The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (45 page)

‘David!’ Pinn seemed to be calling to him from far away. ‘Are you asleep or have you gone into a trance?’

‘I’m all right.’

‘Are you hungry, did you eat any breakfast, shall I bring you something, cook you something?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Sit up for a minute. It makes my head swim to look at you.’

David sat up jerkily and leaned forward over his knees, panting and rubbing his face with one hand. He did feel a little faint, he felt very strange.

‘She’ll come back,’ said Pinn. She took his free hand very gently yet firmly in hers.

‘No.’

‘Where’s she gone?’

‘To my uncle in Germany.’

‘Well, she
will
come back. Meanwhile you’re a big boy, aren’t you.’

The telephone began to ring. David knew at once: It is my mother telephoning from Paddington. ‘No, don’t answer it. Shut the door please.’

Pinn shut the door.

‘Will Kiki come?’ said David against the muted clamour of the phone. ‘You said she would come.’

Pinn said after a moment, ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘She has fallen in love with somebody else.’

My father, thought David. He had seen them together in the car. Tears started into his eyes. ‘Gone for ever,’ he said half to himself, ‘gone for ever’, and he quickly checked his tears with one hand, letting Pinn continue to hold the other. The telephone went on ringing. Pinn removed her glasses.

‘Well, what are you going to do now?’ said Pinn.

‘I don’t know.’

Pinn was beginning to undo the buttons of his shirt. When she had undone them all the way down to his waist she put her band inside and laid it very firmly upon his breast. The particular slightly cupping gentle and yet commanding pressure of that hand upon his flesh produced an instantaneous and very complex change in David’s being. At one moment he was hanging in space, outstretched upon a huge grid of pain: jealousy, loneliness, fear, anger, resentment. He was dis-incarnate and scattered in terrible regions. At the next moment his body had assembled promptly and compactly round about him, obedient to the sudden authority of Pinn’s caressing hand. He saw the details of Pinn’s face become, through its own emotion, arresting and unfamiliar. He saw her frizzy red-gold crown of neat hair, her round and uniformly pink cheeks, her moist mouth and green eyes. ‘I suggest you make love to me,’ said Pinn.

‘I can’t,’ said David, removing her hand, but holding it and retaining the other one.

‘You could have with Kiki? You thought about her?’

‘Yes.’

‘And dreamt about her?’

David recalled the steaming abyss of his dream. ‘Yes.’

‘You don’t want her. You want a woman. Love me. I am nobody, I am everybody. I am the figure in the temple that embodies the will of heaven. I am worthy of you because I am the messenger of your fate. You are looking at me for the first time but I have looked at you many times, you have walked about freely in my dreams. Your youth and your beauty are holy to me. I worship your innocence. Trust me and give it to me. It is the right time. And love me just a little in your heart without fear. I have no will to entangle you or to hold you. I will be kind to you and will set you free and even send you from me. How could I presume to speak about your mother if this were not so? I want you now and I need you now and this is something which your destiny and not mine has ordained. But I need your affection too. I have never begged for anyone’s affection before, but I beg for yours now. If you can give it to me as you love me the world will be made anew in which your manhood begins. You will never understand me or know me, David, but at this moment we can do each other no harm, only good. Believe this and accept my wooing and don’t be afraid. No other woman will ever speak to you like this and there will never be another moment in your life like this one. Come, will you, please?’

In the silence that followed David heard his breathing, heard his heart, or perhaps Pinn’s, echoing the gathered momentum of her speech. The green-eyed face seemed to be transforming itself before him into a beautiful mask of pure gaze. He had never been so absolutely looked at before. The air around him had become exquisite and thin. They both rose.

‘Wait,’ said David, and his voice was gruff. ‘I’ll just go and-’ He left her swiftly and went to the front door and bolted it, went to the kitchen door and bolted it. Then he returned to the hall where Pinn was waiting for him.

Her face was more muddled, more humble now, blurred with her own need. ‘You can care for me a little, can’t you, simply at this moment, it’s not just –?’

‘Yes, yes,’ said David.

‘You can’t understand, but I’ve been a heroine and – you are my reward – and oh, because of so many things – just a moment of somebody’s tenderness —’

‘Yes, yes, yes

‘Come then, my dear.’

They went up the stairs.

‘Well, and how was it?’ said Monty to Kiki St Loy.

‘Super!’ Kiki, now fully dressed, was putting on her sandals.

Monty had slipped on his shirt and was still lying repose fully against a pile of pillows in the disordered bed.

He regarded the girl with tender amazement. How put together she was, with her sleek brown tights and her short lilac-coloured dress of feathery cotton, and the milk-white glassy necklace which she had just slipped about her neck, and her dark burnished gold-shot hair combed out and falling to its straight silken hem with not a strand out of line. So mint-conditioned, so complete and somehow beautifully public, she who had lately been to him a universe where thought and feeling, flesh and world, him and her had so tumultuously intermingled.

‘What do you think?’ said Kiki.

‘What are you thinking.’

‘What are you thinking?’

‘You look so
presentable,’
said Monty. ‘I mean so wellturned-out and uncreased and uncrumpled and neat. I can hardly believe you’re the girl I’ve just been so marvellously in bed with.’

‘I am that girl!’ Kiki sprang at him, a foot dabbing the edge of the bed, landing beside him, on top of him, he felt her sandalled feet against his bare feet, her honey-nylon thighs against his thighs, her neat lilac dress bundling against his shirt, her lips against his jaw, her hair about his neck, about his head. He smelt the apple smell of her flesh, her sweat, the cottony dress, the tender cool smell of her hair.

‘Mind your dress, you silly goose.’

‘I want to be creased and crumpled, I want to be your creased and crumpled Kiki, I want to be undone by you.’

‘You have been undone by me, and I hope you really
did
think it was super. At one point I wasn’t too sure what you were thinking.’

‘I was not thinking.’

‘Feeling then. I didn’t hurt you too much?’

‘No, no, Monty, it was perfect – the hurt was there – but in the midst of all – Oh I am so happy!’

‘Well, don’t be too happy,’ said Monty, pushing her away from him. ‘Remember what I told you earlier. Get out of the way, I’m going to get dressed.’ He got up and sought for his trousers.

‘I love you, Monty,’ said Kiki. ‘Is that wrong?’

‘If anything’s wrong it’s mine,’ said Monty fixing his belt. ‘Many people would call this a crime. If it has unhappy consequences for you that will be some evidence in favour of the view that it was one. This is something that you must look after for me. Part of it all was my trusting you with it’

‘I don’t understand and yet I do understand,’ said Kiki. ‘But I can’t help loving you for ever and there is that too.’

‘A girl of your age doesn’t know about for ever.’

‘I think I do know though,’ said Kiki. ‘
I
know about it. I am a remarkable girl.’

Monty came to where she stood beside the bed, her lilac dress indeed a little crumpled. He took her by the shoulders and looked into the big dark eyes where there were in the iris drifting depths of red, Mediterranean eyes, African eyes.

‘Yes, you are a remarkable girl,’ he said, ‘and that is why I have done this to you and taken this risk. I have passed on some of my pain to you, which is what human beings ought not to do, though human beings constantly do it. And I have done this deliberately. I have victimized you, Kiki, because of your remarkableness and because at a certain moment you were suddenly there and able to make a change of my life.’

‘You will be less unhappy?’

‘Perhaps. Yes.’

‘I think I will be more unhappy,’ said Kiki, ‘if you will really not now – let me see you – though if I have made you less unhappy I will have extra happiness for that.’

‘Less in quantity, my dear, but higher in quality! Let it be made up that way. Now you must go.’

‘No, no. Monty, please. We can never be like this again.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Don’t you think this saddens me too? That is why you must go quickly.’

‘But you
will
see me again – you didn’t mean never – Oh, I feel so terrible, Monty.’

‘I expect we shall meet, why not. But all this must pass.’

‘It will never pass.’

‘Come, come. Any pain I will have caused you is very pure, perhaps the purest pain you will ever feel. It may even help you one day, like a hard thing, to give you a foothold, somewhere quite else, to put your gallant little foot upon.’

‘Let me see you tomorrow.’

‘No. Go now, Kiki. I have nothing more to give you, except my blessing which looks like a curse, but is really a blessing.

You are a brave child and I give this last remnant to your bravery. Go, remarkable girl. And my thanks.’

Monty went away down the stairs and opened the front door.

‘No. Good-bye.’

Kiki passed him and the last he saw was the big dark eyes hazy with unshed tears. Then her long hair tossed and flying. But she left with a firm step and did not look back.

Monty closed the door and leaned against it. Then he sat down on the floor with his back against the door. His world seemed to be sailing, sailing in front of him, the pieces of it huge and coloured like storm clouds. Everything which had been so dark and tight as if he were crushed inside a nut, had loosened and become separated and airy and streaming and a little wild. Monty did not think now, is this good, is this bad? He simply responded to it, as he had responded to the extraordinary advent of Kiki St Loy.

Somewhere in the midst of all these jauntily sailing pieces there was what had happened that night. Sophie had not been in bed. She was lying on the purple sofa in the little drawing-room, in the canopied recess, dressed in a long robe of dark red and blue silk which in fact she had just bought by post from a West End shop. It was the first time she had worn it. She was propped up among the purple cushions and her face looked thin and pale, uncannily greyly pale like the wax effigy of a dead saint in a Spanish church. How much her expression had changed with the vanishing of those plump confident cheeks. She had been saying again and again and again for nearly half an hour, ‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I wish I’d never married you.’ It is simply the litany of her doomed pain, Monty told himself, as he had told himself many times in the last weeks, as Sophie reviled and tormented him, casting her anguish off on to him like an acid shower. He made his usual effort to be quiet, not to quarrel with her, to answer gently, to say to her again and again and again in a countervailing litany, ‘Rest a little. I love you. Don’t be angry with me. Forgive me, Sophie. I love you.’ But once more he failed. ‘All right, I wish I’d never married
you
! I wish I’d had a decent loyal wife and not a whore who went to bed with all my friends!’ ‘You have no friends, you don’t know how they mock and despise you, all of them.’ ‘If they do it’s because you teach them to.’ ‘I despise you, you are not a man at all, oh how I wish I had married a man.’ ‘Oh, shut up, Sophie, go to bed.’ ‘They all mock you, Richard mocks you.’ ‘Shut up!’ ‘You didn’t know I made love with Richard.’ ‘It’s not true.’ ‘It is true, here in our bed, we mocked you.’ ‘You’d invent anything to hurt me, wouldn’t you.’ ‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.’

Monty caught his breath. The memory had risen like a noxious atomic cloud in the midst of his sailing thoughts. He checked himself, made himself rigid, while the hysterical voices went on and on in his mind. He had made them silent at last, seizing her throat. It had been like an embrace. He had to make her silent. He threw himself upon her and silenced her and held her, wanting to hurt her, wanting to dominate and hold that awful consciousness which filled him with so much pain and so much wild awful pity.

‘Sophie,’ he said aloud. ‘Sophie. Sophie. My darling. Rest now. Forgive me.’ She was part of him for ever. Only here within him did she now exist. His love for her was still alive and would live always and would change as live things change. And perhaps as with the years it became softer and vaguer its imperfections would fade too. It could never be made perfect but it would carry fewer of its blemishes into the years to come. He and Sophie, bound together for ever, married for ever. His body relaxed slowly and then he began to remember Kiki and what had just been happening. How strange, he thought, how very strange. And he felt himself in change like a plant, altering in all his parts. What had made this newness? Telling Edgar? Something to do with Edgar himself, some place of innocent affection, some relic of youth even, providing a mysterious fulcrum? So Edgar had somehow made possible Kiki, and Kiki would make possible – what? What delusions were these? Had he not simply committed another crime, a little one? And it seemed then in his mind curiously like the big one, its counterpart. Sophie’s death, Kiki’s tears, to bring about for him, what?

The telephone began to ring. Monty slowly got up and went to it. A man’s voice asked if that was Mr Small.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s Fairhazel here – you know – er -Binkie.’

‘Binkie!’

‘I’m speaking from Bankhurst School.’

‘Binkie! After all these years!’

‘We were expecting you here this morning for interview.’

‘Oh heavens!’ said Monty. The whole matter had, since his conversation with Edgar, gone completely out of his head. It was not only the intervening emotion. When Edgar had said ‘I cannot write you a testimonial’ Monty had felt that the whole plan was automatically cancelled. But of course Edgar had not in fact cancelled Monty’s appointment! ‘I’m so terribly sorry,’ said Monty. ‘I am afraid a rather urgent thing detained me here -a – er – a matter of a forced entry.’