson died.'

'I know about Anderson. He was Danish-American, an architect or something. But what about the other father?'

'Emmanuel Klein. You ought to know about him. He was not a bad classical scholar. A German Jew, of course.'

'I knew he was a learned something-or-other,' I said. 'Palmer spoke of him once or twice. Interesting. He said he still had nightmares about his step-father. I suspect he's a bit frightened of his sister too, though he never actually says so.'

'She could inspire awe,' said Georgie. 'There's something primitive about her. Perhaps it's all those tribes. But you've met her, haven't you?'

'I have just met her,' I said, 'though I can't recall much about her. She just seemed the Female Don in person. Why do those women have to look like that?'

'Those women!' Georgie laughed. 'I'm one of them now, darling! Anyway, she certainly has power in her.'

'You have power without looking like a haystack!'

'Me?' said Georgie. 'I'm not in that class. I don't carry half so many guns.'

'You said I was carried away by the brother. You seem to be carried away by the sister.'

'Oh, I don't like her,' said Georgie. 'That's another matter.'

She sat up abruptly and retrieved her hair and began very rapidly to plait it. She tossed the heavy plait back over her shoulder. Then she hitched up her skirt and some layers of stiff white petticoat and began to draw on a pair of peacock-blue stockings which I had given her. I loved to give Georgie outrageous things, absurd garments and gewgaws which I could not possibly have given Antonia, barbarous necklaces and velvet pants and purple underwear and black openwork tights, which drove me mad. I rose now and wandered about the room, watching her possessively as with a tense demure consciousness of my gaze she adjusted the lurid stockings.

Georgie's room, a large untidy bed-sitting-room which looked out on to what was virtually an alleyway in the proximity of Covent Garden, was full of things which I had given her. I had for long, and vainly, waged a battle with Georgie's relentless lack of taste. The numerous Italian prints, French paperweights, pieces of Derby, Worcester, Coleport, Spode, Copeland, and other bric-a-brac – for I hardly ever arrived without bringing something – lay about, for all my efforts, in a dusty hurly-burly more reminiscent of a junk shop than a civilized room. Georgie was, somehow, not designed by nature to possess things. Whereas when Antonia or I bought anything, which we constantly did, it found its place at once in the rich and highly integrated mosaic of our surroundings, Georgie seemed to have no such carapace. There was no one of her possessions which she would not, at the drop of a hat, have given away and not missed; and meanwhile her things lay about in a sort of impermanent jumble on which my continually renewed sortings and orderings seemed to have little effect. This characteristic of my beloved exasperated me, but since it was also a part, after all, of Georgie's remarkable detachment and lack of worldly pretension, I admired it and loved it as well. It was, moreover, as I sometimes reflected, the very image and symbol of my relation to Georgie, my mode of possessing her, or more precisely the way in which I, as it were, failed to possess her. I possessed Antonia in a way not totally unlike the way in which I possessed the magnificent set of original prints by Audubon which adorned our staircase at home. I did not possess Georgie. Georgie was simply there.

When Georgie had finished with her stockings, she leaned back against the armchair and looked up at me. She had, with her dark heavy hair, rather light clear greyish-blue eyes. Her face was broad, strong rather than delicate, but her remarkably pale complexion had a finish of ivory. Her large somewhat upturned nose, her despair and my joy, which she was always contracting and stroking in a vain attempt to make it aquiline, now forgotten in repose, gave to her expression a certain attentive animal quality which softened the edge of her cleverness. Now in the incense-laden half-light, her face was full of curves and shadows. For some time we held each other's gaze. This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart, was something which I had not experienced with any other woman. Antonia and I had never looked at each other like that. Antonia would not have sustained such a steady gaze for so long: warm, possessive, and coquettish, she would not so have exposed herself.

Two

In almost every marriage there is a selfish and an unselfish partner. A pattern is set up and soon becomes inflexible, of one person always making the demands and one person always giving way. In my own marriage I early established myself as the one who took rather than gave. Like Dr Johnson, I started promptly upon the way in which I intended to go on. I was the more zealous in doing so in that I was counted by the world, and counted myself, very lucky to have got Antonia.

I had, of course, misled Georgie about the success of my marriage. What married man who keeps a mistress does not so mislead her? My marriage with Antonia, apart from the fad. which was a continuing grief to me, that it was childless, was perfectly happy and successful. It was just that I wanted Georgie as well and did not see why I should not have her. Although, as 1 had remarked, I was not indifferent to the 'rules', I was certainly capable of being cool and rational about adultery. I had married Antonia in a church, but that was largely for social reasons; and I did not think that the marriage bond, though solemn, was uniquely sacred. It may be relevant here to add that I hold no religious beliefs whatever. Roughly, I cannot imagine any omnipotent sentient being sufficiently cruel to create the world we inhabit.

I seem to have started here upon some general explanation of myself, and it may be as well to continue this before I plunge into a narrative of events which may, once under way, offer few opportunities for meditation. My name, as you will have gathered, is Martin Lynch-Gibbon, and I come on my father's side of an Anglo-Irish family. My clever artistic mother was Welsh. I have never lived in Ireland, though I retain a sentimental sense of connexion with that poor bitch of a country. My brother Alexander is forty-five, and my sister Rosemary is thirty-seven: my age is forty-one, and I feel myself at times, after a manner which is not without its curious melancholy charms, to be an old man.

To describe one's character is difficult and not necessarily illuminating. The story which follows will reveal, whether I will or no, what sort of person I am. Let me offer here only a few elementary facts. I grew up into the war, during which I spent on the whole a safe and inactive time. I suffer intermittenly from a complex of disorders of which asthma and hay fever are the best known, though not the most disagreeable, and I never succeeded in passing as completely fit. I went on to Oxford when the war was over, and so began my life as an ordinary citizen at a comparatively advanced age. I am a very tall, reasonably good-looking man. I used to be a good boxer, and passed when I was younger as a raffish quarrelsome violent fellow. This reputation was precious to me: equally precious is the reputation which I have more lately gained of having become morose, something of a recluse, something indeed of a philosopher and cynic, one who expects little and watches the world go by. Antonia accuses me of being flippant; but Georgie once pleased me more by saying that I had the face of someone laughing at something tragic. My face, I might add, is the long pale rather heavy old-fashioned face that all the Lynch-Gibbons have, which is a cross between the philosopher Hume and the actor Garrick, and my hair is the brown floppy hair which fades with age to the colour of white pepper. Our family, thank God, never becomes bald.

I took a decisive step when I married Antonia. I was then thirty, and she was thirty-five. She looks now, for all her beauty, a little older than her years, and has more than once been taken for my mother. My real mother, who among other things was a painter, died when I was sixteen, but at the time of my marriage my father was still alive and I had hitherto been but casually involved in the wine trade. I was more concerned, though that also in a dilettante fashion, with being a military historian, a type of study in which, if I could have brought myself to abandon my amateur status, I might have excelled. When I married Antonia, however, everything came, for some time, to a standstill. As I say, I was fortunate to get her. Antonia had been, and indeed still was, a somewhat eccentric society beauty. Her father was a distinguished regular soldier, and her mother, who came out of the Bloomsbury world, was something of a minor poet and a remote relation of Virginia Woolf. For some reason Antonia never got a sensible education, though she lived abroad a great deal and speaks three languages fluently; and also, for some reason, and although much courted, she did not marry young. She moved in a fashionable society, more fashionable than that which I frequented, and became, through her protracted refusal to marry, one of its scandals. Her marriage to me, when it came, was a sensation.

I was not sure at the time, and am still not sure, whether I was precisely what Antonia wanted, or whether she didn't take me simply because she felt it was time to take somebody. However that may be, we were formidably happy; and for quite a long time, handsome clever couple that we were, we were everyone's darlings. So for a while everything was for me at a standstill and I was absorbed completely into the delightful task of being Antonia's husband. When I as it were came round, emerged, that is, from the warm golden haze of those honeymoon years, I found that certain roads were closed to me. My father had died meanwhile, and I settled down to being a wine-merchant, still and even here feeling myself something of an amateur and none the worse for that; and although my conception of myself had somewhat altered, I did not stop feeling happy. After all, as Antonia's husband I could not be other than happy.

Let me now attempt to describe Antonia. She is a woman long accustomed to admiration, long accustomed to think of herself as beautiful. She has long goldenish hair – I prefer women with long hair – which she wears usually in an old-fashioned knot or bun, and indeed 'golden' is the best general epithet for her appearance. She is like some rich gilded object over which time has cast the moonlit pallor of a gentle veneer; or in a more effective simile one might compare her to the water-haunted sunlight on an old pavement in Venice, for there is always something a little fluid and shivering, a little mobile and tremulous about Antonia. She has, especially of late, aged, her face taking on that look which is sometimes described as 'ravaged' and which I notice is usually applied when, as in this case, there is a slight drooping and discomposing of essentially fine features. To my mind such a look can be, and is in the case of Antonia, exceedingly moving and attractive, composing a dignity which was not to be found in the same face when younger. Antonia has great tawny-coloured intelligent searching eyes and a mobile expressive mouth which is usually twisted into some pout of amusement or tender interest. She is a tall woman, and although always a little inclined to plumpness has been called 'willowy', which I take as a reference to her characteristic twisted and unsymmetrical poses. Her face and body are never to be discovered quite in repose.

Antonia has a sharp appetite for personal relations. She is an intense and passionate woman and has passed for this reason for being humourless, though this latter charge in fact is false. Antonia, like me, has no religion; but she achieves what might be called religiosity in relation to certain beliefs. She holds that all human beings should aspire towards, and are within working distance of, a perfect communion of souls. This creed, which borrows as little from popular Oriental cults as it does from Antonia's vestigial Christianity, may best be described as a metaphysic of the drawing-room. In the form in which Antonia holds it, it is original to her, although I can discern its statelier predecessor in Antonia's now frail but resolutely exquisite mother with whom I have maintained a tenuous but gallant relationship. Antonia's undogmatic apprehension of an imminent spiritual interlocking where nothing is withheld and nothing hidden certainly makes up in zeal for what it lacks in clarity. The mere presence of such a belief in a woman, particularly in a beautiful woman, tends of course to create a rich centripetal eddy of emotion round about her, thereby providing itself with an immediate pragmatic verification; and in the early days particularly people were always falling in love with Antonia and wanting to tell her all their troubles. I had no objection to this, as it eased some of my anxieties about her welfare by making her happier than if she had had no soul to commune with but my own.

Of late she had been much taken up with Palmer Anderson, 'Anderson' as she always called him, since she had a mystique about persons whose names, like her own, began with A. This mystique had been active also in relation to my brother Alexander, between whom and my wife there existed a very considerable, almost sentimental, tenderness, though this had been less evident of late since Anderson had become all the rage. I cannot think of anyone less in need of psycho-analysis than Antonia, and I think she went into analysis with Palmer at least partly with the idea of operating on him. I once said sarcastically that I didn't see why I should pay out so many guineas per week so that Antonia should question Palmer about his childhood, and she laughed merrily and did not deny the insinuation. Also, of course, psycho-analysis was for her a 'craze' like earlier ones that she had had for learning contract bridge, learning Russian, learning to sculpt (with Alexander), doing social work, (with Rosemary), and studying Italian Renaissance history (with me). I should add that whatever Antonia took up she proved surprisingly good at, and I had no doubt that she and Palmer were getting on famously.

A word about Palmer is necessary; and this I find difficult. The pages that follow will show how and why my feelings on the subject of Palmer are mixed ones. I shall only try now to describe him as I saw him at the start, before I knew certain crucial facts about him, and when I was still more than a little 'carried away'. Palmer strikes one immediately as an American, though he is in fact only half American and grew up in Europe. He has that tall lanky, 'rangy' loose-jointed graceful close-cropped formidably clean American look. He has silver-grey hair which grows soft, furry, and inch-long all over his very round rather smallish head, and a smooth face which looks uncannily younger than his years. It is hard to believe he is over fifty. He dresses in the American style with belts instead of braces and so on, and affects many foppish and casual rig-outs, involving bright silk handkerchiefs instead of ties. I can never indeed see a gay clean silk handkerchief without thinking of Palmer; there is something about this object which is singularly reminiscent of him. Palmer conveys an immediate impression of gentleness and sweetness and almost, so far have good manners here assumed the air of a major virtue, of goodness. He is also a beautifully cultivated person. It was I, not Antonia, who 'discovered' Palmer, and for a long time, before she took him over, I saw a good deal of him. We used to read Dante together; and his relaxed gaiety, his unshadowed enjoyment of his pleasures, eased and complemented, though without dispelling, my affection of a resigned melancholy. Palmer appeared, in my generously admiring vision of him, as a complete and successful human being. He had come to analysis fairly late, after practising for some time, both in America and in Japan, as an ordinary doctor, and he had achieved a considerable reputation as that fashionable kind of modern magician. He spent half the week in Cambridge, where he lodged with his sister and lent his ear to neurotic undergraduates, and the other half in London, where he seemed to have a formidable number of well-known patients. He worked hard; and as I saw him, he was and deserved to be a being of an exceptional felicity.

I had known Palmer, when this story starts, for nearly four years. I had known Georgie Hands for three years, and she had been my mistress for eighteen months. Georgie, who is now twenty-six, had been an undergraduate at Cambridge, where she had taken a degree in economics. She had then become a graduate student, and more lately a junior lecturer, at the London School of Economics. I had met her, in her early days in London, when I had visited the School once to give a lecture on Machiavelli's account of the campaigns of Cesare Borgia to a student society, and we had met subsequently a few times, had lunch together, and even exchanged some friendly consoling kisses, without anything remarkable occurring in the heart of either. I had never hitherto deceived my wife, and imagined that I had no possible intention of doing so; and it was pure accident that I never introduced Georgie to Antonia in those early and innocent days. Georgie was living then in a hostel for women students, a dreary place which I never attempted to visit. Then she moved into her little flat; and I promptly fell in love with her. It may sound ludicrous, but I think I fell in love with her as soon as I saw her bed.

I did not fall desperately in love with Georgie; I considered myself by then too old for the desperation and extremity which attends a youthful love. But I loved her with a sort of gaiety and insouciance which was more spring-like than real spring, a miraculous April without its pangs of transformation and birth. I loved her with a wild undignified joy, and also with a certain cheerful brutality, both of which were absent from my always more decorous, my essentially sweeter relationship with Antonia. I adored Georgie too for her dryness, her toughness, her independence, her lack of intensity, her wit, and altogether for her being such a contrast, such a complement, to the softer and more moist attractions, the more dewy radiance of my lovely wife. I needed both of them, and having both I possessed the world.

If the extent to which Antonia was inside society was important to me, the extent also mattered to which Georgie was outside it. That I could love such a person was a revelation and education to me and something of a triumph: it involved a rediscovery of myself. Georgie's lack of pretension was good for me. Whereas in different ways both Rosemary and Antonia were perpetually playing the role of being a woman, Georgie played no role: and this was new to me. She was herself, which just happened to involve, and nature had decreed superbly, being a woman. She was concerned neither with role nor with status, and it was with exhilaration that at times I positively apprehended her as an outcast.

This sense of being, with Georgie, 'on the run' had suffered a certain change after Georgie's pregnancy. Whereas our lawless existence before that had seemed gay and even innocent, it was after that connected with a certain pain which remained identifiable among all others, not extreme but persistent. We had lost our innocence, and some remaking of our relationship which was then due was continually deferred, as a result partly of my pusillanimity and partly of Georgie's taciturn endurance. I had at the time of the child made a number of extravagant remarks about wishing to join my lot more completely with hers. These remarks had had no sequel, but they remained between us as a text which must some day be revised, ratified, or at least explained. Meanwhile, it was important to me, even very important, that Antonia should think me virtuous; and, with that degree of self-deception which is essential to a prolonged and successful masquerade, I even felt virtuous.

Three

I was lying on the big sofa at Hereford Square reading Napier's History of the Peninsular War and wondering whether Georgie's incense was going to give me asthma. A bright fire of coal and wood was glowing and murmuring in the grate, and intermittent lamps lit with a soft gold the long room which, even in winter, by some magic of Antonia's, contrived to smell of roses. A large number of expensive Christmas cards were arrayed on the piano; while upon the walls dark evergreens, tied into various clever sprays and joined together by long dropping swags of red and silver ribbon, further proclaimed the season. Antonia's decorations combined a traditional gaiety with the restrained felicity which marked all her domestic arrangements.

I had just come back from Georgie's and was still alone. I had lied to Georgie about the time of Antonia's return – her session with Palmer was not due to end until six – so as to have an interval of quiet before the storm of excited chatter which would undoubtedly follow. Antonia always arrived back from Palmer's house in a state of restless elation. I had supposed, and one is often complacently led to believe by persons undergoing such treatment, that a psycho-analysis is a grim and humiliating affair; but in the case of my wife, analysis seemed to produce euphoria and even self-satisfaction. At peace with the world and with myself I breathed the quiet air, lying relaxed and warm in the bright multi-coloured shell which Antonia and I had created, where silk and silver and rosewood, dark mahogany and muted gilt blended sweetly together against a background of Bellini green. I sipped the frosted fragrant Martini which I had just prepared for both of us and thought myself, I dare say, the luckiest of men. Indeed at that moment I was happy with an idle thoughtless happiness which was never to come, with that particular quality of a degenerate innocence, ever in my life again.

I was just looking at my watch, wondering whether she was late, when Antonia appeared in the doorway. Usually when she entered she took possession of a room, gliding immediately to the centre of it, and even, with people she knew well, turning about as if to fill all the crannies and corners with her presence. But tonight, already so marked as unusual, she stayed at the door, as if afraid to enter, or as if conscious of her entrance as dramatic. There she stood wide-eyed, her hand upon the door handle, staring at me in a disconcerting way. I noticed too that she had not changed her clothes, but was still wearing the striped silk blouse and cinnamon-coloured skirt which she had had on in the morning. Normally Antonia put on different clothes three or four times in a day.

'You haven't changed, my love,' I said, sitting up. I was still in the slow old world. 'What is it? You look a bit bothered. Come and have your drink and tell me all about it.' I laid Napier aside.

Antonia came in now, moving in a slow deliberate heavy-footed way and keeping her eyes fixed on me. I wondered if she had seen something which I had missed in the evening papers, some account of a distant cataclysm, or of some accident to an acquaintance, either of which might be announced to me with a certain portentous interest. She sat down at the far end of the sofa, still watching me with a tense unsmiling look. I tinkled the long glass rod in the cocktail jug and poured her out a Martini. 'What is it, darling? Has there been an earthquake in China or have you been arrested for speeding?'

'Wait a minute,' said Antonia. Her voice sounded thick, almost as if she were drunk. She was taking slow deep breaths, like someone collecting his powers.

I said sharply, 'What's the matter, Antonia? Has something bad happened?'

'Yes,' said Antonia. 'Wait a minute. Sorry.'

She sipped her drink and then poured the rest of it into my glass. I realized that she was inarticulate with emotion.

'For God's sake, Antonia,' I said, beginning to be thoroughly alarmed. 'Whatever is it?'

'Sorry, Martin,' said Antonia. 'Sorry. Wait a minute. Sorry.'

She lit a cigarette. Then she said, 'Look, Martin, it's this. I've got to tell you now. And there's no way of breaking it gently. It's about me and Anderson.' She was looking away from me now and I could see the hand holding the cigarette trembling.

I was still slow. I said, 'You and Anderson what, angel?'

'Well, just that,' said Antonia, 'just that.' She threw the cigarette into the fire.

I stared at her and began to think and to read her face. Her manner more than her words frightened me a lot. I was so used to repose in the peace of her simple confident spirit. I had hardly ever seen my golden Antonia so shaken, and this in itself was dreadful. I said gently, 'Do I understand you? If you mean you're a bit in love with Palmer, I'm not surprised. I'm a bit in love with him myself.'

'Don't be flippant, Martin,' said Antonia. 'This is serious, it's fatal.' She turned towards me, but without taking my gaze.

I pushed back the shorter strands of golden hair from her big pale lined brow and drew my hand down her cheek to her mouth. She closed her eyes for a moment, remaining rigid. 'Well, do stop looking like that, dearest. You look as if you were going to be shot. Calm down and have your drink. Here, I'll pour you out another one. Now talk to me rationally, and don't frighten me out of my wits.'

'You see, it's not a matter of being a bit in love,' said Antonia, looking at me now with a glazed troubled stare. She spoke monotonously as if in her sleep, with an air of comatose desperation. 'It's a matter of being very desperately and deeply in love. Perhaps we ought to have told you sooner, only it was so improbable, such an extreme love. But now we're certain.'

'Aren't you both a bit old for this game?' I said. 'Come now!'

Antonia looked at me, her eyes hardened a little, and she became suddenly more present and conscious. Then she smiled sadly and gave a slight shake of the head.

This impressed me. But I said, 'Look, darling, need we be quite so serious about this?'

'Yes,' said Antonia. 'You see, I want a divorce.'

She had found the word difficult to utter. At the shock of it I stared at her, and bracing her body stiffly she stared back at me, trying to control her face. She lacked expressions for a scene of this austerity. I said, 'Don't be ridiculous, Antonia. Don't say wild things that you don't mean.'

'Martin,' said Antonia, 'please help me. I do mean it, and it will save us a lot of pain if you will understand me now, and see what things are like now. I know this must be a ghastly shock. But please try. It makes me utterly wretched to hurt you like this. Please help me by understanding. I am quite certain and quite determined. I would not have spoken to you if I were not.'

I looked at her. She would soon be in tears, her face stripped, strained like something exposed to a great wind; but there was, in her retention of control, a certain touching dignity. I could not yet believe her or believe that there was anything here which the customary pressure of my will could not sweep aside. I said quietly, 'You're in an over-excited state, my sweet. Has that wretch Palmer been giving you drugs, I wonder? You say you're in love with him. All right. That often happens in analysis. But let's not have any more nonsense about divorce. And now can we just abandon this topic for the present? I suggest you finish your drink and then go and dress for dinner.'

I tried to rise, but Antonia grasped my arm, lifting a pitiful yet violent face. 'No, no no' she said. 'I must say it all now. I can't tell you what this costs me. I want a divorce, Martin. I'm deeply in love. Just believe me, and then let me go away. I know it's absurd and I know it's dreadful, but I'm in love and I'm absolutely relentless. I'm sorry to surprise you and I'm sorry to speak like this, but I've got to make you understand what I mean.'

I sat down again. There was a desperate fierceness in her manner, but there was also fear, fear of my reactions. It was the fear which began to convince me and I felt the first light touch of a nightmarish terror. Yet this strange half-savage, half-terrified being was still my Antonia, my dear wife. I said, 'Well, well, if you're so much in love with your analyst perhaps you'd better go to bed with him! Only don't talk to me about divorce, for I simply won't hear of it!'

'Martin!' said Antonia in a shocked tone. Then she said, and her voice became monotonous again, 'I've already been to bed with him.'

My cheeks became hot with a sudden rush of blood as if I had been struck. My knee was against Antonia's. I captured Antonia's two hands which were still clawing at my sleeve, in a strong grip in my left hand. 'Since when? And how many times?'

She looked back at me, frightened but still firm. Antonia had her own soft frantic evasive way of getting what she wanted. I could feel her will upon me like a leech. She said, 'That doesn't matter. If you really want the details, I'll tell you later. Now I just want to tell you the main truth, to tell you that you've got to set me free. This thing has overwhelmed me, Martin. I've simply had to give in to it. Honestly, it's all or nothing.'

I crushed her wrists in my left hand. It may seem strange, but I was conscious of wondering and of deciding now how I ought to react, I was very conscious of her fear of a blow. I let go of her hands and said, 'Well, let me recommend nothing.'

Antonia relaxed and we drew a little apart. She gave a deep sigh and said, 'Oh, darling, darling —'

I said, 'If I broke your neck now I'd probably get off with three years.' I got up and leaned against the mantelpiece looking down at her. 'What have I done to deserve this?' I said.

Antonia smiled nervously. She patted her hair, her long fingers straying over the bun, pushing in hair-pins. She adjusted the neck of her blouse. She had a little the air of feeling that the worst was over. She said, 'I hate this, Martin. And I've been in torment. You've been so perfect. But I'm beyond thoughts about justification. I'm just desperate.'

'Yes, I have been perfect, haven't I?' I said. 'But still I don't accept what you say. We've been happy. I want to go on being happy.'

'Happy, yes,' said Antonia. 'But happiness is not the point. We aren't getting anywhere. You know that as well as I do.'

'One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance.'

'You must face the fact,' said Antonia, 'that you're a disappointed man.'

'I'm damned if I'm a disappointed man,' I said, 'and if I were it certainly wouldn't be your fault. What you mean is that you're a disappointed woman.'

'A marriage is an adventure in development,' said Antonia, «and ours is simply at a standstill. I was conscious of that even before I fell in love with Anderson. It's partly my being so much older and being a sort of mother to you. I've kept you from growing up. All this has got to be faced sooner or later.' She sipped her drink. She had stopped looking frightened.

'Spare me the clinical stuff, for Christ's sake,' I said, 'it makes me feel sick. Leave me because you want someone else, let's have honest lust, not pseudo-science. But in any case you aren't going. You can't make changes like this at your age. You're my wife and I love you and I want to go on being married to you, so you'd better resign yourself to having a husband and a lover.'

'No,' said Antonia. 'I've got to go, Martin, I've got to. C'est plus fort que moi.' She got up and stood there opposite to me, her stomach thrust out, tall, twisted into a pillar of determination. She added, 'I'm extremely grateful to you for being so rational about it.'

I stared at her beautiful haggard face, concentrated now in a look of boldness mixed with a sort of cringing pity. Her big mobile mouth was working as if she were masticating inwardly the tender things she might have said. I had a sense of miserable confusion and of things having utterly escaped my control. «I'm not being rational,' I said. 'I can hear what you say, Antonia. But your words make no more sense to me than if you were a mad woman. I think I'd better go and talk to Palmer. And if he says we must behave like civilized men I shall kick his teeth in.'

'He expects you, darling,' said Antonia.

'Antonia,' I said, 'let me out of this bad dream. Pull yourself together. This is what is real, our marriage.'

She simply went on shaking her head.

'Anyway, my darling, my Antonia, what would I ever do without you?'

The painful concentration of her face increased and then dissolved as she gave a cry and began suddenly to weep. She looked infinitely pathetic when she was in tears. I went to her and she bowed her head slowly on to my shoulder, not raising her hands to her face. The tears fell between us.

'I knew you'd be good about it,' she said in a moment. 'I'm so relieved to have told you. I've hated lying about it. And you know, you need never do without me.' And she repeated, 'Thank you, thank you,' as if I had already set her free.

I said, 'Well, I haven't broken your neck, have I?'

She said, 'My child, my dear child.'

Four

'So you don't hate me, do you, Martin?' said Palmer.

I was lying down on the divan in Palmer's study where his patients usually reclined. Indeed I was to all intents and purposes his patient. I was being coaxed along to accept an unpleasant truth in a civilized and rational way.

'No, I don't hate you,' I said.

'We are civilized people,' said Palmer. 'We must try to be very lucid and very honest. We are civilized and intelligent people.'

'Yes,' I said. I lay still and sipped the large cut-glass tumbler of whisky and water which Palmer had just replenished for me. He himself was not drinking. As he talked, he paced to and fro, tall and lean, with his hands behind his back, the purple dressing-gown which he wore loosely over his shirt and trousers making a gentle silky swish. He paced to and fro in front of the line of Japanese prints which decorated the far wall, and bandit faces leered from behind him. His small cropped head moved against the blurred soft blues and charcoal blacks of the prints. The air was warm and dry, agitated by a mysterious breeze from some invisible fan. I was sweating.

'Antonia and I have been very happy,' I said. 'I hope she has not misled you here. I still cannot take this in or accept it. Our marriage is an extremely solid structure.'

'Antonia could not mislead me if she tried,' said Palmer. 'Happiness, my dear Martin, is neither here nor there. Some people, and Antonia is one, conceive of their lives as a progress. Hers has been standing still for too long. She is due to move on.' He glanced at me occasionally as he paced, his slightly American voice soft and slow.

Five

I always think of Rembers as my mother's house, though my grandfather bought it originally and Alexander has had it altered considerably since father died. But somehow the house retains indelibly the mark of my mother's gentle fey rather vague personality, and it is in my thought of it perpetually clouded over with a romantic, almost a medieval, haze. It ought most probably to be surrounded by a thick forest of twining roses, like the castle of the sleeping beauty. Yet it is not an old house. It was built about 1880 and is half-timbered with its stucco washed a rich Irish pink. It is a solitary place, built on high ground above the river Stour, on the outskirts of a Cotswold hamlet not far from Oxford, and commanding a view of empty hillsides visited only by hares. The yews and the box which my mother planted have grown well, and the garden might look older than the house were it not for the ageless charm of the place, infinitely decayed at the same time, like something issued from the imagination of Sir John Millais or Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

It was lunch-time on Christmas Eve, and I was in the Oxford train. The sky had been leaden yellow in London and as we passed Reading some snow began to fall in rare large flakes out of a still air. It was very cold. I had decided to spend Christmas with Alexander and Rosemary, and I had telephoned them two days ago to tell them that I was coming, and to tell them briefly that Antonia and I were parting. Antonia and Palmer had pressed me with an astonishing warmth and fervour to spend Christmas with them. It was remarkable how rapidly, after Antonia's revelation, 'they' had come into existence as a sort of institution with its palpable strength, atmosphere, and even traditions. Antonia now divided her day between Hereford Square and Palmer's house in Pelham Crescent, doing her best to be in both places at once. I had never seen her so happy; and I realized with mixed feelings that an important part of her happiness consisted in looking after me. I let her. She had insisted on spending the two nights prior to my departure at Hereford Square, where in any case we normally occupied separate rooms. I went to bed each night blind drunk. I had refused their Christmas offer, not through any fear of anger and violence, but through fear of a too great compliance. I needed to withdraw in order to dress myself again in some shreds of dignity and reason. 'They' had whirled me naked. I hoped now to retrieve at least some tawdry semblance of self-respect by playing, before Rosemary and Alexander, the role of the deceived husband. More simply, I wanted time to think; more simply still, time to feel.

I was only now beginning to believe it. The evening of Antonia's revelation, during which I had had a fantastic amount to drink, seemed in retrospect a lurid dream, full of ghoulish configurations and yet somehow mysteriously painless. It was later that the pain came, a pain unutterably obscure and confused like that induced by some deprivation in childhood. The familiar world of ways and objects within which I had lived for so long received me no more; and our lovely house had put on suddenly the air of a superior antique shop. The things in it no longer cohered together. It was odd that the pain worked first and most immediately through things, as if they had at once become the sad symbols of a loss which in its entirety I could not yet face. They knew and mourned. The loss of Antonia seemed like the impossible loss for ever of all warmth and all security; and it was strange too that although a few days ago I had seemed to divide my being and give to Antonia only a part, it now seemed that with her all was to be dragged away. It was like being flayed. Or more exactly as if the bright figured globe of my existence, which had been so warmly symmetrical to the face of my soul, were twisted harshly off, leaving my naked face against a cold window and darkness.

Yet I had behaved well. That, at least, had emerged, and was indeed the main thing that had been, almost with a gentle insistence, established. I had taken it well; and a warm radiance of gratitude for this was continually perceptible, in which, deprived of other comforts, I was invited abjectly to bask. It was the inevitability of just such basking which I was now in process of running away from. I had lost the moment of action; this I felt with, at times, a terrible fierceness of regret: although it was by no means clear to me what that lost action might have been. It was evident in a way that was now almost consoling and now scarcely bearable, that Antonia and Palmer were very much in love. The revelation of their love and my compliance with it, indeed as I bitterly reflected virtually my blessing upon it, had released in both of them a frenetic gaiety. I had never seen them so gay, so vital, so absolutely flaunting their colours. They seemed now in spirit to be always waltzing. Against such a force I could hardly, I told myself, have prevailed. Yet, I felt too, if I had only somehow tried, if I had known how to try, in the face of her soft determination and her quick gratitude, to keep Antonia, even if I had failed, one particular nagging misery would now be absent. I had been cheated of some moment of violence, of some special though perhaps fruitless movement of will and power: and for this at least I would never forgive them.

It was ironical, I reflected as I sat in the train, that a week ago I had seemed in secure possession of two women; now I was likely to be in possession of neither. It was not clear to me whether the rupture with Antonia had not in some mysterious way also killed my relation to Georgie, as if these two growths had, so far from competing, strangely nourished each other. I was far from sure of this, however, and my thoughts warily, even shyly, returning inconclusively to the image of my mistress. I had not communicated with Georgie since that day of the revelation, and since the thing was not yet common knowledge, she was still presumably ignorant of the change in my situation. I did not look forward to telling her. It was not a time at which I felt well able to have things expected of me; and as I speculated and wondered about what exactly Georgie would expect, it occurred to me how little, after all, I knew her. That she would vulgarly press me to marry her was of course out of the question. It was a matter rather of how far and how she would, in turn, let me off; it was an additional, and when I attended to it a terrible, pain that if in this new situation either Georgie or I 'flagged' we would be betraying and indeed destroying a precious and tender relation which in secrecy and ambiguity had so much flourished. I needed Georgie, I loved her, I felt I could not possibly, especially now, do without her. Yet I did not quite see myself marrying her. Still, it was, I reflected, far too soon to know. I had not yet even begun to fit the pieces together; and there might be some way of fitting them together which would make out a picture of happiness for me and for Georgie. At rare moments, in a quite abstract way, I imagined this happiness, something utterly remote from my present misery and confusion, and yet not totally unconnected with me nor totally impossible.

Rosemary was to meet me at Oxford and drive me to Rembers. I felt in no mood for confronting Rosemary. She had never quite got on with Antonia and would on the one hand be delighted at what had happened, while on the other she would maintain a conventional air of distress: distress such as persons feign at the death of an acquaintance, and which is in fact a glow of excitement and pleasure, perceptible on waking in the morning as a not yet diagnosed sense of all being exceptionally well with the world. Rosemary, I should say, is for her sins a Mrs Michelis, having got married young, and against all our wishes, to a dislikeable stockbroker called Bill Michelis, who subsequently left her; and like most people whose marriages have failed she had a sharp appetite for news of other failed marriages. I had expected Rosemary to marry again, as, quite apart from being a rich girl, she is very attractive to men, but so far she has prudently refrained. Although with her small precise features, refined prim voice, and Lynch-Gibbon pedantry in speech, she gives the appearance of a prude, she is in reality far from prudish and is almost undoubtedly at her somewhat mysterious flat in Chelsea, to which she rarely invites me, involved in continual amorous adventures.

It was snowing hard in Oxford, and must have been doing so for some time, as there was a good inch of soft feathery snow on the ground as I stepped out of the train and began to look around for my sister. I soon saw her and noted that she was dressed entirely in black: on instinct, no doubt. She came up to me and leaned back her small pale face, under its little velvet cap, to be kissed. Rosemary has the attractiveness which is sometimes called petite. She has the long Lynch-Gibbon face and the powerful nose and mouth, but all scaled down, smoothed over, and covered with an exquisite ivory faintly freckled skin. The Lynch-Gibbon face is made for men, I have always felt, and to my eye Rosemary's appearance, for all its sweetness, has always something of an air of caricature.

'Hello, flower,' I said, kissing her.

'Hello, Martin,' said Rosemary, unsmiling and clearly a little shocked at what she felt as my levity. 'This is grave news,' she added, as we pushed our way to the exit. I followed her trim black figure out, and we got into Alexander's Sunbeam Rapier.

'It's bloody news,' I said. 'Never mind. How are you and Alexander?'

'We're as well as can be expected,' said Rosemary. She sounded weighed down by my troubles. 'Oh, Martin, I am sorry!'

'Me too,' I said. 'I like the cute little hat, Rosemary. Is it new?'

'Dear Martin,' said Rosemary, 'don't play-act with me.'

Now we were driving along St Giles. The snow was falling steadily out of a tawny sky. Its white blanket emphasized the black gauntness of the bare plane trees and made the yellow fronts of the tall Georgian houses glow to a rich terracotta.

'I can hardly believe it,' said Rosemary. 'You and Antonia parting, after such a long time! Do you know, I was very surprised indeed.'

I could hardly bear her relish. I looked down at her small high-heeled black-shod feet on the pedals. 'Have you been snowed up at Rembers?'

'Not really,' said Rosemary, 'though I must say it seems to have snowed more there than here. Isn't it odd how it always seems to snow more in the country? Water Lane was blocked last week, but the other roads are fairly clear. The Gilliad-Smiths have been using chains on their car. We haven't bothered. Alexander says it's bad for the tyres. Still, Badgett had to help push us out of the gate once or twice. Where will you live now, Martin?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'Certainly not at Hereford Square. I suppose I'd better find a flat.'

'Darling it's impossible to get a flat,' said Rosemary, 'at least a flat that's fit to live in, unless you pay the earth.'

'Then I shall pay the earth,' I said. 'How long have you been down here?'

'About a week,' said Rosemary. 'Don't let Antonia cheat you about the furniture and things. I suppose as she's the guilty party it should all really belong to you.'

'Not at all,' I said, 'there's no such rule! And her money went into the house as well as mine. We shall sort things out amicably.'

'I think you're wonderful!' said Rosemary. 'You don't seem in the least bitter. I should be mad with rage if I were you. You treated that man as your best friend.»

'He's still my best friend.'

'You're very philosophical about it,' said Rosemary. 'But don't overdo it. You must be miserable and bitter somewhere in your soul. A bit of good cursing may be just what you need.'

'I'm miserable everywhere in my soul,» I said. 'Bitterness is another thing. There's no point in it. Can we talk about something else?»

'Well, Alexander and I will stand by you,' said Rosemary. 'We'll look for a flat for you and we'll help you move in and then if you like I'll come and be your part-time housekeeper. I should like that. I haven't seen half enough of you in these last two or three years. I was just thinking that the other day. And you'll have to have a housekeeper, won't you, and professional ones cost the earth.'

'You're very thoughtful,' I said. 'What's Alexander working on just now?'

'He says he's stuck,' said Rosemary. 'By the way, Alexander's dreadfully cut up about you and Antonia.'

'Naturally,' I said. 'He adores Antonia.'

'I happened to be there when he opened her letter,' said Rosemary. 'I've never seen him so shaken.'

'Her letter?' I said. 'So she wrote to him about it, did she?' Somehow this irritated me terribly.

'Well, I gather so,' said Rosemary. 'Anyhow all I'm saying is, be kind and tactful to Alexander, be specially nice to him.' 'To console him for my wife having left me,' I said. 'All right, flower.'

'Martin!' said Rosemary. Some minutes later we turned into the gate of Rembers.

Six

quoted Alexander, as he dangled his long broad-nailed hand in front of his new fan heater. The sleeve of his white smock fluttered and rippled in the warm wind.

It was half an hour later and we were sitting in the bay-window annexe of Alexander's studio drinking tea and looking out at the falling snow and the south face of the house which could still be seen in the failing afternoon light, its timberings loaded with soft undulating lines of whiteness against the dulled pink. A holly wreath with a red bow hanging on the hall door was sifted over and almost invisible. The nearer flakes fell white, but farther off they merged into a yellowish curtain which prevented our view and made Rembers enclosed and solitary.

In the creamy white smock, self-consciously old fashioned, my brother seemed dressed to represent a miller in an opera. His big pale face in repose had an eighteenth-century appearance, heavy, intelligent, the slightest bit degenerate, speaking of a past of generals and gentlemen adventurers, profoundly English in the way in which only Anglo-Irish faces can now be. One might have called him 'noble' in the sense of the word which is usually reserved for animals.

It was an odd thing about Alexander, and one which I noted ever anew, especially when I saw him at Rembers, that although the form of his face perfectly recalled my father, its spirit and animation perfectly recalled my mother. More than in Rosemary or me, here she lived on, as indeed we both profoundly apprehended in our relation to Alexander. We passed as being, and I suppose we were, a very united family; and though I ruled out financial fortunes and largely played my father's role, Alexander in playing my mother's was the real head of the family. Here in the house and here in the studio, whose whitewashed walls were still dotted with her water-colours and pastel-shaded lithographs, I recalled her clearly, with a sad shudder of memory, and with that particular painful guilty thrilling sense of being both stifled and protected with which a return to my old home always afflicted me; and now it was as if my pain for Antonia had become the same pain, so closely was it now blended in quality, though more intense, with the obscure malaise of my homecomings. Perhaps indeed it had always been the same pain, a mingled shadow cast forward and backward across my destiny.

We had not yet put the lights on, and we sat together in the window-seat, not looking at each other but turned toward the silent movement of the snow and the now invisible 'view' to enjoy which Alexander had a few years ago had the big bay window built. Beyond the curtain which divided it from the annexe, the studio was almost in darkness. In summer it would be scented .with smells of wood, and flower smells from outside and the fresh wet clean smell of clay; but now it smelt only of paraffin from the four big oil-heaters whose equally familiar odour brought me recollections of ill-lit childhood winters.