The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (25 page)

Blaise had shown Emily a picture of David. This action, hitherto unthinkable, had been part of the new sincerity.

‘Soon,’ he said. David was one of the more obscure parts of what he and the women now constantly called the situation‘. ‘I hope he and Luca will be friends.’

‘A little modest hobnobbing with the bourgeoisie may do Luca no harm. The main thing is you’ve got yourself galvanized at last about changing his school. What does David think about all this? Does he see me as a horrible prostitute?’

‘No, of course not. Don’t worry. Everything will settle down. It will have to. We all have to live with the situation and we may as well do so as cheerfully as possible.’

‘Cheerfully?’ said Emily.

‘Well, with resignation, with charity, without violence, without frenzy. I don’t see that you should mind. You and Luca are going to be a good deal better off.’

‘Are we? How pray? Apart from your sudden ability to cope with Luca’s schooling?’

‘You’ll see more of me.’

‘How super.’

‘Well, you always wanted that, Em, didn’t you?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Emily. She was sitting now, staring at him with a peculiar intentness. ‘I didn’t mind about seeing you. I wanted you.’

‘You’ve got me, with much greater security now.’

‘Because Harriet has O.K.d my status. Big deal.’

‘Don’t mock, Em.’

‘She will require you to be kind to me, she will keep you up to the mark, is that it?’

‘Because Harriet knows and accepts, you are that much safer. Surely that’s obvious. There’s a possible catastrophe which has been eliminated.’

‘Harriet’s knowing and forcing you to choose.’

‘Yes.’

‘Harriet may change her mind.’

‘She won’t. She’s a moral being and a person of principle.’

‘I may change my mind. I’m not a moral being, or a person of principle.’

‘You won’t.’

‘You mean, I can’t. Any more than I could before. Less than I could before. Yes.’

‘I don’t mean that —’

‘Oh never mind.’

‘If you’re thinking —’

‘I’m not thinking. That’s rather the point. I am talking calmly and uttering sentences and we are having what looks like a rational conversation, but really I’m a hollow woman. I don’t know what I think, I don’t even know what I feel, I certainly don’t know what I can bear.’

‘What Harriet can bear is the question. And she can bear anything. We rest on her. She is predictable.’

‘I’m not,’ said Emily. ‘However, as you observed, what we’ve got to endure we will endure. It just makes me sick to think how lucky you are. You must feel like the Sultan of Turkey. You’ve got us both. You’ve got away with it, you’ve just absolutely got away with it.’

‘Yes – forgive me – please – you will come and see Harriet won’t you? I won’t be there —’

‘Yes, yes —’

And, Em, be discreet with Harriet, won’t you? I want you to be friends, but -’

‘All right, all right. I don’t have women friends anyway.’

‘What about Pinn?’

‘Pinn’s not a friend. She’s probably not a woman. She’s a phenomenon. Buzz off now, will you, I want to be alone.’

‘See you tomorrow and – we won’t quarrel – will we?’

‘Not any more?’

‘Not any more.’

‘All this predictability is getting me down. All right, Grand Turk, off you go, back to wife number one.’

‘Em, thank you, I’m so grateful, and oh – Em -I do love you so much, you do know that —’

‘Buzz off.’

After Blaise had gone Emily McHugh sat very still for a long time, sitting motionless in her chair and staring at Harriet’s roses, while the sun moved in the room. She felt as she had told Blaise, hollow. She felt impersonal, characterless, echoing. Even the slight toothache which she had had all day wandered ownerless in the room like an irritating unobtrusive insect She felt as if there had been a great natural catastrophe, an earthquake or a deluge, and she had been right in the centre of it, and yet appeared to have escaped unhurt How could it be so? How could the house not be wrecked, her home not shattered? She was still alive – and yet also she was dead. Perhaps she had really been killed and was surviving as a ghost? She and Harriet had conversed without screams or tears. This evening she was actually going over to see Harriet at Hood House. The unimaginable had not only occurred, but had occurred quietly, almost naturally. What could be the
matter
with her, with Harriet with Blaise, that this could happen at all? Who was doing it, who was working it? Was Harriet? Emily had never felt herself less of an agent She was, for the time, simply bereft of will, a dazed spectator of her situation and of herself.

For Blaise, for his relief, for his transparent cunning, she felt a kind of tender pity which was quite a new emotion. She loved Blaise, in all this, very much and felt close to him, though without this love and this closeness including any conception of the future. Would the strain be less? Would they stop quarrelling? Was there a new world? Were things better? Or were they in some deep way much much worse, appalling? She felt like someone who suddenly discovers that they cannot tell of something which they are seeing close to and in a good light whether it is red or green. Some fundamental power of discrimination seemed to have been withdrawn from her. Of course, she and Harriet could never be friends. Even Blaise did not really imagine that. After these first encounters they would probably hardly meet at all. It was important to go to Hood House. Harriet had been very anxious for that and Emily was equally so, though the prospect sickened her. If they were to start existing ‘in the open’ it was important to see where Blaise lived. After all, he had never lived with her; and painful as it would undoubtedly be she had now to recognize more fully than ever before that he lived elsewhere, that he had a real house with a genuine wife and son in it. The son she dreaded. The house she must and could face. After all she had faced the wife. Was this, seeing the house, meeting the son, recognizing it all, her inferior position, her ‘status’ as she had called it, fully at last and with her whole attention and her whole heart, was
this
the worst? Or was there some other worst which with her crippled mind she could not at present see, even though it was staring her in the face?

The humiliating guilt which she had felt when she first confronted Harriet appeared to have gone, charmed away, it seemed, by Harriet herself. Was Harriet ‘good’ then? Was Harriet doing them all good? Was it as simple as that? Had Harriet made the screams, the vile abuse, the whole degrading horror of such a rivalry impossible? Into what was she, Emily, being charmed or changed? What priceless advantage was she now losing? Or did it just mean that everything was going to be much the same, only slightly better – better, for instance, for Luca? Upon what she thought of as Blaise’s cunning, his absurd disgraceful relief, his secret continued duplicity, she looked with indulgence and with love. The love between her and Blaise seemed strangely renewed and made innocent. Innocent : was
that
the important thing? Of course Blaise had lied to her about Harriet and was doubtless busy lying to Harriet about her. Emily did not even now imagine that Blaise had sexual relations with his wife because, though Harriet was neither ugly nor ancient, she was so absolutely ‘not his style’. Her big genteel attractions must be for him inert. Whereas Emily believed, and had always believed with a simple faith worthy of a peasant, in the quite special and enduring nature of her own sexual link with her lover.

Emily had had to believe in that; sometimes there had seemed to be nothing else in her life. And she had contrived to believe in it, even when Blaise had cooled, when they had begun to quarrel, when they had left off doing their ‘things’. She had once felt that she and Blaise had been made for each other at the beginning of the world. The way they ‘fitted’ was a perfect miracle. This was the absolute of what a love should be. And this feeling had never really gone away, and she knew of it now as it revived and warmed her in the very central crisis of ‘the situation’. She and Blaise belonged together, like two animals in the Ark, the only two of their kind. In spite of Hood House, in spite of Harriet and David, in spite of Blaise-less days and nights past and to come, she owned Blaise in a way that no one else ever could.

‘Would you like him?’ said Harriet.

Luca was with her in her boudoir. Harriet was seated and he was standing in front of her, a little way away from her. He had picked up the red mirrorwork elephant and was holding it up in front of his face, the elephant’s brow touching his brow, and looking at Harriet past it. He now nodded his head hard several times, keeping the elephant in place, and smiled at her his curiously conscious cunning smile. With that smile Harriet saw him at fifteen, at twenty, his charm. Then he folded his arms crosswise hugging the elephant against his (very dirty) Micky Mouse shirt.

‘Then he’s your elephant,‘ said Harriet, trying not to let tears of tenderness and sheer wild painful confusion race into her eyes. ‘Will you give him a name?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s bis name?’

‘Reggie.’

‘That’s a good name.’

‘Reggie was a boy at school, he was nice to me.’

‘Aren’t all the boys nice?’

‘No. They hit me. I hit them.’

‘You’re going to a very much better school soon. Will you like that?"

‘Have you ever seen an elephant going up some steps?’ said Luca.

‘No, I don’t think so. Have you?’

‘Yes. At the Zoo. He walked up some steps and his legs looked so funny, like planks inside a sack. Elephants are kind animals. An elephant wouldn’t tread on a man. He’d try not to.’

‘In India elephants help men to work. They carry trees.’

‘They squirt water with their trunks. If a man annoyed them they’d squirt him. There are snakes in India, big ones.’

‘I know. I was born there. My father was a soldier there. He taught Indians about guns.’

‘Did you have a pet snake?’

‘No. I left when I was a baby.’

‘Men play music to snakes and they dance, I saw it in a film. The snake waved his head to and fro. He was in a basket. I’d like a snake. He could live in my pocket. I’d teach him to dance. We have two cats. But I’d like a snake too.’

‘You must ask your mother,’ said Harriet.

Luca was now stroking the elephant with a firm hard movement of bis flat hand, and staring at Harriet with a bright-eyed intentness which seemed almost like amazement. His dark brown very round eyes glowed with a faintly bluish sheen. His dark straight now tousled hair was tumbled about on his head in a chaos of locks. Without moving, Harriet was willing him to come closer, to touch her; and the next moment he had dropped his gaze and with a cunning smile and a look that was almost coy with deliberation he came and leaned against one of her knees. His gesture combined the shyness of a boy lover with the knowingness of a favourite child. Harriet restrained the impulse to hug him violently in her arms. She could play this game too. Lightly, cautiously, breathlessly she began to comb his hair with her fingers, caressing as she did so the dark soft dry cool tresses. He smelt of sweat, of boy, and of something cool and moist like wet earth or water.

‘My snake could go to school with me and nobody would know.’

‘Why aren’t you at school today?’

‘It’s a holiday.’

I wonder if that is true, she thought. ‘Really?’

‘Will my new school teach me about God?’

‘I expect so.’

‘What is God?’ Luca was looking up at her now, his chin on the elephant’s back, one hand firmly on her knee.

‘God is the spirit of goodness,’ said Harriet. ‘He is the spirit of love which we all have in our hearts.’

‘Is he in my heart?’

‘Yes. Whenever you love somebody or want to do something good —’

‘But I don’t,’ said Luca firmly. ‘Does God make us love animals?’

‘He does that too.’

‘I love the cats. And your dogs. And all animals, even the fierce bad ones. I found a bat in your garage. He was hanging upside down and I thought he was a bit of rag. Then I saw his face, such a funny little old face with teeth. A bat would bite you. You couldn’t tame a bat.’

‘After all, you love your father and your mother,’ said Harriet.

‘Can you talk to God?’

‘Yes. Anyone can. It’s called praying.’

‘What do you say to him?’

‘You ask him to help you to be good and to love people.’

‘What people?’

‘All people.’ ‘You mean all people, like all animals?’

‘Yes.’

Luca reflected for a while on the enormity of this requirement. Then he said, ‘I love you. I saw you that night in the garden, and I knew you were magic like in dreams.’

Harriet drew him up against her, hugging him tight at last, and felt his arms fumbling then clinging about her neck.

Blaise, having just left Emily, was walking along the road in a daze. Something that very closely resembled happiness was making his whole head glow. He could not keep a lunatic smile off his face. The sheer continued kindness to him of both the women made him radiant with humility and innocence and relief. He felt he ought to be going everywhere on his knees. Thank you, oh thank you! he kept saying in his heart, to them, to the universe. And every moment which passed, every minute of continued acceptance and calm, made the thing that much more certain. Of course there was much to fear, Blaise told himself, though he could not now see
exactly
what there was to fear. The situation must continue for some time to be dangerously volatile. One of the women might break down. Yet even if she did, what could come of it? They were as caught as ever, they were all caught, and would have to make the best of it and had so blessedly early discovered that they could. They were caught now, why not look at it this way, in a cage of charitable forbearance and enforced truth. Why should either of them prefer a fruitless war which could only do them damage?

The black black spot was David, and from that place Blaise averted his attention. There was nothing he could yet do to mend that damage, whatever it should turn out to be. Harriet would help, could perhaps heal. Blaise felt so humble, so, he picked up Emily’s word, hollow, so as it were transparent: he could not help feeling that David would have to forgive him in the end. His restored innocence seemed almost to blot out his fault. He felt, at moments, like Christian at the foot of the cross. Naturally what would strike David would be his father’s he, his crime, not his emergence into the truth. What would strike David would be the existence, and the continued tolerated existence, of Emily and Luca. But would not David
have
to forgive? David had looked at Luca’s toad. Surely David would forgive. Blaise knew, and shied from the knowledge, that his relations with his son would be, already were, radically changed. But surely surely David would give him back his pardoned being.