The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (38 page)

Oh if only you knew, thought Monty. He replied, ‘Look Harriet, sober up. Loving confers no rights you know. You talk as if you had just emerged into the clear light of day. It seems to me that the opposite is the case. You’ve been knocked on the head, you’re suffering from shock, you’re in frightful pain. Jealousy is one of the most awful of all mental pains and in order to help yourself bear it you’ve invented this great affection for me —’

‘So you think I’m suffering agonies of jealousy?’ said Harriet.

‘Yes.’

She considered this, lifting Lucky’s heavy and now recumbent front half off her knee, and setting him to lie curled up beside her, his big head against her thigh, as she gazed still down the garden towards the yellow privet hedge and speckled fence that divided Monty’s property from that of Mrs Raines-Bloxham.

‘The odd thing is,‘ said Harriet, ‘I don’t think I am. The shock has been somehow too great and that has actually helped, like when someone is shot and instantly paralysed so that the nerves are spared the agony which might kill. Of course I could feel jealousy and I may feel it. Only somehow that’s already something small, and I do feel in this awful way so strong and solitary. I don’t think that Blaise or my former life will ever come back to me in any form – that I could accept or be – pleased by – any more.’ For the first time since her confession began her voice faltered a little towards tears.

That’s better, thought Monty. He pursued, ‘You say you are paralysed. But you won’t stay paralysed. You say you may feel jealousy. You certainly will. You’ve got to see Blaise soon and when you see him you’ll inhabit your love for him all over again. Love for someone you’ve been married to for years can’t suddenly end like this, it’s an addiction. You’ve got a long road, Harriet, and don’t imagine I can tread it with you. You’ve got to work this thing out with Blaise and you can’t foresee how he’ll act or how you’ll act. Blaise is perfectly capable of changing his mind again.’

‘I don’t care if he does.’

‘You will care if he does. He could undo everything, including this new you that you’re so proud of, in a moment. Suppose he comes back and throws himself at your feet, you would be instantly metamorphosed back into what you were before. In fact it wouldn’t be a metamorphosis because you haven’t changed, you only have a comforting illusion of having changed. All this stuff about freedom and will is
false,
Harriet,
false.
Your real work, and your duty too incidentally, is to go on supporting your relationship to Blaise, living inside it over a long time while he decides what he wants and what he’ll do. He is your husband after all.’

‘What about what I want and what I’ll do?’

‘That has no importance. For these purposes you’re still ectoplasm.’

‘Why are you so unjust to me?’ said Harriet, suddenly now turning to look at Monty, shifting herself and the dog a little way from him for a better view. Monty in black linen jacket and white shirt, his dark hair well combed and neat, his black shoes ludicrously well polished, was looking his most jesuitically untouchable. Oh I do love him so, thought Harriet, and this is new, new in the world. I must convince him, I must make him see. He can save me. /
can save him.

‘I’m not being unjust,’ said Monty, still not looking at her, gazing at the dogs on the lawn. (Ajax had just arrived.) ‘I’m being realistic, which I dare say you’re incapable of being at present. Blaise just has absolute power over you. The whole situation holds you emotionally and morally trapped. You are not free. Come back to a few simple clear ideas, Harriet. The idea of your duty, for instance. If Blaise wants soon, or even not so soon, to extricate himself – and he may – to come back to you, to re-establish Hood House, it is your duty to help him. It mightn’t be another woman’s duty. It is yours. Please don’t interrupt me. It is your duty for David’s sake, even if there were no other reason, and there are other reasons. You are not capable of suddenly "living free". You are not prepared for it by nature or by training. You have got to act the humble powerless part. You cannot and ought not to claim the dignity of will and action. In other words you’ve got to behave like a saint however peevish you may feel, because you, being you, haven’t any viable alternative. Years later, if Blaise has really abandoned you and you find that you can really abandon him, all right, you may have to make other arrangements, learn typing and shorthand, learn some new and uncongenial form of life, who knows. And
that
won’t be freedom either. When that time comes all those things will be just as compulsory as the things I’ve been speaking of are now. At present you’re simply foisting a false idea of liberty and power on to a mere bubbling up of emotion, a sentimental feeling you have about me, a feeble muddled desire to be helped. Wake up, come back to reality. You are a long way, perhaps years, away from any deep change in your life. Because of the circumstances and because of your nature you have got to be passive now and simply
wait
for Blaise and see what he does and what he needs. That is the only role of which, without dangerous self-deception, you are really capable, and I advise you to play it.’

‘You are
awful,’
said Harriet. ‘Of course I’ve always known that. But I think now, which I’ve never thought before, that you are being
stupid.’

‘Another relevant point,’ said Monty, his eye moving over the group of dogs like one who ‘reads‘ a picture, ‘is that I haven’t got what you need. I haven’t the
interest.
I’m sorry to be brutal, but clarity is better. There must be no muddle here and no, as you put it, beginning. I am a bereaved man -’

‘I know, I know, I haven’t forgotten for a second.’

‘Bereavement is my occupation and it absorbs me completely. You want me to touch you, to look at you with sympathy. I cannot.’

‘I know – not yet – no woman can come near you in that way – but —’

‘Bereavement is also the cause, or any way the occasion, of real changes in my life. I shall sell this house. I shall cease writing. I have already done so. My life as a fake artist is over and I am not capable of being any other sort of artist. I have to live alone inside myself without Sophie and without Milo. As Edgar may have told you, I intend to become a schoolmaster. I have an appointment at a school which I hope will employ me. I am going to strip my life in ways which have long been in preparation —’

‘Monty, stop. You accuse me of living in a dream world, but it seems to me you’re doing just that! You tell me I can’t change, and then you show off about how you can! If you could only see how self-satisfied you looked just now! Are you really going to mortify yourself in this ridiculous manner? You are your own prisoner too, after all.’

‘These are not impulsive emotional expedients, my dear Harriet. All this is the outcome of deep long things. I’ve never really talked to you about myself and I won’t now, except to say this. I have seemed to some people to be successful —’

‘And you’ve enjoyed it!’

‘In a way of course. But I have a long deep unhappiness about my life, about my marriage, about my work, which now comes to a crisis. I have to resolve this crisis properly or else become a sort of bad person which in a sense I’ve always been but which I’ve never absolutely become. I haven’t become it because of Sophie and the fact that I loved her and because of certain illusions about myself as a writer and certain other (doubtless) illusions about what some people would call religion and I would call I know not what. Things seemed provisional for me which seem now, in the light of her death, absolute. I have my own troubles and my own moment of trial and you have no place in the picture. I have to meet what I have to meet and do what I have to do and you are simply an irrelevance, a, forgive me, profitless distraction. I have absolutely nothing to give you.’

‘No,’ murmured Harriet, ‘no. You accuse me of being in the dark. Perhaps I am more than I think I am. But you are in the dark too. You can’t
know
all those things about your life. You too have to struggle on and see how it turns out. Just don’t in the dark – go too far away from me. I am certain I can help you. To help you would be my salvation, and I can
see
now that to help me would be yours. I am your immediate task. The schoolmaster idea is romanticism.
This
is where you should be. Oh dearest Monty, I hardly dare to say all this to you because I know it makes you mechanically avert your face. But don’t avert it, please. Look at me, Monty, look at me.’

Monty got up abruptly and cast a frowning glance at Harriet. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I have been as accurate as I can. I shall be leaving this house very soon. You can stay on if you wish to. I have said all I have to say and I don’t want any more conversations of this sort. They are a form of self-indulgence to which I am not addicted even if you are.’ He moved quickly away and went into the house, closing the French windows sharply behind him.

Tears rose automatically and at once into Harriet’s eyes, and she drew Lucky towards her again and began to caress his big long soft muzzle, stroking his black lips and touching the fangs beneath. It is unjust, it is so unjust, was her thought. I have never been recognized as myself. Blaise always thought of me as part of him, and I was part of him. This is the first time in my life that I have faced another human being as an independent person. How can he reject me! He must not, he will not. I need and must have his help. He will relent.

She rose, having dropped Lucky, and began to walk slowly down the garden, her copious tears comforting her a little. Lucky, Babu, Panda, Ajax and Buffy followed her slowly, at her pace. She turned into the orchard and along the winding clipped path, Hood House now visible between the trees. The light wind had stripped the whiteness off the ladies’ lace and the seed heads were already forming. The smell of cut grass came to her vivid with memory, carrying ghostly pictures of the Welsh cottage and her sad defeated parents. She mopped her eyes, feeling the relief of a more general sadness. A turning in the path brought the fence and the row of foxgloves into view, and the dogs’ gate into the next garden, now enlarged so as to allow the passage of Ajax, his organs no longer endangered. There was a small scrabbling on the other side of the fence and Lawrence and Seagull came through. Another animal followed, a dark head and then, on all fours, a complete boy. It was Luca.

Harriet exclaimed and immediately fell on her knees, holding out her arms. The boy, with a laugh and a gasp, ran to her, falling down before her and into her embrace. With eyes closed they held each other tight. The dogs frisked about them.

‘I’ve come to call for Pinn,’ said Kiki St Loy.

‘I’ll tell her you’re here,’ said Emily McHugh, and shut the door in her face.

She went back into the sitting-room where, as she noiselessly appeared in the doorway, she saw Pinn passing Blaise a letter. ‘Your little playmate’s here,’ she said to Pinn. ‘You might have told us she was coming.’

‘Sorry, I forgot. Won’t you let her in?’ said Pinn, stroking down her frizz of bright hair in front of a gilt mirror with cupids on top and candlesticks in front, one of Emily’s more ambitious buys.

‘Let her in of course,’ said Blaise, a little flurried about the letter.

Emily returned in silence to the door and opened it. Kiki who, dressed in delicately faded jeans and a long blue silk shirt, was sitting on the stairs, put on a martyred air for a second and then smiled. Her smile expressed the sheer golden self-satisfied joy of healthy youth.

‘They say you’re to come in,’ said Emily with undisguised sourness. Kiki followed her to the sitting-room.

‘Hello, Kiki,’ said Blaise, and his face, Emily thought, could not help reflecting Kiki’s pleasure in herself.

‘Hello, Blaise. Hello, P. Your chariot awaits.’

‘We’ll be off then,’ said Pinn. ‘Come on, little one. Ta ta, love-birds.’ They departed with a wave, and Emily could hear them laughing wildly upon the stairs. Blaise had disappeared to the lavatory, obviously to read his letter.

Emily stood alone in her sitting-room. It was a pretty room, the prettiest she had ever created, in fact the only room she had, like that, created. She had chosen the russet carpet, the purple and blue blotchy curtains, the maroon armchairs of corded velvet (they could not afford a ‘suite’), the long-haired tousled multi-coloured woollen Finnish rug, like a big animal, the long low glass coffee table, the gilt mirror. It had given her such joy. It had seemed so alive.

‘What was in that letter?’ said Emily to Blaise, staring at the curtains, as he returned to the room.

‘What letter?’

‘The letter Pinn gave you.’

‘Oh that. She is ridiculously secretive.’

‘What was in it?’

‘Well don’t look like that. Nothing much, nothing awful.’

‘Well let me see it’

‘I put it down the lavatory.’

‘I don’t believe you. Turn out your pockets.’

Blaise turned out all his pockets on to the coffee table. No letter.

‘Why did you put it down the lavatory? People don’t usually do that with letters. It isn’t even very easy.’

‘I can’t stand Pinn any more. I’m sorry, I know she’s your friend. But she and her letters just seem – muck. I wanted to clean it off myself.’

‘She isn’t my friend, and you don’t even think she is. I’ve felt like that about Pinn for some time. I don’t trust her an inch. It’s you who’s always encouraged her. You had secrets with her over at Putney.’

‘I never did!’

‘Well, you have now. You must be encouraging her or she wouldn’t pass you clandestine letters. What was in the letter?’

‘Nothing except – well, only one thing really, and we thought that already. Luca is over with Harriet’

‘I don’t need to be told that,’ said Emily. ‘When he disappeared I assumed that was where he had gone.’

‘Well it’s better to know. And it was kind of Pinn to tell us.’

‘Why did she need to put it in a secret letter?’

‘She thought you’d be upset and that I’d better sort of break the news to you.’

Emily thought for a moment, still staring at the curtains. Blaise had sat down in one of the maroon armchairs, his outstretched feet almost invisible in the shaggy tangles of the Finnish rug. He looked up at her watchfully. ‘I don’t
think
I believe you,’ said Emily. ‘I don’t think I do. Maybe Pinn said that in the letter, but she said other things as well, things that are worrying you. I can see, I can feel, that you’re worried.’