The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘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 rub
bed 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.’

  ‘So you’re driving Monty to Mockingham this afternoon?’ said David.

  ‘Yes. Don’t be angry with Monty.’

  ‘I’m not angry. I’m just sort of disappointed.’

  ‘Because he hasn’t had a big talk with you?’

  ‘He doesn’t seem to care. And he’s so sort of spiritless.’

  ‘Spirit-less. That he could never be.’

  ‘He just doesn’t seem to function any more.’

  ‘For you, perhaps he doesn’t. We all have our Montys, and they can be disappointing, but perhaps that’s our fault for wanting the wrong thing. Monty is a good deal fonder of you than you seem to imagine.’

  ‘I don’t think Monty is fond of anybody. Sorry.’

  ‘He just feels he can’t help you at present. See it as humility. Some people help themselves by helping others, and this cheers them up because it’s an exercise of power. But Monty mistrusts that sort of power. Maybe because he could have so much of it if he chose.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem right for Monty to be humble,’ said David. ‘I don’t want him like that.’

  ‘I know. We don’t like our Montys humble. We want them to be proud. But that may not be good for them. You’ll see him again anyway at Mockingham when you come. There’s a lot of Monty ahead.’

  Edgar had invited David to Mockingham. Edgar had invited David to come with him to the British School at Athens. David could go on a dig in the Peloponnese if he wanted to. The dig had already turned up a gorgeous torso by Phaidimos and a fine calyx by Douris. None of this helped at all. David could not live the terrible death of his mother, he felt hourly that he could not survive it. Compared with that fact even his father’s obscene hasty marriage, even that woman living at Hood House and changing it all and spoiling it all, was just a foul irritation. His mind felt impossible, like an impossible visual object or like a huge tattered thing which someone was trying to drag through a narrow pipe by awful force. Nothing helped. Well, perhaps Edgar helped a little.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ said Edgar. ‘You can stop yourself. Try the Moselle and tell me what you think of it.’

  ‘Don’t be silly! All wine tastes the same to me!’

  ‘No it doesn’t, David. Now drink some and concentrate. I’ll teach you all about wine at Mockingham. I’ve got a marvellous cellar there. You’ll like it at Mockingham. I’m putting you in the turret room.’

  ‘That’s the nineteenth-century folly?’

  ‘Yes. Thank God my mother never had the cash to pull it down. The turret is octagonal. My great-grandfather admired Frederick the Second. There are windows all round and you can see the whole valley. It’s jolly cold in winter though. In winter we’ll put you in the west wing.’

  ‘ "We"?’

  ‘Monty and I.’

  ‘The west wing is Regency?’

  ‘Queen Anne. It’s less romantic than the Elizabethan part, but far more comfortable.’

  ‘And you’ll help me with Greek like you said?’

  ‘Of course. When you’re up at Oxford reading Greats you’ll be quite near. You can come every vac, and at week-ends, and bring a reading party of your friends. You must regard it as a home.’

  ‘That’s just as well,’ said David, ‘as I haven’t any other one.’

  ‘Don’t say that. They need you.’

  ‘You keep saying so.’

  ‘They do.’

  ‘They don’t. They are self-sufficient. They regard me as part of – her —’

  ‘Steady.’

  ‘They have cut her off, cut her out, it’s as if they were killing her a second time, making her not to have been. And I’ve got to go too. They’re just determined to forget the past and be happy. They are happy. If you’d only seen them at the door when some horrible new furniture was being delivered. They were like a couple of children, laughing, happy, petting each other in front of the van man. And they’re burning all her stuff. They didn’t even ask me. They’re like Hitler, just destroying everything—’

  ‘Steady, steady. They can’t be happy. Your father can’t be. Think, David, think. He must need you.’

  ‘Why should he? He comes to see me now and then because I’m on his conscience, but he can’t talk to me because we haven’t anything to talk about except her and he’s already driven her out of his mind.’

  ‘Of course he hasn’t. He’s just too upset to talk. You must help him.’

  ‘He’s not upset. He’s looking after himself.’

  ‘And Emily. Remember she’s had a bad time. You must forgive your father if he wants to look after her now.’

  ‘Let him. But then he can keep away from me. I’m not going to license it all for him. I can’t do it.’

  ‘You can do something. You can be just a little gentle and kind.’

  ‘It would be sheer hypocrisy.’

  ‘Be a hypocrite then. To ape goodness is a bit of the battle. It may even be even half of it.’

  ‘You think he cares what I think. He doesn’t. That’s what’s so – awful.’

  ‘No, no, you have a lot of power, David. You are the final reconciler. In the end – without you – they will -starve.’

  ‘Let them starve.’

  ‘You have inherited your mother’s part of reconciliation. It must be perfected in you.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. I hate them.’

  ‘For your own sake too you mustn’t. You have got to survive. I don’t mean forget. You have got to become a whole human being and live as one. Hating will only hinder that. You must just – let them be – in your mind. They will need your mercy.’

  ‘I feel I’m in my mother’s place. I feel I am her. I’m all that’s left of her. No one else cares. Well, Uncle Adrian does, I suppose, but he isn’t anybody.’

  ‘He is, as it happens, and you must be kind to him too. Did you write to him like I told you to?’

  ‘No. They’re totally wicked and they just want to be allowed to get away with it.’

  ‘Will you write to Uncle Adrian?’

  ‘Yes! They want me to nod and let them get on with it.’

  ‘Then you must nod. One must not judge. One must nod. You must make your mind quiet. Have you tried? Sauce béarnaise?’

  ‘Yes, I tried – of course I couldn’t exactly pray – She taught me to pray when I was a child – Oh, God, I mustn’t remember —’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what you call it. Keep trying. And stop being afraid of Christ. He’s just the local name of God.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s insincere?’

  ‘No. I don’t believe the dogmas, but still Christ is mine and I’m not going to be deprived of him by the church.’

  ‘Did you ever discuss all this with Monty?’

  ‘Yes, but – Monty is so ambitious. I daresay he’s right to be for him.’

  ‘You said he was humble.’

  ‘Yes, yes, but he’s an absolutist all the same.’

  ‘And one shouldn’t be?’

  ‘I don’t know. One mustn’t worry too much. All human solutions are temporary. Pass your glass will you, dear boy? One has to live in one’s own little local world of religion mostly. For nearly everyone religion is something primitive. We hardly ever get beyond the beginning any more than we do in philosophy. If it’s natural to you to cry out "Christ help me!" cry it and then be quiet. You may be helped.’

  ‘But how do I know what it means, how do I know what’s true?’

  ‘That sort of truth is local too. I don’t mean any r
elativism nonsense. Of course there’s science and history and so on. I mean just that one’s ordinary tasks are usually immediate and simple and one’s own truth lives in these tasks. Not to deceive oneself, not to protect one’s pride with false ideas, never to be pretentious or bogus, always to try to be lucid and quiet. There’s a kind of pure speech of the mind which one must try to attain. To attain it is to be in the truth, one’s own truth, which needn’t mean any big apparatus of belief. And when one is there one will be truthful and kind and able to see other people and what they need!’

  ‘And you say you aren’t an absolutist!’

  ‘No. You see, it’s awfully difficult really. I’m just talking. But you will be kind to your father?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Now what about some treacle pud, it’s awfully good here and you haven’t got a weight problem. Or all those gluey things from Asia Minor? Figs? Crêpes suzette? Just cheese? You don’t mind if I have the crêpes and then join you on the cheese? Waiter! We need some more wine. I think a little Barsac with the pudding, oh of course you aren’t having any – well, perhaps this Moselle -’

  ‘I keep seeing my mother. I even see her in the street. It’s like a constant presence, only it’s so ghastly. And I keep wondering what it was like for her at that moment. I don’t want her to become a nightmare to me.’

  ‘Pray then. Ask for help. Take refuge. That can be done at any time. Whenever it seems like nightmare.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I’ll have the Camembert.’

  ‘Wait. Let me inspect it. Nice and ripe. Yes, you should set up a lifelong habit.’

  ‘Of eating Camembert?’

  ‘Of quieting your mind. Or at least of watching its strange antics from a serene viewpoint.’

  ‘Talking of strange antics – in the middle of everything -I keep on having those fantasies – the ones I told you about -I can’t stop them.’

  ‘About Kiki St Loy and tearing her clothes off?’

  ‘Yes. Isn’t it awful? It seems so wicked now to be thinking about a girl in that way.’