by Айрис Мердок
'But if it's to do with the past and you're going to tell me anyway, why shouldn't I see the letter? What harm can it do? I 'It's better not to touch pitch. A really malicious letter should be read once only and destroyed, or best of all not read at all.
These things lodge in the mind. One must have no truck with suspicion and hatred. Please let me destroy this letter, Kate, please.'
'I don't understand,' said Kate. 'This letter, whatever it says, can do you no possible harm with me. How little you trust me!
Nothing can harm or diminish my love for you. Surely you know that.'
'It's a sense datum,' said Ducane, 'a sense datum. It's something which you would find it hard to forget. Such things can be poisonous, however much love there is. I am to blame, Kate.
But I would rather explain the thing to you myself in my own way. Surely you can appreciate that.'
'No, I can't appreciate it,' said Kate. She had moved forward so that their knees were touching. 'And I don't know what you mean by a «sense datum». It's much better that I should read the letter. Otherwise I shall be endlessly wondering what was in it. Give it to me.'
'No.' Kate drew away a little and laughed. 'Aren't you rather taxing my feminine curiosity?'
'I'm asking you to rise above your feminine curiosity.'
'Dear me, we are moral today. John, have some common sense! I'm dying to know what it's all about! It can't possibly harm you. I love you, you ass!'
'I'll tell you what it's all about. I just don't want you to see this ugly thing.'
'I'm not as frail as all that!' said Kate. She snatched the letter from him and stood up, retreating behind the wooden seat. pucane looked up at her gloomily, and then leaned forward to hide his face in his hands. He remained immobile in this attitude of resigned or desperate repose.
Kate was now very upset. She hesitated, fingering the letter, but her curiosity was too strong. She opened it.
There were two enclosures. The first read as follows:
Dear Madam,
in view of your emotional feelings about Mr John Ducane I feel sure it would be of interest to you to see the enclosed.
Yours faithfully,
A Well Wisher
The second enclosure was an envelope addressed to Ducane, with a letter inside it. Kate pulled out the letter.
My dearest, my dearest, my John, this is just my usual daily missive to tell you what you know, that I love you to distraction. You were so infinitely sweet to me yesterday after I had been so awful, and you know how unutterably grateful I am that you stayed. I lay there on the bed afterwards for an hour and cried – with gratitude. Are we not somehow compelled by love? I shall not let one day pass without giving you the assurance of mine. Surely there is a future for us together. I am yours yours yours Jessica Kate looked at the date on the letter. She felt sick, stricken, as if some heavy black thing had been rammed into her stomach. She clutched the back of the seat, turned as if to sit down, and then moved a little away and sat down on the grass, covering her face.
'Well?' said Ducane after a while.
Kate found a rather shaky voice. 'I think I see now what you mean by a sense of datum.'
'I'm sorry,' said Ducane. He sounded quite calm now, only rather weary. 'There's not much I can say. You were sure it couldn't damage things and I can only hope you were right.'
'But you said it belonged to the past '
'So it does. I'm not having a love affair with this girl, though the letter makes it sound as if I am. I ceased being her T-NATG-L 273 lover two years ago, and was unwise enough to go on seeing her.'
Kate said in a forced voice, 'But of course you can see whortr you like, do what you like. You know I don't tie you in any way. How could I? I'm just a bit surprised that you sort of misled me '
'Lied to you. Yes.' Ducane got up. He said, 'I think I'd better go now. You'll just have to digest it, Kate, if you can. I've acted wrongly and I have in a way deceived you. I mean, I implied I had no entanglements and this certainly looks like one. I'm sorry.'
'You're not going back to London?'
'No, I don't think so.'
'Oh John, what's happening?'
'Nothing, I daresay.'
'Won't you – at least – explain?'
'I'm sick of explaining, Kate. I'm sick of myself.' He went quickly away through the gap in the spiraea hedge.
On her knees Kate slowly gathered up the scattered letters and put them back in the Spanish basket. Tears dropped off her sun-warmed cheeks on to the dry hay. The bird in the wood cried out, hesitant and hollow, cu-cuckoo, cu-cuckoo.
'There's going to be a Happening,' Pierce announced to anyone who was listening.
Saturday lunch was over. Ducane and Mary and Theo still sat at the table smoking cigarettes. Kate and Octavian had retired to the sofa and were talking in low voices. Paula and the twins had gone out on to the lawn where the twins were now playing Badgerstown. Barbara was sitting on the window seat reading Country Life. Pierce was standing in a poised ballet dancer's attitude near the kitchen door.
'What sort of happening, dear?' asked Mary.
'Something violent, something awful.'
Barbara continued to be absorbed in her article.
'You've already done something violent, something awful.' said Ducane. 'I think you should be content with your career of crime.'
'Violent to yourself, or to someone else?' Theo asked, interested.
'Wait and see.'
'Oh you are boring,' said Barbara. She threw the magazine down and went quickly out on to the front lawn. A moment or two later she was laughing loudly with the twins.
Pierce sat down on the window seat and started looking hard into the copy of Country Life. He was flushed and looked as if he might burst into tears. The three at the table began to talk promptly about something else. After a minute Mary got up and said something inaudible to Pierce who shook his head.
She went on into the kitchen. Ducane stubbed out his cigarette and followed her. He was unutterably oppressed by the confederate presence of Kate and Octavian.
'Can I help you at all, Mary? You're not going to wash up, are you?'
'No. Casie will do it. She's just gone to the kitchen garden to see if there are any artichokes for tonight. They're so early this year. I'm taking some raspberries up to Willy.'
'May I come?'
'Yes, of course.'
She doesn't want me, he thought. Well, I'll just go as far as the cottage. Where can I put myself now?
The dark shut-in velvety smell of the raspberries hung over the kitchen table. Mary put a white cloth over the basket, and they went out of the back door and began to walk up the pebble path beside the herbaceous border. It was very hot. Big orange furry bees were clambering laboriously into the antirrhinums. A little flock of goldfinches which had been searching for seeds along the foot of the brick wall took refuge among the broad pale leaves of the catalpa tree.
'Look at those thistles! It's easy to see the gardener's on holiday. I really must do some weeding. Casie hates it.'
'I'll do some weeding.'
'Don't be silly, John. You're on holiday down here. Kate would faint if she saw you weeding. Aren't you awfully hot in that shirt?'
'No, well, I rather like to be in a bath of perspiration.'
'I wish you'd talk to Pierce.'
'You mean –?'
'Tell him to grit his teeth a little about Barb. He will go on annoying her and annoying all of us. I know it's awful, but he must just face it. I keep trying to persuade him to go and stay with the Pember-Smiths. They even have a yachtl'
'If you can't persuade him how can I?'
'I've got no authority. You have. You could speak to him sternly. Ever since you hit him he's devoted to you! I told you he would be.'
'Well, I'll have a try.'
'Bless you. And I do wish you'd have a serious talk with Paula too. She's awfully upset about something, and she won't tell me what, though I've positively asked her. She'd te
ll you.
She's terribly fond of you and you've got authority with her too, well you have with all of us. Just corner her and ask her firmly what it's all about.'
'I'm very fond of her,' said Ducane. 'I suppose I – '
'Good. And don't take no for an answer. You're marvellous, John. I rely on you absolutely. I don't know what we'd do without you.'
'Oh Christ,' said Ducane.
The effect of Jessica's letter had been to draw Kate and Octavian together in a new way, a way new at least to Ducane.
He had never felt sexual jealousy of Octavian before. He felt it now. He had no doubt that his faithlessness had been revealed and discussed. Of course Octavian said nothing. He went about the house smiling inscrutably and looking more than ever like a fat golden Buddha. Kate had avoided seeing Ducane alone. He had the impression that she was completely bewildered about her own feelings. Possibly she would have welcomed an effort, a desperate effort, on Ducane's part to explain, to excuse himself, to wrap up in a web of talk and emotion that so disastrous sense datum. But Ducane, who could not bring himself to return to London, could not bring himself to talk to Kate either. He also felt that he ought not to talk to her, though he was not too sure why. He was aware that his refusal to explain now, and his inability to explain at the time, probably made the thing look graver and weightier than it was.
Yet was it not grave and weighty enough? He had made it seem a small matter by deliberately chilling his own feelings and dimming his own thoughts while permitting Jessica to continue in the fantasy world of her wishes. It was easy to see now that it had been wrong. In receiving the force of Jessica's sense of possession Kate was scarcely receiving a wrong picture.
Jessica's condition was a fact. And if Kate retained the impression that he and Jessica were still lovers, or practically lovers, this was not a completely false impression.
When McGrath had rung Ducane up at the office, Ducane had of course told him to go to the devil. Their conversation had lasted about forty seconds. Ducane had meanwhile been trying desperately to get in touch with Jessica. He had telephoned her ten times, and sent several notes and a telegram asking her to ring him. He had called three times at the flat and got no answer. This from Jessica who, as he knew with a special new pain now, had been used to sit at home continually in the hope that he would write or ring. The feelings with which he turned away from her door strangely resembled a renewal of being in love. He had had, after the third telephone call, no doubt that she had been the first recipient of McGrath's malice; and it had occurred to him to wonder whether she might not have killed herself. An image of Jessica in her shift, pale and elongated, stretched out upon the bed, one stiffening arm trailing to the ground, accompanied him from the locked door and reappeared in his dreams. However, he did not on reflection really think this likely. There had always been a grain of petulance in Jessica's love. A saving egoism would make her detest him now. It was a very sad thought.
His thoughts of Jessica, though violent, were all as it were in monochrome. His imagination had to fight to picture her clearly. It was as if she had become a disembodied ailment which attacked his whole substance. Very different were Ducane's thoughts about Judy McGrath. He remembered the scene in his bedroom with hallucinatory vividness, and seemed to remember it all the time, as if it floated constantly rather high up in his field of vision like the dazzling lozenge which conveys the presence of the Trinity to the senses of some bewildered saint. With a large part of himself he wished that he had made love to Judy. It would have been an honest action, something within him judged; although something else in him knew that this bizarre opinion must be wrong. When one falls into falsehood all one's judgements are dislocated. It was only given this, and given that, and given the other, all of them things which ought not to be the case, that it could seem plausible to judge that making love to Judy would have been an honest action; There is a logic of evil, and Ducane felt himself enmeshed in it. But the beautiful stretched-out body of Judy, its apricot colour, its glossy texture, its weight, continued to haunt him with a tormenting precision and a dreadfully locaz lined painfulness.
And this is the moment, Ducane thought to himself, in this sort of degrading muddle, in this demented state of mind, when I am called upon to be another man's judge. He had been thinking constantly about Biranne too, or rather a ghostly Biranne travelled with him, transparent and crowding him close. The wraith did not accuse him, but hovered before him, a little to the right, a little to the left, becoming at times a sort of alter ego. Ducane did not see how he could let Biranne off; The idea of ruining him, of wrecking his career, of involving him in disgrace and despair, was so dreadful that Ducane kept, with an almost physical movement, putting it away from him.
But there was no alternative and Ducane knew that, in a little while though not yet, he must make himself into that cold judicial machine which was the only relevant and important thing. Radeechy's confession could not be suppressed. It was the completely clear and satisfactory solution to the mystery which Ducane had been briefed to solve. In any case, and quite apart from the inquiry, a murder ought not to be concealed, and it was one's plain duty not to conceal it. Since these conside rations were conclusive, Ducane could be more coolly aware of the danger to himself which would be involved in any concealment. Ducane did not care for guilty secrets, and he did not want to share one with Biranne, a man whom he neither liked nor trusted. And there was also the hovering presence of McGrath, who might know more than Biranne imagined. Ducane knew that if it emerged later that he had suppressed that very important document he would be ruined himself.
'Are you all right, John?'
They had walked up the lane in silence. The variety of witlow herb which is known as 'codlins and cream' filled the narrow closed-in lane with its sickly smell. A wren with up lifted tail moved in the brown darkness of the hedge, accompanying them up the hill.
'I'm fine,' said Ducane in a slightly wild voice. 'It's just that I have bad dreams.'
'Do you mean dreams at night, or thoughts?'
'Both.' Ducane had dreamed last night that he had killed sonle woman, whose identity he could not discover, and was attempting to hide the body under a heap of dead pigeons when he was detected by a terrifying intruder. The intruder was Biranne.
'Tell me about them,' said Mary.
Why do I always have to be helping people, thought Ducane, and getting no help myself? I wish someone could help me. I wish Mary could. He said, 'It's all someone else's secret.'
'Sit down here a minute.' They had reached the wood. Mary sat down on the fallen tree trunk and Ducane sat beside her. He began hacking away with his foot at some parchment-coloured fungus which was growing in wavy layers underneath the curve of the tree. The delicate brown undersides of the fungus, finely pleated as a girl's dress lay fragmented upon the dry beach leaves. Along the bank beside them a pair of bullfinches foraged ponderously in the small jungle of cow parsley and angelica.
'Have you quarrelled with Kate?' asked Mary. She did not look at him. She had put the basket on the ground and regarded it, rocking it slightly with a brown sandalled foot.
She is observant, he thought. Well, it must be fairly obvious.
'Yes. But that's not really – not all.'
'Kate will soon come round, you know she will, she'll mend things. She always does. She loves you very much. What's the other thing, the rest?'
'I have to make a decision about somebody.'
'A girl?'
Her question slightly surprised him. 'No, a man. It's a rather important decision which, affects this person's whole life, and I feel particularly rotten about having to make it as I'm feeling at the moment so – jumbled and immoral.'
'Jumbled and immoral.' Mary repeated this curious phrase as if she knew exactly what it meant. 'But you know how to make the decision, I mean you know the machinery of the decision?'
'Yes. I know how to make the decision.'
'Then shouldn't you just think about
the decision and not about yourself? Let the machinery work and keep it clear of the jumble?'
'You are perfectly right,' he said. He felt extraordinarily calmed by Mary's presence. Ina curious way he was pleased that she had not disputed his self-accusation but had simply given him the correct reply. She assured him somehow of the existence of a permanent moral background. He thought, she is under the same orders as myself. He found that he had picked up the hem of Mary's dress and was moving it between his fingers. She was wearing a mauve dress of crepe-like wrinkled stuff with a full skirt. As he felt the material he thought suddenly of Kate's red striped dress and of Judy's dress with the blue and green flowers. Girls and their dresses.
He said quickly, letting go of the hem, 'Mary, I hope you won't mind my saying how very glad I am about you and Willy., 'Nothing's – fixed, you know.'
'Yes, I know. But I'm so glad. Give my love to Willy. I won't delay you now and I think I won't come any further.'
'All right. You will talk to Paula, won't you, and to Pierce?'
'Yes. I'll do it straightaway. Whichever of them I meet first!'
They stood up. Mary turned her lean sallow head towards him, brushing back her hair. Her eyes were vague in the hot dappled half light. They stood a moment awkwardly, and then with gestures of salutation parted in silence.
Thirty-two
What are you doing in there, Mary?'
'Washing up, Willy.'
'Don't – I'll do it later. Come and talk to me.'
'I've put the raspberries in a bowl. I've put some sugar on them. We might eat them for tea.'
'We might.'
Meals with Willy were still rare, strange, like a picnic, like a eucharist.
Mary came back into the sitting-room wiping her hands on the drying-up cloth. The heat in the room made a kind of positive velvety silence in which one moved slowly as if swimming.