A Severed Head

by Iris Murdoch

  I always think of Rembers as my mother’s house, though my grandfather bought it originally and Alexander has had it altered considerably since father died. But somehow the house retains indelibly the mark of my mother’s gentle fey rather vague personality, and it is in my thought of it perpetually clouded over with a romantic, almost a medieval, haze. It ought most probably to be surrounded by a thick forest of twining roses, like the castle of the sleeping beauty. Yet it is not an old house. It was built about 1880 and is half-timbered with its stucco washed a rich Irish pink. It is a solitary place, built on high ground above the river Stour, on the outskirts of a Cotswold hamlet not far from Oxford, and commanding a view of empty hillsides visited only by hares. The yews and the box which my mother planted have grown well, and the garden might look older than the house were it not for the ageless charm of the place, infinitely decayed at the same time, like something issued from the imagination of Sir John Millais or Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

  It was lunch-time on Christmas Eve, and I was in the Oxford train. The sky had been leaden yellow in London and as we passed Reading some snow began to fall in rare large flakes out of a still air. It was very cold. I had decided to spend Christmas with Alexander and Rosemary, and I had telephoned them two days ago to tell them that I was coming, and to tell them briefly that Antonia and I were parting. Antonia and Palmer had pressed me with an astonishing warmth and fervour to spend Christmas with them. It was remarkable how rapidly, after Antonia’s revelation, ‘they’ had come into existence as a sort of institution with its palpable strength, atmosphere, and even traditions. Antonia now divided her day between Hereford Square and Palmer’s house in Pelham Crescent, doing her best to be in both places at once. I had never seen her so happy; and I realized with mixed feelings that an important part of her happiness consisted in looking after me. I let her. She had insisted on spending the two nights prior to my departure at Hereford Square, where in any case we normally occupied separate rooms. I went to bed each night blind drunk. I had refused their Christmas offer, not through any fear of anger and violence, but through fear of a too great compliance. I needed to withdraw in order to dress myself again in some shreds of dignity and reason. ‘They’ had whirled me naked. I hoped now to retrieve at least some tawdry semblance of self-respect by playing, before Rosemary and Alexander, the role of the deceived husband. More simply, I wanted time to think; more simply still, time to feel.

  I was only now beginning to believe it. The evening of Antonia’s revelation, during which I had had a fantastic amount to drink, seemed in retrospect a lurid dream, full of ghoulish configurations and yet somehow mysteriously painless. It was later that the pain came, a pain unutterably obscure and confused like that induced by some deprivation in childhood. The familiar world of ways and objects within which I had lived for so long received me no more; and our lovely house had put on suddenly the air of a superior antique shop. The things in it no longer cohered together. It was odd that the pain worked first and most immediately through things, as if they had at once become the sad symbols of a loss which in its entirety I could not yet face. They knew and mourned. The loss of Antonia seemed like the impossible loss for ever of all warmth and all security; and it was strange too that although a few days ago I had seemed to divide my being and give to Antonia only a part, it now seemed that with her all was to be dragged away. It was like being flayed. Or more exactly as if the bright figured globe of my existence, which had been so warmly symmetrical to the face of my soul, were twisted harshly off, leaving my naked face against a cold window and darkness.

  Yet I had behaved well. That, at least, had emerged, and was indeed the main thing that had been, almost with a gentle insistence, established. I had taken it well; and a warm radiance of gratitude for this was continually perceptible, in which, deprived of other comforts, I was invited abjectly to bask. It was the inevitability of just such basking which I was now in process of running away from. I had lost the moment of action; this I felt with, at times, a terrible fierceness of regret: although it was by no means clear to me what that lost action might have been. It was evident in a way that was now almost consoling and now scarcely bearable, that Antonia and Palmer were very much in love. The revelation of their love and my compliance with it, indeed as I bitterly reflected virtually my blessing upon it, had released in both of them a frenetic gaiety. I had never seen them so gay, so vital, so absolutely flaunting their colours. They seemed now in spirit to be always waltzing. Against such a force I could hardly, I told myself, have prevailed. Yet, I felt too, if I had only somehow tried, if I had known how to try, in the face of her soft determination and her quick gratitude, to keep Antonia, even if I had failed, one particular nagging misery would now be absent. I had been cheated of some moment of violence, of some special though perhaps fruitless movement of will and power: and for this at least I would never forgive them.

  It was ironical, I reflected as I sat in the train, that a week ago I had seemed in secure possession of two women; now I was likely to be in possession of neither. It was not clear to me whether the rupture with Antonia had not in some mysterious way also killed my relation to Georgie, as if these two growths had, so far from competing, strangely nourished each other. I was far from sure of this, however, and my thoughts warily, even shyly, returning inconclusively to the image of my mistress. I had not communicated with Georgie since that day of the revelation, and since the thing was not yet common knowledge, she was still presumably ignorant of the change in my situation. I did not look forward to telling her. It was not a time at which I felt well able to have things expected of me; and as I speculated and wondered about what exactly Georgie would expect, it occurred to me how little, after all, I knew her. That she would vulgarly press me to marry her was of course out of the question. It was a matter rather of how far and how she would, in turn, let me off; it was an additional, and when I attended to it a terrible, pain that if in this new situation either Georgie or I ‘flagged’ we would be betraying and indeed destroying a precious and tender relation which in secrecy and ambiguity had so much flourished. I needed Georgie, I loved her, I felt I could not possibly, especially now, do without her. Yet I did not quite see myself marrying her. Still, it was, I reflected, far too soon to know. I had not yet even begun to fit the pieces together; and there might be some way of fitting them together which would make out a picture of happiness for me and for Georgie. At rare moments, in a quite abstract way, I imagined this happiness, something utterly remote from my present misery and confusion, and yet not totally unconnected with me nor totally impossible.

  Rosemary was to meet me at Oxford and drive me to Rembers. I felt in no mood for confronting Rosemary. She had never quite got on with Antonia and would on the one hand be delighted at what had happened, while on the other she would maintain a conventional air of distress: distress such as persons feign at the death of an acquaintance, and which is in fact a glow of excitement and pleasure, perceptible on waking in the morning as a not yet diagnosed sense of all being exceptionally well with the world. Rosemary, I should say, is for her sins a Mrs Michelis, having got married young, and against all our wishes, to a dislikeable stockbroker called Bill Michelis, who subsequently left her; and like most people whose marriages have failed she had a sharp appetite for news of other failed marriages. I had expected Rosemary to marry again, as, quite apart from being a rich girl, she is very attractive to men, but so far she has prudently refrained. Although with her small precise features, refined prim voice, and Lynch-Gibbon pedantry in speech, she gives the appearance of a prude, she is in reality far from prudish and is almost undoubtedly at her somewhat mysterious flat in Chelsea, to which she rarely invites me, involved in continual amorous adventures.

  It was snowing hard in Oxford, and must have been doing so for some time, as there was a good inch of soft feathery snow on the ground as I stepped out of the train and began to look around for my sister. I soon saw her and noted that she was dressed entirely in black: on
instinct, no doubt. She came up to me and leaned back her small pale face, under its little velvet cap, to be kissed. Rosemary has the attractiveness which is sometimes called petite. She has the long Lynch-Gibbon face and the powerful nose and mouth, but all scaled down, smoothed over, and covered with an exquisite ivory faintly freckled skin. The Lynch-Gibbon face is made for men, I have always felt, and to my eye Rosemary’s appearance, for all its sweetness, has always something of an air of caricature.

  ‘Hello, flower,’ I said, kissing her.

  ‘Hello, Martin,’ said Rosemary, unsmiling and clearly a little shocked at what she felt as my levity. ‘This is grave news,’ she added, as we pushed our way to the exit. I followed her trim black figure out, and we got into Alexander’s Sunbeam Rapier.

  ‘It’s bloody news,’ I said. ‘Never mind. How are you and Alexander?’

  ‘We’re as well as can be expected,’ said Rosemary. She sounded weighed down by my troubles. ‘Oh, Martin, I am sorry!’

  ‘Me too,’ I said. ‘I like the cute little hat, Rosemary. Is it new?’

  ‘Dear Martin,’ said Rosemary, ‘don’t play-act with me.’

  Now we were driving along St Giles. The snow was falling steadily out of a tawny sky. Its white blanket emphasized the black gauntness of the bare plane trees and made the yellow fronts of the tall Georgian houses glow to a rich terracotta.

  ‘I can hardly believe it,’ said Rosemary. ‘You and Antonia parting, after such a long time! Do you know, I was very surprised indeed.’

  I could hardly bear her relish. I looked down at her small high-heeled black-shod feet on the pedals. ‘Have you been snowed up at Rembers?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Rosemary, ‘though I must say it seems to have snowed more there than here. Isn’t it odd how it always seems to snow more in the country? Water Lane was blocked last week, but the other roads are fairly clear. The Gilliad-Smiths have been using chains on their car. We haven’t bothered. Alexander says it’s bad for the tyres. Still, Badgett had to help push us out of the gate once or twice. Where will you live now, Martin?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Certainly not at Hereford Square. I suppose I’d better find a flat.’

  ‘Darling it’s impossible to get a flat,’ said Rosemary, ‘at least a flat that’s fit to live in, unless you pay the earth.’

  ‘Then I shall pay the earth,’ I said. ‘How long have you been down here?’

  ‘About a week,’ said Rosemary. ‘Don’t let Antonia cheat you about the furniture and things. I suppose as she’s the guilty party it should all really belong to you.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said, ‘there’s no such rule! And her money went into the house as well as mine. We shall sort things out amicably.’

  ‘I think you’re wonderful!’ said Rosemary. ‘You don’t seem in the least bitter. I should be mad with rage if I were you. You treated that man as your best friend.”

  ‘He’s still my best friend.’

  ‘You’re very philosophical about it,’ said Rosemary. ‘But don’t overdo it. You must be miserable and bitter somewhere in your soul. A bit of good cursing may be just what you need.’

  ‘I’m miserable everywhere in my soul,” I said. ‘Bitterness is another thing. There’s no point in it. Can we talk about something else?”

  ‘Well, Alexander and I will stand by you,’ said Rosemary. ‘We’ll look for a flat for you and we’ll help you move in and then if you like I’ll come and be your part-time housekeeper. I should like that. I haven’t seen half enough of you in these last two or three years. I was just thinking that the other day. And you’ll have to have a housekeeper, won’t you, and professional ones cost the earth.’

  ‘You’re very thoughtful,’ I said. ‘What’s Alexander working on just now?’

  ‘He says he’s stuck,’ said Rosemary. ‘By the way, Alexander’s dreadfully cut up about you and Antonia.’

  ‘Naturally,’ I said. ‘He adores Antonia.’

  ‘I happened to be there when he opened her letter,’ said Rosemary. ‘I’ve never seen him so shaken.’

  ‘Her letter?’ I said. ‘So she wrote to him about it, did she?’ Somehow this irritated me terribly.

  ‘Well, I gather so,’ said Rosemary. ‘Anyhow all I’m saying is, be kind and tactful to Alexander, be specially nice to him.’ ‘To console him for my wife having left me,’ I said. ‘All right, flower.’

  ‘Martin!’ said Rosemary. Some minutes later we turned into the gate of Rembers.

  Six

  ‘Since I left Plumtree

  Down in Tennessee

  It’s the first time I’ve been warm!’

  quoted Alexander, as he dangled his long broad-nailed hand in front of his new fan heater. The sleeve of his white smock fluttered and rippled in the warm wind.

  It was half an hour later and we were sitting in the bay-window annexe of Alexander’s studio drinking tea and looking out at the falling snow and the south face of the house which could still be seen in the failing afternoon light, its timberings loaded with soft undulating lines of whiteness against the dulled pink. A holly wreath with a red bow hanging on the hall door was sifted over and almost invisible. The nearer flakes fell white, but farther off they merged into a yellowish curtain which prevented our view and made Rembers enclosed and solitary.

  In the creamy white smock, self-consciously old fashioned, my brother seemed dressed to represent a miller in an opera. His big pale face in repose had an eighteenth-century appearance, heavy, intelligent, the slightest bit degenerate, speaking of a past of generals and gentlemen adventurers, profoundly English in the way in which only Anglo-Irish faces can now be. One might have called him ‘noble’ in the sense of the word which is usually reserved for animals.

  It was an odd thing about Alexander, and one which I noted ever anew, especially when I saw him at Rembers, that although the form of his face perfectly recalled my father, its spirit and animation perfectly recalled my mother. More than in Rosemary or me, here she lived on, as indeed we both profoundly apprehended in our relation to Alexander. We passed as being, and I suppose we were, a very united family; and though I ruled out financial fortunes and largely played my father’s role, Alexander in playing my mother’s was the real head of the family. Here in the house and here in the studio, whose whitewashed walls were still dotted with her water-colours and pastel-shaded lithographs, I recalled her clearly, with a sad shudder of memory, and with that particular painful guilty thrilling sense of being both stifled and protected with which a return to my old home always afflicted me; and now it was as if my pain for Antonia had become the same pain, so closely was it now blended in quality, though more intense, with the obscure malaise of my homecomings. Perhaps indeed it had always been the same pain, a mingled shadow cast forward and backward across my destiny.

  We had not yet put the lights on, and we sat together in the window-seat, not looking at each other but turned toward the silent movement of the snow and the now invisible ‘view’ to enjoy which Alexander had a few years ago had the big bay window built. Beyond the curtain which divided it from the annexe, the studio was almost in darkness. In summer it would be scented .with smells of wood, and flower smells from outside and the fresh wet clean smell of clay; but now it smelt only of paraffin from the four big oil-heaters whose equally familiar odour brought me recollections of ill-lit childhood winters.

  ‘And so?’

  ‘Well, there it is.’

  ‘And Palmer didn’t tell you anything else?’

  ‘I didn’t ask him anything else.’

  ‘And you say you were charming to him?’

  ‘Charming.’

  ‘I don’t say,’ said Alexander, ‘that I would have sprung upon him like a wild animal. But I would have interrogated him. I should have wanted to understand.’

  ‘Oh, I understand,’ I said. ‘You must remember that I am very close to Palmer; which makes it impossible to ask, but also makes it unnecessary.’

  ‘And Antoni
a seems happy?’

  ‘It’s the beatific vision.’

  Alexander sighed. He said, ‘I’m tempted to say now that I never liked Palmer. He’s an imitation human being: beautifully finished, exquisitely coloured, but imitation.’

  ‘He’s a magician,’ I said, ‘and that can inspire dislike. But he’s warm-blooded. He needs love as much as anyone else does. I can’t help being touched by the way he has tried to hold me, as well as Antonia, in this situation.’

  ‘I say pish, Sir, I say bah!’ said Alexander.

  ‘Antonia wrote to you?’ I turned to watch him, his big slow face illuminated by the sallow light of the snow.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. I wonder if I might have guessed. But no, any such thing would have seemed to me impossible. When it came to it I was stunned by her letter.’

  ‘Surely you didn’t get her letter before I telephoned? She would hardly have written to you before she told me!’

  ‘Oh, well, of course not,’ said Alexander. ‘But I didn’t take it in properly when you rang. She didn’t say anything in the letter, you know, not anything informative. Tell me though, where will you live now?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose I’ll get a flat. Rosemary has appointed herself as my housekeeper.’

  Alexander laughed. He said, ‘Why not come and live here? You don’t have to run the business, do you?’

  ‘What would I do here?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Come!’

  ‘Why not?’ said Alexander. ‘You could fleet the time idyllically. This place is the earthly paradise, as we all saw with perfect clarity in childhood before we were corrupted by the world. If you insisted on occupation I would teach you how to model clay or how to carve snakes and weasels out of tree roots. The trouble with people nowadays is they don’t know how to do nothing. I’ve had quite a job teaching Rosemary to do it, and she’s certainly more gifted in that direction than you are.’