The Nice and the Good

by Айрис Мердок

  '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, IT 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 tea;, ful 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 imagery, 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 recognizing 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 any. way. 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 touch 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 wil
l 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. Lim pets. He lay still again. He hoped that Pierce had not found the limpets.

  Thirty-six

  'How much longer? T '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 blank Hess 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 organizing 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-meme enfin 1'etenite 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? 0 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 change. 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 recognized, 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.

  The police launch had come back and suddenly shone a very bright searchlight on to the cliff. Everyone started. The warm purple air darkened about them. The illuminated semicircle of the cliff glowed a powdery flaky red streaked with grey, glistening faintly where the tide had just receded. Above the line of the dark brown seaweed the white daisies hung in feathery bunches, ornamental and unreal in the brilliant light.

  'Look.'

  A faint dark streak had appeared at the waterline. Mary shuddered. The sharp hopes twisted violently within her.

  Drowned, drowned, drowned, her dulling consciousness repeated.

  'The roof slopes down, you know,' one of the coast-guards said.

  'What?'

  'The roof slopes down. It's highest at the opening. It'll be another five minutes at least before they can swim out.'

  I wish he wouldn't say things like that, thought Mary. Twenty minutes from now, half an hour from now, how would her life be then? Could she endure it, the long vigil of death made visible? When would she begin to scream and cry? Would she still exist, conscious, untattered, compact in half an hour's time from now?

  Octavian and Kate were in the other coastguards' boat. She could see Kate staring at the dark shadow in the water. Minutes passed. People in the other boat had begun to whisper.

  Drowned, Mary thought, drowned. The boats had closed in.

  The waters still sank. The opening of the cave became larger and larger. Nothing happened. Drowned.

  There was a loud cry. Something was splashing in the dark hole moving out into the light. Mary held her heart, contracted into a point of agony.

  'It's Mingo.'

  'What?'

  'It's only the dog.'

  Mary stared at the black hole. Tears of pain flowed upon her face.

  There was another movement, a splashing, a swimming head seen clearly in the light, a louder cry, an answering cry.

  'It's Pierce,' someone said into her ear. Theo perhaps.

  She could see her son's head plainly now. The other boat was nearer. Someone had jumped into the sea. He was being held, hoisted. 'I'm all right,' he was shouting, 'I'm all right.'

  Theo was holding her awkwardly as if she needed support, but she was stiff. He's all right. Now John, John.

  'There he is!' It was Kate's voice.

  Mary's boat had nosed to the front, the bow of it almost touching the cliff. Several people were in the water now, splashing about at the mouth of the cave. Mary saw the head of Ducane among them. Then he was bobbing close just at the side of the boat. He was being pushed up, pulled up, raised from the water. He rose up limp and straight out of the sea, the thin white heavy form of a naked man. He flopped into the bottom of the boat with a groan. Mary had taken off her overcoat and wrapped it around him. She gripped and held him fast.

  Thirty-seven

  'I understand you had an unpleasant experience at the weekend,' said Biranne. 'What happened exactly?'

  'Oh nothing much. I was cut off by the tide.'

  'None the worse, I hope?'

  'No, no, I'm fine.'

  'Well, you wanted to see me. Have you decided my fate?'

  'Yes,' said Ducane. 'Have a drink.'

  It was early evening. Ducane, who had been in bed until half
an hour ago, was wearing his black silk dressing gown with the red asterisks over his pyjamas. A fire was burning in the grate which he had laid and lit himself, since Fivey was unaccountably absent. He still felt deeply chilled, as if there were a long frozen pellet buried in the centre of his body. However, the doctor had been reassuring. Mingo had probably saved both him and Pierce from dying of exposure. By the decree of fate and chance the water had abated within feet of them.

  Ducane was still simply enjoying being alive. Existing, breathing, waking up and finding oneself still there, were positive joys. Here I am, he kept saying to himself, here I am. Oh good!

  'Thanks,' said Biranne. 'I'll have some gin. Well?'

  Ducane moved over to close the drawing-room window. The noise of the rush hour in Earls Court Road became fainter.

  The evening sunlight made the little street glow with colour.

  Oh beautiful painted front doors, thought Ducane, beautiful shiny motor cars. Bless you, things.

  'Well, Ducane?'

  Ducane moved dreamily back towards the fire. He went to the drawer of the desk and took out Radeechy's confession which he laid on a nearby chair, and also a copy which he had made on a large piece of paper of the cryptogram which Radeechy had written on the wall of the black chapel.

  'Sit down, Biranne.'

  Biranne sat down opposite to him. Still standing, Ducane handed him the sheet of paper with the cryptogram. 'Can you make anything of that?'

  Biranne stared at it.'No. What is it?'

  'Radeechy wrote it on the wall of the place where he performed his – experiments.'

  'Means nothing to me.' Biranne tossed it impatiently on to the marble table beside his drink.

  'Nor me, I thought you might have an inspiration.'

  'What's this, a sort of spiritual test? Satori – that's Japanese, isn't it? What does it matter anyway?'

  'Radeechy matters,' said Ducane. 'Claudia matters. Aren't you interested?' He was staring down at Biranne.

  Biranne shifted uneasily. Then he stood up and moved back, putting the chair between them. 'Look here,' he said, 'I know what I've done. I don't need to be told by you. I know.'