Free The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch Page A

visited the foreign galleries. Why suddenly this emotion, on this occasion, for this picture? Was it something prophetic? Already a number of times she had walked away, determined not to look back, and had looked back. It was absurd. After all, these were her very own London pictures which she could see again any time she wished. She had intended to tell her little story to Monty, but by the time she reached him it already seemed too trivial. She knew better than to tell it to Blaise. He would say it was something to do with sex.
    How very much I depend on people, she thought, looking at Monty’s profile. What a charming short straight nose he had. Everything about him was proportioned and neat, not like the knobbly looks of most men. Any girl would be pleased to have a nose like that. Harriet had no impersonal abstract world, except perhaps the world of pictures, and that seemed to come to her as pure ‘experience’, not anything she could possibly talk about. What I feel with the pictures is different, she thought, it’s like being let out into a huge space and not being myself any more. Whereas what I feel looking at Monty is so absolutely here and now and me, as if I were more absolutely my particular self than ever, as if I were just throbbing with selfhood. It’s odd because I love the pictures and I love Monty, but it is so different.
    Monty had a hard and rather fixed gazing face, not like Blaise’s face which was so mobile, always changing and dissolving into laughter or annoyance or thought, as if it had no surface but were actually part of what it confronted. Blaise lived his face; Monty peered through his, looking from behind it, and not necessarily, Harriet sometimes uneasily felt, through the eyes. Monty had a sort of intent voyeur face, yet livened at times by a sort of puzzlement or chronic surprise. Only since Sophie’s illness his face had hardened further into a mask. There was a pale smile he smiled for Harriet, but it was quite unlike his old real smile. Harriet loved Monty, not of course in a ‘sexy’ way, but in the way that she loved almost anybody whom she got a chance to love, and perhaps a little bit especially because he always seemed to her so clever and yet so lost. That woman whom he mourns so has ruined his life, she thought to herself.
    Monty did not in fact want to see Harriet at all. He let her come to him in this emotional impetuous way out of a kind of politeness, because this was something which she needed and wanted. She needed the sense of helping him, she wanted the flavour of his grief. A weary sense of duty upheld him in receiving her, in giving her that little wan smile which she so rightly recognized as peculiar. On the other hand she did not irritate him as his mother would certainly have done. Harriet was capable of being silent, and although she very much wanted to touch him (to hold his hand for instance) she accepted his renewed evasions with tact and grace. She had qualities of physical repose which his mother entirely lacked and which poor Sophie had lacked too.
    How awfully neat he is, Harriet was reflecting, and how much I have been looking forward all day to seeing him. Even now he has put on a clean shirt and a tie and such smart cuff-links which he must have chosen to wear, I’m sure I’ve never seen them before, and he is so fantastically clean-shaven, and so clean, even his fingernails are clean, which Blaise’s never are. Of course Monty’s father was a curate, I’m sure that’s significant, he looks so absurdly clerical. And he’s so compact and small-scale, though he is quite tall, he seems so dainty after Blaise’s untidy smelly masculineness.
    ‘Don’t grieve, my dear,’ she said, just to say something. ‘She had a happy life.’
    ‘Oh Harriet, please don’t talk rubbish. You don’t know whether Sophie had a happy life or not. Even I don’t know. And what does it matter now what sort of life she had?’
    ‘I always felt that