A Severed Head

'Come,' said Palmer a little stiffly, 'be serious, Martin. You must take some responsibility for what you've done. As I said, we've got to understand you. And we shall understand you a good deal better after we've met Georgie.'

'Over my dead body.'

'You will have to be reasonable in the end,» said Palmer. 'After all, you are hardly in a position of .strength. So you may as well be reasonable now. Antonia has only just heard of this young woman. It is very natural that she should wish to meet her. And you should both be thankful that she will do so in no spirit of anger.'

'I'm told she is beautiful and clever,' said Antonia, 'and young: which is a lovely thing for you, Martin. Can you not see that I mean what I say? Can you not be generous enough to receive the gift of my good will, my blessing?'

'I tell you I shall go mad,' I said. 'You talk as if you were arranging my marriage. After all, for Christ's sake, you're not my parents!'

Palmer smiled his broad white American smile and drew Antonia closer to him.

Twelve

I closed the door behind me. I said to Georgie, 'Antonia knows. How did she find out?'

When I escaped from Palmer and Antonia I went straight round to Covent Garden. But I did not call on Georgie at once. I spent twenty minutes sitting in a pub and trying to collect myself. I was shivering all over and found it very difficult to think. What I chiefly felt, and this seemed strange, was guilt, overwhelming a

When I turned my thoughts to Georgie I was no better off. A veil of guilt seemed to divide me from her, and with it a sense that the blow of discovery had at least crippled, if not killed, my love for her. An opening of that love to the world would strengthen and purify it, I had thought: and this might indeed have been so had I been able to make the revelation in my own time and in my own way, with dignity and a serene face. But to be had up like that by Palmer and Antonia, to have the thing thrust at me as a crime, and at the same time stroked and cosseted in their benevolent imagination, was to make it appear to me merely obscene: and it occurred to me to wonder inconclusively whether this too were not precisely in their intention. What had happened was just what I had wanted not to happen. I had been right, not Georgie. The effect of being so accused was to call up a positive fountain of guilt which covered now with its nauseating tar my whole love for Georgie which had seemed so simple and so clean. Yet I knew that this was deeply unfair to her; and I told myself that my mood would change.

I wondered too how it had all come out; and the fantastic idea came to me that Georgie herself had betrayed us. Yet after a while I could not believe this. I could not see her being so disloyal, nor could I see her carrying out an action which required, which must require, so much of the histrionic. The thing might have come out in hundreds of ways. Since Antonia's own revelation I had become careless. Something, a letter perhaps, must have been found. I finished my drink and mounted Georgie's stairs. At least it was a sort of going home.

'Well,' I said, 'how did she find out? Do you happen to know?' I found myself, on confronting Georgie, cold and almost angry with her. How angry I was with myself did not bear contemplating.

Georgie was wearing an old skirt and a shapeless jersey. She looked as if she had been up all night. She stared at me gloomily, scratching her nose, and then cleared a space in the mess on the table, pushing the books and papers into a dusty heap. The room was both cold and stuffy. She sat on the table. She said, 'I expect Honor Klein told her.'

This was so unexpected I gaped at her and then sat down in the armchair as if I'd been pushed over. 'However did she know?' I asked.

'I told her,' said Georgie. She sat there gravely, very pale and dignified, one black-stockinged leg under her. She adjusted her skirt and returned my gaze with a face of iron.

'I see,' I said. I was blushing and breathless with anger and shock. After a moment, when I felt able to speak again, I said, 'As you may imagine, I am utterly astonished. Would you mind explaining, please?'

'After you pushed me out into the garden,' said Georgie, 'I didn't go home. I felt so angry. I'll tell you more about that in a minute. I went to the University Library and tried to read something, but it was no good. Well, then I had a coffee and went home. I felt bloody miserable, and I rang you up, but you weren't there.'

'I was out looking for you,' I said.

'Anyway,' said Georgie, 'I'd just put the phone down when the door-bell rang. I thought it was you. Well, it was Honor Klein. She looked pale and grim as hell. I asked her in and gave her a drink and we made some conversation. Then she suddenly asked me about you.'