The Nice and the Good

by Iris Murdoch

  “Have you any definite evidence of Mr Radeechy’s supernatural powers, or was this just something that you felt?”

  “Well, as to evidence, no, but you felt it, like—”

  “Yes, I can imagine that. Where did you first meet Mr Radeechy?”

  “Here in the office, Sir.”

  “I see. And you did these odd jobs of shopping for him, for which I imagine he paid you?”

  “Well, yes, Sir, he did pay me a little for my time—”

  “Quite. Did you see anything of Mrs Radeechy?”

  “I didn’t see much of the lady, Sir, she rather kept out of the way, but I did meet her just to say good evening.”

  “Did she seem to object in any way to your visiting the house?”

  “Oh not a bit, Sir. She knew all about it. A very cheerful lady and very friendly and polite.”

  “Do you think she and Mr Radeechy got on well together?”

  “Devoted, Sir, I should say. I’ve never seen a gentleman so plain miserable as he was after she died. He didn’t do any magic for months.”

  “Mrs Radeechy wasn’t upset by Mr Radeechy’s magic?”

  “Well, I never saw her upset by anything, but it must have got her down a bit because of the girls.”

  “The girls—?”

  “Yes, you see the magic needed girls.”

  Now we’re coming to it, thought Ducane. He shivered slightly and the room vibrated quietly with electrical animal emanations. “Yes, I understand that many magic rituals involve girls, often virgins. Perhaps you could tell me a little about these ones.”

  “I don’t know about virgins!” said McGrath, and laughed a slightly crazy laugh.

  Radeechy had him fascinated, it occurred to Ducane. There was a kind of mad admiration in McGrath’s laugh. “You mean the girls whom Mr Radeechy—used—were—well, what were they like? Did you meet them?”

  “I saw them a bit, yes,” said McGrath. He was now becoming cautious. He rocked his hand to disturb the persistent fly. He looked up at Ducane, signalling with his colourless eyebrows. “Tarts, I’d say they were. I never properly saw him at it, mind you.”

  “What do you think he did with the girls?” said Ducane. He found himself smiling at McGrath, encouragingly, perhaps conspiratorially. The subject matter imposed, almost without their wills, a cosy masculine atmosphere.

  “Do with them?” said McGrath, smiling too. “Well, you know I never saw really, though I did creep back once or twice, and I looked through a window. I was curious, you see. You’d have been curious too, Sir.”

  “I expect I would,” said Ducane.

  “I mean, I don’t think he did any of the usual things, it wasn’t that, he was a pretty odd chappie. He had a girl once lying down on a table, and there was a sort of silver cup balanced on her tummy. She had nothing on, mind you.”

  Ducane thought, a black mass. “Did he have the girls there one at a time or several at once?”

  “One at a time, Sir, only they couldn’t always come, so there were three or four regulars. Once a week it was, punctual on Sundays, and sometimes a special one extra.”

  “Anything else that you saw?”

  “Not so to speak saw. But he had some rather queer things lying around.”

  “What, for instance?”

  “Well, whips and daggers and things. But I never saw him use them, on the girls, I mean.”

  “I see,” said Ducane. “Well, now tell me something about Helen of Troy.”

  “Helen of Troy?” McGrath’s white face turned to a uniform light pink. He withdrew his hands from the desk. “I don’t know anybody of that name.”

  “Come, come, Mr McGrath,” said Ducane. “We know you mentioned someone of that name in your story to the press. Who is it?”

  “Oh, Helen of Troy,” said McGrath vaguely, as if some other Helen had been in question. “Yes, I believe there was a young lady of that name. She was just one of the young ladies.”

  “Why did you say just now you hadn’t heard of her?”

  “I didn’t hear rightly what you said.”

  “Hmmm. Well, now tell me about her.”

  “There’s nothing to tell,” said McGrath. “I didn’t know anything about the girls. I didn’t really meet them. I just heard that one’s name and it sort of stuck in my head.”

  He’s lying, Ducane thought. There’s something about this particular girl. He said, “Do you know the names of these girls and where they could be found? The police may want to question them.”

  “The police?” McGrath’s face crinkled up as if he were going to cry.

  “Yes,” said Ducane smoothly. “It’s a pure formality of course. They may be needed at the inquest.”

  This was untrue. It had already been arranged with the police that the inquest, which was to take place tomorrow, would involve no exploration of the more ‘rum’ aspects of the deceased’s mode of existence.

  “Well, I don’t know their names or where any of them lived,” McGrath mumbled. “I wasn’t connected with them at all.”

  He won’t tell me any more about that, thought Ducane. He said, “Now, Mr McGrath, I believe that the story which you sold also makes mention of blackmail. Would you kindly tell me what this was all about?”

  McGrath’s face became pink once more, giving him a somewhat babyish appearance. “Blackmail?” he said. “I didn’t say anything about blackmail. I didn’t mention that word at all.”

  “Never mind about the word,” said Ducane. “Let’s talk about the thing. ‘Some money changed hands’, did it not?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” said McGrath. He huddled his head down into his shoulders. “The laddies at the paper were very keen on that, it was their idea really.”

  “But they can’t have simply invented it. You must have told them something.”

  “They started it,” said McGrath, “they started it. And I told them I didn’t know anything for sure.”

  “But you knew something or guessed or surmised something? What?”

  “Mr Radeechy said something about it once, but I might not have understood him properly. I told the laddies—”

  “What did he say?”

  “Let me see,” said McGrath. He gazed full at Ducane now. “He said, let me see, he said that someone was getting money out of him. But he didn’t say who or tell me any more about it. And I might not have understood him, and I realise now I shouldn’t have said anything, but those lads were so keen, as if this was really the best bit of the story.”

  He’s lying, thought Ducane. At least he’s lying about Radeechy. Then with sudden clarity the surmise came to him: the blackmailer was McGrath himself. That the newspaper had pressed him to endorse the hint of blackmail was probably true. Greed had dimmed McGrath’s Scottish cunning. He had doubtless imagined that he could get away with the whole thing. An inefficient rogue, Ducane thought.

  “I suppose you imagined that you could get away with the whole thing, Mr McGrath?” Ducane asked, smiling pleasantly. “I mean, that we would never find out who sold the story?”

  McGrath looked at him with a kind of relief and actually sighed audibly. “The boys at the paper said no one would ever know.”

  “Boys at papers will say anything,” said Ducane, “if they think they can get a story.”

  “Well, I’ll know next time,” said McGrath. “I mean—”

  They both laughed.

  “Am I to understand, Mr McGrath, that what you’ve just told me is the entire substance of what you told the newspaper men?”

  “Yes, Sir, that’s the lot, they dressed it up a bit of course in the way they wrote it down, but that’s all that I told them.”

  “You aren’t keeping anything back, Mr McGrath? I should advise you not to, especially as we shall shortly have that story in our hands. Are you sure there isn’t anything else you would like to tell me?”

  “No, nothing else, Sir” McGrath paused. Then he said, “You must be thinking badly of me, Sir. It s
eems bad, doesn’t it, to sell a story about a gentleman when he’s just gone and killed himself. But I did need the money, you see, Sir. It wasn’t that I didn’t like Mr Radeechy, there was nothing personal. He was very good to me, Mr Radeechy was, and I was really fond of him. I’d like you to understand that, Sir. I was real fond of Mr Radeechy.”

  “I understand that,” said Ducane. “I think that’s all then, Mr McGrath, for the moment. I won’t keep you any longer.”

  “For the moment?” said McGrath, a bit dismayed. He rose to his feet. “Will you be wanting to see me again, Sir?”

  “Possibly,” said Ducane. “Possibly not.”

  “Will I have to come to the inquest, Sir?”

  “You probably won’t be needed at the inquest.”

  “Will I be getting the sack from here, do you think, Sir? I’ve been in the job over ten years. And there’s my pension. What happens to that if—?”

  “That is a matter for Establishments,” said Ducane. “Good day to you, McGrath.”

  McGrath did not now want to go. The interview had generated a curious warmth, almost an intimacy, and McGrath wanted Ducane to comfort him. He also wanted to find out from Ducane just how gravely his misdemeanour was likely to be regarded, but he could not sufficiently collect his wits to ask the right questions. He stood staring down, opening and closing his pink mouth a little, like a kitten.

  “Good day,” said Ducane.

  “Thank you, Sir, thank you very much, Sir,” said McGrath. He turned and rather slowly left the room. The little fly accompanied him.

  Well, well, well, thought Ducane, leaning back in his chair. It was probably true that what McGrath had told him about Radeechy and the girls was the substance of what he had told the newspaper men. There was certainly enough there to make an excellent story. About one of the girls, Helen of Troy, there was apparently something which McGrath was concealing, but it might be that this something had been concealed from the newspaper too. McGrath might simply have mentioned her to the journalists because, as he said to Ducane, her nom de guerre had ‘struck’ him, and it added a picturesque detail. And of course the concealed something might be perfectly innocuous, such as McGrath’s having become a bit infatuated with this particular girl. Or it might be something important. The devil of it is, thought Ducane, although I told him we shall shortly have the story in our hands, this may just not be so. The newspaper could not, as things stood at the moment, be compelled to hand it over.

  About the blackmail, Ducane could not make up his mind. While he had been questioning McGrath he had been led to conjecture that McGrath himself was the blackmailer, or at least a blackmailer. The idea now seemed to him less obvious. McGrath had perhaps the personality to be a blackmailer, but, Ducane judged, only to be a small one. Ducane could imagine McGrath leering at Radeechy and suggesting respectfully that the pittance he was paid for the ‘shopping’ might be somewhat increased. And he could imagine Radeechy, half amused, increasing it. And he could see that McGrath, upon the death of the goose that laid the golden eggs, might well be carried away by the impulse to make a last packet out of his poor employer. What he could not imagine was McGrath extracting enormous sums of money from Radeechy. McGrath would not have the nerve, and also he was not quite unpleasant enough. It was probably true that he had been quite fond of Radeechy and in a way fascinated by him. But if McGrath’s blackmail was petty it could scarcely count as a motive for Radeechy’s suicide. Was there someone else, the real blackmailer, behind McGrath?

  Ducane reminded himself that the purpose of the enquiry was to discover whether there was any ‘security interest’ in the case. Since Radeechy had no official access to secret material, the mere fact that he had put himself into a position to be blackmailed and possibly was being blackmailed, need not itself suggest such an interest, were it not that his suicide remained unexplained. If Radeechy had, ex hypothesi, been persuaded to procure and hand over secret material, and if he feared exposure, and even if he did not, here was a quite sufficient motive for suicide. On the other hand, there was not a shred of evidence that Radeechy had done so, he appeared to have no close relations with anyone who might have passed such material to him, those who knew him best did not see such conduct as being in his character, and Ducane was inclined to agree with them. Of course one did not know what price Radeechy might not have been prepared to pay to conceal some particular thing, perhaps some thing of which McGrath had not spoken, and which McGrath did not know, on the assumption that there was another and more important blackmailer in the picture. But Ducane did not seriously imagine that Radeechy had been spying. There was something else behind it all. He thought, my main task is to find out why he killed himself. And he thought, it may all be terribly simple, he may have done it just because of his wife. And if it is terribly simple it is going to be terribly hard to prove!

  There had been no suggestion that Mr and Mrs Radeechy were other than ‘devoted’ and there was evidence to suggest that they had been happily married. The motive might indeed lie here. How Mrs Radeechy coped with the goings on with the ‘girls’ Ducane simply could not imagine; but he now understood enough about the mystery of married couples to know that there is practically nothing with which those extraordinary organisms cannot deal. Mrs Radeechy might well have been entirely tolerant about the girls. McGrath had described her as a ‘very cheerful lady’ and this agreed with other testimony. McGrath himself would, of course, have to be interrogated again and very much more ruthlessly and scientifically. This had been just a preliminary shaking of hands. It should not be too difficult, Ducane thought, to break McGrath down entirely, to threaten him and frighten him. But Ducane did not want to do this until he had made certain whether or not the newspaper could be persuaded to hand over the story. George Droysen had been despatched to conduct this delicate negotiation.

  At this point Ducane began to think about Jessica. The connection of thought was as follows. It is impossible to be a barrister without imagining oneself a judge, and Ducane’s imagination had often taken this flight. However, and this was another reason for Ducane’s ultimate disgust with life in the courts, the whole situation of ‘judging’ was abhorrent to him. He had watched his judges closely, and had come to the conclusion that no human being is worthy to be a judge. In theory, the judge represents simply the majesty and impartiality of the law whose instrument he is. In practice, because of the imprecision of law and the imperfection of man, the judge enjoys a considerable area of quite personal power which he may or may not exercise wisely. Ducane’s rational mind knew that there had to be law courts and that English law was on the whole good law and English judges good judges. But he detested that confrontation between the prisoner in the dock and the judge, dressed so like a king or a pope, seated up above him. His irrational heart, perceptive of the pride of judges, sickened and said it should not be thus; and said it the more passionately since there was that in Ducane which wanted to be a judge.

  Ducane knew, and knew it in a half-guilty, half-annoyed way as if he had been eavesdropping, that there were moments when he had said to himself, “I alone of all these people am good enough, am humble enough, to be a judge”. Ducane was capable of picturing himself as not only aspiring to be, but as actually being, the just man and the just judge. He did not rightly know what to do with these visions. Sometimes he took them, now that he had removed himself from the possibility of actually becoming a real judge, for a sort of harmless idealism. Sometimes they seemed to him the most corrupting influences in his life.

  What Ducane was experiencing, in this form peculiar to him of imagining himself as a judge, was, though this was not entirely clear in his mind, one of the great paradoxes of morality, namely that in order to become good it may be necessary to imagine oneself good, and yet such imagining may also be the very thing which renders improvement impossible, either because of surreptitious complacency or because of some deeper blasphemous infection which is set up when goodness is thought about in the wrong way
. To become good it may be necessary to think about virtue; although unreflective simple people may achieve a thoughtless excellence. Ducane was in any case highly reflective and had from childhood quite explicitly set before himself the aim of becoming a good man; and although he had little of the demoniac in his nature there was a devil of pride, a stiff Calvinistic Scottish devil, who was quite capable of bringing Ducane to utter damnation, and Ducane knew this perfectly well.

  This metaphysical dilemma was present to him at times not in any clear conceptual form but rather as an atmosphere, a feeling of bewildered guilt which was almost sexual in quality and not altogether unpleasant. If Ducane had believed in God, which he had not done since he abandoned, at the age of fifteen, the strict low church Glaswegian Protestantism in which he had been brought up, he would have prayed, instantly and hard, whenever he perceived this feeling coming on. As it was he endured it grimly, as it were with his eyes tight shut, trying not to let it proliferate into something interesting. This feeling, which came to him naturally whenever he experienced power, especially rather formal power, over another person, had now been generated by his questioning of McGrath. And his faintly excited sense of having power over McGrath put him in mind of another person over whom he had power, and that was Jessica.

  Ducane was ruefully aware that his remorse about his behaviour to Jessica was at least partly compounded of distress at cutting, as Jessica’s rather muddled lover, a figure which was indubitably not that of the good man. In fact Ducane had long ago made up his mind that he was a man who simply must not have love affairs, and the adventure with Jessica was really, as he now forced himself sternly to see, a clear case of seeing and approving the better and doing the worse. However, as he also believed, the only point of severity with the past is improvement of the future. Given all this muddle, what was the right thing to do now? Could he, involved as he was in this mess of his own creating, be or even intelligibly attempt to be, the just judge where poor Jess was concerned? How could he sufficiently separate himself from it, how could he judge the mistake when he was the mistake? Ducane’s thoughts were further confused here by the familiar accusing voice which informed him that he was only so anxious now to simplify his life in order to have a clear conscience, or more grossly a clear field, for his highly significant commitment to Kate. Yet was it not plain that he ought, whatever his motives for it might be, to break absolutely with Jessica and to see her no more? Poor Jessica, he thought, oh God, poor Jessica.