A Severed Head

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.

I sat down on the sofa. Georgie turned from looking out of the window and came towards me. The untidy bundle of her hair was contained in the upturned collar of her coat and she kept her hands deep in her pockets as for some time she stared down at me with a look of almost hostile tenderness. She said at last, 'Do you hate seeing me here?'

I said, 'No. I can't tell you how entirely good for me it is to see you here. But there's such pain too.'

'I know,' she said, her voice deep, weighted with understanding. 'Don't be angry with me because of the pain.'

'I am far from that. I feel more like kissing your feet. You've put up with so much from me.' As I spoke these words I felt myself, obscurely yet positively, upon the road towards making Georgie my wife. I had told her once that secrecy was essential to our love. Seeing her in this room, and thus joining the two halves of my life, seemed to prove me wrong and her right. The lies should indeed be done away with: and so far from breaking the texture of my love for Georgie this would set it free to be something stronger and purer than anything I had yet known. Gratitude to her, gratitude for her loyalty, her reason, her sheer kindness to me, possessed my heart.

'Ah, you're hating me!' said Georgie. She was still staring down at me intently, as if to wrest the thoughts out of my head.

'If you only knew how wrong you are!' I said. I gave her back a steady unsmiling stare, and felt pleasure at the idea of surprising her, rewarding her, with my better love. God knows she deserved it.

I got up and began to collect the Christmas cards from the piano. Beneath them it was thick with dust. The business of clearing up had begun.

'It's so strange and moving to be here!' said Georgie. She had begun to roam about the room again. 'I can't think what it's like. It's like possessing you retrospectively. No, not quite. But you've no idea how completely I assumed that I would never sec this place. I will now come to believe, and this will be better, so much better, that in the past, all that time that you were away from me, you really went on existing. It was too painful to believe at the time. But I knew that not to believe it was a failure of love. Now, with your help, I can put that right. I shall love you better, much better, Martin, in the future.'

She came to a standstill in front of me. I was deeply affected by the way in which her words echoed my thought. I sought for, but could not yet find, some eloquence by which to draw her closer in a preliminary exchange of vows.

I threw the pile of Christmas cards on the floor and led Georgie with me towards the mantelpiece. I said, 'I want you to touch everything. I want you to touch all these things.'

She hesitated. 'It would be sacrilege. I should suffer for it!'

'No,' I said. 'It will be good sacrilege. You bring me closer to reality. You have always done that for me.'

I took her hand and laid it on the Meissen cockatoo. We held each other's eyes. Georgie drew her hand back. Then after a moment she rapidly touched all the other objects on the mantelpiece. I took her hand again. It was marked with dust. I kissed it in the palm and raised my eyes to her again. I could see she was on the point of tears. I began to take her in my arms.

At that moment I heard a sound which made my heart violent with fear even before my mind had understood it. It was the familiar sound of a key turning in the front door. Georgie heard it too and her eyes became wide and hard. We stood thus for a second, paralysed. Then I pulled myself roughly out of the embrace.

It could only be Antonia. She had changed her mind about going to the country, and had decided to come and look the furniture over before our interview tomorrow. In another moment she would come straight into the drawing-room and find me with Georgie. I could not bear it.