The Nice and the Good

by Iris Murdoch

  “Are you all right, John?”

  They had walked up the lane in silence. The variety of willow herb which is known as ‘codlins and cream’ filled the narrow closed-in lane with its sickly smell. A wren with uplifted tail moved in the brown darkness of the hedge, accompanying them up the hill.

  “I’m fine,” said Ducane in a slightly wild voice. “It’s just that I have bad dreams.”

  “Do you mean dreams at night, or thoughts?”

  “Both.”

  Ducane had dreamed last night that he had killed some woman, whose identity he could not discover, and was attempting to hide the body under a heap of dead pigeons when he was detected by a terrifying intruder. The intruder was Biranne.

  “Tell me about them,” said Mary.

  Why do I always have to be helping people, thought Ducane, and getting no help myself? I wish someone could help me. I wish Mary could. He said, “It’s all someone else’s secret.”

  “Sit down here a minute.” They had reached the wood. Mary sat down on the fallen tree trunk and Ducane sat beside her. He began hacking away with his foot at some parchment-coloured fungus which was growing in wavy layers underneath the curve of the tree. The delicate brown undersides of the fungus, finely pleated as a girl’s dress lay fragmented upon the dry beach leaves. Along the bank beside them a pair of bullfinches foraged ponderously in the small jungle of cow parsley and angelica.

  “Have you quarrelled with Kate?” asked Mary. She did not look at him. She had put the basket on the ground and regarded it, rocking it slightly with a brown sandalled foot.

  She is observant, he thought. Well, it must be fairly obvious. “Yes. But that’s not really—not all.”

  “Kate will soon come round, you know she will, she’ll mend things. She always does. She loves you very much. What’s the other thing, the rest?”

  “I have to make a decision about somebody.”

  “A girl?”

  Her question slightly surprised him. “No, a man. It’s a rather important decision which affects this person’s whole life, and I feel particularly rotten about having to make it as I’m feeling at the moment so—jumbled and immoral.”

  “Jumbled and immoral.” Mary repeated this curious phrase as if she knew exactly what it meant. “But you know how to make the decision, I mean you know the machinery of the decision?”

  “Yes. I know how to make the decision.”

  “Then shouldn’t you just think about the decision and not about yourself? Let the machinery work and keep it clear of the jumble?”

  “You are perfectly right,” he said. He felt extraordinarily calmed by Mary’s presence. In a curious way he was pleased that she had not disputed his self-accusation but had simply given him the correct reply. She assured him somehow of the existence of a permanent moral background. He thought, she is under the same orders as myself. He found that he had picked up the hem of Mary’s dress and was moving it between his fingers. She was wearing a mauve dress of crepe-like wrinkled stuff with a full skirt. As he felt the material he thought suddenly of Kate’s red striped dress and of Judy’s dress with the blue and green flowers. Girls and their dresses.

  He said quickly, letting go of the hem, “Mary, I hope you won’t mind my saying how very glad I am about you and Willy.”

  “Nothing’s—fixed, you know.”

  “Yes, I know. But I’m so glad. Give my love to Willy. I won’t delay you now and I think I won’t come any further.”

  “All right. You will talk to Paula, won’t you, and to Pierce?”

  “Yes. I’ll do it straightaway. Whichever of them I meet first!”

  They stood up. Mary turned her lean sallow head towards him, brushing back her hair. Her eyes were vague in the hot dappled half light. They stood a moment awkwardly, and then with gestures of salutation parted in silence.

  Thirty-two

  “WHAT are you doing in there, Mary?”

  “Washing up, Willy.”

  “Don’t—I’ll do it later. Come and talk to me.”

  “I’ve put the raspberries in a bowl. I’ve put some sugar on them. We might eat them for tea.”

  “We might.”

  Meals with Willy were still rare, strange, like a picnic, like a eucharist.

  Mary came back into the sitting-room wiping her hands on the drying-up cloth. The heat in the room made a kind of positive velvety silence in which one moved slowly as if swimming.

  Willy was stretched out in his armchair beside the hearth. The front of his shirt was open to the waist revealing a curly mat of grey hair which looked like a shaggy undergarment. He had dug his fingers into the mat and was scratching abstractedly. Mary placed a chair between him and the table and sat down, putting one hand on his shoulder. It was not like a caress, but more like the firm grasping of something loved yet inanimate, like the steering wheel of a car.

  “Is Paula coming for the Aeneid? I’m so glad you persuaded her to read.”

  “No, she scratched today.”

  “How far have you got?”

  “Book six.”

  “What’s happening?”

  “Aeneas has descended to the underworld.”

  “And what’s he doing there?”

  “He has just met the shade of his helmsman Palinurus. Palinurus fell asleep and fell off the stern of the ship and was drowned. As his body is unburied Charon will not carry him across the Styx. But he is told that the people near to where he died will establish a tomb and a cult in his memory, and the region will bear his name. This news cheers the poor fellow up more than somewhat!”

  Willy’s singsong recital oppressed Mary’s heart. She said, “Do you think everyone ought to descend at some time to the underworld?”

  “You mean in search of wisdom or something?”

  “Yes.”

  “Certainly not! It’s very dark and stuffy and one is more likely to feel frightened than to learn anything. Let the schoolroom of life be a light airy well-lighted place!”

  Mary remembered the squealing brakes and the awful cry. She ought to tell all this to Willy. Since she had told John she ought to tell Willy. Only he couldn’t make it easy the way John could. And she knew that today she was to be clumsy with him and denuded of grace.

  She said, “Do you think you learnt anything in that place?”

  “In Dachau? Certainly. I learnt how to keep warm by rubbing myself against a wall, how to be almost invisible when the guards came round, how to have very very long sexual fantasies—”

  “Sorry. I’m being stupid.”

  “No, you’re not, my dear. But very few ordeals are redemptive and I doubt if the descent into hell teaches anything new. It can only hasten processes which are already in existence, and usually this just means that it degrades. You see, in hell one lacks the energy for any good change. This indeed is the meaning of hell.”

  “I suppose at any rate it shows one what one is.”

  “Sometimes not even that. After all, what is one? We are shadows, Mary, shadows.”

  “I’m sure you were not degraded.”

  “Come, come, this is gloomy talk for a lovely girl on a lovely day.”

  “Willy, will you teach me German again—later on?”

  “If you wish it, my child. But why bother about learning German? It’s not very important. Almost anything is more important than learning German.”

  “But I can’t share anything with you,” she said, “your memories, your language, your music, your work, nothing. I’m just—I’m just—a woman.”

  “A woman. But isn’t that everything?”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  She got up and went over to the window. The window ledge was dusty and a dead fly, suspended on a spider’s thread, hung motionless against the glass of the open casement. Mary thought, I must clean the place. The Swiss binoculars, their grey leather shafts veneered with dust, lay upon the ledge and Mary lifted them absently. In the magic circle she saw the edge of the sea, the little whitish ripple curlin
g against the dry stones. Then there were two big dark hunched-up figures. They were Ducane and Paula, sitting just beside the water, deep in talk. Mary put the glasses down irritably.

  “Mary.”

  “Yes, Willy.”

  “Come back here.”

  She came back, vague, uneasy, and standing over him thrust her fingers into his white silky hair at the centre of the brow.

  “Mary, I can never marry you, I can never marry anybody.”

  Mary’s fingers stiffened. Then she drew them back through the fine hair and moved them over his brow, spreading the light perspiration with her fingertips. “That’s all right, Willy.”

  “Forgive me, my dear.”

  “It’s all right. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

  “You haven’t bothered me. You’ve done me ever so much good. You’ve made me twice as much alive.”

  “I’m glad—”

  “I’m eating so much now. I shall get as fat as Octavian.”

  “I’m glad. I wish Kate hadn’t talked so much about us though.”

  “It’ll blow over. We shall be as before.”

  “Theo will be glad. He thought he’d lost you.”

  “Theo is an ass.”

  “We shall be as before.” She caressed his brow, staring over his head at the bookshelves. She did not want to be as before. She wanted great changes in her life. She grappled clumsily with a great obscure pain which had risen up in front of her like a bear.

  “Mary, I love you. Don’t be hurt by me.”

  “I can’t help being hurt—” she said.

  “Cheer up. I can’t give you anything but love, baby, that’s the only thing I’ve plenty of, baby.”

  “Don’t, Willy. I’m sorry I disturbed things as they were. I’ve been a fool.”

  “You’ve been a divine fool and you’ve disturbed nothing.”

  “It’s this interminable summer. I wish it would end. Sorry, I’m talking nonsense.”

  “You need a holiday.”

  “Yes, I need a holiday.”

  “I think I shall get away myself, go to London maybe.”

  “That’s right.”

  What has happened, thought Mary. She moved away, coming apart from him with a kind of horror, as if a human limb were to break off, softly, easily, in a dream. She knew that a certain joy which she had taken in him might never come to her again, the joy of veiled anticipation and purpose. Some precious ambiguous possibility, which would have remained intact for ever, had been taken from them.

  “What ees eet?”

  “I’m sorry, Willy, I’m terribly sorry.”

  Tears came to her now, wrapping her whole head in a quick storm. To hide them she moved to the window and picked up the binoculars again, blinking the tears away. She stared unseeingly into a bright circle of light. Then after a moment her grip on the glasses tightened. “Willy, something perfectly extraordinary is going on down there.”

  Thirty-three

  “PAULA.”

  “Oh, hello, John.”

  “May I walk along with you?”

  “Yes, surely.”

  “Where are the twins?”

  “Out swimming with Barbie. That’s them out there.”

  Three heads bobbed far out in the calm sea over which the afternoon sun had laid a shallow golden haze. Two natives accompanied by a spaniel clumped noisily over the pebbles. Montrose, an immobile fluffy ball upon the break-water, watched the spaniel pass with slit-eyed malevolence. In the further distance Pierce and Mingo were standing by the water’s edge.

  “Shall we sit down?”

  They sat on the hot stones, Paula pulling her yellow dress well down to her knees. Ducane’s hand dug instinctively into the pebbles, seeking the damp cooler stones below. “Do you mind?” He took off his jacket.

  “Odd how those stones are never quite spherical.” Paula spoke in her most precise tones, sounding like one of her children. She examined a mottled mauvish pebble and then tossed it into the water.

  He’s in the Red Sea, now, she thought, he’s steaming north. An enormous elongated Eric, all face and head, moved slowly under steam through a calm resistless sea. I must be completely relaxed, she thought. I must have no will, no purpose, I must simply undergo him.

  I’ll meet him in London, she thought. But would he want to share her bed? How would it be? Perhaps it would be better to see him down here? But she could not bear that he should come near the twins. I must be rational, she thought, I must be rational.

  “Paula—”

  “Sorry. Were you saying something?”

  “What’s the matter, Paula? And don’t say nothing’s the matter. I can see you’re frantic about something.”

  “Nothing’s the matter.”

  “Come, come, Paula. Everyone has been noticing it. Tell me what’s the matter. I might be able to help.”

  So everyone had been noticing it. “You can’t, John. I’m as lonely as a lunatic.”

  “Paula. You’re going to tell me.”

  Am I? she wondered almost vaguely. She picked up and examined another imperfectly spherical stone and tossed it after the first one.

  “Paula, please, my dear—”

  “If I could only tell it all in a completely cold objective way,” she said aloud to herself.

  “Yes, yes, do that. You can. What’s it about? Just tell me roughly what it’s about, to make a start.”

  “It’s about a chap called Eric Sears.”

  “Who is he?”

  “My former lover.”

  “Oh.”

  “You probably imagine, as everybody seems to, that I divorced Richard. Well, I didn’t. Richard divorced me because I had had a love affair with Eric.”

  “Did you love Eric?”

  “I must have done.”

  “Do you love Eric?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Are you seeing him?”

  “I’m going to. He’s on his way back from Australia to see me, to claim me.”

  “You don’t have to be claimed if you don’t want to.”

  “It’s—more complicated than that.”

  “You’re bound to him in some way?”

  “Yes.”

  “A child?”

  “No, no. It’s awful. I couldn’t tell you.”

  “But you’re going to tell me.”

  “It was how things happened with Richard.”

  “I imagine Richard had had plenty of love affairs before Eric came on the scene?”

  “Yes. That’s what they say, is it? Yes, Richard was unfaithful. But that doesn’t excuse my unfaithfulness. It doesn’t even explain it. I was temporarily insane.”

  “What’s Eric like? What does he do?”

  “He’s a potter. He’s a big blonde man with a beard. At least he had a beard. He’s a demon.”

  “How was it that things happened with Richard.”

  Paula took a deep breath. She felt her face contract as if a great wind were straining the flesh backward. She said, “They had a fight.”

  Paula was conscious of the immense quietness of the scene. The sun shone down into clear still water revealing the pale paving of the sea. Very distant feet crunched upon pebbles. Far away an aeroplane hummed, descended. Out on the horizon the swimming children splashed, their voices all but lost in the hot air which moved very slightly above the water like a heavy canopy. “What happened?” said Ducane’s voice, very very softly.

  “It was quite sudden,” she said. “It was at our house, in the billiard room. You know, well perhaps you don’t know, at our house in Chelsea there’s a big room for billiards built on at the back. Richard used to play a bit. It had a door leading into the garden. It was late one night and Richard had said he’d got to go to Paris on office business. I think he said this just to trap me. Of course I’d told him about Eric. I’d told him about Eric right at the start, in a cold blank sort of way, and he was cold and blank about it too. I didn’t even properly realise that he was jealous
. I thought it might even be a kind of relief to him. Eric came round to the house that evening. It was idiotic of me to let him come there, but he very much wanted to. He hadn’t been before. I think he just wanted to walk around in Richard’s place. We were talking in the hall. I think we were just going to leave and go to Eric’s flat. Then we realised that Richard had come in through the garden and was standing in the billiard room in the darkness listening. As soon as I heard a sound I knew what had happened and I turned the light on. Eric and Richard had never met before. We all stood together in the billiard room and Eric started to make some sort of speech. He wasn’t particularly put out and he was proposing to carry off the situation with a high hand. Then Richard just sprang at him. Eric’s a big man, but Richard was in the Commandos, and he just knew how to fight and Eric didn’t. He hit Eric somehow on the neck and I think Eric was half stunned. Then, God knows how he did it, and it happened so quickly, he pushed Eric back against the wall and overturned the billiard table against him.”

  “My God,” said Ducane softly.

  “You know what a billiard table weighs,” said Paula. Her voice was almost pedantic. Her gaze was focused on a particular pebble on the floor of the sea. “The edge of the table came down on to one of Eric’s feet, and the upper part of it crushed him against the wall. He began to scream. Richard and I tried to pull the table back. It was an extraordinary scene. We didn’t say a word to each other, we just pulled at each end of the table. Eric went on screaming. Then the table shifted a little and he collapsed and Richard pulled him out into the open. He was practically unconscious with pain. I went and telephoned for an ambulance.”

  Paula was silent.

  “What happened then?” said Ducane in the same almost whispering voice.

  “I went with him to the hospital. The next time I saw Richard was outside the divorce court.”

  “And was Eric much hurt?”

  “He hadn’t any serious internal injury,” said Paula in her exact voice. “But one foot was completely crushed. He had to have it amputated.” She added, “We pretended it was an accident, of course.”

  Ducane said after a pause. “I see. What happened then?”

  “Well, what happened then was that I abandoned Eric too. I couldn’t go back to Richard, the idea didn’t occur to me, and anyway he wrote to me about divorce the next day. I think he just couldn’t stand it either, somehow. And I couldn’t stay with Eric. His being maimed like that by Richard just snapped things off. I almost hated the sight of him, and I think he hated the sight of me. For a while everything became too terrible, one could scarcely bear to be conscious. I let go of Eric and he just moved away, sort of automatically. I went on seeing him, but it was like acting in some nightmarish play. Then he told me he was going to Australia. We were both relieved.”