The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (proofread) by Iris Murdoch

Author:Iris Murdoch [Murdoch, Iris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd, UK
Published: 2023-05-30T22:41:54.022811+00:00

Harriet had seen her guest off. The tears were soon dried. Harriet had not wept. It had just been suddenly clear that the encounter was over and both of them wanted to escape. Harriet felt exhausted. She urgently wanted Blaise, to see his big rocky reassuring face, with the sweet diffident air which it always wore now, to smell his jacket, to be held and safe. She felt a sort of constant physical anxiety now about Blaise, like the anxiety she had felt about David when he was a baby. She would like to have had Blaise always within sight, within touch. But consent to his absence seemed now more than ever to be a duty. Today he had gone to the library so as to let her face Emily alone. He had even put off Dr Ainsley and Mrs Lister to do so. He would be giving Emily more of his time in the future: Harriet had insisted on this. She had questioned Blaise carefully (and he had hated it) about the amount of time he had been used to spending at Putney. It appeared that Emily’s ration had been the occasional lunch-time and sometimes the earlier part of Blaise’s evening with Magnus Bowles, who also lived south of the river. Harriet had declared that this was not enough. He must surely go sometimes for the whole day at weekends so as to see more of Luca. Blaise had been as vague as possible, but he had agreed. So, just when she needed him so much, he would be absent more. This had to be.

Harriet had never been in the habit of scrutinizing her states of mind. She had never needed to. She had always lived in a world of instinct and certainty. Her silly early loves, before Blaise came, had never required decisions of her, had never even puzzled her really. She had endured them like attacks of the ’flu, with as little probing of their nature. A world of sturdy convention plus a firm sense of duty, together with her fantastic luck, had kept her moving along without any real consciousness of her ‘mind’ at all. She saw the world, not her mind. Now, however, her emotions and her ideas preoccupied her, startled her even. She was aware that her whole mental being had altered since her first meeting with Emily, and was, with frightening speed, altering still. And for the first time in her life she had the unnerving sense that she could not predict either her actions or her feelings. What did remain clear and steady, and this comforted Harriet in these days perhaps more than anything, was her simple sense of duty to her husband. She had got to support Blaise and help him to live truthfully henceforth and to do what he ought to do. It was morally unthinkable that he should abandon a long-established mistress with a small son. Harriet’s marriage vows had indeed prepared her to travail for her husband, and she had always been ready to.

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