A Severed Head

Thirteen

I simply had to see Antonia again. It was with her as we left Pelham Crescent, that the weight of my love and concern remained. I could no more separate my being from her than if she had been my mother; and the confrontation of the two women had made me feel, perhaps momentarily but with desperate sadness, the concreteness of my bond with her, the abstractness of my bond with Georgie. Yet how much Antonia exasperated me. I felt, every twist and turn of it, Georgie's exasperation, her so fastidious curling up. At the same time I resented this wincing in Georgie, resented even her cautious, scrupulous, after her own fashion dignified, approach to a judgement. I had to depart with Georgie; but I had to return to Antonia.

I took Georgie home in the car. We were both silent, exhausted really. Once inside she offered me supper, and I stayed to eat bread and cheese. Georgie was no cook and I had no heart for cooking anything myself. We ate the bread and cheese, wolfishly and with surly looks, washing it down with whisky and water. I felt I could not bear any display of emotion just then from Georgie; I wanted to get away. She taxed me, as we were finishing our meal, with just this, and I could not find the protestations which would console her. She spared me her tears. But it was in both our minds that she had said 'it is unlikely that he will marry me'. For her, I think, these words were a barrier between us which she wished me now lovingly and tempestuously to remove. For me they constituted rather a kind of moratorium, a momentary neutral zone where I could, and how very much in my weariness I needed it, absolutely rest. I had not got it in me to produce for Georgie the passionate reassuring speeches which she wanted. Her words had been intended as a provocation. I accepted them gratefully and in silence as a resting place.

Just before I left we achieved a sort of peace together, lying down for a moment beside the gas fire, forehead to forehead and foot to foot. Georgie's so familiar face, close to mine, in repose at last, her big eyes gentle now, her mouth relaxed, resting from my kisses, was a beloved landscape. Without words we gazed and murmured each other into quietness, until it was as if we had talked in detail for a long time, so spiritual a thing is the human face.

I left Georgie taking aspirins and promising to go to bed at once. I did not suggest and she did not demand that I should remain with her. The prospect of a night together, so eagerly grasped in the old days, was now a problem and not a prize. We were both in a state of emotional exhaustion, and what we really needed for the moment was a rest from each other. In addition I required, with anxiety and with eagerness, to see Antonia once more, however briefly, before I went to bed. I drove the car back to Palmer's house.

It was begi

The lights were on in the hall and the upstairs landing. I listened. There was no sound of voices. I crossed to the drawing-room door and opened it. The fire was burning brightly but there was no one there. I turned the lamps on from the door. The room came into being before me, still, yet tense with its own sinister life. I closed the door behind me and stood there a while. Something of Palmer and Antonia was present, some tall shadow of them, which illicitly and with an almost guilty relish I enjoyed, simply standing in the empty room. I moved towards the fire and realized then that I was a bit drunk. I had had no lunch and precious little supper and I had consumed, with Georgie, a formidable amount of whisky. I sat heavily into an armchair and reflected on how pleasant it was to be alone and not to have to think of ways of justifying myself.

I became aware that I was filled with undirected sexual desire. I wanted somebody. I suppose, after a little while, that it was Antonia that I wanted. I had certainly not wanted Georgie. I had envisaged with a trapped gloom the possibility that she might suggest our going to bed together; I had accepted gratefully her obvious desire to be, for the moment, rid of me. I had not had, for her, the right words, the proper consolations. Later, I knew, I would be able to soothe and delight her with these. Now, however, with a resentment which I knew to be unjust, I was prepared to keep her in suspense and to greet her weary disappointed dismissal with a sigh of relief. No, it was about Antonia, in a sad confused way, that my imagination now played; and it was evident to me that I had not yet accepted that I had lost her. It was as if recent events represented a mock barrier between us, an element as it were in a flirtation, over and past which I would later sweep to a reunion. I imagined myself, ultimately and safely, at home in her arms.

I shook myself out of these dreams. There were places where my thoughts must not go; and as I then reflected how few places were left where they could now go without incurring pain or guilt I decided that I needed some more whisky and recalled that Palmer kept some in the sideboard in the dining-room. Leaving the lights on I crossed the hall. The dining-room door was closed. I opened it and went in.

The room was not dark and my hand hesitated on the electric-light switch. Candles were burning still in the silver candlesticks on the long table, making the room a cave of warm dim luminosity to which my eyes became in a moment accustomed. I stood still, a little surprised, and closed the door behind me. Then I saw that there was someone sitting alone at the far end of the table.

It was Honor Klein. As I saw her the consciousness returned to me, but without being distressing, that I was somewhat tipsy; and I stood there for a moment longer leaning against the door. I could not see her clearly. But I apprehended at once, and it struck me as a trifle strange, that she was not particularly concerned about my arrival. It was like an arrival at the shrine of some remote and self absorbed deity. She was plunged in thoughts of her own.

I came slowly down the length of the table. I saw as I came that Palmer and Antonia had dined. Again there were the two places set, and the bottle, this time of Lynch-Gibbon Chateau Malmaison 1953, almost emptied. Two table napkins lay in disarray beside the places and there was a wide scattering of crumbs upon the polished surface beneath which the light of the candles seemed to burn again. As I approached Honor Klein I saw that without moving her head she was following me with her eyes. It was like the animation of a corpse. I looked down at her with a sort of fastidious surprise and then found that [ had sat down beside her.

I said, 'Excuse me, I was looking for Palmer's whisky. Where are they anyway?'

'At the opera,' said Honor. She spoke in an abstracted tone, as if I had only a smaller corner of her attention. She stared ahead of her now toward the candles. I wondered for a moment if she was drunk, but decided probably it was only I who was drunk.

'At the opera,' I said. It occurred to me as scandalous that Palmer and Antonia, after the scene in which I had taken part in the drawing-room, should have gone out to the opera. Antonia ought to have been waiting for me to come back. I resented this indifference to the tempo of my own drama.