The Nice and the Good (7 page)

“All right. Ring me as soon as you get anything.” He gave Droysen the Trescombe telephone number. “Well, that’s all, friends.”

Ducane stood up. Droysen stood up too. Biranne remained seated, looking at Octavian with a deferential air.

Ducane cursed his own bad manners. He had become so used to being, in his friendship with Octavian, the acknowledged
superior that he had for a moment forgotten that this was Octavian’s room, Octavian’s meeting, and not his. But his chief feeling at that instant was hostility to Biranne. Once, many years ago, across a partition in a restaurant, Ducane had overheard Biranne talking about him, Biranne was speculating about whether Ducane was homosexual. Cursing himself too for the persistence of this memory, Ducane recalled the particular quality of Biranne’s mocking laughter.

“H
OW
did they cook eggs in ancient Greece?” Edward Biranne asked his mother.

“Do you know, I’m not sure,” said Paula.

“What’s Greek for a poached egg?” said Henrietta.

“I don’t know. There are references to eating eggs but I can’t recall any references to cooking them.”

“Perhaps they ate them raw,” said Henrietta.

“Not very likely,” said Paula. “Can you remember anything in Homer?”

The twins, taught Greek and Latin from an early age by their mother, were already fairly proficient classicists. However, they could not remember anything in Homer.

“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?”

“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?”

“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 incomplete at 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 stone-scattered sand which was briefly uncovered at low tide, and farther out a mottled line of mauve seaweed. The water surface 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, recognise 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, almost 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 recognised 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.

My dearest,

You will be surprised at hearing from me again—or perhaps you will not. I somehow know that you have been thinking about me. When I last wrote to you I thought I was going to be married. Well, all that has fallen through. I must admit that I am in a state of utter wretchedness and have been for a long time. I didn’t know that such extreme unhappiness could continue for so long. I write to say that I know now that coming here was a mistake, leaving you was a mistake. And I have decided to come home. In fact when you get this letter I shall already be on the ship.

Of course I do not know what may or may not have happened to you since we parted, but my intuition tells me that you will not have rushed into another marriage. Paula, we are bound together. 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

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 fright. There was something demoniac about Eric. Paula had never been frightened of Richard, although he was a man who 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.

“
J’aimerais mieux t’avoir dans mon lit que le tonnerre
,” replied Barbara primly.

Ducane laughed, reaching out to pluck her hair as she skipped for a few paces beside them.

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, long-legged, 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.”