The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

by Iris Murdoch

  Monty said nothing. He watched her light a cigarette.

  ‘I thought this must be the master bedroom,’ Pinn went on. ‘I didn’t intend to arrive so late. Not that it’s all that late, I would have expected you to be still up. Then when I found the French windows unfastened it was irresistible. I felt like a burglar, it was thrilling. You looked rather beautiful asleep.’

  Monty sat on an upright chair and continued to stare at her.

  ‘They seem to be all in beddy-byes at the other house too.’

  The other house is empty,‘ said Monty. ‘They’re here.’

  ‘Ah. What does that mean I wonder? You’re very quiet aren’t you. Won’t you ask me why I’m here?’

  ‘I suppose you were sent by Blaise to find out what has happened.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Blaise and I understand each other, we’re almost telepathic. I’m his hired murderer. I could have murdered you, by the way, quite easily. You oughtn’t to leave your doors unlocked. Blaise wants to know what his crime looks like from here. He doesn’t say this of course, but I understand him without speech. He’s going to lend me some money to buy a fiat.’

  ‘What are things like over there?’ said Monty.

  ‘I’m glad you’re curious. Do you mind if I take my coat off? It’s just wonderful over there. They’re dazed with love. She’s so happy. I’ve never seen a woman so happy. The bones of her face are dissolving with it. She sings all day. She’s crazy about the new place. She was nearly crying with happiness because she’d bought a tablecloth.’

  ‘And he?’

  ‘He’s happy too of course, but he’s much more conscious. He wants to know where he stands.’

  ‘Does he intend to stick to Emily McHugh now, to live with her?’

  ‘Oh yes, barring accidents.’

  ‘What would an accident be?’

  ‘I’m not sure. That’s connected with the second reason why I’m here.’

  ‘And what is that?’

  ‘To find out which side you’re on.’

  ‘I’m not involved,’ said Monty.

  ‘You must be, you simply must be.’

  ‘You, I presume,’ said Monty, ‘want them to fail.’

  ‘Oh we are being frank, aren’t we!’

  ‘Don’t you?’

  Pinn was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘I ought to have been a man. I would have had eight sons and ruled them with a rod of iron. I once read of a sheikh who had eight hundred sons who could ride horses. I’d like to have been him.’

  ‘Tell Blaise if he wants to know where he stands he’d better come and see Harriet.’

  ‘I suppose she’s still doing her saint act?’

  ‘I do not know what she thinks.’

  ‘Do you want her?’

  ‘Do I what?’

  ‘Do you want Harriet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I wish I could see inside your head,’ said Pinn.

  ‘There’s nothing interesting to see,’ said Monty. ‘Now could you go, please? I want to go back to sleep. Please be quiet going down the stairs.’

  ‘Don’t be so cold with me,’ said Pinn. ‘Haven’t you any ordinary pity?’

  ‘Why should I pity you? Please go.’

  ‘Ah, if only you knew how much I deserved your pity —’

  Suddenly she began to undo her blouse, revealing a much freckled throat and a black brassiere. Staring at him, she let the blouse fall off behind her.

  ‘Stop,’ said Monty. ‘Do you want simply to disgust me? Stop degrading yourself and go.’

  ‘At least there’s a little feeling in your voice at last. I thought maybe you were some sort of zombie.’ She sat gazing, and a strong blush had spread over her face and down her neck.

  ‘What do you want?’ said Monty. ‘And please dress yourself.’

  ‘I want to startle you. I have startled you, don’t deny it, even great you. I want you to look at me. It’s a pleasure to me, I don’t have many. I wish Harriet could see us. Shall I call her?’

  Monty got up and walked away from her down the room. And as he turned his back on Pinn he seemed suddenly to forget her. He saw in a tall mirror Sophie in her wedding gown, weeping as ghosts weep.

  ‘Don’t be angry,’ said Pinn’s voice.

  Monty paced back again and Sophie vanished. ‘Cover yourself.’

  Pinn pulled her blouse on again. She said, ‘Surely you know that I love you. Surely you know that I am yours if you want me.’

  ‘I thought you loved Emily McHugh.’

  ‘I suppose I love her, if that frightful emotion can be called love. I’m not sure. But I love you. And you are worthy of me. You are the only man I’ve ever met who is. We are akin, you know, we are akin, I recognize you.’

  ‘Please don’t talk so loud,’ said Monty.

  ‘You are afraid Harriet might come. You can’t be in love with that sopping wet.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ said Monty. ‘I cannot respond to you in any way. I am just not sufficiently interested in anything you have to say.’

  ‘God, you are a cold fish. What colour is your blood, for Christ’s sake? Why not surprise yourself for a change? No wonder you can’t write anything but sick detective yarns. Your bed is warm even if you aren’t. Let me undress and get into your bed. You must want me, I can see you do. I’m yours, I tell you. God, you’re lucky. Shall I tell you the story of my life?’

  ‘No, thank you. Just go away.’

  ‘You know nothing about real life at all. You don’t know what it’s like to be an outcast, a real outcast You don’t know what real horrors are. I’m going to tell you anyway, whether you like it or not. I’d like to lodge something in your cold fish mind. It will console me afterwards to think you saw my breasts and heard about my brother.’

  ‘Your brother?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve got a younger brother, two years younger. He’s a moron. My father battered him. I saw it happening all through my childhood. My father hated him, he used to hit his head deliberately to destroy his mind, deliberately, and he did it. My mother cleared out ages before of course. My brother was as bright as a button when he first went to nursery school. By the time he was twelve he was done for, his brain was damaged. My father hit him again and again and again. He destroyed his brain. He’s so beautiful, the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. They let him wear his hair long. He’s tall, like a picture. He’s stone deaf and he’s got the mind of a little child. They have to take him to the lavatory. I go to see him every month. He doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know anybody. He’s a beautiful moron. My father married again. He’s happy with his second wife. He’s got a little girl to dote on. So that’s how it is. I wonder if you can imagine what it is to live with that. No, you obviously can’t. But I’m glad I told you. At least I’ve put it into your mind and you won’t ever forget it. I’ve made my mark on your mind. You might even write about it. If you’re capable of writing about anything which is really awful and not just fake.’

  ‘I don’t think it would make a very satisfactory story,’ said Monty.

  ‘Ah-’ Pinn stared for another moment, then began to pull on her mackintosh. She said, ‘I never told about him to anybody else, not even to Emily. You know, I would kill him if I could. I sometimes dream I am stabbing him to death with a very long sharp knife. I dream that I’ve killed him and cut out his heart.’

  ‘Please go,’ said Monty.

  ‘All right. You are a sort of thug. Not that I don’t like it, of course. And after this you can’t expect me to keep away from you. We might just as well have been in bed. You do appreciate me, you know.’

  ‘I’ll turn the landing light on,’ said Monty. ‘Please be very quiet.’

  He went out noiselessly and switched on the lights. Pinn passed him and without looking back went away down the stairs. Monty returned into his room and lay down on the bed. He noticed that, for the second time since Sophie’s death, he felt some vestiges of physical excitement. He forgot Pinn. Images of Sophie crowded
his mind, causing him bitter pain.

  ‘Pinn seems very happy all of a sudden,’ said Emily.

  Blaise said nothing. With Emily on the balcony, he was watching Kiki St Loy getting into the open sports car. Kiki was wearing a long shapeless scarlet shirt over very brief black velvet shorts. Her long legs, in apple green tights, folded themselves inside the car and the door banged. Pinn was already ensconced in the passenger seat Kiki’s long bright hair was neatly tucked down the back of her shirt. She now donned a floppy green hat and tied it over her head with a sort of motoring veil. Without looking up, she raised a brown hand in farewell greeting. Pinn, smiling up at the two watchers, waved, raising both hands in an almost ecstatic gesture. The yellow sports car leapt away with a roar.

  ‘I said Pinn seems very happy all of a sudden.’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘Christ, you aren’t desiring that St Loy bitch?’

  ‘Men are mechanical I’m afraid. No, of course not, no! Em, look at me. I love you.’

  ‘You’d better. I wish to God that bloody girl hadn’t, been in the house baby-sitting that night when we came home. And Pinn keeps bringing her over here. She and Pinn are as thick as thieves, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were lovers. Not that I care. And I wish you wouldn’t encourage Pinn so. I’ve had Pinn. I want Pinn out of my life now and she can take the bloody St Loy girl with her. I want us to be just us at last. You do want that, don’t you?’

  ‘But you wanted us to have friends.’

  ‘Yes, new ones. All the old ones are spoilt. You aren’t moping about Mrs Placid, are you?’

  ‘Certainly not!’

  ‘Because if you are —’

  ‘Emily, I’m not! Oh Em, kid, stop it. I’m here. We’ve bought a refrigerator.’

  ‘Yes. And a mixmaster. And an electric toaster. And a set of superior non-stick saucepans.’

  ‘You’re beginning to believe it?’

  ‘And I’ve buttered Richardson’s paws and Little Bilham’s. Where are they, by the way? We’d better come inside and close that door. You don’t think the cats would be silly enough to jump off the balcony, do you?’

  ‘No, no. Oh Em, your happiness makes me so happy.’

  ‘I hope you’re happy in your own happiness and not just in mine?’

  ‘I am, I am.’

  ‘It’s still not quite real yet. I wish you would work here properly, sweetikin. I wish you hadn’t put off all your patients. Dr Ainsley rang up again, he seemed quite bothered.’

  ‘I will work here. I just need an interval, a holiday.’

  Blaise, seeing two of his patients (Jeannie Batwood and Angelica Mendelssohn) had found himself explaining to them the change in his situation. He had been unable not to tell them all about it. The change of locale, the change of woman, could in any case hardly be allowed to pass without some comment. Blaise had spent the hour on each occasion talking about himself. His patients had eagerly played the analyst. Later he felt bad about this and had cancelled all appointments. Ordinary life must start again soon however.

  Blaise, when he could enforce some repose upon himself in the midst of the vortex of feeling in which he now lived, was amazed at his coolness. Not that he felt in the least cool, but there was a metaphysical coolness about bis proceedings which fairly took his breath away. He seemed to be fully aware of what he had done, he could measure its enormity, and yet he felt practically no guilt. This was not because he vulgarly ‘analysed’ his guilt away. He simply did not ‘take’ the situation in this manner. He felt rather a kind of humility, a recognition of fate. What a shred I am, he thought. How embryonic, how partially formed any human being is. How can we not be dooms to each other? Perhaps in the years before Blaise had simply ‘used up’ all his guilt. He thought with awe of what he used to feel, and could not help conceiving that in a deep way things were better now, even though he had done something terrible (but what exactly?) to his wife and his elder son.

  Blaise coexisted in these days with his mind with a certain frankness. There was a part of him that believed (and he let it believe) that all could still be well in the way in which (with such relief) he had believed it could be after the revelation. Only now it was the other way round. Could this little alteration matter so much? Now he would live with Emily and visit Harriet. Why not? Human beings can get used to anything. Blaise had in fact not at all abandoned the idea that Harriet’s goodness would somehow save them all. Harriet would ‘hang on’ through any ordeal and would in the highest sense make the best of things. Of course any moral idea by means of which he could defend himself (such as that he was acting ‘justly’) was fully entertained in his mind. But in bis conception of an ultimate state of peace Blaise was not deeply concerned with the ‘justice’ of which he had made so much in his letter. ‘Justice’ (and any other moral concept for that matter, such as ‘honesty’, with which he also occasionally conjured) was too abstract to fit the dense texture of the real events. It was not justice he was now offering to Emily. He was not now ‘offering’ her anything. Things which he and she had done and been in years past were having their deep inevitable consequences. The time for guilt was over since the crime had been committed so long ago.

  Intense mutual erotic love, love which involves with the flesh all the most refined sexual being of the spirit, which reveals and perhaps even ex nihilo creates spirit as sex, is comparatively rare in this inconvenient world. This love presents itself as such a dizzily lofty value that even to speak of ‘enjoying’ it seems a sacrilege. It is something to be undergone upon one’s knees. And where it exists it cannot but shed a blazing light of justification upon its own scene, a light which can leave the rest of the world dark indeed. Blaise felt that he was experiencing this miracle fully for the first time, since in what he described to Emily as their ‘first innings’ his joy had been crippled by the necessity of deceit and shocked by bis sense of a desecrated innocence. Now there was no deceit and its very disappearance was the honest recognition of the desecration which had after all happened and could not be undone. How, really, can one think about such a tangled business? Blaise wondered. He could conceive that a better man would not be in his situation, but he could not conceive that a man in his situation could act better.

  Truthfulness was its own reward and fed what must seem to him a pure fire; and freedom was its own reward too. He had a burning sense of his own identity which felt like a justification. Now he recalled how often, on nights when he had felt his lack of deep rapport with Harriet, he had wanted to run out of Hood House, to run to Emily and be with her that other self which was so much more him. Of course he and Emily had quarrelled as the years went by under that intolerable strain. Emily’s sheer endurance under that strain was a further guarantee of the lightness of their union now. After all they had let the world try to part them, they had even helped it! And how utterly the atmosphere of those years had vanished, now that they gazed at each other at last, breathing deep of the tangy air of freedom.

  Blaise knew that he must soon go to see Harriet. He must endure her tears and encounter again that part of his divided self which, however inanimate it might seem at the moment, he knew still lived at Hood House. Of course he still loved Harriet, and as soon as he saw her that other self would revive, though it might be weaker and smaller. I shall just have to live with a split personality, he told himself philosophically. He delayed going, not because he feared Harriet’s reproaches and the sight of her woe, or even because he feared the unnerving transition to his other mode of being, but because he could not bear to blot Emily’s joy. Naturally Emily was afraid, naturally she needed reassurance and it was a marvellous delight to him to give it to her. Her childish pleasure in the new flat moved Blaise to tears. He saw her again as the almost-child whom he had first loved, a creature utterly uncorrupt, utterly unspoilt, an image of truth, of his truth, his own special personal tailor-made incarnate truth.

  All these were the ingredients of Blaise’s ‘coolness’. He felt many pains an
d many fears but he did not feel agonizingly undecided or distraught. There was a great obscure pain about David. And more superficially he worried about Monty, about what Monty thought about it all and whether be had discussed it with Harriet. But the image of Harriet herself was solid and solitary. Even if she was wretched, even if she was angry, ultimately Harriet would be faithful. Harriet would wait. And meanwhile Emily McHugh was singing as she put away the new sheets and pillow cases into the airing cupboard. And as she sang Luca was sitting on the stairs watching her and smiling. Luca was happy too. Out of guilt and wickedness and violence a new stronghold of innocence had been born.

  Emily, stowing away the linen, was singing like a bird out of a warm sense of renewed life, physical well-being, sunshine, sex. Sheets and pillow cases. Towels. Tablecloths. Even damask serviettes! Wow! She had never had a linen cupboard before. She had never bought so many things one after the other in her life, and each new purchase further guaranteed the palace of her love. Emily felt like a martyr who, at one moment being chewed by lions, is at the next in the presence of God being congratulated on her performance. She had indeed endured and now had her reward. She felt so perfectly justified, it was like being endowed with a heavenly body. She was cleansed and soothed and all that tormented angry love for Blaise which had carried her through those horrible years was pacified, purified, beatified. She was intensely and happily in love for the first time in her life. No wonder she sang. Of course there were fears. She needed Blaise’s presence, his eyes, his touch. She needed constant draughts of reassurance. But then these were constantly available. Blaise did not need to tell her that Harriet’s power was broken. The revelation, the smash, the entry of truth upon the scene like an announcing angel had sufficiently made a new world out of which there was no way back. This violence was not the dangerous herald of more. It was not the beginning of the war, it was its end. No wonder Emily, waking every morning to the amazing reality of it all, gritted her teeth with rapture.