The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

by Iris Murdoch

  Now without moving her head she surreptitiously moved her eyes and looked at him. He had stopped scribbling and was kneeling with his head on one side, his lips slightly parted. He seemed to be listening. Emily wondered if she dared ask him what he was listening to. The pain of an unanswered question would spoil the morning, perhaps the entire day. Was it worth risking? She said, ‘What are you listening to?’

  ‘Beetles.’

  ‘Beetles?’ Emily listened hard. At first she heard nothing. Then she became aware of the tiniest tiniest crepitation somewhere in the room. ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Inside the table.’

  Dislodging Richardson Emily leaned across, then listened again. He was right. It was wood beetles inside the oak table leg. One could actually hear the sound of their tiny jaws eating the wood. ‘I can hear them too. Isn’t that nice?’

  Luca smiled at her and began to draw on his paper.

  Emily sat listening with rapture to the beetles and daring now to look at her son. She felt a flood of wild dazed joy as if golden rain had descended upon the room. She seized Richardson and hugged him hard. The cat lazily adjusted himself to her embrace and began to purr.

  After a while Emily decided to dare a little more. She moved slightly and peered at what Luca was drawing. ‘What’s your picture of?’

  Luca said nothing. Emily peered at the paper. In coloured crayons Luca had drawn a house with big windows, and a tree beside it. In front of the house there was a woman in a long dress and a thin long-trousered boy and several dogs. Near the front of the picture, and looking at the other figures, was a man in an overcoat Luca was filling in the coat with brown crayon and Emily recognized the herring-bone design of Blaise’s new overcoat She was about to say, ‘That’s just like Daddy’s coat,’ when something seemed to leap at her face. Emily gasped. She got up quickly and left the room. Luca continued quietly to fill in the picture.

  His failure to achieve the lotus position had always seemed to Monty symbolic. Sophie, who was as flexible as a boy, could sit easily thus, turning the soles of her little feet upward for Monty to kiss. She thought meditation was nonsense. By some dispensation which seemed to Monty entirely felicitous, religion had been left out of her make-up. Monty had tried various positions, and had at last settled for kneeling, sitting back on his heels. This he could maintain for long periods, becoming rapidly unconscious of his body. At first he had resisted the idea of kneeling because of its unsavoury associations. His aim had nothing to do with self-abasement or worship or rubbishy personal prayer. Later he saw that these details did not matter.

  Last night Monty had had a dream which struck him as interesting. He had been a pupil at some sort of grand school, somewhere near the sea, huge and built out of marble. The school was set upon pink rocks, pitted with azure pools, and across those rocks Monty had to scramble in order to reach some class or seminar which it was very important that he should attend. The rocks were slippery, but at last he reached a flight of marble steps which came down among them, and mounted the steps into a large hall surrounded by pillars and partly open to the sky. A man in white robes was standing in the hall obviously waiting for him, and Monty realized that before he could go on to the classroom he had to pass some sort of preliminary test The white-robed figure said to him, ‘You must simply mime what I tell you now. Pretend that you are scooping up water in your hands.’ Monty leaned down to the ground and began to scoop up imaginary water in his hands. As he did so he glimpsed his mentor’s face. It wore a sad disappointed expression and Monty knew that he had failed the test. Then he realized that a saintly man would have imagined himself to be immersed in water up to the chest, up to the neck.

  Monty smiled, thinking what Blaise would have made of this dream. What a load of lies he had told Blaise about himself at various times, not so much deliberately as because he found he simply could not tell Blaise the truth. In Blaise, truth would not be truth. Besides, Blaise believed in the dreary old historical self, lived indeed by that belief, made his money out of that fiction. Of course dreams were rubble. All the same they could be images of faith, little momentary trinkets offered for consolation by mind to mind.

  Philosophy, the anxious connecting of one thing with another, the satanic proliferation of programmes of conceptual dominion, the doubling of an already doubled world, had long seemed to him like the pointless journeying of insects. None of his negative certainties however made him able to judge the worth of his failed spiritual vocation. That it had failed, that his life was for these purposes over, was a condition for his continued efforts, as if he could thus harmlessly dupe himself. This inbuilt assumption of failure had, especially since the evidence of the later days with Sophie, related him more quietly to time. Since there was no hope and therefore no urgency, he could live without ambition from moment to moment, thinking no historical thoughts about what he still persistently attempted to do.

  But what was he attempting? Was it that he had lived too long in his mind and was tired of the scenery? or was it simply a sophisticated rescue operation for an ageing insufficiently talented man who was beginning to be aware of death? By sheer diligence it was possible to set up a huge machine on to which one could gear oneself in a second. Some such machine existed, Monty had, in a number of years, created it. He had only to kneel, to droop his eyelids and take some deep breaths and the sensible world ceased to be. He knew at least enough to know that this, in his case, was merely an experience. However much his technique might improve the enlightening spirit was absent. Except in dreams he had no teacher. It would have been, he felt, artificial, another occasion for lying. No, Monty did not imagine that he had, by bis pains, won anything of value. He had not even glimpsed his freedom. The obsessions which made Magnus Bowles’s life a misery simply travelled with him like dormant viruses. The gods, who had nothing to do with enlightenment, unplacated, undefeated, were still there.

  His latest idea of becoming a schoolmaster rather than, say, buying a luxurious villa in France and trying again to write a straight novel, was no symptom of a changed direction, the acquisition, say, of new ‘social views’. The politics of his days of ‘frightfulness’ had long ago withered within him. He had lacked the sort of passion required to make him, what he would now have despised himself for being, a ‘reactionary’. The miserable issue of all that had been Milo Fane, ascetic hedonist, discreet sadist, cynic. The schoolmaster idea was superficial, an interim measure, a new makeshift device aimed towards an old end. Towards a sort of simplicity and openness of living. An ostentatious hatred of pretention and the bogus (except of course in so far as these informed his own style) had impressed his Oxford contemporaries and probably made them overrate his intellect. He had carried onward within him an ideal of unbogus lucidity, of a contextless clarity of truthful utterance, which he had somehow never been able to crystallize into any ordinary mode of living. What he pursued on his knees was connected with this, but in a way that was full of crucial puzzles. Spirit, after all, can provide a much more durable holiday from morality than sin ever can. What was he seeking, truth or salvation or goodness? Sometimes it seemed to him that these roads diverged absolutely and only conceivably came together at some end point which he would never reach. Sometimes he felt as if he was simply seeking knowledge, or, more simply still, power. More drearily still, he had once imagined that to discipline his mind would be to help his work. But the discipline seemed merely to have stifled what was left to him of spontaneity and joie de vivre.

  This business of trying to get rid of the ego often seemed idiocy. Years could pass in the attempt to centre the consciousness below the navel. The whole thing was laughable rot, oriental unBritish rubbish. How Sophie had mocked. It might be perfectly true that there was no deep sense in things, that nothing and no one had real dignity and real deserving, that ‘the world’ was just a jumble and a rubble and a dream, but was it not supreme cheating to make this senselessness seem to be the very essence of one’s being? He might be a very shoddy
artist, but he had the artist’s capacity to cheat Better surely to live as ordinary clever people live, by wit and pain and sex, finding these at last in the pinnacle of one’s spirit Better to resort to the holiness of suffering and to consent to give some name (‘love’ for instance) to the ground of one’s being, rather than to attempt this radical undoing of a natural essence.

  Yet Monty went on, and in the awful clarity of affliction after Sophie’s death found this curiously unchanged, as if it had in spite of everything wedged its unconscious spearhead into a region beyond. Since the part of him which this hypothetical region concerned was innnitesimally tiny he experienced no sort of alleviation or insight. But misery did not make him alter his routine, even guilt did not This much at least, in its automatic way, the machine’ had done for him.

  ‘Monty, Monty, are you all right?’

  Monty regained his perception of his little Moorish drawing-room with one lamp alight the window open upon darkness and the rain beating down. A certain sense of being battered, it now seemed to him, had been with him. The rain had come in and stained the carpet. Blaise was there, staring down at him. Monty tilted himself sideways and then slowly got up. He looked at his watch. It was nearly midnight. Blaise’s unheralded visit was unusual. He must have come round into the garden.

  ‘Why, you are soaking wet,’ said Monty. Blaise looked distraught, his darkened hair plastered in long streaks upon his brow. ‘Were you in some sort of trance?’

  ‘No, no, gone to sleep more likely.’ Monty had only ever jested to his friend about these matters. ‘I’ll turn on the electric fire. I’ll get you a towel.’ He fetched a towel and closed the window, pulling the curtains carefully across. The battering rain was more remote. Blaise buried his face in the towel, then began to dry his hair.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ said Monty.

  ‘I am afraid,’ said Blaise, ‘that the game is up.’

  Monty stared at him for a moment in silence. ‘Have some whisky.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘What has happened?’

  ‘Luca has found this place. He’s been over here. He’s been in the garden.’

  ‘I saw him,’ said Monty. ‘Odd. That never occurred to me.’

  ‘You saw him?’

  ‘Yes. Standing in the garden a couple of nights ago, looking at the house.’ ‘Oh, Christ. It means the end. Well, I suppose it does, doesn’t it? I can’t think.’

  ‘Sit down, sit down. How did Luca come, how did he know?’

  ‘He stowed away in the car.’

  ‘What does Emily think?’

  ‘She doesn’t know.’

  ‘How do you know then?’

  ‘The char told me. Luca told her. It can’t have been an invention. He said there were a lot of dogs. Anyway you saw him. It’s the end.’

  ‘Well he’s been pretty discreet so far. He hasn’t knocked on the door and asked for Daddy. Though I suppose he might at any moment.’

  ‘Exactly. But it isn’t just that – it’s the separation being broken through —’

  ‘Have you been drinking?’

  ‘Yes. It’s the two worlds, suddenly one sees – they’re really – one world after all.’

  ‘I suppose you had some inkling of this before. What are you going to do?’

  ‘I'll have to tell Harriet. And yet I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. And David. It’s the end of my relation with both of them.’

  ‘You underrate them.’

  ‘But it is clear, isn’t it – I’ll have to tell them now -before Luca starts asking for Daddy. It is clear. Just tell me, would you?’

  ‘It’s very interesting,‘ said Monty. ‘Yes, I imagine so, but let’s think. Suppose Luca could be persuaded to keep quiet-’

  ‘He’s not a rational being. He’s a force. One couldn’t treat him as predictable.’

  ‘I should have thought forces were more predictable than rational beings. But come, he’s just a little child.’

  ‘He’s a demon. He’s come here to ruin me. Oh it’s not his fault –’

  ‘All right, one thing at a time. We assume Luca is fatal. Now let’s consider your state of mind. Don’t you find that you, a bit, want to tell?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Won’t it be a relief in a way to pull everything down on top of you?’

  ‘No, it won’t! That’s just abstract. I’ve got to decide whether tomorrow morning to say to Harriet—’

  ‘Don’t think of the decision,’ said Monty, ‘think beyond it. After all, we’ve talked about this before, it’s not a new idea.’

  ‘It is a new idea, as real as it’s new. I’ve never really imagined what it would be like. David’s face, Harriet’s tears – Oh God –’

  ‘Don’t be so tragic. Try to be intelligent. I admit I am fascinated by your dilemma. Are you not now simply being forced to do what you ought to do, and ought you not to be grateful? You always said it would have to come out sometime, and why not now when there’s a motive?’

  ‘Mephistopheles as usual. We’ve had this conversation before. I don’t think it is what I ought to do, ruin Harriet’s happiness.’

  ‘You’ve already ruined it’

  ‘Ruin David’s exams. Of course it’ll have to come out sometime, but why now? There’s still not enough reason —’

  ‘Yes there is, because of Luca. You’re lucky to have your hand forced.’

  ‘But it’s not being forced, as you said yourself. Luca may there may be nothing more – I’ll ask him not to – Oh God, I hate myself.’

  ‘You speak as if you were losing your virtue now, but it was lost long ago. Anyway, your virtue doesn’t matter here. What matters is the general happiness. You’re not really thinking about Harriet —’

  ‘Since I knew about Luca coming here, I’ve thought of nothing but Harriet and David —’

  ‘No, no, you’re thinking about yourself. Now try to picture it —’

  ‘I can’t, I can’t —’

  ‘You’ve told Harriet. Well, what will she do, what can she do? She’ll have to accept the situation. She won’t divorce you, you know that.’

  ‘It’s simply the fact of her knowing —’

  ‘Exactly. So you haven’t thought. You’ve been telling me for years what hell it all was, leading a double life. The new scene may be hell too but at least it will be different and it may conceivably be better. You’re so obsessed with the loss of your virtue – not even that, that’s serious, but that’s done – with the loss of your reputation, you aren’t thinking how the others may save you.’

  ‘Save me?’

  ‘Yes. Harriet can save you.’

  ‘You mean forgive me? That’s impossible. Simply her knowing would divide us absolutely. Anyway I don’t want to be forgiven, such feelings would just be obscene. And even if Harriet could forgive me, David never could, ever, ever, ever. There isn’t – there isn’t – the machinery – for me to be forgiven – by David – it doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Let’s think about Harriet Harriet is a wonderful woman, intelligent and strong and good – an angel as you’ve often said – and she loves you. Why not cast yourself on to Harriet’s love like people used to cast themselves on God? Stop thinking about your sins and your reputation and think about Harriet’s love.’

  ‘It’s such an outrage against her love. I can’t rely on her just where I’ve hurt her and damaged her most.’

  ‘I don’t see why not. You’re thinking about yourself again, you can’t seem to stop. Anyway, if you tell, you won’t be making yourself morally worse, you may even be making yourself morally better.’

  ‘What I need is for all this not to have happened at all.’

  ‘You need what all sinners need, a salvation which blots out the fault You just happen to be luckier than most sinners since something like that is just conceivably possible in your case.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean – You’ve never said this to me before. You encouraged me to go on.’

  ‘I di
dn’t encourage you to. You were determined to. I just listened.’

  ‘You encouraged me. It amused you. Anyway, what the hell, I wish I was dead.’

  ‘You can’t go through the looking-glass without cutting yourself.’

  ‘Sorry. I’m drunk. I drank a hell of a lot of whisky over there. I kissed Harriet and sent her to bed, and she told me not to work too long – Oh God, perhaps it’s the last time – and I was reading them their book – it’s all so precious – and I’ve destroyed it for ever.’

  ‘And you must think about Emily too.’

  ‘I’d like to kill Emily.’

  ‘Imagine you’ve told. What will Emily do?’

  ‘Celebrate. I don’t know what she’ll do.’

  ‘Of course, you must resign yourself to losing the initiative.’

  ‘You’re loving every moment of this, aren’t you. I wish I’d never said anything to you. Sony. I know I’m behaving like a child, wanting to be told what to do. I suppose I want to be convinced that it’s inevitable.’

  ‘You need a salvation which will redeem your fault. Your two victims can provide it. No one else can.’

  ‘You mean Harriet and David.’

  ‘I mean Harriet and Emily.’

  ‘You don’t understand. I’ve never really – conceived they both exist – one or the other – but not both.’

  ‘I know, I know. This is your ordeal. Simply Harriet knowing.’

  ‘I feel if Harriet ever knew about Emily the world would simply end in a huge explosion.’

  ‘Your ordeal is that it won’t. You’ll all go on existing, sleeping and eating and going to the lavatory.’

  ‘It’s unthinkable. Literally. Like modern physics. I can’t think it.’

  ‘Blot yourself out Give yourself to them, really give yourself. You may find that, surprisingly enough and little as you deserve it, they may look after you.’