The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘There’s no point —’

  ‘I hope you’ll be prepared to support him in some genteel mental home. That’ll be another little item of expense.’

  ‘Well, I suggested adoption, it was you who wanted to keep him.’

  ‘I wanted to keep you.’

  ‘So it was just blackmail.’

  ‘Have you really got the face to taunt me now because I wanted to keep my own child? You’re a bloody phenomenon.’

  ‘You deliberately turn him against me.’

  ‘Don’t be a clot. It’s automatic. "Where’s Daddy?" Not that he ever asks that now, he never mentions you, God knows what goes on in his little head. Remember how we used to think of pretending you were a sailor? God, we were pathetic.’

  ‘Yes, I remember that. We’ve gone a long way together, kid. Let’s still look after each other. Please please be patient a little longer.’

  ‘O.K., but what are we waiting for? For her to die, or what?’

  ‘Emily, need we have this endless fruitless personal talk?’

  ‘What do you want us to talk about, Racine? I thought personal talk was your thing.’

  ‘It isn’t. I don’t talk personal talk all the time with Harriet.’

  ‘Don’t mention that name! I don’t want to hear what happens in your other set-up. Of course you don’t, you don’t need to. She’s secure, she’s got you, she doesn’t have to bother about personal things, because they’re all hunky-dory. She can think about the ruddy dinner service and whether she’ll go to evensong. Oh I’m the flesh and she’s the spirit, don’t tell me, I know! I’ll write it all up for the Sunday papers ope day. "I was an every other Tuesday wife." God, sometimes I feel like people who go to an airport with a machine gun and just shoot everyone within sight. You simply have no idea how much I suffer.’

  ‘You feel jealousy and spite and resentment. I feel guilt. That’s worse.’

  ‘Is it? Get rid of it then, do what I’m always asking you to do!’

  ‘It’s no good, that wouldn’t do it. We’re simply trapped, caught —’

  ‘Who’s "we"? You say that just in order to stop thinking. You’re such a bloody coward. You stay with her out of cowardice, you daren’t step out of line. You daren’t think, so you live in a dream. At least I used to bring a little reality into your life. Over there you live in a bourgeois dream world.’

  ‘Do stop using the word "bourgeois". You don’t even know what it means.’

  ‘It means dream. At least here it’s real. It may be bloody ghastly but it’s real.’

  ‘You said a little while ago it wasn’t real. Or did I misunderstand you?’

  ‘I could kill you sometimes. You know what I mean. Her place is real, it’s part of society, people come there, she’s somebody. This place is nowhere at all. I’m just loose, lost, rattling about, a bit of bloody scrap. No wonder I can’t make friends or look anybody in the face. The women down at the school just stare at me and pass by. They know I’m an unmarried mum. I see bloody no one except you and bloody Pinn and the Welfare busybody. Welfare! Christ! And then you have the face to complain about my conversation! If we had some friends together like ordinary married people do, we might have something else to talk about except ourselves. We could have ordinary talk and gossip and that and look at other things together, and not be always staring at each other. Why do we have to be shut up all the time in this cage? Why can’t we have friends together? I’d like to meet your friend Montague Small, I’ve been watching his Milo Fane series on telly, it’s smashing. He’s an interesting person. I’d like to meet him. He wouldn’t tell Mrs Placid, would he?’

  ‘It’s impossible.’

  ‘Why? Do I just have to live by your bloody decrees? Oh God, if you know how much I wish we could live together in a proper house like real people and give dinner parties, instead of living in this hole like blasted criminals.’

  ‘I’m sorry, my darling —’

  ‘I daren’t even cry in front of you now, you get so ratty. It seems mad to say it, but I’ve simply lived on love all these years, I’m like a bloody saint living on the bloody sacrament. I’ve got all thin and fine by living on pure love! Christ, I’m tough. If I wasn’t I’d be dead!’

  ‘Yes, you’re tough, kid. You’re my tough girl, my Berlin prostitute, my little blackamoor princess.’

  ‘You’ve gone smarmy again. You’re trying to make me stop. I know your tricks.’

  ‘My glinting jewel, my jack of diamonds —’

  ‘My Queen of the Night. Remember how you used to call me that? I’m fed up with being Queen of the Night. I want to be Queen of the Day for a change.’

  ‘Darling, just pity me a little. I’m miserable and desperate too.’

  ‘If it was just you and me I’d comfort you, I’d stop you being miserable. I’d make you happy like women do. But you can’t expect me to feel sorry for you when you’re mostly somewhere else. You do see. You asked for my love and got it and now you’re deliberately destroying it. I said I prayed to stop loving you, but I don’t really want to. It’s what my whole life is for and I can’t change that now. Oh my sweetikin, how can such a love as ours stop, it can’t stop ever, can it? It is a great love, isn’t it, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You must come to me properly, you must find a way through, you must, you must, you must.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know we quarrel, but I love you so much, you are my whole life, you are everything. I haven’t got anything else. You will make it all well, won’t you? You can, I know you can.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And soon?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Emily—’

  ‘All right, all right. God, I’m so tired and now it’s nearly time to get up. There’s the sun shining outside. You know what. You’ve killed me and sent me to hell, and you must descend to the underworld to find me and make me live again. If you don’t come for me, I’ll become a demon and drag you down into the dark.’

  Blaise tended to leave Putney earlier and earlier. These early morning departures were terrible, and were indeed largely symbolic since he could rarely hope to get back to Hood House before Harriet was awake. He wanted to represent each occasion to her as exceptional (‘I simply couldn’t get away’) and also to be able to tell himself that he had not really ‘spent the night’. He condemned himself for inconsistency and meanness and cowardice, but could not now resist the sheer longing to get away as soon as he decently could from Emily’s accusing voice and vicinity. He could, when once away, put himself together again with remarkable speed. He longed for the return to Harriet and calm. And mad as this might seem, he actually did feel calm a good deal of the time at Hood House, and Putney then seemed hardly to exist.

  Emily was either asleep or pretending to be as he pulled his trousers on. Her head was well down under the sheet, only a tuft of black hair showing. Last time he had lifted the sheet and found her crying. Today he felt unable to care whether she was crying or sleeping. Richardson and Little Bilham, who always jumped on to the bed as he left it and occupied his warm place, regarded him, like stray malevolent intelligences escaped from Emily’s consciousness, with cynical unwinking eyes of an almost Egyptian antiquity. He did not even stay this time to shave, but tiptoed quickly out, dreading any recall whether angry or tearful. Out in the little hall he gathered up his things and pulled on his new grey herring-bone overcoat of very light tweed. He felt utterly exhausted, lacerated, wearied to pieces. The sun was well up, but the morning was still cold in its brightness. As he moved quickly to the front door he saw that the door of Luca’s room was open. Luca, in pyjamas, was standing motionless just inside the door and now became visible to Blaise. Blaise stopped. His son looked at him with his round dark eyes, but without any change of expression or attitude. Blaise, to say something, said in a whisper, ‘Mummy’s still asleep.’ Luca said nothing. A sort of anguish leapt at Blaise’s throat like a wild anima
l, but he remained as expressionless as his son. He raised his hand in a vague salute and hurried on and out of the door.

  With immense relief he closed the door softly behind him and walked quickly past the silent curtained windows of the other flats along the tiled path to the road. He breathed deeply, already beginning to feel better. The cold clarifying sun shone upon innumerable garish roses in the little gardens of the trim rows of semi-detached villas by which he had to pass on the way to where he had prudently left the Volkswagen, just short of the Upper Richmond Road. For security reasons he never parked outside the fiats, and never twice in the same place.

  He had nearly reached the car when he realized that someone with an accelerating pace was walking along the pavement behind him. He half turned and saw Constance Pinn.

  Pinn was, as she sometimes described herself, a founder member of the situation. She had become Emily’s char and then Luca’s baby-sitter (Blaise used to take Emily out to dinner in those days) soon after the inception of the ménage at Putney. Emily had early on told her everything over a drink. Blaise had scolded Emily for this indiscretion, but as Emily pointed out Pinn was both necessary and hard to deceive. Pinn had indeed been useful and, apparently, reliable.

  Blaise’s view of Pinn had changed a lot during the time in question. Pinn herself had changed a lot. It was difficult now to remember her as a char: although Pinn had always made a joke of her charing, thus indicating that it was a temporary expedient, taken on simply because she was, to use one of her own favourite words, ‘skint’, and was not to be regarded as in any way placing her socially. In fact, socially speaking, Pinn was in fairly rapid motion. She had managed, during the time Blaise and Emily had known her, considerably to ‘better’ herself, not only financially but in profounder and more important ways. Emily unconsciously and Blaise consciously had helped her a good deal in what she herself called ‘Operation Excelsior’. She had acquired a new voice and had learnt how to dress herself. Blaise suggested books for her to read, told her the answer to large and carefully posed questions (‘Which are the most important plays of Shakespeare?’ ‘Which are the ten great novels?’) and provided a controllable testing place for her new and more ambitious personality. Pinn’s ambitions were laudable, her conduct modest and discreet. Of course (Blaise early saw) Emily had to have a woman to talk to, and this one seemed remarkably harmless. All the same, when he heard those sharp accelerating footsteps behind him and turned to see those slinky spectacles glinting in the sun, Blaise’s heart sank.

  It was of course largely his own fault. He now saw that he should never for a moment have encouraged any sort of complicity between himself and Pinn. To do so was not only disloyal to Emily, it was dangerous to himself. He ought to have remained, with Pinn, bland, benevolent and aloof. He ought thereby to have boxed Pinn firmly into her role as Emily’s necessary confidante. He should have behaved with Pinn as if there was nothing odd in the situation at all, he ought never to have betrayed any weakening of his confidence of his own complete mastery of it. It was easy to see all this now. Then he had had another urgent use for Pinn. In the earlier years leaving Putney had been a very different matter. Then he had left as late as he dared, and felt in every parting the anguish of a possible loss. How could it be that such a young and devastatingly attractive girl should not be surrounded by admirers, and that those admirers should not besiege her with passion, with cunning, with costly gifts, with temptations of every sort? Blaise did not doubt Emily’s love (it would have been impossible to do so) but the fact was that he was married and had not yet managed to set himself free. Emily was often solitary. Supposing some eligible suitor were to appear when she was feeling depressed? It could happen. Did young men come to the flat? Were there people who simply waited for him to go? Of course Emily denied this passionately, but of course Emily would. How could he find out the truth? Pinn practically proposed herself for the role of spy. It seemed hard to believe it now, but Blaise could recall on many occasions pressing pound notes into Pinn’s hand.

  Pinn clearly enjoyed her work and relished the ‘reporting sessions’. She never had anything adverse to report in the matter of rivals, but she gave Blaise long and often alarmingly penetrating analyses of Emily’s states of mind. Blaise only gradually began to realize how intelligent, how conscious, this comparatively uneducated woman was; and he began to feel uneasy. It was not exactly that he feared that Pinn was capable of blackmailing him, though this idea did flash on him occasionally. He had begun to feel vaguely ‘involved’ with her, though not in any obvious way. (Of course they never touched each other.) He felt a desire to get rid of Pinn, but could not see how this was to be done. He simply did not want to have the implications of what he was doing rehearsed to him all the time by this appallingly clear-eyed observer.

  Whose side was Pinn on anyway? At first Pinn had seemed to be almost sycophantically upon his. She had seemed to him too critical of Emily, to the point of disloyalty. ‘That girl just doesn’t know how lucky she is’ and so on. Later on he felt that now keener edge of criticism being turned against himself. He began to dread the interviews, which invariably depressed him. The pound notes stopped passing. Blaise tried to elude his relentless agent, he tried to indicate that that relationship was at an end. But Pinn refused to understand. She still kept discreetly accosting him, conspiratorial and smiling. More lately Blaise had begun to fear something else, nebulous but horrible. What was Pinn, anyway? He now thought that he discerned in her something which she tried to hide from him, a definite possessiveness about Emily. Pinn claimed to have numerous men friends (though Emily said she had never met any of them) and professed to lead what she called a ‘helter-skelter life’ (though she kept it well away from the Upper Richmond Road). But supposing Pinn was just quietly getting her claws into Emily? Suppose in some awful way she and Emily were ganging up against him? Emily seemed to need Pinn more and more and was always quoting her. And now Pinn had actually got herself inside the house.

  ‘Wait a sec.’ Pinn never used his name.

  ‘Let’s sit in the car,’ said Blaise. They walked on and Blaise let Pinn into the passenger seat of the Volkswagen. They sat side by side and Blaise simply waited.

  ‘You’re off early,’ said Pinn.

  ‘You’re up early.’

  ‘I wanted to see you.’

  ‘You mustn’t trouble, you know.’

  ‘No trouble at all, it’s a pleasure.’

  ‘Anything special?’ He could not get away from the conspiratorial tone.

  ‘You know she’s let me a room?’ Emily was always ‘she’.

  ‘Yes. Good idea.’

  ‘You don’t object? Naturally if you objected I’d find other accommodation.’

  ‘Of course I don’t object, I’m delighted.’

  ‘How obliging of you.’

  Pinn’s new voice, clear and a Utile loud, though low in pitch, still somewhat precise and deliberate like that of a stammerer, was perfectly adapted to the concealment of feeling. Pinn now spoke more purely than Emily (who exaggerated her provincialism for Blaise’s benefit), but with remarkably little expression. The effect of power was not lessened.

  ‘Where did she get that fur coat?’ said Blaise. Machine, machine, he thought. Oh God, that conversation last night or this morning or whenever that devil-ridden scrap of nightmare had been. How could two rational beings go on and on simply saying the same awful things to each other week after week, month after month?

  ‘I sold it to her.’

  ‘How much for?"

  ‘Twenty pounds.’

  Someone’s lying, thought Blaise, presumably Emily.

  ‘I don’t see why she shouldn’t have a new coat,’ said Pinn. ‘I see you’ve got one. Very nice too, if I may say so, it suits you. And hers isn’t even a new coat. It’s genuine squirrel though. I bought it off one of the rich kids at school.’

  ‘I don’t mind her having the coat!’

  ‘Good. I thought you did.’

&nb
sp; ‘What on earth possessed her to give up her job?’

  ‘She didn’t jump, she was pushed. Did she tell you she’d given it up? She’s a bit sensitive and touchy about it all. She got the sack.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It was this Kiki St Loy.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Kiki St Loy. She’s the one I bought the coat off. She’s a French girl, well partly French, she just began to break up Emily’s classes, made a dead set at her, made her life hell. Em simply couldn’t cope and the Head asked her to leave.’

  ‘I see.’ Poor Emily, thought Blaise, feeling hatred for Pinn.

  ‘This Kiki St Loy is very beautiful and just eighteen, and I think that got Em’s goat too. Em’s got to an age when –’

  ‘I see. Nothing else special?’ This question, also mechanical, meant: any men?

  ‘No, no, nothing of that sort. She lives like an nun. Since school’s packed up she hardly sees anybody. She just sits at home all day and watches the television. No fun and games. You needn’t worry about that.’

  Since when had Pinn managed to turn all her remarks into veiled accusations? ‘Well, I must go now.-Thanks.’ Blaise never used Pinn’s name either.

  ‘Wait another sec or two. There’s something I want to tell you.’

  Blaise turned to Pinn. Pinn was not bad looking, with short slightly fluffy auburn hair, very round cheeks and pouting lips. Her new spectacles were narrow, oriental, with long shining spurs rising up on either side. The intelligent eyes behind the glass were mottled light brown and green. Pinn smirked. It was an accomplice moment.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s about Luca.’

  Luca. Blaise had gone on and on refusing to see Luca’s schoolmaster, though he knew that he ought, if the word still had any sense, to go and see him. It was not that Blaise feared a breach of security, though that anxiety was always with him. He was afraid of what he might learn, afraid of an involvement, a development, the necessity of another visit, discussions, decisions, problems. He simply had not the time or the energy, or rather he passionately did not want to give his attention to this matter, to have these difficulties as well as all the rest, however much his conscience might torment him about this extra and especially unforgivable failure. Of course Emily did not understand, any more than she understood about holidays, because Blaise could not explain, could not tell her his reasons, which were even shabbier than those she attributed to him. He had refused to give her money to go to Paris not out of meanness (as she thought) but out of jealousy, out of primitive dog-in-the-manger possessiveness. She might meet men in Paris; and he dared not tell her this in case it should put the very idea into her head.