The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘You should go now,’ said Emily. ‘You mustn’t keep Harriet waiting, must you?’

  ‘And you actually talked peacefully together?’ said Blaise. Everything that was now happening seemed strictly impossible.

  ‘No. I told you. She talked. I sneered silently.’

  ‘But you didn’t shout at her, you didn’t tell her to go?’

  ‘Why should I? What she had to say was interesting. And she seems quite a nice person. She’s the one who’s had the shock, after all.’

  ‘So you – you accept the situation?’

  ‘I didn’t say I did. I don’t know what the situation is. Do you?’

  ‘But if you both – if you don’t fight – there we are —’

  ‘Sometimes, I wonder how intelligent you are,’ said Emily. She was arranging in a vase some yellow and white roses which Harriet had sent from the Hood House garden.

  ‘No, no. I’m not crazy,’ said Blaise, ‘I know anything can happen. One can’t absorb a shock like this just – but you’ve been so wonderful, so kind, both of you —’

  ‘So kind to all-important central paramount you. Yes.’

  ‘All right, kid, I’m pure egoist – and – don’t say it – most men are. Let me speak then out of my egoism. I want you both. This is what I’ve never been able in the past to say to you really frankly, I’ve been afraid to. This new truthfulness may help us all. It certainly helps me. I feel suddenly free. I feel better, I don’t feel afraid, I can say what I think. You know, Em, our love was always somehow marred by my feeling so afraid. I can love you so much better now —’

  ‘I wonder what it was you were afraid of which you’re not afraid of now. The possibility of my fighting for my rights? Has that gone then?’

  ‘No. I mean truth is sort of infectious, it spreads. I was always trying to placate you —’

  ‘And now you won’t? You were saying you wanted us both.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have dared to say that before. Of course I don’t love Harriet in the special way that I love you. You know that. But I do care for her and it’s not just duty, though there is duty, absolute duty to both of you. So I am caught and held. That has always been so really, only now thank God I can tell truth about the whole thing to both of you. Now for the first time somehow it can all be well —’

  ‘I think you’re a swindler. You’re getting away with it, that’s what you mean – you having both of us, you having everything, you loved and cherished. You, you, you.’

  ‘Well – yes —’

  ‘You’re being very frank and imagining it suits you. However, I doubt if entire truthfulness has yet descended from heaven. You’ve been such an habitual liar. Remember, I concede nothing.’

  Blaise was silent for a moment, watching Emily carefully planting the roses into a large purple cut-glass vase. Emily was wearing a summer dress, a cheap cotton thing of a pale green, with white daisies upon it, rather like an overall. She had paid today only the discreetest attention to her personal appearance, and she looked pretty, her dark hair boyishly neat, her face creamy pale, her amazing eyes very blue in the clear morning sunlight, flashing now a little with a kind of irony which Blaise could not understand but which he felt to be, in spite of her words, benevolent. He was trying hard not to display a disgraceful relieved happiness which Emily might feel as a provocation. The smallest gentlenesses to him of the two women were gifts which made him feel vastly rich and vastly humble. Never had these two, endowed now with such godlike power over him, seemed so thrillingly attractive. He waited on Emily’s every word and gesture, his whole being vulnerable to her as never before.

  ‘Well,’ said Emily, tickling Little Bilham’s nose with the final rose, then standing back to admire her vase, ‘my point is that you won’t be able to drop your old habits so easily. You’re still trying to placate me with half truths and jostle me into the position that suits you. You say you love me in a special way and her you just sort of care for. Or did I misunderstand you?’

  ‘No – no -,’ said Blaise uneasily. The sun revealed with fearful clarity the little familiar shabby room which Emily had, in her new mysterious mood, meticulously cleaned and tidied. It occurred to Blaise that he had never seen flowers in this room before. Why had it never occurred to him to bring any?

  Emily looked at him with the new indecipherable irony in her eyes. ‘Oh never mind. I could tie you into such knots, but I won’t bother. Today anyway. You won’t tell me the trutheven now, I know that. Only the situation will tell me the truth in the end. Never mind, never mind.’

  ‘Em, kid, you won’t ever, will you, tell Harriet about, you know, our special world? That’s private, such things have to be. An outsider wouldn’t understand. Harriet would just be upset. That’s our secret, isn’t it?’

  ‘I daresay I won’t tell her,’ said Emily. ‘All right, I won’t, it would be pointless. I suppose I should be glad to have some secrets with you still. Is Harriet going to tell everybody about our jolly trio? Your celebrity friend already knows all about it.’ Emily thus designated Monty, whom she seemed to have taken against, rather to Blaise’s relief. ‘Or do I remain boxed up, receiving thrilling clandestine visits from your wife?’

  ‘We’ll have to think, we mustn’t be hasty. There’s my practice. There’s David.’

  ‘When am I going to meet famous David? He looks awfully. handsome in his photo, much handsomer than you.’

  Blaise had shown Emily a picture of David. This action, hitherto unthinkable, had been part of the new sincerity.

  ‘Soon,’ he said. David was one of the more obscure parts of what he and the women now constantly called the situation‘. ‘I hope he and Luca will be friends.’

  ‘A little modest hobnobbing with the bourgeoisie may do Luca no harm. The main thing is you’ve got yourself galvanized at last about changing his school. What does David think about all this? Does he see me as a horrible prostitute?’

  ‘No, of course not. Don’t worry. Everything will settle down. It will have to. We all have to live with the situation and we may as well do so as cheerfully as possible.’

  ‘Cheerfully?’ said Emily.

  ‘Well, with resignation, with charity, without violence, without frenzy. I don’t see that you should mind. You and Luca are going to be a good deal better off.’

  ‘Are we? How pray? Apart from your sudden ability to cope with Luca’s schooling?’

  ‘You’ll see more of me.’

  ‘How super.’

  ‘Well, you always wanted that, Em, didn’t you?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Emily. She was sitting now, staring at him with a peculiar intentness. ‘I didn’t mind about seeing you. I wanted you.’

  ‘You’ve got me, with much greater security now.’

  ‘Because Harriet has O.K.d my status. Big deal.’

  ‘Don’t mock, Em.’

  ‘She will require you to be kind to me, she will keep you up to the mark, is that it?’

  ‘Because Harriet knows and accepts, you are that much safer. Surely that’s obvious. There’s a possible catastrophe which has been eliminated.’

  ‘Harriet’s knowing and forcing you to choose.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Harriet may change her mind.’

  ‘She won’t. She’s a moral being and a person of principle.’

  ‘I may change my mind. I’m not a moral being, or a person of principle.’

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘You mean, I can’t. Any more than I could before. Less than I could before. Yes.’

  ‘I don’t mean that —’

  ‘Oh never mind.’

  ‘If you’re thinking —’

  ‘I’m not thinking. That’s rather the point. I am talking calmly and uttering sentences and we are having what looks like a rational conversation, but really I’m a hollow woman. I don’t know what I think, I don’t even know what I feel, I certainly don’t know what I can bear.’

  ‘What Harriet can bear is the question.
And she can bear anything. We rest on her. She is predictable.’

  ‘I’m not,’ said Emily. ‘However, as you observed, what we’ve got to endure we will endure. It just makes me sick to think how lucky you are. You must feel like the Sultan of Turkey. You’ve got us both. You’ve got away with it, you’ve just absolutely got away with it.’

  ‘Yes – forgive me – please – you will come and see Harriet won’t you? I won’t be there —’

  ‘Yes, yes —’

  And, Em, be discreet with Harriet, won’t you? I want you to be friends, but -’

  ‘All right, all right. I don’t have women friends anyway.’

  ‘What about Pinn?’

  ‘Pinn’s not a friend. She’s probably not a woman. She’s a phenomenon. Buzz off now, will you, I want to be alone.’

  ‘See you tomorrow and – we won’t quarrel – will we?’

  ‘Not any more?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  ‘All this predictability is getting me down. All right, Grand Turk, off you go, back to wife number one.’

  ‘Em, thank you, I’m so grateful, and oh – Em -I do love you so much, you do know that —’

  ‘Buzz off.’

  After Blaise had gone Emily McHugh sat very still for a long time, sitting motionless in her chair and staring at Harriet’s roses, while the sun moved in the room. She felt as she had told Blaise, hollow. She felt impersonal, characterless, echoing. Even the slight toothache which she had had all day wandered ownerless in the room like an irritating unobtrusive insect She felt as if there had been a great natural catastrophe, an earthquake or a deluge, and she had been right in the centre of it, and yet appeared to have escaped unhurt How could it be so? How could the house not be wrecked, her home not shattered? She was still alive – and yet also she was dead. Perhaps she had really been killed and was surviving as a ghost? She and Harriet had conversed without screams or tears. This evening she was actually going over to see Harriet at Hood House. The unimaginable had not only occurred, but had occurred quietly, almost naturally. What could be the matter with her, with Harriet with Blaise, that this could happen at all? Who was doing it, who was working it? Was Harriet? Emily had never felt herself less of an agent She was, for the time, simply bereft of will, a dazed spectator of her situation and of herself.

  For Blaise, for his relief, for his transparent cunning, she felt a kind of tender pity which was quite a new emotion. She loved Blaise, in all this, very much and felt close to him, though without this love and this closeness including any conception of the future. Would the strain be less? Would they stop quarrelling? Was there a new world? Were things better? Or were they in some deep way much much worse, appalling? She felt like someone who suddenly discovers that they cannot tell of something which they are seeing close to and in a good light whether it is red or green. Some fundamental power of discrimination seemed to have been withdrawn from her. Of course, she and Harriet could never be friends. Even Blaise did not really imagine that. After these first encounters they would probably hardly meet at all. It was important to go to Hood House. Harriet had been very anxious for that and Emily was equally so, though the prospect sickened her. If they were to start existing ‘in the open’ it was important to see where Blaise lived. After all, he had never lived with her; and painful as it would undoubtedly be she had now to recognize more fully than ever before that he lived elsewhere, that he had a real house with a genuine wife and son in it. The son she dreaded. The house she must and could face. After all she had faced the wife. Was this, seeing the house, meeting the son, recognizing it all, her inferior position, her ‘status’ as she had called it, fully at last and with her whole attention and her whole heart, was this the worst? Or was there some other worst which with her crippled mind she could not at present see, even though it was staring her in the face?

  The humiliating guilt which she had felt when she first confronted Harriet appeared to have gone, charmed away, it seemed, by Harriet herself. Was Harriet ‘good’ then? Was Harriet doing them all good? Was it as simple as that? Had Harriet made the screams, the vile abuse, the whole degrading horror of such a rivalry impossible? Into what was she, Emily, being charmed or changed? What priceless advantage was she now losing? Or did it just mean that everything was going to be much the same, only slightly better – better, for instance, for Luca? Upon what she thought of as Blaise’s cunning, his absurd disgraceful relief, his secret continued duplicity, she looked with indulgence and with love. The love between her and Blaise seemed strangely renewed and made innocent. Innocent : was that the important thing? Of course Blaise had lied to her about Harriet and was doubtless busy lying to Harriet about her. Emily did not even now imagine that Blaise had sexual relations with his wife because, though Harriet was neither ugly nor ancient, she was so absolutely ‘not his style’. Her big genteel attractions must be for him inert. Whereas Emily believed, and had always believed with a simple faith worthy of a peasant, in the quite special and enduring nature of her own sexual link with her lover.

  Emily had had to believe in that; sometimes there had seemed to be nothing else in her life. And she had contrived to believe in it, even when Blaise had cooled, when they had begun to quarrel, when they had left off doing their ‘things’. She had once felt that she and Blaise had been made for each other at the beginning of the world. The way they ‘fitted’ was a perfect miracle. This was the absolute of what a love should be. And this feeling had never really gone away, and she knew of it now as it revived and warmed her in the very central crisis of ‘the situation’. She and Blaise belonged together, like two animals in the Ark, the only two of their kind. In spite of Hood House, in spite of Harriet and David, in spite of Blaise-less days and nights past and to come, she owned Blaise in a way that no one else ever could.

  ‘Would you like him?’ said Harriet.

  Luca was with her in her boudoir. Harriet was seated and he was standing in front of her, a little way away from her. He had picked up the red mirrorwork elephant and was holding it up in front of his face, the elephant’s brow touching his brow, and looking at Harriet past it. He now nodded his head hard several times, keeping the elephant in place, and smiled at her his curiously conscious cunning smile. With that smile Harriet saw him at fifteen, at twenty, his charm. Then he folded his arms crosswise hugging the elephant against his (very dirty) Micky Mouse shirt.

  ‘Then he’s your elephant,‘ said Harriet, trying not to let tears of tenderness and sheer wild painful confusion race into her eyes. ‘Will you give him a name?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s bis name?’

  ‘Reggie.’

  ‘That’s a good name.’

  ‘Reggie was a boy at school, he was nice to me.’

  ‘Aren’t all the boys nice?’

  ‘No. They hit me. I hit them.’

  ‘You’re going to a very much better school soon. Will you like that?"

  ‘Have you ever seen an elephant going up some steps?’ said Luca.

  ‘No, I don’t think so. Have you?’

  ‘Yes. At the Zoo. He walked up some steps and his legs looked so funny, like planks inside a sack. Elephants are kind animals. An elephant wouldn’t tread on a man. He’d try not to.’

  ‘In India elephants help men to work. They carry trees.’

  ‘They squirt water with their trunks. If a man annoyed them they’d squirt him. There are snakes in India, big ones.’

  ‘I know. I was born there. My father was a soldier there. He taught Indians about guns.’

  ‘Did you have a pet snake?’

  ‘No. I left when I was a baby.’

  ‘Men play music to snakes and they dance, I saw it in a film. The snake waved his head to and fro. He was in a basket. I’d like a snake. He could live in my pocket. I’d teach him to dance. We have two cats. But I’d like a snake too.’

  ‘You must ask your mother,’ said Harriet.

  Luca was now stroking the elephant with a firm hard movemen
t of bis flat hand, and staring at Harriet with a bright-eyed intentness which seemed almost like amazement. His dark brown very round eyes glowed with a faintly bluish sheen. His dark straight now tousled hair was tumbled about on his head in a chaos of locks. Without moving, Harriet was willing him to come closer, to touch her; and the next moment he had dropped his gaze and with a cunning smile and a look that was almost coy with deliberation he came and leaned against one of her knees. His gesture combined the shyness of a boy lover with the knowingness of a favourite child. Harriet restrained the impulse to hug him violently in her arms. She could play this game too. Lightly, cautiously, breathlessly she began to comb his hair with her fingers, caressing as she did so the dark soft dry cool tresses. He smelt of sweat, of boy, and of something cool and moist like wet earth or water.

  ‘My snake could go to school with me and nobody would know.’

  ‘Why aren’t you at school today?’

  ‘It’s a holiday.’

  I wonder if that is true, she thought. ‘Really?’

  ‘Will my new school teach me about God?’

  ‘I expect so.’

  ‘What is God?’ Luca was looking up at her now, his chin on the elephant’s back, one hand firmly on her knee.

  ‘God is the spirit of goodness,’ said Harriet. ‘He is the spirit of love which we all have in our hearts.’

  ‘Is he in my heart?’

  ‘Yes. Whenever you love somebody or want to do something good —’

  ‘But I don’t,’ said Luca firmly. ‘Does God make us love animals?’