Айрис Мердок: The Nice and the Good

'We could try Liddell and Scott,' said Henrietta.
'Willy will know,' said Edward.
'May we have that seaweed in our bath tonight?' said Henrietta.
'You'd better ask Mary,' said Paula.
'There's a letter for you downstairs,' said Edward. 'May I have the stamp? T 'You pig!' cried his sister. The twins, cooperative in most matters, were competitive about stamps.
Paula laughed. She was just preparing to leave the house.
'What kind of stamp is it?'
'Australian.' A cold dark shadow fell across Paula. She went on mechanically smiling and answering her children's chatter as she left her room and moved down the stairs. Of course it might always be from someone else. But she didn't know anyone else in Australia.
The letters were always laid out on the big round rosewood table which stood in the centre of the hall, and which was also usually covered with newspapers and whatever books members of the household were reading and with the paraphernalia of the twins' games. Edward ran ahead and retrieved his copy of More Hunting Wasps which he had laid down on top of the letter so that Henrietta should not observe the stamp. Paula saw from a distance Eric's unmistakable writing upon the envelope.
'May I have it, Mummy, please? T 'May I have the next one,' cried Henrietta, 'and the next one, and the next one?'
Paula's hand trembled. She tore the envelope open quickly, clawed the letter out and put it in her pocket, and gave the envelope to her son. She went out into the sunshine.
The big sphere, cracked and incompleteat the near end, composed of the sky and the sea, enclosed Paula like a cold vault and she shivered in the sunlight as if it were the ray of a malignant star. She bowed her head, making a movement as if she were casting a veil about it, and bolted across the lawn and into the meadow and along the path beside the hawthorn hedge which led down towards the sea. Now she saw in the same sunny darkness her sandalled feet slithering upon the purplish stones of the beach as she fled forward, as if she were falling, to get to the edge of the water. Here the beach shelved steeply and she sat down, with a rattling flurry of pebbles, upon a crest of stones with the sea just below her. It was so calm today that it seemed motionless, touching the shore with an inaudible lapping kiss and the occasional curl of a Lilliputian wavelet. The sun shone into the green water revealing the stonescattered sand which was briefly uncovered at low tide, and farther out a mottled line of mauve seaweed. The water sur face shadowed and dappled the sand with faint bubbly forms like imperfections in glass.
That she had once been in love with Eric Sears Paula knew from the evidence of letters which she had found. She did not know it from memory. At least, she could remember events and pieces of her own conduct, which were only explicable on the assumption that she had been in love with Eric. But the love itself she could not really remember. It seemed to have been not only killed but removed even from the lighted caravan of her accepted and remembered life by the shock of that awful scene.
Eric Sears had been the occasion of Paula's divorce. With the precipitate cruelty of a very jealous man, Richard, whose many infidelities she had tolerated, divorced her for a single lapse.
The occasion of it all, her insane passion for Eric, had been erased from her mind, but otherwise she had got over nothing.
That terrible time, its misery and its shame, lived within her unassimilated and unresolved. She had acted crazily, she had acted badly, and she had got away with nothing. Paula's pride, her dignity, her lofty conception of herself, had suffered a savage wound and that wound still ached and burned, in the daytime and in the night-time. She thought that no one knew of this, though she reflected sometimes that of course Richard must know.
Her love affair with Eric – it had been very brief – now seemed to her something so unutterably mean and unworthy that she could not, even when she tried hard to discipline herself to do so, recognize herself as a protagonist. While she was fairly indulgent to others, had been so to Richard, Paula thought that faithfulness in marriage was very important. Infidelity was undignified and usually involved lying or at least half-truths and concealments. Paula cared very much about what might be called 'moral style'. Someone had once said of her, not quite justly, 'She wouldn't mind what awful thing you did so long as you didn't talk about it in a certain kind of way.' In fact Paula had, by the time their marriage ended, al' most succeeded in convincing her husband that she hated his lies about his adventures more than she hated the adventures themselves. And what offended her in memory about her own conduct, was not so much that she had actually gone to bed with Eric but that she had half-lied to Richard about it and that she had played a mean scurrying part and become involved in a situation which she did not understand and could not control. She regretted it all with an undying regret which only continual efforts of her reason prevented from utterly poisoning her life.
What would have happened if there had not been that dreadful scene with Richard she did not know. Richard would probably have divorced her in any case, he was savage with resentment. She could not conceive that she could have gone on loving Eric. He had made her lose too much. But what had really, and it seemed instantaneously, destroyed her love was his crushing physical defeat at the hands of Richard. This was unjust, but with the deep dark logical injustice of forces which govern us at our most extreme moments and which, though they have nothing to do with morality, must sometimes be recognized in our lives like gods. That scene still haunted Paula in sleeping and in waking nightmares, Richard's distorted face, Eric's screams, the blood that seemed to have got everywhere.
Of course they had all pretended that it was an accident.
Poor Eric. He knew the dark decision of the god as well as Paula did and he submitted to it. He was utterly subdued by shame. When Paula visited him in hospital she soon –knew that he no longer wanted her to come. They scrambled through their adieus. Eric wrote that he was going to Australia. He wrote from Australia in a letter of farewell that he had met a girl on the boat and was going to marry her. That had been nearly two years ago. Paula did not want to hear from Eric again. She did not want to know that Eric still existed.
The sun dazzled angrily upon the water. Frowning against it she slowly unfolded the letter.