The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (48 page)

(In fact, though Blaise never knew it, his patients had largely benefited from the triple shock of Horace Ainsley’s death, of Harriet’s, and of Blaise himself being nearly killed by dogs. Surviving these catastrophes, unhurt by them, increased by them, they all felt better. At a party given by Maurice Guimarron, Angelica Mendelssohn agreed with Septimus Leech that they had never been taken in by Blaise for a single moment. ‘And he imagined we adored him!’ ‘I can’t think why I went on!’ said Angelica. ‘Neither can I,’ said Stanley Tumbelholme, joining the group. ‘I feel so much better since that ghastly creep passed out of my life. How I wish those dogs had eaten him up!’ ‘I’ve nearly finished my novel,’ said Septimus ‘and Penelope says she can sleep like a log nowadays.’ Miriam Lister laughed archly. Septimus and Penelope were shortly to be married. Only poor Jeannie Batwood was silent. She was desperately in love with Blaise and could not now leave him, even though her husband was threatening divorce proceedings.)

Blaise felt, on the whole, relief at the removal of Luca from the scene, though he was distressed for Emily. It was a terrible thing to admit, but he had never really understood Luca or his own feelings about Luca and had never loved the boy as he ought. Luca, conceived as a burdensome problem, had remained one for Blaise. The strange child, as it grew, inspired guilt and fear. It was a relief to have it officially
classified
as subnormal and taken away to be looked after by experts. At this period a holiday from Luca’s presence was in any case essential; later on decisions could be taken with a clearer mind. And although Emily cried a good deal about it, he felt that she too was relieved when that terrible incomprehensible silent suffering was taken away from before her face. This leaves more energy for other things, he thought, such as looking after David: though as yet he had scarcely attempted to do this, and Emily never mentioned the boy. Blaise had twice visited David at Locketts, but talk between them had proved impossible. David remained obstinately taciturn, then politely dismissed his father. Blaise, who had hoped for some little sign of mercy, felt he could not soon again so expose himself. He refrained from any reflection upon these meetings, quietly blurring them away. I will deal with David later, he thought. Just now he is better left with Monty and Edgar. What most immediately matters is Emily, settling her here, making our union real, making her believe in it at last. And once again he thought to himself how wonderful it was to be able to make a woman happy.

And now he was married to Emily McHugh. They faced each other as man and wife. The long fight had ended or had changed. There was to be a new era of wars and revolutions of an entirely different type. The badinage sounded the same but with the disappearance of real danger had lost some of its cutting edge. Had fear really been an important ingredient in their old love? Had he perhaps at least enjoyed his sense of
her
fear? Now it was as if, behind each exchange, they were constantly saying, ‘It’s all right, darling, it’s all right. One can’t now be lost or ruined or destroyed any more. It’s all a game, you know.’ The ferocity in her which he had savoured so now seemed innocuously fake, or at any rate no longer sharpened by circumstance so as to pierce or thrill him. There was a gentler calmer understanding between them, almost a conspiracy, a conspiracy in favour of happiness. It was like an agreement of much older people. As he apprehended this Blaise found himself thinking hungrily of happiness and wondering if this less exciting prize were after all available to him and his second wife. He could not remember the quality of his very first pre-Emily happiness with Harriet, that time had become legendary and all but inaccessible to his mind. Nor could he clarify in memory that transformation of his early affections which had made him feel that Harriet was his sacred love and Emily his profane. As he now edged and nudged the past about, instinctively ordering it for a diminution of pain, he could only remember clearly (or was he partly inventing it?) with a new emphasis and yet also as a form of pity for her, his unhappiness with Harriet, his loneliness with her, his sense of having made the wrong choice and being in the wrong place.

But in what place was he now? The fact of being
married
to Emily came to him with a kind of shock of innocence and blankness, like a very white light, and while it made him feel deeply tender towards her it seemed to diminish their old vertiginous feeling of a unique kinship. Perhaps this kinship had indeed been partly a product of adversity and of the excitements of fear. Now they were no longer living dangerously and must appreciate other qualities and see each other with differences. Yet the thought of their old love remained to them as a token, or as a sort of guarantee, a reassuring flag which at certain times they flew. They had been sure once that they were quite specially made for each other, they had walked through a fire for this and deserved a reward. And even if the reward was puzzlingly different from what they had expected, at any rate the fire had been real. Blaise felt the marks of mortality upon him. He would carry scars and limp for the rest of his life. And as he nursed himself carefully out of the horror of Harriet’s death, he felt older and even more self-indulgent and noticed with pleasure the symptoms of a similar self-indulgence in Emily. They would have money, comfort, a pleasant house, a pleasant easy life. They had suffered together, and would now enjoy worldly consolations and rest at last. How ordinary we shall become, he thought without much regret; and he felt in himself a sort of achieved moral mediocrity, a resignation to being unambitious and selfish and failed which gave him a secret wry delight.

‘I’m glad Adrian’s over,’ said Emily. ‘It’s another phase in the phasing out of you-know-who.’

‘I thought he was never going.’

‘Look, I think you should see Monty.’

‘About David.’

‘No. About the orchard. I want the orchard.’

‘I’ll write to him.’

‘Why not ask him here for a drink?’

‘I thought you didn’t like him.’

‘I did, only I wasn’t going to let on. Anyway I like him now. He’s the only celebrity we’re ever likely to know.’

‘Well I don’t like him now.’

‘I shall go and see him.’

‘You won’t’

‘You see, I can still madden you.’

‘Lay off, kid, I’m tired.’

‘I want the orchard, I want the orchard, I want the orchard.’

‘All right. I’ll try and get it for you.’

Of course it’s not true that I don’t like him now, thought Blaise. But what sort of evil genius he has been to me. I don’t want to see him, not yet anyway, because he makes me feel inferior. He always did, but I suppose I enjoyed it once. Now I don’t and that’s part of the ‘failure’ too, that Monty doesn’t ‘work’ for me any more. Really in a way the whole thing was his doing, something he just did to amuse himself. He made my thing with Emily possible by inventing Magnus Bowles, and he made Harriet run away by killing him. Poor Magnus committing suicide was the last straw for Harriet. Monty really is the king of cynics. Or more like a dreaming god, making awful things happen in a sort of trance. That’s what he’s been like to me. And really I suppose, in a dreadful way, he hasn’t done too badly as our local divinity. It has all ended fairly happily for those who are left alive. Out of so much guilt and muddle at least there is a new beginning for me and Em. And because of Monty I don’t have to think too badly of myself either. It was not my fault Harriet ran off to Hanover, it was Monty’s fault. If he’d looked after her properly she wouldn’t have gone. 1 didn’t kill her, Monty did. He was the immediate cause. Let him have the guilt then and keep it for himself. He has eaten it up as he eats up everything. Let him burst with it like Magnus Bowles. Of course one can’t be friends with a power maniac like that. The sin of pride isolates people more than any other sin. Monty likes to think he’s Lucifer, but really in the end he isn’t even Magnus. He’s thin and small, as thin and mean and shrivelled up as Milo Fane. Yes, that’s who Monty is after all, just Milo in the end with intellect instead of nerve. Well, I’ll write to him about the orchard. I wonder how little I can decently offer?

He’s jealous, the pet, the angel, thought Emily McHugh. He think’s I’m going to start something with Monty, as if I would, or if I did it would be simply to stir Blaise up a bit. I mustn’t let him get too sluggish or take me too much for granted just because we’re married. Emily had never lived so richly and vividly inside herself in her whole life. She now experienced so much which she could not tell to Blaise (simply, like a mystic, for lack of a vocabulary in which to convey such transports) that she sometimes felt that simply by being conscious she must be constantly deceiving him. Also of course she had to draw a decent veil over her absolute satisfaction at the demise of Harriet. She did not feel wild triumph, rather the deep pleasant sense of a task well done, as if, in some quite guiltless and proper way, she herself had eliminated her rival.

Emily felt in these days that she had become something huge, as if her stunted and deprived nature had suddenly grown, expanding upwards and outwards so as to contain what had formerly contained it. She contained Blaise. She felt now, in the tenderest way, larger than he was, stronger, wiser, and she watched him and read him with meticulous loving closeness. She saw, as never before, his faults, his old faults and his new. She saw all in him that was bogus, all that made him the sublime humbug, the sheer dear old charlatan that he was. She observed the coiling protective mechanics of his anxious egoism, his determination not to suffer the horror, his quick busy instinctive destruction of Harriet inside himself. She even saw the imperfection of his love for her and saw it in the
light
of her own more perfect love for him. She too felt the diminution or change of their so specialized ‘kinship’, but she did not grieve, understanding it rather as an opening out of their love to the wide world, which enriched them with a whole new territory of the emotions. All this she had somehow prophetically experienced at that wonderful moment in the little registry office when Blaise had at last slipped the longed-for wedding ring on to her finger, and Pinn and Maurice had kissed her and called her ‘Mrs Gavender’, and she had thought, Blaise and I are
married.
She was an ordinary married woman with a husband and a home. Everything now could be an exercise of her love, including the simple worldly satisfactions which were for her a part of the innocence bestowed by marriage. She loved Hood House, loved tending it and embellishing it and feeling proud of it, and she only wished she could somewhere find her stepfather, if the old swine was still alive, and let him see the stylish way she lived now in a real gentieman’s residence.

Of course she was unhappy about Luca, but the unhappiness was circumscribed by a determination, similar to that of her husband, not to suffer to excess. Luca was at present, for her, in a state of suspension and she tried to feel about him as if he were asleep. The psychiatrist had advised no visits for a month or two. Later on they would see. Emily had burnt the elephant not because Harriet had given it to the child, nor even (which Blaise had not noticed) because there was a tiny smear of Harriet’s blood upon it, but simply because the sight of it suggested the reality of Luca so dreadfully: the possibility of deciding to go and see him, the obscure idea of his ultimate return. How would Luca return? Would he return? All this threatened unbearable mental pain. But Emily was not going to destroy her heart with these questions. She dwelt rather upon the idea that Luca was being helped and healed; and she recalled the awful fear for him, and indeed of him, which she had constantly felt in the old days, when he was so strangely silent with her. Must she not now feel relief to know that, for the time, he had ceased to be a special vulnerable perishable little boy for whom she was so frighteningly responsible, and had become a case like others with which highly qualified experts knew just how to deal? She did feel the relief and took it intelligently for her comfort. The best possible was being done for him, and that must for the present suffice. About David, Emily had no worries at all. David was nearly grown-up. She could almost cross off upon the calendar the weeks and months which must elapse before David should be grown-up. And when that time came he would simply go away and not trouble them any more.

And Emily, as she sat in the bright transformed Hood House kitchen and gazed vague and wide-eyed with love and with cunning understanding pity at her husband, had another reason for feeling that she must spoil herself a little and keep all horrors far away. (The old wooden kitchen table had been banished to the garage and the red tablecloths had gone to Oxfam. Now there was a shiny round white Scandinavian table with a heat-resistant surface and six white chairs to match. All the crumbly shabby darkness was gone.) She had been to the doctor today and had confirmed her suspicion that she was pregnant. When she had heard tins she had felt a sudden instant confidence that Luca would get well. He would be cured and come home and they would all live together happily ever after. She had not yet told the good news to Blaise, and now she was anticipating the pleasure of doing so. How he would fuss about it being a girl! For the first time in her life Emily McHugh looked at her future and saw it stretch out before her like a golden land.

‘
Moules?
’

‘No.’

‘Not a seafood man?’

‘No.’

‘Well,
oeufs
somehow?
Mornay? Timbale de foies de volaille?
Avocado? Or how about smoked salmon?
Quenelles de brochet?
You can’t foreswear all fish, we can’t have a mockery made of serious eating. Smoked trout?’

‘You choose for me,’ said David. A tear spilled from his eye to his cheek and he rubbed it away with a slow gesture.

Edgar saw the tear and returned his attention to the menu. ‘I suggest we both start with smoked salmon. Yes. The
poulet sous cloche
is good here, but – perhaps a steak, we could have a
Chateaubriand
between us. Unless you’d rather have the game pie? No, I think not too. Oh, wine waiter! Yes. Now let me see, the
Graacher Himmelreich
– not
Spatlese
that year, that would be really too sweet at the beginning. Then – then the Pommard ’64. Excellent Yes, we are ready to order now, thank you.’