The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (33 page)

The wall ended, they turned its corner and the scene changed again. Across an obviously disused gravel drive, fuzzed over with little skinny wild flowers, was a high dark yew hedge with a neatly clipped archway in its midst. Pinn crossed the gravel on tiptoe and led her captive through the arch. A square of well-trimmed lawn was here surrounded by four high walls of equally well-trimmed yew where, opposite to their point of entry, another archway was flanked by two yew-niches containing a greyly-naked hatted and booted Hermes and a miniskirted Artemis selecting an arrow. As David followed Finn across the grass he realized, had perhaps known from the start, that the aviary jargoning was the excited voices of girls. He could now hear their high-pitched laughter, the occasional little scream. He passed from sunshine to shadow to sunshine, moving on Pinn’s heels under the second yew arch.

‘Sssh -’ Her hand gripped his as they emerged very cautiously on to a further stretch of lawn. Straight ahead of them was an immense tangled hedge of pink roses and it was from beyond this that the sweet hubbub arose. Pinn scanned the lawn in both directions before she drew him out after her, murmuring, ‘Now
quick,
follow me.’

She released him and moved with long Artemis-like strides across the intervening space and almost with the motion of a diver projected herself into the rose hedge and disappeared into its interior. Panting after her and lowering his head David saw a rounded burrow-like space, like a pathway of a fox or badger, which led into the innermost part of the wide tall hedge, and with a similar dive, half stumbling over his jacket which he was still carrying over his arm, he fell on all fours and scuffled in after his companion.

He fell against something warm and yielding, Pinn’s leg. They were kneeling close together on earth which was suddenly crumbly and moist, inside a sort of low domed hall, greenly twilit and surrounded by the robust reddish thorny stems of the roses, glowing and faintly translucent The rose smell was overwhelming. David became aware of a long pain in his arm where a thorn had scored him in his precipitate entry. He covered his mouth to still his panting. The voices of the girls were very close.

Pinn, jostling to face him, her two knees now touching his knees, was suddenly glaring into his face and holding him by each forearm, sliding her hands in beneath the tumbled shirt sleeves. In a vivid momentary flash David saw Pinn’s small hand with two silver rings upon it, dabbled with blood, presumably his. Pinn’s face glared, round-eyed, puff-cheeked, like a comic mask, close to his, vividly smiling, and for a moment he thought that she was going to kiss him. But she had simply leaned forward to whisper. ‘Not a sound. I’ll show you where to look.’

She twisted about and lay down full-length, wriggling herself gingerly into a space between the glassy red stems where a similar but smaller burrow gave on to the other side of the hedge. David began to follow her, but was stayed by her sandalled foot pressing urgently upon his shoulder. There was evidently only room for one in the burrow. In a moment Pinn was wriggling back and kneeling to push him forward by the shoulders into the place she had vacated. David, almost prone, edged himself towards a circle of leafy sun-shot brightness on the other side of the hedge. An aperture now at last showed him the scene beyond.

A whitish marble basin, half sunk in the grass, filled with water and with the area of a fair-sized swimming pool, lay in the foreground with, rising up behind it, an immense and very battered baroque fountain representing Poseidon surrounded by sea nymphs. In the marble basin, as lithe and pink as fishes, six or seven girls were disporting themselves. They were all entirely naked.

Only much later, as he endlessly rehearsed in his mind the brief vision of the bathing damsels, did David realize how much, in what turned out to be a very short glimpse of them, he had actually seen. At the moment of seeing there seemed to be nothing in his mind except the somehow terrifying distressing impression of those wet pinkish-brown limbs, those long agile legs, the dripping defenceless often graceless buttocks blanched by bikinis, the equally pale small scarcely-grown breasts, the long wet darkened strands of hair plastered to cheeks and necks and backs. Later on however he found he could fill out in memory the whole scene as he had evidently, in spite of his sheer startled terror, managed to perceive it.

Beyond the fountain was a big largely ruined portico, with a cracked and grass-grown pavement, between whose pillars a latticed fence well covered with white flowering clematis formed a screen. To the right of the basin was a high beech hedge, and to the left a fence at whose foot young beeches had been planted. The towering fountain, made of a pale coarse licheny limestone (the basin was also of limestone: only in David’s first feverish vision of it had it seemed to be made of marble) presented a long-bearded and grimly magisterial Poseidon wearing a high, now brokenly, jagged crown and gazing abstractedly into the distance, while a messy tide of nymphs, dolphins, fishes and other merfolk climbed towards his knees, attempting in vain to attract his attention. A dolphin, held aloft by a two-tailed nymph, had evidently once, when the fountain was able to ‘play’, gushed water right up on to the god’s curly beard, which cascading in involuted rings as low as his navel, had been stained in some now distant era of the nineteenth, or even of the eighteenth, century a vivid blackish green.

The basin, probably, on the evidence of the newly-planted beech hedge, only quite lately devoted to the sport of other than purely limestone nymphs, was not very deep and would not have admitted of diving. It was, however, both long and broad and contained the (David’s memory now told him exactly) seven naked girls without overcrowding. The girls, all showy swimmers, were able at any rate to exhibit to each other their splashy crawls, with a great deal of spray and shouting, and some less than dignified clambering in and out, long legs scraping limestones, without too many actual collisions. A slimy sluice down which water had once flowed from the more elevated level of the fountain, well lubricated by the swimmers’ splashes, even served the girl who seemed smallest and youngest among them as a slide, down which with shrieks she constantly descended, scattering her more pretentiously crawling companions.

David became aware that something hot and slug-like was lying on top of him. Pinn, to see the show, had insinuated herself into the burrow beside him, lying half above him, her arm across his shoulder. She began to speak to him in a whisper, though indeed the laughing and shrieking of the bathers would effectively have drowned a much more resonant tone. ‘Aren’t they lovely? Do you see that one over there, just climbing out, that’s my special crony, Kiki St Loy, isn’t she a peach? She wants me to find her a boy friend, would you like to be it? She’s only seventeen, though she pretended to be eighteen to get a car licence. Isn’t she just the prettiest thing? And believe it or not she’s still a virgin. Most of them aren’t, but she was never sure till now that she wanted a man at all. Just look at her, the way she’s standing, admiring herself -’ Kiki had climbed up on to the rim of the basin and was standing rather awkwardly, with salient stomach, one leg firmly planted, the other dabbing a prehensile foot on to the wet curving intermittently broken edging. One arm was a little histrionically outstretched for balance, while with a quick busy hand she was gathering the long strings of her wet hair, squeezing them out and stowing them all neatly together, cast back over one shoulder. As she did this she contemplated her breasts with interested appreciation. Her body was slightly darker than could be explained even by a rich girl’s sunburn, her breasts were brown. (‘Touch of the tarbrush there,’ murmured Pinn.) Her brooding face, quiet and clear in the bright sunlight, was a lucid milky brown, uniform in hue, long-nosed, large-eyed, with the striking appearance which Homer, meaning thereby to compliment Hera, qualifies as ‘ox-eyed’. Her hair, drying a little in the sun, had now declared itself to be a radiant brown, somewhat fairer than might have been expected, when the expressive eyes, so singularly dark and large, turned suddenly in the direction of the rose hedge and seemed to dart their fire right in through the leafy aperture.

David at the same moment raising his gaze as far as her face felt himself, doubtless erroneously, to be observed. He felt the intolerable hot confining weight of Pinn, lying beside, half on, him and constricting his movements. Regardless now of disturbance or possible detection he began to struggle, half sitting up, pushing the obstruction away, and jerking himself out of the thorny tunnel into the middle of the hedge. A moment later he had rolled over and taking the other side of the hedge in a quick rush had burst forth at a run on to the sunlit grass. He ran fleetingly, desperately, the tips of his toes scarcely touching the ground, through the yew archway, across the yew-encircled quadrangle, over the gravel driveway, along the elder path, past the cedar trees, through the door m the wall, between the lettuces, and out through the second and blessedly unlocked door, on to the friendly safe expanse of the public street, where he slowed down to a fast walk. He realized from the strange looks given him by the passers-by, that not only his arm but also his face was liberally smeared with blood. He also realized that he had left his jacket behind, underneath the rose hedge. His flesh was blazing hot. He felt confused violent emotion. Shame. Terror. Wild joy.

‘Didn’t I tell you you’d have to descend to the underworld to find me and make me alive again?’ said Emily.

Everything between them was as it had once been, only with the passage of the years, with the suffering which they had caused each other, with the shock of exposure and the fear of loss, deeper and steadier, more complex, more profoundly felt.

‘Yes,’ said Blaise, kneeling at her feet.

‘Didn’t I tell you that your real self lived with me?’

‘Yes.’ He stretched himself out slowly, luxuriously, like an animal, laying his cheek upon her bare foot.

‘God, how you’ve made me suffer. How you’ve made us both suffer.’

‘Yes.’

‘You do look battered. It’s not just the eye. You look a proper wreck. Well, you know it now, what you were saying yourself. You can’t go through the looking-glass without getting cut. You know that now, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

In the three days that had passed a certain violence had run its course. The fury had passed into them and become part of their knowledge and their strength and they had at last become quieter together. Blaise had listened to Emily speaking to him over hours and hours. ‘It’s her turn to suffer now. I suddenly felt sure what to do. I was prepared to be kind to her, but not to be bloody taken over. She assumed she was top wife, didn’t she. She was bloody forgiving me, and I was taking it as if I were really some sort of blasted criminal. I was like a bloody culprit before her. She was running us both. She was running you, that was what I couldn’t bear. You should just have seen yourself in a mirror, you should just have seen the expression on your silly face, like a Utile boy who’s been let off his caning. I couldn’t bear to see you so bloody meek and submissive before her, it drove me hopping mad. And her saying she regarded me as a wronged woman and an object of pity, and saying how badly you’d treated me and how she’d make you treat me better, as if this was going to stop me feeling bad in front of her, and at first she just had me mesmerized, but then my God I could see it wouldn’t do, I wasn’t going to put up with a Christ-awful arrangement like that. I’m not vindictive, I don’t want to watch her weeping, but it’s just bloody time for me to have my rights and let her put up with the rotten end for a change.’

This outcry, hours and hours of it, which Blaise endured with dazed blissful pain, began to subside at last. Between them now Harriet’s name was scarcely mentioned any more, except in so far as it entered into certain practical arrangements upon which Emily now dilated with a childish pleasure which stung Blaise’s heart with humility and tenderness.

‘We won’t put off long your starting to be a doctor, will we? I want you to be a doctor. I don’t want you to lose anything, anything because of me.’

‘We’ll have to put it off a bit,’ said Blaise now fully dressed, holding the hem of her petticoat which he kissed at intervals, ‘until we see where we are financially.’

‘Here, let me sit down and you put your head here. I do think we should move out of this dump. I think it’s important. It’s not a silly extravagance is it, getting that other flat?’

‘No,’ said Blaise. ‘We must have a new beginning in a new place.’

‘It is psychologically important, like you said. You know, when I saw you signing the lease for the flat I felt as if we were getting married at last – like in my dreams – I’ve so often dreamt I was young again, getting married to you. Oh my dear sweetikin, you don’t know how much I’ve suffered all these years from simply not being what I ought to have been, from simply not being your proper wedded wife.’

‘I do know, kid,’ said Blaise. ‘I can’t take that suffering from you. But for any future suffering, I’ll be around, we’ll do it together.’

‘Together. Now and always?’

‘Now and always.’

‘We won’t need new curtains. These ones will fit. Well, we’ll need one lot of long curtains for the big room. Oh my sweet one, do you think I’m silly, when so many great big things are happening, to be so pleased about curtains and about having a balcony and a bathroom with a carpet in it?’

‘No. That’s a sign of love too.’

‘Everything’s a sign of love. Dear heart, I don’t mind any suffering, you know, so long as you truly love me and so long as it’s me you live with. And we’ll have friends, won’t we, friends of us both who come to the house, like married people have?’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘But not Monty Small or that fat man.’

‘Not them, no.’

‘You know, I think Luca went over to her again yesterday. That’ll have to stop.’

‘Of course.’

‘I think after all a boarding school would be a good idea. I’ll take a job. I feel I could work till I dropped now for
us,
for you and Luca. I just got so empty and idle and lazy because there seemed nothing to work for. I felt I’d lost you.’