A Severed Head

paused once more in front of me, his smooth clever American face all gentleness and concern, his fur of silver hair shining in the lamplight. There was something abstract in his face. It was impossible to pin wickedness or corruption on to such an image.
'It is an important fact,' said Palmer, 'that you and I began it. We began it, did we not, by becoming exceptionally attached to one another. Attachments of that degree are rare in my life. You are certain you are not angry with me?'
'Cher maitre!' I said. I contemplated Palmer's clear open face with its uncanny youthfulness. 'I seem not to know how to be angry with you,' I said slowly, 'although in a way I want to be. I've drunk too much already this evening and I'm not yet sure what has happened to me. I feel very desolate and hurt and confused, but not angry.' It occurred to me then as significant that I had come to see Palmer this evening instead of summoning him to see me. It had not even come into my mind to summon him. It was I who had come running.
'You see, Martin, I am wrapping nothing up,' said Palmer.
'Yes, you are,' I said, 'but very cleverly. It's all wrapping. You're too clever for me. No wonder Antonia wants you. She's probably too clever for me too, only I never realized it.'
Palmer stood looking at me for a while, serene and detached and tender with only a very little anxiety in his look. He pulled at the top of his dressing-gown where a snowy white shirt emerged, and bared a little more of his long neck. Then he resumed his pacing. He said, as if confidently testing something out, 'I knew you'd take it well, I knew you'd take it splendidly.'
'I'm not aware that I've yet revealed how I'm taking it!' I said. But as I said this I realized with a bitter clarity that I had already fallen into my role, my role of 'taking it well', which had been prepared for me by Palmer and Antonia. I had put my head straight into the halter which with care and concern and even affection was being held out. It was important to them that I should let them off morally, that I should spare them the necessity of being ruthless. But if I had power, I was already surrendering it. It was already too late for violence. I was indeed facing something big and formidably well organized.
Palmer seemed to ignore my remark. 'You see,' he said, 'it is not all our idea that you should leave us. In a strange and rather wonderful way we can't do without you. We shall hold on to you, we shall look after you. You'll see.'
'I thought I was supposed to grow up.'
Palmer laughed. 'Oh, don't imagine it will be easy! Nothing here will be easy. It will be a dangerous adventure. But as I say, your liking me so much is the important thing.'
'How do you know I'll keep on liking you, Palmer?' I said. I felt my faculties slipping.
'You will,' said Palmer.
'Loving one's successful rival?'
'The psyche is a strange thing,' he said, 'and it has its own mysterious methods of restoring a balance. It automatically seeks its advantage, its consolation. It is almost entirely a matter of mechanics, and mechanical models are the best to understand it with.'
'You don't see me then as an angel of compassion?'
Palmer laughed gaily. 'Bless you, Martin,' he said. 'Your irony will be the saving of all three of us.'

Five

I always think of Rembers as my mother's house, though my grandfather bought it originally and Alexander has had it altered considerably since father died. But somehow the house retains indelibly the mark of my mother's gentle fey rather vague personality, and it is in my thought of it perpetually clouded over with a romantic, almost a medieval, haze. It ought most probably to be surrounded by a thick forest of twining roses, like the castle of the sleeping beauty. Yet it is not an old house. It was built about 1880 and is half-timbered with its stucco washed a rich Irish pink. It is a solitary place, built on high ground above the river Stour, on the outskirts of a Cotswold hamlet not far from Oxford, and commanding a view of empty hillsides visited only by hares. The yews and the box which my mother planted have grown well, and the garden might look older than the house were it not for the ageless charm of the place, infinitely decayed at the same time, like something issued from the imagination of Sir John Millais or Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

It was lunch-time on Christmas Eve, and I was in the Oxford train. The sky had been leaden yellow in London and as we passed Reading some snow began to fall in rare large flakes out of a still air. It was very cold. I had decided to spend Christmas with Alexander and Rosemary, and I had telephoned them two days ago to tell them that I was coming, and to tell them briefly that Antonia and I were parting. Antonia and Palmer had pressed me with an astonishing warmth and fervour to spend Christmas with them. It was remarkable how rapidly, after Antonia's revelation, 'they' had come into existence as a sort of institution with its palpable strength, atmosphere, and even traditions. Antonia now divided her day between Hereford Square and Palmer's house in Pelham Crescent, doing her best to be in both places at once. I had never seen her so happy; and I realized with mixed feelings that an important part of her happiness consisted in looking after me. I let her. She had insisted on spending the two nights prior to my departure at Hereford Square, where in any case we normally occupied separate rooms. I went to bed each night blind drunk. I had refused their Christmas offer, not through any fear of anger and violence, but through fear of a too great compliance. I needed to withdraw in order to dress myself again in some shreds of dignity and reason. 'They' had whirled me naked. I hoped now to retrieve at least some tawdry semblance of self- respect by playing, before Rosemary and Alexander, the role of the deceived husband. More simply, I wanted time to think; more simply still, time to feel.

I was only now beginning to believe it. The evening of Antonia's revelation, during which I had had a fantastic amount to drink, seemed in retrospect a lurid dream, full of ghoulish configurations and yet somehow mysteriously painless. It was later that the pain came, a pain unutterably obscure and confused like that induced by some deprivation in childhood. The familiar world of ways and objects within which I had lived for so long received me no more; and our lovely house had put on suddenly the air of a superior antique shop. The things in it no longer cohered together. It was odd that the pain worked first and most immediately through things, as if they had at once become the sad symbols of a loss which in its entirety I could not yet face. They knew and mourned. The loss of Antonia seemed like the impossible loss for ever of all warmth and all security; and it was strange too that although a few days ago I had seemed to divide my being and give to Antonia only a part, it now seemed that with her all was to be dragged away. It was like being flayed. Or more exactly as if the bright figured globe of my existence, which had been so warmly symmetrical to the face of my soul, were twisted harshly off, leaving my naked face against a cold window and darkness.

Yet I had behaved well. That, at least, had emerged, and was indeed the main thing that had been, almost with a gentle insistence, established. I had taken it well; and a warm radiance of gratitude for this was continually perceptible, in which, deprived of other comforts, I was invited abjectly to bask. It was the inevitability of just such basking which I was now in process of running away from. I had lost the moment of action; this I felt with, at times, a terrible fierceness of regret: although it was by no means clear to me what that lost action might have been. It was evident in a way that was now almost consoling and now scarcely bearable, that Antonia and Palmer were very much in love. The revelation of their love and my compliance with it, indeed as I bitterly reflected virtually my blessing upon it, had released in both of them a frenetic gaiety. I had never seen them so gay, so vital, so absolutely flaunting their colours. They seemed now in spirit to be always waltzing. Against such a force I could hardly, I told myself, have prevailed. Yet, I felt too, if I had only somehow tried, if I had known how to try, in the face of her soft determination and her quick gratitude, to keep Antonia, even if I had failed, one particular nagging misery would now be absent. I had been cheated of some moment of violence, of some special though perhaps fruitless movement of will and power: and for this at least I would never forgive them.

It was ironical, I reflected as I sat in the train, that a week ago I had seemed in secure possession of two women; now I was likely to be in possession of neither. It was not clear to me whether the rupture with Antonia had not in some mysterious way also killed my relation to Georgie, as if these two growths had, so far from competing, strangely nourished each other. I was far from sure of this, however, and my thoughts warily, even