The Nice and the Good

by Iris Murdoch

  “They aren’t fossils. There’s nothing special about them.”

  “There’s something special about every stone,” said Edward.

  “That is perfectly true in a metaphysical sense,” said Theodore Gray, who had just entered the kitchen in his old red and brown check dressing gown.

  “I am not keeping the house tidy in a metaphysical sense,” said Mary.

  “Where’s Pierce?” said Theodore to the twins. Pierce was Mary Clothier’s son who was fifteen.

  “He’s up in Barbie’s room. He’s decorating it with shells. He must have brought in a ton.”

  “Oh God!” said Mary. The sea shore invaded the house. The children’s rooms were gritty with sand and stones and crushed sea shells and dried up marine entities of animal and vegetable origin.

  “If Pierce can bring in shells we can bring in stones,” reasoned Henrietta.

  “No one said Pierce could bring in shells,” said Mary.

  “But you aren’t going to stop him, are you?” said Edward.

  “If I’d answered back like that at your age I’d have been well slapped,” said Casie the housekeeper. She was Mary Casie, but since she had the same first name as Mary Clothier she was called “Casie”, a dark pregnant title like the name of an animal.

  “True, but irrelevant, Edward might reply,” said Theodore. “If it’s not too much to ask, may I have my tea? I’m not feeling at all well.”

  “Poor old Casie, that was hard luck!” said Edward.

  “I’m not going to stop him,” said Mary, “firstly because it’s too late, and secondly because it’s a special occasion with Barbara coming home.” It paid to argue rationally with the twins.

  Barbara Gray had been away since Christmas at a finishing school in Switzerland. She had spent the Easter holidays skiing with her parents who were enthusiastic travellers.

  “It’s well for some people,” said Casie, a social comment of vague but weighty import which she often uttered.

  “Casie, may we have these chicken’s legs?” said Henrietta.

  “How I’m to keep the kitchen clean with those children messing in the rubbish bins like starving cats—”

  “Don’t pull it all out, Henrietta, please,” said Mary. A mess of screwed up paper, coffee beans, old lettuce leaves and human hair emerged with the chicken’s legs.

  “Nobody minds me,” said Casie. “I’m wasting my life here.”

  “Every life is wasted,” said Theodore.

  “You people don’t regard me as your equal—”

  “You aren’t our equal,” said Theodore. “May I have my tea please?”

  “Oh do shut up, Theo,” said Mary. “Don’t set Casie off. Your tea’s there on the tray.”

  “Lemon sponge. Mmm. Good.”

  “I thought you weren’t feeling well,” said Casie.

  “A mere bilious craving. Where’s Mingo?”

  Mingo, a large grey unclipped somewhat poodle-like dog, was always in attendance upon Theodore’s breakfast and tea, which were taken in bed. Kate and Octavian were ribald in speculation concerning the relations between Theodore and Mingo.

  “We’ll bring him, Uncle Theo!” cried Edward.

  A brief scuffle produced Mingo from behind the florid cast-iron stove which, although it was expensive to run and useless for cooking, still filled the huge recess of the kitchen fireplace. Theodore had begun to mount the stairs bearing his tray, followed by the twins who, according to one of their many self-imposed rituals, carried the animal between them, his foolish smiling face emerging from under Edward’s arm, his woolly legs trailing, and his sausage of a wagging tail rhythmically lifting the hem of Henrietta’s gingham dress.

  Theodore, Octavian’s valetudinarian elder brother, formerly an engineer in Delhi and now long unemployed, was well known to have left India under a cloud, although no one had ever been able to discover what sort of cloud it was that Theodore had left India under. Nor was it known whether Theodore in reality liked or disliked his brother, his contemptuous references to whom were ignored by common consent. He was a tall thin grey-haired partly bald man with a bulging brow finely engraved with hieroglyphic lines, and screwed-up clever thoughtful eyes.

  “Paula, must you read at the table?” said Mary.

  Paula Biranne, the twins’ mother, was still absorbed in her book. She left the disciplining of her children, with whom she seemed at such moments to be coeval, entirely to Mary. Paula had been divorced from Richard Biranne for over two years. Mary herself was a widow of many years’ standing.

  “Sorry,” said Paula. She closed her copy of Lucretius. Paula taught Greek and Latin at a local school.

  Meal times were important to Mary. They were times of communication, ritualistic forgatherings almost spiritual in their significance. Human speech and casual co-presence then knit up wounds and fissures which were perhaps plain only to Mary’s own irritated and restless sensibility, constantly recreating an approximation to harmony of which perhaps again only she was fully aware. At these points of contact Mary held an authority which nobody challenged. If the household possessed a communal unconscious mind, Mary constituted its communal consciousness. The regularity of breakfast lunch tea and dinner was moreover one of the few elements of formal pattern in a situation which, as Mary felt it, hovered always upon the brink of a not unpleasant but quite irrevocable anarchy.

  The hot sun shone through the big windows with their quaint Victorian Gothic peaks and their white cast-iron tracery, greenly shaded on one side by honeysuckle and on the other side by wistaria, and revealed the stains upon the red and white check table-cloth, the cake crumbs upon the stains, and the coffee beans and human hair upon the paved floor. The position was that the twins had had their tea, Theo had removed his, Pierce had not come down for his, Kate was late for hen as usual, Mary and Paula and Casie were having theirs.

  “She’s got a new car again,” said Casie.

  “I wish you’d say who you mean and not call everybody ‘she’,” said Mary.

  “My sister.” Casie, having spent most of her life tending her late ailing mother whom she referred to as “the old bitch”, could not forgive her younger sister for having escaped this fate and married an affluent husband. Casie, with a red chunky face and a coil of iron grey hair, was much given to crying fits, often set off by sad things she saw on television, which claimed Mary’s preoccupied and exasperated sympathy.

  “What kind?” said Paula absently. She was still thinking about Lucretius and wondering if a certain passage would be too hard to set in the examination.

  “A Triumph something or other. It’s well for some people. The Costa Brava and all.”

  “We saw that flying saucer again today,” announced Henrietta, who had come back carrying Barbara’s cat, Montrose. The twins often made this claim.

  “Really?” said Mary. “Henrietta, please don’t put Montrose on the table.”

  Montrose was a large cocoa-coloured tabby animal with golden eyes, a square body, rectangular legs and an obstinate self-absorbed disposition, concerning whose intelligence fierce arguments raged among the children. Tests of Montrose’s sagacity were constantly being devised, but there was some uncertainty about the interpretation of the resultant data since the twins were always ready to return to first principles and discuss whether cooperation with the human race was a sign of intelligence at all. Montrose had one undoubted talent, which was that he could at will make his sleek hair stand up on end, and transform himself from a smooth stripey cube into a fluffy sphere. This was called “Montrose’s bird look”.

  “Don’t ask me where they get the money from,” said Casie. “It’s enough to make a Socialist of you.”

  “But you are a Socialist, Casie,” said Mary. So were they all, of course, but this seemed notable only in the instance of Casie.

  “I didn’t say I wasn’t, did I? I just said it was enough to make you one.”

  “Do you know which is the largest of all birds?” said Edward, pushi
ng his way in between Mary and his sister.

  “No. Which is?”

  “The cassowary. He eats Papuans. He kills them by hitting them with his feet.”

  “I think the condor is bigger,” said Henrietta.

  “It depends whether you mean wing-span or weight,” said Edward.

  “What about the albatross?” said Paula. She was always ready to enter into an argument with her children, whom she treated invariably as rational adults.

  “He has the biggest wing-span,” said Edward, “but he has a much smaller body. Do you know how big a breast bone we should need to have if we were going to fly? Mary, do you know how big a breast bone we should need to have if we were going to fly?”

  “I don’t know,” said Mary. “How big?”

  “Fourteen feet wide.”

  “Really? Fancy that.”

  “In the case of the condor—” said Paula.

  “Do be careful, Henrietta,” said Mary to Henrietta, who was engaged in hitting her brother’s face with one of Montrose’s paws.

  “It’s all right, his claws are in,” said Henrietta.

  “Mine wouldn’t be if I were him,” said Casie. “When I was your age I was taught not to maul my pets about.”

  “I do wish you’d do something about those stones,” said Mary. “We shall all be falling over them. Couldn’t you put them in order of merit, and then we could find a home outside for the less important ones?”

  The idea of putting the stones in order of merit appealed at once to the twins. They dropped the cat and settled down on the floor with the pile of stones between them and were soon deep in argument.

  “Has Theo been up to see Willy?” asked Paula.

  “No. I suggested it, but he just laughed and said he wasn’t Willy’s keeper.”

  Willy Kost, a refugee scholar, lived in a bungalow on Octavian’s estate which was known as Trescombe Cottage, a little further up the hill from Trescombe House. Willy suffered from a melancholia which was a cause of anxiety to the household.

  “I suppose they’ve quarrelled again. They’re like a couple of children. Have you been up?”

  “No,” said Mary. “I haven’t had a moment. I sent Pierce up and Willy seemed OK. Have you been?”

  “No,” said Paula. “I’ve had a pretty full day too.”

  Mary was rather relieved. She felt that Willy Kost was her own special responsibility, practically her property, and it mattered that she was always the one who knew how Willy was. She would go up and see him tomorrow.

  “It’s just as well Ducane is coming,” said Paula. “He always does Willy good.”

  “Is Ducane coming?” said Mary. “I wish somebody would tell me something sometimes!”

  “I suppose you realise the room isn’t ready,” said Casie.

  “I think Kate assumes it’s a regular thing now and that’s why she didn’t tell you.”

  John Ducane, a friend and colleague of Octavian’s, was a frequent weekend visitor.

  “Casie, would you mind doing the room after tea?”

  “Of course I mind,” said Casie, “in my one bit of free time; what you mean is will I, yes I will.”

  At that moment Kate Gray came into the kitchen, followed by Mingo, and at once as if struck by some piercing stellar ray the scene dissolved into its atoms and reassembled itself round Kate as centre. Mary saw, pinioned in some line of force, Paula’s keen smiling dog face, felt her own face lift and smile, her hair tossed, blown back. Mingo was barking, Montrose had jumped on to the table, Casie was pouring more hot water into the pot, the twins, disarranging their careful line of stones, were both chattering at once, fastening brown sandy hands on to the belt of Kate’s striped dress.

  Kate’s bright round face beamed at them all out of the golden fuzz of her hair. Her warm untidy being emphasised the sleekness, the thinness, the compactness of the other two, Mary with her straight dark hair tucked behind her ears and her air of a Victorian governess, Paula with her narrow head and pointed face and the well adjusted surfaces of her cropped brown hair. Kate, herself undefined, was a definer of others, the noise, the heat, the light which flattered them into the clearer contours of themselves. Kate spoke with a slight stammer and a slight Irish accent.

  “Octavian isn’t coming tonight after all.”

  “Oh dear,” said Mary, “he won’t be here for Barb.”

  “I know, it’s too bad. Something’s happened at the office.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Some chap killed himself.”

  “Good heavens,” said Paula. “You mean killed himself, there in the office?”

  “Yes. Isn’t it awful?”

  “Who was he?” said Paula.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What was his name?”

  “I didn’t think to ask. He’s not anyone we know.”

  “Poor fellow,” said Paula. “I’d like to have known his name.”

  “Why?” said Edward, who was experimenting with the tendons of one of the chicken’s legs.

  “Because it’s somehow easier to think about somebody if you know their name.”

  “Why?” said Henrietta, who was dissecting the other leg with a kitchen knife.

  “You may well ask,” said Paula. “Plato says how odd it is that we can think of anything, and however far away it is our thought can hit it. I suppose I can think of him even if I don’t know his name—”

  “You are right to think of him,” said Kate. “You are so right. You reproach me. I feel reproached. I just thought of Octavian and Barbara.”

  “Why did he kill himself?” said Edward.

  “I’ll do Ducane’s room now,” said Mary to Casie.

  “No, you won’t,” said Casie.

  They got up together and left the kitchen.

  The lazy sun, slanting along the front of the house, cast elongated rectangles of watery gold on to the faded floral wallpaper of the big paved hall, which served as the dining-room at weekends. The front door was wide open, framing distant cuckoo calls, while beyond the weedy gravel drive, beyond the clipped descending lawn and the erect hedge of raspberry-and-creamy spiraea, rose up the sea, a silvery blue, too thin and transparent to be called metallic, a texture as of skin-deep silver paper, rising up and merging at some indeterminate point with the pallid glittering blue of the midsummer sky. There was something of evening already in the powdery goldenness of the sun and the ethereal thinness of the sea.

  The two women swept round the white curve of the stairs, Casie clumping, Mary darting, and disputed briefly at the top. Mary let Casie go on to the spare room and turned herself in the direction of Barbara’s room.

  Mary Clothier and her son Pierce had lived for nearly four years now at Trescombe House. Mary’s father, a sickly defeated man, had been a junior clerk in an insurance office, and he and Mary’s vague gentle mother had perished together of double pneumonia, leaving their only child, then aged nine, to the care of an elderly and rather needy aunt. Mary had managed, however, by means of scholarships, to win herself a good education, in the course of which she encountered Kate. Kate admired Mary and also quite instinctively protected her. They became firm friends. Much later, at some point in Mary’s wanderings of an impecunious and socially uncertain widow Kate had suggested that she should come and live with them, and Mary had come, with many misgivings, for a trial period. She had stayed. Kate and Octavian were well off and enjoyed the deep superiority of the socially secure. Mary, a deprived person who had sometimes come near, rather romantically, to thinking of herself as an outcast, appreciated both these advantages in her friends, and was prepared to be herself propped up by them. But of course she could not have accepted this act of rescue had it not been for an indubitable virtue of generosity in both her hosts, a virtue somehow expressed in their roundness, in Octavian’s big spherical bald head with its silky golden tonsure, in Kate’s plump face and fuzzy ball of touchable yellow hair. There was a careless magnanimity about them both, something
too of the bounty of those who might have been magnificent sinners magnificently deciding for righteousness. They were happily married and spontaneous in their efforts to cause happiness in others. Mary was untroubled by the thought that she was in fact extremely useful to them. Mary ran the house, she controlled the children, she was the one who was always there. But she knew that the benefits to herself were infinitely greater.

  The presence, more recently, of foxy-faced Paula was something about which Mary had been, at first, not too certain. Paula was a college friend of Mary’s, and not known to Kate until the time, after her divorce, when Paula came to stay. “Everyone invites a divorced woman,” Paula had said. Mary had invited her and Kate had adored her. Kate had suggested that Paula should stay with them indefinitely, Octavian had started to make the joke about his harem, and the matter had been fixed up. Paula had been Mary’s older and revered college friend. Mary thought it possible that Paula at close quarters might prove exacting; also she was afraid of becoming jealous. Paula was an uncompromising person and at times Mary had experienced her as a sort of unconscious prig. The strength and clarity of her being, her meticulous accuracy and truthfulness, operated as a reproach to the mediocrity and muddle which Mary felt to be her own natural medium. Paula had a hard cool dignity which had been quite unimpaired by her divorce, the details of which Mary never learnt, though it was generally known that Richard Biranne was an irresponsible chaser of women. That both Kate and Paula ‘adored’ Mary was of course taken, a little too much, for granted. Mary was prepared to watch, in her nervous hyperconscious way, their interest in each other, and in the first few months of Paula’s sojourn Mary suffered acute pains of anticipation. However, in the end it was Paula’s coolness, her detachment, her peculiar virtue which soothed Mary’s nerves, and even provided Mary with the energy which she needed to see the situation exactly as it was. She soon concluded that there was nothing to fear. The mutual affection of Kate and Paula held no threat to her. There was nothing hidden and no possibility of a plot. With this acceptance came a special pleasure in their existence as a free trio which she knew that the others shared.