A Severed Head

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 ca

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 co

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.