The Nice and the Good

by Iris Murdoch

  “No good,” said Pierce in a new calm voice. “It’s a dead end.”

  The calmness was the final tone of despair.

  Ducane said, “Let’s move back a bit. I can’t stand this rock on the back of my neck.” He thought, I would rather the standing up. As he moved back and straightened up he could feel the pebbles shifting underneath his feet. The sea had followed them.

  “It’ll rise quite fast in here,” said Pierce. “I’m afraid we’ve had it.” He uttered a low long-drawn-out moan.

  Ducane began to take in, more from that dreadful sound than from the words, what was to be. He began to say something aloud to himself. But at that moment something extraordinary happened, something pierced through the sphere of darkness and black wet masses and noisy water. It seemed like light. But it was not light. It was the smell of the white daisies.

  “Pierce, the air is fresher here, I can feel air coming down from above. There may be some cranny, some shaft we could climb up—”

  They blundered against each other, their arms above their heads, feeling the blunt rock. Ducane felt as if his hands had become lumps of blackness, lumps without fingers. He could not now stop from shuddering and there was a hissing sound which he realised he must be making himself.

  “There’s something here,” said Pierce beside him.

  Ducane’s groping encountered a hole. There was a faint movement of air. “Is it big enough to get up?”

  “I think so. Stay where you are a minute.”

  Pierce disappeared from beside him. There were soft slippery sounds and grunts and then Pierce’s voice triumphant from above, “I’m up. At least there’s a ledge. I don’t know if it goes farther.”

  “Are there footholds? How did you—?”

  “Wait, I’m coming down. Keep clear.”

  There was a slithering noise and Pierce landed heavily beside him, seizing his shoulder.

  “How did you get up?”

  “It’s a chimney. One can brace oneself. Shoulders on one side and feet on the other. It runs diagonally, so it’s quite easy, sixty degrees I should think. You can get into the hole just by hitching yourself up and sitting on the edge of it. It’s awfully slippery, that’s the only thing. I’ll take Mingo up now.”

  I can’t do it, thought Ducane. Even as a boy he had not been able to do that particular trick. And now, out of condition, exhausted, paralysed with cold— He said, “You can’t climb up and carry Mingo. You’ll fall and break a leg. We’ll have to leave Mingo behind. Mingo, he thought, and me.

  “I’m not going to leave Mingo behind,” said Pierce in a breaking voice. “I can push him. Just help me lift him into the hole. Here, feel it, feel it.”

  Between them they lifted the wet warm heavy dog up into the hole. Fortunately Mingo was used to being lifted about like a sack.

  “Push him up, he’ll slide. I’m getting in now. Just put your hand behind me, that’s right, not too hard, stand by in case we tumble back.”

  The panting straining mass moved upward and for a moment Ducane could feel the boy’s body braced like a bow and then his supporting hand was left in the air. A time passed. Then Pierce’s voice: “We’re up! Only just though, my God he’s a weight. Stay still, Mingo, lie down. I wonder if we can—Christ, there doesn’t seem to be much room. Can you come up now?”

  Ducane sat on the edge of the dark hole whose blackness was no thicker than the surrounding air, and with the sense of a hopeless ritual slowly bent his knees until his feet were against the opposing wall. Even this required an almost impossible effort. He sat there. He had not the strength even to try. He moved his back against the slimy rock. His body was without force.

  The sea was moving just below him in strong regular surges, grinding the pebbles forward and back. The hollow clapping noise below had merged into a soft chaotic roar. But Ducane scarcely heard the sounds, scarcely knew if they were inside his head or not. He wondered, suppose I were to let the water itself lift me up the chimney? But no. It would rush up that narrow sloping hole like a demon and come sucking down again. Anything in that confined space would be battered to pieces.

  “What is it, John?” said Pierce’s voice sharply from above.

  “I can’t do it,” said Ducane.

  “You must. Try. Keep your feet just a little lower than your head. Feel the wall for good foot places. Then just slide your shoulders and let your feet do the work like walking.”

  “I can’t try, Pierce. I haven’t any strength. Don’t worry. The sea will carry me up when the time comes.”

  “Don’t be crazy. Look out, I’m coming down.”

  Ducane could not move his cramped body in time. Pierce arrived, tumbling him out of the hole on to his knees in the rising water.

  “Sorry. Oh God. I could try and push you but I could only just manage Mingo. Oh God, what shall we do? If only I’d brought a rope—I never thought—”

  Ducane had managed to stand up. He thought, I haven’t got much longer before some sort of collapse. He could not think if this would be a collapse of mind or of body. Mind and body seemed utterly fused now in cold aching pain, and darkness. He said to himself deliberately, I must do everything that I can to survive. He said slowly, leaning back against the rock, “We might—make—a rope—of our clothes—Pierce.”

  “Yes, yes, quick. Can you undress? Nylon vests and pants, tear them into strips.”

  “I am undressed, dear boy. You’ll have to do the tearing. Here.”

  Ducane climbed awkwardly out of his vest and underpants. He seemed to have lost the schema of his body and had to find out the position of his limbs by experiment. He began to shiver uncontrollably.

  “No, keep yours till I’ve torn mine. Oh Christ, they won’t tear. I’m losing my strength.”

  “Tear them along the side seams first,” said Ducane. “Don’t drop anything, for God’s sake, we’d never find it again. Here, I’ll hold the end, pull now, pull.” There was a faint rending sound. “Good, good, now these, go on. Do you think that’s enough? It’ll stretch of course. Can you knot them? Reef knots.”

  “My hands won’t work,” said Pierce’s voice. There was a tearful tremor.

  “Think about the knots, don’t think about your hands. Let me—good, you’ve done it. Now Pierce, listen and obey me. You go up again with one end of the rope and we’ll try like this. I’ll have to tie it round my waist, nothing else will do. Then just pull steadily and I’ll try to use my hands and feet. Be careful not to overbalance, and if I suddenly start to fall let go. And if I can’t get up then that’s that. Don’t come down again, it’s pointless and you may be too exhausted to get back. I’ll take my chance when the sea comes. Now up you go.”

  Pierce went from him with a faint groan. In the greater noise of the water Ducane could not hear him climbing. Ducane sat himself into the hole, paying out the limp wet rope and shuddering. The movement of the rope ceased.

  “Have you still got it?” said Pierce from above.

  “Yes. I think I can tie it round me, there’s enough.” But can I tie it, he thought? Idiotic not to have told Pierce to tie it. Very slowly he drew it round his waist and composed a knot. “Pull now, very gently, and I’ll try to climb.”

  It’s impossible, thought Ducane, utterly impossible. The sea water out of which he had just lifted himself was knee deep. A light spray seemed to be sifting through the black air. The noise inside his head now had a metallic overwhelming quality as in the feverish nightmares of his childhood. If I could only pray, he thought, if there was only some reservoir of force out of which I could draw something extra. He sat cramped in the hole. There was not enough force in his legs to lift him even an inch from his sitting position. His legs were stiff and cold and powerless, and his naked back worked helplessly, sliding a little up, a little down, on the slimy icy rock. His slippery unclothed body hung inertly between the walls, getting no purchase, exerting no force. He thought, if I could only somehow occupy my mind it might help my body, anything, erotic im
agery, anything. Something white was floating in the air in front of him, close in front of his eyes, suspended in space. The face of a woman swam in front of him, seeming to move and yet to be still like the racing moon, indistinct and yet intent, staring into his eyes.

  He found that he was no longer sitting but was suspended, braced between the two walls. Stay, stay, he said to the shimmering face as almost surreptitiously he paid attention to his edging feet, his braced back, and the hunched enduring frame between them. He could hear Pierce speaking above him with a disintegrated echoing wordless voice. The steady pull of the rope continued. Very very slowly Ducane edged upward. It was becoming easier. The pallid face was composing into a face that he knew.

  Ducane lay upon the ledge. These stars of warmth behind his closed eyes must be tears, he thought almost abstractedly. Pierce was rubbing him and trying to introduce one of his arms into the sleeve of the jersey.

  “Wait, Pierce, wait, wait.”

  A little while later Ducane sat up. He stretched out numbed hands touching black surfaces which might have been Pierce, Mingo, rock. The sweetish powdery celestially dry smell of the white daisies was stronger. The noise below had increased, seeming circular now, circular, he thought, as if water were being hurled violently round and round a huge circular vessel. He said to Pierce, hardly recognising his own voice, “Can we get on from here?”

  “No. I’ve been trying. There are crannies, but no outlet.”

  “I see.” Ducane listened to the noisy sea. There was this new note. The water must be entering the foot of the chimney.

  “How much time has passed, Pierce? Is it nearly high tide?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve lost all count of time. And my watch isn’t luminous.”

  “Neither is mine. Do you think we’re above the high tide line?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is it wet in here?”

  “I can’t tell. I’ve lost my feeling. Do you think it is?”

  Ducane began to move his hands again, trying to discern what he was touching. He felt something long and smooth, like a cold line drawn upon the dark. Then he put his fingers to his lips. The fingers tasted salt. But they would taste salt anyway. He licked his fingers, warming them to a small agony. Then he drew his cold dark line again and tasted again. Salt. Or was he perhaps mistaken? Or were his fingers too soaked in the sea to lose their salty taste? He said to Pierce, “I can’t tell either.” He thought, it is better not to know.

  “Put the jersey on now, please.”

  “Listen, Pierce. Our chances of survival here, if we aren’t drowned, depend on two things, your jersey and Mingo. It’s just as well Mingo followed you in. He’s a godsend. Where is he? Feel how warm he is. I suggest, if we can, that we both get inside your jersey and put Mingo between us. I’m afraid the rope isn’t going to be much good to us now, but we may as well wrap it round, that’s right. Now can you pull the jersey over my head and then come up inside it yourself? Mind you don’t go over the edge. How much space is there?”

  “There’s about four or five feet, but the roof slopes. Lift your arm, can you. Shift over this way. Now over your head.”

  Ducane felt the damp wool dragging on his shivering arm and then descending over his face. He nuzzled through it. He lay quiet as Pierce climbed up his body, driving his head up through the sweater. The neckline gave at the seams and Pierce’s head was thrust against his own, bone to bone, and Pierce was fighting his arm into the other sleeve of the sweater.

  “Pull it down as far as you can, John. I’ll roll over a bit. Damn, Mingo’s the wrong way round. We don’t want to stifle him between us. Could you pull him up towards me, just pull him by the tail.”

  Unprotesting silent Mingo, warm Mingo, was at last adjusted with his bulky body between them, his head emerging at the bottom of the sweater. After a moment or two Ducane could feel the sparkling painful particles of warmth beginning to stream into him. A little later he felt something else, which was Mingo licking his thigh.

  “Comfortable?”

  “All right. You can’t move any farther back?”

  “No.”

  The water was boiling at the bottom of the shaft, rushing up it and then retiring with a noise like a cork being withdrawn from a bottle. Ducane thought, at any rate we shall know pretty soon, one way or the other. He was lying on his right side, with Pierce’s head propped against his, the hard cheekbone pressing into his cheek. They lay like two broken puppets, lolling head to head. Ducane felt a faint shuddering and a wet warmth touched his cheek. Pierce was crying. He put a heavy limp arm over the boy and made the motion of drawing him closer.

  I wonder if this is the end, thought Ducane, and if so what it will all have amounted to. How tawdry and small it has all been. He saw himself now as a little rat, a busy little scurrying rat seeking out its own little advantages and comforts. To live easily, to have cosy familiar pleasures, to be well thought of. He felt his body stiffening and he nestled closer to Mingo’s invincible warmth. He patted Pierce’s shoulder and burrowed his hand beneath it. He thought, poor, poor Mary. The coloured images were returning now to his closed eyes. He saw the face of Biranne near to him, as in a silent film, moving, mouthing, but unheard. He thought, if I ever get out of here I will be no man’s judge. Nothing is worth doing except to kill the little rat, not to judge, not to be superior, not to exercise power, not to seek, seek, seek. To love and to reconcile and to forgive, only this matters. All power is sin and all law is frailty. Love is the only justice. Forgiveness, reconciliation, not law.

  He shifted slightly and his free hand, now moving behind Pierce’s back, touched something in the darkness. His chilled fingers explored it. It was a small ridged pyramid-shaped excrescence on the rock. His moving hand encountered another one. Limpets, thought Ducane. Limpets. He lay still again. He hoped that Pierce had not found the limpets.

  Thirty-six

  “HOW much longer?”

  “Only a few minutes now.”

  Voices were hushed.

  The night was warm and the smell of the white daisies moved dustily across the water, laying itself down upon the still satiny skin of the sea’s surface. A large round moon was turning from silver to a mottled gold against a lightish night sky.

  The two boats floated near to the cliff. There had been every confusion, appeals, suggestions, plans. The villagers, thrilled by the mishap, had produced innumerable theories about the cave, but no facts. The police had been told, the coastguards had been told, the navy had been told. The lifeboat had offered to stand by. Frogmen were to come to take in aqualung equipment. Telephone calls passed along the coast. Time passed. The frogmen were needed for an accident elsewhere. Time passed on to the consummation of the high tide. After that there was a kind of lull.

  “Now we can’t do anything but wait,” people said to each other, avoiding each other’s eyes.

  Mary was sitting in the stern of the boat. There had been other craft earlier, sightseers in motor boats, journalists with cameras, until the police launch told them to go away. There was silence now. Mary sat shuddering with cold in the warm air. She was wearing Theo’s overcoat which at some point he had forced her to put on. The coat collar was turned up and inside the big sleeves her hidden hands had met and crawled up to clutch the opposing arms. She sat full, silent, remote, her chin tilted upward a little, her big unseeing eyes staring at the moon. She had shed no tears, but she felt her face as something which had been dissolved, destroyed, wiped into blankness by grief and terror. Now her last enemy was hope. She sat like somebody who tries hard to sleep, driving thoughts away, driving hopes away.

  Near to her in the boat, and clearly visible to her although she was not looking at them, were Willy and Theo. Perhaps she could perceive them so sharply because their image had occurred so often during the terrible confusions and indecisions of the afternoon and evening. Willy and Theo, among the people from whom her grief had cut her off so utterly, the least cut off. Theo sat closest to her
now in the boat, occasionally reaching out without looking at her to stroke the sleeve of the overcoat. Casie had wept. Kate had wept. Octavian had rushed to and fro organising things and telephoning. She supposed she must have talked to them all, she could not remember. It was silence now.

  Mary’s thoughts, since she had got into the coastguards’ boat, now more than half an hour ago, had become strangely remote and still. Perhaps it was for some scarcely conscious protection from the dreadful agony of hope that she was thinking about Alistair, and about what Ducane had said about him, Tel qu’en lui-même enfin l’éternité le change. She formed the words in her mind: What is it like being dead, my Alistair? As she said to herself, my Alistair, she felt a stirring of something, a sort of sad impersonal love. How did she know that this something in her heart, in her mind, where nothing lived but these almost senseless words, was love at all? Yet she knew. Can one love them there in the great ranks of the dead? The dead, she thought, the dead, and formed abstractly, emptily, namelessly the idea of her son.

  Death happens, love happens, and all human life is compact of accident and chance. If one loves what is so frail and mortal, if one loves and holds on, like a terrier holding on, must not one’s love become changed? There is only one absolute imperative, the imperative to love: yet how can one endure to go on loving what must die, what indeed is dead? O death, rock me asleep, bring me to quiet rest. Let pass my weary guilty ghost out of my careful breast. One is oneself this piece of earth, this concoction of frailty, a momentary shadow upon the chaos of the accidental world. Since death and chance are the material of all there is, if love is to be love of something it must be love of death and chance. This changed love moves upon the ocean of accident, over the forms of the dead, a love so impersonal and so cold it can scarcely be recognised, a love devoid of beauty, of which one knows no more than the name, so little is it like an experience. This love Mary felt now for her dead husband and for the faceless wraith of her perhaps drowned son.