The Nice and the Good

by Iris Murdoch

  Paula was coming down the narrow stairs at Foyles. She had already spent several hours on her book-hunt and had eaten her sandwiches in the Pillars of Hercules. She had also made some purchases, which he had asked her to make, for Willy. She had not mentioned this to Mary, as she was aware that Mary was intensely jealous of anyone who performed services for Willy. This sort of discretion came to Paula quite naturally and unreflectively.

  Paula was carrying a large basket full of books and also a parcel under her arm. She thought, well that’s the lot, but what shall I do with all this weighty stuff now. There was still some time before the train on which she and Pierce and Mary were to travel back to Dorset. Paula thought, I’ll go to the National Gallery and dump these in the cloak-room and look at some pictures. She emerged into the hot and crowded street and hailed a taxi. Up and up. Heat Wave to Continue, said the posters.

  Paula knew a good deal about pictures and they brought to her an intense and completely pure and absorbing pleasure which she received from no other art, although in fact her knowledge of literature was much greater. Today, however, as she mounted the familiar steps and turned to the left into the golden company of the Italian primitives all she could think about was Eric, the image of whom, banished by the book-hunt, now returned to her with renewed force. Eric slowly, slowly moving towards her like a big black fly crawling over the surface of the round world. She had just had a postcard from him posted in Colombo.

  Paula had an image of Eric’s hands. He had strange square hands with very broad flattened fingers and long silky golden hair which grew not only on the back of the palm but well down to the second finger joint. A signet ring which he wore was quite buried in this tawny grass. Perhaps his hands had somehow decided for him that he must be a potter. Paula could smell his hands smelling with the cool sleek smell of wet clay. Eric had only just managed to make a living with his pottery at Chiswick. Paula had liked his lack of worldliness, she had liked his hands miraculously wooing the rising clay, she had liked the clay. It was all so different from Richard. Perhaps I fell in love with Eric’s hands, she thought, perhaps I fell in love with the clay. Eric had seemed to her, after Richard’s mixture of intellectualism and sophisticated sensuality, so solid and natural. Yet Eric was terribly neurotic, she thought for the first time. He was posing as a natural man, as an artisan, with his curious smock and his great leonine head of unkempt golden hair. Big Eric, big man. So much the greater the appalling horror of his … defeat by Richard. How could Eric ever forgive her for that defeat? The thought came to her, perhaps Eric is coming back to kill me. Perhaps that is the only thing which can give him peace now. To kill me. Or to kill Richard.

  Richard. Paula, who had been walking at random through the rooms, stopped dead in front of Bronzino’s picture of Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time. Richard’s special picture. “There’s a real piece of pornography for you,” she could hear Richard’s high-pitched voice saying. “There’s the only real kiss ever represented in a picture. A kiss and not a kiss. Paula, Paula, give me a Bronzino kiss.” Paula went to the middle of the room and sat down. It was long ago, before their marriage even, that Richard had ‘taken over’ that picture of Bronzino. It was he who had first made her really look at it, and it had become the symbol of their courtship, a symbol which Paula had endorsed the more since she found it in a way alien to her. It was a transfiguration of Richard’s sensuality, Richard’s lechery, and she took it to her with a quick gasp of surprise even as she took Richard. Chaste Paula, cool Paula, bluestocking Paula, had found in her husband’s deviously lecherous nature a garden of undreamt delights. Paula was incapable of unmarried bliss. Her married bliss had been bliss indeed.

  Paula sat and looked at the picture. A slim elongated naked Venus turns languidly toward a slim elongated naked Cupid. Cupid stoops against her, his long-fingered left hand supporting her head, his long-fingered right hand curled about her left breast. His lips have just come to rest very lightly upon hers, or perhaps just beside hers. It is the long still moment of dreamy suspended passion before the spinning clutching descent. Against a background of smooth masks and desperate faces the curly-headed Folly advances to deluge with rose petals the drugged and amorous pair, while the old lecher Time himself reaches out a long and powerful arm above the scene to bring all sweet things to an end. “Did you go to see my picture, Paula?” Richard would always say, if Paula had been to the Gallery. The last time he had said it to her was at the end of the first and only quarrel they had had about Eric. He had said it to reconcile them. She had not replied.

  Paula told the taxi to stop at the corner of Smith Street and the King’s Road. She paused beside the grocer’s shop on the corner and the grocer, who recognised her, bowed and smiled. She smiled a quick constricted smile and began to walk down the street. This was an idiotic way of torturing herself, as idiotic as the impulse she had suddenly had last year to ring Richard up at the office. She had listened silently for a minute to his familiar voice saying “Biranne”, and then a puzzled “Hello? Hello?” and then she had replaced the receiver. What she was going to do now was to look again at the house in Chelsea where she and Richard had lived. She knew, from something she had overheard Octavian saying, that he lived there still.

  She walked more slowly now on the shady side of the street, the opposite side to the house. She could already see the front door, which used to be blue, and which had been newly painted in a fashionable brownish orange. He’s had the door painted, she thought, he’s cared enough, he looked through books and chose a colour. And as she came closer still she thought, how very clean the windows are, and there’s a window box with flowers in it that’s new. And she thought, why am I surprised? I must have been assuming that without me there it would be all cobwebs and desolation. I must have been assuming that without me Richard would be demoralised, broken down, done for. Yes, I did think that. How could he have chosen a new colour for the door without me? She stopped in the shade opposite to the house. There was no danger of Richard being there at that time of the afternoon. Paula put her hand over her left breast, curling her fingers round it as Cupid had curled his fingers round the breast of his mother. She was just wondering whether she dared to cross the road and peer in at the front window when something absolutely terrible happened. An extremely attractive and well-dressed woman came briskly down the street, stopped outside Richard’s house, and let herself in with a latch key.

  Paula turned abruptly away and began to walk quickly back toward the King’s Road. Hot raging tears filled her eyes. She knew now, knew it with a devouring crippling pain in her body’s centre, that she had not only assumed that without her Richard was demoralised and desolate and unable to have the front door painted. She had, not with her mind but with her flesh and her heart, assumed that without her Richard was alone.

  Jessica Bird had hardly ever visited John Ducane at his own house. This had never seemed to her particularly significant. John had always told her how cheerless his own house was and what pleasure he received from visiting her flat. So they normally, and of late always, met at Jessica’s flat and not at the house in Earls Court.

  Jessica had not felt deprived or excluded. Now, however, especially since he had spoken of leaving her, Ducane’s house had become in her mind a place both mysterious and magnetic, as if it contained, in the form of some talismanic object, the secret of his change of heart. She had nightmares about the house in which it appeared vastly enlarged into a labyrinth of dark places through which she wandered lost and frightened looking for John. Jessica did not yet believe that he would leave her. She did not see the sense of his leaving her, given that she demanded so little. She could not quite bring herself to say to him: take another mistress, I can bear it. But by making him promise to tell her when he did take another mistress she felt that she had in some sense patently condoned his doing so. What then could have driven him into these frantic efforts to escape from her? As there was no proper cause for the frenzy Jessica could not quite believe
that the frenzy was real. There must be some misunderstanding, she thought, there must be some mistake.

  When one is much in love—and Jessica was still much in love—it is difficult to believe that the beloved’s affection may really have diminished. Any other explanation will be accepted except this one. Besides, Jessica had already suffered her crisis of death and rebirth when John had ceased to be her lover. She had been crucified for him already and had risen again, and this had persuaded her of her immortality. Since then John had become entissued in the whole substance of her life in a way which seemed at last invulnerable since it was removed from the drama of an ‘affair’. That he should want to take that from her seemed in him purely wilful.

  There are mysterious agencies of the human mind which, like roving gases, travel the world, causing pain and mutilation, without their owners having any full awareness, or even any awareness at all, of the strength and the whereabouts of these exhalations. Possibly a saint might be known by the utter absence of such gaseous tentacles, but the ordinary person is naturally endowed with them, just as he is endowed with the ghostly power of appearing in other people’s dreams. So it is that we can be terrors to each other, and people in lonely rooms suffer humiliation and even damage because of others in whose consciousness perhaps they scarcely figure at all. Eidola projected from the mind take on a life of their own, wandering to find their victims and maddening them with miseries and fears which the original source of these wanderers could not be justly charged with inflicting and might indeed be very puzzled to hear of.

  Jessica felt herself so powerless and so harmless in her relation to John that she could not conceive that she was rapidly becoming as hateful to him as a boa-constrictor clutching him about the neck. She could not conceive that he had nightmares about her. Ducane could not forgive Jessica for having broken his resolution by screaming and made him so abjectly take her in his arms. This scene, which he could not banish from his mind, seemed to symbolise the way in which he had allowed himself, by a show of violence, to be trapped into a position of hateful falsity. Meanwhile poor Jessica, whose whole occupation was thinking about him, was driven by the sheer need of an activity connected with him to write him daily love letters, which he received with nausea, read cursorily, and did not answer.

  What had driven Jessica, on this summer afternoon, to make the journey to Earls Court was chiefly the letter which she had received from Ducane saying that he had too much work to do this week to be able to see her. She was miserably disappointed not to see him. But she received yet another impression from the letter which was in a curious way invigorating, and this was the clear impression that Ducane was lying. She did not believe in these ‘evening conferences’. She was sure that he had never lied to her before. A certainty of his absolute truthfulness with her had been a steady consolation. But the tone of this letter was something new; and Jessica was almost glad of it, since to detect him in a lie, even to know that he was lying, seemed to endow her with a certain power. It was after all very improbable that John should be so busy that he had no time in the whole week to see her. The letter sounded distinctly shifty.

  Jessica had no very clear intention in her pilgrimage. She did not really want to spy on John, she just wanted the comfort of doing something, however vague, ‘about him’. She considered waiting at Earls Court tube station and meeting him ‘by accident’ as he emerged, since he occasionally returned by train, and she did in fact wait for a while in the station entrance although it was still a little early for him to be coming home. Then she walked slowly up the road and down the short street which led to the backwater of small pretty houses where John lived.

  John’s road, a cul-de-sac, met the other street at right angles and opposite to this junction there was a public house which was just opening its doors. Into this pub Jessica now went and stationed herself with a glass of beer at the window with a good view of the corner and of the front of Ducane’s house. She had not been there for long, and was wondering whether if she saw him she could stop herself from running out, when something happened which astonished and appalled her. An extremely attractive and well-dressed woman came briskly down the street, stopped outside Ducane’s house, rang the bell and was instantly admitted.

  Jessica put her glass down. She thought, he is there, he is in there, he has been lying, he has a mistress. A completely new sensation of jealousy shook her whole body in successive shudders of pain. At the same moment, by some connected miracle, the strength which had flowed into her when she had received Ducane’s lying letter was increased a hundredfold, and in that quiet sleepy pub a new demon came into existence, the demon of a ferociously determined jealous woman.

  Kate Gray came briskly down the street, stopped outside Ducane’s house, rang the bell, and was instantly admitted. She knew that Ducane could not be at home since he was going directly from the office to spend the evening with Octavian. Kate had come to make her personal investigation of Ducane’s manservant.

  “I want to come in and leave some things for Mr Ducane and to write him a note,” said Kate, advancing promptly into the hall. “Could you let me have some writing paper please? And perhaps I could leave these things in the kitchen. Thank you, I know the way. I am Mrs Gray. You are Fivey, I believe.”

  Fivey had followed Kate into the kitchen and was silently watching her unload from her basket a box of marrons glacés and a bottle of slivovitz, her offerings to Ducane and her excuse for calling.

  “You keep things very neat in here, Fivey,” she said approvingly. “Very neat and clean indeed. It’s a pleasant kitchen, isn’t it. Now these things are for Mr Ducane. You know he won’t be home until late this evening, he’s over with my husband.”

  Kate surveyed Fivey across the table. She found him very unexpected indeed. Ducane’s attempts at describing, in answer to a question of Kate’s, his man’s personal appearance had been vague and had made Kate anticipate something a little coarse and brutish. Brutish perhaps Fivey was, but with the picturesque romanticised almost tender brutishness with which the Beast is usually represented in productions of Beauty and the Beast, a large touching cuddly animal which had always seemed to Kate in her childhood greatly to be preferred to the tediously handsome prince into which it had to be metamorphosed at the end. Kate marked the apricot skin, so strikingly blotched with big brown freckles, the huge inflated shaggy head, the abundant hair and moustache the rich colour of a newly opened conker, the long long slanted eyes of the purest spotless light brown, the long straight line of the lips. He must comb it, she thought. I wonder if I could persuade Octavian to grow a moustache, I never realised it could be so becoming.

  Kate became aware that she had for some moments been staring at Fivey, who had been staring back. She said hastily, “Could you bring me some paper please, to write my note on.”

  Without a word Fivey disappeared and returned in a moment with some paper. Kate sat down at the table and wrote Dearest John. His hands are spotted too, she thought, lifting her eyes far enough to see one of them. I wonder if he is spotted all over. She put in a comma and poised her pen. She could not think of anything to say to John. She went on Here I am, and crossed it out. She wrote I’ve just been to Fortnum’s and I’ve got you some nice things. She said to Fivey, “I don’t think after all it’s necessary to leave a note. Just tell Mr Ducane I delivered these.”

  Fivey nodded and Kate slowly crumpled the note up. Something had gone wrong. She made out that what was wrong was that Fivey had not spoken. Ducane didn’t say he was dumb, she thought.

  She said, “I hope you’re happy here with Mr Ducane, Fivey?”

  “Mr Ducane is a very kind gentleman.”

  “Good heavens!” cried Kate. “Mr Ducane never told me you were Irish!” There was no mistaking the voice. “Why I’m Irish too!”

  “I took the liberty of recognising your accent, ma’am,” said Fivey. His face was impassive and the slanted brown eyes were intently fixed on Kate.

  “How splendid, I
come from County Clare. Where do you come from?”

  “I come from County Clare myself.”

  “What an extraordinary coincidence!” cried Kate. “Well, that’s a real bond between us. Where in Clare are you from?”

  “On the coast there—”

  “Near the Burren?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “How astonishing! I come from quite near there. Are your people still there?”

  “Only my old mother, ma’am, with her little house and a cow.”

  “And do you often go back?”

  “It’s the fare, ma’am. I send my mother a little bit of my wages, you see.”

  I must give him the fare, thought Kate, but how? He looks rather a proud man. Of course I can see now that he’s Irish.

  “Have you been in England long, Fivey?”

  “Not long at all, ma’am. I’m a country boy.”

  A real child of nature, she thought. How very simple and moving he is, a true peasant. Ducane didn’t describe him properly at all. And she thought, I do rather wish he was our servant. I wouldn’t at all mind having Fivey.

  “London must be a bit intimidating. But I expect you’ll get used to it.”

  Kate, who by now felt very disinclined to leave the house, got up and began to prowl about the kitchen, patting cups and stroking saucepans and peering into bowls. She was beginning to feel quite at ease in the presence of Fivey as if warm rays from his reassuring beast-like presence were both caressing and stimulating her nerves.

  “Have a marron glacé,” she said. She tore the box open and thrust it across the table towards him.