The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

Penguin Books
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

Iris Murdoch was born in Dublin of Anglo-Irish parents. She went to Badminton School, Bristol, and read classics at Somerville College, Oxford. During the war she was an Assistant Principal at the Treasury, and then worked with U.N.R.R.A. in London, Belgium and Austria. She held a studentship in philosophy at Newnham College, Cambridge, for a year, and in 1948 returned to teach philosophy in Oxford as a Fellow of St Anne’s College. In 1956 she married John Bayley, teacher and critic. She was awarded the C.B.E. in 1976 and was made a D.B.E. in the 1987 New Year’s Honours List.

Her other novels are
Under the Net
(1954),
The Flight from the Enchanter
(1955),
The Sandcastle
(1957),
The Bell
(1958),
A Severed Head
(1961),
An Unofficial Rose
(1962),
The Unicorn
(1963),
The Italian Girl
(1964),
The Red and the Green
(1965),
The Time of the Angels
(1966),
The Nice and the Good
(1968),
Bruno’s Dream
(1969).
A Fairly Honourable Defeat
(1970),
An Accidental Man
(1971),
The Black Prince
(1973), winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize,
The Sacred and Profane Love Machine
(1974), winner of the Whitbread Prize,
A Word Child
(1975),
Henry and Cato
(1976),
The Sea, The Sea
(1978), for which she won the Booker Prize,
Nuns and Soldiers
(1980),
The Philosopher’s Pupil
(1983) and
The Good Apprentice
(1985). She has also written
The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artist
(1977): based on her 1976 Romanes lectures,
A Year of Birds
(1978), a volume of poetry, and
Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues
(1986).

Iris Murdoch
The Sacred and Profane
Love Machine

Penguin Books

The boy was there again this evening, and the dogs were not barking.

David stopped in the act of pulling his curtain against the dark twilight and gazed intently down into the garden. The boy was standing under the acacia tree, just on the near-side of the fence that divided the Hood House garden from the orchard. The figure was so still so merged into the blotchy spotty half-darkness of the scene that David would have been at a loss to explain how it was that he was so sure that it was a boy and that the boy was staring at the house. In fact, he had seen the shadowy boy before, two days ago, scarcely more clearly, at about this time. A small figure, a small boy, eight or nine years old perhaps. Why did none of the dogs bark?

David jerked the curtain across and turned on the light. He felt no urge to go down and investigate. The pulling of the curtain had already made the incident seem unreal and unimportant. A sensation which he felt almost all the time now, a sort of mild aching disgust and lassitude, made him unable to concentrate his mind. He sat down heavily upon a chair and turned unfocused eyes upon the blur of bis school books lying about him upon the floor. Then with an involuntary evasive movement he turned back towards the window curtain and blinked hard three times.

He had just been engaged in removing the paper covers from all his books. A large cardboard box contained the mass of glossy sturdy polychrome smashed-up jackets which in a sudden fit of irritable energy he had ripped off, revealing the glowing sides and discreet gilded lettering of the volumes beneath. There was no doubt about it, the books looked more beautiful and more real without their covers. Montague Small had once told him that he had celebrated his fortieth birthday by thus undressing all his library. ‘A wrapped up book is waiting for something,’ said Montague. David had decided not to let his wait for his seventeenth birthday. He picked up a sleek slim dark blue book and stroked it. Catullus, Oxford Classical Text.
Excrucior.

The pain in question was not the agony of love, however, and women were not yet David’s problem, apart from his mother of course. He was visited by highly localized burning erotic anguishes which he relieved (with distaste but without guilt) in the privacy of his room. He dreamed of a Miranda, but none had so far appeared, and the exclusively masculine life of his day school was devoid of love objects. His distress was obscurer, a sort of fear of never being able to be a real person at all. He felt obscenely amorphous, globular, a creature in metamorphosis trailing a half discarded form. Even his terrors were blunted and unvivid, not enlivening. Lassitude and disgust staled all.

David was a fastidious boy. The wet red mouths of the dogs offended him, and the sight of bis mother smiling upon that row of slobbering noisy feeders. He noticed how things dropped from his father’s fork at meal-times, even from his father’s lips: his father who now turned crimson in the face after a second glass of wine. The involuntary spasms of the body, its slimy moist interior, inspired horror. Shameless kissing in the cinema made him turn away. He would have given up eating altogether if that had been possible, would at any rate have eaten only in private, picking up dry small fragments with his fingers. Any slovenly messiness in the kitchen made him squeamish. His mother licking a spoon, then using it to stir the food. Greasy stuff trodden underfoot. The dogs made the garden foul, however much his mother ran about, and sometimes inside the house itself a vile smell would destroy both appetite and peace. They were not even very nice dogs. An early reading of the
The Hound of the Baskervilles
had made David afraid of dogs. Only of course he told nobody about this.

Last night he had dreamt about a huge blue fish struggling in the breaking waves upon the very edge of the sea. As it opened its dripping mouth towards him he had seen that its tail was half a girl with long flailing legs. He woke in horror to the sound of a howling dog. He had so often told his dreams to his father when he was a small child, it was as if his father still roamed inquisitively in his dream world, a co-spectator rather than a denizen. A blessed silence upon almost every subject had fallen between them in the last year. After the dream, he had lain awake tormented by images, faces that imposed themselves upon his closed eyes. Often it was the face of Christ, hanging just before him as upon a veil, amazingly beautiful, then turning gradually into a sneering mask. Christ was a problem to David. Prayer had been an addiction once, but the perpetual presence of this ubiquitous intrusive Friend amounted now almost to hallucination. Why had such a weird belief been induced in him when he was too young to defend himself against it? And how had his mother’s vague gentle faith and the mild Anglicanism of his public school spawned in him the secret superstitions of a mopping mowing slave? Compulsive stupid rituals had replaced those frenzied conversations with God. There was a smelly intimacy about it all, connected with his mother, his mother’s knee, sentimental gushings of a ridiculous familiarity offered to a deity devoid of dignity, devoid of austerity, devoid even of mystery, but now just proving horribly hard to get rid of.

Moving towards the door he saw himself in the long mirror which his mother had insisted on installing. He looked at himself, at his slim figure and blue-eyed long-tressed head. His hair, flaxen at birth, was still a lightish gold. Long uncut it fell in unruly Pre-Raphaelite splendour to his shoulders. He looked at his thinness and his straightness and his cleanness. He was a solitary being, he thought, a loner, always would be. Sometime soon he would be a
man:
he pronounced the word to himself as if one were to say a gryphon, a chimera.

Then he smiled at his image, suddenly finding it ridiculous. He had always seen himself as the Beloved Disciple.

Harriet Gavender (neé Derwent) had also seen the boy; only in her case it was the first sighting. And she too had noticed the silence of the dogs. Coming out quietly into the midsummer twilight of the still garden to breathe the rich polleny fragrance of the silent air, she had seen the small perfectly motionless figure standing just beside the fence of Monty’s orchard, merged almost into the dark trunk of the acacia tree. Harriet stopped abruptly upon the paved terrace and great fear invaded her heart. Why? Surely there was nothing to be afraid of in an inquisitive trespassing child. Then she recalled a dream which she had had on the previous night. She had dreamt that she was in her bedroom, in her bed (only Blaise was not with her), and that she had awakened in the darkness to see a strange light shining at the window. This is no dream, she said to herself as she rose in fright and went to look out. Just outside in the branches of a tree was the source of light, a radiant child’s face, the face only, suspended there and looking at her. She ran back at once and burrowed under the bedclothes, thinking in great terror: suppose that face were to come and look at me through the window?

The dream, only now remembered, seemed to dazzle her for a moment, and turning her head away towards the sombre facade of the house she suddenly saw the dim face of her son at the window of his darkened room. David too was gazing down the garden, looking at what she had seen. He did not notice his mother. After another moment he pulled his curtain across and the light came on brightly behind it. Harriet looked down the garden again. It all seemed to have become much darker. The boy was gone. A bat had noiselessly appropriated the space between, a flittering weaving almost substanceless fragment of the invading dark. Had the child, she wondered for a moment, been really an apparition, a visitor strayed over the border from another world? Or had she imagined that small silent watcher? How stupid I am, she thought. It’s just a boy, it’s nothing at all.

She walked out a little way on to the lawn, breathing deeply and sighing. A collared dove groaned once in the final light. A pink rose reclining upon the big box hedge glimmered with contained electric luminosity. A blackbird, trying to metamorphose itself into a nightingale, began a long passionate complicated song. The birds sing so much more carefully in the late evening. The great cloud fields had faded behind the bumpy tops of the orchard trees, whose silhouette was so familiar to Harriet that she seemed to be thinking it rather than seeing it, and the sky had dulled to a sort of dark light-less white netted over with grey, a colour which it would retain all night. It was midsummer. Midsummer night in fact, Harriet thought. The thought came to her with a bittersweet sense of time passing. How much she loved the slow parade of the English year, and how sad it was too, with its increasing store of memories. And her mind flew back to the summer balls of her girlhood when, in a totally vanished world, she had danced all night in the arms of agile lieutenants.

A light had come on in Monty’s house, obscured by the trees but gleaming through them. Harriet walked as far as the fence and looked at the light. What was Monty doing now? Moping? Weeping? Did he really not want to be visited? Harriet’s woman’s heart yearned towards the mystery of the sad solitary man. Montague Small occupied the adjacent house which was called Locketts, a smaller place which the then owner of Hood House had made to be built about 1900, and had subsequently occupied, at the bottom of his own very extensive garden. Most of the garden, including the orchard so much coveted by Blaise, now belonged to Locketts, and Hood House, which had later been sold separately, had only a square of lawn to bless itself with, and the long fat box hedge and the acacia tree and Harriet’s herbaceous border and her few roses. As Blaise had often observed, the logical way to divide the garden would have been to cut it beyond the orchard, which was continuous with the Hood House garden, whereas the garden ‘proper’ of Monty’s house was at a right-angle, round a corner, and in fact the house was in another road. But as Harriet said to her complaining husband, perhaps Mr Lockett (for he had called his new house after himself) had not been a very logical kind of man.