Айрис Мердок - A Severed Head

Georgie was looking at Alexander. She stretched out her long legs in a deliberate attempt to relax. Her breath came slowly and deeply. She was thinner and paler, wearing a black tweed pinafore dress with a high-necked striped blouse. Her hair, cascaded on top and carefully pinned, was immaculate. She seemed, with so much neatness, beautifully older. Alexander, with a cautious veiled tenderness, returned her look. The sense of my exclusion was for a moment almost unbearable; and I had a sudden repetition of an impression which I had had before in relation to Palmer and Antonia. They simply wanted me out of the way. I had to be somehow, tenderly, carefully, lovingly, but relentlessly dealt with before they could pass me by and get on with their lives together.

Georgie at last had steadily turned to look up at me and our eyes met. Hers were big, intense, troubled, yet full of a vitality which might at any moment shamelessly declare itself as happiness. God knows what she saw in mine. In that interchange she could not help, very briefly, now that she had a hold upon her emotions, exhibiting, almost flaunting before me, her new sense of her freedom. She had said that without freedom she would not exist. No wonder I had lost her. I went to fetch the champagne.

As I returned with bottles and glasses I became aware that Antonia was quietly descending the stairs. She had changed her dress and put on a good deal of make-up. She had evidently decided not to go out. When she saw me she paused a moment, gave me a sombre hostile look, and then proceeded slowly to the drawing-room door. I opened it for her and followed her in. The other two, who were sitting together on the sofa and ostentatiously not talking to each other, rose.

I caught a glimpse over her shoulder of Alexander's face. His features were drawn together as if focusing to a point. The moment passed.

'Well, what a lovely surprise!' said Antonia, her voice a little higher than usual. She was the least under control of the four of us.

'I hope we have your blessing,' said Alexander in a low submissive voice. He stooped towards her.

'My most hearty blessing!' said Antonia. 'Can blessings be hearty? My blessing anyway. Let me kiss the child.' She kissed Georgie, who stared and gripped Antonia's arm as the kiss descended on her cheek. I poured out the champagne.

Alexander and Georgie were exchanging looks. We raised our glasses and I said, 'Let me be the one to say, a happy ending to a strange tale! From Antonia and Martin, to Georgie and Alexander, love and good wishes and congratulations!' Rather awkwardly we clicked the glasses and drank.

I poured out some more. Everybody was needing the stuff and we drank it like addicts. During this ritual there was a curious silence, all of us staring about at each other. I looked at Alexander. His face, seeming a little harder and absurdly young, had the crazy dazed look which is born of reckless behaviour or happiness. He had turned now to look at Antonia and I saw his features focus once again, drawn out to a fine point of provocative appeal. Georgie, not looking at him, was leaning very slightly in his direction as if responding to a magnetic pull. Their bodies were already acquainted. Georgie was gazing up at me now with a fugitive distressed smile well under control, keeping her glass steady at her lips. Drink always restored her. Antonia, holding her glass away from her in one hand in an Egyptian attitude, was staring at Alexander. Her mouth drooped. I noticed the rouge on her cheeks and how elderly she had become. But after all I had become elderly myself. I reflected that we were two aged parents wishing the young people well.

To end the silence which had gone on too long I said to Georgie, 'How smart you're looking! Quite the up-to-date girl.'

Georgie smiled, Antonia sighed, we all fidgeted a little, and Alexander murmured, 'There was a young man of Pitlochry, Kissed an up-to-date girl in the rockery …'

Still desperately kicking the conversation along I said, 'And talking of Pitlochry, where are you off to for your honeymoon?'

Alexander hesitated. He said, 'New York, actually,' and looked at Georgie. I looked at her too. She looked down into her glass.

We were all silenced again. That had been an unlucky move and I could see Georgie's averted face stiffen and grow burning red.

I said hastily, 'How nice. And where will you live? Mainly at Rembers? Or up in town?'

'Both, I expect,' said Alexander. 'But we certainly intend to inhabit Rembers properly, not just at week-ends.' He answered vaguely conscious of Georgie's mounting distress.

'That will be good for Rembers,' I said. 'It's a house that loves people. It will be good for it to have a real family in it, to have children there again.'

As I said this and promptly wished it unsaid, I heard Georgie draw a sharp breath. She closed her eyes and two tears rolled suddenly down her cheeks.

Antonia heard the indrawn breath and turned her head. She saw Georgie's face. Then she said Oh, her mouth worked, her brow reddened, and her own eyes, like two great wells, were instantly overflowing. She bowed her head over the glass which she was holding stiffly in front of her and her tears fell into the champagne. Georgie had covered her face with her handkerchief. I looked at Alexander and Alexander looked at me. After all, for better and worse we had known each other a long time.

Extreme love is fed by everything. So it was that the shock of Georgie's decision, once the immediate pain had been suffered, opened as it were a channel down which my desires with an increased violence ran in the direction of Honor. The thing seemed intended; and in that perspective Georgie's action, though hideously upsetting and painful, counted chiefly as a clearing of the decks. I was, it seemed, to be deprived of consolation. I was to be stripped, shaved and prepared as a destined victim; and I awaited Honor as one awaits, without hope, the searing presence of a god. There was nothing which I could reasonably, even, expect: yet all was in the waiting. It was not until I was positively pushing open the door at Pelham Crescent that it occurred to me that I might not, in the course of my embassy, set eyes on Honor at all: so closely did I think of the brother and sister as being connected.

I closed the front door behind me and hung up my dripping raincoat. I had set out far too early from Hereford Square and had spent some time walking about in the rain trying to become calm and rational. All the same, my heart nearly choked me, so high did it leap, as I knocked on the door of Palmer's study and went in to the lamplight and the quiet interior, warm and dry and close-fitting as the inside of a nut. Palmer was alone.

He lay outstreched on the divan. He was in pyjamas, with the purple dressing-gown and thick red slippers. Although he had his back to the light I saw at once the greenish shadow on his cheek, the remains of the black eye. I saw it with surprise, having forgotten that I had struck him, or having not quite in retrospect believed that his flesh was vulnerable. He was fumbling when I came in with a large box of paper handkerchiefs. A wastepaper basket full of crumpled paper was beside him and his first words were, 'My dear fellow, don't come near me, I've got the most devilish cold!'

I sat down on a chair against the wall, as if I were in a waiting-room. I looked at Palmer wearily, passively. Perhaps after all I had only come to be judged and punished. I waited for him to act.

He sneezed violently several times, said, 'Oh dear, Oh dear!' and then 'Do have some whisky. There's some on the side, and ice in that barrel thing. A cold always goes straight to my liver so I'll stick to barley water.'

I helped myself and lit a cigarette and waited. It now seemed clear to me, desolately, that I was not going to see Honor; and if this, inconclusively, was the end it was a terrible one.