The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (37 page)

All these were the ingredients of Blaise’s ‘coolness’. He felt many pains and 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.

She turned now and saw Luca behind her, sitting on the stairs. How much, in these days, Luca had the air of an interested spectator. He was smiling at her now. Could so young a child actually be looking sardonic? That could not be the meaning of his smile. ‘You little hobgoblin you!’ she said and seized him and shook him roughly in her embrace. New springs of love for her son had risen in her expanded being, and the perfect physical connection between herself and Blaise made her able to touch and hold the child in a new way.

'I’m sorry,‘ said Monty. ‘I’m very sorry.’

He and Harriet were sitting on a rather skeletal rain-worn teak seat on the lawn by the study window. Fast small clouds bowled along, occasionally blotting out the sun. Monty in a flimsy black summer-weight jacket, felt cold and would have liked to go inside to the wood fire in the study, only the nature of the recent conversation made any immediate such move seem frivolous, even heartless. Harriet, very tense, was staring down the garden at the Douglas firs, stroking Lucky (his surname had been early dropped), who was sitting beside her on the seat with a responsible air, his huge wide paws upon her lap, gazing up into her face with calm contemplative affection, while her mechanical hand lightly lifted the ruff of rusty brown fur about his big long-nosed face. On the lawn Babu and Panda lay watching with jealous concentration, while Buffy, wrapped in his unhappy thoughts, sat erect behind them.

Harriet had lived through universes of feeling since the moment, years ago it seemed now, when she had received Blaise’s second letter. Her certainty and promptness about leaving Hood House had seemed later to be a sort of pointless pique. In such a tragedy why run anywhere? Then it had seemed right again, an impulse of self-defence which had landed her in just the proper place. The flight symbolized her surprising determination not to forgive her husband. When Harriet had wanted to reassure Blaise and to take away his pain she had felt utterly at one with herself. She was a woman, and perhaps there are many such, who lived, like an embryo inside an egg, upon a supporting surrounding matrix of confidence in her own virtue. No nineteenth-century matron, or even one from ancient Rome, could have been more confident than Harriet that she was a good person and would always be able to act rightly. There was nothing vainglorious or forced about this view, it even coexisted in her with a good deal of simple humility. I just have that sort of temperament, she said to herself, the result of a cheerful orderly childhood and a good upbringing and a quiet way of life. Of course, I have never been severely tried, but I have resources and principles. I can rely upon myself and others will be right to rely upon me. This little confidence she placed, without feeling herself in any way remarkable, indeed conscious that she was the smallest of small fry, in the centre of her family life. She saw more of Blaise’s faults than he ever dreamt of, and she supported him with the pure will of her own humble decency. That was how she felt it all and lived it all, and this was a great part of her happiness.

So it was that when the awful trial did come Harriet swung into response to it with an almost exultant and only momentarily surprised sense of her own strength. She suffered the shock and the pain, but there she was, where she had always been, in the centre, needed and able to respond. Distress had to be eased, tears dried, and she could do it, and the performance of these duties was patently more important than the indulgence of her jealousy or of her shocked disappointment in her husband. The performance of the duties was a real solace, and the power to perform them filled her up at need like divine grace. This had been before Blaise’s second defection. The difference
then
she could never have conceived of beforehand. She could support and forgive a penitent husband who needed her love and her strength. But when all that power seemed no longer necessary, when Blaise cut the channel through which, for so many years, as he almost unconsciously made use of it, it had fed him, Harriet felt utterly deprived of her central certainties and no longer at all knew how to think about what she ought to do. Perhaps she had never known how to think about what she ought to do. What she had possessed were not principles but instincts, the warm wise possessive instincts of a happy wife and mother. For a situation where she was not needed she had no heroism.

Harriet had of course, from the start of the new time, wanted and required to believe Blaise’s assertions about the deadness of his present relation with Emily. Feeling sorry for Emily had helped Harriet a lot. Also she could not imagine, after meeting Emily, how any man, let alone wise decent Blaise, could prefer such a woman to herself. That an erotic preference could so war with all the tried openness of married love she did not conceive, and in any case she knew nothing of Blaise’s ‘special interests’.
Now
she believed that he had loved Emily and that he still loved her. Blaise’s second letter brought instant despair and sheer agonizing amazement to Harriet. And with these came afflictions which were quite new to her, debilitating crippling jealousy and resentment, anger, even hatred. Like a cloistered jungle native suddenly infected by the viruses of civilization, she keeled over. What a less secluded temper might have withstood laid her low. She simply did not know what to do with her mind. She needed support and someone whom she cared for to confide in. This after all she had always had. Adrian was in Germany. David had his own agony and repulsed all her attempts to speak to him. She turned with increasing urgency to Monty.

It now seemed to her that she had loved Monty for a long time. He alone of all her vague friends had held an important place in her heart. Her desperate need of him now made this temperate but deep affection turn into a frenzy. The sense of being laid aside out of the action, rejected, no longer needed, sent away, shook Harriet to the roots of her being and almost seemed to make her a different person. She felt as if she were back at the beginning again, though a much more empty beginning, as if she were young and in anguish, facing an open alien world and grasping wildly at what might save her. It was not just that she needed help and comfort, somebody literally to hold her hand. Her disowned rejected love needed another object. It was not that she now judiciously cast her husband off. She experienced him as gone, and she had to have the comfort of making someone else need her. Her powerful loving nature could not rest idle. She loved Monty, and could not remain silent or make little of it. Hence the extraordinary (to him) confession which she had just uttered.

Monty had felt enough affection for Harriet to be glad of her visits at a time when he wanted to see no one else, and enough to be thoroughly irritated by Edgar’s attentions to her. This represented perhaps, to him, a good deal of affection. Now, however, he was alarmed. There are unhappy countries (Poland, Ireland) whose misery is aesthetically unpleasing and inhibits sympathy. Monty had been moved by the spectacle of Harriet the loving and successful wife and impressed by the confident forgiving wronged Harriet. He had even admired, at first glimpse anyway, the fierce decision-making ‘Hood House is finished’ Harriet. This latest Harriet (for indeed it was like meeting a new person) unnerved and puzzled him. It was as if (and how unjust this was) Harriet’s innocence were gone, had been destroyed for ever: that innocence upon which, he now realized, he himself had in his own way reposed. Now he saw in her the scars of jealousy and resentment and the relentless tentacles of need, and he pitied her heartily but he shuddered. He feared for himself. He feared the dreadful complexity of her urgent demand upon him. He did not want to have to change himself, to modify his being to meet her case. In fact all the time he knew that part of him was pleased by her strange declaration of love; and he was very much afraid of betraying any tenderness which should, in this dangerous state of things, sweep her towards him. I must be very hard and clear, he thought. That will ultimately help her most.

‘I am very touched,’ said Monty. ‘But I just cannot help you in the way that you want.’

‘I’m not suggesting a love affair,’ said Harriet, in a new rather metallic tone, still staring down the garden. ‘I might suggest marriage, I mean later. That’s how much I feel. The point is I need you now. I need you to be with me and simply to let me love you. I must love you.’

‘You mustn’t,’ said Monty. ‘You don’t know me. If I accepted your love it would do us both harm. One can’t simply stand there and be loved. You want an involvement and I just absolutely don’t. Sorry. Sorry.’

‘You can’t – I think – imagine,’ said Harriet slowly, ‘what it’s – like – to be me – now. I realize a lot of things about myself. Obvious things perhaps. I married very young. Blaise has been my only man. I suppose that meant that in a way I never grew up. It seemed perfect. If Blaise had been what he appeared to be perhaps it would have been perfect, a kind of perfection anyway. I would never have needed to grow up and change and see the world as terrible, for it
is
terrible, it is terrible in its nature, in its essence, only sometimes one can’t see. Some people never see.
You
have always known this, and I know you knew, long ago, something I could not name in you attracted me, and it was this, that you
knew.
As Blaise never did. Blaise pretended to. He played at it with his patients, but he was too self-centred and too fond of pleasure really to see it. Blaise has always lived in a dream world.’

‘We all live in dream worlds,’ said Monty.

‘And now that I’m
out
– now that I’ve had – all my possessions – ripped from me – it’s as if I were back at the start, having to live by my wits, if you see what I mean, for the first time in my life. When I married Blaise I was just a piece of ectoplasm, and I might have stayed like that for ever. Now I realize I’ve become a person – not necessarily a nice person at all – but a person, an individual, something with edges. When I was happy I was – you can scarcely imagine it because you’ve always been a person – maybe men always are more than women – when I was happy I was so
vague.
I lived in others and through others, I didn’t live in myself. It sounds like a good way to live. Maybe it was a good way to live in some small sense, I mean that a part of the world was good, was contented and in order – and I was part of that part, not exactly causing it, but it lived through me and I through it. But I wasn’t anything real or hard in the middle, I had no structure, or if I had I wasn’t conscious of it and I didn’t use it I must have been changing though, and becoming, though I didn’t know it, what I am now. I can’t have
become
all this, and there’s really a lot of it, in a few days, can I?’

‘We discover ourselves in affliction,’ said Monty.

‘I suppose one way of putting it is that I’m free for the first time in my life. I have to make decisions and choices in an open field. I have to look after
myself
and make or mar my own destiny by reaching out for things or letting them go. I’ve been so protected, so shut up, so shut in. Now it’s like a bright light, awful, too bright, one has nowhere to hide, one has to move. And it’s in this light and in this way that I’ve come to you, Monty. You can’t think how – significant this is to me – that I realize that I love you. It’s as if it’s my first free act – it’s so –
valuable -’

It is to you, he thought. But that does not necessarily give it value for me. This new intensely self-possessed Harriet was fascinating. Misery had certainly given her energy, a sense of identity, a powerful questing will. It was even impressive. His part however was to be lucid and disappointing and cold. The least tenderness or excitement, the least foothold in his heart, and he and she would both be in danger.

‘And I feel so strong, Monty. I feel as if I can compel you almost I’ve always thought of you as strong and myself as weak. But now I feel as if I had power over you, claims, rights. You’ve got to help me, I will make you love me, we have a future. This is a strange way for a woman to talk whose husband has just left her. But I won’t sit at home and weep, I won’t! I can make a new destiny, a new life, I’ve got to, whether I like it or not. And when I need you, you are here. You must see how
meant
it all is. You needn’t work it out now – you think so much and that makes you cautious -I don’t really want to capture you all at once – at least I do want to, but I know I can’t – I want you simply to let something begin between us – well, it has begun, it began before, before I knew about Blaise. Just let it go on, let it live, let it be, let it become. I need you terribly, Monty, oh I do need you so. Won’t you simply please
meet
these needs, I mean hour by hour, minute by minute, be with me, look after me, help me? Then you won’t be able not to love me. You need love too, you know – not only to be loved, but to love.’