The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (47 page)

Yes, she could rehearse these feelings still, but her mind and her heart were already changing. She regretted bitterly having gone away without David. She had booked the flight for the afternoon leaving no interval in London, so great had been her haste to escape, her fear of some new appeal from Blaise. She had simply not had the will to change her plan. Here were the aeroplane tickets, like authentic messages from fate, and in default of other ideas about what to do she had simply obeyed them. She needed Adrian’s support and counsel, not least because he seemed now to be the last person left. Blaise, Monty, Edgar, Magnus, all gone, and now David too had rejected her. The cruelty of his disappearance was an awful just judgement. That too was part of a machine from which she had not, for all her ‘feelings’ and her ‘principles’, the spirit or the courage really to escape.

Indeed, what made Harriet, as she sat paralysed, waiting for the luggage to arrive from the aeroplane, feel now most desperate of all was the slow automatic realization that running away had altered nothing. It was an empty gesture. It was not a life-giving leap into freedom. What after all could she do? In the end she had nobody but Blaise. Adrian would be very sympathetic, very rational, very kind, but he would soon want her to go away, to go
home.
There was no solution, it all came back to Blaise in the end. No one else needs me, she thought, except the children, and they can’t save me. Blaise needs me terribly, he needs my forgiveness to perfect his happiness with Emily. He needs Hood House and a pretence that it can go on and on as before. Perhaps David needs that too. It is certainly what Blaise needs and wants. He cannot confront what he has done. He will beg to be let off and not to be punished. He will pester me for a token pardon and then he will treat me as he used to treat Emily, only it will be easier because I am so much less aggressive and Hood House is there. I can revive Hood House and turn on the heaters and pack up Blaise’s clothes if he wants them and be there to be visited. And he will visit me and grovel and accuse himself and speak slightingly of Emily and indulge his emotions and his guilt and return to her feeling stronger and cleaner. And he will bless me sincerely and think I am good and tell Emily I am ‘wonderful’ and they will laugh together about me.. And I shall be alone. This kindness to him, which is just weakness really, is my only and my last resource. I shall come to it, I am coming to it, I am thinking exactly what he wants me to think, and the only escape from this is a kind of violence of which I am not capable. There is no great calm space elsewhere, thought Harriet, where a tree stands between two saints and raises its pure significant head into a golden sky. What had seemed to be an intuition of freedom and virtue was for her simply a trivial enigma, an occasion for little meaningless emotions. She was caught in her own mind and condemned by her own being.

‘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 theirs 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.