A Severed Head

I woke up shivering. It was dark. The blankets had fallen to the floor and the camp bed felt damp as well as very hard and cold. I had a sharp pain in my stomach, doubtless the result of drinking a great deal the night before. Or was it still the night before? I got up, found my dressing-gown, and switched on the light.

The naked bulb lit up a scene of gloomy disorder, the gaunt camp bed with its trail of blankets, the bare floorboards, my suitcase disgorging towels, underwear, packets of letters, and an electric razor. My jacket and trousers lay in a heap where I had drunkenly fallen out of them. The half-empty whisky bottle stood in the corner. There were various cigarette ends. The glass which I had just overturned with my foot rolled slowly across the floor until it came to rest against a leg of the bed. It made a hollow sound. The famous oil-fired central heating seemed to be making little impression on the temperature of the room. I turned on the electric fire which was set into the wall and it glowed in the bright light with a cheerless pallor. The demon asthma, defeated when I went to bed by drink and sheer exhaustion, was present still, and I could feel it squeeze my chest like a broad band wound about me and gradually tightening. Intermittent whines and gurgles issued from my lungs, I tried to breathe slowly. I knotted the belt of my dressing-gown and opened the window, but shut it at once after one sniff of the cold thick air outside. I looked out.

Far below me in a kind of dark, Lowndes Square slumbered in the haze of its street lamps out of which black trees soared almost to the level of my window. I could not make out whether the diffused light in which I saw the shapes below was a twilight or whether it was simply the glow of lamplight spread out upon the night. The sky was dark and thick. I wondered what time it was. My watch had stopped and the telephone was not co

Palmer had of course been right. It was only on the following day that the full shock came to me. I had returned to London in a daze, had come straight to Lowndes Square and had then slept until late. That had been, assuming that it was now after midnight, yesterday morning. When I woke I woke to a state of terror and despair which was unlike anything I had ever experienced. I had tasted despair in the past, but as I remember it had always had a fairly clear cause and a clear nature. This present thing was confused and irrational and its very obscurity was a source of fear. I was frightened to be alone with it and yet there was no one to whom I could run. I could not even make out what part in my condition was played by horror of incest. I had never consciously felt any aversion from the idea of an embrace of siblings. Yet perhaps it was just this idea at work in my soul through some pattern which I could not discern which brought about this almost tangible sense of darkness. What was strange too was that this particular horror, whatever its source, was now indissolubly co

During my interview with Palmer my sense of Honor's proximity had been as it were diffused, a trembling in the atmosphere which was not quite a sound but which if it had been audible might have been a shriek. Now afterwards my thought of her, focused, was a round pain to the periphery of which the torn fragments of my being adhered like rags of flesh. I could indeed hardly put a name to my state, so unlike was it to anything which I had experienced previously when in love. It seemed as if this condition had with those no common feature. Yet I could not think what else to call it if it was not love which so brought me to my knees.

I could not without agony recall the mounting level of my intention and its terrible climax. Something still remained to torment me of a kind of dream which I had had of some miraculous and magnificent encounter with Honor in which the lurid light of battle which had so flashed over our past meetings should be transformed into, or rather finally seen as, the glow of a violent love. I had dreamed of her as free, as alone, as waiting in her still slumbering consciousness for me, reserved, separated, sacred. The so-different truth of the matter could scarcely be contemplated. I had not for a second conceived of her possessing a lover; and at the idea that she had taken to her in that role her brother my fascinated and appalled imagination reeled. In any woman this dark love could not but be something of colossal dimensions. Some sign of how great it was I could indeed now in retrospect see, interpreting in the light of my knowledge Honor's bewildering conduct.

I thought of myself as in every sense lost, sunk without trace in a love which now seemed tinged with insanity, and deprived altogether of hope. I attached little importance to Palmer's statement that what I had seen would be without a sequel. It seemed as if Honor's will alone, bent upon Palmer, must bring all that she wished to pass. I had of course no intention, had never had any intention, of speaking to Antonia. Antonia seemed to me as unco

I spent the day in a sort of limbo. I could not eat anything, nor could I rest because of a dreadful aching and tingling in the limbs. I walked about in Hyde Park, returned to the flat, and set out again at once through fear of being alone. The misty park was desolate as a moon landscape but at least there were forms of human beings upon it here and there. I thought a little bit about Georgie, but her figure, seeming already to belong to a remote past, looked so sadly upon me that I could not endure to contemplate it. I could not ask Georgie to console me because I loved another, nor could the old love, poor pathetic thing as it now seemed, heal me of the new. I drank a great deal and went to bed about nine o'clock in a desperate desire for oblivion.

I wondered now if I should not try after all to go to sleep again. There was nothing I could do with myself waking. I pulled the blankets back on to the camp bed and lay down on top of them without switching out the light; but the ache had come back into my limbs and I knew it was useless to attempt to rest. I got up again and began to hunt for my asthma tablets, tilting the rest of the contents of my suitcase out on to the floor. I found them, and retrieved the glass which turned out to be cracked. I trailed out to the kitchen and began gloomily to wash a plastic mug which had been left behind by the previous tenant.

A strange sudden sound echoed through the flat. It was close by, and yet I could not locate its direction. It seemed to come from everywhere at once. I jumped, with a violent trip of the heart, and then stood rigid listening to the silence and wondering what I had heard. The sound came again. After a terrified moment I realized that it was the door bell which I had not heard before. I adjusted my dressing-gown and went into the dark corridor, leaving the door open behind me to give some light. I fumbled with the catch of the front door, my hands trembling with nervousness, and eventually got it open. The lights were on on the landing. It was Antonia.