The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (30 page)

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 elbow. 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 glory 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.

Blaise had stopped dabbing his eye, which having received the full force of a second blow was now entirely closed and surrounded by a purple stain. His single eye stared and bis mouth was straight with a grimness more moving to Emily than any tender smile. At Paddington they walked from the platform and with a single accord went and sat down on one of the benches near the paper stall on the main concourse. It appeared to be midnight and there were few people about under Isambard Kingdom Brunei’s high cast-iron arches. Some sleepless pigeons walked about and pecked without optimism at screwed-up chocolate papers. A tramp dozed in a corner, so sunk inside a ragged overcoat that only a few tufts of hair proclaimed his head. Emptiness and night possessed the big brilliantly lighted station. Emily stretched out her legs and through a rent in her trousers scratched at the coagulated blood on her knee. She felt giddy with happiness and certainty. She would have been content to sit thus beside Blaise, not looking at him, not speaking to him, not touching him, for the rest of the night, for days, for weeks.

At last Blaise spoke. ‘Well, we are a pair of babes in the wood, aren’t we.’

‘Perhaps the pigeons will come and cover us up with chocolate papers,’ said Emily. She wanted to laugh and laugh and laugh, but her voice merely trembled slightly. Love possessed and shook her as a terrier shakes a rat And between herself and her lover the old fierce strong electric current had been renewed and flowed once more filling her brimful with knowledge and with truth.

‘Here we are then,‘ said Blaise. ‘Here we are – again.’

‘I hope you realize
where
we are,’ said Emily, still not looking at him.

‘Yes.’

‘You realize that you’ve got to choose.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’ve chosen.’

‘Yes.’

She turned towards him at last, still not touching.

‘You see, Edgar was quite right,’ said Blaise. He spoke in a very cool analytical tone which made Emily tremble with desire. ‘Although it looked like acting properly it wasn’t, it was riddled with falsehood, it couldn’t have gone on. You didn’t have to hit me, though I’m glad you did, to make me understand. I understood back there in the drawing-room. I think all that was needed was a bit of noise. Then I saw.’