The Sacred and Profane Love Machine Read Free

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    There was a soft soundless flurry and something wet and warm brushed Harriet’s hand. It was the nose of Ajax, the black Alsatian. Then all the dogs were suddenly round about her, not ecstatic but gently pleased with her, undulating in a circular ballet of quiet orderly prancing. The dogs had been a lovely accident really. They were her pets, not David’s, not Blaise’s. They were outdoor dogs of course. They lived, in as much comfort as Harriet could contrive, in the old garage. She had wanted to bring little Ganimede into the house once, but it had proved impossible to house-train him. Dogs, like humans, can be disturbed for ever by an unhappy childhood. Anyway it had seemed so unfair to the other dogs of whom at that time there were four. Now there were seven in all: Ajax, the Alastian, Ganimede, a black miniature poodle, Babu, a black spaniel, Panda, a black labrador mongrel with white markings, Buffy, an airedale, Lawrence, a Welsh collie, and Seagull, a small black and white terrier. The idea that they should all be black and have classical names had been early abandoned. Harriet had originally acquired Ajax because she felt nervous at Hood House when Blaise was away from home at night, as he sometimes had to be to see patients. (Magnus Bowles, for instance.) When she was a child she had had a^ morbid fear of cats, and used to search her bedroom carefully every night in case a cat had secreted itself there. In later life she feared burglars, tramps, gipsies, violent intruders. Of course Blaise had told her that burglars symbolized sexual intercourse, but this interesting revelation did not cure her fright or prevent her from holding her breath to listen for strange noises in the dark. Harriet had acquired Ajax as an adult dog from the Battersea Dogs Home, and then the thing had become rather an addiction. ‘When you feel depressed you go and pick a dog!’ said Blaise with exasperation. But it was so touching to go there and rescue some pathetic affectionate beautiful animal, it was a kind of creative act.
    ‘No, outside, boys, outside, boys,’ she murmured. ‘You’ve had your dinners. Now be good dogs.’ She shut the kitchen door upon the concourse of dark muzzles and turned on the light. Harriet had never let Blaise modernize the kitchen and, also in spite of him, they usually took their meals there, at the rectangular deal table covered by its red and white check cloth. The big chaotic rather obscure room suited Harriet. It was friendly and undemanding and smelt humbly of the past, full of dark lined old wood that needed scrubbing. She passed through it now, gazing unmoved upon a pile of greasy plates, and mounted the stairs, resisting as usual the usual temptation to go and call on her son, and went into her ‘boudoir’. This was a tiny cluttered room, originally a dressing-room. Blaise’s more austerely pretentious taste reigned in the rest of the house. Harriet, who could not bear to discommode a spider and who would spend ten minutes washing a lettuce rather than let any minuscule creature inadvertently elude rescue, extended her charity in a quite instinctive way to things. Now that both her parents were dead most of the serious family stuff was at Adrian’s flat in London, but Harriet had carried away, together with her various childhood treasures, a lot of awkward homeless oddments, brass ornaments and such, which no one else seemed to want or love, and which now mingled with an exotic miscellany of gaudy little gifts which Adrian and her father had brought her from various parts of the world, from Benares, from Bangkok, from Aden, from Hong Kong, the casual spoils of innumerable bazaars, jars and trays and boxes, little animals, little men, little gods of whom she did not know the names, all that ‘junk shop rubbish’ for which Blaise scolded her so, although he secretly found her absurd animism rather touching. And now, stuffed into the middle or hanging on to the edges, were the