The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch Read Free Book Online

once of being lonely. In fact they had rarely managed to make joint friends, to compose, as most married couples do, a new world which they inhabited together. They had no people to gossip about. They never somehow quite managed to set up the ordinary married state between them at all. Sophie continued to flirt with her old friends and to make new friends who did not want to meet her husband, and Monty, increasingly isolated, watched her.
    Perhaps, he thought now and had sometimes thought then, his love for Sophie had been in his life something too intense, too magical. He had fallen in love with her instantly when, after he was already a well-known writer, an old college friend had introduced him to her at a party. She did not even then look like an actress. (She was in fact a very bad one.) She looked like a poor little rich girl. He recalled still with great clarity and purity, that first vision of her, leaning eagerly a trifle forward, her elegantly shod feet neatly together, her dark eyes glowing with self-satisfaction, her shiny little handbag held up childishly in front of her, her powdery turned-up nose, her clever provocative elaborate make-up, her very smart very plain dress. Her laughter. Her pert little vanity, her absolute rich girl’s confidence, tempered by a certain touching simplicity and waifishness. All this penetrated straight into his heart. She was not the sort of woman he liked or approved of. He loved her crazily and at once, not for ‘reasons’ but just because the totality of her particular charm made her suddenly entirely indispensable to him. He entered into an immediate frenzy and proposed two days later. She refused him. He kept on proposing. At last she said yes. Of course there had been other women, but they were unimportant.
    Naturally he had loved her more than she had loved him. That had been written into the contract. They had spoken of it and laughed over it. She had married him, partly at least, for reasons, which she frankly acknowledged. She was old enough (her thirtieth year was in sight) to feel that she had been a waif for long enough. She thought (as he put it to her later) that she wanted to stop racing around. She admired Monty and she trusted him absolutely and she was impressed by the way he loved her. She proposed to rest upon him. It all added up. For him, there had been no addition sum. He had lived throughout upon magic, upon romantic love in its fullest sense, and this magic, now that she was gone, seemed sometimes likely to kill him. He had never been able, as most husbands are, to make the transition from frenzy to deep quiet communion. Sophie had not let him. Later she had grown fatter and had put on the thick round glasses which soon seemed so much a part of her. Only as she became less dazzling she seemed to collect even more admirers. There was no rest. She never settled down.
    Sophie had isolated him. So had Milo Fane. Milo had even cut him off from the world of literature. Obsessively writing, he scarcely now read at all. At times he felt that Sophie and Milo between them had done for him properly. Novel-writing is at the best of times a lonely occupation. Monty wrote fluently and fast, hoping somehow that each novel would excuse and rescue its predecessor. He had intended at first to write a few best-sellers and then to settle down to serious composition. Perhaps he had even just intended to impress his mother. But he had reckoned without Milo. Milo turned out to have tremendous vitality and staying-power. Of course the sedentary man enjoys pretending to be the man of action: that is banal. There were deeper and stranger links between Milo and his creator. Some men, perhaps most men, are the lifelong dupes (or beneficiaries) of self-ideals or self-pictures developed in adolescence. Monty adolescent, fatherless, insecure, saw himself as a sort of ‘terror’. He even at Oxford, among his radical friends, affected to hold extreme right-wing views. He lived by and