The Nice and the Good (18 page)

The brush fell to the floor. Mrs McGrath’s right hand collected her glass and Ducane’s, holding them rim to rim and set them down on one of the tables. Her left hand now began to curl snake-like round his, the fingers slowly crossing his palm and tightening.

Ducane stared into Mrs McGrath’s now very drowsy blue eyes. She leaned gradually forward and laid her lips very gently upon his lips. For a second or two they stayed thus quietly lip to lip. Then Mrs McGrath slid her arms round his shoulders and crushed herself violently against him, forcing his lips apart. Ducane felt her tongue and her teeth. A moment later he had detached himself and stood up.

Mrs McGrath remained motionless, both hands raised in the attitude into which he had flung her on rising. Her North Sea eyes were narrow now, amused, predatory and shrewd. She said softly, “Mr Honeyman, Mr Honeyman, I like you, I like you.”

Ducane reflected a good deal afterwards about his conduct on this occasion and could not later acquit himself of having quite disgracefully ‘let things happen’. But at the moment what he mainly felt was an intense irresponsible physical delight, a delight connected with the exact detail of this recent set of occurrences, as if all their movements from the
moment at which their hands touched had composed themselves into a vibrating pattern suspended within his nervous system. He felt the outraged joy of someone round whose neck an absurdly bulky garland of flowers has quite unexpectedly been thrown. With this he felt too the immediate need to be absolutely explicit with Mrs McGrath and let her know the worst.

He said very quickly, “Mrs McGrath, it is true that I am not a police officer, but I am a representative of the government department in which your husband works. I’m afraid your husband is in trouble and I have come here to ask him some rather unpleasant questions.”

“What’s your name?” said Judy McGrath, relaxing her pose.

“John Ducane.”

“You’re sweet.”

Ducane sat down cautiously on one of the coffee tables, carefully pushing a clover-spotted china pig family out of the way. “I’m afraid this may prove a serious matter—”

“You’re very sweet. Do you know that? Drink some more pink wine. What do you want McGrath to tell you? Maybe I can tell you?”

Ducane thought quickly. Shall I? he wondered. And some professional toughness in him, perhaps reinforced by his natural guilt, now ebbing back through his delighted nerves, said yes. He said, giving her every warning by the gravity of his look, “Mrs McGrath, your husband was blackmailing Mr Radeechy.”

Judy McGrath no longer had the eyes of a priestess. She looked at Ducane shrewdly yet trustfully. She looked at him as she might have looked at an old friend who was conveying bad news. After a moment she said, “He’ll lose his job, I suppose?”

“How much did Radeechy give him to keep quiet?” asked Ducane. He held her in a cool almost cynical gaze, and yet it seemed to him afterwards that there was as much passion concealed in this questioning and answering as there had been in the flurry that preceded it.

“I don’t know. Not much. Peter isn’t a man with big ideas. He ate off newspapers all his childhood.”

Ducane gave a long sigh. He stood up again.

While he was framing his next question there was a sound of footsteps on the stairs. They turned instantly to each other. She said in a low voice, “That’s him now. We’ll meet again Mr Honeyman, we’ll meet again.”

The door opened and McGrath came in.

Ducane’s plan of surprising McGrath had certainly succeeded. McGrath stood still in the doorway with his pink mouth open staring at Ducane. Then his features crinkled into an alarmed furtive frown and he turned towards his wife with a lumbering violent movement.

“Good evening, McGrath,” said Ducane smoothly. He felt alert and cold.

“Well, I’m off to the pub,” said Judy McGrath. She picked up her handbag from the sofa and went to the door. As McGrath, now again looking at Ducane, did not move, she pushed him out of her way. He banged the door to after her with his foot.

“I’m sorry to intrude,” said Ducane. “I find I have to ask some more questions.”

“Well?”

There was a dangerous sense of equality in the air. McGrath still contained the violence of the arrested gesture towards his wife. Ducane thought, I must rush him. He said, “McGrath, you were blackmailing Radeechy.”

“Did my wife tell you that?”

“No. Radeechy’s papers told us. As you know, the penalties for blackmail are very severe indeed.”

“It wasn’t blackmail,” said McGrath. He leaned back against the door.

“Well, let us say that Radeechy rewarded you for keeping your mouth shut. Frankly, McGrath, I’m not interested in you, and if you will now tell me the
whole
truth I’ll do my best to get you off. If not, the law will take its course with you.”

“I don’t understand,” said McGrath. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“Come, come. We
know
you extorted money from Radeechy. I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you to wonder whether you were partly responsible for his death?”

“Me?” McGrath came forward and gripped the back of the sofa. He had started to think now and had plumped his
face out with a look of upset and peevish self-righteousness. “He never minded
me
. He never worried about
me
. I liked him. We were friends.”

“I’m afraid I don’t believe you,” said Ducane. “But what I want to know now—”

“It
wasn’t
blackmail,” said McGrath, “and you couldn’t prove it was. Mr Radeechy gave me money for what I did. I didn’t worry him at all, it couldn’t have been because of me, you just ask Mr Biranne, he’ll tell you what it was like up there at Mr Radeechy’s place. I never threatened Mr Radeechy with anything, you couldn’t prove it was blackmail, I mean it wasn’t blackmail, the old gentleman just liked me, he
liked
me and he paid me generous like, that’s all it was.”

Ducane stepped back. His mind twisted and darted to catch the thing which had been thrown at it so unexpectedly. He controlled his face. He said coolly, “Mr Biranne. Yes, of course. He was there quite a lot, wasn’t he.”

“I’ll say he was,” said McGrath, “and he’ll tell you what it was like between me and the old fellow. Me a blackmailer! Why I wouldn’t hurt a fly! I was—”

McGrath went on protesting.

Ducane thought, so Biranne was lying about his relations with Radeechy. Why? Why? Why?

T
HE
three women were walking slowly along the edge of the sea. The smooth sea was a light luminous uniform colour of blue, scattered over with twinkling, shifting gems of brightness, and divided by a thin dark blue line from the more pallid empty blue sky, into which on such a day it seemed that one could look infinitely far. There had been a few natives on the beach that morning, but now they had gone away in the dead time of the early afternoon. On the curve of the open green hillside just inland, like a figure in the background of a painting by Uccello, Barbara could be seen riding her new pony.

Outlined against the pale blue light, the figures of the women seemed monumental in the empty scene. They walked slowly and lazily in single file, Paula first, dressed in a plain shift of yellow cotton, Mary next in a white dress covered with small blue daisies, and Kate last, in a purplish reddish dress of South Sea island flowers. Kate, wearing her canvas shoes, was walking along with her feet in the sea. At low tide there was a little sand at the sea’s edge and she was walking upon the sand. The other two walked higher up, upon the crest of mauve and white pebbles.

Paula was twisting her wedding ring round and round upon her thin finger. She had often felt inclined to throw the ring into the sea, and been prevented by some almost superstitious scruple. She was thinking now, what on earth shall I do? She had just received a postcard from Eric posted in Singapore. Something about the slow progress across the globe of her ex-lover appalled and paralysed her. Her first reaction had been one of sheer terror. Yet it was possible that she had a genuine duty here; and in the light of that word ‘duty’ she had found herself able once more to reflect. Perhaps Eric’s mind, wounded and crippled by her fault, could only be healed by her ministration? She need not after all now marry Eric, or become again his mistress, as it had seemed to her in the first shock and for no very clear reason, that she must. All that was necessary
was that she should resolutely confront him, talk to him with reason and kindness, talk if necessary on and on and on. He had gone away too quickly and she had been so cravenly glad of this. She had never
understood
that situation, she had never really contemplated it, she had shuffled it off. Perhaps if she tried now to understand it and to help Eric to understand it she would do them both some good of which at present she had not even the conception. It was simply that the idea of confronting Eric was an idea of such pure and awful pain that she could not in any way manipulate it in her thought.

I never understood what happened, Paula thought. Everything was so dreadful that I stopped thinking. I never tried to see what it was like for Richard either. If I had I might have tried to stop him from going away. But I hated myself and the muddle of it all so much, I let Richard go just because I wanted to be left alone. I ought to have fought Richard then with my intelligence. Yet it all seemed inevitable and perhaps it was. Is it fruitless to think about the past and build up coherent pictures of how one’s life went wrong? I have never believed in remorse and repentance. But one must do something about the past. It doesn’t just cease to be. It goes on existing and affecting the present, and in new and different ways, as if in some other dimension it too were growing.

She looked away over the sinister silent blue surface of the Eric-bearing sea. If I could think clearly now, she wondered, about what I did then could I do us all some good? Then she reflected that this ‘us all’ seemed to include Richard; yet there was nothing further in the rest of time that she could do for Richard except leave him utterly alone. It was Eric, not Richard, whom she might have now the power to help, and she must save her wits from crazy fear by thinking on the
problem
of how to do it. I must think it all out beforehand, she thought, and I must be in control. Eric could make me do things, that was what was so dreadful. Of course Paula had revealed her trouble to no one. She preserved it in her private heart like the awful bloody arcana of a mystical religion.

Mary was thinking, suppose I were to marry Willy and take him right away? The idea was vague, wonderful, with
its sudden suggestion of purpose, of space, of change. It was a surprise idea. And yet why not? Ducane had been right when he said that she had settled down to feeling inferior to Willy. She had allowed Willy to cast a bad sleepy spell upon both of them. What she needed now was will, some freshness out of her own soul to break that spell. I’ve never had gaiety of my own, thought Mary. Alistair was gay, the gaiety of our marriage was all his. I am naturally an anxious person, she thought, stupidly,
wickedly
anxious. Even now, as I walk along beside this blue sea covered with sugary light I see it all through a veil of anxiety. My world is a brown world, a dim spotty soupy world like an old photograph. Can I change all this for Willy’s sake? There is a grace of the gods which sends goodness. Perhaps there is a grace of the gods which sends joy. Perhaps indeed they are the same thing and another name for this thing is hope. If I could only believe a little more in happiness I could control Willy, I could
save
Willy.

In fact John Ducane’s “You have power” had already made a difference to her relations with Willy. She could not yet imagine herself proposing marriage to him, though she had tried to picture this scene. Yet, between them, things were changing. I think I was too obsessed with the idea that he should talk to me about the past, she thought, about what it was like
there
. I felt that this was a barrier between us. But I know now that I can leap over the barrier, I can come close to Willy and hustle him just by a sort of animal cheerfulness, just by a sort of very
simple
love. It isn’t my business to knit up Willy’s past, to integrate it into a present I can share with him. It may be impossible to do this anyway. I must be loving to him in a free unanxious sort of way, even ready to make use of him to procure my own happiness! I already feel much more independent with him. Mary had felt this greater independence as a sense of almost bouncy physical well-being as she moved, differently now, about Willy’s room. And she had seen Willy being positively puzzled by it. When she saw that look of puzzlement upon his dear face she laughed the best laugh she had laughed for a long time.

Kate was thinking how wonderfully cool the water goes on feeling upon my ankles, a marvellous feeling of something
cool caressing something warm, like those puddings where there’s a hot cake hidden inside a mound of ice cream. And what an intense heavenly blue the sea is, not a dark blue at all, but like a cauldron of light. How wonderful colour is, how I should like to swim in the
colour
of that sea, and go down and down a revolving blue shaft into a vortex of pure brightness where there isn’t even colour any more but just bliss. How wonderful everything is and Octavian isn’t the least bit hurt about John, I know he isn’t, not the least little bit, it doesn’t worry him at all. Octavian is happy and I’m going to make John happy. He’s still worried about Octavian but he’ll soon see that all is well, that all is perfectly well, and then he’ll settle down to be happy too. How wonderful love is, the most wonderful thing in the whole world. And how lucky I am to be able to love without muddle, without fear, in absolute freedom. Of course Octavian is great. He has such a divine temperament. And then, if it comes to that, so have I. We were both breast-fed babies with happy childhoods. It does make a difference. I think being good is just a matter of temperament in the end. Yes, we shall all be so happy and good too. Oh, how utterly marvellous it is to be me!