The Sacred and Profane Love Machine Read Free Page A

things that Monty had given her lately, since Sophie died, handing them out at random whenever she called, plates, ornaments, cushions, bits of embroidery, as if he wanted to strip Locketts and deprive it of all memory.
    The walls of the boudoir were covered with paintings and photographs. The paintings were Harriet’s own (she had thought herself a painter once), pale splodgy water-colours, laboriously high-lighted oils whose paint seemed to have thinned with the years. The photographs were all of family; of her parents’ wedding, of Harriet’s wedding, of David as various children, of a younger slimmer hawkier Blaise, of her soldier father in uniform, of her soldier brother in uniform, of her disappointed pretty mother. Ubique quo fas et gloria ducunt had been a tattered pilgrimage for Harriet’s mother. Harriet had been born in India when her father was Gunnery Instructor at the School of Artillery at Deolali. Harriet’s mother, doing an Indian season with a diplomatic cousin, had met and married the romantic Captain Derwent. A caparisoned elephant attended their wedding. (There was a photograph of the elephant too.) Soon after came a home posting and the war. Captain (now Major) Derwent became an instructor at Catterick, then commanded an anti-aircraft battery in Wales. Later on he was at Woolwich, later still in Germany. He never rose above the rank of Major. Harriet’s mother followed the camp, living in furnished lodgings (only she drew the line at Germany). There had been a Welsh mountain cottage which the children had liked. There had been too little money and no romance. The days of the elephant were far off now. As a widow Harriet’s mother had lived in Ireland. Harriet rarely saw her in the later years. The thought of her came tenderly back in connection with country things: blackberrying, sloes for sloe gin, quinces for jelly, ponies and heather, the smell of honeysuckle or damp hay, the vanilla taste of russet apples. Harriet cherished these intense yet shadowy almost pointless visitations. It was so important to think quiet loving thoughts about people in idle moments, especially perhaps about the dead, who being substanceless so desperately need our thoughts.
    Harriet looked into her Dutch marquetry mirror (a Christmas gift from Blaise) and patted her very long intertwined coiled up golden tinged dark brown hair. Instinctively her broad calm face became even calmer. She was wearing the long spotted voile dress which Blaise said made her look so Victorian. She was always careful not to dress too young. Some of her friends simply never noticed when they put on weight. Harriet sat down at her desk and relaxed into a melancholy idleness. She felt at these times empty, floppy, disjointed, as if she covered a huge area quietly like a large limp suspended sea animal, like an immense uninhabited continent: and this was for her really a form of being happy. Each person doubtless has a sort of form or structure or schema (only that would not have been Harriet’s word) into which his consciousness lazily stretches itself out when uncoerced, and which is, however unglittering and inglorious, his happiness. Harriet was happy. The house around her felt happy too with the stored-up warmth of her anxious yet composed and unassertive temperament.
    Of course she had her worries, especially David and sometimes the aching sense of a tiny lost talent, but she was loved and loving and had an untroubled conscience and that was quite enough, for one of her temper, for happiness, that deep confiding slow relationship to time. Hers was a sometimes sad but always smiling happiness. She loved her husband and her son and her brother and carried every discontent into the light of that love to be consumed. Sometimes she had a feeling of what she thought of as ‘littleness’ (‘small fryness’) when she thought: how I wish I were a great painter or a great something. She had been to art school and had had ambition. But early