The Nice and the Good

by Iris Murdoch

  The person who had opened the door for him was a tall woman with a very dark complexion, so dark that he took her at first for an Indian, dressed in a white dressing gown, her head wrapped in a towel. Possibly the white turban had suggested India. There was something very surprising about the woman though Ducane could not at first make out what it was. The room was a little obscure and hazy, as the curtains were half pulled.

  “I can’t abide cats, and they take things anyway, they’re half starving and they scratch; my mother told me I had one jump on my pram and it was sitting there right on my face and ever since if there’s a cat in the room I can’t get my proper breath, funny isn’t it. Have you got a thing about cats yourself?”

  “No, I don’t mind cats,” said Ducane. “I’m sorry to trouble you, but I’m looking for Mr McGrath.”

  “Are you a policeman?”

  The question interested Ducane. “No. Is Mr McGrath expecting the police?”

  “I don’t know what he’s expecting. I’m expecting the police. I’m expecting the Bomb. You’ve got a sort of hunting look.”

  “Well, I’m not a policeman,” said Ducane. But I’m the next best thing, he thought with a little shame.

  “McGrath’s not here. He’ll be back soon though. You can wait if you like.”

  Ducane noticed with some surprise that his agitation had now completely disappeared, being replaced by a sort of calm excited interest. He felt physically at ease. He could well believe that he had a hunting look and he wore it coolly. He began to inspect his surroundings, starting with the woman who confronted him.

  The tall white-clad woman in the turban was certainly not Indian. Her complexion was rather dark and wisps of almost black hair could be seen escaping from the towel, but her eyes were of an intense opaque blue, the thick dark blue of a Northern sea in bright clouded light. Ducane judged her to be some sort of Celt. She stood before him, equally staring, with a relaxed dignity, her arms hanging by her sides, her eyes calm and slightly vague, like a priestess at the top of some immensely long stone staircase who sees the distant procession that wends its way slowly towards her mystery.

  Startled by this sudden vision, Ducane lowered his eyes. He had been staring at her in a way that was scarcely polite and, it now seemed to him, for some time.

  “Don’t tell me who you are, let me guess.”

  “I’m just from—” Ducane began hastily.

  “Oh never mind. In case you’re wondering who the hell I am, I’m Judy McGrath, Mrs McGrath that is, not old Mrs McGrath of course, she’s dead these ten years the old bitch. I’m McGrath’s wife, God help me; well, you’d hardly think I was his mother, would you, though I’m not what I was when I won the beauty competition at Rhyl. I did win it, you know, what are you looking like that for? I’ll show you a picture. You married?”

  “No.”

  “I thought you were a bachelor, they have a sort of fresh unused look. Queer?”

  “No.”

  “Not that you’d tell me. It’s their mothers that do it to them, the old bitches. Why don’t you sit down, there’s no charge. Drink some pink wine, it tastes like hell but at least it’s alcohol.”

  Ducane sat down, on a sofa covered with a thin flower-printed bedspread, which had been tucked down into the back of the seat. The room was cluttered and stuffy and smelt of cosmetics. A second door, half open, showed a darkened space beyond. The furniture, apart from the sofa, consisted of low dwarfish chairs with plastic upholstery and modern highly varnished coffee tables, grouped round a television set in the corner. The tables were covered with slightly dusty trinkets, little vases, fancy ash-trays, china animals. A rather expensive-looking camera lay upon one of the chairs. A white frilly petticoat was extended upon the linoleum reaching into the darkened doorway. The place had somehow the air of a shop or a waiting room, an un-confident provisional faintly desperate air, an atmosphere of boredom, an atmosphere perhaps of Mrs McGrath’s boredom.

  “Oh God I was so bored when you arrived!” said Mrs McGrath. “It’s so boring just waiting.”

  What does she wait for, Ducane wondered. Somehow it was plain that it was not her husband. “No, thank you,” he said to the glass of wine she was holding out to him. He noticed that she was holding something in her other hand which turned out to be a hand mirror.

  “Toffee nose, eh? I’m legally married to McGrath, you know, would you like to see my passport? Or do you think I’m going to put a spell on you? I’m not a nigger, I’m as good as you are. Or are you anti-Welsh? You’d be surprised how many people are. Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief, and all that, and they really believe it. I’m Welsh Australian actually, at least my parents were Welsh Australian only they came home and I was born in Rhyl where I won the beauty competition. I could have been a model. You English?”

  “Scottish.”

  “Christ, like McGrath, except he isn’t, he’s a South London hyena, he was born in Croydon. My name’s Judy, by the way. Oh, beg pardon, I told you. Excuse me while I change.”

  Mrs McGrath disappeared into the next room, scooping up the extended petticoat as she went by. She returned a moment later dressed in a very short green cotton dress and brushing out her blackish hair. Her hair, abundant and wiry, swept down on to her neck in a thick homogeneous bundle, rounded at the end, giving her a somewhat Egyptian look.

  Ducane rose to his feet. He had become aware that what was remarkable about Mrs McGrath was simply that she was a very beautiful woman. He said, “May I change my mind and have some wine.”

  “That’s matey of you. Christ, what ghastly plonk. Here’s yours. Sit down, sit down. I’m going to sit beside you. There. Mind if I go on brushing my hair? No, hard luck, I’m wearing tights, there’s nothing to see.”

  Mrs McGrath, now seated beside Ducane, had ostentatiously crossed her legs. He sipped the pink wine. If she was indeed putting a spell on him he felt now that he did not mind it. The room had begun to smell of alcohol, or perhaps it was Mrs McGrath who smelt of alcohol. Ducane realised that she was a little tipsy. He turned to look at her.

  The low-cut green dress revealed the dusky line between two round docile tucked-in white breasts. Mrs McGrath’s face, which seemed without make-up, now looked paler, transparently creamy under an even brown tan. The wiry black hair crackled and lifted under the even strokes of the brush. Dark Lady, thought Ducane. He thought, Circe.

  The cold dark blue eyes regarded him with the calm vague look. Mrs McGrath, still brushing, reached her left hand for her own glass. “Pip pip!” She clinked her glass gently against Ducane’s and with a sinewy movement of her wrist caressed the side of his hand slowly with the back of hers. The movement of the brush stopped.

  Mrs McGrath’s hand was still in contact with Ducane’s. Ducane had an intense localised sensation of being burnt while at the same time a long warm spear pierced into the centre of his body. He did not remove his hand.

  The brush fell to the floor. Mrs McGrath’s right hand collected her glass and Ducane’s, holding them rim to rim and set them down on one of the tables. Her left hand now began to curl snake-like round his, the fingers slowly crossing his palm and tightening.

  Ducane stared into Mrs McGrath’s now very drowsy blue eyes. She leaned gradually forward and laid her lips very gently upon his lips. For a second or two they stayed thus quietly lip to lip. Then Mrs McGrath slid her arms round his shoulders and crushed herself violently against him, forcing his lips apart. Ducane felt her tongue and her teeth. A moment later he had detached himself and stood up.

  Mrs McGrath remained motionless, both hands raised in the attitude into which he had flung her on rising. Her North Sea eyes were narrow now, amused, predatory and shrewd. She said softly, “Mr Honeyman, Mr Honeyman, I like you, I like you.”

  Ducane reflected a good deal afterwards about his conduct on this occasion and could not later acquit himself of having quite disgracefully ‘let things happen’. But at the moment what he mainly felt was an intense irresponsible
physical delight, a delight connected with the exact detail of this recent set of occurrences, as if all their movements from the moment at which their hands touched had composed themselves into a vibrating pattern suspended within his nervous system. He felt the outraged joy of someone round whose neck an absurdly bulky garland of flowers has quite unexpectedly been thrown. With this he felt too the immediate need to be absolutely explicit with Mrs McGrath and let her know the worst.

  He said very quickly, “Mrs McGrath, it is true that I am not a police officer, but I am a representative of the government department in which your husband works. I’m afraid your husband is in trouble and I have come here to ask him some rather unpleasant questions.”

  “What’s your name?” said Judy McGrath, relaxing her pose.

  “John Ducane.”

  “You’re sweet.”

  Ducane sat down cautiously on one of the coffee tables, carefully pushing a clover-spotted china pig family out of the way. “I’m afraid this may prove a serious matter—”

  “You’re very sweet. Do you know that? Drink some more pink wine. What do you want McGrath to tell you? Maybe I can tell you?”

  Ducane thought quickly. Shall I? he wondered. And some professional toughness in him, perhaps reinforced by his natural guilt, now ebbing back through his delighted nerves, said yes. He said, giving her every warning by the gravity of his look, “Mrs McGrath, your husband was blackmailing Mr Radeechy.”

  Judy McGrath no longer had the eyes of a priestess. She looked at Ducane shrewdly yet trustfully. She looked at him as she might have looked at an old friend who was conveying bad news. After a moment she said, “He’ll lose his job, I suppose?”

  “How much did Radeechy give him to keep quiet?” asked Ducane. He held her in a cool almost cynical gaze, and yet it seemed to him afterwards that there was as much passion concealed in this questioning and answering as there had been in the flurry that preceded it.

  “I don’t know. Not much. Peter isn’t a man with big ideas. He ate off newspapers all his childhood.”

  Ducane gave a long sigh. He stood up again.

  While he was framing his next question there was a sound of footsteps on the stairs. They turned instantly to each other. She said in a low voice, “That’s him now. We’ll meet again Mr Honeyman, we’ll meet again.”

  The door opened and McGrath came in.

  Ducane’s plan of surprising McGrath had certainly succeeded. McGrath stood still in the doorway with his pink mouth open staring at Ducane. Then his features crinkled into an alarmed furtive frown and he turned towards his wife with a lumbering violent movement.

  “Good evening, McGrath,” said Ducane smoothly. He felt alert and cold.

  “Well, I’m off to the pub,” said Judy McGrath. She picked up her handbag from the sofa and went to the door. As McGrath, now again looking at Ducane, did not move, she pushed him out of her way. He banged the door to after her with his foot.

  “I’m sorry to intrude,” said Ducane. “I find I have to ask some more questions.”

  “Well?”

  There was a dangerous sense of equality in the air. McGrath still contained the violence of the arrested gesture towards his wife. Ducane thought, I must rush him. He said, “McGrath, you were blackmailing Radeechy.”

  “Did my wife tell you that?”

  “No. Radeechy’s papers told us. As you know, the penalties for blackmail are very severe indeed.”

  “It wasn’t blackmail,” said McGrath. He leaned back against the door.

  “Well, let us say that Radeechy rewarded you for keeping your mouth shut. Frankly, McGrath, I’m not interested in you, and if you will now tell me the whole truth I’ll do my best to get you off. If not, the law will take its course with you.”

  “I don’t understand,” said McGrath. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  “Come, come. We know you extorted money from Radeechy. I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you to wonder whether you were partly responsible for his death?”

  “Me?” McGrath came forward and gripped the back of the sofa. He had started to think now and had plumped his face out with a look of upset and peevish self-righteousness. “He never minded me. He never worried about me. I liked him. We were friends.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t believe you,” said Ducane. “But what I want to know now—”

  “It wasn’t blackmail,” said McGrath, “and you couldn’t prove it was. Mr Radeechy gave me money for what I did. I didn’t worry him at all, it couldn’t have been because of me, you just ask Mr Biranne, he’ll tell you what it was like up there at Mr Radeechy’s place. I never threatened Mr Radeechy with anything, you couldn’t prove it was blackmail, I mean it wasn’t blackmail, the old gentleman just liked me, he liked me and he paid me generous like, that’s all it was.”

  Ducane stepped back. His mind twisted and darted to catch the thing which had been thrown at it so unexpectedly. He controlled his face. He said coolly, “Mr Biranne. Yes, of course. He was there quite a lot, wasn’t he.”

  “I’ll say he was,” said McGrath, “and he’ll tell you what it was like between me and the old fellow. Me a blackmailer! Why I wouldn’t hurt a fly! I was—”

  McGrath went on protesting.

  Ducane thought, so Biranne was lying about his relations with Radeechy. Why? Why? Why?

  Fourteen

  THE three women were walking slowly along the edge of the sea. The smooth sea was a light luminous uniform colour of blue, scattered over with twinkling, shifting gems of brightness, and divided by a thin dark blue line from the more pallid empty blue sky, into which on such a day it seemed that one could look infinitely far. There had been a few natives on the beach that morning, but now they had gone away in the dead time of the early afternoon. On the curve of the open green hillside just inland, like a figure in the background of a painting by Uccello, Barbara could be seen riding her new pony.

  Outlined against the pale blue light, the figures of the women seemed monumental in the empty scene. They walked slowly and lazily in single file, Paula first, dressed in a plain shift of yellow cotton, Mary next in a white dress covered with small blue daisies, and Kate last, in a purplish reddish dress of South Sea island flowers. Kate, wearing her canvas shoes, was walking along with her feet in the sea. At low tide there was a little sand at the sea’s edge and she was walking upon the sand. The other two walked higher up, upon the crest of mauve and white pebbles.

  Paula was twisting her wedding ring round and round upon her thin finger. She had often felt inclined to throw the ring into the sea, and been prevented by some almost superstitious scruple. She was thinking now, what on earth shall I do? She had just received a postcard from Eric posted in Singapore. Something about the slow progress across the globe of her ex-lover appalled and paralysed her. Her first reaction had been one of sheer terror. Yet it was possible that she had a genuine duty here; and in the light of that word ‘duty’ she had found herself able once more to reflect. Perhaps Eric’s mind, wounded and crippled by her fault, could only be healed by her ministration? She need not after all now marry Eric, or become again his mistress, as it had seemed to her in the first shock and for no very clear reason, that she must. All that was necessary was that she should resolutely confront him, talk to him with reason and kindness, talk if necessary on and on and on. He had gone away too quickly and she had been so cravenly glad of this. She had never understood that situation, she had never really contemplated it, she had shuffled it off. Perhaps if she tried now to understand it and to help Eric to understand it she would do them both some good of which at present she had not even the conception. It was simply that the idea of confronting Eric was an idea of such pure and awful pain that she could not in any way manipulate it in her thought.

  I never understood what happened, Paula thought. Everything was so dreadful that I stopped thinking. I never tried to see what it was like for Richard either. If I had I might have tried to stop him from going away. But I hated myself a
nd the muddle of it all so much, I let Richard go just because I wanted to be left alone. I ought to have fought Richard then with my intelligence. Yet it all seemed inevitable and perhaps it was. Is it fruitless to think about the past and build up coherent pictures of how one’s life went wrong? I have never believed in remorse and repentance. But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.

  She looked away over the sinister silent blue surface of the Eric-bearing sea. If I could think clearly now, she wondered, about what I did then could I do us all some good? Then she reflected that this ‘us all’ seemed to include Richard; yet there was nothing further in the rest of time that she could do for Richard except leave him utterly alone. It was Eric, not Richard, whom she might have now the power to help, and she must save her wits from crazy fear by thinking on the problem of how to do it. I must think it all out beforehand, she thought, and I must be in control. Eric could make me do things, that was what was so dreadful. Of course Paula had revealed her trouble to no one. She preserved it in her private heart like the awful bloody arcana of a mystical religion.

  Mary was thinking, suppose I were to marry Willy and take him right away? The idea was vague, wonderful, with its sudden suggestion of purpose, of space, of change. It was a surprise idea. And yet why not? Ducane had been right when he said that she had settled down to feeling inferior to Willy. She had allowed Willy to cast a bad sleepy spell upon both of them. What she needed now was will, some freshness out of her own soul to break that spell. I’ve never had gaiety of my own, thought Mary. Alistair was gay, the gaiety of our marriage was all his. I am naturally an anxious person, she thought, stupidly, wickedly anxious. Even now, as I walk along beside this blue sea covered with sugary light I see it all through a veil of anxiety. My world is a brown world, a dim spotty soupy world like an old photograph. Can I change all this for Willy’s sake? There is a grace of the gods which sends goodness. Perhaps there is a grace of the gods which sends joy. Perhaps indeed they are the same thing and another name for this thing is hope. If I could only believe a little more in happiness I could control Willy, I could save Willy.