The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

by Iris Murdoch

  Blaise Gavender was driving his Volkswagen over Putney Bridge. Crossing the river was always a bad moment. People sometimes wonder how spies can live an ordinary life. Blaise knew. One simply divided one’s mind in two and built impenetrable barriers between the parts.

  It was low tide. As he looked at the sluggish light-brown meander of water he remembered a dream he had had last night. Some fishes in a muddy pool were ceremonially drowning a cat. The fishes had pale semi-human faces surrounded by flapping layers of repulsive finny matter. They had pushed the cat’s head under water and were holding it down with their fins. Surely it must be dead by now, Blaise thought with fascinated pity. But the cat’s tail, still visible above the water, continued to jerk about.

  This doctor business, Blaise was thinking. It’s all an illusion. I can’t put that part of my life straight without putting it all straight. But I can’t do that either. I can’t stop earning money, I daren’t stop. Even with Emily’s job, even if I get a grant to become a medical student, I can’t stop her allowance, I can’t ask her to suffer more. And I’d hardly ever be able to see her then. Thank God I never told her about the doctor idea. I can’t drive her mad. Besides it would be dangerous. No wonder I’ve never been able to save any money. I’ve given so much time and so much life to something which has turned out so badly. This bloody lie has ruined everything. And now just when I see some really good possibility in my life at last, I can’t have it because of this, because of her. However I shift the pieces about I’m trapped. I can’t afford to be poor. If all this came out it would ruin my practice. Anyway, it can’t come out, it would kill Harriet. I don’t want it to come out. But I don’t want it to go on either. God, there must be some way of sorting it out, there must be some best course. But there isn’t. Anything good is immediately cancelled. Because I feel vile I can’t spur myself to do good. What is good here anyway? It is entirely hidden.

  Sometimes, reviewing his dilemma, Blaise felt that the thing he resented most of all was the loss of his virtue. Another man might have called the lost thing his honour. A girl might have called it her innocence. Blaise mourned for his lost goodness. He was condemned to live in a sinful state, although his mind did not consent to sin and rejected it. Reflection about his psychology did not help him at all. Much of the machinery was painfully clear, but irrelevant The agonizing fact was that he could not now be good because he had to go on and on and on acting a bad role, it was as simple as that; even though he so often and so frenziedly felt the role as entirely alien. What an ordinary thuggish homme moyen sensuel he appeared to have turned out to be, and yet of course he was not. His virtue had mattered to him. He had treasured it when he was young. His fellow students thought him ‘wise’, his patients still did. A sense of himself as wise and good had led him into his chosen vocation, had given him the ‘nerve’ required to practise. The same guiding star now, with wonderful clarity, pointed him onward. But he could not go. It was as if his virtue did not know that he had lost it, could follow it no further. It kept on pointing. This was the anguish. And Harriet: she had so perfectly fostered in him that happy sense of being a good man, which sometimes almost forgetting, he seemed still to retain. When had the wickedness started, where was it located? How ever had he managed to put himself into his position of torment?

  In fact he had not slipped into it either accidentally or unwillingly. He had rushed into it with cries of joy. This memory was sometimes an agony, sometimes a consolation. Blaise had known ever since boyhood that he had certain peculiarities. They had never troubled him. This exercise of common sense was indeed part of his wisdom, and reflection on his own oddness had also led him to study psychology. He was not all that odd, he early concluded. Most people were pretty odd. It was interesting. He had early discovered, partly by introspection, partly by intuition, partly by questioning others, and partly by a study of literature, that human minds, including the minds of geniuses and saints, are given to the creation of weird and often repulsive fantasies. These fantasies, he coneluded, are in almost every case quite harmless. They live in the mind, like the flora and fauna which live in the bloodstream, and like these may be in some ways beneficial. They are of course symptoms of mental structure, but are not themselves usually causes, except perhaps in art. Fantasy concerning murder may make a man write a book about murder, but is very unlikely to make him commit murder. So, theoretically and by instinct, Blaise lived cheerfully with the oddities of his mind (which did not, in his case, concern murders). He knew his ridiculous undignified inner self very well; and it never occurred to him that he might ever want to act his fantasies or that it would be of any interest to meet a cognate fellow-dreamer. Obsessive rituals and the search for alter-egos was a sign of mental ailment, and Blaise was thoroughly mentally healthy. He was not going to develop any of those precise needs which lead ultimately into the little cupboard. He later studied such cravings in his patients with the cool eye of science. He knew all about it. Was he not a wise man?

  Blaise believed it to be a sign of mental well-being to like all sorts of people, and he liked all sorts of people. He had certainly no preconceived theory about the sort of woman he might marry, except that he thought she would probably be an intellectual. Then one day suddenly there was Harriet, not an intellectual but – what? – a sort of saint? Well, not a saint so much as a noble lady. Harriet’s sweetness was very ordinary really, her selflessness was selfish in a very ordinary woman’s way. But she had a beautiful, as it were, aristocratic, dignity and tact. Harriet was neither socially grand nor rich, but Blaise’s rather snobbish mother approved of her at once. Blaise was much in love. Something that he loved in Harriet was her absolute openness, her non-peculiarness, her (dreadful word) normality. Harriet was right out in the open, in the light. Had there been after all some tiny fear in him which Harriet’s sunniness had extinguished? Harriet would never let him shut himself into any dark cupboard. When he married Harriet he felt that all that, though still there of course (such things are ineradicable) had become utterly unimportant and harmless and small. Of course he never imparted any of these reflections to Harriet. He did not want to trouble his lovely calm wife with tales which might alarm or sicken her. Anyway she would not have understood. What went on in her mind he soon found out without her even noticing. It was nothing at all unusual.

  Blaise had been happily married for nearly ten years when he met Emily McHugh. He met her at a lecture on Merleau-Ponty at the French Institute. Of course Harriet was not with him. Emily was a student at a teachers’ training college, writing a thesis about Merleau-Ponty. Emily was twenty-two. Her appearance struck him at once. She wore her nearly black hair long in those days, tied roughly back with an elastic band. She was small and very slim, with a small ardent face, a little sharp nose, and brilliant rather hard and stony blue eyes. She spoke in a deliberately harsh and unobliging voice with a slight London accent. She immediately, though somewhat mechanically, flirted with Blaise when they met (no one introduced them) at the cocktail party after the lecture. Blaise flirted too. He found himself, however, almost at once finding some pretext for referring to ‘my wife’. Emily gave him a strange look. It was clear to Blaise after about twenty minutes that he could not let this fascinating chance acquaintance disappear for ever. How had he so early known? They often discussed this later. Even at the first meeting he had felt (yet on what evidence?) like an animal who had thought that just his sort of animal did not exist anywhere in the forest – and then had suddenly met one. They talked of Emily’s work. Merleau-Ponty readily provided an excuse for another meeting. Blaise promised an off-print of his early paper on Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis. He delivered it to her two days later in a pub near the British Museum. Emily never finished her thesis.

  ‘Did you meet anybody interesting at the French do?’ ‘There was a student working on Merleau-Ponty. We had an argument’ This was the only thing Blaise had ever said to Harriet about Emily. Harriet had noticed nothing, had never for a second suspect
ed. Her trust in him was perfect. In the early days it had seemed inconceivable that Harriet should not have read the truth off his blazing face, off his trembling hands. The day after the British Museum pub, he and Emily were in bed together. It was ecstatic, sudden, total. As total as Harriet’s trust, its cataclysmic necessary counterpart. Sin was an awful private happiness blotting out all else; only it was not sin, it was glory, it was his good, his very own, manifested at last. This was the dark cupboard all right, only it was not dark, it was blazing with light and as large as the universe. Everything he had done before seemed feeble, shadowy and insincere. A combination of pure free creation and pure causality now felicitously ruled his life. The dark forces had never "been stronger or more clearly seen, but he was not their puppet. They rose into the bright air like a fountain and carried him skyward with them. He had never fretted after, never even dreamt of, a woman who could so complement his own strangeness. This was not just intense sexual bliss, it was absolute metaphysical justification. The world in its detail was revealed at last to an indubitable insight. His whole being was engaged, he was identified with his real self, he fully inhabited his own nature for the first time in his life.

  Though she had had, in a casual and unimpressed way, a good deal of varied sexual experience, Emily McHugh had never really been in love before. She had been true to her deep thing, she informed Blaise. She had remained free, she had known how to wait, she had made no compromises with society, she had not given up hope and accepted a second best! Blaise hung his head. It had indeed been a failure of faith and courage, not to wander on through the forest, not to search faithfully for his true mate, not to believe and endure. He did not ever exactly curse his marriage or curse Harriet, buj he saw it all as a pitiful and unworthy mistake. He wished with the most biting remorse that it could all be undone and made never to have been, and in this rather abstract sense he sometimes wished that Harriet could die or be somehow just spirited away for ever. In fact, when he was with Emily, Harriet seemed like a dream and tended to slip out of his consciousness altogether. As for Emily’s reproaches, he wore them like rubies. What they were even pleased to call their vices penetrated the texture of their whole life down to the minutest details of repartee and verbal wit.

  Of course Emily was not really an intellectual, but she had the style of one, she was literate and sharp and witty. Illegitimate, poor, fatherless, she had struggled into her education against great odds. How brave she is, he often thought, she does not even know how brave she is. What will and courage had carried such a girl to the length of even hearing of Merleau-Ponty! She did not however ‘live herself’ as a thinker. She had an integrated animal quality which was unlike, but complementary to, her partner’s psychological texture. She was not unconscious of her being, but wore it without the quick anxieties and awareness which formed part of Blaise’s pleasure. She found nothing odd or ridiculous in rituals which she had never except mentally performed before; and it was this deep calm priestess-like confidence which led her lover on into the land which crystallized gorgeously about them like a solidifying dream, the thunderclap blending of the fantastic and the real. The ritual aspect of their relationship proceeded with intuitive spontaneous ease and occupied them quite a lot at the start. There were objects the sight of which, or even the thought of which, could give Blaise an erection. But as they soon even more rapturously discovered, it did not really matter much what they ‘did’. All this, everything, like the earth upon the last trump, was caught up and included in the miraculous quality of their spiritual-physical grasp of each other. The particular thrilling violences resided more purely in looks and in tones and in the intimate sway of one consciousness in its fierce blissful wrestling with another. However, that they had also ‘done everything’, gave them a virtuous sense of completeness. They lived like gods together.

  Except of course that they could not live together. At first, incredible as it later seemed, the sheer force of love made them seem scarcely aware that Blaise was married and that he had to spend much of the week with his wife. The cruelty of absence stirred them to hotter transports of love. Blaise crossed Putney Bridge faint and molten with desire, and when they met they wept and danced. It seemed at first frivolous to worry about, even to be conscious of, their more worldly difficulties. A change came (erotic love is never still) when Emily started posing questions. The questions could not disturb them of course, since there had to be suitable answers. Their love had to triumph, to work, so it just would. Still, there were questions. Blaise put off telling Harriet. He would of course tell Harriet and dispose of Harriet. But he did not want to be too unkind and he needed time in which to arrange it all for the best. Emily was not anxious, she did not drive or press him. It was enough for the present that he so indubitably loved her, it was enough too that she knew and Harriet did not. She even pitied Harriet, who was elderly and deceived and fat and no longer loved by Blaise. ‘Mrs Placid’ was Emily’s name for Harriet. Poor Mrs Placid.

  Luca had been an alien growth. Their love, so dense, so seamless, so complete, had not seemed framed with any space left for a child. They had not wished for, dreamt of or anticipated children. That problem belonged to quite another world, to quite another set of arrangements. They did not even, though they might have done so, conceive of it as belonging to the time after Blaise should have ‘disposed’ of Harriet. At least this was what Blaise felt, and he was fairly sure that it was what Emily felt until she actually found herself pregnant Blaise later accused Emily of concealing her pregnancy until it was too late to terminate it. Emily retorted that she had no need for deceitful stratagems to entrap one who was so utterly bound to her in love and trust. However that might be, Luca arrived, and across his cradle Blaise and Emily looked at each other with eyes which sparkled with a new anguish.

  Blaise, who had up to now visited his dark goddess in a discreet one-room flat in Highgate, moved his second minage to Putney. It is hard to say at what moment it began to dawn on both of them that some longer and more complex trial period lay ahead than they had envisaged in the days of their first rapture. ‘You aren’t going to do it,’ said Emily one day. ‘You’re going to funk it’ Blaise said nothing. They sometimes quarrelled, and the quarrels began to be really painful, not like the joyous pain of the twin fighters which they had once been. Then on an evening when Emily had screamed at him with what for an instant looked like near hate, he had said, ‘Wait Please. When David is older I will come to you. I can’t do it now. I can’t.’ Her reproaches then brought him no pleasure. David’s life had lengthened. Public school, and now later university, had been set up as the stage when all would be changed and reversed. With shame and with resentment Blaise read in Emily’s eyes her slow loss of hope, her desperate contempt. However, with a spirit which he often, with a rekindling of his old dark joy, admired and adored, she gritted her teeth and carried on. At other times he felt: well, what else can she do, poor girl?

  There was one other thing she could do, as he of course knew, and that was kick everything to pieces. She could go and confront Harriet. In fact all she needed to do to ruin him was to write a letter. Emily did not know and had deliberately never wished to know where he lived with his wife. ‘I don’t want to know anything about your bourgeois existence,’ she told him. ‘I don’t want to think about it at all.’ In this she had never wavered, and Blaise knew that she regarded with an almost superstitious horror and disgust the existence of that elsewhere into which he vanished. Not only did she feel no curiosity about it, she symbolically annihilated it in her mind. However that did not imply that she might not suddenly in some moment of hatred and despair take it into her head to smash through the barrier. She could easily discover his other lair and invade it.

  Fear of this did not in fact trouble Blaise very much. He had once told Emily that if she decided to ruin him in this way he would never see her again. The threat was unnecessary. Emily, intelligently brooding upon the situation, quite sufficiently saw that this sort of
wrecking action would not serve her turn. He saw the intelligence working and working in her suspicious alienated eyes. Did she still believe that when David went to college Blaise would quietly break it all to Harriet and come and live with Emily? Did he believe it? As the years went by he came to see her slightly less often. Neither of them commented. ‘You know I’ll never leave you, never give you up,’ he said to her in moments of tenderness, and there were still many. ‘I know,’ she said. And she did know: but this did not help much either.

  ‘Magnus Bowles’ was of course a fiction, invented by Montague Small. Soon after Monty’s arrival at Locketts, and in fact during the brief and inauspicious time when Monty was allegedly Blaise’s patient, Blaise had blurted the whole business out. This was when Blaise was beginning to feel very anxious, but was still very much in love. He told Monty, in the confessional quietness of his own parlour, partly out of a ridiculous bravado and joie de vivre, partly in order to get Monty’s help and advice, and partly because he had to tell another man. Monty of course was fascinated. When Blaise saw that glow of delighted curiosity in his friend’s eye he already began to suspect that he had made a mistake. However it was a relief, and Monty did help. How the whole thing failed to come to light (to be obvious to Harriet) in the early stages was a mystery in retrospect. Blaise was constantly recklessly absent, sometimes for days on end, at important ‘conferences’, seeing urgent ‘patients’, studying in remote ‘libraries’. Only Harriet’s monumental calm trust (what Emily called her stupidity) kept the structure up. It never occurred to Harriet to doubt or in any way to check statements whose falsity would have been clear under the lightest scrutiny. Her poor husband was very very busy, that was all. She and David, much absorbed with each other, endured his absences and ecstatically welcomed his returns. He always came back so tired, poor thing.