The Nice and the Good

by Iris Murdoch

  “Thank God for that. When can I—? I mean, have we decided anything?”

  Paula stared back, tears and all. “Richard, ask yourself, ask yourself, do you really want to?”

  “Why, Paula, you’re—Oh Paula, yes, yes, yes. Please give me your hand.”

  Paula moved towards him. Their hands touched, their knees touched. They were both trembling.

  “Oh Richard, not here—someone will—”

  “Yes, here.”

  The Americans, who had come back hoping for another look at the Bronzino, retreated rapidly.

  “Paula, I’m falling in love with you again, most terribly in love.”

  “I’ve never been out of love with you, never for a second.”

  “Look, Paula, do you mind if we go home at once? I want to kiss you properly, I want to—”

  They sprang up. Richard took a quick look at the attendant’s back and approached the Bronzino. He drew luxurious fingers across the canvas, caressing the faintly touching mouths of Venus and Cupid. Then he seized Paula by the hand and pulled her after him. They left the Gallery at a run. The attendant turned about and began anxiously counting the pictures.

  Thirty-nine

  “HAVE a drink,” said Ducane.

  “Thanks. A little sherry.”

  “Do you mind the fire? It’s not too hot for you?”

  “No, I like it. Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”

  “I’m feeling much better. How’s Pierce?”

  “Pierce is in splendid shape. He sends much love, by the way. He said I was to remember to say much love.”

  “Mine to him. Do sit down. It’s so nice of you to have come.”

  Mary Clothier dropped her coat on the floor and sat down rather awkwardly, holding her glass of sherry stiffly in front of her as if it were something she was unaccustomed to holding, such as a revolver. Her hand trembled slightly and some drops fell on to the stretched blue and white check of her dress and softly moistened her thigh. She looked around the room with curiosity. It was a restrained dignified pretty room full, to Mary’s taste over-full, of intense quietly coloured trinkets. These lay about on polished surfaces looking more like toys than like ornaments. She looked out through the sun-drenched window at the cast-iron window boxes and brightly painted doors of the small neat houses opposite, and her heart sank. She thought, how little I know him.

  “Isn’t it splendid about Richard and Paula?” she said.

  “Marvellous.”

  “I’m very glad,” said Mary. “They’re so happy, just like gay children.” She sighed. “But weren’t you surprised? I had no idea they were thinking of it. Paula is so secretive.”

  “Mmm. Was a bit quick. Just goes to show. Life can be sudden. All that.”

  Mary looked at Ducane who was trampling about on the other side of the room, in the space behind a tall armchair, like an animal in a stall, and leaning momently on the back of the chair to attend to her. He was wearing, and had profusely apologised for, a black silk dressing gown covered with spidery red asterisks, and dark red pyjamas underneath. The garb made him look faintly exotic, faintly Spanish, like an actor, like a dancer.

  “John, what was it like in the cave? Pierce won’t tell me anything. And my imagination keeps on and on. I’ve been having awful dreams about it. Did you think you were going to die?”

  Ducane said slowly, leaning over the chair, “It’s hard to say, Mary. Perhaps. Pierce was very tough and brave.”

  “So were you, I’m sure. Can you tell me what it was like, could you describe it starting at the beginning?”

  “Not now, Mary, if you don’t mind.” He added, “I saw your face there in the darkness, in a strange way. I’ll tell you—later.”

  His air of authority calmed her. “All right. So long as you will tell me. Did you make that decision, John?”

  “What decision?”

  “You said you had to make a decision concerning another person.”

  “Oh yes. I decided that.”

  “And was it the right decision?”

  “Yes. I tidied that business up. I’ve tidied up a number of things. In fact I’ve tidied up nearly everything!”

  “Good for you.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about!” said Ducane. “Sorry. I’m still awfully nervy.”

  Mary smiled a little uncertainly. Then she said with a sudden random bitterness, “I don’t know anything about you.”

  “You’ve known me for years.”

  “No. We’ve noticed each other as familiar objects on a landscape, like houses or railway stations, things one passes on a journey. We’ve said the minimum of obvious things to each other.”

  “You do us less than justice. We’ve communicated with each other. We are alike.”

  “I am not like you,” she said. “No, you belong to a different race.” She looked about the room at the toy-like trinkets. Outside the window the heavy sunny evening was husky with distant sound.

  He looked puzzled, discouraged. “I have a feeling that you are not complimenting me now!”

  She stared at his thin brown face, his narrow nose, the particular fall of the dry dark hair. Their conversation sounded to her hollow, like an intermittent rhythmless drum beat. She shivered.

  “It doesn’t matter. You are different. I must go.”

  “But you’ve only just come.”

  “I only came to see if you were all right.”

  “Perhaps I ought to have told you I’m not! You hardly flatter me by rushing away so soon. I was hoping you would have dinner with me.”

  “I’m afraid I have an engagement.”

  “Well, don’t go yet, Mary. Have some more sherry.”

  He filled her glass. The black silk brushed her knee.

  Why have I landed myself in this absurd and terrible position, thought Mary Clothier. Why have I been such a perfectly frightful ass? Why have I, after all these years, and contrary to all sense and all hope and all reason fallen quite madly in love with my old friend John Ducane?

  The realisation that she was in love with Ducane came to Mary quite suddenly on the day after the rescue from the cave, but it seemed to her then that she had already been in love for some time. It was as if she had for some time been under an authority the nature of which she had not understood, though she had had an inkling of it in the moment almost of violence when she had thrown her coat about the wet cold naked man. On the following day, when Ducane had already been taken back to London by Octavian, Mary felt a blackness of depression which she took to be the aftermath of terror. She was weeding the garden in the hot afternoon. With a savage self-punishing persistence she leaned over the flowerbed, feeling the light runnels of perspiration crawling upon her cheek. She had been thinking intensely about Ducane but without thinking anything specific. It was as if she were attending to him ardently but blankly. She straightened up and went to sit down in the shade underneath the acacia tree. Her hot body went limp and she lay down flat. As she relaxed she had a vivid almost hallucinatory image of Ducane’s face, together with a physical convulsion like an electric shock. She lay quite still, collecting herself.

  Realising that one is in love with someone in whom one has long been interested is a curious process. What can it be said to consist of? Each human being swims within a sea of faint suggestive imagery. It is this web of pressures, currents and suggestions, something often so much less definite than pictures, which ties our fugitive present to our past and future, composing the globe of consciousness. We think with our body, with its yearnings and its shrinkings and its ghostly walkings. Mary’s whole body now, limp beneath the tall twisted acacia tree, became aware of John from head to foot in a new way. She imaged him with a turning and hovering of her being, as if a wraith were plucking itself out of her towards him. She felt his absence from her as a great tearing force moving out of her entire flesh. And she shivered with a dazzled joy.

  Had she, then, not been in love with Willy? No, she had not been i
n love with Willy. She had loved Willy with her careful anxious mind and with her fretful fingertips. She had not thus adored him with her whole thought-body, her whole being of yearning. She had not been content to be for him simply herself and a woman. This was the old, the unmistakable state of being in love which she had imagined she would never experience again. Indeed as she lay pinned to the ground, looking up at the blotched sunlight moving upon the lined form of the acacia tree, she felt that she had never experienced it before. And she turned over groaning on to her face.

  Great love is inseparable from joy, but further thought brought to her an equal portion of pain. There was absolutely nothing that she could do with this huge emotion which she had so suddenly discovered in herself. It was not only that Ducane belonged to Kate. He was a man utterly inaccessible to herself. He had been very kind to her, but that was simply because he was a good man who was kind to everybody. His attention to her had been professional, efficient and entirely momentary. She was far too plain an object to remain visible to him. On the whole he was used to her as one might be used to an efficient servant.

  Of course he must never know. How long would it take her to recover? At the thought that she had known of her condition for twenty minutes and was already wondering about her recovery, tears brimmed over Mary’s closed eyes and mingled with the sweat on her shining face and dripped down into the warm grass. No, she would not think of recovery. Indeed she felt that she would never recover. She would live with her condition. And he must never know. She must make no move, utter no breath, lift no finger.

  Nevertheless in two days’ time, after two days of pure agony, she felt that she had to see him. She would see him briefly, utter some commonplaces, and be gone. But she felt that she had to see him or she would die. She had to make a journey towards him. Sick with emotion, she travelled to London, telephoned him, and asked if she could call upon him briefly before dinner.

  She sat in his presence in an ecstasy of pain and prayer. Her intense joy at being in his presence flickered through the matrix of her dullness, her stupidity, her inability to say anything which was not tedious. Oh John! she cried within herself as if for help. Oh my darling, help me to endure it!

  John Ducane leaned on the back of the chair and contemplated Mary’s small round head, compact as an image out of Ingres, her pale golden complexion, the very small ears behind which she had tucked her straight dark hair.

  John Ducane thought to himself, why have I landed myself in this absurd and terrible position? Why have I been such a perfectly frightful ass? Why have I so infelicitously, inopportunely, improperly and undeniably fallen quite madly in love with my old friend, Mary Clothier?

  It seemed now to Ducane that his thoughts had been, already for a long time, turning to Mary, running to her instinctively like animals, like children. The moment had been important when he had thought about her, we are under the same orders. But he had known, long before he had formulated it clearly, that she was like him, morally like in some way that was important. Her mode of being gave him a moral, even a metaphysical, confidence in the world, in the reality of goodness. No love is entirely without worth, even when the frivolous calls to the frivolous and the base to the base. But it is in the nature of love to discern good, and the best love is in some part at any rate a love of what is good. Ducane was very conscious, and had always been conscious, that he and Mary communicated by means of what was good in both of them.

  Ducane’s absolute respect for Mary, his trust in her, his apprehension in her of virtues which he understood, made the background of an affection which grew, under the complex force of his needs, into love. It is possible that at this time he idolised her, and fell in love at the moment at which he thought, she is better than me. During his gradual loss of a stiff respect he had had for himself, he had felt the need to locate in someone else the picture of an upright person. His relation with Jessica, his relation even with Kate, perhaps in a subtle way even more his relation with Kate, had left him muddled. He was a man who, unless he could think well of himself, became confused and weak of will. He had begun to need Mary when he had begun to need a better image of himself. She was the consoling counterpart of his self-abasement.

  Also she was of course, he realised, a mother goddess. She was the mother of Trescombe. In this light he was able to see something almost mysterious in the plainness of her role. She had already been transfigured for him by his jealousy of Willy, a jealousy which had surprised him, appearing first as an unexplained depression, a blank want of generosity. This was a jealousy very different from the jealousy of Octavian which he had momently felt at the withdrawal of Kate. Jealousy of Octavian had wakened him to a sense of his own position as improper and idiotic. Jealousy of Willy had made him feel, I want a girl of my own. And then, I want this girl of my own.

  It seemed to him now, and this added to his pain, that he had only urged her to marry Willy out of guilt and fear at his own failure with Willy. Of course she must never know how he felt and Willy must never know. Once they were married he would avoid them absolutely. I am out of the saga, he thought. He had a heavy sense of being left in total isolation; everyone had withdrawn from him and the person who could most have helped him was pre-empted by another.

  He stared at Mary. His whole body ached with his sense of how much she might have done for him. To cause himself a sharp sobering pain he said, “How is Willy?”

  “Oh, very well I believe. I mean, much as usual.”

  “When are you getting married?” said Ducane.

  Mary put her glass down on the octagonal marble table. She flushed and snapped in a breath. “But I’m not getting married to Willy.”

  Ducane came round the armchair and sat down in it. “You said it wasn’t quite fixed—”

  “It’s not happening at all. Willy doesn’t want to marry. It was all a mistake.” She looked very unhappy.

  “I’m sorry—” said Ducane.

  “I thought Kate would have told you,” said Mary. She was still red, looking hard at her glass.

  “No,” said Ducane. He thought, I suppose I’d better tell her. “Kate and I—well, I don’t think we’ll be seeing quite so much of each other—at least not like—”

  “Did you really quarrel then?” Mary asked in a slightly breathless voice.

  “Not really. But—I’d better tell you, Mary, though you won’t think well of me. I was formerly entangled, well in a way was entangled, with a girl in London and Kate found this out, and felt I’d been lying and I suppose I had. It was rather complicated, I’m afraid. Anyway it somehow spoilt things. It was foolish of me to imagine that I could—manage Kate.”

  This isn’t the way to say it, he thought. It makes it sound dreadful. She’ll think badly of me for ever.

  “I see. A girl in—I see.”

  He said rather stiffly, “You must be sad about Willy. I’m sorry.”

  “Yes. He sort of turned me down!”

  She loves him, he thought, she loves him. She’ll persuade him in time. Oh God.

  Mary had begun slowly to gather her coat into a bunch around her feet. “Well, I hope you’ll be happy, John, happy with—Yes.”

  “Don’t go, Mary.”

  “I have got an appointment.”

  He groaned to himself. He wanted to take her in his arms, he wanted to be utterly revealed to her, he wanted her to understand.

  “Let me give you something before you go, something to take away with you.” He looked wildly round the room. A French glass paper-weight was lying on the desk on top of some papers. He picked it up and quickly threw it into Mary’s lap. The next moment he saw that she had burst into tears.

  “What is it, my heart?” Ducane knelt beside her, thrusting the table away. He touched her knee.

  Holding the paper-weight tightly in her skirt and blowing her nose Mary said, “John, you’ll think I’m crazy and you’re not to worry. There’s something I’ve got to tell you. I can’t go away out of that door without telling you.
I wasn’t really in love with Willy. I loved Willy dearly, I love him dearly, but it’s not being in love. One knows what being in love is like and it is a very terrible thing. I shouldn’t tell you this, you’ve got this girl, and you’ve been so awfully kind to me and I oughtn’t to trouble you and I meant to say nothing about it, I really did, and if you hadn’t—”

  “Mary, what on earth are you talking about?”

  “I love you, John, I’ve fallen in love with you. I’m sorry, I know it’s improbable, and perhaps you won’t believe me, but it’s true, I’m terribly sorry. I promise I’ll be rational about it and not a nuisance and I wouldn’t expect you to see me, well now you won’t want to see me—Oh God!” She hid her face in the handkerchief.

  Ducane rose to his feet. He went over to the window and looked out at the beautiful geraniums and the beautiful motor cars and the blue evening sky full of beautiful aeroplanes on their way to London Airport. He tried to control his voice.

  “Mary, have you really got a dinner appointment?”

  “No. I just said that. Sorry, John, I’m going now.”

  “I suggest you stay,” said Ducane, “and talk the situation over. There’s plenty to eat in the house and I’ve got a bottle of wine.”

  “There’s no point in talking it over. It would only make things worse. There’s nothing to say. I just love you. That’s all of it.”

  “That’s half of it,” said Ducane. “Possibly over dinner I might tell you the other half.”

  Forty

  “WAS that really it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure you did it right?”

  “My God, I’m sure!”

  “Well, I don’t like it.”

  “Girls never do the first time.”

  “Perhaps I’m a Lesbian.”

  “Don’t be silly, Barbie. You did like it a little?”

  “Well, just the first bit.”

  “Oh Barb, you were so wonderful, I worship you.”