The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

‘One’s mind is such an old rubbish heap. All sorts of little bits of machinery start up. Don’t bother about them. Watch them a while, then make a change.’

  ‘They’re so detailed -’

  ‘I daresay they are. But if that’s your sexual fantasy life I shouldn’t think you have much to worry about. Everyone has sexual fantasies.’

  ‘Do they? Do you still have any sexual fantasies, Edgar? What are they about?’

  Edgar laughed considerably. ‘Well – well – well – I say, shall we be devils and have Irish coffee?’

  Edgar let the Bentley purr to a halt a little way away from Locketts. He had left David (who was now occupying Adrian’s flat) in town bound for the British Museum. He stopped the car short of the house underneath a large cherry tree which leaned out over the roadway. He pushed his seat back a little and relaxed, reclining his head and looking up at the blue sky through the branches. He saw that the tree was in copious flower and thought to himself how odd, a cherry tree in flower at midsummer. And it’s a wild cherry too, and they usually flower earlier. The woods at Mockingham are white with them in April, even in March in a warm spring. Then he saw that the flowers did not belong to the cherry but were the flowers of a huge white rose which had clambered up into the tree and climbed right up to the top and was spilling out over the branches in pendant showers of small white blossoms. And as he looked up and saw the very blue sky between, beyond, its brightness lending a radiant transparency to the innumerable flowers, a few white petals fluttered slowly down and attached themselves with a deliberate gentle insistence to the Bentley’s windscreen.

  Edgar delayed so, for the luxury of a little period of reflection before going to fetch Monty. There was plenty of time. The drive to Mockingham would take less than three hours. They would take it easily. And arrive in time for evening drinks upon the terrace. How beautiful the valley would look in this perfect weather, the littie mixed woodland all feathery and glowing with different greens, the river flashing its signal where here and there its windings became visible, the tithe barn, big as a fortress in the middle distance with white doves crowding on its stone-tiled roof.

  As Edgar looked up at the rose-whiteness and at the sky and breathed slowly and deeply, he let the news come to him that in spite of everything he was happy. Was this disgraceful? Perhaps, but it was hopelessly natural. Two women had died and he had loved them both. How different they were and had differently touched his heart What exquisite sweet pain he had felt when Monty married Sophie. He had carried that pain about for so long like a precious casket. Sophie had privileged him only by her endless teasing. The lie about Amsterdam was her final tease. She had never given him a moment’s peace. But Harriet had reminded him of his mother and conveyed the promise of a refuge of total gentleness. Harriet could have given him, without even noticing it, a lot of joy. He had wanted so litde from these women after all – or was it much? – some small secure affection, holding of hands. And now they were both gone. Yet Edgar knew that he was not desperate with bereavement, his case was not that of Monty or of David. Whereas for his mother he had really mourned and always would. At Mockingham earlier in the week he had tasted the old black misery, looking at the chair in the drawing-room where she used to sit with her feet tucked under her, showing yards of silk stocking and a hint of suspenders. How girlish she had remained right to the end.

  The shock of Harriet’s death had almost broken through into the terrible abode of his demons. He had for many years now been spared the demons, though he was constantly aware of their continued presence. He could hear them, as it were, moving behind the wall. They belonged to him and would doubtless go with him to the grave. His mind too, like David’s, ran irresistibly to the horror. He watched his mind as one might watch a bad dog, tugged it a little, and waited for quietness to return. He had had other abominations in his life. He might resemble a huge pink baby and spend his time in libraries reading very obscure texts, but he had had his share of soldiering through nightmares, and things had happened to him of which he could not speak even to Monty. Guilt was always the worst of the problem. (The amazing business at Oregon, the catastrophe at Stanford about which thank God hardly anybody knew.) He prayed and some help arrived. The demons kept their distance. And he could now think steadily of Sophie and Harriet without the self-indulgence of any personal despair.

  What he was reflecting upon now as he looked up at the sky through the half transparent papery screen of the climbing rose was how a miracle seemed to have come about lately in his life. Suddenly there were two people who needed him. He had two people of his own to love and cherish. Since his mother and his old nanny had died he had never had anybody. He had always been seeking and searching, sometimes tolerated, usually laughed at, never really wanted, always ultimately abandoned. Edgar had lived many years with his mind and needed no analyst to tell him of his peculiarities. It was no accident that he was unmarried and alone, that his love for women was unrequited, and his love for men undeclared. But now all of a sudden he had two people. How miraculous. Monty had never really known how much Edgar had loved him in the old days, he did not even know it now. And as Edgar thought of how things had turned out at last he was hard put to it to restrain his lips from uttering a triumphant little song of thanksgiving.

  Monty’s confession to him had made one of the most moving and exciting moments of Edgar’s life. The matter of it had cost him a shudder, not exactly of horror as of reverent compassionate affection. But the all-importance of Monty made what he said of almost secondary interest. Edgar felt that he was receiving Monty, as one might receive a holy gift or talisman or the sacrament itself. And he held what he had been given with a breathless humble gratitude, hardly able to credit his good fortune. He had feared that afterwards, Monty would immediately draw back. But Monty had not drawn back. ‘I am lame. I am blind.’ These words of Monty’s echoed in Edgar’s mind and brought the thanksgiving often to his lips as he meditated upon them in secret. Monty would have understood perfectly of course and uttered his sarcastic laugh; only of such matters Edgar was careful never to vouchsafe any hint to his friend. He was so anxious not to seem to press any advantage that he might even have seemed stiff and cool, except that he knew too that Monty could read him like a book.

  The humility and simplicity of Monty’s behaviour to him since the confession filled Edgar with amazed gratitude, and also made him cautiously conjecture that he had been the instrument for doing Monty some sort of crucial ‘good’. Edgar did not know, had never really known, what Monty’s demons were like, but he saw his friend as now somehow emerging from a place of terror. Monty’s curious docility was an aspect of it, the way, for instance, in which he had agreed to come to Mockingham. Of course Edgar wanted now to keep Monty at Mockingham for ever, and of course he had not said this to Monty, and of course Monty knew and was coming to Mockingham all the same. They had discussed in a relaxed way various jobs which Monty might in due course do. ‘And of course you could always stay on at Mockingham and write,’ Edgar had said casually, changing the subject immediately afterwards.

  The matter of Monty was of absolute importance. Perhaps it seemed to him now, it had always been the central thing in his life, even though he had long since become resigned to never achieving a real friendship with Monty. Doubtless he had only loved Sophie (or so frenziedly gone on loving her) because of Monty. Monty was ubiquitous in Edgar’s being and represented a central need which, had it not in this form existed, Edgar would have had to invent. The matter of David was a marvellous unexpected bonus, from the gods. The thought of David as an Oxford undergraduate, even if he was not (but perhaps he would be?) at Edgar’s college inspired a warm delight. The thought of David at Mockingham reading a Greek text under Edgar’s supervision filled Edgar with sensations which would have been, had he had less confidence in his own self-knowledge and self-control, quite disgraceful. Edgar, who knew how attractive Monty too found the boy, had avoided any discussion of David, not out of possible jealo
usy (that his love for Monty, and what a test of it for one of a jealous nature, quite precluded) but out of simple propriety : though here again he realized how transparent he was to the gaze of those dark Jesuitical eyes. At this point in his reflections he recalled David’s question about his sexual fantasies and laughed aloud. Edgar’s fantasies did not merely concern touching David’s elbow over a text of the Agamemnon. In fact not only David but also Monty would have been astounded had they ever known what Edgar’s sexual fantasies concerned.

  Edgar leaned forward to start the car. The windscreen was now so covered with adherent rose petals as to hinder visibility, and as he did not want to crumple the petals with the windscreen-wiper, he got out and picked them all off carefully with his fingers. He was about to drop them on the pavement, but decided to put them into his pocket instead. He got back into the car and drove on the little way to Locketts. He let himself in with the key which Monty had given him.

  It was ominously stuffy in the long hall which was usually cool and fresh with the moving airs of summer. Edgar called out ‘Monty!’ and went on into the Moorish drawing-room. The air here too was thick and breathless, smelling of must and dust as if the house had taken a journey in time. Edgar returned to the hall, looked into the study, and then went again to call at the foot of the stairs before going on into the garden. Then he saw, upon the table near the front door, a fat envelope addressed to him in Monty’s writing. As soon as he saw the envelope Edgar’s poor heart, never a stranger to fear of loss, gave a big sad frightened jolt. He picked the letter up and ran back with it into the drawing-room, tearing it quickly open. Monty’s communication was as follows:

  My dear Edgar,

  You will probably not be too surprised to learn that when you receive this letter I shall be gone; and when I say gone I mean gone. (Not dead of course, no nonsense of that sort.) Did you really believe that I would come to Mockingham? (Did I? Yes, I think so for a time. But how does one know what one believes until one sees what one does?) It is possibly very ungrateful (or something) thus to give you the slip. I have indeed sincere feelings of gratitude. I am grateful for what you have done for me. (You know what I mean.) You were for me a felicitous instrument which perhaps only you could have been. I am also grateful, in a way I find more difficult to express, for your affection. For a short while this unwonted warmth made me feel almost human. I had the illusion of conversing with a fellow being without a barrier, without a steel door, without a black hood over my head. (It was an illusion however; my state was entirely subjective.) I have never, I think, impressed upon you how almost impossible I find it to communicate with anybody. These troubles are however not interesting; and even if you are interested in them they are still not interesting. There are dull areas of egoism and failure which have no resonance and reflect no light. Such are my lonelinesses, which I once thought that Sophie might cure. But she was solitary too, though totally unconscious of it as women often are. Figuratively speaking, we conversed in brief shouts. That this was the sort of thing which you would not put up with at any price I saw at once when we first met at Oxford, and determined to scare you for ever into keeping your distance; a plan which would have worked perfectly well had you not come upon me at a truly desperate moment of weakness. Your nervous desire for intimacy and communion of souls, your urge to sidle up close and gaze into eyes and whisper into ears, has always filled me (excuse me, dear Edgar) with a disgust which prompted in turn the brutality which you have so suffered, deplored and enjoyed. I regard your blundering kindness and officious desire to ‘understand’ me simply as a rude trespass upon the fastidious integrity of my being. Your moral style sets my teeth on edge, just as your soggy so called religion makes me want to vomit. I pretended to myself for a while that we could nevertheless be friends, partly out of the aforesaid gratitude, and partly out of sheer desperation. But, soberly, no, my dear fellow, no, it simply won’t do. And pray do not pretend that you really think, it would or that you ‘love’ me so much that the loss of me will prove of any serious importance. I do not say (though this is true, my dear) that you are ‘better off without me’. You imagine that I have hitherto caused you pain. In reality that was never more than mere self-indulgent discomfort. At close quarters I would have caused you torment. The merest gifle compared with the slow knife in the guts. There is no need to dwell on this. I say simply that you will not really miss me. You are about to enter a new world of people whom you will find (if you can now terminate your schoolboy infatuation) far more interesting than I am. I know that you will derive satisfaction from helping David. (I would have done so too. Only you will probably do him little harm and I might have done him much.) And (I do not say this cynically) Oxford will be full of Davids. So it would be hypocrisy to say that I am vastly concerned about you. In a way, you will have suffered from being too useful to me: like the Russian guardsmen who spent one night with Catherine the Great and whose bodies were found the next day floating in the Neva. (An image which may even, if you can staunch your grief at my departure, amuse you a little.) Yes, it’s the Neva for you, dear Edgar, I am afraid. I don’t want to see you again, so please don’t try to make any overtures to me later on, should it occur to you to do so. I should regard them with the nausea I have already described. In addition (and what is more human?) I thoroughly resent your having not only witnessed my weakness but actually helped me to overcome it! So henceforth keep clear. You already know my capacity for kicking fawning dogs. Let us make a tolerably clean end to a tolerably decent encounter. You wished to serve me and you have done so. Be satisfied with that.

  I am going to stay with a friend in Italy and will be away for some months. After that I shall sell Locketts and go and live in some more distant solitude (not near Oxford) with the person I shall by that time have become. I do not think that art or what I know of spirit will heal or better me. (As far as the latter goes I have always tended quite crudely to mistake my level.) Nor do I imagine that any deeper spring of inspiration or invention will ever flow for me as a writer. I may even produce another Milo story. So you see what a confession of failure and admission of defeat all this amounts to. Maybe there are times when one should welcome defeat, tell it to come right in and sit down. What I feel about this is not anything like despair (that has passed). I feel a resignation which I will not insult you by dubbing humility. It really does not matter tuppence to anyone, even to me, what I shall write or whether I shall ever write. Almost all one’s thoughts about oneself are simply vanity. This letter is vanity, the attempt to attach interest and importance to what has none. (That stuff about how my friendship would have tormented you: pure vanity!) It is not even important whether or not I have been deliberately cruel in thus leading you on (if that is what I have been doing) until the very last moment. You may think what you like about it, and what you think does not matter either. There is a certain pleasure in writing to you. I suppose this is a sign of affection. (I am not sure. I also enjoy picturing your dismay.) I am grateful to you and in an inert way I wish you well. You are one for whom every little thing matters. This sort of moral greed has always been a source of irritation to me. I am going now where things will matter less, and if this is to the devil then this does not matter either, since if there is a devil I am he. (Vanity again, my dear.) That’s all, I think. Just close the front door when you go and leave the key on the table, would you. I have locked all the other doors and windows. Oh by the way, I found some of your letters to Sophie after all. They are on the bureau in my study. They are ridiculously touching and I read them with the greatest amusement.

  Good-bye.

  M.

  Edgar finished reading the letter, sat down upon the purple sofa and dropped the sheets of paper on to the floor. Monty’s final piece of frightfulness. He stared at the window and at the gently moving branches of the wistaria outside and listened to the profound airless silence of the house, and let these representations carry a sense of terrible solitude into his heart. Monty had given him the
slip. Had he expected it? Had he really imagined that he and Monty would grow old together at Mockingham? Had it not trembled in his mind with the insecurity of a mirage? He had believed in his love for Monty, but in Monty himself had he ever for a second been able to rest? Monty had indeed defended himself ably, resolutely refusing himself as even an object of faith. How much it all mattered, yes, every little thing mattered, and how minutely, Edgar reflected, he would torment himself by going over and over and over every detail of it in time to come.

  And the future for Edgar as he now poured himself out a glass of whisky, seemed suddenly shrivelled up and small. He searched in it for consolation and found none. Monty had wrapped up all Edgar’s affections and taken them away with him. Nothing now in his heart reached out towards the world at all. Of course he would help David because it was his duty to do so, but the task had lost its charm. Any lustre which David had had for him was simply reflected from Monty. Any lustre which the world had had was simply reflected from Monty. The mad hope of Monty which had come to him on that evening when Monty had confessed, had robbed all other things of their light. Even poor Harriet had been so robbed. Edgar recalled now very clearly Harriet’s face when she had said to him that she would come to Mockingham, and how her face had changed when he denied her; and he seemed to be seeing that sorrowful change as if for the first time. How simple and inevitable, how perfectly necessary, the denial had seemed at that moment. Yet if he had taken Harriet to Mockingham then she would still have been alive now. I preferred a ghost to reality, he thought; and yet I could not then have abandoned Monty, he held me in a grip of steel. O rapacious ruthless ghost!

  Edgar picked up the letter and began to look at it again. Then he jumped up and hurried from the drawing-room to Monty’s study. There was something live and moving in the room, the small wood fire still burning in the grate. There on the bureau tied up with string was a small packet of letters, the few remnants of so many which, over the years, he had written to Sophie. He undid the package. The envelopes were already faded. Mrs Montague Small. Mile Sophie Artaud. Sophie’s maiden name rang forlornly, like a bell in some abandoned palace moved by the wind. He recalled with a suddenly gasp of memory the lyricism of days so different and so long ago when, always one of many, he had pursued Sophie through Europe. He recalled days rent with pain but overflowing all the same with the golden light of youth. She had made him dive into a lake after one of her shoes. Beside another lake (Como? Maggiore?) he had (it was the boldest thing he ever did) opened her dress and put his hand inside. And as he felt her heart beating he was suddenly with her, right through the barrier, and saw her face devoid of mockery, devoid suddenly of all defence, even that of the mask of personality. How sick he had been with love. What a child she had been, what a light airy mischievous spirit, Ariel, Puck. And what dust it all was now. He recalled the harsh angry voice which he had heard upon the tape. Yet it seemed to him as he held the letters in his hand that some part of her soul from which the grace of youth had never been withdrawn still fluttered unquietly within him. Because of Monty he had never really been able to make his peace with Sophie, never been able to let her, living or dead, come to rest in his heart. He was about to open one of the letters to Mile Artaud, when he was startled by a sudden darkening of the study window. A girl was standing outside.