The Nice and the Good (23 page)

“No.”

“Well, in that case I can’t tell him, can I? I’d hate to ge poor Fivey into trouble.”

“Did you leave a note for Ducane?”

“No. And I took away the bottle and the rest of the marrons!”

“And you didn’t tell Fivey whether or not to say you’d called? You’re a very inefficient intriguer. You’d better ring him up tomorrow morning!”

“I
can’t
. Oh Octavian, I
am
dreadful. No, I’ll just have to leave it, and if John mentions my having called I’ll say something vague.”

“Well, you’ve certainly entertained me. Never a dull moment with you around. Ready?”

“Ready, darling. Oh Octavian, it’s such
fun
being married to you.”

P
IERCE
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 internalised tail-wag, 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 could 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 of 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 sunbaked surface. He lifted 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 waist-line, 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 two!”

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 cleared 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 sufficiently to produce a thing of great beauty. Theo knew that the gift of the ammonite must represent a considerable 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 on”s and “Good boy”s 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 recognisable face as contorted as a Japanese mask. Theo thought, he is furiously angry, no, he is about to burst into tears.

“Steady on, Pierce.”

“I’m so bloody fucking miserable.”

“All right. But you oughtn’t to take it out of the twins.”

“Maybe. Oh what does it matter. I hate everyone. Everything’s
black
.”

Picturing himself taking the naked
kouros
into his arms, Theo settled down on the stones and sat firmly upon his hands. Pierce stood between him and the water, twisting and rippling his brown body like a prisoner in bonds against the luminous blue sheet of sky and sea.

“Keep the blackness inside yourself then,” said Theo. “Don’t pass it on.”

“If I kept it all inside I think I’d die of it. Have you ever been hopelessly in love, Uncle Theo?”

“Yes.” Hopelessly just about describes it, thought Theo, pressing the palms of his hands down on to the stones.

With an indolent stoop and a grimace Pierce picked up his clothes and began to walk slowly away along the beach in the opposite direction to the twins.

Theo wanted to call him back. But then he thought, oh
let him go, there’s no mending a fruitless love, it just has to be endured. I endure, let him endure.

He rose to his feet, but did not follow Pierce. He walked along to where, further on, he could see that the twins had sat down, with Mingo beside them. They had not started on their game of Feathers. As he came nearer he saw that Henrietta was crying.

Mingo greeted Theo as if they had not met for a year. Theo sat down beside Henrietta. “Come, my pet, don’t grieve. Pierce is very unhappy, you know that. And when people are unhappy they often make other people suffer, quite automatically.”

“What did he have to do that for?” cried Edward indignantly. “If he didn’t want it he could have given it back to us. It was such a lovely one.”

“It was the most beautiful one of all,” Henrietta wailed. “Edward didn’t want to give it and I persuaded him to, just to cheer Pierce up. Oh I do wish I hadn’t!”

“Never regret a good action,” said Theo. “It has more power than you know. Pierce will tell you he’s sorry, and you must promise to forgive him.”

The twins agreed, after a little argument, that they would forgive Pierce. Henrietta was tearful for a while longer about the sad fate of the ammonite deep in the sea, until Theo and Edward joined in consoling her by picturing how happy it would be talking to the crabs and the fishes and how it would much rather be there than getting dusty up in Pierce’s bedroom.

Why ever did I do that, Pierce asked himself as he stepped into his trousers. I’ll tell them I’m sorry, he thought, but that won’t do any good. Oh well, I don’t care, I detest everybody. I believe I’m becoming bad, like Barbara said. All right, I’m bad and I’ll
be
bad.

Barbara was absent at present, staying with a school friend in town. Pierce had hoped that her absence might bring some relief, even in the form of apathy, but had not reckoned with the sheer pain of the absence itself. His black mood, which during the unpredictable torment of her presence had remained incoherent, now seemed to be becoming much harder and more definite as if he were
gathering himself for some final destructive assault. And his physical desire for the phantom Barbara seemed even more teasingly painful than his desire for the glimpsed girl of flesh and blood.

He had been unable to prevent himself from following her about and provoking her, until she had told him in plain terms that she was going to town for a holiday from him. They had quarrelled violently, and Pierce had returned later to his room to find lying about on his bed all the objects which he had ever given to Barbara as presents. He had retaliated by returning to her room, and breaking some of them in the process, all the things which she had ever given him, including the excellent all-purpose knife which she had brought him from Switzerland and which had been the apple of his eye.

Pierce, fully dressed now but barefoot, stood by the edge of the glossy sea. He looked down at the receding underwater stones which the sun was revealing through a panel of green, still but bubbly like imperfect glass. He thought, I shall punish her somehow, I shall have to. And then I shall go into Gunnar’s Cave and jolly well stay there and
drown
.

M
ARY
climbed over the low wall of the graveyard. Her blue and white cotton dress caught on a sparkling edge of warm stone and a fine shower of dusty earth spilled over into her sandal.

Willy was a little way ahead of her, moving slowly over the bouncy interlaced ropes of the ivy. He moved with a rhythmical dancer’s motion, his limp imperceptible, the mysterious pliancy of the ivy floor entering into his body.

Mary leaned back against the wall. She was in no hurry to catch him up. The hot afternoon was silent with a thick powdery fragrant silence which Mary breathed ecstatically up into her head. A very very distant cuckoo call endorsed the silence like a mark or signature. Mary thought, I am lazy, I am in no hurry. She thought, today
I have him on a lead
. She smiled at the thought.

From this part of the graveyard nothing was visible except the whitish grey monuments, their tops tapering into invisibility in the over-abundant light, and the octagonal church, up whose walls Mary noticed the small-leaved ivy was beginning to climb. At some later time perhaps the church itself would simply be a mound of ivy, as so many of the gravestones had already become. Beyond the shimmering forms of the graves the afternoon sky was empty, a pale colourless radiant void.

Mary began to move, not following Willy but going parallel to him. Her sandalled feet touched the woven surface of the springy ivy, which yielded but with no sense of touching the ground below. Walking on water would be rather like this, Mary thought, one would feel the water as thick yielding stuff pressing up against the soles of one’s feet. She paused and touched the iron railing which surrounded one of the obelisks, streaking her hand with brown. She was conscious of Willy near to her, moving. The substance of the summer afternoon joined their two bodies so that when he moved she felt her own flesh very gently tugged at. Today we are like Siamese twins, she thought, only we are
joined together by some sort of delicious extensible warm ectoplasm.