A Severed Head (6 page)

‘
You
’
re very thoughtful,
’
I said.
‘
What
’
s Alexander working on just now?
’

‘
He says he
’
s stuck,
’
said Rosemary.
‘
By the way, Alexander
’
s dreadfully cut up about you and Antonia.
’

‘
Naturally,
’
I said.
‘
He adores Antonia.
’

‘
I happened to be there when he opened her letter,
’
said Rosemary.
‘
I
’
ve never seen him so shaken.
’

‘
Her letter?
’
I said.
‘
So she wrote to him about it, did she?
’
Somehow this irritated me terribly.

‘
Well, I gather so,
’
said Rosemary.
‘
Anyhow all I
’
m saying is, be kind and tactful to Alexander, be specially nice to him.
’
‘
To console him for my wife having left me,
’
I said.
‘
All right, flower.
’

‘
Martin!
’
said Rosemary. Some minutes later we turned into the gate of Rembers.

‘
Since I left Plumtree

Down in Tennessee

It
’
s the first time I
’
ve been warm!
’

quoted Alexander, as he dangled his long broad-nailed hand in front of his new fan heater. The sleeve of his white smock fluttered and rippled in the warm wind.

It was half an hour later and we were sitting in the bay-window annexe of Alexander
’
s studio drinking tea and looking out at the falling snow and the south face of the house which could still be seen in the failing afternoon light, its timberings loaded with soft undulating lines of whiteness against the dulled pink. A holly wreath with a red bow hanging on the hall door was sifted over and almost invisible. The nearer flakes fell white, but farther off they merged into a yellowish curtain which prevented our view and made Rembers enclosed and solitary.

In the creamy white smock, self-consciously old fashioned, my brother seemed dressed to represent a miller in an opera. His big pale face in repose had an eighteenth-century appearance, heavy, intelligent, the slightest bit degenerate, speaking of a past of generals and gentlemen adventurers, profoundly English in the way in which only Anglo-Irish faces can now be. One might have called him
‘
noble
’
in the sense of the word which is usually reserved for animals.

It was an odd thing about Alexander, and one which I noted ever anew, especially when I saw him at Rembers, that although the form of his face perfectly recalled my father, its spirit and animation perfectly recalled my mother. More than in Rosemary or me, here she lived on, as indeed we both profoundly apprehended in our relation to Alexander. We passed as being, and I suppose we were, a very united family; and though I ruled out financial fortunes and largely played my father
’
s role, Alexander in playing my mother
’
s was the real head of the family. Here in the house and here in the studio, whose whitewashed walls were still dotted with her water-colours and pastel-shaded lithographs, I recalled her clearly, with a sad shudder of memory, and with that particular painful guilty thrilling sense of being both stifled and protected with which a return to my old home always afflicted me; and now it was as if my pain for Antonia had become the same pain, so closely was it now blended in quality, though more intense, with the obscure malaise of my homecomings. Perhaps indeed it had always been the same pain, a mingled shadow cast forward and backward across my destiny.

We had not yet put the lights on, and we sat together in the window-seat, not looking at each other but turned toward the silent movement of the snow and the now invisible
‘
view
’
to enjoy which Alexander had a few years ago had the big bay window built. Beyond the curtain which divided it from the annexe, the studio was almost in darkness. In summer it would be scented .with smells of wood, and flower smells from outside and the fresh wet clean smell of clay; but now it smelt only of paraffin from the four big oil-heaters whose equally familiar odour brought me recollections of ill-lit childhood winters.

‘
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.