The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (23 page)

They entered the Moorish drawing-room. Mr Lockett had had a fountain there, in a recess, between the saffron and grey lentils, but Monty had replaced it by a bookcase. The vivid de Morgan tiles sull peered out over the tops of the books.

‘I can’t bear it,’ said Edgar. He sat down heavily in one of the elaborate white basket chairs, making it scream a little.

‘You don’t have to.’

‘It means I can’t go there any more.’

‘Really?’

Edgar in tweeds (it had not occurred to him to remove his jacket) was sweating freely. Monty was in white shirt and black trousers with the narrowest conceivable leather belt. The room was cool, as he had remembered to keep the shutters closed earlier in the day. He poured out drinks into tall glasses. Gin and freshly pressed lemon, and slices of a lime which Harriet had given him, and soda water and a little parsley floating about, like his mother used to make in the old days. Sophie never drank long drinks even in summer.

‘How can I, with that grief in the house. I can’t imagine anything more awful. Oh poor poor Harriet —’

‘Poor Harriet,’ echoed Monty. He felt extreme irritation against Edgar and his self-regarding reactions.

‘And I’d want to punch that swine. He has that wonderful wife and —’

‘It’s more complicated than that,’ said Monty. ‘Probably. Anyway we’ll never know.’

‘That’s just it,’ said Edgar, draining his glass and holding it out for more, ‘we’ll never know. We can never ask. Of course Harriet is blameless. You aren’t insinuating anything are you?’

‘I insinuate nothing.’

‘How did she find out?’

‘Blaise told her. His nerve broke.’

‘The swine. Oh dear, oh dear. I can’t talk to Harriet like I used to any more.’

‘You have known her for less than a week.’

‘I couldn’t expect her to confide in me about that, could I? How can I even offer her my sympathy? Oh God, what awful suffering.’

‘Yes, it is awful,’ said Monty, ‘but as you said, we can’t enter in. Better to keep clear. You’d better shove off to Oxford. Just drink up and go, will you?’

Edgar had drained another glass and was in possession of a generous third. ‘I suppose I could write her a letter. Could I write her a letter?’

‘That’s it, write her a letter. From Oxford. Now drink up and go.’

Harriet was coming to see Monty on the following morning for what she announced as a long talk. Monty looked forward to her visit with a mixture of alarm and excitement. He wanted Edgar to clear out. He wanted to think about Harriet.

‘What on earth are you doing?’ said David to his mother, in the vivid kitchen where the red and white cloth glowed in the indirect light of the hot sun. She, in a pale mauve dress with white smocking, was setting out the best tea service, thin bread and butter and honey and sugary fruit cakes. The Gavender household never had tea. The sugary cakes were for Harriet’s elevenses.

She turned her gaze towards the window.

David’s pale face flushed, but his features did not flicker. ‘I suppose that’s him.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is she here?’

‘No.’

‘Are we going to have visits like this often?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Did you invite him?’

‘No.’

David moved towards the door.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Out. Till he’s gone.’

‘Please,’ said Harriet. ‘To please me. Please go and talk to him. Say just a word to him. Go and talk to him and ask him to come in to have tea.’

David looked at his mother. Her neck above the high mauve collar was as red at that of some strange bird, her face was red and seemed swelled with emotion, though there was no sign of tears, rather a sort of tremulous uncertain excitement.

‘I know ifs difficult,’ said Harriet. ‘But it will be harder next time if you run away now. We’ve got to make this somehow ordinary or we won’t be able to bear it. Please. Please.
Please.’

Blaise came in. He had a transformed look. He looked humbler and stupider, not unlike Buffy, his face patchily pink, his short gingery hair jagged, his big jaw unshaven and covered with gleaming points of red. ‘Look who’s outside,’ he said, smiling humbly and idiotically at Harriet. David turned his face away, as he had used to do as a child when his parents ate messily. ‘What shall we do?’ said Blaise diffidently.

Harriet said, ‘I’ve asked David to say hello to him and ask him in to tea.’

‘Is that – all right – darling?’

‘Of course it’s all right We can’t just leave the child sitting on the lawn.’

Blaise turned to David and was about to say something. David walked out of the garden door and went quickly across the grass. A primitive awful sense of sacrilege and sheer trespass swelled his chest and made him want to scream get out, get out! He strode up to Luca and stood in front of him. The recumbent dogs all jumped up. Seagull twisted round and plopped out of Luca’s embrace. There was a faint general growling. The small brown-eyed boy looked up at the tall blue-eyed boy.

‘My mother says will you come in to tea.’

For a moment Luca said nothing. He simply stared up at the stern unsmiling face. Then he said, ‘Would you like to see a toad?’

David, who had until now been simply hot with that confused boiling of misery and outrage, and who had uttered his mechanical words as ungraciously as possible, felt suddenly that characteristic cleavage of the soul which is the cold call of duty and, even in his anger against it, recognized it. He breathed deeply and said, ‘Yes.’

Luca, moving himself gingerly, knelt up and gently introduced both his hands into the pocket of his blazer. The hands emerged holding a small brown toad. The toad wriggled a little, and then settled into the supporting hands, looking upwards with its bright bulging eyes and an air of concentration which was oddly like a frown. Its dry dark spotted skin glimmered in the sunlight.

David looked at the toad. He knelt down on the grass.

‘They’re looking at something together,’ said Harriet.

Her voice was a little quavering but she was well in control. What had become plain to Emily at the moment of meeting had been as plain to Harriet as if she could have looked into Emily’s soul as into a box. Where Harriet had expected the terrifying challenge of hatred, suddenly there was none, there was only an object of pity. For Harriet had seen the guilt and the shame which Emily had so greatly wanted to hide from her; and all these things had been for Harriet a sort of searing consolation.

She had not attempted to describe their talk to Blaise, in fact she felt that any mundane description of it would simply mislead him. So much had passed between them which words did not then express and could not now explain. She felt that her meeting with Emily had been an achievement. She had done, against Blaise’s judgement, what she thought to be right, and she had behaved to Emily with all the self-assertive dignity and kindness which she had intended in her heart She had, in Emily’s territory, planted her own standard and with no censorious device upon it The vulgar brawl which Blaise had mutely feared could not have been more impossible, and this impossibility had been imposed by Harriet’s own firm gentle will. She had done the very best she could, she had been brave, and the little meeting with Luca, that had been a success too, something so mysteriously important and so curiously easy.

At the same time, Harriet knew that the shock wave had not yet really come. She was simply, before it arrived, carrying out as many quick sensible movements as she could, shoring up her place, her home, against the tornado. Awful grief and fear hovered somewhere near to her, hanging in the still atmosphere like a faintly restless black balloon which she would touch lightly with her hand and push gently further away. But she was in control of herself, and as she suddenly realized with an absolutely new feeling of energy, she was simply in control. All these people now depended upon
her.
She, and only she, could, if it were possible at all, help, heal and avert disaster. And now in the livid light before the storm she could see Blaise very clearly too. She could see him now and understand him perfectly, as he looked with amazement out into the garden where his two sons were kneeling on the lawn together, looking down at something and talking.

‘My God,’ said Blaise, ‘Oh my God.’ He felt from within his idiotic humble smirk. It was the best that he could do to hide a sort of stupid relieved joy, improper and insane. Harriet had said that her meeting with Emily had ‘gone well’. Clearly there had been no slanging match. Blaise had not returned to Emily. He had driven Harriet home to lunch. Lunch had been an empty ceremony since neither of them could eat at all. They had conversed awkwardly, gently, about Emily, then about their own past, the early days of their marriage. After lunch Blaise had slipped out and telephoned Emily from a call box. She said in that heavy way he knew so well. ‘Oh, it’s you.’ ‘Yes. Forgive me.’ ‘Fuck off.’ ‘You were kind to Mrs Placid.’ ‘There is no Mrs Placid.’ ‘You were kind to Harriet.’ ‘She was kind to me.’ ‘May I come and see you tomorrow morning?’ ‘Do what you bloody like.’ Emily rang off. It had been a very merciful conversation.

Blaise had returned to the house and tiptoed to his study. Harriet was lying down. He lay down too, relaxing upon the sofa, gazing at the ceiling, and letting relief lift him up like a tide. So far, so good. So far, they were both being kind to him. Had he, oh Christ, got away with it? Would God, in the form of two wonderful women, forgive him, grant him salvation after all? It was too early to know. But today there had been such mercy. I am unworthy, he said to himself, blinking and grinning at the wonder of it all. Was it conceivable that the worst was over? Blaise too saw the black balloon of grief and possible catastrophe and he tapped it away from him with a light touch. He felt love for Harriet and love for Emily welling up in his heart, and realized that he was experiencing this double love for the first time in his life as innocent.

Now as he saw David and Luca so impossibly together he wanted to yell out to the universe in gratitude. He turned to Harriet and saw how tenderly, how perfectly, she understood all that he was feeling. ‘Oh – you -’ she said, in her way; and took him into her arms and pressed his beaming head down against her shoulder.

‘Isn’t it funny,’ said Harriet. ‘The only person he told was Magnus Bowles.’

‘Really,’ said Monty.

‘I feel I’m living in a myth,’ she said. ‘I feel the pain itself is giving me the energy to bear it. Is that crazy?’

‘No.’

‘Of course there’ll be shock later. Secondary shock, or whatever they call it. People die of that.’

‘You won’t.’

‘I feel so talkative, as if I were drunk all the time. I feel as if I were seeing myself all the time, and admiring myself for standing it’

‘You are wonderful.’

‘Did you tell Edgar?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He wanted to punch Blaise.’

‘How sweet of him. Oh Monty, it’s all so extraordinary. I woke up in the morning and – oh it was such pain – just for a moment I thought it was all a bad dream.’

‘Yes.’

‘I feel I’m living on pain, riding on it, like a sea.’

‘So you’re on top of it.’

‘Yes. Now. It’s odd, but I feel so full of
power,
I’ve never felt this before, I’ve always depended on other people, on the strong people, my father, Adrian, then Blaise, even David. Now suddenly I feel – everybody depends on me.
She
depends on me. Oh Monty, the little boy is so enchanting.’

‘You don’t resent him?’

‘No, how could one, how could any woman resent a child —’

‘I suspect some women could,’ said Monty. He was not sure. How much did he really know about women? Were they different from men? Somehow he had never quite classified Sophie as a woman. He was annoyed with himself because he found Harriet’s state of mind so difficult to imagine and because he was disconcerted by her reactions.

‘Luca likes me too – it’s quite a thing – it’s like a sudden new love in the middle of it all – like a —’

‘Spring in the desert. Blossom in the wilderness.’

‘You’re laughing at me! Monty, you are doing me good!’

‘I haven’t said anything.’

‘You don’t need to. I feel – you see, you’re the only person I can talk to, and I feel now for the first time that I can talk to you perfectly. There’s perfect understanding between us, I can say anything and be understood.’

It was true. Harriet’s amazing exhilaration, there was no other word for it, had swept away all the old barriers of her nervousness, his coldness. She was suddenly able, with a strong instinctive deftness, to run the conversation. She was, probably for the first time in her life, utterly obsessed with herself, interested in herself, pleased with herself, with her ablity to endure pain, with what she had called her ‘power’. This great flowering of self-pleasure gave warmth, gave light.

‘I took Blaise for better or worse. Suppose he had cancer or were disfigured or blind or lost his mind? I’d nurse him, I’d look after him. Of course I never conceived of
this
sort of trial, but how could I fail it? I mustn’t, I can’t. Really, Blaise and I have never felt closer to each other, never more perfectly in love, it’s made us both so much more alive, like being shipwrecked together.’

‘You are very good.’

‘No, no. You see, he’s so
relieved,
it’s like being a priest and giving somebody absolution, seeing the burden drop off. His relief is so wonderful. I’ve never been able to
give
someone I loved something they wanted so much. It’s pure hedonism.’

‘Goodness is finding pleasure in right acts.’

‘He’s so humble, and oh he is so relieved, not to have to lie any more, to have all that awful fear and deceit swept right away. And he really is sorry, and so frank about it all, not sparing himself at all, he really is contrite, I’ve never seen him like that, I’ve never seen anybody like that I just want to hug him and hug him and tell him that it’s all right’.

‘Well I’m glad it
is
all right,’ said Monty.

Misfortune had crushed him like a worm, deprived him nearly of life. The woman seemed to thrive on it. Her eyes were all dazed and glowing, her dark goldeny-brown hair, tumbling in a thick involved braid down her neck, seemed to be done in a new way, or perhaps it was just a felicitious accident She looked younger. As she talked, making vigorous gestures with her plump arms, her long blue and white striped dress swept the floor. He could smell the newly-washed cotton material, Harriet’s face powder, warm flesh, roses.