The Nice and the Good

by Iris Murdoch

  Jessica

  Ducane dropped the letter in the fire. He saw Jessica’s devotion now, intact, completed as it were, as a beautiful and touching thing. He did not feel any relief at the thought that she would soon be, perhaps already was, ‘cured’. He had handled ignominiously something which now seemed to him intensely pure. The bitter quarrels, the hundred reasonings of the hundred moments, were past now and would soon be lost even to memory. What held him was the judgment of a court of higher instance that he had lied and bungled and had no dignity which could compare with her dignity of having simply loved him. He opened Kate’s letter.

  Dearest John,

  I do hope you are really well and suffering no ill effects from your awful experience. It’s not easy to know how to write to you, but I felt you would be expecting a word. So many things seem to have happened all at once.

  Since I opened that letter which you asked me not to open I have of course been thinking very much about you and me, and in conclusion I am feeling thoroughly dissatisfied with myself. My nature has always been to eat cakes and have them, and one can try to do this once too often. I was so certain that with you and me our so strange, so nebulous, and yet so powerful something could be managed so that we had all fun and no pain. But the mechanisms of love have their own curious energies, and also (forgive me for saying this) I did rather rely on your not having misled me on a certain point. I confess I have found this revelation of another relationship hard to bear. As I said at the time, of course I have no rights where you are concerned. Yet maybe just this was our mistake, to think we could have this something without some degree of possessiveness. And if I had known earlier that you had a close relationship I would not have let myself go quite so far in getting fond of you. Though now it seems to me to have been idiotic to imagine that I could in any way secure someone as attractive as you without being either your wife or your mistress. But this is just what I did imagine. You will think me a fool. Anyway in view of it all I feel a little drawing back is in order, and fortunately this sort of thing happens pretty automatically. You probably feel a good deal of relief, as you must have had misgivings about an ‘entanglement’ with me which I now realise was mainly my doing. Be happy with Jessica. It is out of place to say ‘feel free’, since I never claimed to tie you, and yet there was a tie. But it is gone now. Please of course feel that you can come to Trescombe as before. Octavian sends love and joins me in hoping to see you soon.

  Kate

  Ducane dropped the sheets one by one into the flames. Kate’s writing was so large that her letters came in huge bundles. He thought, how unbecoming to a woman is that particular tone of resentment, and how difficult it is even for an intelligent woman to disguise it. Then he wondered to himself, why am I being harder on Kate than on Jessica? The answer was not far to seek. Jessica had loved him more. It was self, fat self, that mattered in the end. Ducane idly picked up the piece of paper which remained on the table It was Radeechy’s cryptogram. He stared at it without thought. Then he began to scrutinise it more closely. Something about the centre part of it was beginning to look curiously familiar. Then suddenly Ducane saw what it was. The central part of the square consisted of the Latin words of the ancient Christian cryptogram.

  This elegant thing can be read forwards, backwards or vertically, and consists, with the addition of A and O (Alpha and Omega) of the letters of the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer arranged in the form of a cross.

  Who had invented, to scrawl mysteriously upon what darkened wall, that curious charm to conjure, by its ingenious form and its secret content, what powers surely more sinister and probably more real than the Christian god? And what had Radeechy done to it, to divert its power and make its talismanic value his own? Ducane studied the letters round the edge of the square. A and O again twice, only reversed. The other letters then simply read RADEECHY PATER DOMINUS.

  Ducane threw the paper down. He felt disappointed, touched, upset. There was something schoolboyish and pathetic in the egoism of Radeechy’s appropriation of the Latin formula. It was the sort of thing one might have carved inside one’s desk at school. Perhaps all egoism when it is completely exposed has a childish quality. Ducane felt piercingly sorry for Radeechy. The solving of the cryptogram had given him a sense of speech with him, but babbling baffled speech. After all the machinery of evil, the cross reversed, the slaughtered pigeons, the centre of it all seemed so empty and puerile. Yet Radeechy was dead, and were not the powers of evil genuine enough which had led him to two acts of violence? Ducane could not see into that world. He saw only the grotesque and the childish, and whatever was frightening here seemed to be something of limited power, something small. Perhaps there were spirits, perhaps there were evil spirits, but they were little things. The great evil, the dreadful evil, that which made war and slavery and all man’s inhumanity to man lay in the cool self-justifying ruthless selfishness of quite ordinary people, such as Biranne, and himself.

  Ducane got up and walked about the room. The scene had certainly been cleared. Fivey gone, Judy gone, Biranne gone, Jessica gone, Kate gone, Paula gone. He looked at himself in a mirror. His face, which he thought of as ‘lean’, looked peaky and thin, and he noticed the greasy unclean appearance of his hair and the dulled lock of grey in the centre of his forehead. His eyes were watery and yellowed. His nose was shiny and red from the sun. He wanted somebody, somebody. He needed a shave.

  He said to himself, an era of my life has come to an end. He reached for some writing paper and sat down and began to write.

  My dear Octavian,

  It is with great regret that I write to tell you that I must tender my resignation.…

  Thirty-eight

  WILL I faint when I see him?

  Paula wondered. It was idiotic to meet in the National Gallery. He had suggested on a postcard that they should meet beside the Bronzino. Paula had been touched. But it was a silly Richardesque idea all the same. If he had sent a letter and not a postcard she might have suggested something else. As it was she felt that all she could do was send another postcard saying yes. Fortunately there was nobody about at this fairly early hour except an attendant who was now in the next room.

  Paula had arrived too soon. As Richard, with characteristic thoughtlessness, had suggested an early morning meeting, she had had to stay overnight at a hotel. She did not want to stay either with John Ducane or with Octavian and Kate. Indeed she had not told Octavian and Kate. And she needed to be alone. She had not slept. She had been unable to eat any breakfast. She had sat twisting her hands in the hotel lounge and watching the clock. Then she had to run to the cloakroom thinking she was going to be sick. At last she rushed out of the hotel and got into a taxi. Now there was half an hour to wait.

  I might faint, thought Paula. She still felt sick and a black canopy seemed to be suspended over her head, its lower fringes swinging just above the level of her eyes. If that blackness were to come rushing down her body would twist and tilt and she would fall head first down into a dark shaft. She felt the vertigo and the falling movement. I’d better sit down, she thought. She moved carefully to the square leather-cushioned seat in the centre of the room and sat down.

  The violence, the violence remained between them like a mountain, or rather it had become more like a dreadful attribute of Richard himself, as if he had been endowed with a menacing metal limb. Odd to think that. It was Eric who really had the metal limb. Had that scene in the billiard room made Richard impossible for her for ever? She had never really thought this, but she seemed to have assumed it. Without it she would never have left Richard. With it she had not even wondered if it was possible to stay. Was it reasonable, was it not mad, to find this thing so important, so as it were physically important?

  Paula stared at Bronzino’s picture. Since Richard had appropriated the picture she had deliberately refrained from making any theoretical study of it, but she remembered vaguely some of the things which she had read about it earlier on. The figures at th
e top of the picture are Time and Truth, who are drawing back a blue veil to reveal the ecstatic kiss which Cupid is giving to his Mother. The wailing figure behind Cupid is Jealousy. Beyond the plump figure of the rose-bearing Pleasure, the sinister enamel-faced girl with the scaly tail represents Deceit. Paula noticed for the first time the strangeness of the girl’s hands, and then saw that they were reversed, the right hand on the left arm, the left hand on the right arm. Truth stares, Time moves. But the butterfly kissing goes on, the lips just brushing, the long shining bodies juxtaposed with almost awkward tenderness, not quite embracing. How like Richard it all is, she thought, so intellectual, so sensual.

  A man had appeared in the doorway. He seemed to materialise rather than to arrive. Paula felt a great force pin her against the back of the seat. He came quickly forward and sat beside her.

  “Hello, Paula. You’re early.”

  “Hello—Richard—”

  “So am I, I suppose. I couldn’t do anything, I had to come.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, hello—”

  Paula made no attempt to talk. She was trying to control her breathing. A long breath in, now out, in, now out. It was quite easy really. She moved a little away, looking sideways at Richard, who was leaning one arm on his knee and staring unsmilingly at her. An attendant passed by. There was no one else in the room.

  “Look, Paula,” said Richard, in a low voice, “let’s be business-like, let’s make a business-like start anyway. Ducane told you about this awful thing about Radeechy?”

  “Yes.”

  “About me and Claudia? Everything?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, let’s separate two issues, shall we? (a) Whether you think I ought to give myself up as it were, hand the whole issue over to the police and get myself sacked and charged with being an accessory. And (b) what you and I are going to do about ourselves. If you don’t mind, I’d like to get (a) settled first.”

  God, how like Richard this is, thought Paula, and a painful shaft of something, tenderness perhaps, memory, pierced through her. The black canopy had gone away and her breathing seemed likely to go on. But her heart was hurting her with its violence.

  “Aren’t the two issues connected?” said Paula. She had found herself unable to look at him and was looking at the floor.

  “They’re connected in the sense that you might or mightn’t want to visit me in jail. Only in one of the four possible permutations of (a) and (b) and yes and no are they actually interdependent.”

  Oh Richard, Richard. “Is John—sort of forcing you here?”

  “No, no one’s forcing me. I just want (a) settled. We can’t take (b) first.”

  “John seems to think it’s all right to keep it all quiet, and he—”

  “Damn John. What do you think?”

  Paula had not expected this. She had been utterly appalled by the story about Claudia and Radeechy, but she had not thought that any further judgment on it would be required from her. Or rather, she had at once taken over Ducane’s judgment that it was not necessary for Richard to own up. She tried to think about it now. Richard was requiring her to be objective. That in itself was extraordinary, as extraordinary as the fact that they were now sitting side by side. She looked up at the terrible figures of Truth and Time.

  “I don’t think it’s necessary, Richard. John’s quite clear that his enquiry doesn’t need your evidence. You can’t help—the others now. You’d be punishing yourself and I see no point in it.”

  Richard gave a long sigh.

  She thought, he’s relieved, oh God, and she felt the pain again. She looked back at the floor and let her gaze creep as far as to his feet. Metal limbs.

  “Now what about (b), Paula?”

  “Wait, wait,” she murmured. “Let us be, as you say, business-like.” She moved a little further away and began to look at him. His twisted face had screwed itself further into a contorted suspicious mask of anxiety which he touched periodically with his hand as if trying to smooth it out.

  “Richard, do you want to come back?”

  He said a short clipped “Yes”. He added, “Do you want me back?”

  Paula said in the same quick tone, “Yes”. Their two “yeses” hovered, inconclusive and curt.

  “Richard, you’ve been living with somebody, haven’t you?”

  “How did you know? Or did you just assume it?”

  “I went one day—to the house—just to look—when I knew you were at the office. And I saw a rather beautiful girl let herself in with a latch key.”

  “God. Did you do that, Paula? God. Well, there was a girl, but it’s over now. She was a tart.”

  “What sort of difference do you think that makes?”

  “All right. None. Anyway, she’s gone. She’s eloped to Australia with Ducane’s manservant, if you must know!”

  “Did she write and tell you?”

  “No, Ducane told me. Christ, you’re not going to be jealous of a tart who’s half way to Australia!”

  “There hasn’t been anyone else, just lately I mean?”

  “No. What about you? Have you had anybody?”

  “No.”

  “You’re not in love with Ducane, are you?”

  “No, of course not, Richard!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes!”

  “Good. Well, go on interrogating me. I can’t for the life of me see why you should want me back at all.”

  “Richard, I must talk to you about Eric.”

  “Christ, that bastard hasn’t turned up again?”

  “No, no. He wrote and said he was going to, but he changed his mind, thank heavens.”

  “You don’t love him, do you?”

  “No, no, no.”

  “Then can’t we forget him?”

  “No, we can’t, that’s the point. At least we can’t forget—what happened. I know this sounds a bit mad, but that awful scene has remained like a sort of black lump spreading poison.”

  “I know,” he said softly, “I know.”

  Some Americans had arrived to inspect the Bronzino. They lingered, making learned comments, then glanced at the tense immobile pair upon the seat and hastily took themselves off.

  “Paula,” said Richard, “we’re both rational beings. Maybe we couldn’t do anything about this apart, but we might be able to do something together. Something dreadful happened for which we were both to blame. It happened. You know I don’t believe in God or in guilt feelings or in repentance or any stuff of that sort. The past is gone, it doesn’t exist any more. However, things that do exist are responsibilities occasioned by the past and also our thoughts about it, which we may not find it very easy to control. I judge that there’s nothing further we can do for Eric except try to forget the bloody fool. There are things we might do for each other to make this cloud lift, if we decided that it was worth our trying to live together again. I don’t think the blank lump would poison us then. I think it would just gradually go away.”

  As Paula looked at him, listening to his precise high-pitched voice so familiarly explaining something, expounding something, she felt a shudder pass through her which she recognised a second later as physical desire. She wanted to hurl her arms around Richard and hold him tightly. She stiffened and closed her eyes.

  “What is it, Paula?”

  “Nothing, nothing. You may be right. Let’s go on.” She opened her eyes and looked into a blue-golden blur of Bronzino. “Richard, if you were to come to me, if, if, would you go on having love affairs with other girls from time to time?”

  After a short silence Richard said in a dry voice, “Possibly.”

  “I thought so—”

  “Please, Paula—It’s hard to say. At this moment I feel—well, hell, feelings are just feelings. I don’t know what I’d do. If the old pattern continues I’d probably be unfaithful now and then. I’d have to wait and see. You know it’s no use my telling you I’ve decided anything.”

  “I know. I expect
I could stand it. Only, Richard, will you, would you, please not tell me lies?”

  “You mean you’d want me to tell you every time I kiss my secretary?”

  “No. But I’d want to know if you were going to bed with your secretary.”

  Richard was silent again for a short while, during which time a group of schoolchildren did the room with celerity. He said slowly, “It’s not at all easy to make such promises beforehand, Paula. At least it’s easy to make them. It’s not so easy to be sure what one will do when one is being tempted by some piece of quick trouble-free pleasure.”

  Paula stared at the enamel-faced figure of Deceit, and at her reversed hands and scaly tail. Was it here, after all, that everything broke down and descended into a roaring shaft of shattered masks and crumpled rose petals and bloody feathers? But as she looked, clear-eyed now, she felt, infinitely stronger than any doubt, her intention to take Richard back. She turned to him.

  “All right. But lies do corrupt and spoil.”

  “I know that. I would keep them to a minimum.”

  The Richardesque precision and even his intent at this moment of all moments to keep the door a little bit ajar for Venus, Cupid and Folly, touched her to an intensity of love for him which she could hardly control.

  “Paula, about the twins—”

  “What about the twins?”

  “They’re not anti-me?”

  “Oh my darling, no. They’ve kept their love for you, nothing’s touched it, I know that.”

  The sudden endearment, the image of the children, brought a hot rush of tears as far as her eyes. She blinked, turning away, and the thought came to her for the first time, am I still attractive to him?