The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (34 page)

‘You never lost me,’ said Blaise. ‘Surely you knew that.’

‘I’m not sure. I feel now so much more connected to our beginnings, to our very first deep true love. I feel that never ceased at all, it just waited, and if there were bad patches I’ve simply forgotten them.’

‘Me too.’

‘And you’ll see her now and then and David of course. They’ll get used to it. They’ll see you haven’t vanished into thin air. I don’t want them to suffer much. I mean I don’t
want
them to suffer at all, but somebody’s got to, thanks to clever you!’

‘I know, kid —’

‘You’ll keep faith now?’

‘Yes, Em darling —’

‘I’d better keep my foot on your neck all the same.’

‘Your foot is always on my neck. I love it there.’

‘And you’ll really write to her tonight and show me the letter?’

‘And we’ll walk together to the post and post it.’

‘That’s my sweet prince.’

Blaise drew her over sideways and down towards him and studied that bright pert small very blue-eyed face, which happiness had illumined with even more than its former youthful loveliness. The old seductive vitality had returned, everything was back in place which had made her once so utterly irresistible to him. He kissed her, tasting the kiss with closed eyes.

How amazingly practical he had been in these three days. He had sorted out all his papers and business documents at Hood House. He had signed the lease of a flat in Fulham. He had put off his patients and told them he was moving his consulting rooms into town. He had done everything – except tell Harriet that he was going. Of course I’m not
really
going, he told himself at intervals, when the whole thing began to seem too dizzily dreadful. It’s simply a matter of justice, it’s like I used to envisage it when I was more clear-headed, nearer the start. There are two women, neither of whom I can leave. They must take their turns. I have to put this burden on to Harriet. She is strong enough to bear it, I can pay her that compliment. And her peace was shattered anyway. She’ll live at Hood House with David and I’ll visit her there like I used to visit Emily here, only oftener of course, as it’ll be open and above board and so that much better. The
whole
situation will be better, and isn’t that what’s most important? One will simply have redistributed the pain. And that
is
just, after all. I tried for so wickedly long to overlook Emily’s misery, simply not to see it. It’s right that now I should have to gauge it and to try to make her some amends. Of course it’s a terrible business but after all I’ve always known it was a terrible business. Anything I do is going to be somehow wrong. This solution is objectively the least wrong, and hang my motives. Anyhow, without
those
motives how could I make Emily so happy? And to make someone
so
happy is surely a good thing.

What am I supposed to do? What
can
I do for the best? Blaise inquired of some enigmatic power which still seemed, after all this, to be discontented with him and still to accuse him of something. Of what? Of a sort of awful
vulgarity?
Was that his sin, that too its punishment, that he was irredeemably
vulgar?

Milo Fane, tall, cold, expressionless, stared into the muzzle of the gun which his captor now pointed at him with a hand which trembled alarmingly.

‘Keep still,
keep still,’
said de Sanctis.

Contemptuously Milo turned his back and sauntered away down the room. He moved without haste, feeling the trembling lethal steel behind him. He counted the paces: two more to reach the table. As he suddenly side-stepped de Sanctis fired. The bullet passed Milo and struck the pier glass at the end of the room, shattering it into a glittering spray of tiny fragments. At almost the same moment Milo’s hand closed on the heavy bronze: Neptune taming a sea-horse? his incurably literary mind suggested as, almost without turning, he hurled the object and then was after it with the speed of a panther. The bronze caught de Sanctis squarely on the side of the head and a moment later Milo had repossessed himself of his Mauser.

He looked down upon his fallen senseless foe. It was a moment for speed. A knife flashed in Milo’s hand. With fastidious distaste he drew down the sock above one of de Sanctis’s flashy Italian suede shoes and bared the ankle. With measured deliberation he severed the Achilles tendon. De Sanctis was screaming. Milo was wiping the blood off his hand with a clean handkerchief. He was walking down the stairs. He drew a bar of chocolate out of his pocket and began to undo the paper.

Monty stared fascinated at the television, which he had turned on intending to see the news. The long forgotten words of the book came shadowily back to him as he stared at Richard Nailsworth’s stiffly handsome face upon whose unmoved ruthlessness the cameras were now gloatingly concentrated. He switched off the set. His watch must have stopped before he wound it, he had evidently missed the news. No consolations tonight in the form of floods, earthquakes, massacres, hijackings, public executions, murders or wars. Nothing to laugh at at all in fact.

He wandered out of the little downstairs dressing-room where, together with a painted wall cupboard large enough to conceal several pre-Raphaelite princesses, he kept the television set. He passed along the hall where the tea chests full of unanswered letters were now overflowing on to the floor. He kicked one of them as he passed dislodging a little stream of missives: messages of sympathy, appeals for money, political manifestos, bills, letters from lunatics, letters from women. He went into his study and crossed to the open window. It was already almost dark outside and a number of bats were dancing a tango over the lawn, taking sudden swoops towards the house as if they had dared each other to dart right up to Monty and touch his face with a passing wing. He watched them for a while, then turned on a lamp and closed the shutters. The stained-glass cupboards glowed dully like metal. Mr Lockett had had lights fitted inside them, but the effect had seemed to Monty garish. Sophie had sometimes turned the lights on to annoy him. It had been a fairly warm afternoon but now it felt cool in the house, almost cold, as if some diffused spiritual condition were declaring itself clammily. As he often did on such summer evenings, Monty had lit a small wood fire in the mosaic fireplace. How much this little room had comforted him once. He shuddered and felt the fear which lived with him now, the fear of his own mind.

He saw a letter from his mother, which had arrived by the morning post, lying upon the table, and he reached for it and opened it. The usual love letter. Still announcements of a visit and no date fixed. His mother was poised like a kestrel, waiting, watching, wondering. She was obviously afraid of coming too soon. He felt her fear, he felt her will, not even in her written words, but deep in himself, in the part of him that was her. Underneath his mother’s letter was now revealed a letter from Richard Nailsworth once again urging him to come to Richard’s villa in Calabria. Monty pictured Richard’s face, so much more vulnerable and touching when he was not playing Milo. That, not He crumpled up Richard’s letter, then tore his mother’s up carefully into small pieces and dropped both letters into the fire.

Monty had been alone now for four days. No one had come near him during this time except for Harriet, who had called in briefly, evidently upset and unwilling to talk. The telephone bell was still silenced. He had expected Edgar to turn up again to do his Old Man of the Sea act, but Edgar had not come and Monty was surprised to find himself disappointed. He looked in vain for Edgar’s Bentley, in this road and the next. Doubtless Edgar had been offended by Monty’s horrible remark. Monty felt a vague urge to apologize but decided it was pointless. Where was Edgar anyway? Back at his London Club, or at Mockingham supervising the destruction of his mother’s unsightly greenhouse? Monty had got as far as discovering the telephone number of Bankhurst School, but had not yet used it. He felt it as a sort of life-line however. He knew that he could force himself to pursue this job and that once he had put himself in a context where he had to behave normally he would probably find himself behaving normally. Writing was utterly and absolutely now out of the question. Getting through time was rather the problem. The cry of ‘Help me!’ – but there was no one there.

Devotion to truth might save him somehow: austerity, honesty, discipline; yet he had in his desert place to
invent
these things. He made his regular attempts to meditate, but their very formality gave admission to horrors. The depths where he had seemed to find silence and emptiness and peace now writhed with forms. He resorted to elementary techniques such as counting his breaths, but the numbers themselves became huge in his mind and enigmatically significant as if they were printed upon immense cards. He wanted to he on the floor and weep but tears seemed eternally denied. No wonder he missed Edgar. Any human company was a relief. Yet there was no one whom he had the will positively to seek for.

Monty, who had wrapped himself in the white fur rug from the big armchair, had just decided to give himself a sleeping pill and go to bed when someone started ringing the bell and banging violently upon the front door knocker in a way suggestive of terror and desperation. Monty leapt up and raced through the hall turning the lights on. He opened the door and Harriet entered, passing him quickly by and going on into the lighted room. She was wearing the cashmere shawl which she had drawn up over her head. He caught a glimpse of her face and guessed instantly what had happened. Had he, during these four awful days, been waiting for it?

He followed her into the study. Without a word she handed him the letter and then sat down quietly. Standing beside the lamp Monty read Blaise’s words.

Harriet my darling,

I have to tell you this and I beg you to accept it with all the wonderful courage and compassion which you have so far shown in this dreadful business. I am going to live with Emily. I have to. I have simply got to choose. (Edgar was right.) I cannot live with you both and since it has all come out I have simply realized that I cannot now any longer ask Emily to take second place. She has suffered enough. I must now give her and Luca the comfort of a real home, a place where I am nearly all the time. Oh my God, if only I could divide myself in two, but I can’t! Hood House already exists and will go on existing. And of course I shall come to see you there. And I shall trust you marvellously to keep it in existence, for David’s sake and because you are some kind of saint. My dearest girl, I
pray
you to accept this new scene and to make it work. After the first shock, you will see that it is not impossible. The alternative to ‘making it work’ is just violence and chaos which you
cannot
choose. My mind is made up and I am certain of my course. I must now give myself to Emily, who has suffered so patiently and so long, during a time when you were happy. Oh do not despair of happiness again, my dear, I shall always be there. We shall just have somehow, shall we not, to learn each other anew and love each other anew in this different life. I
know
that you will attempt this and I bless you for it from the bottom of my heart. I shall be living with Emily in Fulham, in fact we are moving at once. (So there is no point in coming to Putney.) I think anyway it is better that we should not meet for a short while. Let there be an interval during which we both take stock. I feel so terrible and so desolate as I write these awful and irrevocable words to you. Do you remember when you first knew of Emily, you said, ‘I love you. I just want to help you. What else would you expect me to do?" Can you, oh can you please, still say this under this further awful burden which I put upon you? You and only you can still save us all. You must do it and you will do it. I am acting with my eyes open. I
see
how awful all this is, what an outrage, what a crime. But I am placed between crime and crime and I have to move Try to see it as an act of justice and forgive me. We must both learn, you and I, and we can learn to bear it. For this is anguish to me too, my dear. I cannot write more. Oh forgive me. And hold everything still in its place, my love and my saint.

B.

P.S. I hope you will understand when I say this: naturally in the new set-up Emily wants to have Luca all to herself, especially now that he has a resident father at last! We are planning a new school for him. (Not the one we decided before.) He must be made to fit in and settle down. So
please
don’t disturb him trying to see him any more. You must appreciate that this is simply a matter of the child’s welfare. Letters will be forwarded from the Putney address.

Oh my dear – I am so sorry

Monty read this effusion slowly and with care and then looked at Harriet. He had seen the effects of strain, even of frenzy, in her face, and saw now the traces of tears. But her look was not that of a totally distraught woman.

‘What do you think of that?’ said Harriet.

Her steady tone made suddenly a kind of intimacy between them; and Monty realized at once how much better he was feeling. Harriet’s troubles were a far more effective cure than catastrophes on television. He answered cautiously, ‘Is he serious?’

‘Of course!’

‘I mean, won’t he come rushing back in a couple of days saying he was in a muddle and please will you have him back? I mean, how
can
he exist without you?’

‘He’s in love with her again. He won’t come rushing back. He’ll be hanging the curtains at the flat in Fulham.’

Monty stared at Harriet in amazement. Was there no end to the surprises which this remarkable woman could spring upon him? Her stern controlled face seemed scarcely recognizable. She looked like a distant relation of herself. The features were similar but the expression was utterly new.

‘He is mad with relief,’ said Harriet. ‘He has pulled it off. He is free, he is gone. He has done it at last.’

‘But he said he didn’t care for her any more.’

‘He lied. Or else he has simply discovered he does. Perhaps she forced him to choose. Anyway, however it’s happened, he’s chosen.’