The Sacred and Profane Love Machine Read Online Free PDF Page A

eyes and gazed intently at the Prince.
    “Come,” he said.’
    Blaise closed the book. Of course both Harriet and David knew the story, though Harriet usually claimed to have forgotten. But Blaise liked to finish at an exciting moment He read aloud well, with spirit but without too much emphasis. The reading aloud custom dated from David’s childhood. They had read most of Scott, Jane Austen, Trollope, Dickens. Blaise loved it. There was an actor manqué somewhere inside him.
    The reading took place in summer in what Blaise called the breakfast-room (though they never breakfasted there) and in winter in the kitchen. The breakfast room was really the sitting-room. The drawing-room was rarely sat in or withdrawn to. Harriet, ensconced in an armchair opposite to her husband with a box of chocolates at her side, was sewing. She always sewed at reading time because David as a small child had once said that he loved to see her sew. Did he still, or did it merely annoy him now, she wondered. This was the pattern of so many of her dilemmas about her son. Because of him, so many of the silly little rituals of a happy marriage were put in question. Harriet was (not very skilfully) blanket-stitching the frayed cuff of one of Blaise’s old jackets. The jacket smelt of Blaise, not a tobacco smell, as he was a nonsmoker, but a sweaty doggy thoughtful male odour. How much that smell expressed the difference between men and women. Harriet would have liked to embrace the jacket, now at this very moment, and bury her face in it, only she had learnt long ago to modify her transports in the company of either of her two men, let alone in the company of both.
    David was sitting on the floor, not near Harriet (he used to lean against her knees once), one foot tucked under him, his head drooped, quietly grimacing and blinking as if the story were producing extraordinary trains of thought. His fair, now rather greasy, tangly hair, which was beginning to turn slightly upward at the ends, flopped around his face in a random and unintelligible chaos of criss-crossing locks. Does he never comb it, she wondered. Oh, if only he would let me. She felt his consciousness of her ardent look, and shifted her attention to his faded jeans, one slim boney ankle, one dirty sandalled foot, the carpet. She sighed deeply and laid aside her needle.
    Blaise meanwhile was quietly reading through the next section of the book, half smiling with appreciation and pleasure, then suddenly frowning with thought. Harriet was a little older than her husband and she felt the age gap in these moments of contemplation. How young he still was. He was less handsome than her son, but he looked so strong and decisive and manly. He had straight faintly reddish hair, which he kept cut very short, a pink large square-jawed face, a long thin mouth, and long blue-grey winter sea eyes. David’s eyes were his father’s, only much bluer. Harriet’s eyes were a clear plain brown. The presence of both the men in this sort of quietness filled her with a kind of happiness which was also anguish, was terror. Life had been so terrifyingly generous to her. She sighed again and helped herself to another chocolate. At that moment she suddenly remembered the apparition of the intruding boy. She was about to tell Blaise about it, but then decided not to. Blaise would think it was one of her ‘night fears’, and he always thought that her fears meant something when in fact they meant nothing. Perhaps she had imagined the boy anyway.
    David was feeling tense and miserable. The reading sessions had embarrassed him horribly ever since the days of The Wind in the Willows which were now some time ago. The silent will of both parents beseeching him, compelling him, to come made now a nightly drama. Once or twice lately he had just not turned up, and had sat alone in his room grinding his teeth. He gazed at a greasy food stain upon his father’s lapel and inhaled the smell of milk chocolate with which