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

quickly terminated the discussions.
    Even when he had been happiest with Sophie (and they had been happy) Monty had sometimes wondered why all his life he had so wantonly deviated from an image of calmness (he was loath to give it any grander name) which he had (it now seemed to him) from his earliest years had plain before his face. Even as a silly exhibitionist undergraduate he had known about that. Even what he was pleased to think of as his demons themselves suggested the only form which his salvation from them could take, assuming that he wanted to be saved. Of course this had nothing to do with God, who had passed out of Monty’s life very early on. He spoke to no one about this matter, least of all Sophie, with whom he never talked about deep things. He meditated on it secretly; and as he sat, frenzied with pain, watching Sophie suffer (she was not good at it) he had thought almost with longing of the time after her death when he could, as never before, take refuge with that. (As if Sophie’s death could enlighten him in a sort of spiritual orgasm.) But how unlike his expectation of it this later time had turned out to be. He had thought to live in suffering like a salamander in the flames. He had not expected or conceived of the sheer horror of her absence, he had not expected mourning to be a sort of fruitless searching, he had not foreseen the remorse. Why had he, quite apart from anything else, not made Sophie happier? It would not have been difficult. If he could not even see that, what could he see? How could he have behaved so stupidly badly? And now in the stead of the blank quietness he had hoped for, he felt like a hunted informer seeking a new identity. He felt, in a way so familiar as to be almost dreary, the chosen victim of the gods, the self-admitted traitor, the one destined for judgement. His old friends kept changing their masks, but he and they had not moved an inch.
    He had lost all sense of direction. His life seemed at an end, yet he felt no urge to kill himself, the hours and the days had to be got through somehow. And thought continued, cold thought, in the midst of it all. He even coldly asked himself, can I not turn all this misery into art, into real art, not the pseudo-art of Milo Fane? Can art for me ever be more than vile self-indulgence? This involved the question, can I now get rid of Milo? And this sent him back again to the question of the calmness, the question of getting rid of himself. Was he too old a leopard to change his spots? Could he undo himself completely at the age of forty-five? Could he get rid of them and achieve that? What anyway, in the most mundane sense, was he to do with himself? Richard Nailsworth, the actor who played Milo, had invited him to stay at his villa in southern Italy. But that would be the last place to seek consolation. I must simply stop writing, thought Monty. If he wrote now or in the foreseeable future he would write muck. If he wrote another Milo Fane novel he was done for. What could he do? Why not become a schoolmaster again? he thought to himself at some point in his reflections, and then the thought kept recurring. After all, this was the only work, besides writing detective stories, for which he was trained. He had done it once, why not again? It was decent ordinary work, and he must somehow find his way back-to ordinary life or lose what was left of his soul. Much much later he might try to write again. Or perhaps never. Meanwhile, why should he not simply put himself in a position where he had to attend to the needs of others? This was no spiritual orgasm, but it looked a good deal more like the way. This still vague notion, passing him at intervals in the maelstrom of his distress, alone carried some hint of a possible future.
    Monty moved back from the window where the pale cold light was increasing, the sky not yet declared as blue. In the dimness of the room he peered at himself in a mirror. How well he knew that disingenuous face