The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (7 page)

‘This is drivel,’ said Monty. ‘And since you admit to being retarded, I can only agree. If there is anything which you admire in me, it is probably what I least value in myself.’

‘I don’t mean your frightfulness – remember what we used to call your frightfulness – at least not exactly that. You’ve got a centre, you can think, you can invent. Are you writing another Milo Fane?’

‘No.’

‘You know I’ve never really been loved by a woman.’

‘
Tiens
.’

‘Somehow I’ve always wanted the ones that didn’t want me. I’m the absolute queen bee of unrequited love. And then with Sophie – it was so especially awful – Oh God – what can you be thinking of me—’

‘I’m thinking,’ said Monty, ‘of how we all used to call you "Rosie" in college.’

Edgar had indeed not changed much. The drink problem, if it was one, had not marked him yet. The plump smooth full-lipped uniformly pink youthful face had been so mysteriously and discreetly touched by middle age, it was not clear how one knew it was not still the face of an undergraduate.

‘Yes, "Rosie", yes. I think you invented that. I rather liked it. You were bloody kind to me in those days. I’ve kept all your letters, even from then. And all Sophie’s letters of course. There weren’t many. I’ll show them to you one day. Would you like that?’

‘No.’

‘Do you mind if I have some more Scotch. In a weird way this is like old times. How we used to talk about women before we really knew any! Do you remember saying to me
laissons les jolies femmes aux homines sans imagination?
’

‘No.’

‘We used to talk all night. Women, philosophy. "Nothing in reason supports the assertion that it is good absolutely to relieve suffering." How we broke our heads on that one, do you remember?’

‘I think you’d better go now.’

‘Hitting something soft back hard, like in badminton, that’s what our friendship has always been like. I used that image once in a letter to you. I kept all your letters – Did you – No, of course, you said you didn’t —’

‘Oh, go away,’ said Monty. ‘There isn’t any friendship. I know, now that you remind me of it, that you were once all set for some sort of big emotional intellectual friendship between us, full of challenges and responses and rows and reconciliations and exchanges of clever letters, but it never existed except in your mind. After we left college the only real connection between us was Sophie, and now she’s dead.’

‘You sound so cold, – as if you’d accepted her death.’

‘Of course I’ve accepted her death. I accept facts.’

‘That’s your – frightfulness – again. You always hated vulgarity and sentiment. Oh God. Coming home to England you know – I kept thinking and thinking how I’d see her -I didn’t even think of her saying anything to me. I felt I’d be like a dog, just sitting and looking at her. I was faint with joy at the idea of seeing her. Did she talk about me ever?’

‘Occasionally.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She made jokes.’

‘Well – I’m glad of that – if I was good for a laugh – that was all right. Coming home I felt—’

‘Have you still got that big house? I forget its name.’ But as he spoke Monty remembered the name.

‘Mockingham. Yes. It’s been a bit of a problem since my mother died. And you know my sister lives in Canada now. It’s only twenty miles from Oxford, so I suppose I’ll partly live there. Do you remember coming to Mockingham?’

‘Yes.’ Monty especially remembered the first occasion. It was his first visit to a large English country house, where all was ‘accustomed, ceremonious’. He had been impressed, but had carefully concealed this fact from Edgar.

‘You remember the coolness with my mother about your not coming to church?’

‘Are you still devout?’

‘Well, I go. I tag along. I don’t know what I believe. But it helps me not to go to the dogs. Not so fast, anyway. I say, Monty, that tape you were playing. Do you think you could -?’

‘No.’

‘Will you sometime?’

‘No. Could you go now! I’m going back to bed.’

‘I’m sorry – don’t be angry with me, Monty.’

‘I’m not angry. Just clear off, will you.’

‘I’ll come to see you tomorrow.’

‘It is tomorrow. And you won’t’ Monty rose and pulled back the curtains and opened the shutters. Bright sunshine flooded the dark elaborate little room, drawing blue flashes out of the de Morgan tiling.

‘Can I come this evening?’

‘No.’

‘When, then?’

‘Look, Edgar,’ said Monty, ‘I’m glad we’ve talked, but that’s that. We have nothing more to say, unless you count drooling on about Sophie as saying something. I don’t want to see you and I can’t imagine that you really want to see me. Maybe I’ll look you up one day in Oxford. Except that I’m never there. Anyway, good-bye.’

‘But, Monty, Monty -’ Edgar had risen.

‘Go, go. Here, take this.’ Monty reached out to the chimney-piece and took up a Coleport mug brightly painted with sprays of red roses. Take it, take it away. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that I want to dismantle the place, like Aladdin’s palace. Whenever anybody comes, I give them something to take away.’

‘Oh thank you – how pretty – I’ll put it in my room in college. Monty, do you think, later on I mean, when you’ve had time to sort things out, you could give me something of Sophie’s?’

‘No.’

‘Anything, anything at all, one of her shoes —’

‘No!’

‘Monty, you don’t mean it about not seeing me tomorrow? I’ve
got
to see you, I’ve
got
to talk about her, I shall go mad. You may have had time to get used to it, but I haven’t -’

‘Go away,’ said Monty. ‘I don’t want to see you. /
don’t want to see you.
Understand. Go away. Please.’ He opened the drawing-room door and went out into the hall.

Edgar followed. He stood, arms hanging, holding the Cole-port mug by the handle. Then suddenly he gave a little whine and began to cry. His face grew red and seemed to be instantly wet all over with tears. He said, ‘I can’t bear it, I can’t bear it.’ He continued silently to cry, staring at the ground and not wiping his tears.

Monty studied him for a moment or two. Then he went to the front door and opened it wide. A spurt of bird song entered into the house. Edgar set off along the hall and, with a powerful whiff of whisky, went past Monty and out of the door, still crying.

Monty went back up to his bedroom and darkened it again by pulling the curtains. He got back into bed. He wondered if the sight of Edgar’s tears might now help him to cry. He tested himself hopefully, but it was no good. His heart was beating hard and his head was aching and he lay sleepless. It was nearly six o’clock.

‘Blaise is away,’ said Harriet. ‘He’s with Magnus Bowles.’

‘Oh really,’ said Monty. He got up and wandered restlessly to the window. They were in the little Moorish drawing-room which the intense evening sunshine was illuminating with a rich powdery light, making the turquoise ducks upon the tiles to glitter like jewels and the saffron and grey lentil trees to glow with a pearly radiance. Harriet was sitting among the patchwork cushions upon the purple canopied sofa, looking with her pale mauve robe and her half-tumbled glinting brown hair, like some sultan’s delight. The room was somnolent and the garden fragrances were lacking in freshness, heavy like incense. Monty felt a little faint, perhaps from lack of food, perhaps from lack of air. A large pink-silver-paper-covered milk chocolate fish (a salmon perhaps?) which Harriet had brought with her lay upon the low table beside Edgar’s empty whisky glass. It was once again six o’clock.

The morning post had brought another letter from Monty’s mother, who was mercifully still at Hawkhurst.

My darling boy,

I am thinking of you all the time and will come to you soon. I just
brood
over your grief, wishing so much that my loving thoughts could make it well. I know by intuition, telepathy, what you will, how much you are suffering. We have always been so close and known each other’s minds. I would draw off that pain if I could. I can at least share it. Be quiet within yourself, dearest child, try to be quiet in your mind. I don’t mean resignation, you are not a resigned person. We know what we think, don’t we, of ‘the will of God’ and all that false comfort that weak people fly to. Just be gentle and relaxed with your sorrow. And be sure to take all those pills the doctor gave you, won’t you, dear. I was so glad of your letter though it said so little. I may telephone you soon. I did ring on Tuesday actually, but I got no answer. I expect you were in the garden.
Do not make any decisions about property until I have seen you,
you are in no state to do so. We shall have to think it all out carefully together, won’t we. I look forward to a long quiet conference about practical matters. Taking decisions will make you feel that time has passed, and time
does
heal, you know. It will do you good to face these ordinary things, but you must not attempt to do so alone. Our job is to get you writing again, isn’t it, to get you and Milo on the road again! You will feel so much better then. And we shall arrange your future for the best, and decide what to do about Locketts. So leave all these tiresome things until I come, dearest. Do not worry about me. Your little mother is perky, and full of her own concerns. Do you know, I have just bought a new dress? It is a lovely cornflower blue, I think that you will like it. I send you, dearest boy, like little birds, so many loving thoughts. My heart flies to you. I think about you with such an intensity of love. Know that, as you read these words, I am thinking of you.

Ever your loving and faithful Leonie.

Harriet was looking at Monty and wondering what he was thinking. He was not thinking about his mother. He was not afraid of Leonie’s telephone calls, since he had silenced the telephone bell with a piece of plastic wire. He was thinking: I must destroy that bloody tape recording. He had played it again that morning.

Harriet had spent the afternoon at the National Gallery. She usually did this on Magnus Bowles days. Blaise would drive her into town in the afternoon and drop her off at the Gallery, or at some other art exhibition, while he went on to the British Museum Reading Room. Then in the evening he would drive to the southern suburb where Magnus lived, and Harriet would make her way home by train and bus. She had never learnt to drive the car.

She had felt very strange that afternoon in the National Gallery. An intense physical feeling of anxiety had taken possession of her as she was looking at Giorgione’s picture of Saint Anthony and Saint George. There was a tree in the middle background which she had never properly attended to before. Of course she had seen it, since she had often looked at the picture, but she had never before felt its significance, though what that significance was she could not say. There it was in the middle of clarity, in the middle of bright darkness, in the middle of limpid sultry yellow air, in the middle of nowhere at all with distant clouds creeping by behind it, linking the two saints yet also separating them and also being itself and nothing to do with them at all, a ridiculously frail poetical vibrating motionless tree which was also a special particular tree on a special particular evening when the two saints happened (how odd) to be doing their respective things (ignoring each other) in a sort of murky yet brilliant glade (what on earth however was going on in the foreground?) beside a luscious glistening pool out of which two small and somehow domesticated demons were cautiously emerging for the benefit of Saint Anthony, while behind them Saint George, with a helmet like a pearl, was bullying an equally domesticated and inoffensive little dragon.

Hypnotized by the tree, Harriet found that she could not take herself away. She stood there for a long time staring at it, tried to move, took several paces looking back over her shoulder, then came back again, as if there were some vital message which the picture was trying and failing to give her. Perhaps it was just Giorgione’s maddening genius for saying something absurdly precise and yet saying it so marvellously that the precision was all soaked away into a sort of cake of sheer beauty. This nervous mania of anxious ‘looking back’ Harriet recalled having suffered when young in the Louvre and the Uffizi and the Accademia. The last visit on the last day, as closing time approached, indeed the last minutes of any day, had had this quality of heart-breaking severance, combined with an anxious thrilling sense of a garbled unintelligible urgent message. This experience had been a stranger to her for some time now since Blaise was not interested in pictures and she had not visited the foreign galleries. Why suddenly this emotion, on this occasion, for this picture? Was it something prophetic? Already a number of times she had walked away, determined not to look back, and had looked back. It was absurd. After all, these were her very own London pictures which she could see again any time she wished. She had intended to tell her little story to Monty, but by the time she reached him it already seemed too trivial. She knew better than to tell it to Blaise. He would say it was something to do with sex.

How very much I depend on people, she thought, looking at Monty’s profile. What a charming short straight nose he had. Everything about him was proportioned and neat, not like the knobbly looks of most men. Any girl would be pleased to have a nose like that. Harriet had no impersonal abstract world, except perhaps the world of pictures, and that seemed to come to her as pure ‘experience’, not anything she could possibly talk about. What I feel with the pictures is different, she thought, it’s like being let out into a huge space and not being myself any more. Whereas what I feel looking at Monty is so absolutely here and now and me, as if I were more absolutely my particular self than ever, as if I were just throbbing with selfhood. It’s odd because I love the pictures and I love Monty, but it is so different.

Monty had a hard and rather fixed gazing face, not like Blaise’s face which was so mobile, always changing and dissolving into laughter or annoyance or thought, as if it had no surface but were actually part of what it confronted. Blaise lived his face; Monty peered through his, looking from behind it, and not necessarily, Harriet sometimes uneasily felt, through the eyes. Monty had a sort of intent
voyeur
face, yet livened at times by a sort of puzzlement or chronic surprise. Only since Sophie’s illness his face had hardened further into a mask. There was a pale smile he smiled for Harriet, but it was quite unlike his old real smile. Harriet loved Monty, not of course in a ‘sexy’ way, but in the way that she loved almost anybody whom she got a chance to love, and perhaps a little bit especially because he always seemed to her so clever and yet so lost. That woman whom he mourns so has ruined his life, she thought to herself.