Айрис Мердок: The Nice and the Good

This is the conclusion to which, in these awful months of misery, I have at last come. There are eternal bonds which are made in registry offices and in churches, there are eternal bonds which are made in other and stranger and more terrible ways. You understand what I mean, Paula. I suffered for you, I was wounded for you, and there is a lack which only you can fill and a pain which only you can cure. I thought I would 'get over' what happened. I have not. And I know that you have not either. (I have had the most extraordinary series of dreams about you, by the way.) I think we belong to each other. We must live with what has happened, we must live it into ourselves, and we must do this together. (How very strange the human mind is. I have had many new causes for wretchedness since I came to Australia. People have disappointed me and deceived me and let me down. But everything that has made me really miserable has been somehow connected with that, has somehow been that.) You owe this to me, Paula, and I know that you pay your debts. You cannot be happy yourself or feel pleased with the way you behaved to me when I have been (I use the words advisedly) nearly destroyed because I was guilty of loving you. One must acknowledge the past, assimilate it, be reconciled to it. We can heal each other, we can save each other, Paula, and only we can do this for each other. I feel an echo from you deep in my heart and I know that what I say is true. Wait for me, pray for me, receive me, oh my dear. I will write again from the ship. To all eternity Yours Eric Paula crumpled up the letter. Then she tore it up into very small pieces and strewed it upon the still taut surface skin of the water. How that letter conjured Eric up, in all the detail which she had mercifully forgotten, like a demon figure in front of her shadowing the bright sea: his forced ecstasies, his mystical certainties, his blend, which she had once found so touching, of weakness and menace, the ruthless cunning of his egoism. Of course she had acted badly, not least in abandoning him so rapidly at the very end. But she had forever been emptied of love for him and of the ability to help him. That was her certainty. Was it true though, Paula asked herself, trying to steady her mind, could she still help Eric, ought she to try?

Perhaps he was right to say that there was still something which they had to do for each other. Her heart shuddered at it.

At the idea of seeing him again she felt nausea, a kind of sick never been Irlgntenea or rcicnaru, ai«ivugu iie was a uiau wuu was capable of violence. She knew now that she had been very very frightened of Eric. This was the quality of the love which she had so completely forgotten.

'It was an Abyssinian cat And on its dulcimer it sat,' chanted Edward, hauling Montrose out of the basket into which Mingo, repulsed by the cat's cold stare, had been making tentative and unsuccessful efforts to climb. Mingo climbed in. Affronted, Montrose escaped from Edward on to the stove and fluffed himself out into his bird look.

'May we have that seaweed in our bath tonight?' Henrietta asked Mary Clothier.

'Whatever do you want seaweed in your bath for?' asked Mary.

'It's our special cure for rheumatism,' said Edward.

'You aren't suffering from rheumatism, are you, Edward?'

'No, it's for Uncle Theo really, but we thought we'd better test it ourselves in case there were any toxic effects.'

'Last time you two had seaweed in your bath it all went down the plug and it was stopped up for days,' said Casie, who had just come in with a basket of lettuces and tomatoes.

'We promise we won't let it go down the plug this time!'

'All right then,' said Mary. 'Look, I do wish you'd take those stones out into the garden.'

Kate and Ducane who were passing by the kitchen door smiled at each other and went on into the hall. Ducane called back to the kitchen, 'Oh Mary. Kate and I are just going up to see Willy.'

'Well, don't be late for tea, it's special Sunday tea.'

'And how is my little nymph?' said Ducane to Barbara, whom they met in the doorway.

'Taimerais mieux t'avoir clans manually lit que le tonnerre,' replied Barbara primly. siuppeu for a rew paces vesiue Luem.

Barbara was round-faced, like her mother, and had the same shortish slightly fuzzy fair hair, only whereas Kate's unkempt mop shifted about her like a slightly crazed halo, Barbara's hair, much more carefully cut, cupped her head like an elaborate filigree head-piece. Her complexion was that of a child, rosy and shiny, with that delicious apple-like shininess which usually disappears in adolescence. Short-skirted, longlegged, barefooted, her prancing feet were the same smooth glowing golden-brown colour as her legs.

'Why don't you go and look for Pierce?' said Kate. 'I saw him down by the churchyard and he looked rather lonely to me.'

Barbara shook her head with a virtuous air. 'I must go and practise my flute. I'm going to give Willy a Mozart recital.'

'Aren't you going to give me a Mozart recital?' Ducane asked.

'No. Only Willy.' She skipped away into the house.

'How that child has grown!' said Ducane. 'She's as tall as you. And nearly as pretty.'

'Darling! I'm afraid Pierce and Barbara aren't exactly hitting it off since she came back.'

'Well, you know what's the matter. They're growing up.'

'I know. They do develop early these days. I thought somehow, having been together so much like brother and sister, they'd be sort of inoculated.'

'Nothing inoculates them against that,' said Ducane. And he realized as he spoke that he did not at all like the idea of Barbara being involved in that. He would have liked her never to grow up.

'But this poor chap,' said Kate, reverting to what they had been discussing earlier. 'Why did he do it?'

Ducane had not spoken to Kate about the inquiry. Although he had received the news of his task coolly enough from Octavian he was feeling far from happy about it. It was the sort of thing which could turn into an awful mess. It might be very difficult to find out the truth quickly, and impossible to demons45 trate that there was no security interest and no case for a more elaborate investigation. However, it was not just the prospect of failing and being discredited which daunted Ducane. He did not like the idea of investigating another man's private life in this way. Moreover the personality of Radeechy, about whom he had reflected considerably since his arrival in Dorset, now seemed to him both puzzling and sinister. He was sure that the spiritualism, or whatever it was, was connected with the suicide; and he felt instinctively that here, once he had started to pry, he would unearth something very unpleasant indeed.

'I don't know why he did it,' said Ducane. He lost his wife lately. That might have been it.'

By this time they had crossed the level lawn behind the house with its two tall feathery acacia trees, climbed over a low palisade of string and sticks which had something to do with the twins, and were climbing a path, made with great labour the previous year by Pierce and Barbara out of pebbles from the beach, between twin hedges of plump veronica bushes.

Ducane's hand passed caressingly over the compact curves of the bushes. At this moment his mind was divided into several compartments or levels. At one level, perhaps the highest, he was thinking about Willy Kost, whom he was so shortly to meet and whom he had not seen now for some time, since on Ducane's last two week-ends Willy had declared by telephone that he wanted no visitors. At another level Ducane was thinking in an upset nervous way about Radeechy and wondering what George Droysen would find out in Fleet Street. At yet another level, or in another compartment, he was miserably recalling his weakness at the end of the scene with Jessica and miserably wondering what on earth he was going to do about her next week.