The Nice and the Good

  The quartet of children had also got on reasonably well. They all went away to school now, Pierce to Bryanston, the twins to Bedales and Barbara to La Résidence in Switzerland. Their presence, their absence, together with the alternation of week and weekend made of Mary’s existence a chequer-board of contrasting atmospheres. When the children were away Kate often spent part of the week at the Grays’ house in London, if she was not absent on a trip with Octavian, who treated airline timetables as most people treat train timetables. The arrival of the weekend changed the house with the introduction into it of the mystery of a married pair. Kate and Octavian, charmingly, ebulliently wedded, took, as it were, the thrones which awaited them. Paula and Mary then wore their status of women without men. They laughed at Octavian’s harem jokes and heard late at night behind walls the ceaseless rivery murmur of the conversing couple. When the children were at home the weekend was a less intensive matter just because the house was fuller and more anarchic and less private. But the children too were altered by it, Barbara becoming suddenly “the child of the house”, a somewhat purdah-like condition, half privilege, half penalty, the nature of which was never questioned by the other three. The presence of men, Octavian and of late John Ducane (it occurred to no one to count Uncle Theo as a man), also made the conduct of the children not exactly more disciplined, but more coherent and self-conscious.

  On the whole Mary Clothier was satisfied, at least she enjoyed a harassed nervous rather dark content which she told herself was the best she was capable of. Alistair Clothier had died when Pierce was a very small child, leaving his wife with no money. Mary, who had abandoned the university to marry, found it hard to earn. She became a typist. Pierce gained a scholarship at his father’s old school. They managed; but Mary had never forgiven the fates for so cheating her over Alistair. A spirit took possession of her which was sardonic, sarcastic, narrow. She had come to expect little and to rail on what she had. Kate, who was not even conscious of Mary as a disappointed person, half cured her. Kate, eternally and unreflectively happy herself, made Mary want happiness and startled her, by a sort of electrical contact, into the hope of it. Kate’s more demonstrative affections gave Mary the courage of her own. The golden life-giving egoism and rich self-satisfaction of Kate and her husband inspired in Mary a certain hedonism which, puny as it was by comparison, was for her a saving grace. For the rest, she understood very well indeed the things that hurt her, and on the whole she now accepted them.

  Mary passed along the top corridor, observing the twins who had emerged on to the lawn in front of the house. They were resuming one of their special games. The twins had a number of private games which they had invented for themselves, the rules of which, though she had many times observed them, Mary was unable to deduce. She sometimes suspected that these games were mathematical in nature, based upon some sort of built-in computer system in those rather remarkable children which they had not yet discovered that other people did not possess. Most of the games had brief and uninformative names such as “Sticks” or “Feathers”. The one which was at present being played upon the sloping lawn, in an area of rectangles and triangles marked out with string, was called, no one had ever discovered why, “Noble Mice”.

  The door of Barbara’s room was open and Mary saw through the doorway the intent preoccupied profile of her son as he bent down and peered through horn-rimmed spectacles at the surface of the large table in the window. Pierce, brown-complexioned, brown-haired, brown-eyed, possessed a large nose which descended in a straight line from his brow, giving to his plump waxen face a somewhat animal quality. An impulse to stroke him down over brow and nose like a pony had already troubled, in half conscious form, a number of people, including some of his masters at school. He had a serious staring gaze which, together with a slow pedantic habit of speech, gave him the air of an intellectual. In fact, though clever, he was idle at school and far from bookish. Mary, still unseen, moved closer and saw that Pierce had covered the table with a complicated pattern composed of hundreds of shells arranged in spirals, tiny ones in the centre, larger ones on the outside. Adjusting the outer edge of the pattern he stooped to select a shell from a heap at his feet.

  Pierce became aware of his mother and turned slowly to face her. He rarely moved fast. He looked at her without smiling, almost grimly. He looked at her like an animal, cornered but not frightened, a dangerous confident animal. And Mary apprehended herself as a thin dark woman, a mother, a representative somehow of the past, of Pierce’s past, confronting him as if she were already a ghost. This came to her in an instant with an agony of possessive love for her son and a blinding pity of which she did not know whether it was for him or for herself. Next moment, as she searched for something to say, she took in the scene, Barbara’s pretty room, so tidy and empty now, but already expectant. And with an immediate instinct of her son’s vulnerability she saw the huge shell design as utterly untimely. It was something that belonged to the quietness of Pierce’s thought about Barbara and not to the hurly-burly of Barbara’s actual arrival, which Mary now anticipated with a kind of dread. The careful work with the shells seemed to her suddenly so typical of Pierce, so slow and inward and entirely without judgment.

  There was a shout from the lawn outside and then the sound of a car upon the gravel and the ecstatic barking of Mingo. Pierce did not move instantly. He held his mother’s anguished look for a moment longer and then as she moved back he went unhurriedly past her and along the landing.

  “Mama, it was so marvellous, I had a fab lunch in the aeroplane and they offered me champagne, oh Mary, you mustn’t carry my case, must she, mama, just look at Mingo’s tail, it’s going round and round like like a propeller, down, Mingo, you’ll hurt Montrose with your big paws, Montrose knew me, didn’t he, mama, where’s Uncle Theo gone to, I hardly saw him, Edward don’t pull my skirt so, it’s new, Henrietta I’ve got such a sweet dress for you, I got it in Geneva, is Willy all right, I’ve got him a marvellous pair of binoculars, I smuggled them, wasn’t I brave, I’ve got presents for everybody, laisse moi donc, Pierce, que tu m’embêtes, mama, I went riding every day and my French is so good now and I practised my flute such a lot, I played in a concert, and aren’t I brown, just look how brown I am, I’ve got some lace for you, mama, and a brooch for Mary, and a clock for papa, Henrietta could you take Montrose, do be careful with that suitcase it’s got Italian glass in it, just put it on the bed, could you, Mary, oh it’s so heavenly to be home, I do wish papa was here, everything looks so wonderful, I shall walk up and see Willy, what on earth are all those shells doing on my table, just push them up in a pile will you, oh damn they’re falling all over the floor, Casie I do wish you’d keep the twins out of my room, now you can put the other suitcase on the table, that’s right, thank you so much, and mama it was marvellous I went to such a fab dance, we all had to dress in black and white, and I went up in a helicopter, I was so frightened, it’s not a bit like an aeroplane.…”

  Three

  JOHN DUCANE looked into the eyes of Jessica Bird.

  Jessica’s eyes slowly filled with tears. Ducane looked away, sideways, downward. He had not left her then, when he ought to have done, when the parting would have been an agony to him. He was leaving her now when it was less than agony, when it was almost relief. He ought to have left her then. The fact remained that he ought to leave her now. He needed this thought to strengthen him against her tears.

  He looked up again, past her blurred suffering head. His imagination, already alienated from her room, perceived its weirdness, Jessica’s room was naval in its austerity. No homely litter of books or papers proclaimed its inhabitant and the pattern of clean hard colours and shapes was not merged into any human mess or fuzz. If furniture is handy man-adjusted objects for sitting, lying, writing, putting, the room contained no furniture, only surfaces. Even the chair on which Ducane was sitting, the only chair, was just a sloping surface bearing no friendly curved relation to the human form. Even the bed wherein he had o
nce been used to wrangle with Jessica looked like a board, its rumpled shame ironed smooth. Formica shelves, impersonal as coffee bar table tops, supported the entities, neither ornaments nor works of art, which Jessica made or found. She wandered the rubbish tips at night, bringing back bricks, tiles, pieces of wood, tangles of wire. Sometimes she made these things into other things. Sometimes they were allowed to remain themselves. Most of the entities however were made of newspaper by a method perfected in Jessica’s bathroom at a cost of regularly blocked drains. A half-digested mush wherein newsprint was still partly visible was solidified to form neat feather-weight mathematical objects with pierced coloured interiors. These objects, standing inscrutably in rows, often seemed to Ducane to belong to a series the principle of which he had not grasped. They were not intended for contemplation and were soon destroyed.

  Jessica taught painting and English at a primary school. She was twenty-eight and looked eighteen. Ducane, round-blue-eyed, hook nosed, patchily grey, was forty-three and looked forty-three. They had met at a party. Falling in love surprised them both. Jessica, pale, thin, mini-skirted, with long brownish gold hair tangling over her shoulders or pony-tailed with in-twisted ribbons, presented to Ducane an almost unintelligible thing and certainly not his kind of thing. She seemed to him vastly talented and almost totally non-intellectual, an amalgam he had never encountered before. She belonged to a race of the young whose foreignness he felt and had never dreamt of penetrating. They had made each other puzzled and happy for a while. Ducane made her presents of books she did not read, jewellery she could not wear, and small expensive objets d’art which, placed among her tribal trinkets, took on a truly surrealist air of estrangement. He tried vainly to persuade her to work in permanent materials. She saw him as corrupted, fascinating, infinitely old.

  Though Ducane did not fully realise it, his nervous uncertain sensuality needed some sophisticated intellectual encouragement, a certain kind of play, which Jessica was unable to provide. His profound puritanism could not in any case brook a long affair. He had not the temperament to be anybody’s lover. He knew this. His adventures had been infrequent and fairly short. He felt a rational guilt too at keeping this young attractive girl for himself when he did not intend to marry her. Ducane, who liked his life to be simple, did not care for concealments and feelings of guilt. In time, the excitements of discovery diminished, he began to find her curious aesthetic more exasperating than charming, and was able to see her less as a rare and exotic animal and more as an eccentric English girl, not after all so young, and well on the way to becoming nothing more mysterious than an eccentric English middle-aged woman. He had then, ashamed of himself for not having had it earlier, the strength to end an affair which he knew should never have been started. It was then, over eighteen months ago, that he ought to have left her. He allowed her tears to move him then and agreed that though no longer lovers they should remain friends, meeting almost as often as before. He was the readier to agree since he was still half in love with her.

  There was perhaps in his passion more cunning than he knew, since when he had released himself from his primary guilt he found her freshly charming, contemplated and touched her with an unmarred delight, and half persuaded himself that he had acquired a child, a friend. He became gradually and sadly aware that she did not share his new-found liberty. He had not set her free. She was still in love with him and indeed still behaved as if she were his mistress. Her time consisted of seeing him, waiting, and seeing him again, of presence, absence, presence. She watched him anxiously, muting her love, instinctively afraid of making him feel trapped or guilty. She touched him very carefully with superficial lingering touches as if to extract some essence, some strong salve, to keep her through those empty absence times. The world still came to her only through him. He became aware of a wrought-up intensity of suffering which she could not forbear occasionally to let him glimpse. He began to dread his visits to her for fear of these death’s head glimpses. They both became frightened, irritable, quarrelsome. Ducane at last decided that there was only one remedy, the brutal one of a complete parting. He had thought this into clarity. But since he had been talking to her, trying to explain, they were back again in the familiar muddled atmosphere of pity and passion.

  “What have I done?”

  “You haven’t done anything.”

  “Then why can’t things go on, why do you suddenly say this now?”

  “I’ve been thinking. It’s a totally wrong situation.”

  “There’s nothing wrong. I just love you.”

  “That’s the trouble.”

  “There’s little enough love in the world. Why do you want to kill mine?”

  “It’s not so simple, Jessica. I can’t just accept your love.”

  “I don’t see why not.”

  “It isn’t fair to you. I can’t keep you cornered?”

  “Suppose I want to be cornered.”

  “What you want isn’t the point. Be tough enough to see that.”

  “You think you’re acting in my best interests?”

  “I know I am.”

  “You’ve got tired of me, why not say so?”

  “Jessica, you know that I love you. I just can’t go on making you suffer like this.”

  “I’ll suffer less in time. Why should one live without suffering anyway?”

  “It’s bad for us both. I must take some responsibility—”

  “Damn your responsibility. There’s someone else. You’ve taken a new mistress.”

  “I haven’t taken a new mistress.”

  “You promised faithfully that you’d tell me if you ever did.”

  “I keep my promises. I haven’t.”

  “Then why can’t things go on as before? I don’t ask much of you.”

  “That’s just it!”

  “Anyway, John, I’m just not going to let you go away. I honestly … don’t … think … I could stand it.”

  “Oh God,” said Ducane.

  “You’re killing me,” she said, “for something that’s just—abstract.”

  “Oh God,” he said, and got up, turning his back on her. He was afraid that the girl, who was kneeling on the floor in front of him, would throw herself forward and clasp his knees. The violence of his words, of her surprise, had kept them till now facing each other rigidly.

  Ducane said to himself, human frailty, wickedness in me, has made this situation where I automatically have to behave like a brute. She is right to say why kill love, there is never enough. Yet I have to kill this love. Oh God, why is it so like a murder. If I could only take all the suffering on to myself. But that is one of the punishments of wickedness, perhaps the last and worst one, that even if one wills it one cannot do it.

  She said behind him, her voice breaking, “Well, I think there must be some special reason. Something’s happened to you—”

  The trouble was that this was true, and Ducane was weakened by a sense of the impurity of his motives. He knew the act was right, and perhaps he could have done it as a naked simple act, but the shadows of his own interests confused him. He wanted to set Jessica free, but he wanted even more to be free himself. For what had happened to John Ducane was Kate Gray.

  Ducane had known Kate for a long time; only lately with that easy shifting of consciousness in relation to the utterly familiar which is one of the privileges of growing older, he had found himself somewhat in love with her and had apprehended her as somewhat in love with him. The discovery brought him no dismay. Kate was very married. He was certain that there was no thought in her lovely head which she did not impart, in their long nightly conversations, to her husband. He had no doubt that the married pair had discussed him. He would not have been mocked, but he might have been laughed at. He could hear Kate saying, “John’s a bit sweet on me, you know!” Whatever had so beautifully happened was something to which Octavian was privy. There was, in the situation, no danger. There was no question of a love affair. Ducane could tell Jessica truthfully th
at he had no mistress and no prospect of one. In fact, following some cautious instinct, Ducane had never mentioned Kate to Jessica, nor Jessica to Kate. He knew that Kate, in her new awareness of him, took him to be fancy free, and that this was an important belief. The irony of it was that he was fancy free. Only now that his feelings for Kate had become more urgent he felt the imperative need to rid himself of this last vestige of an entanglement.

  What John envisaged with Kate, and envisaged fairly clearly, was something which was new in his life, and in his vision of it there was a kind of resignation, an acceptance of himself as no longer young and no longer likely to marry. He needed a resting point, he needed a home, he needed, even, a family. He knew, without her having said it, that Kate understood this perfectly. She had told him, he had told her, in half passionate, often wholly passionate, kisses which they now exchanged quite easily and spontaneously, smiling into each other’s eyes, whenever they happened to be alone together. He knew that for Kate there was nothing but joy in the prospect of so caging him. For himself, the relationship would at times be painful, and had already been so. But he could embrace these exact, these detailed pains; and even the pain could be an element in something that was wholly good. Kate’s generosity, her happiness, even her love for her husband, perhaps especially her love for her husband, could make a house for John. He liked and respected Octavian, he was fond of all the children and especially of Barbara. He needed to be committed and attached at last and to be able to love in innocence, and he felt certain now that he could commit himself to Kate, and through her to her family and to her whole household. But to do this with a free and truthful heart he would have to end, and end completely, this muddled compromise with Jessica which should never have come into being at all. Kate had never questioned him. When she did he would have to be able to tell the truth. This was the personal urgency which made him feel, as he heard Jessica sobbing behind him, so like a murderer.