Айрис Мердок - The Nice and the Good

Mary now began to walk slowly down the far side of the road. She could see already that the yellow privet hedge which she and Alistair had planted had been taken away and the creosoted fence had been taken away and a low brick wall with a crenellated top had been put there instead. The small front garden, which she and Alistair had planted with roses, was en tirely paved now except for two beds out of which large sprawling rosemary bushes leaned to sweep the paving stones with their bluish branches. Now Mary, almost opposite the house, could see with a shock the light of a farther window within the darkness of the front room. They must have knocked down the wall between the two downstairs rooms. She and Alistair had often discussed doing so. She stopped and looked across. The house seemed deserted, the street deserted. She touched the smooth close-grained surface of the now thick and robust trunk of one of the prunus trees. The next tree was still missing, the one which the swerving car had knocked over.

Mary felt sick and faint, holding on to the sturdy tree. The shape of the downstairs windows brought back to her that last evening, a summer evening with a lazy pointless atmosphere like the atmosphere with she was breathing now. She and Alistair had been quarrelling. What about? There was an atmosphere of quarrel, not serious, usual, a tired summer evening quarrel. She could see the letter in his hand which he was going to take to the post. She could not see his face. Perhaps she had not looked at his face. She had come to the window to watch him go down the path and step off the pavement and she had seen everything, heard everything: the sudden swerving car in the quietness of the road, the screech of brakes, Alistair's hesitation, his leap for safety which took him in fact right under the wheels, his hand thrown upward, his terrible, terrible cry.

Why ever did I come here, thought Mary. I didn't know it would be like this. And, as if in substance the very same, the old thoughts came crowding to her. If only I had called him back, or tapped on the window, or said just one more sentence to him, or gone with him, as I might have done if we hadn't been quarrelling. Anything, anything might have broken that long long chain of causes that brought him and that motor car together in that moment of time. Tears began to stream down Mary's face. She detached herself from the tree and began to walk on. She found herself saying half aloud what she had said then crazily over and over to the people who crowded round her on the pavement. 'You see, so few cars come down our road. So few cars come down our road.'

Paula was coming down the narrow stairs at Foyles. She had already spent several hours on her book-hunt and had eaten her sandwiches in the Pillars of Hercules. She had also made some purchases, which he had asked her to make, for Willy.

She had not mentioned this to Mary, as she was aware that Mary was intensely jealous of anyone who performed services for Willy. This sort of discretion came to Paula quite naturally and unreflectively.

Paula was carrying a large basket full of books and also a parcel under her arm. She thought, well that's the lot, but what shall I do with all this weighty stuff now. There was still some time before the train on which she and Pierce and Mary were to travel back to Dorset. Paula thought, I'll go to the National Gallery and dump these in the cloakroom and look at some pictures.

She emerged into the hot and crowded street and hailed a taxi. Up and up. Heat Wave to Continue, said the posters.

Paula knew a good deal about pictures and they brought to her an intense and completely pure and absorbing pleasure which she received from no other art, although in fact her knowledge of literature was much greater. Today, however, as she mounted the familiar steps and turned to the left into the golden company of the Italian primitives all she could think about was Eric, the image of whom, banished by the bookhunt, now returned to her with renewed force. Eric slowly, slowly moving towards her like a big black fly crawling over the surface of the round world. She had just had a postcard from him posted in Colombo.

Paula had an image of Eric's hands. He had strange square hands with very broad flattened fingers and long silky golden aown to the seconu anger joint. signet ring wnicn he wore was quite buried in this tawny grass. Perhaps his hands had somehow decided for him that he must be a potter. Paula could smell his hands smelling with the cool sleek smell of wet clay.

Eric had only just managed to make a living with his pottery at Chiswick. Paula had liked his lack of worldliness, she had liked his hands miraculously wooing the rising clay, she had liked the clay. It was all so different from Richard. Perhaps'I fell in love with Eric's hands, she thought, perhaps I fell in love with the clay. Eric had seemed to her, after Richard's mixture of intellectualism and sophisticated sensuality, so solid and natural. Yet Eric was terribly neurotic, she thought for the first time. He was posing as a natural man, as an artisan, with his curious smock and his great leonine head of unkempt golden hair. Big Eric, big man. So much the greater the appalling horror of his… defeat by Richard. How could Eric ever forgive her for that defeat? The thought came to her, perhaps Eric is coming back to kill me. Perhaps that is the only thing which can give him peace now. To kill me. Or to kill Richard.

Richard. Paula, who had been walking at random through the rooms, stopped dead in front of Bronzino's picture of Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time. Richard's special picture. 'There's a real piece of pornography for you,' she could hear Richard's high-pitched voice saying. 'There's the only real kiss ever represented in a picture. A kiss and not a kiss. Paula, Paula, give me a Bronzino kiss.' Paula went to the middle of the room and sat down. It was long ago, before their marriage even, that Richard had 'taken over' that picture of Bronzino. It was he who had first made her really look at it, and it had become the symbol of their courtship, a symbol which Paula had endorsed the more since she found it in a way alien to her. It was a transfiguration of Richard's sensuality, Richard's lechery, and she took it to her with a quick gasp of surprise even as she took Richard. Chaste Paula, cool Paula, bluestocking Paula, had found in her husband's deviously lecherous nature a garden of undreamt delights. Paula was incapable of unmarried bliss. Her married bliss had been bliss indeed.

Paula sat and looked at the picture. A slim elongated naked Venus turns languidly towards a slim elongated naked Cupid.

Cupid stoops against her, his long-fingered left hand supporting her head, his long-fingered right hand curled about her left breast. His lips have just come to rest very lightly upon hers, or perhaps just beside hers. It is the long still moment of dreamy suspended passion before the spinning clutching descent.

Against a background of smooth masks and desperate faces the curly-headed Folly advanced to deluge with rose petals the drugged and amorous pair, while the old lecher Time himself reaches out a long and powerful arm above the scene to bring all sweet things to an end. 'Did you go to see my picture, Paula?' Richard would always say, if Paula had been to the Gallery. The last time he had said it to her was at the end of the first and only quarrel they had had about Eric. He had said it to reconcile them. She had not replied.

Paula told the taxi to stop at the corner of Smith Street and the King's Road. She paused beside the grocer's shop on the corner and the grocer, who recognized her, bowed and smiled.

She smiled a quick constricted smile and began to walk down the street. This was an idiotic way of torturing herself, as idiotic as the impulse she had suddenly had last year to ring Richard up at the office. She had listened silently for a minute to his familiar voice saying 'Biranne', and then a puzzled 'Hello?