The Nice and the Good

by Iris Murdoch

  “What did the Scotland Yard boys think of all this? Won’t they want to take it over?”

  “They don’t know! I took the finger-prints myself. I told them some yarn.”

  “Mmm. Let’s not be in trouble later!”

  “Let me decide this, Octavian. We shall have to tell the police. But I don’t want Biranne startled just yet.”

  “You’re not going to ask him to explain?”

  “Not yet. I want to do this thing properly. I want another lead. I want Helen of Troy. She’s the missing link now.”

  Ducane’s Bentley moved slowly along with the rush hour traffic over the curved terracotta-coloured surface of the Mall. Clouds of thick heat eddied across the crawling noise of the cars and cast a distorting haze upon the immobile trees of St James’s Park, their midsummer fullness already drooping. It was the sort of moment when, on a hot evening, London gives an indolent sigh of despair. There is a pointlessness of summer London more awful than anything which fogs or early afternoon twilights are able to evoke, a summer mood of yawning and glazing eyes and little nightmare-ridden sleeps in bored and desperate rooms. With this ennui, evil comes creeping through the city, the evil of indifference and sleepiness and lack of care. At such a time the long-fought temptation is wearily yielded to, and the long-dreamt-of crime is with shoulder-shrugging casualness committed at last.

  Ducane, who was sitting in the front of the car with Fivey, felt this miasma creeping about him along the crowded pavements which were passing him by with such dream-like slowness. Everything in his life seemed to have become inflated and distorted and grotesque. He had told a lie to Jessica. He had told her that evening conferences in the office prevented him from coming to see her this week. He had promised to see her next week. He felt himself increasingly cornered by Jessica, as if the girl was an entangling power which was growing. At moments, almost with cynicism, he thought, grow then, and make me brutal, make me a demon with a demon’s strength. Then the sense of these thoughts as utterly evil would reduce him again to an elementary confusion.

  His longing to see Kate had meanwhile become alarmingly intense, so intense that he had been tempted that morning, instead of going to Scotland Yard, to tell Fivey to drive him to Dorset. But he knew perfectly clearly that any gesture of this sort would introduce an ugly and perhaps irreparable disorder into the harmonious pattern which Kate herself had so confidently invented, decreed and imposed. There was a kind of sweet and innocent unconsciousness in his relations with Kate from which the sharply problematic, even the unexpected, must be kept far away. There could be great affection, there could be deep love, but there must be no moments of frenzy. Need there could be, but steady orderly need, not clutching need. How precarious it all now seemed to him, this big golden good round which he was now arranging his existence and for the sake of which he was killing Jessica’s love. I wonder if I should tell Kate everything about Jessica, he wondered, and with an élan of relief imagined himself kneeling on the floor with his head on Kate’s knee. But no, he thought, it would hurt her terribly, and, he ruefully thought, it would expose me as being half a liar. I must tell her, but later, later, later, when it’s all long finished and no longer an agony. To tell her now would be entirely against the rules, her rules. I mustn’t involve Kate in any of my muddles. Her idea is that our relationship is to be simple and sunny, and simple and sunny I must faithfully make it to be.

  The discovery about Biranne had upset Ducane more than he had been prepared to reveal to Octavian. He did not at all like/having as a quarry a man whom he disliked, and whom he disliked for irrational and unworthy reasons. Ducane had for the moment lost, and this was perhaps the work of that wicked summer indolence, his usual sense of being compact and self-contained and presenting a hard working surface to the world. He felt sorry for himself, he felt menaced and vulnerable. In this state, people could ‘get inside him,’ knives could be inserted and turned. This was one reason why he had funked facing Jessica. There was a kind of extreme pain which Jessica could cause him and which, out of blind love, she had so far refrained from causing. He felt that if he came to her in this stripped enfeebled mood she would instinctively torment him to the utmost. Nor did Ducane now fancy having Biranne as an adversary. He shrank from the prospect of perhaps having power over the man. Whatever it was that had bound Biranne and Radeechy together it was something unpleasant, with what was to Ducane’s prophetic nostrils a rather eerie sort of unpleasantness. Whatever happened, it seemed likely that Ducane would shortly be involved in some sort of personal struggle with Biranne, for which, in his present state, he felt insufficiently compassionate, clear-headed, and indeed strong.

  There was also the curious matter of Mrs McGrath. Immediately after Ducane’s departure from McGrath’s house he had looked back on that incident with a little shame and some amusement and a certain surprised exhilaration. It was some time since the unexpected had entered Ducane’s life in quite that guise and it had seemed to him rather delightful. Later on it amused him less. His investigation was nebulous and tricky and indeed unsuccessful enough already without his complicating it by acting irresponsibly and indiscreetly. He could not afford to make mistakes. McGrath was an unscrupulous man, a blackmailer and a babbler to the press, and altogether not the sort of person whose wife higher civil servants in charge of confidential enquiries should be alleged to have been kissing. Ducane did not really think that, whatever Mrs McGrath might have said to her husband, there was any serious trouble McGrath could make for him. But it was the sort of thing which simply ought not to happen. More deeply he felt in retrospect depressed by the scene, as if some sleepy drug which he had swallowed with the pink wine were weighing on his senses still. Perhaps it was out of the somnolent ennui of the Circean chamber where Mrs McGrath waited that there had followed him away that sense of point-lessness which now so much took away his strength.

  The car was moving, more quickly now, along the Old Brompton Road in the direction of Ducane’s house in Earls Court. While these gloomy and debilitating thoughts had been occupying his mind, Ducane had been exchanging almost unconscious chat with Fivey about the weather and the predicted continuation of the ‘heat wave’. Ducane could not feel that he had made, with his servant, any notable progress, although he had in a quite physical way become more used to having him about the house and could now easily restrain his annoyance at the droning Jacobite songs and at hearing Fivey using the hall telephone to make bets on horses. Fivey had confided one more piece of information about his mother, that she had ‘taught him to steal from shops’. But when Ducane had tried to lead him on into revelations about his subsequent career in crime, his fellow Scotsman had just murmured mysteriously, “It’s a very hard world, Sir”. And questioned by Ducane about a photograph of a woman of indeterminate age which Fivey kept in his bedroom, had merely answered mournfully, “Far away and long ago, Sir, far away and long ago”. However in spite of these intimations of the bitterness of life, Fivey, also patently feeling himself more at home, was at times almost jaunty, his eyes lightening with a look of intelligence, almost amounting to a wink, as he met his master’s look, as if to say, I’m a rogue, but you’re one too, you know, in your own way. I doubt if there’s a ha’porth of difference between us. You’re just luckier than I am, that’s all. This quiet insolence rather pleased Ducane.

  As the car now turned into Bina Gardens Ducane was watching the slow, significant, majestic movements of Fivey’s very large and copiously freckled hands upon the steering wheel. As Ducane watched, he found that his own hand, which had been extended along the back of the seat, had somehow or other found its way down on to Fivey’s farther shoulder. Ducane considered the matter for a moment. He decided to leave it where it was. He even shifted it a little so that his fingers curved gently, without gripping, over the bone of the shoulder. The contact brought to Ducane the intense and immediate comfort which it now seemed to him he had been seeking for all day. Fivey gazed impassively straight ahead.

&
nbsp; Seventeen

  THE three women were in town. Paula had come up to buy books, Kate was on her usual mid-week visit, and Mary had been persuaded to come up because she ‘needed a change’. Mary had also come in order to encourage Pierce to leave Dorset, having skilfully prompted a luncheon invitation for him from the Pember-Smiths, who were about to set out for the Norfolk Broads where their new yacht was waiting. Mary hoped that Pierce’s school-fellow, Geoffrey Pember-Smith, might boast about the yacht to some effect over lunch, since Pierce had already been invited to accompany them to Norfolk. But she feared, or rather she knew, that her offspring would be simply counting the hours until he could rush back to the misery of his now almost complete non-communication with Barbara. Mary pitied his pain and was increasingly irritated by Barbara’s ostentatious insouciance, but there was nothing she could do. At moments she came near to thinking that just this useless dragging suffering of her son made the whole idea of living with Kate into a mistake. But if it had not been Barbara it would have been some other girl, the pains of a first love cannot be avoided, and it would be ridiculous to be too sorry for Pierce. All the same the situation depressed Mary, and she was vaguely afraid of Pierce being driven by Barbara into the commission of some sort of outrageous excess.

  Pierce had not of course confided in his mother, but she was glad to learn that he had confided in Willy. Willy was very fond of Pierce and discussing him with Willy she had had a deep reassuring feeling, as if Willy had already fallen into the role of Pierce’s father. Since Ducane had spoken the ‘liberating words’ in the beech wood Mary had felt much more at ease in Willy’s presence and had made him more at ease too. They talked more readily; and although their talk was still less intimate than she would have wished, Mary no longer had that doomed feeling of anguished needful separation which had used to paralyse her so much in his presence. She could touch him now more spontaneously, more playfully, and without desperation. She thought to herself, in a language that was new to her, I’ll make something of Willy yet, I’ll make something of him.

  The four of them had travelled up together by train and separated at Waterloo, Paula to go to Charing Cross Road, Kate to Harrods, Pierce to the Pember-Smiths, and Mary to have a quick lunch by herself in a coffee bar, for she had a plan of her own for the day about which she had spoken to nobody.

  Mary gave up her ticket at Gunnersbury station and walked up the ramp toward the road. The summer melancholy of suburban London, gritty, contingent, trivial, hung over the scene like an old familiar smell and the unforeseeable physical operations of memory made her at each step tremble with recognition. It was many years since she had been here.

  She walked along, and although she could not before have pictured the road in her mind, she remembered each house. It was as if out of some depth, adorned with the significance of the past, each thing came up into a frame which was placed ready for it just the moment before: a carved gate-post, an oval of stained glass in a front door, a sweep of clematis against a trellised wall, clammy dark green moss upon a red tiled path, a lamp post with a lonely look upon a circle of pavement. These houses, ‘the older larger houses’ as she had thought of them then, were singularly unchanged. In the torpor of the afternoon the remembered road had the slightly menacing and elusive familiarity of a place in a dream when one thinks: I have been here, yet where is it and what is going to happen? The colours too seemed like dream colours, vivid and yet somehow enclosed and dulled, not reflecting light, as if they were intense colours seen in darkness. And the streets were empty as in a dream.

  Mary turned a corner and for a moment did not recognise the scene at all. Houses had disappeared. Tall blocks of flats and huge garages had taken their place. Now there were a few cars, but still nobody walking on the pavements. Mary frowned away from her eyes the ghostly crowding images of things no longer there, and thought with a sudden surprised pain, perhaps our house too will have simply disappeared. But by now she had reached the end of the little road and could see, half way down upon the left, the small semi-detached house where she had lived with Alistair during the four years of their marriage.

  They had been the first inhabitants of that house, which had been built after the war. The frail municipal saplings of the road, which she now recognised as prunus and whose name then she had never troubled to learn, had grown into big mature trees. Alistair, a trifle younger than his wife, had been too young to serve in the war, and had been still doing his chartered accountancy exams when he had brought his young bride to the little house in Gunnersbury. Mary steadied herself, putting her hand on to the low wall at the corner of the road, aware, almost as if it were a separate personality, of her hand’s sudden memory of the surface of the wall, the slightly sharp crumbly stones, and the urban moss, which, like the moss upon the red tiled path, contrived to remain damp and clammy even in the hottest sun.

  With the touch of her hand upon the wall there came the unexpected image of a piano, their old upright piano long since sold, yet now indelibly associated with the mossy wall in virtue of some lost thought which Mary must have thought once as she paused with her shopping bag at the corner of the road. Alistair had a beautiful baritone voice and they had often sung together, he playing the piano, she standing with her hands on his shoulders, head tossed back in an abandonment of song. This was a purely happy memory and she could recall even now that feeling of her face as it were dissolving into an immediate joy. Alistair could play and sing. He was also a fairly good painter, and a talented poet, and a writer, and he was good at chess, and a fencer, and a formidable tennis player. As she suddenly rehearsed these things in her mind she thought, he had so many accomplishments. And it occurred to her as she caressed the wall that she must have rehearsed these things, just as she had done now, when she was deciding to marry him. Only it occurred to her that the word ‘accomplishments’ belonged not to then but to now, and that it was a sad and narrowing word.

  That Mary had had the nerve to come back and see the little house in Gunnersbury was due in some obscure way to Willy. She had not spoken to him about it and indeed had never talked to him about Alistair at all. But with the hardening of her resolution to make something of Willy had come a sense of having somehow shirked the past, of having too cravenly put it away. She must be able to talk to Willy about Alistair and about exactly how things were and about what happened. And in order to do this she felt that she had to go back, to revive and refresh those dull old memories and those dull old pains. She had, in a quite new way which was now possible, to confront her husband.

  How absolute and absorbing that confrontation would be she had not foreseen. She had not foreseen the clematis and the tiled path and the wall. Willy seemed a poor shadow now compared with the bursting reality of these things. The torpid summer atmosphere of the road whose smell, a dusty faintly tarry smell, she recognised so well, was the atmosphere of her marriage, a gradual sense not so much of being trapped as of a contraction, of things becoming smaller and less bright. Was it just that, in some quite vulgar worldly way, she had been disappointed in finding her husband less distinguished than she had imagined? Perhaps I ought not to have married him, Mary thought, perhaps I didn’t love him quite enough. Yet did it make any sense to make that judgment now? What could the wall and the moss really tell her about the mind and heart of a girl of twenty-three? She recalled now, though more as a physical object than as an intellectual one, Alistair’s enormous novel, which she had so devotedly typed out, and which she had retyped with less enthusiasm after the first two copies had become tattered almost to pieces after being sent to twenty publishers. The novel still existed. She had discovered it only a year ago in a trunk and had felt physically sick at turning its pages.

  Mary now began to walk slowly down the far side of the road. She could see already that the yellow privet hedge which she and Alistair had planted had been taken away and the creosoted fence had been taken away and a low brick wall with a crenellated top had been put there instead. The small fro
nt garden, which she and Alistair had planted with roses, was entirely paved now except for two beds out of which large sprawling rosemary bushes leaned to sweep the paving stones with their bluish branches. Now Mary, almost opposite the house, could see with a shock the light of a farther window within the darkness of the front room. They must have knocked down the wall between the two downstairs rooms. She and Alistair had often discussed doing so. She stopped and looked across. The house seemed deserted, the street deserted. She touched the smooth close-grained surface of the now thick and robust trunk of one of the prunus trees. The next tree was still missing, the one which the swerving car had knocked over.

  Mary felt sick and faint, holding on to the sturdy tree. The shape of the downstairs windows brought back to her that last evening, a summer evening with a lazy pointless atmosphere like the atmosphere which she was breathing now. She and Alistair had been quarrelling. What about? There was an atmosphere of quarrel, not serious, usual, a tired summer evening quarrel. She could see the letter in his hand which he was going to take to the post. She could not see his face. Perhaps she had not looked at his face. She had come to the window to watch him go down the path and step off the pavement and she had seen everything, heard everything: the sudden swerving car in the quietness of the road, the screech of brakes, Alistair’s hesitation, his leap for safety which took him in fact right under the wheels, his hand thrown upward, his terrible, terrible cry.

  Why ever did I come here, thought Mary. I didn’t know it would be like this. And, as if in substance the very same, the old thoughts came crowding to her. If only I had called him back, or tapped on the window, or said just one more sentence to him, or gone with him, as I might have done if we hadn’t been quarrelling. Anything, anything might have broken that long long chain of causes that brought him and that motor car together in that moment of time. Tears began to stream down Mary’s face. She detached herself from the tree and began to walk on. She found herself saying half aloud what she had said then crazily over and over to the people who crowded round her on the pavement. “You see, so few cars come down our road. So few cars come down our road.”