Айрис Мердок - A Severed Head

'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 Antonia 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.'
'You're an artist,' I said, 'and for you doing nothing is doing something. No. I shall get back to Wallenstein and Gustavus Adolphus and What Is a Good General.' I had for some time been quietly engaged on a monograph on the Thirty Years War in which the competence of these two commanders was compared. This was to be a chapter in a projected larger work on what constituted efficiency in a military leader.
'There are no good generals,' said Alexander.
'You are the dupe of Tolstoy who thought all generals were incompetent because all Russian generals were incompetent. Anyway, I shall try to work more seriously in future. Antonia, it must be admitted, was time-consuming.'
'Beautifully,' said Alexander. He sighed again and we were silent for a minute.
'Show me some of the results of your inactivity,' I said.
He rose and pulled back the curtain. He turned the switch in the studio and a number of strips flickered to life overhead, producing the illumination of an overcast afternoon in spring. The great room, which was a Cotswold barn converted by my mother, retained its high roof and rough-hewn wooden rafters from whose scored crevices the warm oily air, gently circulating, seemed to sift down an ancient dust. The long work table, with its scrubbed surface and neat groups of meticulously cleaned tools, spanned the farther wall. Other things, though with an air of having their own places, were dotted about: pieces of uncut stone, enormous tree roots stacked like a tent, wooden blocks of various sizes, like overgrown nursery bricks, tall objects covered with damp grey cloths, a box full of ornamental gourds, a pillar of ebony shaped by nature or art, it was hard to tell which. A row of clay bins flanked the wall by the window, and at the far end was a population of plaster casts, torsos, swinging headless bodies, and heads mounted on rough wooden stands. The floor of blue imitation Dutch encaustic tiles was covered, according to a fantasy of Alexander's, with dry rushes and straw.
Alexander crossed the room and began carefully to undo the cloths which draped one of the tall objects. A revolving pedestal began to appear with something mounted upon it. As he removed the last cloth he switched off the centre lights and turned on a single anglepoise lamp on the work table which he swung round towards the pedestal. There was a clay head in the first stages of composition, the early stages when the wire framework had been roughly filled out and then the clay laid over it in various directions in long strips until the semblance of a head appears. This particular moment has always seemed to me uncanny, when the faceless image acquires a quasi-human personality, and one is put in mind of the making of monsters.
'Who is it?'
'I don't know!' said Alexander. 'It's not a portrait. Yet I feel odd about it, as if I were looking for the person it was of. I've never worked quite like this and it may be useless. I did some quite non-realistic heads, you remember, ages ago.'
'Your perspex phase.'
'Yes, then. But I've never wanted to do an imaginary realistic head before.' He moved the lamp slowly and the oblique light made dark lines between the strips of clay.
'Why don't modern sculptors do them?» I asked.
'I don't know,' said Alexander. 'We don't believe in human nature in the old Greek way any more. There is nothing between schematized symbols and caricature. What I want here is some sort of impossible liberation. Never mind. I shall go on playing with it and interrogating it and perhaps it will tell me something.'
'I envy you,' I said. 'You have a technique for discovering more about what is real.'
'So have you,' said Alexander. 'It is called morality.'
I laughed. 'Rusted through lack of practice, brother. Show me something else.'
'Who is this?' said Alexander. He turned the anglepoise directly upward and revealed a bronze head which was mounted on a bracket above the work table.
I felt a shock of surprise even before I recognized it. 'I haven't seen that in years.' It was Antonia.
Alexander had done the head in the early days of our marriage and then professed dissatisfaction with it and refused to part with it. It was in a light golden bronze and showed a youthful forward-darting Antonia that was not quite familiar to me: a champagne-toasted dancing-on-the-table Antonia that seemed to belong to another age. The shape of the head was excellent, however, and the great flowing pile of hair at the back, wildly tressed and somewhat Grecian: and the big rapacious slightly parted lips, these I knew. But it was a younger, gayer, more keenly directed Antonia than my own. Perhaps she had existed and I had forgotten. There was nothing there of the warm muddle of my wife. I shivered.
'It can't be her without the body,' I said. Antonia's swaying body was an essential part of her presence.
'Yes, some people are more their body than others,' said Alexander, as he played the beam over his head, unshadowing a cheek. 'All the same, heads are us most of all, the apex of our incarnation. The best thing about being God would be making the heads.'
'I don't think I like a sculpted head alone,' I said. 'It seems to represent an unfair advantage, an illicit and incomplete relationship.'
'An illicit and incomplete relationship,' said Alexander. 'Yes. Perhaps an obsession. Freud on Medusa. The head can represent the female genitals, feared not desired.'
'I didn't mean anything so fancy,' I said. 'Any savage likes to collect heads.'
'You wouldn't let me collect yours!' said Alexander. I had never let Alexander sculpt me, though he had often begged.
'To carry on your pike? No!' As we laughed he drew his hand over the back of my head, feeling the shape under the hair. A sculptor thinks from the skull outwards.
We stood for a little longer looking up at the head of Antonia until I felt the misery rising in my heart. I said, 'I could face a stiff drink soon. By the way, I sent off a case of Vierge de Clery and some brandy.'
'They came this morning,' said Alexander. 'But no port! All claret would be port if it could.'
'Not if I could catch it in time!' I said. We had this argument every Christmas.
'I'm afraid we've got the usual mob coming tomorrow,' said Alexander. 'I wasn't able to put them off. Rosemary says they look forward to it! But with luck we may be snowed up.'
We wandered across to the door and opened it, pausing on the threshold to look at the scene outside. The cold air touched us sharply. It was darker now, but the last light of day lingered with a living glow which seemed to emerge from the snow itself. The white untrodden sheet stretched away to where the two great acacia trees, loaded now and half sketched in in black, marked the end of the lawn and framed the now hidden vista of hills wherein were folded the lost ironstone villages of Sibford Gower and Sibford Ferris. The snow fell silent and straight down out of a windless sky, and through the open door we apprehended its positive silence. We were shuttered as in a tomb. Then darkly blurred as in a Chinese picture, a blackbird on its way to roost moved suddenly in the lee of a bush, turned its head towards us, and then sped away noiselessly low over the snow. In the last twilight of the afternoon we saw its eye and its orange beak.
'The ousel-cock, so black of hue,
With orange-tawny bill,'
Alexander murmured.
'You quote too aptly, brother.'
Too aptly?'
'You don't recall the rest?'
'No.'
'The throstle with his note so true,
The wren with little quill,
The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,
The plain-song cuckoo grey,
Whose note full many a man doth mark,
And dare not answer nay.'
Alexander was silent for a moment. Then he said, 'Have you been faithful to Antonia?'
The question took me by surprise. However I replied at once, 'Yes, of course.'
Alexander sighed. The light came on in the drawing-room and cast into the darkening air a cone of gold into which the snowflakes, grey now and scarcely visible above, filtered to become, before they came to rest, tinsel for a moment. The evergreen kissing bough which Rosemary laboriously plaited every Christmas, as my mother had taught her to do, was to be seen hanging in the window, decked with coloured balls, and oranges and long-tailed birds and candles and hung with mistletoe; and now I could see my sister mounting on a chair to set the candles alight. They flickered, and then rose in a strong glow as the old ambiguous symbol swayed slightly in the breeze that always haunted those tall ill-fitting Victorian windows.
'Why «of course»?' said Alexander.
At that moment we heard the tinkle of the piano. Rosemary was beginning to play a carol. It was Once in Royal David's City. I took a deep breath and turned away from the door. I crossed the room to collect my cigarettes which I had left in the bay-window. Alexander, who did not seem to expect an answer to his question, had turned the anglepoise back to shine upon his unfinished head. We contemplated it together to the distant sound of the piano. I had known that it reminded me of something, something sad and frightening, and as I looked now at the damp grey featureless face I remembered what it was. When my mother had died Alexander had wanted to take a death mask, but my father had not let him. I recalled with a sudden vividness the scene in the bedroom with the still figure on the bed, its face covered with a sheet.
I shuddered and turned to the doorway. It was quite dark outside now. The snow fell, invisible save in the light from the window, into the depths of its own sleep. Rosemary began to play another verse.