The Sacred and Profane Love Machine by Iris Murdoch Page A

his mind (which did not, in his case, concern murders). He knew his ridiculous undignified inner self very well; and it never occurred to him that he might ever want to act his fantasies or that it would be of any interest to meet a cognate fellow-dreamer. Obsessive rituals and the search for alter-egos was a sign of mental ailment, and Blaise was thoroughly mentally healthy. He was not going to develop any of those precise needs which lead ultimately into the little cupboard. He later studied such cravings in his patients with the cool eye of science. He knew all about it. Was he not a wise man?
    Blaise believed it to be a sign of mental well-being to like all sorts of people, and he liked all sorts of people. He had certainly no preconceived theory about the sort of woman he might marry, except that he thought she would probably be an intellectual. Then one day suddenly there was Harriet, not an intellectual but – what? – a sort of saint? Well, not a saint so much as a noble lady. Harriet’s sweetness was very ordinary really, her selflessness was selfish in a very ordinary woman’s way. But she had a beautiful, as it were, aristocratic, dignity and tact. Harriet was neither socially grand nor rich, but Blaise’s rather snobbish mother approved of her at once. Blaise was much in love. Something that he loved in Harriet was her absolute openness, her non-peculiarness, her (dreadful word) normality. Harriet was right out in the open, in the light. Had there been after all some tiny fear in him which Harriet’s sunniness had extinguished? Harriet would never let him shut himself into any dark cupboard. When he married Harriet he felt that all that, though still there of course (such things are ineradicable) had become utterly unimportant and harmless and small. Of course he never imparted any of these reflections to Harriet. He did not want to trouble his lovely calm wife with tales which might alarm or sicken her. Anyway she would not have understood. What went on in her mind he soon found out without her even noticing. It was nothing at all unusual.
    Blaise had been happily married for nearly ten years when he met Emily McHugh. He met her at a lecture on Merleau-Ponty at the French Institute. Of course Harriet was not with him. Emily was a student at a teachers’ training college, writing a thesis about Merleau-Ponty. Emily was twenty-two. Her appearance struck him at once. She wore her nearly black hair long in those days, tied roughly back with an elastic band. She was small and very slim, with a small ardent face, a little sharp nose, and brilliant rather hard and stony blue eyes. She spoke in a deliberately harsh and unobliging voice with a slight London accent. She immediately, though somewhat mechanically, flirted with Blaise when they met (no one introduced them) at the cocktail party after the lecture. Blaise flirted too. He found himself, however, almost at once finding some pretext for referring to ‘my wife’. Emily gave him a strange look. It was clear to Blaise after about twenty minutes that he could not let this fascinating chance acquaintance disappear for ever. How had he so early known? They often discussed this later. Even at the first meeting he had felt (yet on what evidence?) like an animal who had thought that just his sort of animal did not exist anywhere in the forest – and then had suddenly met one. They talked of Emily’s work. Merleau-Ponty readily provided an excuse for another meeting. Blaise promised an off-print of his early paper on Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis. He delivered it to her two days later in a pub near the British Museum. Emily never finished her thesis.
    ‘Did you meet anybody interesting at the French do?’ ‘There was a student working on Merleau-Ponty. We had an argument’ This was the only thing Blaise had ever said to Harriet about Emily. Harriet had noticed nothing, had never for a second suspected. Her trust in him was perfect. In the early days it had