The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (2 page)

Because of the form of the garden, and also because Locketts was such a charming and somehow significant little house (quite a gem of
art nouveau)
it had always been a matter of great importance to the Hood Houseites who their neighbour was. Of course they had another next door neighbour, but that was an elderly lady, a Mrs Raines-Bloxham, who politely declined to know them. (This was not snobbery: she politely declined to know anybody.) And when the Gavenders had first come to Hood House, not so very many years ago, Locketts had been empty. The arrival of Montague Small
(the
Montague Small, as David, who was a thriller reader, had gleefully informed them) and his intense pretty little Swiss ex-actress wife had aroused an interest and a curiosity which were not long unsatisfied. The Smalls were gratifyingly friendly though the tiniest bit aloof. It seemed so right that it should be a
writer’s
house, Harriet had thought. They all liked Monty. Harriet pretended to like Sophie, and tried to, but never quite did. For Harriet, Sophie was hopelessly foreign. As for Blaise, he prayed openly ‘Oh Lord, let that woman never want to be a patient of mine!’ Then a bit later Monty had come round one day with an utterly changed face to tell them that Sophie had cancer. There had been an interval of withdrawal, Monty cold, Sophie invisible. Then Sophie died. That was now nearly two months ago. Monty was very very bereaved. ‘I have never seen a man mourn so,’ said Blaise.

Harriet turned back across the dim garden. The lightless light looked down from the white night sky. The blackbird’s long song was over. A distant owl was hooting. One star was visible. Jupiter, David had told her. Venus did not rise until after two. How thick the silence was, though it was not really country here of course, not like in Wales in her childhood. Wilder Buckinghamshire was a little away, and the houses went on continuously among the trees in the direction of London, whose pink glare illuminated the night sky in winter. A light had just come on in Blaise’s study. How pretty, how foursquare, how quite ridiculously
housey
Hood House looked with its shallow slate roof and its pretty flint and stone patterning and its tall early Victorian windows, quite the oldest as well as the handsomest house in its area. A sort of seaside house she thought of it as being, without quite knowing why. Perhaps the little white wrought-iron balconies on the first floor gave it that slight air of marine quaintness. It was not a very big house but it was the grandest house that Harriet had ever lived in. She and Blaise had been far from well off when they got married.

There was a soft soundless flurry and something wet and warm brushed Harriet’s hand. It was the nose of Ajax, the black Alsatian. Then all the dogs were suddenly round about her, not ecstatic but gently pleased with her, undulating in a circular ballet of quiet orderly prancing. The dogs had been a lovely accident really. They were her pets, not David’s, not Blaise’s. They were outdoor dogs of course. They lived, in as much comfort as Harriet could contrive, in the old garage. She had wanted to bring little Ganimede into the house once, but it had proved impossible to house-train him. Dogs, like humans, can be disturbed for ever by an unhappy childhood. Anyway it had seemed so unfair to the other dogs of whom at that time there were four. Now there were seven in all: Ajax, the Alastian, Ganimede, a black miniature poodle, Babu, a black spaniel, Panda, a black labrador mongrel with white markings, Buffy, an airedale, Lawrence, a Welsh collie, and Seagull, a small black and white terrier. The idea that they should all be black and have classical names had been early abandoned. Harriet had originally acquired Ajax because she felt nervous at Hood House when Blaise was away from home at night, as he sometimes had to be to see patients. (Magnus Bowles, for instance.) When she was a child she had had a^ morbid fear of cats, and used to search her bedroom carefully every night in case a cat had secreted itself there. In later life she feared burglars, tramps, gipsies, violent intruders. Of course Blaise had told her that burglars symbolized sexual intercourse, but this interesting revelation did not cure her fright or prevent her from holding her breath to listen for strange noises in the dark. Harriet had acquired Ajax as an adult dog from the Battersea Dogs Home, and then the thing had become rather an addiction. ‘When you feel depressed you go and pick a dog!’ said Blaise with exasperation. But it was so touching to go there and rescue some pathetic affectionate beautiful animal, it was a kind of creative act.

‘No, outside, boys, outside, boys,’ she murmured. ‘You’ve had your dinners. Now be good dogs.’ She shut the kitchen door upon the concourse of dark muzzles and turned on the light. Harriet had never let Blaise modernize the kitchen and, also in spite of him, they usually took their meals there, at the rectangular deal table covered by its red and white check cloth. The big chaotic rather obscure room suited Harriet. It was friendly and undemanding and smelt humbly of the past, full of dark lined old wood that needed scrubbing. She passed through it now, gazing unmoved upon a pile of greasy plates, and mounted the stairs, resisting as usual the usual temptation to go and call on her son, and went into her ‘boudoir’. This was a tiny cluttered room, originally a dressing-room. Blaise’s more austerely pretentious taste reigned in the rest of the house. Harriet, who could not bear to discommode a spider and who would spend ten minutes washing a lettuce rather than let any minuscule creature inadvertently elude rescue, extended her charity in a quite instinctive way to things. Now that both her parents were dead most of the serious family stuff was at Adrian’s flat in London, but Harriet had carried away, together with her various childhood treasures, a lot of awkward homeless oddments, brass ornaments and such, which no one else seemed to want or love, and which now mingled with an exotic miscellany of gaudy little gifts which Adrian and her father had brought her from various parts of the world, from Benares, from Bangkok, from Aden, from Hong Kong, the casual spoils of innumerable bazaars, jars and trays and boxes, little animals, little men, little gods of whom she did not know the names, all that ‘junk shop rubbish’ for which Blaise scolded her so, although he secretly found her absurd animism rather touching. And now, stuffed into the middle or hanging on to the edges, were the things that Monty had given her lately, since Sophie died, handing them out at random whenever she called, plates, ornaments, cushions, bits of embroidery, as if he wanted to strip Locketts and deprive it of all memory.

The walls of the boudoir were covered with paintings and photographs. The paintings were Harriet’s own (she had thought herself a painter once), pale splodgy water-colours, laboriously high-lighted oils whose paint seemed to have thinned with the years. The photographs were all of family; of her parents’ wedding, of Harriet’s wedding, of David as various children, of a younger slimmer hawkier Blaise, of her soldier father in uniform, of her soldier brother in uniform, of her disappointed pretty mother.
Ubique quo fas et gloria ducunt
had been a tattered pilgrimage for Harriet’s mother. Harriet had been born in India when her father was Gunnery Instructor at the School of Artillery at Deolali. Harriet’s mother, doing an Indian season with a diplomatic cousin, had met and married the romantic Captain Derwent. A caparisoned elephant attended their wedding. (There was a photograph of the elephant too.) Soon after came a home posting and the war. Captain (now Major) Derwent became an instructor at Catterick, then commanded an anti-aircraft battery in Wales. Later on he was at Woolwich, later still in Germany. He never rose above the rank of Major. Harriet’s mother followed the camp, living in furnished lodgings (only she drew the line at Germany). There had been a Welsh mountain cottage which the children had liked. There had been too little money and no romance. The days of the elephant were far off now. As a widow Harriet’s mother had lived in Ireland. Harriet rarely saw her in the later years. The thought of her came tenderly back in connection with country things: blackberrying, sloes for sloe gin, quinces for jelly, ponies and heather, the smell of honeysuckle or damp hay, the vanilla taste of russet apples. Harriet cherished these intense yet shadowy almost pointless visitations. It was so important to think quiet loving thoughts about people in idle moments, especially perhaps about the dead, who being substanceless so desperately need our thoughts.

Harriet looked into her Dutch marquetry mirror (a Christmas gift from Blaise) and patted her very long intertwined coiled up golden tinged dark brown hair. Instinctively her broad calm face became even calmer. She was wearing the long spotted voile dress which Blaise said made her look so Victorian. She was always careful not to dress too young. Some of her friends simply never noticed when they put on weight. Harriet sat down at her desk and relaxed into a melancholy idleness. She felt at these times empty, floppy, disjointed, as if she covered a huge area quietly like a large limp suspended sea animal, like an immense uninhabited continent: and this was for her really a form of being happy. Each person doubtless has a sort of form or structure or schema (only that would not have been Harriet’s word) into which his consciousness lazily stretches itself out when uncoerced, and which is, however unglittering and inglorious, his happiness. Harriet was happy. The house around her felt happy too with the stored-up warmth of her anxious yet composed and unassertive temperament.

Of course she had her worries, especially David and sometimes the aching sense of a tiny lost talent, but she was loved and loving and had an untroubled conscience and that was quite enough, for one of her temper, for happiness, that deep confiding slow relationship to time. Hers was a sometimes sad but always smiling happiness. She loved her husband and her son and her brother and carried every discontent into the light of that love to be consumed. Sometimes she had a feeling of what she thought of as ‘littleness’ (‘small fryness’) when she thought: how I wish I were a great painter or a great
something.
She had been to art school and had had ambition. But early marriage, combined with the fact that Blaise never took her vocation seriously, had led her to lay aside her brush. She knew that she led a selfish life because all her otherness was so much a part of herself. There was no strain or distance really, even her charities were easy and pleasant and rich in the rewards of gratitude. I am a deeply selfish person, she told herself sometimes, and so I shall never be great, not like men are great, or touched by greatness.

Now however she was thinking about her son. Every mother has to endure it, I suppose, she thought. The marvellous intimacy could not last. He had withdrawn first from Blaise, now from her. Blaise said it was natural and proper. He had become untouchable; and Harriet, with her long habit of touching, was suddenly in a dilemma, in an anguish. She was visited by alarmingly precise ghostly yearnings. Feelings very like the torments of an unrequited love made her blush and tremble. It was indeed dreadfully like being in love. She wanted to hold him in her arms again, to cover him with kisses, to untangle with caressing fingers that untidy and now absurdly long golden hair. But nothing was less possible. He had become, as if further to confuse her, dauntingly good-looking in this last year. What Blaise called David’s ‘archaic smile’ haunted her like a sort of erotic enigma. He was so tall now and often so stern, and yet inside this dignified angel there was surely the same awkward adorable small boy. He had odd mannerisms, new ones, secret ones. There were so many things one could not talk about. Did he still lay out his penknife and his compass and all his other little treasures before he turned out the light? How happy it had made her once to think that David prayed nightly for herself and Blaise. The thought had soothed her own growing disbelief. Did he do so still? It was inconceivable to ask. She knew of mothers who flirted with their adolescent sons. It was impossible for her to do so. David, in his new grown-upness, had already a sort of authority, an absolute ability of veto. Harriet knew very well what she could and could not dare. I must pull out, she thought: it was like the ending of an affair, giving somebody up. Would one be thus condemned to break the links one by one? Of course it was simply natural change and not an ending, and of course her love could not end, could not in the faintest detail of its being diminish ever. The trouble was that she could not see at present how her love for David could change sufficiently for her not now and henceforth for ever to be in the position of concealing something which he would uneasily suspect. She leaned forward over her hands in sudden anguish. What was that quotation about love being ‘woman’s whole existence’? It was certainly true in her case, and how terrifying it was.

Blaise Gavender had enjoyed his supper. He enjoyed his food. There had been asparagus, which so deliciously scented the urine. Harriet was an untidy slovenly housewife but a decent cook. Earlier he had been upset because he had been rude to a man who came to read the electric meter. The man had been a little casual. Blaise had suddenly acted the country squire. Why? These little outbursts would have interested him once. Now he let the incident fade, efficiently digested like the asparagus. Perhaps he thought of all ‘callers at the house’ as patients, and so as properly obsequious. At this moment, while desultorily mending with glue and Sellotape a broken Japanese bowl of Harriet’s, he was trying with fair success to keep his mind strictly on his patients. Sometimes he hated his patients. That was bad. His sort of healer could only operate through a love relationship. Of course that could be bad too. Monty had once said to him that all curiosity divorced from love or science was necessarily malign. Monty had been talking about a writer and his characters. But the phrase had struck Blaise in relation to his own work. He enjoyed his work, but why? That he had long ago seen through his motives did not tell him what to do next. It did not even mean that he could not help people. He could and did.

The thought of Monty always caused irritation, though Blaise was fond of his interesting talented neighbour. He had talked too much to Monty. In other parts of the animal kingdom males instinctively threatened each other in a mechanical and meaningless manner. The blackbirds on the lawn were doing it every day. Of course he had been a fool ever to accept Monty as a patient, though that interlude had been mercifully brief. Had he ever understood Monty’s motives? Blaise quickly terminated the relation when he realized that the healer was in danger of being taken over by the sufferer.