Айрис Мердок - The Nice and the Good

Pierce and Uncle Theo and Mingo were down on the beach together. Uncle Theo was sitting up, with Mingo's head and front paws on his lap. Pierce, who had been swimming, was extended upon his face, his arms limply stretched out above his head. For some time now Theo had been contemplating the lean stretched out body beside him, first wet, now dry, and baked to a light and almost uniform shade of biscuity brown.

As there were no natives in sight Pierce had been swimming naked. Uncle Theo sighed deeply, consuming the sigh inside himself so that it should not be audible.

Uncle Theo's right hand was automatically twisting and caressing Mingo's woolly fur. Mingo was generally agreed to be more like a sheep than a dog, and the twins were convinced that he must have sheep ancestry. Mingo's eyes were closed, but a faint vibrating of his hot body, a sort of internalized tailwag, showed that he was awake. Uncle Theo's gaze brooded upon the limp hunched shoulders, the jutting shoulder-blades, the slim sweeping waist, the thin yet firm hips and the long straight legs of what Willy Kost had called 'a certain kouros'. The soles of Pierce's feet, which Uncle Theo tould just see by leaning forward a little, were pleasantly wrinkled and dusted over with sand. They would be nice and curious to touch, the skin hardened and yet tender. They would taste of sea salt.

Uncle Theo's left hand, in the small space between himself and the boy, fingered the mauve and white pebbles on the beach. These stones, which brought such pleasure to the twins, were a nightmare to Theo. Their multiplicity and randomness appalled him. The intention of God could reach only a little way through the opacity of matter, and where it failed to penetrate there was just jumble and desolation. So Theo saw it, and what was for the twins a treasury of lovable individuals (it grieved the twins that they could not distinguish every stone with their attentions and carry it into the house) was for Theo an expanse of abomination where the spirit had never come.

Does nature suffer here, in her extremities, Theo wondered, or is all dead here? Jumble and desolation. Yet was it not all jumble and desolation, was it not all an expanse of senseless random matter, and he himself as meaningless as these stones, since in real truth there was no God?

The pebbles gave a general impression of being either white or mauve, but looked at closely they exhibited almost every intermediate colour and also varied considerably in size and shape. All were rounded, but some were flattish, some oblong, some spherical; some were almost transparent, others more or less copiously speckled, others close-textured and nearly black, a few of a brownish-red, some of a pale grey, others of a purple which was almost blue. Theo, rooting among them, had dug a small hole revealing layers of damp and glistening pebbles beneath the duller sun-baked surface. He lifed one up to look at it. It was a flattish grey stone with a faint fan-like fossil marking upon it. It was not worth keeping it for the twins whose vast collection already contained many such.

Theo rubbed it dry on his trousers. Then with great care and gentleness he laid it upon Pierce's spinal cord, near to the waistline, balanced upon one of those vertebrae whose delicate curving line his eye had been tracing. Pierce groaned faintly. Theo picked up another stone and laid it upon Pierce's right shoulder, and then placed another upon the opposite shoulder to balance it. Absorbed now in his task, he shifted Mingo a little and began to cover Pierce's back with a symmetrical design of flattish stones. As he laid each stone very carefully down, drying it first and warming it a little in his hands (the surface stones were too hot for comfort) the tips of his fingers encountered the warm flesh, sandy and slightly gritty to the touch. The climax of this activity, to which Uncle Theo looked hungrily forward, and which he provoked himself by deferring, was the moment when he should oh so gently and lingeringly place a stone upon the summit of each of Pierce's buttocks.

There was a sudden crunching sound and two shadows fell upon them. Pierce twisted away, scattering the stones, and sat up. Damn, thought Theo, damn, damn, damn.

'Please may we have Mingo?' said Edward. 'We need him for our game of Feathers.'

'He won't come,' said Pierce. 'He's in a love-state with Uncle Theo.' Pierce did not cover himself for Henrietta, who was used to male nakedness.

'He'll come if we ask him specially,' said Henrietta. 'He's such a polite dog.'

'Come on, Mingo, stop lazing,' said Theo, pushing the dog off his lap.

'Seen any saucers lately?' said Pierce.

'Yes, we saw one yesterday. We think it's the same one.'

'Funny, isn't it,' said Pierce, 'that no one seems to see those saucers except you twol'

The twins were dignified on the subject of their saucers. Edward, who had been engaged in hauling the reluctant and rather floppy Mingo up on to his four paws, said 'Oh how I wish it would rain!'

Henrietta was now beckoning her brother aside and whispering to him. Edward released Mingo who forthwith collapsed again. After a good deal of whispering and fumbling, Edward cleard his throat and addressed Pierce in what the children called his official voice. 'Pierce. We've got something here we should like to give you.'

'What?' said Pierce in an indifferent tone. He had lain down again upon the pebbles, on his back this time.

The twins came round to him and Pierce raised himself indolently upon an elbow. 'Here,' said Edward. 'We'd like you to have this, for yourself.'

'With our best love,' said Henrietta.

Edward held out something and Pierce received it in a brown gritty hand. Theo, peering, saw that it was a fossil, a rather remarkable one, an almost perfect ammonite. The delicate finely indented spiral of the shell was clearly marked on both sides of the stone as Pierce now turned it over in his palm, and the sea had rounded the edges and blurred the pattern just that the girt or me ammonite must represent a wnstueraote sacrifice on the part of the twins, who valued their stones for aesthetic as well as for scientific reasons.

'Thanks,' said Pierce, holding the stone rather awkwardly.

Edward stood back, as if to bow, and then quickly turned his attention again to the animation of Mingo. Pierce got lazily up to his feet. With many 'Come ons' and 'Good boys' the twins had cajoled the dog into following them, and they were just beginning to march away across the dazzling mauve and white expanse, when Pierce suddenly twitched and straightened as if he had received an electric shock. He then twisted his naked body like a curling spring, his arm flung back, rotated upon his heels, and with a mighty cast sent the ammonite spinning far out to sea.

Edward and Henrietta, who had seen what happened, stopped dead. Theo leapt to his feet. Pierce turned away with his back to the sea. The twins started walking again, and receded stiffly, followed by Mingo.

'You absolute little swine,' said Theo to Pierce, 'what ever possessed you to do that?'

Pierce looked at him, half over his shoulder, with a scarcely recognizable face as contorted as a Japanese mask. Theo thought he is furiously angry, no, he is about to burst into tears.