A Severed Head Read online

  Iris Murdoch

  A SEVERED HEAD

  1961

  One

  ‘You’re sure she doesn’t know,’ said Georgie.

  ‘Antonia? About us? Certain.’

  Georgie was silent for a moment and then said, ‘Good.’ That curt ‘Good’ was characteristic of her, typical of a toughness which had, to my mind, more to do with honesty than with ruthlessness. I liked the dry way in which she accepted our relationship. Only with a person so eminently sensible could I have deceived my wife.

  We lay half embraced in front of Georgie’s gas fire. She reclined against my shoulder while I examined a tress of her dark hair, surprised again to find in it so many threads of a pure reddish gold. Her hair was as straight as a horse’s tail, almost as coarse, and very long. Georgie’s room was obscure now except for the light of the fire and a trio of red candles burning upon the mantelpiece. The candles, together with a few scraggy bits of holly dotted about at random, were as near as Georgie, whose ‘effects’ were always a little ramshackle, could get to Christmas decorations, yet the room had a glitter all the same as of some half descried treasure cavern. In front of the candles, as at an altar, stood one of my presents to her, a pair of Chinese incense holders in the form of little bronze warriors, who held aloft as spears the glowing sticks of incense. Their grey fumes drifted hazily to and fro until sent by the warmth of the candle flames to circle suddenly dervish-like upward to the darkness above. The room was heavy with a stifling smell of Kashmir poppy and sandalwood. Bright wrapping-paper from our exchange of presents lay all about, and pushed into a corner was the table which still bore the remains of our meal and the empty bottle of Château Sancy de Parabère 1955. I had been with Georgie since lunchtime. Outside the window and curtained away was the end of the cold raw misty London afternoon now turned to an evening which still contained in a kind of faintly luminous haze what had never, even at midday, really been daylight.

  Georgie sighed and rolled over with her head in my lap. She was dressed now except for her shoes and stockings. ‘When must you go?’

  ‘About five.’

  ‘Don’t let me catch you being mean with time.’

  Such remarks were as near as I ever got to feeling the sharper edge of her love. I could not have wished for a more tactful mistress.

  ‘Antonia’s session ends at five,’ I said. ‘I should be back at Hereford Square soon after that. She always wants to discuss it. And we have a dinner engagement.’ I lifted Georgie’s head a little and drew her hair forward, spreading it over her breasts. Rodin would have liked that.

  ‘How is Antonia’s analysis going?’

  ‘Fizzingly. She enjoys it disgracefully. Of course, it’s all for fun anyhow. She’s got a tremendous transference.’

  ‘Palmer Anderson,’ said George, naming Antonia’s psychoanalyst, who was also a close friend of Antonia and myself. ‘Yes, I can imagine becoming addicted to him. He has a clever face. I imagine he’s good at his trade.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I dislike what you call his trade. But he’s certainly good at something. Perhaps he’s just good. He’s not simply sweet and polite and gentle as only Americans can be sweet and polite and gentle, though he is that. He has real power in him.’

  ‘You sound rather carried away by him yourself!” said Georgie. She edged into a more comfortable position, her head in the crook of my knee.

  ‘Perhaps I am,’ I said. ‘Knowing him has made a lot of difference to me.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I can’t say exactly. Perhaps he has made me worry less about the rules!’

  ‘The rules!’ Georgie laughed. ‘Darling, surely you became indifferent to the rules long ago.’

  ‘Good heavens, no!’ I said. ‘I’m not indifferent to them now. I’m not a Child of Nature like you. No, it’s not exactly that. But Palmer is good at setting people free.’

  ‘If you think I don’t worry - but never mind. As for setting people free, I don’t trust these professional liberators. Anyone who is good at setting people free is also good at enslaving them, if we are to believe Plato. The trouble with you, Martin, is that you are always looking for a master.’

  I laughed. ‘Now that I have a mistress I don’t want a master! But how did you come across Palmer? Oh, of course, through the sister.’

  ‘The sister,’ said Georgie. ‘Yes, the curious Honor Klein. I saw him at a party she gave for her pupils once. But she didn’t introduce him.’

  ‘Is she any good?’

  ‘Honor? You mean as an anthropologist? She’s quite well thought of in Cambridge. She never actually taught me, of course. Anyway, she was usually away visiting one of her savage tribes. She was supposed to organize and help me with my moral problems. God!’

  ‘She’s Palmer’s half-sister, isn’t she? How does it work? They seem to be several nationalities between them.’

  ‘I think this is it,’ said Georgie. ‘They share a Scottish mother who married Anderson first and then Klein when Anderson died.’

  ‘I know about Anderson. He was Danish-American, an architect or something. But what about the other father?’

  ‘Emmanuel Klein. You ought to know about him. He was not a bad classical scholar. A German Jew, of course.’

  ‘I knew he was a learned something-or-other,’ I said. ‘Palmer spoke of him once or twice. Interesting. He said he still had nightmares about his step-father. I suspect he’s a bit frightened of his sister too, though he never actually says so.’

  ‘She could inspire awe,’ said Georgie. ‘There’s something primitive about her. Perhaps it’s all those tribes. But you’ve met her, haven’t you?’

  ‘I have just met her,’ I said, ‘though I can’t recall much about her. She just seemed the Female Don in person. Why do those women have to look like that?’

  ‘Those women!’ Georgie laughed. ‘I’m one of them now, darling! Anyway, she certainly has power in her.’

  ‘You have power without looking like a haystack!’

  ‘Me?’ said Georgie. ‘I’m not in that class. I don’t carry half so many guns.’

  ‘You said I was carried away by the brother. You seem to be carried away by the sister.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t like her,’ said Georgie. ‘That’s another matter.’

  She sat up abruptly and retrieved her hair and began very rapidly to plait it. She tossed the heavy plait back over her shoulder. Then she hitched up her skirt and some layers of stiff white petticoat and began to draw on a pair of peacock-blue stockings which I had given her. I loved to give Georgie outrageous things, absurd garments and gewgaws which I could not possibly have given Antonia, barbarous necklaces and velvet pants and purple underwear and black openwork tights, which drove me mad. I rose now and wandered about the room, watching her possessively as with a tense demure consciousness of my gaze she adjusted the lurid stockings.

  Georgie’s room, a large untidy bed-sitting-room which looked out on to what was virtually an alleyway in the proximity of Covent Garden, was full of things which I had given her. I had for long, and vainly, waged a battle with Georgie’s relentless lack of taste. The numerous Italian prints, French paperweights, pieces of Derby, Worcester, Coleport, Spode, Copeland, and other bric-à-brac - for I hardly ever arrived without bringing something - lay about, for all my efforts, in a dusty hurly-burly more reminiscent of a junk shop than a civilized room. Georgie was, somehow, not designed by nature to possess things. Whereas when Antonia or I bought anything, which we constantly did, it found its place at once in the rich and highly integrated mosaic of our surroundings, Georgie seemed to have no such carapace. There was no one of her possessions which she would not, at the drop of a hat, have given away and not missed; and meanwhile her things lay about in a
sort of impermanent jumble on which my continually renewed sortings and orderings seemed to have little effect. This characteristic of my beloved exasperated me, but since it was also a part, after all, of Georgie’s remarkable detachment and lack of worldly pretension, I admired it and loved it as well. It was, moreover, as I sometimes reflected, the very image and symbol of my relation to Georgie, my mode of possessing her, or more precisely the way in which I, as it were, failed to possess her. I possessed Antonia in a way not totally unlike the way in which I possessed the magnificent set of original prints by Audubon which adorned our staircase at home. I did not possess Georgie. Georgie was simply there.

  When Georgie had finished with her stockings, she leaned back against the armchair and looked up at me. She had, with her dark heavy hair, rather light clear greyish-blue eyes. Her face was broad, strong rather than delicate, but her remarkably pale complexion had a finish of ivory. Her large somewhat upturned nose, her despair and my joy, which she was always contracting and stroking in a vain attempt to make it aquiline, now forgotten in repose, gave to her expression a certain attentive animal quality which softened the edge of her cleverness. Now in the incense-laden half-light, her face was full of curves and shadows. For some time we held each other’s gaze. This sort of quiet gazing, which was like a feeding of the heart, was something which I had not experienced with any other woman. Antonia and I had never looked at each other like that. Antonia would not have sustained such a steady gaze for so long: warm, possessive, and coquettish, she would not so have exposed herself.

  ‘River goddess,’ I said at last.

  ‘Merchant prince.’

  ‘Do you love me?’

  ‘Yes, to distraction. Do you love me?’

  ‘Yes, infinitely.’

  ‘Not infinitely,’ said Georgie. ‘Let us be exact. Your love is a great but finite quantity.’

  We both knew what she referred to, but there were some topics which it was profitless to discuss, and this we both knew also. There was no question of my leaving my wife.

  ‘Do you want me to put my hand in the fire?’ I said.

  Georgie still kept my gaze. At such moments her intelligence and her lucidity made her beauty ring like a silver coin. Then with a quick movement she turned about and laid her head upon my feet, prostrating herself before me. As I briefly contemplated her homage I reflected that there was no one in the world at whose feet I would myself have lain in such an attitude of abandonment. Then I knelt down and gathered her into my arms.

  A little later when we had finished for the moment with kissing each other and had lit cigarettes, Georgie said, ‘She knows your brother.’

  ‘Who knows my brother?’

  ‘Honor Klein.’

  ‘Are you still on about her? Yes, I believe so. They met on some committee at the time of the Mexican Art Exhibition.’

  ‘When am I going to meet your brother?’ said Georgie.

  ‘Never, as far as I’m concerned!’

  ‘You said you always used to pass your girls on to him, because he couldn’t get any of his own!’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘but I’m certainly not going to pass you on!’ Ever since I had made that injudicious remark my brother Alexander had become an object of romantic fantasy to my mistress.

  ‘I want to meet him,’ said Georgie, ‘just because he’s your brother. I adore siblings, having none of my own. Does he resemble you?’

  ‘Yes, a bit,’ I said. ‘All Lynch-Gibbons resemble each other. Only he’s round-shouldered and not so handsome. I’ll introduce you to my sister Rosemary if you like.’

  ‘I don’t want to meet your sister Rosemary,’ said Georgie, ‘I want to meet Alexander, and I shall go on and on at you about it, just as I shall go on and on at you about that trip to New York.’

  Georgie had an obsession about seeing New York, and I had in fact very rashly promised to take her with me on a business trip which I had made to that city last autumn. At the last moment, however, some qualm of conscience, or more likely some failure of nerve, at the prospect of having to lie on quite such a scale to Antonia made me change my mind. I have never seen anyone as bitterly and so childishly disappointed; and I had since then renewed my promise to take her with me on the next occasion.

  ‘There’s no need to nag me about that,’ I said. ‘One of these days we’ll go to New York together, on condition I hear no more nonsense about paying your own fare. Think how much you disapprove of unearned income! You might at least let me spend mine on a sensible project!’

  ‘Of course it’s ludicrous your being a businessman,’ said Georgie. ‘You’re far too clever. You ought to have been a don.’

  ‘You imagine that being a don is the only proper way of being clever. Perhaps you are turning into a blue stocking after all.’ I caressed one of her legs.

  ‘You got the best History first of your year, didn’t you?’ said Georgie. ‘What did Alexander get, by the way?’

  ‘He got a second. So you see how unworthy of your attention he is.’

  ‘At least he had the sense not to go into business,’ said Georgie. My brother is a talented and quite well-known sculptor.

  I was in fact half of Georgie’s opinion that I should have been a don, and the subject was a painful one. My father had been a prosperous wine merchant, founder of the firm of Lynch-Gibbon and McCabe. On his death the firm had split into two parts, a larger part which remained with the McCabe family, and a smaller part which comprised the original claret connexion in which my grandfather had been interested, which I now managed myself. I knew too, although she never said so, that Georgie believed that my having stayed in business had something to do with Antonia. Her belief was not totally erroneous.

  As I had no taste for this particular discussion and also wanted to get off the subject of my dear brother, I said, ‘What will you be doing on Christmas Day? I shall want to think about you.’

  Georgie frowned. ‘Oh, I shall be out with some of the chaps from the School. There’ll be a big party.’ She added, ‘I won’t want to think about you. It’s odd how it hurts at these times not to be part of your proper family.’

  I had no answer to that. I said, ‘I shall be having a quiet day with Antonia. We’re staying in London this time. Rosemary will be at Rembers with Alexander.’

  ‘I don’t want to know,’ said Georgie. ‘I don’t want to know what you do when you’re not with me. It’s better not to feed the imagination. I prefer to think that when you aren’t here you don’t exist.’

  In fact, I thought along these lines myself. I was lying beside her now and holding her feet, her beautiful Acropolis feet as I called them, which were partly visible through the fine blue stockings. I kissed them, and returned to gazing at her. The heavy rope of hair descended between her breasts and she had swept a few escaping tresses severely back behind her ears. She had a beautifully shaped head: yes, positively Alexander must never meet her. I said, ‘I’m bloody lucky.’

  ‘You mean you’re bloody safe,’ said Georgie. ‘Oh yes, you’re safe, damn you!’

  ‘Liaison dangereuse,’ I said. ‘And yet we lie, somehow, out of danger.’

  ‘You do,’ said Georgie. ‘If Antonia ever found out about this, you’d drop me like a hot potato.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ I said. Yet I wondered if she wasn’t right. ‘She won’t find out,’ I said, ‘and if she did, I’d manage. You are essential to me.’

  ‘No one is essential to anyone,’ said Georgie. ‘There you go looking at your watch again. All right, go if you must. What about one for the road? Shall I open that bottle of Nuits de Young?’

  ‘How many times must I tell you never to drink claret unless it has been open at least three hours?’

  ‘Don’t be so holy about it,’ said Georgie. ‘As far as I’m concerned the stuff is just booze.’

  ‘Little barbarian!’ I said affectionately. ‘You can give me some gin and French. Then I really must go.’

  Georgie brought me the glass and we sat e
nlaced like a beautiful netsuke in front of the warm murmuring fire. Her room seemed a subterranean place, remote, enclosed, hidden. It was for me a moment of great peace. I did not know then that it was the last, the very last moment of peace, the end of the old innocent world, the final moment before I was plunged into the nightmare of which these ensuing pages tell the story.

  I pushed up the sleeve of her jersey and stroked her arm. ‘Wonderful stuff, flesh.’

  ‘When’ll I see you?’ said Georgie.

  ‘Not till after Christmas,’ I said. ‘I’ll come if I can about the twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth. But I’ll ring up anyway before that.’

  ‘I wonder if we’ll ever be able to be more open about this?’ said Georgie. ‘I do rather hate the lies. Well, I suppose not.’

  ‘Not,’ I said. I didn’t like the hard words she used, but I had to give it her back as sharply. ‘We’re stuck with the lies, I’m afraid. Yet, you know, this may sound perverse, but part of the nature, almost of the charm, of this relation is its being so utterly private.’

  ‘You mean its being clandestine is of its essence,’ said Georgie, ‘and if it were exposed to the daylight it would crumble to pieces? I don’t think I like that idea.’

  ‘I didn’t quite say that,’ I said. ‘But knowledge, other people’s knowledge, does inevitably modify what it touches. Remember the legend of Psyche, whose child, if she told about her pregnancy, would be mortal, whereas if she kept silent it would be a god.’

  It was an unfortunate speech on which to part from Georgie, for it brought our minds back to something which I at least preferred never now to think about. Last spring my beloved had become pregnant. There was nothing to be done but to get rid of the child. Georgie had gone through with the hideous business in the manner that I would have expected of her, calm, laconic, matter-of-fact, even cheering me along with her surly wit. We had found it exceedingly difficult to discuss the matter even at the time, and we had not spoken of it since. What vast wound that catastrophe had perhaps made in Georgie’s proud and upright spirit I did not know. For myself, I got off with an extraordinary ease. Because of Georgie’s character, her toughness and the stoical nature of her devotion to me, I had not had to pay. It had all been quite uncannily painless. I was left with a sense of not having suffered enough. Only sometimes in dreams did I experience certain horrors, glimpses of a punishment which would perhaps yet find its hour.