Айрис Мердок - The Nice and the Good

'What's the music?' said Theo.
'Slow movement of the twelfth quartet, opus 127.'
'I can't bear it.'
Willy switched the gramophone off.
'A consciousness in agony represented in slow motion.'
'Yes,' said Willy.
Theo leaned against the long window, looking out. 'Wonderful binoculars these. Did Barbara give them to you?'
'Yes.'
'I can see our Three Graces walking along by the edge of the sea. Each one more beautiful than the last.'
'Oh.'
'You know why I haven't been for so long?'
'Why?'
'I think I'm bad for you.'
Willy was drinking the whisky. 'You know that's not so, Theo.'
'It is. You need brisk ordinary people. You and I always talk metaphysics. But all metaphysics is devilish, devilish.'
'There is no good metaphysics?'
'No. Nothing about that can be said.'
'Sad for the human race, since we are such natural prattlers.'
'Yes. We are natural prattlers. And that deepens, prolongs, spreads and intensifies our evil.'
'Come, come,' said Willy. 'Very few people know of these devilish theories you speak of.'
'They have their influence. They pervade, they pervade. They produce illusions of knowledge. Even what we are most certain of we know only in an illusory form.'
'Such as what?»
'Such as that all is vanity. All is vanity, Willy, and man walks in a vain shadow. You and I are the only people here who know this, which is why we are bad for each other. We have to chatter about it. You and I are the only people here who know, but we also know that we do not know. Our hearts are too corrupt to know such a thing as truth, we know it only as illusion.'
'Is there no way out? ff 'There are a million ways out on this side, back into the fantasy of ordinary life. Muffins for tea is a way out. Propertius is a way out. But these are just boltholes. One ought to be able to get… through… to the other side.'
'You may be right about Propertius,' said Willy, 'but I would like to say a good word for muffins for tea.'
'Mary.'
'No, no, not Mary. Mary is something else. Just muffins for tea.'
'There are muffins and muffins,' Theo conceded. 'But let us take Propertius now. What is the point of all this activity of yours, what are you really after? Senseless agitation, senseless agitation, the filling of a void which for your eternal salvation had much better be left unfilled. Is your edition of Propertius going to be a great work of scholarship?'
'No.'
'Is it necessary to the human race?'
'No.'
'It's not great, it's not even necessary. It's mediocre, it's a time-filler. Why do you do it?'
Willy reflected for a moment. He said, 'It expresses my love for Propertius and my love for Latin. Love needs to be exT-NATG-Epressed, it needs to do work. This may be something which cannot be stated in your devilish metaphysics without being somehow falsified, but it is… an indubitable good. And if there is an indubitable good within one's reach one stretches out one's hand.'
'Permit me to correct your description, my dear Willy. The object of love here is yourself, this is the value which you attempt with Latin and with Propertius to exalt and to defend.'
'That is possible,' said Willy. 'But I don't see why one should necessarily know. You are a great one for not knowing things.
Let's not know that, shall we?'
Theo had left the window and was standing by the table leaning down upon his knuckles and regarding his host. The front of his jacket was hanging open revealing a crumpled shirt, stained brown braces and a dirty woollen vest. From this inwardness of Theo a mingled smell of sweat and dog was beamed across the pile of open books and dictionaries.
Willy shifted, rubbing a thin ankle with a small delicate hand.
'And after Propertius, what? T 'Another time-filler, I suppose.'
'Did they tell you about that chap who committed suicide?'
'No,' said Willy, surprised. 'Who?'
'Oh, no one we know, as Kate would say. Just some meaningless fellow in my dear brother's office. They're all agog. It's the jolliest thing that's happened since Octavian's CBE. They're keeping it from you, you know why! You're becoming a sort of sacred object to the people down there.'
'They shouldn't worry about me,' Willy mumbled. 'I shall stay out my time.'
'Yes, I think you will,' said Theo, 'though I don't know why.
I don't know why I do. I feel ill all the time now. And I can't stand it down there, that's why I came up here to torment you.
It's getting worse down there. They're all watching each other ever so sweetly. Homo homini lupus, Willy, homo homini lupus. They're all of them sex maniacs and they don't even know it. There's my dear brother, that perfect 0, getting erotic vvny nun paruon Lnem a flue, sail vvniy. iney uont uo much harm. You rail on us all for not being saints.'
'Yes, yes, yes. And when I stop that railing I shall be dead.
It is the only thing I know and I shall cry it out again and again, like a tedious little bird with only one song.'
'If you know that much you must know more. There is then a light in which you judge us.'
'Yes,' said Theo. 'The light shows me evil, but it gives me no hope of good, not a shred of hope, not a shred.'
'You must be wrong,' said Willy. 'You must be wrong.'
'You express a touching and very fundamental form of religious faith. Nevertheless there are the damned.'
'Theo,' said Willy. 'Tell me sometime, tell me perhaps now, what really happened to you in India, what happened?'
Theo, his narrowed pointed face thrust well forward over the table, shook his head. 'No, no, my heart, no.' He said after a moment. 'You, Willy, tell me sometime, tell me perhaps now, what it was like for you… in that place.'
Willy was silent, regarding one hand and seeming to count the fingers with the thumb. He said slowly, 'It might be possible… some time… to tell you.'
'Bosh,' said Theo. 'You mustn't tell me, you must never tell me, such things can't be told, I wouldn't listen.' He lurched back from the table and came round behind Willy. He put his large thick hands down on to Willy's shoulders, feeling the small catlike bones. He kneaded the flesh with his fingers. He said, 'I am a very foolish man, Willy.'
'I know you are. A certain kouros '
'Damn kouroi. You must forgive me, absolve me.'
'You're always wanting to be forgiven. What do you want to be forgiven for? Presumably not for being rude and negligent and disloyal and selfish and…'
'No!' They both laughed.
'I can forgive you, Theo. I can't absolve you. You must absolve yourself. Pardon the past and let it go… absolutely . away: . Theo leaned down until his brow was touching the silky white hair. He closed his eyes and let his arms slide forward over Willy's shoulders to receive the comfort he had come to receive, the close caressing pressure of Willy's hands upon his.
'Octavian, I've discovered something rather odd.'
'Sit down, John. I must say I'm glad you've discovered something, odd or otherwise. What is it?'
'Listen,' said Ducane. 'I went to see McGrath yesterday evening at his house '
'Was McGrath blackmailing Radeechy?'
'Yes, he was, but that's not important. McGrath mentioned Biranne. He said Biranne was often at Radeechy's place.'
'Biranne? I thought he didn't know Radeechy at all.'
'So he led us to suppose. Well, I didn't express any surprise, I just made McGrath go on talking, and I got him back on to what exactly happened when he came to Radeechy's room after the shot was fired, and something else emerged. Biranne had locked the door.'
'Locked the door of Radeechy's room? On the inside? T 'Yes. McGrath said, «And then Mr Biranne let me in».'
'Was McGrath telling the truth?'
'I'm assuming so.'
'I suppose one might – do it instinctively?'
'An odd instinct. Of course the door could only have been locked for a moment. McGrath reached the door, he reckons, less than a minute after the shot. But why was it locked at all?
However, wait, there's more. I began to think then about that scene, what might have happened in those few moments, and I noticed something which I ought to have noticed straight away as soon as I saw the police photographs.'
'What?'
'Radeechy was left-handed.'
'I never spotted that. So –?'
'No, you mightn't have. But one left-handed man notices another. One of the few serious conversations I ever had with Radeechy was about the causes of left-handedness. He told me he was completely helpless with his right hand.'
'Well –?'
'The gun was lying on the desk beside Radeechy's right hand.'
'Good heavens,' said Octavian. Then he said, 'I suppose he might have used his right hand –?'
'No. You just imagine shooting yourself with your left hand.'
'Might it have fallen there somehow out of his other hand?'
'Impossible, I think. I looked at the photographs carefully.'
'So what follows?'
'Wait a minute. Now Biranne did say that he'd moved the gun – '
'Yes, but he said he only moved it an inch to see Radeechy's face and then pushed it back where it was.'
'Precisely – '
'Oh God,' said Octavian, 'you don't think that Biranne killed him, do you?'
'No, I don't – '
'Biranne hasn't the temperament, and besides why – '
'I don't know about Biranne's temperament. Anyway, find the motive and the temperament will look after itself.'
'Of course that could be the perfect crime, couldn't it. Go into a man's room, shoot him, and then «discover» the body.'
'Possibly. Though consider the difficulties in this case. The shot was fired from very close quarters into the mouth. However, let me go on with the tale. I went over to Scotland Yard.
You remember I asked you to get the to say a word to those boys over there. Evidently he did, because they were all dying to help me for a change. I wanted to check the fingerprints on the revolver, to see whether they were left-hand prints and whether they were in the right place.'
'And –?'
'They were left-hand prints all right, and they were, as far as I could see, in the proper place. Not that that proves anything conclusive, but at any rate he'd had his hand on the gun in such a way that he could have fired it himself. Now Biranne said he'd touched the gun. How did he say this? Did he seem particularly nervous and upset? T I 'Yes!' said Octavian. 'But we were all jolly nervous and upset!
We're not used to death after lunch!'
'Naturally. Well, there were Biranne's fingerprints all right upon the barrel of the gun only. You remember he gave his fingerprints to the police.'
'Yes. Rather officiously, I thought at the time. None of this proves he didn't shoot Radeechy, wipe the gun clean and press the thing into Radeechy's hand. Hence perhaps the locked door.'
'No. But if he'd had the knowledge to press it into Radeechy's left hand he'd have had the knowledge to leave the gun on the left side of the desk.'
'That's true. I suppose that lets Biranne out. Unless it's all fiendish cunning…'
'No, no, I don't believe anything of that sort. Well, to continue.
I then followed up an idea I'd had. You remember those old-fashioned stiff starched collars Radeechy used to wear?'
'Yes.'
'Biranne's fingerprints were also on Radeechy's collar.'
'On his collar? You don't think there was a fight or something?, 'I rather doubt that. There was no other evidence of a fight.
I think it means that Biranne moved the body.'
'An odd thing to do. And he didn't say he did. Why ever –?, 'You remember,' said Ducane, 'that you were puzzled because there was no suicide note, it seemed so out of character? T 'You think – You think Biranne searched the body and took away the note?'
'Well, it's a possibility. If Biranne and Radeechy were in something together, Biranne might have been afraid of what Radeechy might have in his pockets. I feel sure he searched the body, whether to get hold of the suicide note or of something else. The mistake with the gun also suggests that Biranne was taken by surprise. He panicked, knew he'd only got a moment for his search, locked the door – a rather dangerous thing to do – and then, one can picture it, pushed the gun out of the way, pulled Radeechy back in the chair in order to get at all his pockets. Then when he'd let Radeechy fall back on the desk he instinctively put the gun beside his right hand.'
'Could be, could be,' said Octavian. 'I thought at the time at least I didn't think, it was just vaguely in my mind – how neatly the gun was lying beside the right hand. Whereas it might have fallen anywhere but there.'
'Yes,' said Ducane ruefully. 'I thought of that afterwards.
I'm afraid I haven't been very bright, Octavian. And I ought to have noticed at once that the gun was on the wrong side, and if I'd been there I might have, only in the photographs it was harder to see.'
'But isn't it an odd coincidence that Biranne was there, the nearest person, when it happened? Can we be certain Biranne didn't – kill him – it's an awful idea and I can't believe it, but it is all so strange.'
'We can't be certain, but I don't believe Biranne killed him. If he had he would have pressed the gun into Radeechy's right hand or laid it on the left side of the desk. He wouldn't have got one thing right and the other thing wrong. I don't believe it anyway. As for the coincidence – well, it might be a coincidence.
Or Radeechy might have done it suddenly as a result of something Biranne said to him. We don't know that Biranne wasn't in the room before the shot. Or Radeechy might have summoned Biranne to see him do it.'
'It's weird,' said Octavian. 'And pretty disconcerting.
Radeechy didn't know anything which had any security interest, but Biranne knows practically the whole bag of tricks. What could they have been up to?»
'Not that, I feel pretty sure,' said Ducane. 'No. I think it's something much odder, something to do with Radeechy's magic.'
'McGrath didn't say anything what Biranne did at Radeechy's place?'
'No. McGrath just saw him arriving there. I think McGrath was telling the truth. I frightened him a bit.'
'We've sacked the blighter now, by the way.'
'That's all right. I'm afraid I've got everything I can out of him.'
'What did the Scotland Yard boys think of all this? Won't they want to take it over? T 'They don't know! I took the fingerprints myself. I told them some yarn.'
'Mmm. Let's not be in trouble later!'
'Let me decide this, Octavian. We shall have to tell the police.
But I don't want Biranne startled just yet.'
'You're not going to ask him to explain? T 'Not yet. I want to do this thing properly. I want another lead. I want Helen of Troy. She's the missing link now.'
Ducane's Bentley moved slowly along with the rush hour traffic over the curved terracotta-coloured surface of the Mall.
Clouds of thick heat eddied across the crawling noise of the cars and cast a distorting haze upon the immobile trees of St James's Park, their midsummer fullness already drooping. It was the sort of moment when, on a hot evening London gives an indolent sigh of despair. There is a pointlessness of summer London more awful than anything which fogs or early afternoon twilights are able to evoke, a summer mood of yawning and glazing eyes and little nightmare-ridden sleeps in bored and desperate rooms. With this ennui, evil comes creeping through the city, the evil of indifference and sleepiness and lack of care. At such a time the long-fought temptation is wearily yielded to, and the long-dreamt-of crime is with shouldershrugging casualness committed at last.
Ducane, who was sitting in the front of the car with Fivey, felt this miasma creeping about him along the crowded pavements which were passing him by with such dream-like slowness.
Everything in his life seemed to have become inflated and distorted and grotesque. He had told a lie to Jessica. He had told her that evening conferences in the office prevented him from coming to see her this week. He had promised to see her next week. He felt himself increasingly cornered by Jessica, as if the girl was an entangling power which was growing. At moments, almost with cynicism, he thought, grow then, and make me brutal, make me a demon with a demon's strength.
Then the sense of these thoughts as utterly evil would reduce him again to an elementary confusion.
His longing to see Kate had meanwhile become alarmingly intense, so intense that he had been tempted that morning, instead of going to Scotland Yard, to tell Fivey to drive him to Dorset. But he knew perfectly clearly that any gesture of this sort would introduce an ugly and perhaps irreparable disorder into the harmonious pattern which Kate herself had so confidently invented, decreed and imposed. There was a kind of sweet and innocent unconsciousness in his relations with Kate from which the sharply problematic, even the unexpected, must be kept far away. There could be great affection, there could be deep love, but there must be no moments of frenzy.
Need there could be, but steady orderly need, not clutching need. How precarious it all now seemed to him, this big golden good round which he was now arranging his existence and for the sake of which he was killing Jessica's love. I wonder if I should tell Kate everything about Jessica, he wondered, and with an elan of relief imagined himself kneeling on the floor with his head on Kate's knee. But no, he thought, it would hurt her terribly, and, he ruefully thought, it would expose me as being half a liar. I must tell her, but later, later, later, when it's all long finished and no longer an agony. To tell her now would be entirely against the rules, her rules. I mustn't involve Kate in any of my muddles. Her idea is that our relationship is to be simple and sunny, and simple and sunny I must faithfully make it to be.
The discovery about Biranne had upset Ducane more than he had been prepared to reveal to Octavian. He did not at all like having as a quarry a man whom he disliked, and whom he disliked for irrational and unworthy reasons. Ducane had for the moment lost, and this was perhaps the work of that wicked summer indolence, his usual sense of being compact and self-contained and presenting a hard working surface to the world. He felt sorry for himself, he felt menaced and vulnerable.
In this state, people could 'get inside him', knives could facing Jessica. I mere was a lunti of extreme pain wtucn Jessica could cause him and which, out of blind love, she had so far refrained from causing. He felt that if he came to her in this stripped enfeebled mood she would instinctively torment him to the utmost. Nor did Ducane now fancy having Biranne as an adversary; He shrank from the prospect of perhaps having power over the man. Whatever it was that had bound Biranne and Radeechy together it was something unpleasant, with what was to Ducane's prophetic nostrils a rather eerie sort of unpleasantness.
Whatever happened, it seemed likely that Ducane would shortly be involved in some sort of personal struggle with Biranne, for which, in his present state, he felt insuffi., ciently compassionate, clear-headed, and indeed strong.
There was also the curious matter of Mrs McGrath. Immediately after Ducane's departure from McGrath's house he had looked back on that incident with a little shame and some amusement and a certain surprised exhilaration. It was some time since the unexpected had entered Ducane's life in quite that guise and it had seemed to him rather delightful. Later on it amused him less. His investigation was nebulous and tricky and indeed unsuccessful enough already without his complicating it by acting irresponsibly and indiscreetly. He could not afford to make mistakes. McGrath was an unscrupulous man, a blackmailer and a babbler to the press, and altogether not the sort of person whose wife higher civil servants in charge of confidential inquiries should be alleged to have been kissing.
Ducane did not really think that, whatever Mrs McGrath might have said to her husband, there was any serious trouble McGrath could make for him. But it was the sort of thing which simply ought not to happen. More deeply he felt in retrospect depressed by the scene, as if some sleepy drug which he had swallowed with the pink wine were weighing on his senses still.
Perhaps it was out of the somnolent ennui of the Circean chamber where Mrs McGrath waited that there had followed him away that sense of pointlessness which now so much took away his strength.
The car was moving, more quickly now, along the Old Brompton Road in the direction of Ducane's house in Earls Court. While these gloomy and debilitating thoughts had been occupying his mind, Ducane had been exchanging almost unconscious chat with Fivey about the weather and the predicted continuation of the 'heat wave'. Ducane could not feel that he had made, with his servant, any notable progress, although he had in a quite physical way become more used to having him about the house and could now easily restrain his annoyance at the droning Jacobite songs and at hearing Fivey using the hall telephone to make bets on horses. Fivey had confided one more piece of information about his mother, that she had 'taught him to steal from shops'. But when Ducane had tried to lead him on into revelations about his subsequent career in crime, his fellow Scotsman had just murmured mysteriously, 'It's a very hard world, Sir'. And questioned by Ducane about a photograph of a woman of indeterminate age which Fivey kept in his bedroom, had merely answered mournfully, 'Far away and long ago, Sir, far away and long ago'. However in spite of these intimations of the bitterness of life, Fivey, also patently feeling himself more at home, was at times almost jaunty, his eyes lightening with a look of intelligence, almost amounting to a wink, as he met his master's look, as if to say, I'm a rogue, but you're one too, you know, in your own way. I doubt if there's a ha'porth of difference between us.
You're just luckier than I am, that's all. This quiet insolence rather pleased Ducane.
As the car now turned into Bina Gardens Ducane was watching the slow, significant, majestic movements of Fivey's very large and copiously freckled hands upon the steering wheel. As Ducane watched, he found that his own hand, which had been extended along the back of the seat, had somehow or other found its way down on to Fivey's farther shoulder. Ducane considered the matter for a moment. He decided to leave it where it was. He even shifted it a little so that his fingers curved gently, without gripping, over the bone of the shoulder. The contact brought to Ducane the intense and immediate comfort which it now seemed to him he had been seeking for all day.
Fivey gazed impassively straight ahead.