A Severed Head

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Don’t dislike me, Georgie,’ said Antonia. She bent her appealing look upon Georgie, and I could feel her intimate insistent will bent upon the girl. It was almost palpable, like a warm electric fan.

  ‘Why ever should I?’ said Georgie. ‘You are much more likely to dislike me.’

  I quietly removed my arm from Antonia’s pressure.

  ‘Ah, you mustn’t feel guilty!’ said Antonia.

  ‘You misunderstand me,’ said Georgie. ‘I was just replying to your remark. I wasn’t implying anything else. I don’t feel guilt. I realize that I may have harmed you. But that is quite another thing.’

  I could feel Georgie’s stiffness. She seemed with it almost a marionette. She was stiff as a piece of wood with her anxiety to be accurate, to be truthful, to be precise, and to express no emotion whatsoever. In the face of Antonia’s dewy radiance she was utterly closed and cold.

  ‘Don’t be so harsh with me, my child,’ said Antonia. She was desperate to establish a relationship. She wanted here, to meet her special need, to soothe and calm her, the warm human contact.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Georgie. ‘I wish you well. Perhaps you wish me well. It’s just that it’s difficult to talk.’

  ‘I do wish you well, I do!’ said Antonia, clutching on to this. ‘I wish you both so well. I hope you and Martin will be very very happy. Do believe me, this will always be near my heart.’

  ‘Leave me out of it, Antonia,’ I said. I could not bear that she should seem ridiculous to Georgie. A protective love for Antonia overwhelmed me, a desire to carry her away and hide her, to shield her from the cold young stare of a more exacting sincerity.

  ‘Whatever can you mean, leave you out?’ said Antonia, laughing a little and fixing her hand again on my sleeve. ‘How can you, between us, be left out, my dear? Isn’t he absurd!’ She turned with a gay feminine appeal to Georgie again.

  ‘Martin means there’s nothing to discuss and some subjects are better not touched on,’ said Georgie. She was rigid with strain. She kept a wide-eyed level look on Antonia and did not glance in my direction. She was conscious of Antonia’s hand.

  ‘But, Georgie, there is everything to discuss!’ said Antonia.

  ‘Perhaps we’d better go now,’ I said. ‘You’ve clapped eyes on each other, which was what you wanted to do.’ I put my glass down, releasing myself again from the tender clutch.

  ‘Oh, don’t go!’ said Antonia with a wail. ‘I haven’t had anything like enough of simply looking at Georgie. You must forgive me, child. You mustn’t be embarrassed by the way I go on, must she, Martin? I mean well, I really do! Please sit down and drink your sherry.’

  No one sat down and Georgie did not pick up her drink. She turned towards me, wanting another prompting to go. If I was by then afraid that she might pity Antonia her look should have reassured me. She was far too anxious about herself, about being accurate, about preserving, as only the young are ruthless enough at such time to do, the dignity of exact statement. ‘I think I ought to go,’ she said. ‘Will you come with me, Martin, or stay here? I honestly don’t mind which you do. It was kind of you to ask me,’ she said to Antonia. ‘I am glad to have met you. I think it is a good thing for both of us.’

  ‘My dear child, I am so glad too,’ said Antonia. ‘You must learn to be patient with me. You will learn.’

  ‘I doubt if we shall meet again,’ said Georgie. ‘But, as I say, I am glad to have seen you. It makes things more honest. I did not enjoy deceiving you. I wish you well. And now I must really go.’

  ‘No, no,’ cried Antonia, ‘and don’t speak of our not meeting again, why, that would be cruel! When you are married to Martin we shall often meet. I love Martin still, you know, I do. In some ways I love him better than ever.’

  ‘That is nothing to do with me, Mrs Lynch-Gibbon,’ said Georgie, ‘and as for my being married to Martin, it seems to me very unlikely that this will ever happen. In any case it is no one’s business but our own. I hope I haven’t been rude. If I have, I apologize. I must go. Thank you very much for asking me.’ She bowed again her stiff puppet bow and began to walk away.

  While Antonia raised her cry of protest the door opened to admit Palmer. He raised his hands in a gesture of surprised delight, and then spread them wide, advancing on the hesitating Georgie like a father greeting a long-lost child.

  ‘Why, I nearly missed her!’ he cried gaily. ‘A patient delayed me. They are so demanding! Forgive me for being so informal, Georgie Hands. I believe we have a lot of friends in common.’

  ‘She knows your sister,’ I said. I came up behind Georgie, ready to pilot her out. I had had more than enough.

  ‘I saw you at a party once,’ said Georgie, ‘but you wouldn’t remember me.’ She held out her hand.

  ‘Then I am the poorer for that!’ said Palmer. ‘Please don’t go. Do stay and have another drink. We can at least start to get acquainted.’ He retained Georgie’s hand, which she left woodenly in his grasp while he stood back, extending his arm and looking at her with admiration.

  ‘We must be off,’ I said.

  ‘Well, Martin,’ said Palmer, still holding Georgie and turning to me, ‘you are a lucky man! No, I must insist on my rights. Georgie, I forbid you to talk of going yet!’

  A sound behind us made us turn. Antonia was holding her handkerchief before her face. She took another deep breath and uttered a long sob.

  Palmer released Georgie and I pushed her past him. As he approached Antonia I hustled Georgie on towards the door. Antonia uttered a terrible long trembling wail and then sat down in the chair in a storm of weeping. I led Georgie out, leaving Palmer to use whatever were now the most up-to-date psychological methods for dealing with hysterical women.

  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 beginning to be foggy again. A yellow sulphurous haze hung about the street lamps of Pelham Crescent imposing its own infernal curfew, and my steps as I crossed the pavement left moist sticky traces. There were no traffic noises here. The place was sunk in the stricken silence of the gathering fog. The great London night contracted about me into a cold brown kernel, where the damp curled and crept, diminishing, and already too opaque to return an echo. I hurried up to the door and stepped quietly into the warm fresh-smelling hall. I had stayed long with Georgie. The time was a little after ten o’clock.

  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 Château 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.

  ‘What’s on?’ I said.

  ‘Götterdämmerung.’

  I laughed.

  Presently I got up and went to the cupboard to look for whisky. As I passed behind her I saw something lying upon the table. It was the Japanese sword, encased in its scabbard of lacquered wood, which usually hung in the hall. Honor Klein had evidently been continuing her dismantling activities. There was no whisky but I found a bottle of excellent brandy. I returned to the table with the bottle and two glasses. ‘You’ll join me?’

  With a sort of effort she gave me her glance. Her face, in which I now apprehended a fugitive resemblance to Palmer, had a slumbrous look which I could not decipher. It might have been sheer weariness, it might have been resignation. She said after a moment, ‘Thank you, yes, why not.’ I realized, but without understanding and without curiosity, that somehow, in some way, she was in extremis. 1 poured out the brandy.

  We sat in silence for a while. The room was beginning to seem abnormally dark. Perhaps some of the fog had drifted in from outside. One of the candles began to flicker, and its flame foundered sizzling in a sea of melted wax. As I saw it go I felt frightened and then wondered if I had rightly identified the thing which clutched at my heart.

  I said to Honor Klein, ‘You didn’t waste much time in having me brought to justice.’

  She kept her eyes on the candles and smiled very slightly. ‘Was it unpleasant?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I suppose so. Everything is so unpleasant nowadays it’s hard to tell.’ I found I could talk to her with remarkable directness. Our conversations were refreshingly lacking in formality. As I spoke I reached out automatically towards the sword, which lay with the blunt-ended scabbard towards me; but Honor Klein drew it away a little and I left my hand upon the table to fiddle with the bread crumbs.

  I wondered if I should ask her why she had made Georgie confess, but found that I could not bring myself to do so. A nervous shrinking which was not exactly dislike made me hesitate to probe the motives of such a being. Therewith some vague yet powerful train of thought led me to say, ‘I’m a broken reed after all.’

  I was not sure why I said this, but some subterranean affinity with the thoughts of my companion must have prompted it, for she replied at once, ‘Yes. It doesn’t matter.’

  We both sighed. My hand moved restlessly upon the table. I began to stare at the sword and to want very much to get hold of it. Honor was holding it in a possessive predatory way, her two hands on the scabbard, like a large animal holding down a small one. She faced the candles looking pale and rather haggard, her eyes screwed up as against a great light, and I tried in vain to detect what it was, other than a certain elusive air of authority, which made her resemble her brother; for the fact was that Palmer was beautiful while she was very nearly ugly. I contemplated her sallow cheek which shone dully like wax, and the black gleaming hair, oily, straight, and brutally short. She was a subject for Goya. Only the curve of her nostril and the curve of he
r mouth hinted, with a Jewish strength, a possible Jewish refinement. I said, ‘Is the sword yours?’ and as I spoke I put my hand on the end of the scabbard.

  She stared a little and said, ‘Yes. It’s a Japanese Samurai sword, a very fine one. I used to have a great interest in Japan. I worked there for a time.’ She drew the sword away again.

  ‘You were with Palmer in Japan?’

  ‘Yes.’ She spoke as out of a deep dream.

  I wanted her to know that I was present. I said, ‘May I see the sword?’

  I thought for a moment that she was going to ignore me. But she turned towards me as if taking thought. Then she twisted the thing about on the polished surface of the table. I expected her to offer me the hilt, but instead, as I reached for it, she took the hilt in her own hand and with a swift movement drew the sword from the scabbard. At the same time she rose to her feet.

  The sword came out with a swishing clattering sound and disturbed candles flashed for a moment in the blade. She laid the scabbard on the table and let the blade descend more slowly until it lay along her thigh. Its bright surface showed against the dark material of her dress as with head bowed she gazed down along its slightly curving length.

  When she spoke her voice was dry. She might have been in the lecture room. ‘In Japan these swords are practically religious objects. They are forged not only with great care but with great reverence. And the use of them is not merely an art but a spiritual exercise.’

  ‘So I have heard,’ I said. I moved her chair out of the way so as to see her better and made myself comfortable, crossing one leg over the other. ‘I am not attracted by the idea of decapitating people as a spiritual exercise.’

  Somewhere, seeming at first to be inside my head, I heard a small sound. Then I realized it was a very distant peal of church bells; and I brought to mind that it was New Year’s Eve. Some nearer bells took up the peal. We both listened for a moment in silence. Soon it would be the turn of the year.