The Nice and the Good

by Iris Murdoch

  “Octavian’s a very happy man.”

  “Yes, Octavian is a happy man. And that is relevant, you know.”

  “I know. Dear Kate, I’m a lonely person. And you’re a generous woman. And we’re both very rational. All’s well here.”

  “I knew it was, John, only I just wanted you to say it, like that. I’m so glad. You’re sure it won’t be somehow painful for you, sad, you know—?”

  “There will be some pain,” he said, “but pain that I can deal with. And so much happiness too.”

  “Yes. One doesn’t want to be just painless and content, does one? You and I can be so much to each other. Loving people matters, doesn’t it? Really nothing else matters except that.”

  “Come in,” said Willy Kost.

  Ducane entered the cottage.

  Willy was sitting stretched out in a low chair beside the hearth, his heels dug into a spilling of grey wood ash. The gramophone behind him was playing the slow movement of something or other. It seemed to Ducane that Willy’s gramophone was always playing slow movements. The noise immediately irritated Ducane, who was unmusical to the point of positively disliking the concourse of sweet sounds. His mood as he approached the cottage had been elevated and intense. The harmony generated by his scene with Kate, the perfect understanding so quickly reached between them, had enabled him to switch his thought with a peculiar singleness of attention to the problem of Willy. The music was now like an alien presence.

  Willy, who knew how Ducane felt about music, got up and lifted the playing arm off the record and turned the machine off.

  “Sorry, Willy.”

  “S’all right,” said Willy. “Sit down. Have something. Have some tea or something.”

  Willy limped into his little kitchen where Ducane heard the hiss and then the purr of the oil stove. The single main room of the cottage was filled with Willy’s books, some on shelves, some still in boxes. Kate, who could not conceive of life without a large personal territory of significantly deployed objects, constantly complained that Willy had never unpacked. She had forgiven him his shudder when she once suggested that she should unpack for him.

  The big table was covered with texts and notebooks. Here at least was an area of significance. Ducane touched the open pages, pretending to look at them. He felt a slight embarrassment as he often did with Willy.

  “How goes it, Willy?”

  “How goes what?”

  “Well, life, work.”

  Willy came back into the room and leaned on the back of a chair, observing his guest with amused detachment. Willy was a small man, delicate in feature, with a long thin curvy mouth which seemed always a little moist and trembling. He had a great deal of longish white hair and a uniformly brown rather oily and glistening face and sardonic narrow brown eyes. A velvety brown mole on one cheek gave him a curious air of prettiness.

  “‘Day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night showeth knowledge’.”

  Ducane smiled encouragingly. “Good!”

  “Is it good? Excuse me while I make the tea.”

  He returned with the tea tray. Ducane accepted his cup and began to perambulate the room. Willy with a large glass of milk resumed his chair.

  “I envy you this,” said Ducane. He indicated the table.

  “No, you don’t.”

  It was true that he did not. There was always a period of time, more or less brief, when they met after an interval, when Ducane fumbled, flattered. He was patronising Willy now, and they both knew it. The barrier created between them by this spontaneous, this as it seemed automatic, flattery and patronage could be broken easily by Willy’s directness if Willy had the sheer energy to break it. Sometimes he had. Sometimes he had not, and would sit by listlessly while Ducane struggled with their meeting. Ducane in fact could overcome this automatic falseness in himself unaided, but it took a little time and a very conscious measure of seriousness and attention. Willy was always difficult.

  “I envy something,” said Ducane. “Perhaps I just wish I had been a poet.”

  “I doubt if you even wish that,” said Willy. He lay back and closed his eyes. It looked as if it was one of his listless days.

  “To live with poetry is next best,” said Ducane. “My daily bread is quite other.” He read out at random a couplet from the open page.

  “Quare, dum licet, inter nos laetemur amantes: non satis est ullo tempore longus amor.”

  A physical vision of Kate came to him out of the words of Propertius, especially out of that final amor, so much stronger than the lilting Italian amore. He saw the furry softness of her shoulders as he had often seen them in the evening. He had never caressed her bare shoulders. Amor.

  “Stuff, stuff, stuff,” said Willy. “These were clichés for Propertius. In couplets like that he was talking in his sleep. Well, most human beings are talking in their sleep, even poets, even great poets.” He added, “The only amor I know anything about is amor fati.”

  “Surely a manifestation of pure wickedness,” said Ducane.

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “That it’s wicked to love destiny? Yes. What happens is usually what oughtn’t to happen. Why love it?”

  “Of course destiny shouldn’t be thought of as purposive,” said Willy, “it should be thought of as mechanical.”

  “But it isn’t mechanical!” said Ducane. “We aren’t mechanical!”

  “We are the most mechanical thing of all. That is why we can be forgiven.”

  “Who says we can be forgiven? Anyway that needn’t imply love of fate.”

  “It’s not easy of course. Perhaps it’s impossible. Can a thing be required of us and yet be impossible? I don’t see why not.”

  “Submit to fate but don’t love it. To love it one must be drunk.”

  “And one should not be drunk?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Supposing being drunk is the only way to carry on?”

  “Oh stop this, Willy!” said Ducane.

  These conversations with Willy frightened him sometimes. He was never sure if Willy meant what he said or meant the opposite of what he said. He felt as if he were being used, as if Willy were using him as a hard neutral surface against which to crush, like insects, the thoughts which haunted him. Like a baffled witness, he was afraid of being deliberately led to make some damaging, some perhaps fatal, admission. He felt both powerless and responsible. He said, “There must be other ways of carrying on.”

  “Even without a God!”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t see why,” said Willy.

  Ducane felt, as so often before, yawning between them the terrible gulf which divides the mentally healthy from the mentally crippled.

  “But you are working?” said Ducane. He knew that he was falling back into the tone of patronising. Yet he feared Willy’s obscure intensities and feared that he might be at such moments employed by Willy to confirm unwittingly some final edict of despair.

  “No.”

  “Oh come!” Ducane knew that Willy had looked forward to this visit. He knew too that the visit was rendering Willy unspeakably miserable. This had happened before. In fact it often happened in spite of the fiction kept up briskly by everyone, including the two protagonists, that Ducane was eminently “good for” Willy.

  Ducane thought, if I were not the tied-up puritan that I am I would touch him now, take his hand or something.

  “What ees eet?” Willy was observing his friend. He spoke the question caressingly, exaggerating his foreign accent. It was a ritual question.

  Ducane laughed. Some current flowed again, but flowing away from Willy, leaving him more isolated and unreadable than ever. “Oh, I’m just worrying about you.”

  “Do not do so, John. Tell me of your own things. Tell me about life at that famous place ‘the office’. Do you know I have never been in that place where so many people spend their lives. Tell me about the office.”

  The wraith of Radeechy rose before Ducane like a
physical presence in the room, and with it came the puzzlement and the curious fear which he had felt before. He knew that he must not tell Willy about Radeechy. Suicide is infectious, which is one reason why it is wrong. But he felt too that there was some germ of craziness here, perhaps even of evil, to which he should not expose the organism of Willy’s soul, frail in ways which he could not determine or even imagine.

  He said “It’s very dull in the office. You are well out of it.” He said to himself, I must remember to tell the others not to mention Radeechy to Willy. He thought, if Willy were ever to commit suicide I should never forgive myself, I should know it was my fault. Yet his affection was impotent. What could he do? If he could only persuade Willy to talk to him about the past.

  He said abruptly, “You sleeping all right these days?”

  “Yes, fine, until the cuckoo wakes me up about four thirty!”

  “No bad dreams?”

  They stared at each other, Ducane still standing with his tea cup and Willy stretched out in the chair. Willy smiled a slow rather cunning smile and began to whistle softly.

  There was a sharp rap on the door which then flew open to admit the twins, marching abreast and talking at once.

  “We’ve brought you something!” cried Edward.

  “You’ll never guess what it is!” cried Henrietta.

  They marched up to Willy and laid a light soft spherical object on his knees. Willy straightened up to lean over it exclaiming with interest.

  “Whatever can it be? What do you think it is, John?”

  Ducane moved over to look at the elongated ball of dull green, a few inches long, which Willy was touching with a curious finger. “Some sort of bird’s nest, I suppose,” he said. He felt himself de trop, a spoilsport, an intruder upon a scene of intimates whose rhythm he could not catch.

  “It’s a long-tailed tit’s nest,” cried Edward.

  “They’ve brought up their babies,” cried Henrietta. “We watched them building the nest, we watched them all through, and now they’ve gone away. Isn’t it a beautiful nest? You see, outside it’s made of moss and lichen, see how they’ve woven it together, and inside it’s all lined with feathers.”

  “One man counted more than two thousand feathers in a long-tailed tit’s nest!” cried Edward.

  “It’s very beautiful,” said Willy. “Thank you, twins!” He looked up at Ducane over the nest which he was holding lightly in his hands. “Goodbye, John, thank you for coming.”

  “A bad crow tried to drive them away,” Henrietta was explaining, “but they were so brave—”

  Willy and Ducane smiled at each other. Ducane’s smile was ironical and rueful. Willy’s smile was apologetic and very sad in some way which Ducane could not fathom. With a salute, Ducane turned to the door.

  Willy shouted after him, “I’m all right, you know. Tell them I’m all right.”

  Ducane walked down the meadow path of clipped grass and into the spotted shade of the beech wood. When he came to the smooth grey tree trunk on which he had embraced Kate he did not sit down upon it. He stood for a moment or two quite still. Then he knelt down in the crisp dry beech leaves, leaning his arms on the warm shaft of the tree. He was not thinking about Willy, he was not being sorry for Willy. He was being infinitely sorry for himself because the power was denied to him that comes from an understanding of suffering and pain. He would have liked to pray then for himself, to call suffering to him out of the chaos of the world. But he did not believe in God, and the kind of suffering which brings wisdom cannot be named and cannot without blasphemy be prayed for.

  Seven

  “WE haven’t sung our bathing song once since you came back,” Henrietta complained to Barbara.

  “Well, you go and sing it.”

  “No, we must all four sing it or it isn’t proper.”

  “I’ve forgotten it,” said Barbara.

  “I don’t believe you,” said Pierce.

  Barbara was lying full length upon the ivy. Pierce was standing a little way off leaning against a tombstone off which he was intently scratching yellow lichen with a finger nail.

  “You three go and bathe for heaven’s sake,” said Barbara. “I don’t want to come. I feel far too lazy.”

  “Mingo’s getting too hot,” said Edward. “Why don’t dogs have the sense to lie in the shade?”

  Mingo lay panting on the ivy near Barbara who rocked his warm sheep-like body now and then with a bare foot. Hearing his name uttered he swivelled his eyes, lifted his sausage tail an inch or two and let it languidly fall.

  “It makes me hot to look at him,” said Henrietta. “I do wish it would rain.”

  “Take him away then,” said Pierce. “Drop him in the sea.”

  “Go and hunt for flying saucers,” said Barbara.

  “We did see one, really we did!”

  “Are you coming, Pierce?” said Edward.

  “No. You go and bathe, twins, and stop making such a damn fuss.”

  “No one wants to bathe these days!” said Henrietta, quite suddenly close to tears.

  “Pierce, you’re cross!” cried Edward accusingly. To be cross was traditionally a serious fault.

  “No, I’m not. I’m sorry.”

  “Maybe we won’t bathe,” said Henrietta to Edward. “We’ll play Badgerstown instead.”

  “Well, I want to bathe,” said Edward.

  “You two go down,” said Pierce. “Maybe I’ll follow you. Go on, don’t be asses.”

  “Mingo, come, boy,” said Edward.

  Mingo got up rather reluctantly. His grey woolly face smiled dutifully, but he was too hot and weary to wag his tail, which swung inertly behind him as he followed the twins, placing his big floppy paws carefully upon the yielding ivy.

  The abandoned graveyard was about a quarter of a mile from the house. Together with its hexagonal green-domed church, the empty and padlocked fane of a geometer god, it bore witness to a vivid eighteenth-century life of the region which was now but pyramidally extant. The crowded square sloped down toward the sea and behind it, hazed by trees in small valleys or caught distantly by sunlight through folds in rounded hills, could be seen the pale rectangular façades of houses which had once contained this silent population. There, if they lingered still, they were the discreetest and most mannerly of ghosts. Here they had kept their past time untouched, become a little shadowy perhaps, but subsistent as the real dreams of real sleepers. The draped urns and obelisks, the sublimely truncated columns, the obliquely leaning slabs inscribed with angelic putti and confidently lettered with a divinely dictated clarity and proportion, all glittering a faintly blueish white now in the bright sun, quivered between presence and absence with that quality of being perhaps altogether an hallucination which belongs to certain Greek archaeological sites.

  Yet for all its compactness the place was not exactly a township. It had the kind of unity which a god might have imposed, a little carelessly, upon some place to which he intended to return and which he later utterly forgot, an attentive inscrutable sort of pattern not like human art. There was a sense of speech, as if something were said which yet, as words in an out-door theatre, was at once devoured by the air. In fact nature had taken the churchyard to herself with a relentlessness that was almost sinister, as if she had set herself to paralyse, to blur and render indistinct, the activity of those too attentive dreamers. A very thick small-leaved ivy had grown over the whole area, covering the smaller stones entirely and clambering up the slender shafts of the taller ones, woven in between into a thick springy matrix which seemed to swing a little off the ground.

  From where Pierce and Barbara were, at the top of the graveyard, the thin grey spire of Trescombe parish church, marking the village, could be seen rising from trees a mile to the cast, while to the west the roof of Trescombe House was just visible beyond a slope of old yews which had been bent sideways and smoothed along the top by the mingled beating and caress of the strong sea wind. Ahead was a curve of sheep-nibbled green gras
s which flattened to the stone-strewn meadow which fringed the beach. The twins had just reached the far end of the meadow and slowed their march on to the stones, with frequent pauses now to shake the pebbles out of their sandals. Mingo, his lethargy apparently departed, had run ahead and his sharp excited barks, Mingo’s “seabarks” as Edward called them, could be clearly heard from below. Mingo, although a confident and enthusiastic swimmer, never seemed to get over his sheer surprise at the great restless watery phenomenon. A little further on the figure of Uncle Theo could be seen, walking along very slowly with his head bowed. When Uncle Theo went for a walk he seemed to look exclusively at his own feet, as if fascinated by their regular motion. Beyond Uncle Theo were some alien holiday-makers, referred to as “natives” by the children, of whom this part of the shore happily attracted few, because of its rebarbatively stony nature, and because the steeply shelving beach and the strong currents were thought to make bathing dangerous.

  Cradled upon a swathe of ivy Barbara now lay full length in the sun. She had kicked off her sandals, and her white cotton dress, spotted with little pale green daisies, carelessly ruffled up as she had tossed herself down on to the dark swinging greenery, displayed a length of bronzed thigh above the knee. Her eyes, barely open, appeared liquid and fugitive between the lashes.

  Pierce, with his back to her, was savagely ripping the ivy strands off the face of one of the smaller squarer stones to reveal a relief carving of a sailing ship.

  “So you think I tell lies, do you?” said Barbara after a while.

  “I don’t believe you’ve forgotten the bathing song. You can’t have.”

  “Why not? When one’s in Switzerland this place seems pretty remote.”

  “This place is more important than Switzerland.”

  “Who says it isn’t?”

  “You cried when you went away.”

  “I’m grown up now. I only cry when I’m bored. You’re boring me. Why don’t you go and bathe or something.”

  “I don’t want to. Not unless you come too.”

  “Why do you follow me around all the time? Can’t you do anything by yourself now? Why are you here at all, if it comes to that? Aren’t you supposed to be staying with those Pember-Smith people and sailing in their yacht?”