As I got the car out I exclaimed to Antonia that of course Georgie must be all right since she would be with Alexander, and Antonia had told me that Alexander had rung up from Rembers last night when I was out and had mentioned that Georgie was still in London. All the same, Antonia thought my anxiety was completely irrational. I knocked again.
I listened to the silence. Of course it was ridiculous to be so afraid. The arrival of the hair had had the heavy significance of a token in a dream; but there was no need to apply nightmare logic to it. Georgie's present was doubtless a jest, though a rather bitter and macabre one. She herself was probably at this moment in some nearby library, and I stood outside an empty room. Yet I could not quite convince myself of this and I knew that I could not go away. I wondered if I should make some more telephone calls; but I had already rung all the numbers where she might be found. Almost by now I simply wanted to get into the room as if this in itself would avert disaster. The locked door had become magnetic. Still I waited, until, prompted suddenly by something I thought I heard, I leaned down and put my ear to the keyhole, holding my breath. After a moment I heard a sound and then came the same sound repeated. It seemed to be a low regular sigh of heavy breathing coming from just inside the door. I straightened up and stood for a moment chilled and paralysed. What I had heard terrified me. ,
Georgie's windows were inaccessible. There was no way in but through the door. I threw myself against it once or twice in a futile manner. Then I remembered the decorator's tools which were still lying about downstairs. I rushed down and began to turn them over. The street door was open as usual and outside on the bright rainy pavements people were going to and fro. I selected a heavy flat-ended cementing trowel and a hammer and raced back upstairs. I dug the edge of the trowel as deeply as possible into the crack of the door beside the lock and drove it farther in with blows of the hammer. Then I used the trowel as a lever. Something cracked inside. A moment later the handle of the trowel broke off. I pushed the door but it was still firm. I took the hammer and struck the door with all my strength in the region of the lock. There was more cracking and then I could see a crevice growing wide. I gave it my shoulder and the door came open.
I went in and pushed it to behind me. There was a heavy silence within. The room was dark, as the curtains were still drawn. The place was airless and smelt vilely of alcohol and stale tobacco smoke whose fumes seemed to linger visibly in the air as I pulled the curtains apart. Or perhaps I only imagined that there was a grey haze. Someone was lying on the floor. It took me a moment to be certain that it was Georgie. It was not just that her shorn head made her hard to recognize: her face too, in a deep slumber of unconsciousness, had quite lost the semblance of her usual self, had become as it were anonymous. It seemed as if she had almost, already, gone.
I leaned over her and spoke her name and shook her by the shoulder. She was completely inert and I realized that she had passed beyond any such immediate recall. Her face was puffed and blueish, and she was breathing raucously through her mouth. I did not hesitate for long. I found the telephone book and dialled the number of Charing Cross Hospital and explained that someone had accidentally taken an overdose of sleeping pills. They promised an ambulance at once. In that area it was a daily occurrence.
I knelt down on the floor beside Georgie. I wondered if I ought to go on trying to wake her, but decided not to. I felt obscurely that I might do her harm by touching her; her condition imposed a taboo and the limp half- inhabited body filled me with a sort of revulsion. She looked like a drowned girl. At first I kept looking at her face whose strangeness fascinated me. It was indeed as if she had become a different person, as if an alien being had taken her body. I could have been persuaded that this was merely a rough semblance of Georgie; and as she lay there completely limp with her mouth open, the lifeless air and the deep regular breathing made her seem like a waxwork. She was lying on her side with one hand extended above her head. She was wearing a blue shirt and black trousers. These I recognized. Her feet were bare. I contemplated her feet. These I recognized too. I touched them, They felt cold and waxen and I covered them with a cushion. I looked at her long trousered legs and at the curve of her thigh. The shirt was unbuttoned and I could see the rise of a breast within. I looked at her neck and at one ear now more fully revealed by the shorn hair. I looked at her extended familiar hand, the palm uppermost and open as in a gesture of appeal or release. All these I had possessed. But now it was as if all had disintegrated into pieces, the pieces of Georgie, the person lost.
I was scarcely at that moment capable of memories or speculations. But I seemed again to hear her voice saying, 'Martin, you don't know how near the edge I am.' Indeed, there was so much I did not know, had not cared to know. Georgie's stoicism had helped to make me a brute. She had so cunningly spared me her sufferings. I had enjoyed but never had to pay. But someone had paid. As I looked down at her slim inert body I recalled the nightmare of her pregnancy which had ended in relieved embraces and champagne. If she died, I had killed her. I thought this, but stupidly and without feeling. There was no whole presence in the flesh before me and I still could not bring myself to touch her. It would have been like fingering parts of a corpse. Yet with a sense of abasement in which there was an element of desire I lay full length on the floor beside her with my face close to hers. I could feel her breath.
Some moments passed. I heard a sound at the door and began to rise. Reclining on one elbow I saw a figure enter. The door closed again. Honor Klein was looking down at me.
I got as far as a sitting position and said, 'The ambulance is coming.'
Honor said, 'I was afraid of this. She sent me a very strange letter.'
I said, 'She sent me her hair.»
Honor stared at me. Her face was closed and stiff. Then she looked at Georgie and said, 'I see. That's it. I thought she looked rather odd.' She spoke with detachment and precision.
I thought, she is pitiless. Then I thought, so am I.
Honor was wearing a shabby unbelted mackintosh. She was hatless, her black hair a little sleeked by the rain. As she stood there, hands in pockets, surveying the room she had a sharp business-like air. She might have been a detective. I rose to my feet.
She said, 'As she let us both know let us hope that she has not made a serious attempt. Have you found the tablets?'
I had not thought of that. We began to hunt, shifting books and papers, upsetting loaded ash-trays and piles of underclothes, and tipping the contents of drawers on the floor, stepping to and fro over Georgie's inert legs. I undid the dishevelled bed and looked under the pillow. Turning back to see Georgie still lying there amid the disordered sea of her belongings and glimpsing for a second the intent face of Honor as she rifled another cupboard I wondered into what half-ludicrous nightmare I had strayed. At last we found something, an empty bottle which had contained a well-known brand of sleeping drug, and we left off our search.
I looked at my watch. It was hard to believe that it was less than ten minutes since I had telephoned the hospital. The ambulance must arrive soon. Suddenly still, Honor and I looked at each other across the recumbent Georgie. It occurred to me that this was the first time that I had been alone with Honor since the night in Cambridge. Only I was not alone with her. We had a terrible chaperone. She was present to me, but only as a torment, as an apparition; and I knew that I was looking at her as I had never looked at any human being but as one might look at a demon. And she looked back out of her shallow Jewish mask, the line of her mouth dead straight between the curving lips, the narrow eyes black. Then we both looked down at Georgie.
Honor knelt down beside her and began to clear away from round her the various papers, garments, and other oddments which had a little snowed upon her during our rifling of the room. I saw with a curious surprise that Georgie was lying in exactly the same drowned attitude as when I had arrived. When Honor had cleared a space about her she put her hand on the girl's shoulder and turned her on to her back, moving her outflung arm down to her breast. Then she put a cushion under her head. I shivered. As I knelt on the other side the two women composed for me for an instant into an eerie pieta. Honor with bowed head, suddenly gentle with concern, and Georgie slain, alienated, sleeping.
Honor was still touching Georgie's shoulder. As if this contact lent an articulate presence to the sleeping girl, I now felt able to touch her too and I drew my finger down her thigh. I could feel the soft warm leg through the material. But what I felt more, as in an electric circuit, was the shiver of connexion between Honor's hand and mine; and I remembered our two hands almost touching on the blade of the Samurai sword. I covered my face. The ambulance came.
Twenty-six
