The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (32 page)

Luca looked up at her with the cunning almost seductively conscious look which made it sometimes seem impossible that he was just a little boy of eight.

‘He has the longest tail,’ he said.

It was true he
had
the longest tail, and Harriet’s allegiance wavered slightly. Oh dear, would they have to take
two
dogs?

The smiling anxious friendly faces behind the wire moved with them in an ordered group, backed by the flailing tails. Oh how terribly touching they all were!

‘I wonder if it tires a dog to wag its tail so?’ said Harriet. ‘I feel quite exhausted just looking at them!’

‘Do they kill the ones that aren’t taken?’ said Luca.

‘I don’t know. No, of course not.’ Harriet preferred not to think about that. She felt the immediate hot presence of tears, never far from her now.

The dalmatian with the very long tail was certainly a charming animal. Harriet had never seen one with quite so many spots either, and she was about to say this to Luca but resolved not to, because really they
had
decided, hadn’t they? The dalmatian had a rather silly face, but Harriet could not make out whether this counted for or against him. They moved on to the next cage. There was a rather charming airedale, prettier than Bufly, with a brilliant autumnal coat and bright amber eyes, only of course Harriet never had two dogs of the same kind so he was not in play. There was a sweet long-haired dachshund. ‘He’s a dear, isn’t he!’ said Harriet, crouching and touching the long nose which protruded through the wire. How moving a dog’s nostrils were, moist and dark, like the dark moist places of nature, hillside pools, rock crannies by the sea.

‘He’s too small,’ said Luca, who had already made it evident that he had a set of standards, mysterious but firm, by which to make the anguishing dog-decision.

In silent accord they moved back to the first cage. The Cardiganshire corgi, somewhat resembling a huge caterpillar, with his glossy dark brown flowing coat (tweed colour, Harriet thought of it as) concealing his short legs and almost sweeping the ground, had been shouldered back by the taller dogs but was wagging his plumey tail with equal enthusiasm and in order to get a better view of his human visitors intermittently and clumsily rising on to his hind legs in a most engaging way. His face with its big muzzle, so absurdly large in relation even to his quite burly frame, glowed with intelligence and goodwill and his beautiful eyes, of a limpid colour of peaty brown, gazed upon Harriet with a curiously intimate and personal kind of beseeching. It was as if, already, he
knew.

Harriet and Luca looked at each other. Words were unnecessary. Their communion was already perfect.

‘He’s
your
dog,’ said Harriet ‘You know that, don’t you?’

Harriet was more profoundly moved than she dared (fearing tears, a kind of soppiness which might embarrass her dignified friend) acknowledge even to herself by the excursion to the Dogs’ Home. The combination of Luca and the dogs was almost too much. ‘Dignified’ was indeed strangely the word for the little boy. He was a child of great inwardness and entirely lacking in the anxiety which had characterized her own son at that age. Luca, barbarously under-educated, had something of a savage’s self-possessed beauty. More than that. One was in the presence of a mind. What exactly went on in this mind Harriet could not conjecture. But she experienced the moment to moment perfection of their converse with the pleasure which might be associated with a successful love affair; and the partner who created the confidence and set the tempo was Luca. She felt, even, looked after. With what an extraordinary tact and deliberation he now took hold of her hand. She barred back the wild tears.

Harriet had more than this motive for weeping. Blaise had come back of course, everything was going along, not exactly ‘as usual’, but, under the dreadful new dispensation, with what should have been a fairly steadying degree of usualness, except that Harriet now knew that something awful would happen, was perhaps already happening. This conviction was totally irrational and she resisted it, but it kept returning. The old eternal communication between herself and Blaise had ceased. Of course, looking back, she knew objectively that in the early days of his association with Emily he
must
have been, with so much to conceal, alienated. But she had not felt the alienation, and it was as if by never recognizing it she had annihilated it. Something wonderful to do with the marriage bond, to do with perfect marriage vows, had made her able retrospectively to assimilate that disloyalty and make it as if it had never been. Blaise had repented and had returned, even long before she ever knew of Emily McHugh’s existence, and Harriet need ask for nothing more. She could, here, do the rest. But this present alienation was new and was another matter.

I am imagining it all, she thought. But there was so much evidence. The house itself bore witness to the dislocation. The objects in the kitchen, in the bedroom, in her boudoir, in Blaise’s study, which usually, untidily and randomly placed as they were, coalesced into an organic interior, like to the world of a rich and well-regulated mind, were suddenly disconnected from each other. Some current which had joined them up into an aesthetic whole had ceased to flow. They lay about derelict, resembling the things in the house of someone who has died, surveyed by some stranger, his heir, to whom their histories and nature were unknown and uncared for. The house just looked a meaningless mess and Harriet had no will any more to cherish it. Customary activities such as ‘doing the flowers’ had simply lapsed. There were no fresh flowers in the house now, not even roses, which were so easy to pick and arrange. A vase of withered Dutch irises had stood in the hall for several days and the task of throwing away the flowers and emptying out the water had been monumentally too difficult for Harriet.

Of course everything to do with David was full of pains and problems. Harriet had, as it were, reconnoitred David with the greatest care, trying to find some way of reaching him. He remained polite, laconic, cold. However her bond with her son was profound and old and even across the estrangement they could still look at each other, there were momentary looks when she pleaded and he frowned, when she knew that their souls touched. She could not lose David and she would win him again somehow. She planned, and had said this to Blaise who distractedly agreed, to do just what David had asked: to take him abroad with her for a few days, just the two of them, to Paris perhaps. Once they were really alone together the barriers would surely fall. She had not yet put any date to this plan or spoken of it to her estranged son, but the idea of it consoled her.

Blaise was certainly in an odd mood, distraught, preoccupied, excited, but uncommunicative. He was
busy.
He had cancelled appointments with his patients in an unprecedented manner, and was absent for a lot of each day at, he said, the British Museum Reading Room. He was, he said, anxious now to finish his book, he was just on the last lap. Dr Ainsley, who rang up when Blaise was out, anxious to see him, sounded upset and also, unnervingly, as if he knew things which Harriet did not know, and was trying to find out how much Harriet knew. Surely Blaise could not have confided in the patients something which he had not told her? ‘When are you going to see Emily?’ she asked him. He replied with obvious exasperation, ‘Oh next week some time. She’s away.’ ‘Away? Where?’ ‘On holiday. With that girl Kiki St Loy. They’ve gone off in the car.’ ‘Who’s looking after Luca?’ said Harriet. ‘Pinn is.’ ‘Where have they gone to?’ ‘How do I know? Just don’t keep on about Emily, will you?’ Have they
quarrelled,
Harriet wondered with a moment of wicked hope. But somehow it didn’t feel like that. Of course questioning Luca, when he arrived on his mysterious visits, was out of the question. The ‘dignity’ of her relation with the boy forbade any such vulgar proceeding.

When at home now Blaise spent his time in his study, where as she could see from the state of the waste paper baskets, he was doing a lot of sorting and tearing up of papers. Perhaps it was something to do with finishing the book. He also made excursions to the loft, where old trunks of his held various treasures. He was even sorting out his
clothes.
He was putting his affairs in order. What for? Harriet’s mind touched the possibility but instantly shied from it: was it conceivable that her husband was
preparing to bolt!
However she so knew that this was impossible that she could not so interpret the evidence, could not, in this light, even see it. Blaise was ‘going through a phase’. She could not lose him any more than she could lose David. It was simply a matter of holding on, letting them both feel the absoluteness of her love and trust, and waiting for them to become open to her again. So Harriet waited and hoped. But, for whatever reason, the misery she now silently endured was more intense than any she had known.

‘We’ll have
that
one,’ she said to the attendant.

The Cardiganshire corgi, separated from his less fortunate friends, emerged from the cage a free dog. Luca, kneeling with bare knees on the dirty ground of the yard, put his arms round the corgi’s neck and had his face thoroughly licked. Luca’s eyes closed in a rare moment of utterly rapt childish bliss as he embraced the dog. Harriet hastily wiped away the now inevitable tears.

‘What shall we call him?’

‘Lucky Luciano.’

‘What name is that?’

‘It’s a gangster. Like what I want to be when I grow up.’

The weather had re-established itself. David, walking along the Upper Richmond Road, was sweating, although he had taken off his jacket. He felt the perspiration running down his ribs and glueing his white shirt to his skin down the whole length of his back.

Last night he had dreamt he was in China. In a wild mountain landscape he had seen, up a steep path, a wooden cistern fed by a warm spring. In the thick creamy water a naked girl was bathing. Then suddenly with horror he had seen the mountain shudder and begin to move. With increasing speed a great roaring avalanche was beginning to descend. The sea of tumbling rocks engulfed the cistern and blotted out the path. And now there was nothing but torn earth and piled up stones and a deep dark chasm out of which the steam arose in swirling clouds.

No one had told him Emily McHugh’s address. He had found it for himself in an old address book of bis father’s cryptically entered under ‘McH’, together with the telephone number. David felt, as he walked along, almost faint with an emotion which he could not name, compounded of fear and excitement and grief. He simply had to see Emily McHugh. What he would say or do when face to face with her he did not know. He felt hatred for her, but had no intent to reproach or revile her, that would be merely absurd. He simply had to
see
her, and then decide what happened next. He turned down the side street, and a few minutes later, with a violently pounding heart, was in the grubby corridor filled with rubbish boxes and children’s tricycles, and was at the shabby door and ringing the bell.

An impressive auburn-haired woman in a green linen dress opened the door.

David looked upon her with bulging eyes. He said, just audibly, ‘I am David Gavender.’ The possibility then occurred to him for the first time that his father might be within.

‘Well, I am not Emily McHugh,’ said Pinn.

David felt intense relief. ‘Is she -? ’

‘She’s not here. No one’s here but me. I’m Constance Pinn. Have you heard of me?’

‘No.’

‘I’ve heard of you. You’re much better-looking than your picture.’

After a moment’s silence, David began to turn away.

‘Wait a mo, handsome. What did you want with Emily?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Don’t go away. Or, wait a bit. I’ll come with you. I won’t ask you in, the place is a shambles. Wait.’

David waited.

Pinn emerged wearing a matching green jacket over her dress. She seemed to be full of private glee and actually laughed, staring at him, as they set off down the corridor.

‘Where are you going to, my pretty one?’

David gestured vaguely.

‘Come along with me then. I’m going to the school where I work. It’s a girls’ school. Have you ever had a girl?’

‘No.’

‘Wouldn’t you like to?’

David gestured even more vaguely. He walked mechanically beside Pinn, letting her touch his arm, tug him gently by his napping shirt sleeve to guide him.

‘What do you think of your daddy’s carry-on?’

David was silent.

‘You mustn’t be too hard on him,’ said Pinn. ‘People get in awful messes. You’ll be in a mess yourself pretty soon. Life is a series of messes. It’s easier than you young people think to tell a lie and then have to tell another. And falling in love can’t be avoided and has to be forgiven. You weren’t going to be nasty to poor little Em, were you?’

‘No.’

‘There’s a good pet. Emily’s had a rotten life. Almost as rotten as mine.’

They were walking along beside a high brick wall, and Pinn stopped suddenly at a door in the wall and produced a key. They both went through the door and found themselves in a large vegetable garden, surrounded by three other high brick walls, along one of which ran a row of greenhouses.

‘Where’s this?’ said David.

‘Sssh!’ said Pinn. ‘This is the school. Keep your voice down. There are no men on the staff, only a few outside servants. A man’s voice sounds very conspicuous in here. Just follow me and don’t talk. I want to show you something.’

The tall walls seemed to exclude the sound of main road traffic or reduce it to a bumble-bee buzz, as the two figures crossed the garden by a diagonal path between beds of radiantly healthy lettuces. They reached another gate and passed through it. And as they did so a new sound came to David’s ears, a sweet high-pitched jargoning as of a near-by aviary of little chattering birds.

They were now in what appeared to be a miniature park or meadow, with the uncut grass just coming into flower and covered with a reddish sheeny light. A little way off, almost black with their own density, stood two immobile very large Lebanon cedars. Beyond was an elm, green as the lettuces, and half hidden by some slightly farther trees, the slanted pale facade of an eighteenth-century house. To the right, leading along the brick wall, was a path fringed by golden elder bushes covered in flat saucers of creamy flowers, and along this path, finger on lips, Pinn led the way. The aviary jargoning was louder.