The Nice and the Good

by Iris Murdoch

  “I say, may I come in for a moment?”

  Ducane’s thoughts were interrupted by the voice of Richard Biranne, who had just put his head round the door.

  “Come in, come in,” said Ducane pleasantly, checking with a quick physical twitch the instant hostility which had gripped his whole body at the appearance of Biranne.

  Biranne came in and sat down opposite to Ducane. Ducane looked at his visitor’s clever face. Biranne had a long handsome slightly tortured-looking intellectual head. His stiff wiry hair, colourlessly fair, stood up in a wavy crest, elongated his face. His shapeless-looking mouth was twisted and rather mobile. He had a high-pitched donnish voice which was physically disturbing, as if it made objects in his vicinity vibrate and do their best to break. Ducane could well imagine that he was attractive to women.

  “Droysen told me about McGrath,” said Biranne. “I was wondering if you had seen that sinner and got anything out of him, if that’s not an indiscreet question.”

  Ducane did not see why he should not discuss the matter with Biranne, who had after ail seen the opening of the drama. He said, “Yes, I saw him. He told me a few things. I’ve got the beginnings of a picture.”

  “Oh. What did you get out of him?”

  “He says he did the shopping for Radeechy’s magical goings-on. He says the magic involved naked girls. That, with a few trimmings, is supposed to be what he spilled to the press.”

  “Have you got on to the girls?”

  “Not yet. McGrath said he didn’t know anything about them. Which I don’t believe.”

  “Hmmm. What about the blackmail story?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ducane. “It seems to me possible that McGrath himself was blackmailing Radeechy in a quiet way. But that’s not important. There’s something else. There’s someone else.”

  “Someone eke?” said Biranne. “I don’t see why. Is that just a guess? It seems to me you’ve got all the ingredients for an explanation already.”

  “It doesn’t add up. Why did Radeechy kill himself? And why did he leave no note? And why did he do it in the office? I can’t help feeling that’s significant.”

  “Had to do it somewhere, poor devil! It’s interesting that you think McGrath might have been blackmailing him. Couldn’t that be the reason?”

  “I don’t think so. But I’ll soon know.”

  “You sound very confident. Have you got another lead?”

  Ducane suddenly began to feel cautious. It disturbed him to see Biranne sitting in the chair from which the multi-coloured image of McGrath had not yet entirely faded. There came to him again that faintly thrilling feeling of mingled unworthiness and aspiration which had been occasioned by the putting of McGrath to the question. Yet Ducane had no power over Biranne. Biranne was not a prisoner in the dock.

  He felt an impulse to mystify his visitor. He replied, “Yes, I’ve one or two leads. We’ll see, we’ll see.”

  Now he could feel, almost physically, his familiar be-devilment merging with his old dislike of Biranne. He must, at last, forget the quality of that mocking laughter. He himself had often mocked at harmless men, and indeed meant by it but little harm. The puffed up and affronted self must cease its importunities at last. He recalled Biranne’s distinguished war record. Here was another motive for envy, another source of this thoroughly unworthy dislike. As Ducane gazed at Biranne, who was now preparing to depart, the dusty sunshine in the room brought a vision dazzling into his eyes of Paula and the twins, as he had last seen them together on the beach in Dorset. It had never occurred to Ducane, who liked and admired Paula, to doubt that in their divorce Biranne had been the guilty party. He had heard Biranne talking about women. But what he felt now, as he watched his visitor’s departure, was something more like pity: to have had a wife like Paula, to have had children like the twins, and to have wilfully and utterly lost them.

  Nine

  “DO anything you like,” said Jessica, “only don’t say the word ‘never’. I should die of that word.”

  John Ducane was miserably silent. His timid hangdog look had made him into another person, a stranger.

  “I just don’t understand,” said Jessica. “There must be some way round this, there must be. Think, John, think, for Christ’s sake.”

  “No way,” he mumbled, “no way.”

  He was standing beside the window in the thick afternoon sunlight, shrunken up with wretchedness, rendered by misery physically appalling and strange, as if he were barnacled over with scabs and scales. He moved his head very slowly to and fro, not significantly but as an animal might, twitching its shoulders under a painful yoke. He cast a quick shrewd hostile glance at Jessica and said, “Oh my God.”

  Jessica said, “You want me to make it easy for you to leave me, don’t you. But I can’t. I might just as well try to kill myself by stopping breathing.”

  “My poor child,” he said in a low voice, “don’t fight, don’t fight, don’t fight.”

  “I’m not fighting. I’m just wanting to stay alive.”

  “It’s become such a bloody mess, Jessica—”

  “Something in you may have become a mess. I haven’t changed. John, why can’t you explain? Why are you doing this to us?”

  “We can’t go on in this sort of emotional muddle. We’ve got no background, no stability, no ordinariness. We’re just living on our emotions and eating each other. And it’s so rotten for you.”

  “You aren’t thinking of me, John,” she said, “I know it. You’re thinking of yourself. As for ordinariness, why should we be ordinary? We aren’t ordinary people.”

  “I mean we can’t co-exist and take each other for granted. We aren’t married and we aren’t just friends either. It doesn’t work, Jessica, it’s a bad situation.”

  “It’s been bad lately, but everything would calm down if you’d only stop making a fuss.”

  “We’ve got to simplify things. One has got to simplify one’s life.”

  “I don’t see why. Suppose life just isn’t simple?”

  “Well, it ought to be. All lives ought to be simple and open. With this thing going on our lives can’t be either. We’re like people living on drugs.”

  “There isn’t any thing that’s going on except that I love you. This thing’s in your mind.”

  “All right, it’s in my mind then. I ought never to have let this relationship start, Jessica. The responsibility is entirely mine. I acted very wrongly indeed.”

  “Starting this relationship seems to me one of the better things you’ve ever done, however it ends.”

  “We can’t separate it from how it ends.”

  “Why can’t you live in the present? You live everywhere but in the present. Why can’t you just be merciful to me now?”

  “We are human beings, Jessica. We can’t just live in the present.”

  Jessica closed her eyes. Her love for John was so intense at that moment it was like being burnt alive. She thought, if I could only perish now and fall at his feet like a cinder.

  His sudden decision not to see her any more was utterly incomprehensible to the girl, it was a death sentence from a hidden authority for an unknown crime. Nothing had changed, and then there was suddenly this.

  John Ducane had been the first great certainty in Jessica’s life. She had never known her father, who died when she was an infant. The working class home of her mother and step-father had been a place which she endured and from which she ultimately escaped into an art school. But her life as a student now seemed to Jessica to have been substanceless, seeming in retrospect like a rather casual drunken party. She had been to bed with a number of different boys. She had tried out a number of new and fashionable ways of painting. No one had tried to teach her anything.

  Like most of her fellow students Jessica was, to an extent which even John Ducane did not fully appreciate, entirely outside Christianity. Not only had she never believed or worshipped, she had never been informed about the Bible stories or the doctrines of the
Church in her home or school. Christ was a figure in a mythology, and she knew about as much about him as she knew about Apollo. She was in fact an untainted pagan, although the word suggested a positivity which was not to be found in her life. And if one had been disposed to ask for what and by what Jessica had lived during her student days, the answer would probably have been ‘her youth’. She and her companions were supported and united by one strong credo, that they were young.

  Jessica thought, or had thought, that she was talented as an artist, but she could never decide what to do. From her education in art she had acquired no positive central bent or ability, nor even any knowledge of the history of painting, but rather a sort of craving for immediate and ephemeral ‘artistic activity’. This had by now become, in perhaps the only form in which she could know it, a spiritual hunger. She and her comrades had indeed observed certain rules of conduct which had something of the status of tribal taboos. But Jessica had never developed the faculty of colouring and structuring her surroundings into a moral habitation, the faculty which is sometimes called moral sense. She kept her world denuded out of a fear of convention. Her morality lacked coherent motives. Her contacts with her contemporaries, and she met no one except her contemporaries, and her very strict contemporaries at that, were so public and so free as to become finally without taste. She even became used to making love in the presence of third and fourth parties, not out of any perversity, but as a manifestation of her freedom. After all, accommodation was limited, and nobody marked, nobody minded.

  Jessica had thought herself in love on a number of occasions but in fact her attention had been very much more concentrated upon not having a baby. Perpetual change and no hard feelings was the general rule, and one which had kept Jessica, who religiously obeyed it, both inexperienced and in a sense uncorrupted and innocent. There was a kind of honesty in her mode of life. Her integrity took the form of a contempt for the fixed, the permanent, the solid, in general ‘the old’, a contempt which, as she grew older herself, became a sort of deep fear. So it was that some poor untutored craving in her for the Absolute, for that which after all is most fixed, most permanent, most solid and most old, had to express itself incognito. So Jessica sought to create and to love that which was perfect but momentary.

  This was the zeal, this the fanaticism, which she attempted to communicate to the children whom she taught at school. She taught them to work with paper, which could be crumpled up at the end of the lesson, with plasticine, which could be squeezed back into shapeless lumps, with bricks and stones and coloured balls which could be jumbled together again; and if paint was ever spread upon a white surface it was to move like a river, like a mist, like the changing formations of the world of clouds. No one was ever allowed to copy anything; and a little boy who once wanted to take one of his paper constructions home to show his mother was severely reprimanded. “So it’s all play, Miss?” a child had said to Jessica at last in a puzzled tone. At that moment Jessica felt the glowing pride of the successful teacher.

  Jessica’s refusal to compromise with ‘the fixed’, which was for her the analogue of, which perhaps indeed was, pureness of heart, and which had once made her feel so spiritually superior, had become, by the time she encountered John Ducane, something about which, although she was just as dogmatic, she was a good deal less confident. Her earliest conversations with Ducane had been arguments in which he had expressed surprise at her ignorance of great painters and she had expressed disapproval of what she regarded as the flaccid promiscuity of his taste. It appeared that he liked almost everything! He liked Giotto and Piero and Tintoretto and Titian and Rubens and Rembrandt and Velasquez and Tiepolo and Ingres and Renoir and Matisse and Bonnard and Picasso! Jessica was not far from thinking that a taste so catholic must be guilty of insincerity. When pressed by John she would cautiously admit to liking one or two individual pictures which she knew well. But really she only liked what she could immediately appropriate and use up in her own activity, and this, as the years went by, seemed to be becoming less and less.

  Ducane had been the most serious event of her life. He had made her entirely uncertain of herself while at the same time providing what seemed the only possible complete healing for that uncertainty. Jessica’s disguised longing for a place of absolute rest, the longing which had been running out through her feverishly active finger tips, found a magisterial and innocent satisfaction in John. The girl loved him without reservation. His particular stability, his alien solidness and slowness, his belongingness to the establishment, his age, above all his puritanism now seemed to her what she had been seeking for all her life. His puritanical shyness and reserve shook her with passion. She worshipped his seriousness about the act of love.

  In fact John and Jessica never really managed to understand each other at all, and this was chiefly the fault of John. If he had been a wiser man, or a man with a kind of nerve which he was too fastidious to possess, he would have taken young Jessica firmly in hand and treated her as if she were his pupil or his disciple. Really Jessica longed for John to instruct her. Of course she did not know what kind of instruction she craved; but it was in the nature of her love to think of him as wise and full and of herself as foolish and empty. And John apprehended this hunger in her too, but he instinctively feared it and did not want to find himself playing the role of a teacher. Scrupulously, he shrank from ‘influencing’ his young and now so docile mistress. As soon as he sensed his great power he shut his eyes to it, and herein was guilty of an insincerity more grave than that of the aesthetic promiscuity attributed to him by Jessica. This denial of his power was a mistake. John ought to have been bold enough to instruct Jessica. This would have created a more intelligible converse between them and would also have forced Ducane to reveal himself to the girl. As it was John withdrew in order not to cramp Jessica, in order to make a space into which she should expand; but she was unable to expand and worshipped across the space without understanding him. While she was almost completely concealed from him by the word ‘artist’, which he associated with a conventional idea to which he expected Jessica to conform, not realising that she was a new and completely different species of animal altogether.

  Jessica was thinking, I can’t bear this pain, he must take this pain away from me. It must be all a nightmare, just a bad dream, it can’t be true. When we stopped being lovers I thought it meant that I was to be in his life forever, I accepted it, I went through it because I loved him so much, because I wanted to be what he wished. And he let me go on loving him and he must have been glad that I loved him. He can’t go away from me now, it’s impossible, it’s a fantastic mistake.

  The summer afternoon London sunshine made the room hot and hazily bright and desolate and hid John’s figure behind a sheet of dusty light, making it insubstantial as if it was a puppet out there that spoke his words while the real John had merged into her tormented body.

  Ducane had been silent for some time, looking out of the window.

  “Promise you’ll come again,” said Jessica. “Promise it or I shall die.”

  Ducane turned, bowing his head under the light. “It’s no good,” he said in a low toneless voice. “It’s better for me to go away now. I’ll write to you.”

  “You mean you won’t come again?”

  “It makes no sense, Jessica.”

  “Are you saying that you’re leaving me?”

  “I’ll write to you—”

  “Are you saying that you are going to go now and not come back?”

  “Oh God. Yes, I’m saying that.”

  Jessica began to scream.

  She was lying on her back on the bed and John Ducane was lying beside her, his face buried in her shoulder and his dry cool hair touching her cheek. Jessica’s two hands, questing across the dark stuff of his jacket, met each other and clasped, holding him in a tight compact embrace. As her hands interlocked across his back she sighed deeply, gazing up at the ceiling which the slanting golden sunlight of the evening had ma
de shadowy and dappled and deep, and the gold filled her eyes which seemed to grow larger and larger like great lakes brim full of peace. For the terrible pain had gone, utterly gone, and her body and her soul were limp with the bliss of its departing.

  Ten

  THERE was a loud crash upstairs, followed by a prolonged wailing sound.

  Mary rather guiltily tossed Henrietta’s copy of The Flying Saucer Review, which she had been perusing, back on to the hall table, and ran up the stairs two at a time.

  The scene, in Uncle Theo’s room, was much as she had expected. Theo was sitting up in bed looking rather sheepish, holding Mingo in his arms. Casie was crying, and trying to extract a handkerchief from her knickers. Theo’s tea tray lay upon the floor with a mess, partly on it and partly round about it, of broken crockery, scattered bread and butter, and shattered cake. The carpet had not suffered, since the floor of Theo’s room was always thickly covered with old newspapers and Theo’s underwear, and into this fungoid litter the spilt tea had already been absorbed.

  “Oh Casie, do stop it,” said Mary. “Go downstairs and put the kettle on again. I’ll clear this up. Off you go.”

  Casie went away still wailing.

  “What happened?” said Mary.

  “She said she was a useless broken-down old bitch, and I agreed with her, and then she threw the tea tray on to the floor.”

  “Theo, you just mustn’t bait Casie like that, you’re always doing it, it’s so unkind.”

  Mingo had jumped down and was investigating the wreckage on the floor. The woolly fur which stuck out on either side of his mouth, and which he was now fluttering over the broken china, resembled moustaches. His wet pink nose quivered as he shot out a delicate pink lip and very daintily picked up a thin slice of bread and butter.