The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (17 page)

‘Not for you. You are the unmoved mover. Yet in a wayunrequited love is a contradiction. If it’s true love, it somehow contains its object. There’s proof of God’s existence like that.’

‘That sounds like your chap who thought love could roll everything up into a ball.’

‘Never mind. I may not know much about Empedocles, but I know quite a lot about love. Don’t you worry. Just let me love you. May I hold your hand? Would Blaise mind? I’m terribly harmless you know.’

Harriet laughed. She did not know what to make of this big boyish clever middle-aged man who had suddenly appeared in her life. It was true that she had a few men friends, mainly people she had met through Adrian and had known for years and years. But Harriet was not a flirt and had no gift for
badinage.
There was nothing playful and certainly nothing unpredictable in these relationships. Edgar seemed to have come close to her in some hitherto unknown way, by some route which she did not know existed. Laughing, she let him take her hand for a moment, squeezed his, and rose. ‘Let’s go out into the garden. I want you to meet the dogs.’

‘I wish you’d come to Mockingham. Blaise too of course. Would you? My mother was a great gardener.’

Harriet pushed open the garden door. Leaving the strawberry canopy behind them, they went out on to the lawa The dogs who had been sitting and lying in a group, holding a meeting, rose respectfully and advanced. Edgar stroked Ajax, then sat down on the grass and let the dogs, who suddenly became excited, climb on top of him. Chuckling explosively he lay back on the grass. Pushing each other, they began ecstatically to lick his face.

Monty, who had just presented David with a pair of Bohemian glass finger bowls and sent him away unkissed, observed this scene from the shadow of the orchard trees. It filled him with anger. He walked slowly back towards Locketts, meditating upon this anger, its nature and its cause.

Emily McHugh was sitting on the floor in her sitting-room. The floor was covered with newspaper. She had set out Luca’s big drawing board, pinned paper to it, laid out his coloured pencils, his poster paints, brushes, water. Sometimes he could thus be persuaded to paint. He never sought out the paints for himself. When he did paint it was often very good. Emily had a huge multi-coloured picture of a cat pinned up in the kitchen. It was as good as Matisse. It gave her much consolation.

This morning in Luca’s bedroom, she had found the woolly piglet which Blaise had given Luca, hanging by its neck on a string from the end of the bed. Emily released the animal.

It was Sunday. The weather was still hot but murky, the sun shining through a haze. Pinn was out drinking with a chap, a bank manager, with whom she always went out drinking on Sunday mornings. Emily could not find the Italian cameo brooch which Blaise had given her in the first days of their love. Had vile Pinn borrowed it? Or had Emily lost it? She often lost things and forgot things now.

She sat down on the floor with her legs stretched out, wearing her old pink quilted dressing-gown, sipping a glass of sherry, her back against the tattered chair which Richardson used as a claw sharpener. Peach and grey Richardson was lying like a long warm sausage against one of her bare legs. Little Bilham sitting on top of the bookshelves opposite, his tail curled neatly round his front paws, stared at Emily with golden unwinking eyes. How wicked cats’ faces are, thought Emily, even the faces of dear cats, one’s very own, are somehow alien and cruel. Or do I just see cruelty everywhere now? Below Little Bilham Emily’s French texts, battered and dirty, reeled on the shelves. Emily never looked at them now. She hardly read anything except the newspaper. Blaise used to bring her books once.

Luca was kneeling on the floor and energetically making a pencil scrawl on the corner of his drawing board, not on the paper but on the board. Emily had been sitting in silence with him for some time. She often did this at weekends, or tried to. Sometimes he went away, leaving any room she entered. Sometimes there was, she thought, a kind of silent communion. At least he tolerated her presence. Emily had leamt on these occasions not to watch him too closely. As long as she looked at the cats and not at him, and above all refrained from tears, he might stay. At any sign of emotion he quietly went, leaving the room noiselessly like an animal, vanishing like a fox. So Emily sat quietly, breathlessly, rapt as if in prayer, letting her heart simply fill and brim over with pure thoughtless love for her son.

Now without moving her head she surreptitiously moved her eyes and looked at him. He had stopped scribbling and was kneeling with his head on one side, his lips slightly parted. He seemed to be listening. Emily wondered if she dared ask him what he was listening to. The pain of an unanswered question would spoil the morning, perhaps the entire day. Was it worth risking? She said, ‘What are you listening to?’

‘Beetles.’

‘Beetles?’ Emily listened hard. At first she heard nothing. Then she became aware of the tiniest tiniest crepitation somewhere in the room. ‘Where are they?’

‘Inside the table.’

Dislodging Richardson Emily leaned across, then listened again. He was right. It was wood beetles inside the oak table leg. One could actually hear the sound of their tiny jaws eating the wood. ‘I can hear them too. Isn’t that nice?’

Luca smiled at her and began to draw on his paper.

Emily sat listening with rapture to the beetles and daring now to look at her son. She felt a flood of wild dazed joy as if golden rain had descended upon the room. She seized Richardson and hugged him hard. The cat lazily adjusted himself to her embrace and began to purr.

After a while Emily decided to dare a little more. She moved slightly and peered at what Luca was drawing. ‘What’s your picture of?’

Luca said nothing. Emily peered at the paper. In coloured crayons Luca had drawn a house with big windows, and a tree beside it. In front of the house there was a woman in a long dress and a thin long-trousered boy and several dogs. Near the front of the picture, and looking at the other figures, was a man in an overcoat Luca was filling in the coat with brown crayon and Emily recognized the herring-bone design of Blaise’s new overcoat She was about to say, ‘That’s just like Daddy’s coat,’ when something seemed to leap at her face. Emily gasped. She got up quickly and left the room. Luca continued quietly to fill in the picture.

His failure to achieve the lotus position had always seemed to Monty symbolic. Sophie, who was as flexible as a boy, could sit easily thus, turning the soles of her little feet upward for Monty to kiss. She thought meditation was nonsense. By some dispensation which seemed to Monty entirely felicitous, religion had been left out of her make-up. Monty had tried various positions, and had at last settled for kneeling, sitting back on his heels. This he could maintain for long periods, becoming rapidly unconscious of his body. At first he had resisted the idea of kneeling because of its unsavoury associations. His aim had nothing to do with self-abasement or worship or rubbishy personal prayer. Later he saw that these details did not matter.

Last night Monty had had a dream which struck him as interesting. He had been a pupil at some sort of grand school, somewhere near the sea, huge and built out of marble. The school was set upon pink rocks, pitted with azure pools, and across those rocks Monty had to scramble in order to reach some class or seminar which it was very important that he should attend. The rocks were slippery, but at last he reached a flight of marble steps which came down among them, and mounted the steps into a large hall surrounded by pillars and partly open to the sky. A man in white robes was standing in the hall obviously waiting for him, and Monty realized that before he could go on to the classroom he had to pass some sort of preliminary test The white-robed figure said to him, ‘You must simply mime what I tell you now. Pretend that you are scooping up water in your hands.’ Monty leaned down to the ground and began to scoop up imaginary water in his hands. As he did so he glimpsed his mentor’s face. It wore a sad disappointed expression and Monty knew that he had failed the test. Then he realized that a saintly man would have imagined himself to be immersed in water up to the chest, up to the neck.

Monty smiled, thinking what Blaise would have made of this dream. What a load of lies he had told Blaise about himself at various times, not so much deliberately as because he found he simply could not tell Blaise the truth. In Blaise, truth would not be truth. Besides, Blaise believed in the dreary old historical self, lived indeed by that belief, made his money out of that fiction. Of course dreams were rubble. All the same they could be images of faith, little momentary trinkets offered for consolation by mind to mind.

Philosophy, the anxious connecting of one thing with another, the satanic proliferation of programmes of conceptual dominion, the doubling of an already doubled world, had long seemed to him like the pointless journeying of insects. None of his negative certainties however made him able to judge the worth of his failed spiritual vocation. That it had failed, that his life was for these purposes over, was a condition for his continued efforts, as if he could thus harmlessly dupe himself. This inbuilt assumption of failure had, especially since the evidence of the later days with Sophie, related him more quietly to time. Since there was no hope and therefore no urgency, he could live without ambition from moment to moment, thinking no historical thoughts about what he still persistently attempted to do.

But what was he attempting? Was it that he had lived too long in his mind and was tired of the scenery? or was it simply a sophisticated rescue operation for an ageing insufficiently talented man who was beginning to be aware of death? By sheer diligence it was possible to set up a huge machine on to which one could gear oneself in a second. Some such machine existed, Monty had, in a number of years, created it. He had only to kneel, to droop his eyelids and take some deep breaths and the sensible world ceased to be. He knew at least enough to know that this, in his case, was merely an experience. However much his technique might improve the enlightening spirit was absent. Except in dreams he had no teacher. It would have been, he felt, artificial, another occasion for lying. No, Monty did not imagine that he had, by bis pains, won anything of value. He had not even glimpsed his freedom. The obsessions which made Magnus Bowles’s life a misery simply travelled with him like dormant viruses. The gods, who had nothing to do with enlightenment, unplacated, undefeated, were still there.

His latest idea of becoming a schoolmaster rather than, say, buying a luxurious villa in France and trying again to write a straight novel, was no symptom of a changed direction, the acquisition, say, of new ‘social views’. The politics of his days of ‘frightfulness’ had long ago withered within him. He had lacked the sort of passion required to make him, what he would now have despised himself for being, a ‘reactionary’. The miserable issue of all that had been Milo Fane, ascetic hedonist, discreet sadist, cynic. The schoolmaster idea was superficial, an interim measure, a new makeshift device aimed towards an old end. Towards a sort of simplicity and openness of living. An ostentatious hatred of pretention and the bogus (except of course in so far as these informed his own style) had impressed his Oxford contemporaries and probably made them overrate his intellect. He had carried onward within him an ideal of unbogus lucidity, of a contextless clarity of truthful utterance, which he had somehow never been able to crystallize into any ordinary mode of living. What he pursued on his knees was connected with this, but in a way that was full of crucial puzzles. Spirit, after all, can provide a much more durable holiday from morality than sin ever can. What was he seeking, truth or salvation or goodness? Sometimes it seemed to him that these roads diverged absolutely and only conceivably came together at some end point which he would never reach. Sometimes he felt as if he was simply seeking knowledge, or, more simply still, power. More drearily still, he had once imagined that to discipline his mind would be to help his work. But the discipline seemed merely to have stifled what was left to him of spontaneity and
joie de vivre.

This business of trying to get rid of the ego often seemed idiocy. Years could pass in the attempt to centre the consciousness below the navel. The whole thing was laughable rot, oriental unBritish rubbish. How Sophie had mocked. It might be perfectly true that there was no deep sense in things, that nothing and no one had real dignity and real deserving, that ‘the world’ was just a jumble and a rubble and a dream, but was it not supreme cheating to make this senselessness seem to be the very essence of one’s being? He might be a very shoddy artist, but he had the artist’s capacity to cheat Better surely to live as ordinary clever people live, by wit and pain and sex, finding these at last in the pinnacle of one’s spirit Better to resort to the holiness of suffering and to consent to give some name (‘love’ for instance) to the ground of one’s being, rather than to attempt this radical undoing of a natural essence.

Yet Monty went on, and in the awful clarity of affliction after Sophie’s death found
this
curiously unchanged, as if it had in spite of everything wedged its unconscious spearhead into a region beyond. Since the part of him which this hypothetical region concerned was innnitesimally tiny he experienced no sort of alleviation or insight. But misery did not make him alter his routine, even guilt did not This much at least, in its automatic way, the machine’ had done for him.

‘Monty, Monty, are you all right?’

Monty regained his perception of his little Moorish drawing-room with one lamp alight the window open upon darkness and the rain beating down. A certain sense of being
battered,
it now seemed to him, had been with him. The rain had come in and stained the carpet. Blaise was there, staring down at him. Monty tilted himself sideways and then slowly got up. He looked at his watch. It was nearly midnight. Blaise’s unheralded visit was unusual. He must have come round into the garden.