Айрис Мердок - The Nice and the Good

'You've brought me flowering nettles and put them in a wine glass.'

'Yes.'

'If I were a poet I would write a poem about that. Cruel nettles put into a wine glass by a girl – '

'They aren't cruel,' said Mary. 'These ones have no sting.

And I'm not a girl.' Willy's steady refusal to learn the flowers of the countryside, indeed to recognize the details of the countryside at all, had first exasperated and then charmed her. 'A girl, a girl –'he repeated softly.

Did Willy wish he was a poet, Mary wondered. She was beginning to want to touch him but knew that she must not do so yet. She said, 'Willy, I do wish you'd go down and see Theo.'

'I don't go down and see people. People come up and see me.'

'Yes, I know. But I think he somehow needs you – '

'No, no. As far as Theo is concerned I am an unnecessary hypothesis.'

'I don't agree. I think you're special for him.'

'Only one person is special for Theo, and it certainly isn't me. Tell me, how are the others, how is your handsome son?'

'Oh that reminds me, Willy. Would you mind coaching Pierce in Latin again these holidays? He's awfully worried about his Latin.'

'Yes, certainly. I can take him any day round about this time.'

Willy banned visitors after six o'clock. He said that he was always working then, but Mary wondered. In her search for the key to Willy's interior castle she speculated often about the quality of his solitude. What was it like in the evenings and in the night for Willy? Once a violent curiosity had driven her to call on him unexpectedly about nine. The lights were switched off and he was sitting in the glow of the wood fire and she had the impression that he had been crying. Willy had been so upset and annoyed by her late visit that she had not ventured to repeat it.

'He seems to think his Greek's all right. Though I must say it doesn't seem to be a patch on the twins' Greek.'

'Yes,' said Willy, 'the twins' Greek is indeed erstaunlich.' It irritated Mary when Willy used a German word or phrase.

The first summer he had been there she had persuaded him to teach her German, and had spent an hour with him on several mornings a week. Willy gently terminated this arrangement after it became clear that Mary never had enough time to do the necessary learning and exercises, and tended to be very upset by her failures. Mary hated to think about this. The following summer he gave the same time to Paula, and they read the whole of the Iliad and the Odyssey aloud together. During this period Mary suffered acute physical pains of jealousy.

'What eet? T 'Nothing,' she said shortly, but she knew that Willy knew exactly what she was thinking.

'What is the matter with Paula?' said Willy. His thoughts and Mary's often became curiously intertwined during these times when she prowled the room and he watched her.

'Is anything the matter?'

'Yes. She seemed to me to be worried or frightened or something.'

'I expect it's just the end of term,' said Mary. 'She's overtired.

Did she come up to see you?' It might have been Paula who brought in the two white roses.

'No, I met her on the beach when I was having my early walk.' In the summer Willy often took very early walks by the sea before anyone was up.

Mary paused again at the window where her questing finger had drawn in the light dust a twining pattern which showed up clearly in the bright sunlight. Trescombe House could not be seen from the cottage as the wood intervened but there was a view, over the sloping tree tops, of a part of the beach, with the rust-coloured headland known as the Red Tower to the right, and to the left, over a curvy green field, a glimpse of the abandoned graveyard, the little green dome of the geometer god, and greyer and hazier in the far distance the pencil line of the Murbury sands with the black and white lighthouse at the end.

Straight ahead of her Mary could see something bobbing on the sea, quite near in to the shore, and she picked up the binoculars to have a look at it.

'Ouf!' she said.

'What? V 'These binoculars are uncanny.'

As she turned them into focus she could see the leaves on the trees of the wood as if they were inches in front of her face.

She had never handled such powerful glasses. She moved the clear lighted circle down the hill and across the stones of the beach to pick up the object which she had seen upon the sea.

She saw the faint ripples of the sea's verge and the glossy satiny skin of the calm surface and then a trailing hand. Then she had full in view the little green plastic boat which the twins called 'the coracle' after the boat in Treasure Island. In the boat, both dressed in bathing costumes, were Kate and John Ducane.

She could see from the dark clinging look of their costumes T-NATG-D 97 that they had just been swimming. They were laughing in a relaxed abandoned way and Ducane had just put his hand on Kate's knee. Mary lowered the glasses.

She turned back into the room and came to stand in front of Willy and stare at him. She thought sadly, gaiety and laughter are not in my destiny. Alistair had been gay, but somehow Mary had been the pleased spectator of his gaiety rather than a participant in it. Kate was gay and could make others laugh, even Willy. Paula had something else with Willy, a calm camaraderie of shared interests. But I just make him sad, thought Mary, and he just makes me sad.

'What seat, my child?'

'You,' she said. 'You, you, you. Oh, I do love you.'

She often said this, but the words always vanished away, as if they were instantly absorbed into the infinite negativity which confronted her. She wished to pierce Willy with these words, to disturb him, even to hurt him, but he remained remote and even his tenderness to her was a mode of remoteness.

It did not occur to her to think that Willy could be indifferent to her affection nor even to doubt that he found her attractive.

Though not formally beautiful, Mary had as a physical endowment a strong confidence in her own power to attract. No, it was something else which kept them separate so. If Theo seemed to her like a man with broken bones walking about, Willy seemed like an inhabitant of some other dimension who could only tenuously communicate with the ordinary world.

This would have troubled her less if she had not imagined his other dimension as a place of horror. Trying to make it more concrete she wondered, what could it be like to have suffered such injustice? Can he ever bring himself to forgive them? Mary thought that this would have been the problem for herself.

But she had no evidence that it was the problem for Willy.

Perhaps his demons were quite other.

She sat down now, bringing a chair up close against the side of his and sitting so that she faced him. As she did so, looking down, she saw within the front of her dress her breasts pressing together like twin birds, and she thought I am a treasure waiting to be found.

'You are… You are…– saia, –a troll… that's what you are. Oh, you do exasperate me so!'

She began to caress him, drawing her fingers very lightly through the longish silky white hair, exciting it until it crackled and lifted a little to her touch. Then she started to caress his face with her finger tips, first lightly outlining his profile, his big faintly scored brow, his thin Jewish nose, the tender runnel above his lips, the roughened prickly chin, then moving her fingers to his eyes, which flickered shut and flickered open again, his cheeks, moulding the bones, and drawing her finger tips back along the length of his mouth: the soft feeling of the human face above the bone, touching, vulnerable and mortal. At last, with a movement which did not break the rhythm of hers, Willy captured her hand and held it with the palm flattened against the side of his head. His eyes closed now, and for a long time they sat quietly thus. Such was their lovemaking.