Айрис Мердок: The Nice and the Good

He was a tall thin grey-haired partly bald man with a bulging brow finely engraved with hieroglyphic lines, and screwed-up clever thoughtful eyes.
'Paula, must you read at the table?' said Mary.
Paula Biranne, the twins' mother, was still absorbed in her book. She left the disciplining of her children, with whom she seemed at such moments to be coeval, entirely to Mary. Paula had been divorced from Richard Biranne for over two years.
Mary herself was a widow of many years' standing.
'Sorry,' said Paula. She closed her copy of Lucretius. Paula taught Greek and Latin at a local school.
Meal times were important to Mary. They were times of communication, ritualistic forgatherings almost spiritual in their significance. Human speech and casual co-presence then knit up wounds and fissures which were perhaps plain only to Mary's own irritated and restless sensibility, constantly recreating an approximation to harmony of which perhaps again only she was fully aware. At these points of contact Mary held an authority which nobody challenged. If the household possessed a communal unconscious mind, Mary constituted its communal consciousness. The regularity of breakfast lunch tea and dinner was moreover one of the few elements of formal pattern in a situation which, as Mary felt it, hovered always upon the brink of a not unpleasant but quite irrevocable anarchy.
Victorian Gothic peaks and their white cast-iron tracery, greenly shaded on one side by honeysuckle and on the other side by wistaria, and revealed the stains upon the red and white check tablecloth, the cake crumbs upon the stains, and the coffee beans and human hair upon the paved floor. The position was that the twins had had their tea, Theo had removed his, Pierce had not come down for his, Kate was late for hers as usual, Mary and Paula and Casie were having theirs.
'She's got a new car again,' said Casie.
'I wish you'd say who you mean and not call everybody «she»,' said Mary.
'My sister.' Casie, having spent most of her life tending her late ailing mother whom she referred to as 'the old bitch', could not forgive her younger sister for having escaped this fate and married an affluent husband. Casie, with a red chunky face and a coil of iron grey hair, was much given to crying fits, often set off by sad things she saw on television, which claimed Mary's preoccupied and exasperated sympathy.
'What kind?' said Paula absently. She was still thinking about Lucretius and wondering if a certain passage would be too hard to set in the examination.
'A Triumph something or other. It's well for some people.
The Costa Brava and all.'
'We saw that flying saucer again today,' announced Henrietta, who had come back carrying Barbara's cat, Montrose.
The twins often made this claim.
'Really?' said Mary. 'Henrietta, please don't put Montrose on the table.'
Montrose was a large cocoa-coloured tabby animal with golden eyes, a square body, rectangular legs and an obstinate self-absorbed disposition, concerning whose intelligence fierce arguments raged among the children. Tests of Montrose's sagacity were constantly being devised, but there was some uncertainty about the interpretation of the resultant data since the twins were always ready to return to first principles and discuss whether cooperation with the human race was a sign of intelligence at all. Montrose had one undoubted talent, which was that he could at will make his sleek hair stand up on end, and transform himself from a smooth stripey cube into a fluffy sphere. This was called'Montrose's bird look'.
'Don't ask me where they get the money from,' said Casie.
'It's enough to make a Socialist of you.'
'But you are a Socialist, Casie,' said Mary. So were they all, of course, but this seemed notable only in the instance of Casie.
'I didn't say I wasn't, did I? I just said it was enough to make you one.'
'Do you know which is the largest of all birds?' said Edward, pushing his way in between Mary and his sister.
'No. Which is?»
'The cassowary. He eats Papuans. He kills them by hitting them with his feet.'
'I think the condor is bigger,' said Henrietta.
'It depends whether you mean wing-span or weight,' said Edward.
'What about the albatross?' said Paula. She was always ready to enter into an argument with her children, whom she treated invariably as rational adults.
'He has the biggest wing-span,' said Edward, 'but he has a much smaller body. Do you know how big a breast bone we should need to have if we were going to fly? Mary, do you know how big a breast bone we should need to have if we were going to fly?'
'I don't know,' said Mary. 'How big?'
'Fourteen feet wide.'
'Really? Fancy that.'
'In the case of the condor – 'said Paula.
'Do be careful, Henrietta,' said Mary to Henrietta, who was engaged in hitting her brother's face with one of Montrose's paws.
'It's all right, his claws are in,' said Henrietta.
'Mine wouldn't be if I were him,' said Casie. 'When I was your age I was taught not to maul my pets about.'
'I do wish you'd do something about those stones,' said Mary. 'We shall all be falling over them. Couldn't you put them in order of merit, and then we could find a home outside for the less important ones?'
The idea of putting the stones in order of merit appealed at once to the twins. They dropped the cat and settled down on the floor with the pile of stones between them and were soon deep in argument.
'Has Theo been up to see Willy?' asked Paula.
'No. I suggested it, but he just laughed and said he wasn't Willy's keeper.'
Willy Kost, a refugee scholar, lived in a bungalow on Octavian's estate which was known as Trescombe Cottage, a little further up the hill from Trescombe House, Willy suffered from a melancholia which was a cause of anxiety to the household.
'I suppose they've quarrelled again. They're like a couple of children. Have you been up?'
'No,' said Mary. 'I haven't had a moment. I sent Pierce up and Willy seemed O. Have you been?'
'No,' said Paula. 'I've had a pretty full day too.'
Mary was rather relieved. She felt that Willy Kost was her own special responsibility, practically her property, and it mattered that she was always the one who knew how Willy was.
She would go up and see him tomorrow.
'It's just as well Ducane is coming,' said Paula. 'He always does Willy good.'
'Is Ducane coming?' said Mary. 'I wish somebody would tell me something sometimes!'
'I suppose you realize the room isn't ready,' said Casie.
'I think Kate assumes it's a regular thing now and that's why she didn't tell you.'
John Ducane, a friend and colleague of Octavian's, was a frequent week-end visitor.
'Casie, would you mind doing the room after tea?'
'Of course I mind,' said Casie, 'in my one bit of free time; what you mean is will I, yes I will.'
At that moment Kate Gray came into the kitchen, followed by Mingo, and at once as if struck by some piercing stellar ray the scene dissolved into its atoms and reassembled itself round Kate as centre. Mary saw, pinioned in some line of force, Paula's keen smiling dog face, felt her own face lift and smile, her hair tossed, blown back. Mingo was barking, Montrose had jumped on to the table, Casie was pouring more hot water into the pot, the twins, disarranging their careful line of stones, were both chattering at once, fastening brown sandy hands on to the belt of Kate's striped dress.
Kate's bright round face beamed at them all out of the golden fuzz of her hair. Her warm untidy being emphasized the sleekness, the thinness, the compactness of the other two, Mary with her straight dark hair tucked behind her ears and her air of a Victorian governess, Paula with her narrow head and pointed face and the well adjusted surfaces of her cropped brown hair. Kate, herself undefined, was a definer of others, the noise, the heat, the light which flattered them into the clearer contours of themselves. Kate spoke with a slight stammer and a slight Irish accent.
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