psyche abhors a vacuum. Honor and I are going away soon to travel, far away, and for a long time. Nothing real detains you. Come with us.'
I looked at the ground. Palmer had a talent for making me feel that I was going mad. I had never heard speak more clearly the voice that says 'all is permitted'. And with that 'all is permitted' came also 'all is possible', and a vision of Honor, somehow, somewhere, after all, existing in my future. I looked up again and saw that, coming from the door behind Palmer, she had entered the room.
I rose, and for a second I wondered if I should faint. But then, holding the back of my chair, I saw myself confronting them as a prisoner confronts his judges. This made me harden and I breathed and sat down again, staring.
Honor was dressed in a high-necked black garment of which I could not remember afterwards whether it was a silk dress or an overall. Her arms were bare below the elbow. She stood behind Palmer, whose relaxed body seemed to glow with awareness of her, and they both observed me, Honor with her head lowered and her shining band of hair falling forward to frame her eyes. She stood behind Palmer like a captor, and the voluptuous curve of his relaxed body spoke the word 'victim'. I felt I ought to turn away.
'I've asked Martin to join us,' said Palmer. He was watching me with a broad half-smiling face, as one might watch a struggling fish or a fly.
'Are you mocking me, Palmer?' I said. I could not look at Honor.
'Don't fall below your destiny, Martin,' said Palmer. 'As a psycho-analyst, I don't of course imagine that freedom is to be won by convulsive movements of the will. All the same, there are times of decision. You are not a man to be bound by ordinary rules. Only let your imagination encompass what your heart privately desires. Tell yourself: nothing is impossible.'
I laughed and rose to my feet again. 'You are mad,' I said. 'Do you really imagine that I could live, for however short a while, with you two, that I can even go on knowing you two? Am I to take this seriously?' At this my eyes met Honor's over Palmer's head.
In that instant a communication passed between us, and even as it did so I reflected that it was perhaps the final one. I did not imagine it; she gave me a very slight shake of the head and a curtain came down over her eyes. It was a decisive and authoritative farewell: in the pain of which, as I received it, I also knew for certain that she had not talked about me to her brother. It was our first and last moment of intimacy, vivid, but concentrated to a solitary point. I looked back instantly to Palmer.
I said, 'We have finished with each other.'
'In that case,' said Palmer, 'since we are going away for good, I doubt if we shall meet again.'
'Then good-bye,' I said.
'As you choose, Martin,' said Palmer, 'as you choose.'
Twenty-five
'He was terribly depressed and disappointed,' I said, 'but as you can imagine, very clear-headed. He told me to say you're not to worry about him and that he'll recover in time. He said how grateful he was to you, how he hoped he hadn't hurt you, how he wished it had all been possible. He was brave though. He said he had to accept your decision and that it wouldn't really have worked. But he said it was a marvellous attempt and he wouldn't wish it undone.'
We had been over this a number of times. 'I wonder how I know that you're lying?' said Antonia.
It was breakfast-time, a late breakfast-time, on the next day. Antonia and I, still in dressing-gowns, were sitting on over the cold toast and coffee. It seemed that neither of us could move. She was pale, listless, and irritable. I was exhausted.
'I'm not lying,' I said. 'If you won't believe what I say, why do you keep asking me?'
Now that the taboo had been broken Antonia could talk of nothing but Palmer, endlessly remaking her relationship with him retrospectively.
'Whatever he said he didn't say that,' said Antonia.
I had not the heart to tell her that she had scarcely been mentioned. 'Alexander's right,' I said. 'He's not quite human.'
'When did he say that?' said Antonia.
'When he heard about you and Palmer.'
Antonia frowned down at the cold cloudy liquid in her cup. She pushed back on to her shoulder the half- undone bundle of her weighty hair. She said 'Ach –', and then 'Nor is she.'
'Nor is she,' I agreed, and sighed. We both sighed.
'I hope they go to America or Japan and stay there,' said Antonia. 'I don't want to hear of them again, I don't want to know that they exist.'
'That's what will happen, my darling,' I said. 'Falling out of love is a matter of forgetting how charming someone is. You'll be surprised how soon you forget.' We sighed again.
'Forget! Forget!' said Antonia. 'We both seem to be half dead.' She lifted her eyes to mine, sombre, restless, cross.
I wondered whether I did indeed want to leave her. Yes, I suppose I did. Not that it mattered. I wondered what, at that moment, she was thinking about me. With curiosity and hostility we examined each other.
'You do love me, don't you, Martin?' said Antonia. She asked it, not tenderly, but with a sort of brisk anxiety.
I said, 'Of course I do, of course.'
It sounded flimsy enough, and we went on looking at each other morosely, our eyes dark with private grief. It would have needed a great effort to take her hand and I did not make the effort. And as I stared and stared at last Antonia became invisible and all I could see was Honor, her dark assassin's head bowed a little towards me, the curtain falling upon the light of her eyes.
'There's a parcel for you, by the way.'
I returned with a start. I broke up some cold rubbery toast in my hand. I wondered if I had the energy to make us some more hot coffee. 'Oh, where?'
'In the hall,' said Antonia. 'Don't move, I'll get it. And I'll put on the kettle for more coffee.'
She came back in a moment carrying a long narrow box covered in brown paper which she put down beside me with the words 'Orchids from some admirer!' and then went away into the kitchen.
I looked at the box and picked at my lower lip. My lips were dry and cracked with too much smoking. I lit another cigarette and wondered distantly how I would get through the day. It was a problem demanding some ingenuity. I glanced at the window and saw that it was still raining. I cut the string of the parcel with the bread knife.
I had no fight in me, that was the truth. I did not want to receive any more lashes. Palmer had too much confused me. If he had deliberately intended to place a barrier across the path of my desires he could not have done better; and this made me half believe that, after all, he knew. But with this, and with far more authority, there came the image of Honor shaking her head: Honor utterly secret but lost. I began to pull t he paper off the box.
Palmer did not know, but it didn't matter now whether he knew or not. They would go, the infernal pair, to Los Angeles, to San Francisco, to Tokyo, and Antonia and I would forget; and I would do, and she would do, what defeated desire, together with a bored and dim conscience, suggested as remaining for us to do. I opened the box.
There was a lot of dark stuff inside. I stared at it with a sort of puzzled revulsion, wondering what it was. I stood up and moved the box to the light to see it better. I felt I did not want to touch it. At last I did very gingerly touch it, and as I did so I realized that it was human hair. It took me another moment to recognize the long thick tress which filled the box as Georgie's hair, Georgie's whole beautiful dark chestnut-tinted head of hair. I cannoned violently into Antonia in the doorway.
'Georgie,' I called, 'Georgie,' and banged again upon the locked door of her room. There was silence within.
