The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

by Iris Murdoch

  ‘Policemen!’ said Luca.

  Harriet looked up. There was a curious group of uniformed men standing in the doorway of the lounge. Harriet stared. The tense still attitudes of the men announced something unusual. Danger. Harriet’s heart suddenly began to beat very fast. She turned and saw next to her a stout German whom she had noticed on the plane. His face struck her with terror. It had gone completely white, his mouth open, his eyes staring towards the centre of the room. Harriet looked there. In the midst of a deadly quietness and frozen immobility of everybody else, two young men were standing together, one of them holding a long glittering tube in his hands. More police appeared in another doorway. Someone called out peremptorily in German. A woman screamed. One of the policemen raised a revolver. There was a sudden crackling cf deafening sound and the room became full of desperate agonized screaming. The stout man beside Harriet fell to the floor bleeding profusely. Screaming herself, Harriet covered Luca with her body.

  ‘What did you think of Uncle Adrian?’ said Blaise.

  ‘Stuffed shirt,’ said Emily.

  ‘I think he’s rather sweet,’ said Blaise. ‘We never got on of course. He always regarded me as a charlatan.’

  ‘You are a charlatan, dear. But is he really a soldier? Why wasn’t he in uniform?’

  ‘They don’t wear uniform off duty except in war.’

  ‘He looked like a bank clerk to me.’

  ‘I wish you’d stop buttering the cats’ paws, it’s a ludicrous idea anyway. Little Bilham has walked all over the Indian carpet.’

  ‘I hope you liked my little touches in the drawing-room.’

  ‘No, I did not. I told you not to change things without asking me.’

  ‘And I told you I had to make it my house and you agreed. Wasn’t it funny about Uncle Adrian wanting Lucky?’

  ‘Rather touching. He said he wanted something that had specially belonged to Harriet.’

  ‘I notice you didn’t offer him anything valuable!’

  ‘He didn’t want anything valuable. I gave him all that stuff off her desk.’

  ‘You are comically mingy. What are you making that face for?’

  ‘Because I am in pain. Have you forgotten?’

  ‘Oh, you mean your foot.’

  ‘Yes. I mean my foot. I shall be lame for the rest of my life. You don’t seem to mind.’

  ‘Fortunately you have a sedentary occupation. I expect you’re glad that dog’s gone. I don’t suppose you want to see another dog as long as you live.’

  Blaise had had a narrow escape. He had had to have twenty-five stitches in his neck as well as an operation on his leg, but Ajax’s teeth had not severed an important artery. Almost immediately after he fell David and Pinn ran out of the house and beat the dogs off. When Monty arrived it was all over.

  In the long confused aftermath Ajax and Panda and Babu and Lawrence and Seagull had all been destroyed. So had poor Buffy, who had done nothing but stand on the lawn and bark, as usual not daring to join the other dogs in whatever strange thing they were up to together. Ganymede (certainly a guilty dog) was saved by the resourcefulness of Mrs Raines-Bloxham, who had had a clandestine relationship with him for some time, feeding him secretly in her kitchen, and who simply came round and removed him before the situation had been properly clarified. Lucky, exemplifying his name, survived too by accident. Possibly because he was not yet integrated into the pack and was not used to being fed regularly in the same place, he had shown more initiative when challenged by hunger and had wandered off to explore Monty’s dustbins: in the course of which exploration he had been unwittingly provided with an alibi by Kiki, who had shut him unnoticed into Monty’s garage when she moved thence her car, which she had thus secreted in case Blaise should see it in Monty’s drive and be grieved. (She was a thoughtful girl.) So Lucky, discovered later, was deemed not to have been involved. Blaise had been about to return him to the Dogs’ Home when Adrian appeared and, on hearing that Harriet had doted on the animal, adopted him.

  Harriet had perished in the massacre at Hanover airport. She had saved Luca’s life, shielding him with her bullet-riddled body. Blaise, telephoned by Adrian, had flown out to bring home his wife’s remains and his shocked alienated child. Since that appalling moment Luca had not spoken, had not uttered a word or a sound, looking mutely out at the world with terrified eyes which seemed bright with pain as if bright with tears. He recognized Blaise and his mother, but put them aside gently with helpless animal gestures when they tried to tend him. Emily wept long and long over him, but consented to have him taken away to a special institute for mentally disturbed children. The psychiatrist there did not regard his case as hopeless.

  Soon after the funeral Emily moved into Hood House and immediately after that Blaise and Emily were quietly married in a registry office. Pinn and Maurice Guimarron were the witnesses. Blaise had informed Monty by letter and Monty had sent good wishes but had not turned up. On Emily’s arrival at Hood House David had moved back to Locketts where, so far as Blaise knew, he still was. Blaise had not yet set himself to woo and reconcile his elder son. Later there would be a time for that, a time for all the things that had to be done and ought to be done so as to set the world in order again. Oddly enough the world could be set in order, that Blaise knew in the midst of the weary aching blank mood which had possessed him since the first shock had worn away. Secretly, cautiously, he felt that he had come through the fire and had probably emerged unscathed. He had survived. That Harriet should simply have been killed, meaninglessly slaughtered by people who knew nothing of his predicament, that his problem could have been so absolutely solved in this extraordinary way, struck Blaise first as being unendurably accidental, and later as being fated. It had all happened so quickly that for a time he could not believe that Harriet had gone, that she had been thoroughly and for ever mopped up and tidied away. How terribly complete death was, how strangely clean. For a long time sheer shock kept him physically sick, but this sickness seemed unconnected with Harriet. Meanwhile he kept, in a kind of almost superstitious fright, expecting her, looking for letters, listening for telephone calls. Was there no final message? And in the old ordinary accustomed parts of himself he missed her dreadfully.

  ‘I miss her so, oh I do miss her so!’ he kept moaning to Emily, as if this testimony were very imporant. He felt an obsessive need, in his conscience, to keep on as it were holding up her picture in front of Emily. And Emily recognized the need and respected it: which indeed was easy enough for her to do. The fates had done Emily an amazingly good turn, and she could afford to be generous. She was relaxed about it though. She did not pretend any sorrow, nor did she trouble her imagination about Blaise’s sufferings which she regarded as strictly temporary. She concealed her satisfaction under a gentle cool tact, though every now and then she would murmur something like: ‘How awfully considerate of Mrs Placid to go off and get herself massacred.’ And Blaise respected that. Emily reckoned that these little brutalities, these attempts to trivialize the horror of it, would be good for him somehow, would make him feel that life simply had to stagger on without becoming a nightmare. And perhaps Emily was right.

  Blaise never saw Harriet’s body, which had been identified by Adrian. He was indeed determined not to see it, though Adrian said the face was unmarked and obviously thought that Blaise ought to see the body. Adrian organized all the formalities for bringing the coffin back to England. Adrian in fact decided that it should be brought back. Blaise, in a frenzy of self-protective haste, would have preferred an immediate interment in Germany. Formality, which clearly comforted Adrian, did nothing for Blaise. Adrian also arranged the funeral and burial in a big London cemetery where their father and mother were already at rest. (‘He will visit her grave regularly,’ Blaise said to Emily with surprise.) Harriet, at death, passed back into the hands of the Derwent family with a natuialness for which Blaise felt weakly grateful. It seemed to diminish his loss a little if it turned out in the end that she was really th
eirs after all.

  He dreamed continually about Harriet and felt in dreams a piercing compassion and also a fear which he dared not allow into his ordinary life. In one dream he saw her feeding the dogs and crying desperately over them with some dreadful anxiety. In another he saw her face badly bruised but not bleeding, looking at him accusingly. She is not dead, he thought, she is only hurt and I have hurt her. How could I have done that to my dear wife who is so kind and good? Waking, he soon put away these refinements of pity and terror. He aimed at simpler modes of survival and ways of passing the necessary time. He allowed himself, almost as if rationing them, periods when he grieved about her, mourning the maim in himself which her awful death had made. With swift mechanical efficiency his egoism took its countermeasures, and had begun to do so from the second when Adrian’s voice on the long-distance telephone had informed him of Harriet’s fate. I will not allow this horror to lodge itself deep in me, he thought. I will not let the abomination of death make a place in my life. I must immediately think about myself, about my future, about how Emily will console me, about how I shall one day be happy. I will not think that it is my fault. I will not think about Harriet’s sufferings, they are over. I will not be destroyed by this, I will turn it to the best account I can and heal myself through my responsibilities to the living. I will try to lead a simpler, better, easier life without problems, and let the cleanness of death do at least this for me. After all I do need rest now. I will not live with a ghost. Go away, he said in his mind, go, go, go, as if he were cutting off the little hands or tentacles of dreadful pity which were reaching up at him from the grave.

  Meanwhile he and Emily worked silently, surreptitiously, feverishly, like people trying to conceal a crime, to erase all traces of Harriet’s existence from Hood House. A perpetual bonfire burnt in the garden on to which the spouses, usually avoiding each other in this chore, quietly piled Harriet’s more dispensable belongings, the poor rubble of Harriet’s finished life: the contents of her desk, her childhood mementoes, the water-colours of Wales, her books of recipes, her newspaper cuttings about her father’s regiment, picture postcards from her father and brother, drawerfuls of cosmetics and combs and ribbons and old belts, even underwear. The strange funeral pyre gradually consumed them all. Harriet’s clothes and her few inexpensive jewels had gone to Oxfam. Only a silver-gilt bracelet engraved with roses had been coveted by Emily, who had prompted Blaise to urge her to keep it. She had never worn it however. The mirrorwork elephant and the uniformed teddy bear had returned from Germany with Luca, and the teddy bear had gone on with him to the institution. The elephant had somehow been left behind at Hood House. Blaise found its charred remains one day upon the bonfire and pondered the mood which had led Emily to decree its destruction.

  Harriet’s will made Blaise her heir of course, and he was interested as well as pleased to discover that she had possessed considerable assets, inherited from her father, of which he had known nothing. Did this concealment, he wondered, indicate some area of mistrust of him in Harriet’s mind? Perhaps she had simply wanted to surprise him with her little nest-egg on a rainy day. She had spoken of ‘securities’ once when they had been discussing his plan to become a doctor. More probably she herself had not known their value. The money was certainly welcome now when there were so many expenses, such as redecorating the house and altering the kitchen to suit Emily. Fortunately too Blaise’s practice was continuing to flourish, though with an almost complete change of clientele. A large number of the old patients had left, declaring themselves cured. As he now worked mainly with groups, he could take on many more people, and even then there was a waiting list Blaise and Emily still occasionally talked of the possibility of his becoming a doctor, but neither felt that this was now an urgent matter.

  (In fact, though Blaise never knew it, his patients had largely benefited from the triple shock of Horace Ainsley’s death, of Harriet’s, and of Blaise himself being nearly killed by dogs. Surviving these catastrophes, unhurt by them, increased by them, they all felt better. At a party given by Maurice Guimarron, Angelica Mendelssohn agreed with Septimus Leech that they had never been taken in by Blaise for a single moment. ‘And he imagined we adored him!’ ‘I can’t think why I went on!’ said Angelica. ‘Neither can I,’ said Stanley Tumbelholme, joining the group. ‘I feel so much better since that ghastly creep passed out of my life. How I wish those dogs had eaten him up!’ ‘I’ve nearly finished my novel,’ said Septimus ‘and Penelope says she can sleep like a log nowadays.’ Miriam Lister laughed archly. Septimus and Penelope were shortly to be married. Only poor Jeannie Batwood was silent. She was desperately in love with Blaise and could not now leave him, even though her husband was threatening divorce proceedings.)

  Blaise felt, on the whole, relief at the removal of Luca from the scene, though he was distressed for Emily. It was a terrible thing to admit, but he had never really understood Luca or his own feelings about Luca and had never loved the boy as he ought. Luca, conceived as a burdensome problem, had remained one for Blaise. The strange child, as it grew, inspired guilt and fear. It was a relief to have it officially classified as subnormal and taken away to be looked after by experts. At this period a holiday from Luca’s presence was in any case essential; later on decisions could be taken with a clearer mind. And although Emily cried a good deal about it, he felt that she too was relieved when that terrible incomprehensible silent suffering was taken away from before her face. This leaves more energy for other things, he thought, such as looking after David: though as yet he had scarcely attempted to do this, and Emily never mentioned the boy. Blaise had twice visited David at Locketts, but talk between them had proved impossible. David remained obstinately taciturn, then politely dismissed his father. Blaise, who had hoped for some little sign of mercy, felt he could not soon again so expose himself. He refrained from any reflection upon these meetings, quietly blurring them away. I will deal with David later, he thought. Just now he is better left with Monty and Edgar. What most immediately matters is Emily, settling her here, making our union real, making her believe in it at last. And once again he thought to himself how wonderful it was to be able to make a woman happy.

  And now he was married to Emily McHugh. They faced each other as man and wife. The long fight had ended or had changed. There was to be a new era of wars and revolutions of an entirely different type. The badinage sounded the same but with the disappearance of real danger had lost some of its cutting edge. Had fear really been an important ingredient in their old love? Had he perhaps at least enjoyed his sense of her fear? Now it was as if, behind each exchange, they were constantly saying, ‘It’s all right, darling, it’s all right. One can’t now be lost or ruined or destroyed any more. It’s all a game, you know.’ The ferocity in her which he had savoured so now seemed innocuously fake, or at any rate no longer sharpened by circumstance so as to pierce or thrill him. There was a gentler calmer understanding between them, almost a conspiracy, a conspiracy in favour of happiness. It was like an agreement of much older people. As he apprehended this Blaise found himself thinking hungrily of happiness and wondering if this less exciting prize were after all available to him and his second wife. He could not remember the quality of his very first pre-Emily happiness with Harriet, that time had become legendary and all but inaccessible to his mind. Nor could he clarify in memory that transformation of his early affections which had made him feel that Harriet was his sacred love and Emily his profane. As he now edged and nudged the past about, instinctively ordering it for a diminution of pain, he could only remember clearly (or was he partly inventing it?) with a new emphasis and yet also as a form of pity for her, his unhappiness with Harriet, his loneliness with her, his sense of having made the wrong choice and being in the wrong place.

  But in what place was he now? The fact of being married to Emily came to him with a kind of shock of innocence and blankness, like a very white light, and while it made him feel deeply tender towards her it seemed to diminish their
old vertiginous feeling of a unique kinship. Perhaps this kinship had indeed been partly a product of adversity and of the excitements of fear. Now they were no longer living dangerously and must appreciate other qualities and see each other with differences. Yet the thought of their old love remained to them as a token, or as a sort of guarantee, a reassuring flag which at certain times they flew. They had been sure once that they were quite specially made for each other, they had walked through a fire for this and deserved a reward. And even if the reward was puzzlingly different from what they had expected, at any rate the fire had been real. Blaise felt the marks of mortality upon him. He would carry scars and limp for the rest of his life. And as he nursed himself carefully out of the horror of Harriet’s death, he felt older and even more self-indulgent and noticed with pleasure the symptoms of a similar self-indulgence in Emily. They would have money, comfort, a pleasant house, a pleasant easy life. They had suffered together, and would now enjoy worldly consolations and rest at last. How ordinary we shall become, he thought without much regret; and he felt in himself a sort of achieved moral mediocrity, a resignation to being unambitious and selfish and failed which gave him a secret wry delight.