The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (43 page)

Unable to take himself to bed Monty stood at his study window eating bread and butter and cheese and waiting for the dawn. He did not think, I have done well. He did not think, what imbecility ever possessed me to pour it all out to Edgar. He felt, as he had said to his friend, emptied. He could not make out if the emptiness were good or bad. Perhaps it was good. It certainly produced a certain calmness. There was a hint of peace around, just as sometimes, early in the year, there is a hint of spring around. But possibly this was mere mood, illusion, even drink. I wonder if I shall really go to Mockingham, Monty wondered, and be shown up to one of those huge fantastically cold bedrooms with those four-poster beds that used to impress me so? And come down and have dinner with Edgar and drink port afterwards and talk about philosophy and college business. Was there such a world, could he see it, could he smell it? Was it the ancient unfamiliar smell of innocence? Perhaps all Sophie’s love affairs had been imaginary, perhaps Sophie had been chaste after all.

After a while he let himself out into the garden and began to walk across the lawn. The sky was already pale with dawn, a very pale yet obscure blue, offering no light and yet somehow allowing things to body themselves forth as if they themselves were emitting a sort of spotty pallor. He could see the dense shapes of the fir trees, a prowling darkness which was a dog. A bird uttered a half phrase and fell silent again. He turned into the orchard and after a moment of strolling stopped suddenly and stared. He could see now through the trees the outline of Hood House and a light which had just come on in Blaise’s study.

Monty’s immediate feeling was fear, a kind of terror of the uncanny, born of the dawn light and of the deep abiding horrors in his own soul. Who could be there now in empty abandoned Hood House, turning the lights on and walking from room to room in frightful meditation? Blaise? Monty felt a fear of Blaise which was partly a fear for Blaise. It was not exactly that he imagined that Blaise might hate him, might wish to injure him, might wish to kill him. But the horror of Blaise’s world touched him closely, and suddenly the more closely after what had just happened in his own. Blaise was a sort of pitiable walking danger, like something radioactive. Blaise had come there, searching, hoping, Blaise wishing it all undone, wishing himself dead? After a moment’s hesitation Monty went forward and reached the hole in the fence and climbed through it and paused again. A downstairs light was on too, the hall light shining through the kitchen. The curtains were drawn in Blaise’s study and the lighted square revealed the flowery pattern of the curtains, pasted on to the grey emergent shape of the house.

There was an aggressive scuffle and some barking. ‘Who’s a good boy, then?’ He thought, I must see Blaise, I ought to. I must stop him from thinking of me as Mephistopheles, I must stop him imagining I somehow lured him on to disaster on purpose. Surely he cannot really think this. I should not have talked to him like that with Harriet, it was wrong. How strange that he should turn up now when I sort of require him. I must make my peace with him and not allow him to have the horrors alone in that house in the dawn. I must see him because I too need these things. Accompanied by desultory barks he moved across the lawn and along the side of the house. The front door stood ajar. Monty glided into the lighted hall and up the stairs. He knocked softly on Blaise’s study door and entered.

‘Oh!’ said Harriet, dropping a number of cards on the floor.

‘It’s you!’ said Monty. ‘I thought it was Blaise. Oh, Harriet, what is it?’

Harriet said nothing for a moment. She was wearing her long white coat, and her face against the upturned collar looked grey, livid, as mottled as the dawn light. Her hands flew to her throat, pulling at the buttons of her dress as if she might faint. She looked at Monty grimacing with anxiety and shock, with fear, perhaps with aversion. She recalls my words, he thought, they are planted in her soul. That too should have been done quite otherwise.

‘Nothing,’ said Harriet in a dead voice. ‘What do you want?’

‘I thought it was Blaise.’

‘Sorry. It isn’t.’

She returned to her occupation. She was rifling Blaise’s filing cabinet, of which several drawers were open and the contents lying scattered about the floor.

‘What are you looking for, Harriet? Can I help you?’

The very bright direct light in the room made the scene seem unreal and horrible, the search a violation, a kind of violence, like a visit from the secret police. Harriet took up another handful of cards, glanced at them and tossed them on to the floor with a clatter.

‘What are you looking for?’

‘Magnus’s address.’

‘Magnus Bowles? His address?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why – ever –?’

‘I’m going to see him,’ said Harriet. ‘He knows all about it, he knows all about Blaise and me, he knew from the start, Blaise told him everything, he probably told him all sorts of things he never told me, and I feel so certain that Magnus is a wise person, a sort of kind good holy man. I’ve felt this thing about him for a long time. Blaise belittled him but then Blaise belittles everybody. Blaise can’t
see
any kind of greatness. I’ve got to talk to Magnus, I’ve
got
to, I feel certain he could help me. Blaise said I was the only woman who really existed for Magnus. He must need me. And if he needs me I need him. And he’s – the last one -’ Her voice broke and she turned back to the cabinet and wrenched out another drawer.

‘Oh dear!’ said Monty.

‘Of course Blaise took away a lot of stuff, but he didn’t take the old files with the addresses. All the old papers are here, stuff from years ago, and there’s a file for everybody, for
everybody,
except Magnus. I suppose you don’t know Magnus’s address, do you?’

‘Harriet,’ said Monty. ‘You don’t know then – about Magnus.’

‘Don’t know what?’ she turned, glaring at him, fierce almost.

‘Magnus is dead,’ said Monty. ‘He committed suicide – a little while ago. He took sleeping pills. He’s dead.’

Harriet sat down slowly at Blaise’s desk and with an automatic gesture cleared a space of papers in the middle of it. She gazed at the leather of the desk where the thick dust was crisscrossed with random trails. She said nothing, but sat stiffly, gazing down.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Monty. He looked at her with pity, but also with a curious exhilaration. He tried to compose thoughts, words, in his head. He waited for her to speak, he waited for her to weep, but she did neither. She sat like a stunned condemned prisoner before him.

‘Harriet,’ said Monty, ‘please forgive me for what I said to you before, with Edgar. It was stupid and – unnecessary. It was for your sake. I just wanted to warn you, I didn’t want you to rely too much on someone like me. But I do care for you and I do want to help you. That was just a sort of act – it was cowardly of me – please believe that I do really want to be of service —’

Harriet turned to him her strange condemned face. ‘Thank you, but your service will not be needed, your help would be of no help, any more than your – apology is. I was simply grateful that you made yourself so clear. I am going to make other arrangements in my life now. Tomorrow I shall move back into Hood House with the two boys. I am sorry to have inconvenienced you for so long. Good night.’

‘It’s morning,’ said Monty. He pulled back the curtains. Outside the sun was shining and there was a little jumbled sound of birds singing in the orchard trees.

Harriet, who had turned back to the desk, did not reply to him. She murmured something which sounded like ‘end ... end ...’

‘I know you’re angry,’ said Monty, ‘and you have good reason. But please stay at Locketts and be a little kind to me. Perhaps I need you – after all —’

‘Oh I’m not
angry?
said Harriet, in a voice almost inaudibly without resonance. ‘If you think I’m angry you have understood nothing. It doesn’t matter that much.’

‘All right. We can’t talk to each other now. But just remember later that I do care – in spite of all those stupid things I said. Now I’ll go. Good – day —’

He paused, but as she did not move or reply he left her and went downstairs, switching off the lights, and out again into the garden. His own trail of footsteps in the thick dew led away across the lawn. As he reached the hole in the fence, Ajax, his coat wet with dew from the long orchard grass, came through to meet him, sleek and dark as a seal. Monty’s hand touched his wet fur and felt the vibration of a soft growl as he slipped through into his own garden. He walked slowly along the path towards Locketts treading upon a carpet of small white daisies. He must remember to tell Blaise that Magnus Bowles was dead. How quickly and rightly it had been done. The curious exhilaration he had felt when he told Harriet the news came back to him now as a feeling of freedom. Had talking to Edgar really made a difference? Something had made a difference. Milo was dead, Magnus was dead, and Monty felt himself increased by these deaths. He felt better. He dared not yet return to any close scrutiny of his deepest woe, not yet. He felt like a man who has had plastic surgery for his burnt face, but dare not yet look into the mirror. No, that’s not the image, he thought to himself. It’s more like a leg operation, an eye operation. And he recalled how he had said to Edgar, ‘I am lame, I am blind.’ He must have been confoundedly carried away to enact such humility. Drunk no doubt. No wonder Edgar was pleased.

Monty entered the house and went into his study. He knelt down for a while in his usual meditative pose, but without attempting to meditate. He reflected in a relaxed way about Harriet and about how he would try to make her trust him again. He would write her a careful letter. She will come round, he thought, she needs me and she really has nobody, now even Magnus is dead.

The boys were stirring above. Monty emerged into the hall and began to delve a little into the tea-chest of letters. Perhaps today he would look at some of them. It also occurred to him that he might now unmuzzle the telephone, and he went to it and began to pull out the piece of plastic wire with which he had jammed the bell. As he lifted the instrument he could feel it trembling and vibrating in his hand. It was actually at this moment trying to ring. He pulled the wire out and lifted the receiver, instantly stifling its outcry.

‘We have a call for you from Italy,’ said the operator’s voice.

An English voice said tentatively, ‘Hello.’

‘My dear Dick,’ said Monty, ‘however many times must I tell you that I detest long distance calls, especially at breakfast time.’

‘If you won’t fetch Luca, I will,’ said Emily.

‘It’s not so simple,’ said Blaise. ‘You know what that boy is like. We can’t keep him here against his will, he’ll just decamp.’

‘I want Luca fetched.’

‘Anyway with us like this he’s better out of the house.’

‘With us like what?’

‘Like this!’

‘I sometimes think you hate your own child.’

‘Emily, do talk sense, things are bad enough —’

‘All right, I know you regret what you’ve done, I know you don’t want to be here —’

‘Oh
stop
it!’

‘The school rang up again.’

‘Of course they did. If we aren’t careful he’ll be taken into care. Thank God it’s nearly the end of term.’

‘Dr Ainsley rang too. He sounded pretty crazed up.’

‘Fuck him.’

‘And Mrs Batwood rang.’

‘Honestly, I’d rather Luca stayed with Harriet for the present. I’ve got enough trouble without that pixie. In the autumn we’ll send him to that boarding school.’

‘We?’

‘You and I. In the autumn —’

‘I don’t know whether I shall still be alive in the autumn.’

‘Is that a suicide threat?’

‘No. I’m far beyond suicide threats. I just don’t know whether I can stand the strain and what happens when I can’t. And the autumn is far away. Anything may have happened to us all by then.’

‘What are you complaining about? I’m here, aren’t I?’

‘Are you?’

‘I’ve smashed up my life for you. I don’t know what more you want!’

‘You want to go back to her.’

‘I do not!’

‘Oh, well, never mind,’ said Emily, staring at the table cloth, not having raised her voice at all, ‘never mind, never mind, never mind.’

‘Oh
Christ
!’ said Blaise. He did not want to quarrel with Emily, but he was near to screaming with exasperation and anxiety and indecision and sheer fear.

‘I think it would be better if Luca and I just cleared off to Australia and let you return to your ordinary life with Harriet,’ said Emily, ‘if you’d pay our fare.’

‘Stop saying that. You don’t mean it.’

‘I do. I think I may not have made clear to you just how much Luca matters here. He is my son. He is the only thing I’ve got in the world that’s really mine. I’m not going to let bloody Harriet have him. All right, you needn’t fetch him today, but I want him back here by the end of the week, otherwise I’m going over there to kick the place to bits. Got that?’

‘All right, all right,’ said Blaise. Emily’s new quiet tone terrified him, and just when he had so much to think about. Oh if he could only
think
! And how very much he did not want Luca in the house just now. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll fetch him.’

‘And when are you going to see the lawyer about the divorce?’

‘Soon.’

‘Which day?’

‘Oh soon,
soon
!’ said Blaise. ‘I can’t do everything at once!’

‘No divorce, no go, you know that?’

‘Yes, yes, yes!’

Blaise’s hand in his pocket convulsively clutched the letters which he had received by the latest post and which he had concealed from Emily. One was from Monty, the other from Harriet. Monty’s letter ran as follows:

Dear Blaise,

I thought I had better tell you that our old friend Magnus Bowles is no more. I assassinated him yesterday for Harriet’s benefit. (She was proposing to go and see him.) He took an overdose of sleeping pills and is dead. As he had outlived his usefulness, I thought it would be less confusing for all concerned if he were liquidated. I am sorry I was not able to consult you first.