The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

by Iris Murdoch

  David had intended simply to stay away from the house until after the train had left and then to return. He tried not to reflect upon whether he would then find his mother still there. He felt like someone who has gone to avoid a death scene or the removal of a body. When he came back it would be done and the house though terrible would be clean. Oh that awful uncleanness, as he had felt it in the last days, his own dear precious home haunted, infested! The spectacle of his mother and Luca, whispering, laughing, petting Lucky, petting each other. His own title of son usurped and caricatured. His mother could not know what she was doing or she would not do it. He had intended simply to stay away, but now he realized that his ramblings had brought him fairly near to the railway station and he could actually go and watch the train depart.

  A piece of disused railway track curving through a cutting led towards the station where the ground evened out a little. David had often walked this way, striding upon the grass-embedded sleepers, crumbly as dark chocolate, and searching for old nuts and bolts, venerable relics, their sturdy cast-iron forms printed with vanished insignia. He hurried along now, springing upon the soft slightly rotting wood until the little station was almost in sight and he could see the glittering rails of the still open permanent way. A disused railwayman’s hut, a wooden shack, solid and now quite hollow, stood just before the intersection. David glided in through the gaping door and looked along the line. The station was quite close and he could command a view of the platform. A few people were waiting for the London train. His mother was not among them. It was a quarter to eleven.

  Perhaps she won’t come, he thought. If only she could not fail this test, if only she could find it impossible to leave without him. He could go back and take her in his arms. If only he knew how to do this. But they had lost the language of their affections, they had lost the style. How repulsive to him had been that hasty embrace in the hallway, that awkward hot almost guilty kiss. He stood well back within the open square of the window, in the shadow, and watched the platform. He turned to consult his watch. It was dark in the hut and smelt of warm unpainted wood and elder flowers. When he looked up Harriet and Luca had come on to the platform. Harriet was talking to the taxi driver, gesturing, perhaps telling him to drive quickly back towards the house in case David should be coming from there. She looked about, her gaze even crossing the dark window of the hut, as if she expected him to come running up from somewhere at any moment. He saw that she had brought his suitcase with her. He could not see her face clearly but he could read the detailed symbolism of her movements with the lifelong sympathy of his own body. She was distraught. I will go to her, he thought. Then suddenly she knelt down and, pretending to be settling Luca’s coat collar, embraced him with a frantic gesture.

  A few minutes later the train was audible. It swept past, obscuring the view for a moment, and then stopped at the platform. Harriet had gone back to the barrier and was looking away down the road. The guard was calling to her. She returned and began pushing the suitcases into the train. She bundled Luca on. The door banged. David saw her still hanging out of the window as the train rattled away into the trees and curved out of sight. Its vibration hovered in the air for a while after it had gone and then there was silence. David emerged from the hut and walked up to the other side of the station, crossed the footbridge, and began to walk slowly along the road that led back to Hood House. It was a longer way than through the fields but he had no heart to walk in the fields now. The hot piney sandy smell of the railway was gradually left behind. He thought, I am entirely alone. I am entirely alone and abandoned for the first time in my life. I have neither father nor mother. She got into the train. She need not have done so. She got into the train and went away without me.

  Simply the waiting, the vigil, the refusal had been his purpose. But what now? He was suddenly on his own, returning to an empty house. She will come back, he thought. But would she? When? He had, with his body’s sympathy, felt her final frenzied need to flee, to run. Of course there was Monty, there was Edgar. But he felt alienated from Monty. Monty had refused to talk to him when talk would have helped so much. Monty had become aloof and mute. And David’s mother too had rejected Monty. ‘He is no use,’ she said once, after she had virtually shut the door in Monty’s face. Monty was ‘no use’ and Edgar would soon be going back to Oxford. David would be alone. He could not go back to his school after those telephone calls. All his life someone had fed him, provided his clothes, given him money, told him what to do who would look after him now?

  ‘David!’ Pinn seemed to be calling to him from far away. ‘Are you asleep or have you gone into a trance?’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘Are you hungry, did you eat any breakfast, shall I bring you something, cook you something?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Sit up for a minute. It makes my head swim to look at you.’

  David sat up jerkily and leaned forward over his knees, panting and rubbing his face with one hand. He did feel a little faint, he felt very strange.

  ‘She’ll come back,’ said Pinn. She took his free hand very gently yet firmly in hers.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where’s she gone?’

  ‘To my uncle in Germany.’

  ‘Well, she will come back. Meanwhile you’re a big boy, aren’t you.’

  The telephone began to ring. David knew at once: It is my mother telephoning from Paddington. ‘No, don’t answer it. Shut the door please.’

  Pinn shut the door.

  ‘Will Kiki come?’ said David against the muted clamour of the phone. ‘You said she would come.’

  Pinn said after a moment, ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She has fallen in love with somebody else.’

  My father, thought David. He had seen them together in the car. Tears started into his eyes. ‘Gone for ever,’ he said half to himself, ‘gone for ever’, and he quickly checked his tears with one hand, letting Pinn continue to hold the other. The telephone went on ringing. Pinn removed her glasses.

  ‘Well, what are you going to do now?’ said Pinn.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Pinn was beginning to undo the buttons of his shirt. When she had undone them all the way down to his waist she put her band inside and laid it very firmly upon his breast. The particular slightly cupping gentle and yet commanding pressure of that hand upon his flesh produced an instantaneous and very complex change in David’s being. At one moment he was hanging in space, outstretched upon a huge grid of pain: jealousy, loneliness, fear, anger, resentment. He was dis-incarnate and scattered in terrible regions. At the next moment his body had assembled promptly and compactly round about him, obedient to the sudden authority of Pinn’s caressing hand. He saw the details of Pinn’s face become, through its own emotion, arresting and unfamiliar. He saw her frizzy red-gold crown of neat hair, her round and uniformly pink cheeks, her moist mouth and green eyes. ‘I suggest you make love to me,’ said Pinn.

  ‘I can’t,’ said David, removing her hand, but holding it and retaining the other one.

  ‘You could have with Kiki? You thought about her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And dreamt about her?’

  David recalled the steaming abyss of his dream. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t want her. You want a woman. Love me. I am nobody, I am everybody. I am the figure in the temple that embodies the will of heaven. I am worthy of you because I am the messenger of your fate. You are looking at me for the first time but I have looked at you many times, you have walked about freely in my dreams. Your youth and your beauty are holy to me. I worship your innocence. Trust me and give it to me. It is the right time. And love me just a little in your heart without fear. I have no will to entangle you or to hold you. I will be kind to you and will set you free and even send you from me. How could I presume to speak about your mother if this were not so? I want you now and I need you now and this is something which your destiny and not mine has o
rdained. But I need your affection too. I have never begged for anyone’s affection before, but I beg for yours now. If you can give it to me as you love me the world will be made anew in which your manhood begins. You will never understand me or know me, David, but at this moment we can do each other no harm, only good. Believe this and accept my wooing and don’t be afraid. No other woman will ever speak to you like this and there will never be another moment in your life like this one. Come, will you, please?’

  In the silence that followed David heard his breathing, heard his heart, or perhaps Pinn’s, echoing the gathered momentum of her speech. The green-eyed face seemed to be transforming itself before him into a beautiful mask of pure gaze. He had never been so absolutely looked at before. The air around him had become exquisite and thin. They both rose.

  ‘Wait,’ said David, and his voice was gruff. ‘I’ll just go and-’ He left her swiftly and went to the front door and bolted it, went to the kitchen door and bolted it. Then he returned to the hall where Pinn was waiting for him.

  Her face was more muddled, more humble now, blurred with her own need. ‘You can care for me a little, can’t you, simply at this moment, it’s not just –?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said David.

  ‘You can’t understand, but I’ve been a heroine and – you are my reward – and oh, because of so many things – just a moment of somebody’s tenderness —’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes

  ‘Come then, my dear.’

  They went up the stairs.

  ‘Well, and how was it?’ said Monty to Kiki St Loy.

  ‘Super!’ Kiki, now fully dressed, was putting on her sandals.

  Monty had slipped on his shirt and was still lying repose fully against a pile of pillows in the disordered bed.

  He regarded the girl with tender amazement. How put together she was, with her sleek brown tights and her short lilac-coloured dress of feathery cotton, and the milk-white glassy necklace which she had just slipped about her neck, and her dark burnished gold-shot hair combed out and falling to its straight silken hem with not a strand out of line. So mint-conditioned, so complete and somehow beautifully public, she who had lately been to him a universe where thought and feeling, flesh and world, him and her had so tumultuously intermingled.

  ‘What do you think?’ said Kiki.

  ‘What are you thinking.’

  ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘You look so presentable,’ said Monty. ‘I mean so wellturned-out and uncreased and uncrumpled and neat. I can hardly believe you’re the girl I’ve just been so marvellously in bed with.’

  ‘I am that girl!’ Kiki sprang at him, a foot dabbing the edge of the bed, landing beside him, on top of him, he felt her sandalled feet against his bare feet, her honey-nylon thighs against his thighs, her neat lilac dress bundling against his shirt, her lips against his jaw, her hair about his neck, about his head. He smelt the apple smell of her flesh, her sweat, the cottony dress, the tender cool smell of her hair.

  ‘Mind your dress, you silly goose.’

  ‘I want to be creased and crumpled, I want to be your creased and crumpled Kiki, I want to be undone by you.’

  ‘You have been undone by me, and I hope you really did think it was super. At one point I wasn’t too sure what you were thinking.’

  ‘I was not thinking.’

  ‘Feeling then. I didn’t hurt you too much?’

  ‘No, no, Monty, it was perfect – the hurt was there – but in the midst of all – Oh I am so happy!’

  ‘Well, don’t be too happy,’ said Monty, pushing her away from him. ‘Remember what I told you earlier. Get out of the way, I’m going to get dressed.’ He got up and sought for his trousers.

  ‘I love you, Monty,’ said Kiki. ‘Is that wrong?’

  ‘If anything’s wrong it’s mine,’ said Monty fixing his belt. ‘Many people would call this a crime. If it has unhappy consequences for you that will be some evidence in favour of the view that it was one. This is something that you must look after for me. Part of it all was my trusting you with it’

  ‘I don’t understand and yet I do understand,’ said Kiki. ‘But I can’t help loving you for ever and there is that too.’

  ‘A girl of your age doesn’t know about for ever.’

  ‘I think I do know though,’ said Kiki. ‘I know about it. I am a remarkable girl.’

  Monty came to where she stood beside the bed, her lilac dress indeed a little crumpled. He took her by the shoulders and looked into the big dark eyes where there were in the iris drifting depths of red, Mediterranean eyes, African eyes.

  ‘Yes, you are a remarkable girl,’ he said, ‘and that is why I have done this to you and taken this risk. I have passed on some of my pain to you, which is what human beings ought not to do, though human beings constantly do it. And I have done this deliberately. I have victimized you, Kiki, because of your remarkableness and because at a certain moment you were suddenly there and able to make a change of my life.’

  ‘You will be less unhappy?’

  ‘Perhaps. Yes.’

  ‘I think I will be more unhappy,’ said Kiki, ‘if you will really not now – let me see you – though if I have made you less unhappy I will have extra happiness for that.’

  ‘Less in quantity, my dear, but higher in quality! Let it be made up that way. Now you must go.’

  ‘No, no. Monty, please. We can never be like this again.’

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think this saddens me too? That is why you must go quickly.’

  ‘But you will see me again – you didn’t mean never – Oh, I feel so terrible, Monty.’

  ‘I expect we shall meet, why not. But all this must pass.’

  ‘It will never pass.’

  ‘Come, come. Any pain I will have caused you is very pure, perhaps the purest pain you will ever feel. It may even help you one day, like a hard thing, to give you a foothold, somewhere quite else, to put your gallant little foot upon.’

  ‘Let me see you tomorrow.’

  ‘No. Go now, Kiki. I have nothing more to give you, except my blessing which looks like a curse, but is really a blessing.

  You are a brave child and I give this last remnant to your bravery. Go, remarkable girl. And my thanks.’

  Monty went away down the stairs and opened the front door.

  ‘No. Good-bye.’

  Kiki passed him and the last he saw was the big dark eyes hazy with unshed tears. Then her long hair tossed and flying. But she left with a firm step and did not look back.

  Monty closed the door and leaned against it. Then he sat down on the floor with his back against the door. His world seemed to be sailing, sailing in front of him, the pieces of it huge and coloured like storm clouds. Everything which had been so dark and tight as if he were crushed inside a nut, had loosened and become separated and airy and streaming and a little wild. Monty did not think now, is this good, is this bad? He simply responded to it, as he had responded to the extraordinary advent of Kiki St Loy.

  Somewhere in the midst of all these jauntily sailing pieces there was what had happened that night. Sophie had not been in bed. She was lying on the purple sofa in the little drawing-room, in the canopied recess, dressed in a long robe of dark red and blue silk which in fact she had just bought by post from a West End shop. It was the first time she had worn it. She was propped up among the purple cushions and her face looked thin and pale, uncannily greyly pale like the wax effigy of a dead saint in a Spanish church. How much her expression had changed with the vanishing of those plump confident cheeks. She had been saying again and again and again for nearly half an hour, ‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I wish I’d never married you.’ It is simply the litany of her doomed pain, Monty told himself, as he had told himself many times in the last weeks, as Sophie reviled and tormented him, casting her anguish off on to him like an acid shower. He made his usual effort to be quiet, not to quarrel with her, to answer gently, to say to her again and again and agai
n in a countervailing litany, ‘Rest a little. I love you. Don’t be angry with me. Forgive me, Sophie. I love you.’ But once more he failed. ‘All right, I wish I’d never married you! I wish I’d had a decent loyal wife and not a whore who went to bed with all my friends!’ ‘You have no friends, you don’t know how they mock and despise you, all of them.’ ‘If they do it’s because you teach them to.’ ‘I despise you, you are not a man at all, oh how I wish I had married a man.’ ‘Oh, shut up, Sophie, go to bed.’ ‘They all mock you, Richard mocks you.’ ‘Shut up!’ ‘You didn’t know I made love with Richard.’ ‘It’s not true.’ ‘It is true, here in our bed, we mocked you.’ ‘You’d invent anything to hurt me, wouldn’t you.’ ‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.’

  Monty caught his breath. The memory had risen like a noxious atomic cloud in the midst of his sailing thoughts. He checked himself, made himself rigid, while the hysterical voices went on and on in his mind. He had made them silent at last, seizing her throat. It had been like an embrace. He had to make her silent. He threw himself upon her and silenced her and held her, wanting to hurt her, wanting to dominate and hold that awful consciousness which filled him with so much pain and so much wild awful pity.

  ‘Sophie,’ he said aloud. ‘Sophie. Sophie. My darling. Rest now. Forgive me.’ She was part of him for ever. Only here within him did she now exist. His love for her was still alive and would live always and would change as live things change. And perhaps as with the years it became softer and vaguer its imperfections would fade too. It could never be made perfect but it would carry fewer of its blemishes into the years to come. He and Sophie, bound together for ever, married for ever. His body relaxed slowly and then he began to remember Kiki and what had just been happening. How strange, he thought, how very strange. And he felt himself in change like a plant, altering in all his parts. What had made this newness? Telling Edgar? Something to do with Edgar himself, some place of innocent affection, some relic of youth even, providing a mysterious fulcrum? So Edgar had somehow made possible Kiki, and Kiki would make possible – what? What delusions were these? Had he not simply committed another crime, a little one? And it seemed then in his mind curiously like the big one, its counterpart. Sophie’s death, Kiki’s tears, to bring about for him, what?