Free The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch

Taking decisions will make you feel that time has passed, and time does heal, you know. It will do you good to face these ordinary things, but you must not attempt to do so alone. Our job is to get you writing again, isn’t it, to get you and Milo on the road again! You will feel so much better then. And we shall arrange your future for the best, and decide what to do about Locketts. So leave all these tiresome things until I come, dearest. Do not worry about me. Your little mother is perky, and full of her own concerns. Do you know, I have just bought a new dress? It is a lovely cornflower blue, I think that you will like it. I send you, dearest boy, like little birds, so many loving thoughts. My heart flies to you. I think about you with such an intensity of love. Know that, as you read these words, I am thinking of you.
    Ever your loving and faithful Leonie.
    Harriet was looking at Monty and wondering what he was thinking. He was not thinking about his mother. He was not afraid of Leonie’s telephone calls, since he had silenced the telephone bell with a piece of plastic wire. He was thinking: I must destroy that bloody tape recording. He had played it again that morning.
    Harriet had spent the afternoon at the National Gallery. She usually did this on Magnus Bowles days. Blaise would drive her into town in the afternoon and drop her off at the Gallery, or at some other art exhibition, while he went on to the British Museum Reading Room. Then in the evening he would drive to the southern suburb where Magnus lived, and Harriet would make her way home by train and bus. She had never learnt to drive the car.
    She had felt very strange that afternoon in the National Gallery. An intense physical feeling of anxiety had taken possession of her as she was looking at Giorgione’s picture of Saint Anthony and Saint George. There was a tree in the middle background which she had never properly attended to before. Of course she had seen it, since she had often looked at the picture, but she had never before felt its significance, though what that significance was she could not say. There it was in the middle of clarity, in the middle of bright darkness, in the middle of limpid sultry yellow air, in the middle of nowhere at all with distant clouds creeping by behind it, linking the two saints yet also separating them and also being itself and nothing to do with them at all, a ridiculously frail poetical vibrating motionless tree which was also a special particular tree on a special particular evening when the two saints happened (how odd) to be doing their respective things (ignoring each other) in a sort of murky yet brilliant glade (what on earth however was going on in the foreground?) beside a luscious glistening pool out of which two small and somehow domesticated demons were cautiously emerging for the benefit of Saint Anthony, while behind them Saint George, with a helmet like a pearl, was bullying an equally domesticated and inoffensive little dragon.
    Hypnotized by the tree, Harriet found that she could not take herself away. She stood there for a long time staring at it, tried to move, took several paces looking back over her shoulder, then came back again, as if there were some vital message which the picture was trying and failing to give her. Perhaps it was just Giorgione’s maddening genius for saying something absurdly precise and yet saying it so marvellously that the precision was all soaked away into a sort of cake of sheer beauty. This nervous mania of anxious ‘looking back’ Harriet recalled having suffered when young in the Louvre and the Uffizi and the Accademia. The last visit on the last day, as closing time approached, indeed the last minutes of any day, had had this quality of heart-breaking severance, combined with an anxious thrilling sense of a garbled unintelligible urgent message. This experience had been a stranger to her for some time now since Blaise was not interested in pictures and she had not