The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (12 page)

Shame, which had once been entirely absent, became the atmosphere of his life. He felt ashamed and venomously angry before Emily, ashamed and obscurely frightened before Luca. When he thought of David he felt a sort of absolutely pure shame which was more piercing than any other. Whereas Blaise experienced his fatherhood of Luca as an obscure form of punishment, he experienced his fatherhood of David, still in spite of everything, in a deep ordinary almost happy way; and it was this defeated happiness which produced the pure and particularly poignant suffering. It was as if David’s father had never been told and could not but be happy. He loved David so much and was so proud of him, and could not help completing this picture by filling in David’s love for i him and David’s pride in him. Any boy wants and needs to admire his father. In earlier and more rational discussions with Emily, Blaise had argued that the shock to David should be postponed to an age when it would do less damage. Emily asked why she was supposed to be concerned about the welfare of Mrs Placid’s boy. But she seemed sometimes to accept the consideration as an argument; perhaps because she needed to feel that there were reasons for the delay in making ‘the move’ which were not simply Blaise’s uncertainty about the absolute value of their love.

Meanwhile David passed in protected ignorance the various milestones of his life, while the tormented lovers continued to argue. How, Blaise constantly wondered, could he bring this desolation and this misery into the serene innocent lives of his wife and son? Of course the desolation was already there, right in the middle of the scene, making Harriet fear burglars and collect dogs, making David’s eyes contract and turn away. For David too, in the black depths of his adolescent distress, unconsciously ‘knew’. Yet this knowledge was infinitely more merciful and less harmful than that unimaginably awful real knowledge which ‘the move’ would involve. How could Blaise, after that, look into David’s face again? He would earn his son’s lifelong contempt, perhaps hatred. Harriet and David had done nothing to deserve those horrors. However much one suffered from the pain of conscience had one not a duty to keep quiet and digest one’s own scandals? Was it not perhaps right that he and Emily, the guilty ones, should continue to hug the poison to themselves, perhaps for ever? Oh, if only he could set it all to himself simply as a task, however wearying, however difficult, however long! How he envied ordinary men their innocent problems, their jobs, their mortgages, their overdrafts! How he envied the bereaved Monty his clean pain!

Blaise felt shame before Emily, before David, before Luca. Where Harriet was concerned something much stronger had been happening which was now his chief and most awful preoccupation. As one mystery wound its way on into deeper defiles of horror, the other mystery, though without thereby bringing him any hope or release, had emerged into a new brightness. At one time Blaise had scarcely recalled Harriet when he was with Emily. Now he scarcely recalled Emily when he was with Harriet. Once Emily had seemed real and Harriet a dream. Now Harriet seemed real and Emily a dream. He had told Emily that he had no sexual relations with Harriet. This had been true. It was true no longer. Harriet had of course silently, perfectly, waited. How much, if only it were not for the devils, he would have enjoyed, and somehow in spite of them did enjoy, being once more with his chaste modest virginal dear wife. How much more satisfying this was than ‘doing things’ with Emily. Harriet had once seemed to lack what Emily possessed in such abundance, ‘seductive vitality’. But now his wife drew him with quiet power, rousing in him mixed intensities of reverence and desire. He had never felt any such emotion in his life before, and he regarded himself with awe. His ‘spy’ life became, in a terrible deprived way, simpler, as a function of these changes which made his whole existence more precarious by supplying him with a new but equally baffling set of motives.

Of course memory falsifies to conceal disagreeable causal connections. But the shift was becoming increasingly clear. It had been anguish to experience the continued maiming of his great love for Emily. It was an even greater anguish to discover that his love for Harriet, which had been obscured and gone underground like a river, was not only intact but was emerging into the light stronger and deeper and purer than it had ever been before. After all, his innocent love for Harriet, as if unaware of his badness, had simply gone on growing in the natural way in which married love grows. And he instinctively longed for Harriet’s sympathy in his sufferings. If he hurt his finger she sympathized, so why not now? To see the vision of healing love, but no longer to be able to profit by it: is this perhaps the worst suffering of the damned in hell? The fruits of virtue and evil are automatic; he saw that now. But surely, surely, he repeated to himself, there must be a best moral choice, some decent and not too painful, not annihilating, way out, some salvation which could expunge his fault? Could not gentleness and patient imagination somehow unviolently unravel this, or was he condemned to die like a rat in a storm drain? If someone suffers terribly, surely at last it can be said: let there be forgiveness, he has suffered enough. But who could utter these releasing words?

He felt now so absolutely ‘in the truth’ with Harriet, as if he had already told her and been forgiven. Because of her there seemed, oddly, to be nothing fake in their relationship. He drank from her calmness, her tenderness, a sort of spurious strength which ought to have been, but could not be an instrument of his salvation. Oh how could he have been such a witless fool as so to ruin and lose what, in his continued false possession of it, he saw now to be supremely valuable? If only he were living now in ordinary honest wedlock with such a wife and with such a son he would be the happiest man in the whole world. Emily had cheated him not only of his goodness but of his destined happy life. Sometimes he hated her for this so much that he wanted to kill her.

It was all becoming increasingly urgent for him as a question of truth, a choice for him between truth and death. Where truth was death too. Yet could he still be saved by an angel and could that angel be Harriet? At night he often dreamed that he had told Harriet and that all was somehow perfectly well. And in waking moments too he thought, could there not be some way of getting safely past that awful barrier that stood before him as an implacable iceberg, as an image of absolute smash: some way of telling the truth, and yet keeping everything just as it was before, like a juggler with a pile of balanced plates who jerks one out and keeps the others steady?

How spoilt and wretched his life was through his own fault. And how miserably unjust it all was to Emily. ‘Our love has just never had a chance. It’s had to live all its life under the carpet. No wonder it’s as flat as a pancake!’ Still, however unjustly, it was simply the case that the balance had shifted, the picture had changed. Had Harriet, just by innocently loving him, just by smiling and arranging the flowers and being his legitimate wife, finally
won?
And if so what followed from that?

Blaise remembered that he had not fed the dogs. He had had these two dogs since he was quite a little boy, both of them smooth-haired fox terriers, named Tango and Rumba by Blaise’s father, who was fond of dancing. Blaise felt terrible guilt and fear because he remembered that the dogs were shut into the old stables and no one knew they were there and no one would hear them barking. They had been there for days and days, for weeks. How could he possibly have forgotten them, and what would his father say? He began to run, but his feet had become large and heavy and were cleaving to the earth. At last he reached the stables and unbarred the top half of the door of the last loose box and peered into the obscure interior. There was no movement within. He looked and looked. Then with horror he saw the two dogs. They had become dark and dried up and elongated and were hanging from hooks upon the wall. He thought, when I did not come they must have hanged themselves. Then he thought, no, they have died and become something else, and the gardener thought they were some sort of tools or implements and hung them up. But what sort of tools or implements have they become?

‘Wake up, damn you, wake up!’

Emily was shaking him by the shoulder. Blaise awoke and was immediately dazzled by the bright bedside lamp. Emily, lying beside him, had tilted the lamp so that it shone directly on to his face. He shut his eyes again. Then opened them and looked at his watch. It was three o’clock.

‘I told you not to do that. It’s absolute hell being wakened up like that.’

‘And it’s absolute hell lying awake and thinking the thoughts I’m thinking and listening to you snore.’

‘Put out the light.’

‘I want to tell you something.’

‘You’ve decided to take Luca to Australia, well off you go then.’

‘How can I bloody go to Australia when I’ve got no bloody money?’

‘I see you’ve bought a fur coat. I asked you not to buy any clothes till the sales.’

‘You notice everything, don’t you. Well, clever-dick, it’s not a fur coat, it’s simulated, and I didn’t buy it, Pinn gave it to me. I gave her a pound for it.’

‘That’s called buying it. Put out the light and let’s sleep.’

‘Sleep, sleep, you just want to sleep all the time now. We used to stay awake all night. Now you want to go beddy-byes at ten.’

‘If we didn’t stupefy ourselves with drink we wouldn’t get so comatose.’

‘I like that. You taught me to drink. I suppose we need the stuff now to get through an evening together. God!’

‘Well, get on with what you want to tell me.’

‘I was too frightened to tell you earlier. I’m getting feebleminded.’

‘What is it?’

‘I usedn’t to be frightened of you. Now I’m frightened of everything, even you.’

‘
What is it
?’

‘I’ve given up my job.’

‘Christ! Why?’

‘I’ve decided to retire. Other men support their wives. I’m tired. I’m getting old. You can start supporting me.’

‘You know I can’t afford to. You know we agreed —’

‘Be quiet, you’ll wake Luca.’

‘He must be awake already. What’s that noise? Christ, somebody’s at the front door.’

‘Relax, it isn’t Mrs Placid with a blunt instrument, it’s only Pinn letting herself in.’

‘
Pinn?
’

‘Yes, that’s the other thing I was too timid to tell you. I’ve taken a lodger. Pinn lives here now.’

‘You mean you’ve taken Pinn as a lodger?’

‘I’ve just told you that.’

‘How dare you do so without asking me.’

‘Well, you aren’t here all that often. I live here, I imagine. It’s my home.’

‘It’s my home too. I pay the bloody rent.’

‘That’s about all you do do, to make it your home. And that reminds me, there’s a third thing. You won’t like this either. They’re putting up the rent in October, it’ll be nearly double.’

‘You seem pleased. Em, how can you have been so stupid about Pinn? Do you think she’s listening at the door?’

‘No, she’s gone into her room. She’s my friend, isn’t she? And she’s made herself jolly useful.’

‘Well you can tell her to get out tomorrow. I’m not coming here if Pinn’s here. You can bloody well choose. How can I be with you when that woman’s in the house snooping and listening?’

‘What does it matter
now?
’

‘You’ve done this on purpose to upset me. And you’ve given up your job on purpose.’

‘Maybe I have. Maybe I feel it’s time for a change.’

‘Tell blasted Pinn to get out tomorrow or I will.’

‘She pays rent you know. However it’s up to you. You’ll have to double my allowance, what am I saying, triple it’

‘I can’t, you know I can’t.’

‘I don’t know anything of the sort, I don’t see your bank account.’

‘Please, Em, have some consideration for me.’

‘Why should I? You even grudge me the money to get my teeth fixed.’

‘I can’t afford it! Especially now. Harriet has to make economies too —’

‘I told you never to mention that name. Economies! You mean do without the gold dinner service and the third car?’

‘We only have one car —’

‘I don’t want to know. "We" and "us" and roughing it with one motor car!’

‘If some of this dental work is really necessary —’

‘God, you are crawlingly mean. Don’t you want me to look nice?’

‘I don’t care how you look. We’re too close to each other for that to matter.’

‘Do you imagine you’re the only person who ever looks at me? Well, you obviously do. Or are you afraid I’ll attract another man?’

‘Don’t be a fool, Em.’

‘Anyway, it’s not just aesthetic. To eat, teeth must meet.’

‘You know that if something is absolutely necessary —’

‘And what about my holiday, if it comes to that, or don’t I get one again this year? When am I going to see Paris?’

‘Oh do shut up.’

‘And I need new chair covers.’

‘I suggest you persuade the bloody cats not to tear the place up.’

‘Destruction is their only pleasure. Soon it will be mine.’

‘We’ll make a list —’

‘I know your bloody lists. You make a list and then you feel faint and clear off. I give you notice, the years of heroism are over. I used to tighten my belt, Christ, I almost enjoyed it, I did enjoy it, suffering for you and all that. But not any more. The pain doesn’t amuse me any more.’

‘Well, what do you want? You know we’re simply stuck.’

‘We can unstick, even if it unsticks the world. You ask what I want. I want a bit of security at last. You pay the rent here, you say. Fine, but what happens if you go under a bus? You’ve always kept me on a shoe-string on purpose to keep me tame and humble —’

‘That’s not true. You know I’d be very glad –’

‘If I went to Australia and was never heard of again. Thanks very much! No such luck.’

‘That wasn’t what —’

‘I’m afraid of the future. I want to be set up properly. I’m sick and tired of living on hand-outs.’

‘You’re not living on hand-outs. I give you a regular allowance —’

‘You’ve taken my life. Christ, I’m thirty-one, and I’m terrified of poverty and old age. That’s what you’ve done to me!"