The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘He’s rather fun, isn’t he,’ said Emily.

  ‘He promised to forsake all others —’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Blaise, ‘I value your observations and your advice, and I’m sure it’s very charming of you to come here and hold my wife’s hand and offer her your protection, whatever that means -’

  ‘Stop drivelling, Edgar,’ said Monty, ‘come with me.’ He tried to take Edgar’s arm, but was shaken off. Harriet made a holding gesture.

  ‘Because you are good you think that you can save them, but it is they who will defile you. You must not assent to what is wrong, that is not what the Gospel requires. You are a believer in Christian marriage. One must be in the truth and you are not. You must come away so that he can see what he has done. As it is he sees nothing. This is a lie, this man’s lie, and he must live it and undo it. But you have put him in a position where he cannot stop lying. No one here, not even you, is good enough to redeem this thing. They will not tolerate your forgiveness, in the end they will hate you for it, they will go on intriguing as they have always done, they will not even be able to help it, and you will find too late that you have not been a healer but an accomplice of evil. He must decide, he must choose, that is where he has put himself. He has not acknowledged his fault, he is continuing in it, and you will be eternally his victim, abandoning him to wicked ways and conniving at his sin. For his sake you must not allow this foul thing to continue.’

  ‘Oh come, come, come!’ said Pinn.

  ‘Thanks for the message,’ said Emily.

  Harriet said, ‘Edgar, I am listening to you. But there is a little boy in the case.’

  ‘Could you remove your friend?’ said Blaise to Monty.

  ‘No, I will not go. I must testify. I haven’t said it clearly yet and I must say it clearly. Harriet, listen. Don’t you see that you are putting him in a situation where he simply can’t help lying to you? You have not required the truth of him. You must require him to decide. Vague tolerant pity is not true kindness here. You are trying to spare yourself —’

  ‘We’ve all had enough of you,’ said Blaise, putting his glass down and coming forward. ‘Just shut up now, will you. Monty, for God’s sake do something, take his other arm, or does this amuse you?’

  ‘Please!’ cried Harriet.

  Blaise seized hold of Edgar, but Edgar with some violence pulled up his arm to defend himself and hit Blaise smartly in the eye with his elbow. Blaise subsided on to the floor. Harriet screamed. Emily ran to Blaise. Monty rushed to Edgar who was still vaguely flailing about with his arms, looking for Blaise who had so suddenly disappeared from his field of vision. With a robust though inexpert version of a blow used by Milo, Monty struck Edgar on the neck with the side of his hand. Edgar too subsided on to the floor with a crash.

  ‘Quick, get him out,’ said Monty. In a second Pinn was with him and they had somehow got Edgar upright and were propelling him towards the front door. ‘Harriet – Harriet – Mockingham -’ Edgar was crying out, like someone uttering a battle cry.

  Once outside the front door they were suddenly in a different world. The clouded sun was already announcing twilight. A blackbird, bright as a toy amid the motionless swirl of the leaves, was singing in a tall snaky birch tree. He sang against silence. Mrs Raines-Bloxham passing by slowly to her house looked with curiosity at the emergent trio. She had always expected irregularities from a psychiatrist’s residence. Edgar had fallen silent and was allowing himself to be propelled along by the other two. At the gate, watched by Mrs Raines-Bloxham, riveted now on her front door step, he gripped the gate-post and stopped.

  ‘Come on, Edgar, there’s a dear fellow.’

  ‘I’m sorry,‘ said Edgar. ‘I’m drunk. There was no need to hit me though.’

  ‘Sorry. Come along now.’

  More slowly they resumed their procession. They turned the corner. Mrs Raines-Bloxham entered her house.

  When they got to the door of Locketts Monty said to Pinn, ‘Thank you very much. I can manage now.’

  Edgar lurched on by himself through the doorway. Pinn stood her ground. She said, ‘Let me come in. Please.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Monty.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Monty stared at her for another moment, then went inside and slammed the door.

  Edgar had lurched on into the little drawing-room. He sat down abruptly in one of the wickerwork chairs, smashing one of its arms with a rending sound. He was murmuring something to himself, ‘Down in deep dark ditch sat an old cow chewing a beanstalk.’

  Monty went slowly into the rather murky room. One of the shutters which had been closed against the sun was still across darkening the scene. He went over mechanically and pushed it and closed the window. Almost at his feet was David, sitting on the floor, his head pillowed against the purple sofa, fast asleep. At the same moment a snore announced that Edgar was asleep too.

  Monty squatted down beside David and examined him carefully. The swollen reddened eyelids betokened the weeping spoken of by Edgar. The lips were slightly parted to show a glitter of teeth, and the ‘archaic smile’ was shadowily present, though a little downward droop at the corners had changed it into a rather tearful smile. The light golden hair was tangled, drawn forward over the brow perhaps by the distraught hand, which now lay open, palm upward, upon the sofa, as if imploring. The other hand was clenched upon the knee, the shoulder exposed. Suiting his breathing quietly to that of the sleeping boy, Monty slowly knelt, and then leaned forward to rest his head lightly upon David’s shoulder, letting his body relax slowly. The boy’s jacket was still damp with tears. In the darkening room Monty lay there open-eyed and gained, amid terrible thoughts, some kind of consolation.

  Meanwhile in the Hood House drawing-room. The silence after Edgar’s removal was broken by Harriet’s weeping. The shedding of tears is of course not simply the semi-automatic discharge of water from the eyes, it is usually an action with a purpose, a contribution even to a conversation. Harriet wept now with a physical relief at being decently able to weep instead of having to be polite, and as an indication to whom it might concern that for the present she had had enough. She had tried very hard to be good and act rightly, this little party which had ended so disastrously was itself one of her right acts. Now there must be, she vaguely supposed, some sort of new phase. She had certainly done her- best And with a vague prophetic shudder, she felt a little as governments or as princes feel who, to placate opinion or to clarify their position, act with ostentatious tolerance towards some opposition group who, if they then misbehave, can be more firmly dealt with with impunity. Yet this was also, for her state of mind, too powerful and too conscious an image. It was psychologically necessary to Harriet to feel that she had played a good, even an absurdly good, part. But she was aware enough to know that the sheer awfulness of the situation had an impetus of its own which was beyond her will and beyond the will of others too.

  She had not expected Edgar’s ‘testimony’, but when it came it came with the same message, and an almost welcome helplessness overwhelmed her. She took what she needed from Edgar’s outburst, and let the rest go, had already forgotten it She had thought that she was in control, that she was the one who was looked to. But now it seemed that she was not in control after all, nobody was in control, that she was a victim, that they were all victims. There was nothing venomous in this collapse and it was not even intended as an appeal to Blaise. Harriet did not expect him to rush to her side, she did not even want it. She wept quietly, for and with herself, sitting gracelessly upon the upright chair beside the wall, as some derelict refugee might weep in an airport or a station waiting-room, unobserved and bereft of future plans. Wiping her hot face, kicking off her shoes and closing her eyes, she murmured a soft rhythmical ‘oh, oh oh’ and wept into her already soaking handkerchief.

  Blaise at the moment was concerned about his right eye, which had made violent contact with Edgar’s el
bow. Still sitting on the floor, he covered and then stroked the bruised eye, opened it, shut it, opened it again. His vision had returned to normal but the area was painful and the eye already narrowing. Emily McHugh kneeling close by, not touching him, surveyed Blaise with a look which was strangely cold and bright. So might someone look who had suddenly seen, far off, not yet fully worked, yet somehow there, the solution of some long and baffling mathematical problem.

  Blaise began slowly to get up. He said to Emily in a matterof-fact way, ‘I’m just going to bathe my eye.’ He went heavily out of the drawing-room and into the kitchen leaving the door open. He turned on the cold tap and began clumsily to ladle water in his hands on to the burning painful area. Emily went out into the hall and put on her light fawn mackintosh and arranged her scarf. Blaise began to say something to her through the doorway.

  ‘Good-bye,’ said Emily. She went to the front door and left the house, closing the door quietly. Blaise leaned for a few moments over the sink, regarding his wet hands. Then, not pausing to dry himself, he turned and hurried after her.

  Twilight was already gathering in the luxuriantly leafy trees of the long road and the clouded sky had paled to a sort of lightless hazy white. Emily was already some distance away, running as hard as she could. In silence Blaise began to run after her, and as the cool air touched his hot damaged face he felt a great pure clarity entering his head, entering his brain, flowing through him in a cleansing stream.

  Blaise had never in his life before experienced quite the sheer confusion about his own thoughts and feelings which he had experienced in recent days. He had been unhappy before, guilty before, but he had usually understood what he was feeling, however powerless he might have been to change it Since his confession to Harriet the only sensation which was at all clearly declared was his humble relief at having been forgiven by the two women. It was all so wonderful, so simple, so unexpected. A moment of confidence in truth, a moment of attention to duty, and suddenly what had been evil was all turned into good, with no punishment, without the loss of anything, not of any one thing, which he wished to retain. Well, there was David, but that problem was not insoluble, David would not vanish, Blaise knew that his son loved him. And there were the two women held in the new framework, offering him undiminished love, indeed enhanced love and accepting each other with a calm realism. The relief, the gratitude, had been violent indeed.

  But Blaise knew that he could not live by this gratitude. What had been so wrenched about must have other huge consequences. His deepest attachments were in movement obscurely and without his will. More than he had realized, he had needed and relied upon the appearance (and as he often experienced it the reality) of a normal ordinary happy even conventional even dull home life at Hood House: a life where he mended things and mowed the lawn and cleaned the car. To this amalgam even his sense of wronging Harriet contributed something. And as, in recent years, his feelings had moved back towards his wife, his love for her was compounded with this present everyday guilt and pity. Harriet’s ordinariness, her goodness, her legality shone for him in this light. She was good and sweet and she was wronged. And, as he now realized, the strength of his pity was a function of the secret strength and liveliness of his relation with Emily. He could perhaps have stopped loving Emily if he could have treated her, as he sometimes pretended to himself that he did, merely as an object of duty; and he would then have made a more challenging problem out of the task of loving his wife. As it was the mysterious chemistry of the situation, the familiar strong egoism of his own mind, had sorted it out thus for his comfort His secret life with Emily somehow helped and certainly increasingly informed his love for Harriet.

  Now Harriet, in what might have seemed a moment of defeat with the revelation to her of her .status as a wronged and cheated wife, had suddenly grown in stature. Harriet had become heroic. Her dignity, her monumental kindness, her power to hold and dominate the situation had amazed him and had been in effect a test of his love for her, which had in recent years become in its resigned guiltiness so calm and sweet The changed developed Harriet must, when the resting time of gratitude was over, demand of him a changed developed love. At the same time the jerk of revelation had seemed to sever him from Emily. Everything that he had loved in Emily seemed now in eclipse. Never in those nine years had Emily faltered, never looked guilty or weak, though her strength had more and more expressed itself in fruitless punishing complaint Now suddenly Emily had been picked up, as by a hurricane, and given a small but official place in this new Harriet-owned world, the world brought into being by Harriet’s goodness. And Emily had looked guilty before Harriet and had obeyed her and had allowed Harriet to plan Luca’s schooling, as if Harriet were Emily’s mother and Luca Harriet’s grandson.

  Blaise had imagined himself before as inside a cage, and when he had felt nothing but the great blessed relief he had seemed to be out of it But cages made of long wrong-doing are not so easily disposed of. Had he conceivably exchanged one cage for another? The deep falsity, the lie of which Edgar had spoken, still existed. But what was it exactly, where was it, and what did he now want? Truth, freedom? Where were they, in which direction? As Blaise ran along the darkening road in pursuit of Emily he began confusedly to feel that he knew.

  Emily ran desperately, exultantly. She had stuffed her handbag into her pocket and swung along the road long-legged, like a schoolgirl. She too, since the revelation, had been utterly confused about her own feelings. She had felt of course a sort of disappointment, though she had also felt a sort of relief. She had always pictured the end of the long miserable deception as being brought about by herself, as involving the final loss of Blaise, and as signifying somehow or other, her own death. Extreme continuing unhappiness often consoles itself with images of death which may in a sense be idle, but which can play a vital part in consolation and also in the continuance of illusion. If that happens I am dead, consoles, and also dulls the edge of speculation and even of conscience. It is another way of saying, to me that cannot happen. ‘The final bust-up’ would mean either, almost impossibly, Emily’s total possession of Blaise or else, almost necessarily, the withdrawal of Blaise from her life. Dreams of acquiring Blaise by means of revelation had certainly come to seem more and more empty, about equivalent to the visions of Harriet being run over or dying of cancer which had solaced the early days of Emily’s unhappy liaison.

  But now it had happened, quickly and with a weird ease, and there had been no explosion, no cataclysmic universal collapse. Blaise had been as it were politely handed back to her by Harriet, an authorized object inevitably and however reluctantly at any rate with kindness and composure to be shared: shared much as before except that the long deception was over. Of course there would still be life-giving lies. Blaise would never never tell Harriet everything. Blaise would go on lying to Harriet about how he did not care for Emily and never made love to her, just as no doubt he was lying to Emily about how he did not care for Harriet. Blaise’s duplicity would remain, a little familiar haze upon the scene, comforting though also of course depressing. And there they would be, all three of them, as the years went by, the two guilty and the one guiltless. And Harriet would somehow run things and be unfailingly kind and play the older woman and help Emily, and help Luca, and Emily would be submissive and grateful and would gradually stop feeling guilty and .. . But what had occurred to Emily after the liberating bang of Edgar’s outcry, as she sat on the floor and unsympathetically watched Blaise stroking the damaged eye, was that none of these things had really got to happen at all, since she could prevent them. The power of pure destruction was still hers. She could still make it death or glory.

  As she ran along wide-eyed and wild-eyed she expected and soon heard Blaise in pursuit. He did not call her name but she knew his running footsteps. Emily ran faster. She did not want to be caught. What she wanted now was to elude Blaise, to lose him, to know that he was frenziedly searching for her and not finding her. She had no notion how death or gl
ory would work out or even happen and she did not want it to happen yet. She wanted a little time to gloat over her power, short of the agony which the exertion of it might bring on. Emily was fleet of foot and could easily have outstripped her lover, only a projecting paving stone caught her flying toe and the next moment she was full-length on the ground, her handbag disgorging its contents in the gutter and one sandal left behind her. As she sat up, investigating a grazed knee and torn trousers, Blaise arrived panting. Emily scooped back the contents of the bag and retrieved her sandal. She rose a little stiffly. Blaise was saying something. Emily gazed at the tremulous mouth and the swollen bruising eye. Then taking careful aim with her still swinging handbag she bit him across the face as hard as she could. Then she walked quietly on, limping a little.

  The road was dark now, though the sky was still pale, become hazily bluer though cloudy. The street lamps came on making bowers of vividly green or red leaves round about them. The lazy capacious brick houses had put their lights on and uncurtained windows cast squares of brightness upon neatly raked gravel or attentive cascades of rambler roses. Emily walked on and Blaise walked first a little behind her, then beside her, holding a handkerchief to his eye. He made no attempt to touch her and there was silence between them. But now as Emily walked a sensation of pure bliss rose in her, rising from the warm paving stones, passing through her thin sandals up through her trembling knees ... She was simply filled with bliss, her blood had turned into some heavenly golden liquor which lightly scorched all her flesh and bubbled out at the top of her head, catching fire there and becoming a little dancing flame of joy, like the headdress of a Pentecostal saint. Emily walked along, gazing ahead down the dark road, aflame and yet immensely cool, immensely strong, immensely light.

  When they reached the little suburban station Blaise went ahead and bought two tickets for London. They sat on a seat together in silence, they boarded the train in silence. On the train they sat opposite to each other and stared at each other without speaking or smiling, and the silence between them was like the silence of eighteen-year-old lovers who having suddenly and mysteriously achieved a perfect communion are simply silenced by joy, finding that now they can converse fully without words. Only Blaise and Emily were not eighteenyear-old lovers, but grown-up people who had made each other suffer for many years. And this made the silence between them even more beautiful.