The Sacred and Profane Love Machine Read Free Page B

marriage, combined with the fact that Blaise never took her vocation seriously, had led her to lay aside her brush. She knew that she led a selfish life because all her otherness was so much a part of herself. There was no strain or distance really, even her charities were easy and pleasant and rich in the rewards of gratitude. I am a deeply selfish person, she told herself sometimes, and so I shall never be great, not like men are great, or touched by greatness.
    Now however she was thinking about her son. Every mother has to endure it, I suppose, she thought. The marvellous intimacy could not last. He had withdrawn first from Blaise, now from her. Blaise said it was natural and proper. He had become untouchable; and Harriet, with her long habit of touching, was suddenly in a dilemma, in an anguish. She was visited by alarmingly precise ghostly yearnings. Feelings very like the torments of an unrequited love made her blush and tremble. It was indeed dreadfully like being in love. She wanted to hold him in her arms again, to cover him with kisses, to untangle with caressing fingers that untidy and now absurdly long golden hair. But nothing was less possible. He had become, as if further to confuse her, dauntingly good-looking in this last year. What Blaise called David’s ‘archaic smile’ haunted her like a sort of erotic enigma. He was so tall now and often so stern, and yet inside this dignified angel there was surely the same awkward adorable small boy. He had odd mannerisms, new ones, secret ones. There were so many things one could not talk about. Did he still lay out his penknife and his compass and all his other little treasures before he turned out the light? How happy it had made her once to think that David prayed nightly for herself and Blaise. The thought had soothed her own growing disbelief. Did he do so still? It was inconceivable to ask. She knew of mothers who flirted with their adolescent sons. It was impossible for her to do so. David, in his new grown-upness, had already a sort of authority, an absolute ability of veto. Harriet knew very well what she could and could not dare. I must pull out, she thought: it was like the ending of an affair, giving somebody up. Would one be thus condemned to break the links one by one? Of course it was simply natural change and not an ending, and of course her love could not end, could not in the faintest detail of its being diminish ever. The trouble was that she could not see at present how her love for David could change sufficiently for her not now and henceforth for ever to be in the position of concealing something which he would uneasily suspect. She leaned forward over her hands in sudden anguish. What was that quotation about love being ‘woman’s whole existence’? It was certainly true in her case, and how terrifying it was.
 
    Blaise Gavender had enjoyed his supper. He enjoyed his food. There had been asparagus, which so deliciously scented the urine. Harriet was an untidy slovenly housewife but a decent cook. Earlier he had been upset because he had been rude to a man who came to read the electric meter. The man had been a little casual. Blaise had suddenly acted the country squire. Why? These little outbursts would have interested him once. Now he let the incident fade, efficiently digested like the asparagus. Perhaps he thought of all ‘callers at the house’ as patients, and so as properly obsequious. At this moment, while desultorily mending with glue and Sellotape a broken Japanese bowl of Harriet’s, he was trying with fair success to keep his mind strictly on his patients. Sometimes he hated his patients. That was bad. His sort of healer could only operate through a love relationship. Of course that could be bad too. Monty had once said to him that all curiosity divorced from love or science was necessarily malign. Monty had been talking about a writer and his characters. But the phrase had struck Blaise in relation to his own work. He