The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (3 page)

Fiddling with the jigsaw puzzle of the Japanese bowl (was a piece missing?) he recalled a dream which he had had last night. He was standing in the garden beside the acacia tree when he saw that part of the trunk appeared to be moving. A huge snake was gradually descending the tree towards him. He watched with horror and a kind of joy the approach of the snake. Only it was not exactly a snake, since it had a pair of large wings folded upon its back, in the way in which a beetle’s wings are folded. As it came near to him it reared its head and the wings spread out and began to buffet him on either side, half suffocating him in their strong soft violence. Meanwhile the creature’s large tail, tapering to a point finer than a pencil, had wound itself round one of his legs. He was a woman in the dream. He had no difficulty in interpretation. He knew the muck heap of other people’s minds. He knew the muck heap of his own.

How dull and unmagical his own dreams seemed to have become, he thought, as if he were stolidly interpreting them even as he dreamed. And how rarely did a patient’s dream astonish or move him now. Well, it was not his business to be astonished or moved. The patients had become, for him, a grubby grey contingent of predictable people. Whereas for Harriet they remained objects of reverence and mystery. Since they mostly came to the house, she knew them a little bit at a saying ‘Good morning’ level. But Harriet, who would have been an excellent wife for a headmaster, had always yearned for a closer relation, a more positive kind of service. Not that she wished in any way to encroach upon Blaise’s priestly function. She would have liked to mend their clothes. Of course there should have been six children, not just David. They had hoped for more. Blaise had been sad about that. But Harriet positively and half-consciously suffered from a sheer excess of undistributed love, like having too much milk in the breasts. She suffered from having these huge resources by which she could directly benefit only her husband and her son.

Some of the patients indeed had been with him for years and could almost have played the role of children. In a way they did people the house. They were not easy to get rid of. He had lately begun to take them in groups as a way of preparing them for the end, the parting, the severing of the umbilical cord, their cure. Also this meant that he could, and not only for financial reasons, take on new patients. There was, alas, no substitute for the unravished chastity of the new patient. The existing ones were in fact wonderfully various. Each had his
idee fixe,
something which he took to be his ‘reason’ for consulting Blaise, although this ‘reason’ often concealed a complex of other lesions. Stanley Tumbelholme had an obsessional fear of his sister. Angelica Mendelssohn suffered paralysing jealousy through being in love with members of the Royal Family. Maurice Guimarron thought he had committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. Septimus Leech was a blocked writer. Penelope Biggers was insomniac because she feared to ‘die’ in her sleep and be buried alive. Horace Ainsley (who had once been Blaise’s doctor and was still Monty’s) exhibited chronic indecision caused by irrational guilt. Miriam Lister had a daughter with homicidal tendencies whom Blaise was treating by treating the mother. Jeannie Batwood simply wanted to save her marriage. Not that Blaise necessarily discounted or even radically reinterpreted what his patients said they thought. He received an early lesson from a patient who always wore gloves because she said she had the stigmata. It was a little while before it occurred to Blaise to ask her to remove the gloves. She had the stigmata, and was later successfully treated for hysteria.

Blaise knew perfectly well that he was not really qualified to do what he professed to do. He was by now very experienced and no longer feared making radical mistakes. However, though he never said this except jokingly to Harriet (who hotly denied it) he knew that he was some sort of charlatan. He had never taken a medical degree. He had studied philosophy and psychology at Cambridge, he had done a thesis on psychoanalysis, and later taught psychology, at Reading University. (It was during his first year at Reading that he had met Harriet at a dance.) He had started to practise his own sort of therapy first of all as a temporary and risky experiment, and also because what he saw of others in the field led him to think that he could do better. He had probably not been wrong. Of course he enjoyed power, all meddlers with the mind enjoy that. And of course he was aware that this absorption in other people’s misery had more to do with sex than with either altruism or science. He had passed far beyond worrying about that either. The fact was that he could indeed like a priest make to cease the biting mental pain which, in the interstices of ‘real’ tragedy, so needlessly erodes the lives of men. He had the gift. He had the
nerve.
He was a strong and thoroughly able person. Why now this absolute crisis of confidence? Surely he was not such a fool as to grow sick of the thing simply because it had become so easy and so lucrative.

When the idea that he ought to throw up his practice and take a medical degree had first occurred to Blaise, he had rejected it out of hand as an irrational fantasm, a project of self-punishment generated by some quite differently located sense of guilt. To surrender his steady income, to run, at his age, the gauntlet of tedious and possibly difficult exams, to accept alien judgement and hard work: no. This was just the (so familiar among his patients) disingenuous craving of a middle-aged man for a cleansing spiritual test. Also, as his father had been a successful doctor, bis motives were even more miserably transparent. However the idea inconveniently persisted so that he began positively to fear it. Of course there were plenty of facts about the brain and nervous system which, wielding the power he did, he ought to know and did not. He was surrounded by mysteries. But as time passed his painful idea presented itself less as a desire for specialized professional improvement and more as a desire for absolute change. For many reasons, he had ceased reading, ceased thinking, of late. He needed radical intellectual change.

His fascination with the enchanted enchanting curiously self-determining world of psychoanalytical theory had now begun to seem, in his own case at any rate, to be a form of self-indulgence. The different ‘schools’ were like so many magical gardens, each with its own flora and its own design, and each surrounded by its own high wall. As a practitioner Blaise was pragmatic, ‘empirical’ in the simplest sense of the word. He simply tried to see what would ‘work’, and was prepared to take a fairly
ad hoc
common-sense view of what constituted ‘working’. He had long ago stopped worrying about which school he belonged to, nor did he feel this resignation as a failure of science. He had intended to write a big book about it all once, but had given that up. The discriminations no longer seemed to be worth making. He occasionally recorded an idea for an article, and let Harriet continue to believe in the existence of the book, since she seemed to care about it. His present
malaise
was more profound. As a result of experience, of his patients and of himself, he had begun to lose faith in all ‘deep’ theories of the mind. He could quiet his patients by telling them that it was a ‘long haul’, by telling them to ‘accept themselves’. He could prevent
them
from being crippled by guilt. But what he had once, theoretically at least, regarded as ‘surface phenomena’ of morality and freedom retained, for him, their unassimilable awkwardness in a way which made him sometimes feel that he lived with his patients in a world, for all its horrors, of comfortable illusion. The torment which he tried to spare his patients he could not escape from himself: the pain of irrevocable decisions taken in the old-fashioned blindfolded responsible way. Perhaps he was just sick to death of the human mind, sick of himself and his habits and bis doings, and as some men tire of the world and turn to God, he was turning to science.

He had talked to Harriet about it of course. She only partly understood, but she was all sympathy, all support. He knew that Harriet would feel sad if they had to sell Hood House and live for a time more modestly. She would feel lonely during the long hours when he would be a hospital slave. (Yes, it did seem like a punishment.) But she wanted his happiness and his fulfilment more than anything, she willed his will, she willed him. Already she saw herself as ‘the doctor’s wife’. God, he was lucky. He had never when young imagined that he would marry a woman so totally non-intellectual. But her intuitive attention to him was so shrewd, he could do without intellectual chat. She was never tedious, always fresh, intent, intense, but with a sort of immediate graceful animal intensity, quite unlike the cunning reflective shifts and transports of his patients. Harriet’s intensity did not exclude, what Napoleon valued most in a woman, repose. Even her vague Christianity, which he had taken care not to uproot but had hoped to see quietly wither, now seemed something he could not do without, any more than he could forego the special way she stretched out her hands to him when he entered a room where she was. There was no doubt that she had influenced him, and not only by making him kinder to spiders.

As Blaise sat thinking these, and now other, thoughts the twilight had come, and he had set aside the completed Japanese bowl. He got up and went to the window, standing there in the dark and looking down at the paved terrace. He saw the pale form of his wife who was just outside the kitchen door, gazing away down the garden. Her motionless figure seemed brimful of the stillness of the evening, her quietness made the garden more quiet. She still had much of that ‘story book’ beauty which had once seemed to him like a vision of another mortal world. He loved those silly flowing girdled robes which a more critical eye would have wished to see upon a slimmer woman. He looked away down the garden at the tall poised silhouette of the acacia tree and the denser darkness of the orchard beyond. Monty Small was talking of leaving Locketts. Would he consent to sell the orchard? Yet, really, was this a moment for buying orchards! Harriet had moved away down the garden and now there were her neurotic dogs swirling about her like little black ghosts. Blaise pulled the curtains and turned on the light.

It was nearly reading time. Would David come? Harriet stared so, he must speak to her. He must speak to David about giving up Greek. And he must talk to Monty about Magnus Bowles. Oh God, he had so many troubles. He had so much wanted a daughter.

‘“Where is Nastasia Philipovna?” asked the Prince breathlessly.

“She’s here,” replied Rogozhin slowly, after a slight pause.

“Where?”

Rogozhin raised his eyes and gazed intently at the Prince.

“Come,” he said.’

Blaise closed the book. Of course both Harriet and David knew the story, though Harriet usually claimed to have forgotten. But Blaise liked to finish at an exciting moment He read aloud well, with spirit but without too much emphasis. The reading aloud custom dated from David’s childhood. They had read most of Scott, Jane Austen, Trollope, Dickens. Blaise loved it. There was an actor
manqué
somewhere inside him.

The reading took place in summer in what Blaise called the breakfast-room (though they never breakfasted there) and in winter in the kitchen. The breakfast room was really the sitting-room. The drawing-room was rarely sat in or withdrawn to. Harriet, ensconced in an armchair opposite to her husband with a box of chocolates at her side, was sewing. She always sewed at reading time because David as a small child had once said that he loved to see her sew. Did he still, or did it merely annoy him now, she wondered. This was the pattern of so many of her dilemmas about her son. Because of him, so many of the silly little rituals of a happy marriage were put in question. Harriet was (not very skilfully) blanket-stitching the frayed cuff of one of Blaise’s old jackets. The jacket smelt of Blaise, not a tobacco smell, as he was a nonsmoker, but a sweaty doggy thoughtful male odour. How much that smell expressed the difference between men and women. Harriet would have liked to embrace the jacket, now at this very moment, and bury her face in it, only she had learnt long ago to modify her transports in the company of either of her two men, let alone in the company of both.

David was sitting on the floor, not near Harriet (he used to lean against her knees once), one foot tucked under him, his head drooped, quietly grimacing and blinking as if the story were producing extraordinary trains of thought. His fair, now rather greasy, tangly hair, which was beginning to turn slightly upward at the ends, flopped around his face in a random and unintelligible chaos of criss-crossing locks. Does he
never
comb it, she wondered. Oh, if only he would let me. She felt his consciousness of her ardent look, and shifted her attention to his faded jeans, one slim boney ankle, one dirty sandalled foot, the carpet. She sighed deeply and laid aside her needle.

Blaise meanwhile was quietly reading through the next section of the book, half smiling with appreciation and pleasure, then suddenly frowning with thought. Harriet was a little older than her husband and she felt the age gap in these moments of contemplation. How young he still was. He was less handsome than her son, but he looked so strong and decisive and manly. He had straight faintly reddish hair, which he kept cut very short, a pink large square-jawed face, a long thin mouth, and long blue-grey winter sea eyes. David’s eyes were his father’s, only much bluer. Harriet’s eyes were a clear plain brown. The presence of both the men in this sort of quietness filled her with a kind of happiness which was also anguish, was terror. Life had been so terrifyingly generous to her. She sighed again and helped herself to another chocolate. At that moment she suddenly remembered the apparition of the intruding boy. She was about to tell Blaise about it, but then decided not to. Blaise would think it was one of her ‘night fears’, and he always thought that her fears meant something when in fact they meant nothing. Perhaps she had imagined the boy anyway.

David was feeling tense and miserable. The reading sessions had embarrassed him horribly ever since the days of
The Wind in the Willows
which were now some time ago. The silent will of both parents beseeching him, compelling him, to come made now a nightly drama. Once or twice lately he had just not turned up, and had sat alone in his room grinding his teeth. He gazed at a greasy food stain upon his father’s lapel and inhaled the smell of milk chocolate with which bis mother’s audible munching was polluting the atmosphere. If only his mother would not stare at him and sigh like a lovesick girl. Of course he loved his parents dearly, only now everything about them grated on his nerves until he could scream. Their self-conscious air of a happy home life made him want to go and starve in a garret. If only he had gone to a boarding school, then home might have been a treat. He rose and mumbled good night and went out quickly and silently. Later in his own room he listened to the murmurous sound, so rarely heard by an outsider, of spouses communing privately with each other. How much it had soothed him when, as a small child, he had fallen asleep night after night, lulled to security by that noise as by the murmur of a friendly brook.