A Severed Head

by Iris Murdoch

  That ‘we’ still came naturally from Antonia’s lips. I wondered at her. At the same time, I needed her. The devil of it was that I needed both of them. The thread of intimacy was not yet broken after all between Antonia and myself. I apprehended this fact with a sort of agony. I had only had notice of my death. The stroke had not really fallen yet.

  ‘Look,’ said Antonia, ‘could you do a favour for Anderson and me?’

  ‘It seems to be my métier.’

  ‘Could you meet Honor at the station tonight?’

  ‘Honor?’

  ‘You know, Anderson’s sister. She’s arriving from Cambridge.’

  ‘Oh, Honor Klein. Yes, I suppose so. Only I scarcely know her. Why can’t Palmer meet her?”

  ‘He’s got a dreadful cold,’ said Antonia. ‘He really mustn’t go out in this fog.’

  ‘Can’t she take a taxi?’

  ‘She’s expecting Anderson, and he’s afraid that if he doesn’t come she’ll wait indefinitely on the platform in this ghastly weather.’

  ‘She doesn’t sound very intelligent,’ I said. ‘All right, I’ll meet her.’ Antonia’s ‘Anderson’, which had once sounded so curiously formal, now had a ring of hideous intimacy; and somehow the fact of Palmer having a cold irritated me extremely.

  Antonia squeezed my arm and moved round to lean her head against my knee. I was beginning to be tormented by physical desire for her. She said, ‘I feel rather nervous about Honor.’

  ‘You’ve met her before, though. She seems a pretty harmless old don.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve met her,’ said Antonia, ‘but I’ve never noticed her.’

  ‘Neither have I,’ I said. “This suggests that she’s harmless.’ I began to stroke Antonia’s hair.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry,’ said Antonia, ‘only Anderson seems a bit worried. He doesn’t say much, but I think he thinks that Honor thinks that I’m not good enough for him.’

  ‘That’s a lot of thinking,’ I said. ‘You’re good enough for a king, and quite good enough for our Palmer. There’s nothing to be nervous about. You’re a goddess, and she’s just a poor old German spinster. Tell yourself that. What time is the train?’

  ‘Five fifty-seven at Liverpool Street,’ said Antonia. ‘Martin, you’re an ace. I’m afraid the train’s sure to be awfully late because of the fog. Perhaps you could bring her straight to Pelham Crescent. I wonder if you have the faintest idea how good you are?’

  ‘I’m beginning to realize,’ I said. ‘It hurts so much, for one thing.’

  Antonia sat back on her heels. She was consciously, almost shamelessly, exerting her power. She held me a while in the glow of her attention; and I let her so hold me, with a sort of despair, knowing the fruitlessness of taking her in my arms.

  ‘We won’t let go of you, Martin,’ she said. ‘We’ll never let go of you.’

  I had feared the inevitable breaking of the thread of intimacy. In Antonia’s intention this thread, somehow, would never be broken. I felt an abject relief together with a spiritual nausea which made her look to me, for a moment, almost hideous. I was near to breaking down. I said, ‘You can’t have everything, Antonia.’

  She put her two hands on my knees and leaned forward with glowing eyes. ‘I can try, my darling, I can try!’

  Eight

  Liverpool Street Station smelt of sulphur and brimstone. Thick fog filled it and the great cast-iron dome was invisible. The platform lights were dulled, powerless to cast any radiance out into the relentless haze, so that the darkness seemed to have got inside one’s head. Excited, strangely exhilerated by the fog, obscure figures peered and hurried past. One moved about within a small dimly lighted sphere, surrounded by an opaque yet luminous yellow night out of which with startling suddenness people and things materialized. The time was five forty-five.

  I had got the car out early in case I should get lost on the way. However, flaring fog lights all along Piccadilly and Holborn had kept me crawling steadily on, and I had arrived in fair time. I had already inquired how late the train would be, which no one seemed to know, and had inspected the bookstall at length and purchased a cheap edition of a book about jungle warfare in Burma. I was now sitting in the comparative brightness of the buffet sipping some rather cold tea. I shook out my scarf, which was damp and soggy. I could have wrung the moisture from it. I was chilled to the bone and so dejected that it was almost laughable. With that I felt more than a little mad.

  The scene with Antonia had left me stiff and weary, as if I had been beaten, or had come a very long way. I was by now in a state which could only be described as being in love. Yet it was a strange love, whose only possible expression was my acquiescence in her will to keep that thread unbroken between us. At the same time, to consent to this was torture and I felt the tender bond like a strangler’s rope. I was confounded by the utter impossibility of violence. Yet violence, veiled with misery, moved within. What most appalled was the sense which I had so clearly had when I was with Antonia of my need for her, my need for them; and what I now abjectly craved was to see Palmer and to receive from him some impossible inconceivable reassurance. I was their prisoner, and I choked with it. But I too much feared the darkness beyond.

  I looked at my watch. It was five fifty-four, still too early for a drink. I got up and went out to inquire again at the platform where the train was due. Still no one seemed to know how late it would be, and I stood about for a while with my coat collar turned up, breathing the thick contaminated air. It pressed down into my lungs, cold, damp, and filthy, doing me no good at all. The place was an image of hell. I wondered if I would recognize Dr Klein. I could not recall her face, and could conjure up only some generalized image of a middle-aged Germanic spinster. I remembered being disappointed at her lack of any resemblance to Palmer. Otherwise she had seemed so true to type as to be without special points of interest. I took a gloomy satisfaction in performing the disagreeable task of meeting her. To be icily and inconveniently here, suffocating on this railway station and faced with the discomfort of a long wait: this was after all the only thing I could do just now to spite Antonia and Palmer. It was for this moment my only weapon. Also it passed the time.

  I bought an evening paper and read about how many people had been killed already by the fog. The time was five fifty-nine. I began to think about Georgie and about our meeting tomorrow. I could find somewhere in my heart a warm germ of gladness at the thought of Georgie. Yet I was terrified of seeing her too. I could not at present face anything in the way of a showdown or argument about fundamentals with Georgie. I had been as it were too completely reabsorbed into Antonia. I could think of nothing but Antonia. The pressure upon me of Georgie’s needs, any requirement that I should now imagine her situation, would be intolerable, and I felt sick at the thought. Yet I did want to see her. I wanted consolation, I wanted love, I wanted, to save me, some colossal and powerful love such as I had never known before. ‘That train’s coming in now, sir,’ said the ticket collector.

  The roar of the unseen train reached a crescendo and then died to a rattle and its nose became visible at the near end of the platform. People began to materialize very rapidly at the barrier, and I concentrated on my, as it now seemed impossible, task of recognizing the person I was to meet. Several middle-aged women passed by with strained preoccupied faces and rapidly vanished. Everyone was hurrying and everyone looked ill. It was the Inferno indeed. I began to cough. Dr Klein would be looking for her brother, and I supposed I might identify her by her own searchings and hesitations. But I would have to do it quickly, for if she wandered even a few steps away from the barrier she would be lost in the fog.

  When Palmer’s sister did at last appear I recognized her at once. The face came back to me with a rush, as so often happens when what one cannot picture appears unexpectedly as something well known. It was not a very pleasant face: heavy, perceptibly Jewish, and dour, with just a hint of insolence. The curving lips were combined with a formidable straightness and narrowness o
f the eyes and mouth. Dr Klein advanced from the barrier and stood still, looking about. She was frowning, and looked haggard in the lurid yellowish light. She wore no hat and drops of foggy moisture stood already upon her short black hair.

  I said ‘Dr Klein?’

  She turned towards me and glared. She had clearly no idea who I was.

  I said, ‘I am Martin Lynch-Gibbon. We have met before, though you may have forgotten. Palmer asked me to meet you. May I carry something?’

  I noticed that she was hugging a lot of small parcels, which gave her something of the air of a mid-European Hausfrau. When she spoke I expected a thick German accent, and was surprised by her deep cultured English voice. I had forgotten her voice.

  ‘Where is my brother?’ she said.

  ‘He’s at home,’ I said. ‘He’s got a cold. Nothing serious. I’ll take you there at once. The car is just outside. Here, let me take this.’ I relieved her of the largest parcel.

  As she handed it over Dr Klein gave me a keen look. Her narrow dark eyes, which seemed in the strange light to be shot with red, had the slightly Oriental appearance peculiar to certain Jewish women. There was something animal-like and repellent in that glistening stare. She said, ‘This is an unexpected courtesy, Mr Lynch-Gibbon.’

  It took me a moment to apprehend the scorn in this remark. It took me by surprise, and I was surprised too how much it hurt. It occurred to me that this was the first judgement I had received from an outsider since I had officially taken up my position as a cuckold, and I was irritated to find that, for a second, I minded cutting a poor figure. It certainly might seem an odd moment to be running errands for Palmer. We walked in silence towards the car through a shadowy and slightly hysterical crowd of arriving and departing travellers and those whose trains were lost without trace.

  Outside the fog was as thick as ever, and it took me some time to get the car into the street. The baffled headlights glowed, tiny futile balls, in front of a wall of darkness which their beams could not pierce. We began to proceed at a walking pace along Cheapside. In order to say something I asked, ‘Was it foggy in Cambridge?’

  ‘No, not foggy.’

  ‘Your train was very punctual. We expected it to be late.’

  A grunt was the reply to this. I said to myself, I don’t care what this object thinks of me. The fog came steadily over us in waves and it was extremely difficult to see where one was on the road. People had abandoned their cars here and there by the pavement, and there were a great many obstacles to avoid on the left, while on the right the headlights of approaching vehicles only at the last moment materialized out of the thick darkness. To keep straight along the narrow channel in the middle seeing traffic lights in time, and not starting to swerve crazily as soon as complete obscurity descended was a feat demanding the utmost concentration. I leaned forward over the wheel, my forehead nearly touching the windscreen upon which the wipers were rubbing a mass of wet grime to and fro. I felt with a sort of exhilaration that we were very likely to hit something pretty soon. Enlivened by this, I said suddenly to my companion, ‘Well, Dr Klein, what do you think of Palmer’s latest little exploit?’

  She turned abruptly towards me and the hem of her coat fell across my hand on the gear lever. Before she had time to reply a large lorry suddenly appeared a foot away on my right. I must have wandered over the centre of the road. I braked violently and swerved and must have shaved the lorry by an inch. I said ‘Sorry.’ She turned back, gathering her coat about her legs. The apology might have covered either thing.

  I turned southward down what I took to be Shaftesbury Avenue. The windscreen was becoming opaque and frosted; I Wound down the window on my side and the cold choking air came in. My nose was beginning to drop moisture. I said to her, ‘Would you mind opening your window and keeping a look-out on that side?’ She opened the window in silence and we proceeded thus for a while with our heads hanging out on opposite sides. Honor Klein’s body sagged and jolted beside me like a headless sack, and I could feel again the rough material of her coat grazing my hand. Great orange flares at Hyde Park Corner showed us the way into Knightsbridge, and by their light I stole a glance at my companion. I saw only her hunched shoulders; and then, revealed momentarily, the back of her leg, turned and braced, a stout crepe-soled shoe, and the plump curve of her calf clad in a thick brown and white knitted stocking traversed by a dark seam. I returned my attention to the road. That curving seam reminded me just for an instant that she was a woman.

  By the time we reached Pelham Crescent the fog had lifted a little. I opened Palmer’s big close-fitting hall door, which is always unlocked, and ushered Dr Klein inside. I felt a bond with her now because of our ordeal. The hall was warm and deeply carpeted and after the vapours outside it smelt sweet, a smell of polished wood and new textiles. Breathing was suddenly a luxury. I paused while she took off her coat, and saw above her head the huge tasselled Samurai sword which Palmer had inconsequently suspended above a little rosewood chiffonier which Antonia and I had once greatly coveted.

  I wondered if Palmer and Antonia were indeed here, since we were much earlier than the time I had predicted. I said in a friendly manner, ‘Would you like to go upstairs first? I’ll go and see if Palmer and Antonia are in the drawing-room. Of course you know your way about.’

  Dr Klein gave me her unsmiling stare. She said, ‘You are very hospitable, Mr Lynch-Gibbon, but I have been in this house before.’ She marched past me and threw open the drawing-room door.

  The drawing-room was full of golden firelight and there was a strong resinous smell of burning logs. The black-shaded lamps had been extinguished and the dark furry wallpaper glowed reddish and soft in the moving light. I saw at once and painfully that Palmer and Antonia were indeed not expecting us. They were sitting side by side in two upright chairs by the fire. Palmer had his arm round my wife and their faces, turned tenderly full towards each other were seen clearly in profile, each outlined with a pencil of gold. They seemed in that momentary vision of them like deities upon an Indian frieze, enthroned, inhumanly beautiful, a pair of sovereigns, distant and serene. They turned towards us, startled but not yet risen, still gracious in their arrested communion. I came up beside Honor Klein.

  Something strange happened in that instant. As I turned to look at her she seemed transfigured. Divested of her shapeless coat she seemed taller and more dignified. But it was her expression that struck me. She stood there in the doorway, her gaze fixed upon the golden pair by the fire, her head thrown back, her face exceedingly pale; and she appeared to me for a second like some insolent and powerful captain, returning booted and spurred from a field of triumph, the dust of battle yet upon him, confronting the sovereign powers whom he was now ready if need be to bend to his will.

  The impression was momentary. Antonia leapt up and came forward with cries of welcome. Palmer began hastily turning on the lamps. Honor Klein gave her attention to Antonia, answering her questions about the journey and about the fog in a slow way which seemed at last, in its very laboriousness a little Germanic.

  Nine

  I had an infernal headache. I had left them early, declining a pressing invitation to dinner, and then had stayed up half the night drinking whisky, and I still felt, as I prepared to leave the office, rather sick and giddy. Last night, strangely enough, I had not felt too dejected; but this, I reasoned out, was because of a particular illusion which had been fostered by the whisky, an illusion to the effect that I was shortly going to do something remarkable which would miraculously alter the situation. It was unclear what this remarkable action would be; but as the night proceeded I more and more sensed its magnificent veiled presence. I had not, it seemed, after all been cheated of my moment of power.

  Today, however, I could see only too clearly the emptiness of this dream which was but the hollow correlate of my role of total victim. There was nothing I could do; nothing, that is, except act out with dignity my appointed task of being rational and charitable: a task whose charms,
never many, were likely to diminish as my charitableness and rationality came to be, by all concerned, increasingly taken for granted. More precisely, there was nothing to be done in the near future except to make sensible arrangements with Antonia about the furniture, write a number of letters about the Lowndes Square flat, and see my solicitor about the divorce proceedings: that, and see Georgie.

  I was sorry that I had made myself so drunk last night, not only because of the hideous depression of the hangover, but because I felt it would make me stupid in dealing with Georgie. I still had mixed feelings about seeing her, and indeed my opposite wishes had both increased in intensity. On the one hand I felt more than ever absorbed into the idea of Antonia. I wanted to think about her all the time, although this activity was entirely painful. In an obsessed way, what I most desired was to be talking over ‘the situation’ with Antonia and Palmer, and if either of them had had the time to indulge me that is what I would have been continually doing. On the other hand, the image of Georgie, moved by some pure power of its own, was active within me, and made in my tormented thoughts a cool and even authoritative place for itself. Thither I did feel drawn. Georgie’s robust cheerfulness, her good sense, her lucid toughness were perhaps just what I required to pull me out of the region of fantasy which I was increasingly inhabiting and return me to the real world. Yet could I, as things were, rely on Georgie to be cheerful and lucid? What demands might she not now, especially finding me in this weakened state, make upon me? I unutterably wanted some simplicity of consolation. But Georgie too was a person capable of being in torment.

  I locked up my desk and put into my brief-case the list of clients whom I had promised to visit in January and the draft of my chapter on the tactics of Gustavus Adolphus at the battle of Leuthen. I had made arrangements so as not to have to come to the office again for a little while. The clients would receive a note to the effect that Mr Mytten, my young assistant, would visit them instead, as I was indisposed. Mytten was at present still in Bordeaux, where it was dangerous to send him since he prolonged his visits so unconscionably, conducting some negotiations with a small house with which we had newly begun to do some business. Mytten was a Roman Catholic, a sybarite and an ass, but he was loyal and a decent judge of wine, and went down splendidly with my more snobbish clientele. I could trust him with the visiting, though not of course with the tasting, and I noted that my next essential engagement was to taste hock, of which we still handled a little, on 30 January. Of course I always politely consulted Mytten and very occasionally listened to his advice on what to buy, but a director of a small wine firm tends to become an omnipotent and jealous deity, and it was on my palate alone that the firm of Lynch-Gibbon depended; and as I had no paternal feelings towards Mytten and did not believe that I could train him to be a second me, the little firm would doubtless perish with me, and the particular piece of reality represented by the discerning taste which my father had so carefully trained and fostered in his son would vanish away for ever.