The Nice and the Good (12 page)

There had been no suggestion that Mr and Mrs Radeechy were other than ‘devoted’ and there was evidence to suggest that they had been happily married. The motive might indeed lie here. How Mrs Radeechy coped with the goings on with the ‘girls’ Ducane simply could not imagine; but he now understood enough about the mystery of married couples to know that there is practically nothing with which those extraordinary organisms cannot deal. Mrs Radeechy
might well have been entirely tolerant about the girls. McGrath had described her as a ‘very cheerful lady’ and this agreed with other testimony. McGrath himself would, of course, have to be interrogated again and very much more ruthlessly and scientifically. This had been just a preliminary shaking of hands. It should not be too difficult, Ducane thought, to break McGrath down entirely, to threaten him and frighten him. But Ducane did not want to do this until he had made certain whether or not the newspaper could be persuaded to hand over the story. George Droysen had been despatched to conduct this delicate negotiation.

At this point Ducane began to think about Jessica. The connection of thought was as follows. It is impossible to be a barrister without imagining oneself a judge, and Ducane’s imagination had often taken this flight. However, and this was another reason for Ducane’s ultimate disgust with life in the courts, the whole situation of ‘judging’ was abhorrent to him. He had watched his judges closely, and had come to the conclusion that no human being is worthy to be a judge. In theory, the judge represents simply the majesty and impartiality of the law whose instrument he is. In practice, because of the imprecision of law and the imperfection of man, the judge enjoys a considerable area of quite personal power which he may or may not exercise wisely. Ducane’s rational mind knew that there had to be law courts and that English law was on the whole good law and English judges good judges. But he detested that confrontation between the prisoner in the dock and the judge, dressed so like a king or a pope, seated up above him. His irrational heart, perceptive of the pride of judges, sickened and said it should not be thus; and said it the more passionately since there was that in Ducane which wanted to be a judge.

Ducane knew, and knew it in a half-guilty, half-annoyed way as if he had been eavesdropping, that there were moments when he had said to himself, “I alone of all these people am good enough, am humble enough, to be a judge”. Ducane was capable of picturing himself as not only aspiring to be, but as actually being, the just man and the just judge. He did not rightly know what to do with these visions. Sometimes he took them, now that he had removed
himself from the possibility of actually becoming a real judge, for a sort of harmless idealism. Sometimes they seemed to him the most corrupting influences in his life.

What Ducane was experiencing, in this form peculiar to him of imagining himself as a judge, was, though this was not entirely clear in his mind, one of the great paradoxes of morality, namely that in order to become good it may be necessary to imagine oneself good, and yet such imagining may also be the very thing which renders improvement impossible, either because of surreptitious complacency or because of some deeper blasphemous infection which is set up when goodness is thought about in the wrong way. To become good it may be necessary to think about virtue; although unreflective simple people may achieve a thoughtless excellence. Ducane was in any case highly reflective and had from childhood quite explicitly set before himself the aim of becoming a good man; and although he had little of the demoniac in his nature there was a devil of pride, a stiff Calvinistic Scottish devil, who was quite capable of bringing Ducane to utter damnation, and Ducane knew this perfectly well.

This metaphysical dilemma was present to him at times not in any clear conceptual form but rather as an atmosphere, a feeling of bewildered guilt which was almost sexual in quality and not altogether unpleasant. If Ducane had believed in God, which he had not done since he abandoned, at the age of fifteen, the strict low church Glaswegian Protestantism in which he had been brought up, he would have prayed, instantly and hard, whenever he perceived this feeling coming on. As it was he endured it grimly, as it were with his eyes tight shut, trying not to let it proliferate into something interesting. This feeling, which came to him naturally whenever he experienced power, especially rather formal power, over another person, had now been generated by his questioning of McGrath. And his faintly excited sense of having power over McGrath put him in mind of another person over whom he had power, and that was Jessica.

Ducane was ruefully aware that his remorse about his behaviour to Jessica was at least partly compounded of distress at cutting, as Jessica’s rather muddled lover, a
figure which was indubitably not that of the good man. In fact Ducane had long ago made up his mind that he was a man who simply must not have love affairs, and the adventure with Jessica was really, as he now forced himself sternly to see, a clear case of seeing and approving the better and doing the worse. However, as he also believed, the only point of severity with the past is improvement of the future. Given all this muddle, what was the right thing to do now? Could he, involved as he was in this mess of his own creating, be or even intelligibly attempt to be, the just judge where poor Jess was concerned? How could he sufficiently separate himself from it, how could he judge the mistake when he was the mistake? Ducane’s thoughts were further confused here by the familiar accusing voice which informed him that he was only so anxious now to simplify his life in order to have a clear conscience, or more grossly a clear field, for his highly significant commitment to Kate. Yet was it not plain that he ought, whatever his motives for it might be, to break absolutely with Jessica and to see her no more? Poor Jessica, he thought, oh God, poor Jessica.

“I say, may I come in for a moment?”

Ducane’s thoughts were interrupted by the voice of Richard Biranne, who had just put his head round the door.

“Come in, come in,” said Ducane pleasantly, checking with a quick physical twitch the instant hostility which had gripped his whole body at the appearance of Biranne.

Biranne came in and sat down opposite to Ducane. Ducane looked at his visitor’s clever face. Biranne had a long handsome slightly tortured-looking intellectual head. His stiff wiry hair, colourlessly fair, stood up in a wavy crest, elongated his face. His shapeless-looking mouth was twisted and rather mobile. He had a high-pitched donnish voice which was physically disturbing, as if it made objects in his vicinity vibrate and do their best to break. Ducane could well imagine that he was attractive to women.

“Droysen told me about McGrath,” said Biranne. “I was wondering if you had seen that sinner and got anything out of him, if that’s not an indiscreet question.”

Ducane did not see why he should not discuss the matter with Biranne, who had after ail seen the opening of the
drama. He said, “Yes, I saw him. He told me a few things. I’ve got the beginnings of a picture.”

“Oh. What did you get out of him?”

“He says he did the shopping for Radeechy’s magical goings-on. He says the magic involved naked girls. That, with a few trimmings, is supposed to be what he spilled to the press.”

“Have you got on to the girls?”

“Not yet. McGrath said he didn’t know anything about them. Which I don’t believe.”

“Hmmm. What about the blackmail story?”

“I don’t know,” said Ducane. “It seems to me possible that McGrath himself was blackmailing Radeechy in a quiet way. But that’s not important. There’s something else. There’s
someone
else.”

“Someone eke?” said Biranne. “I don’t see why. Is that just a guess? It seems to me you’ve got all the ingredients for an explanation already.”

“It doesn’t add up. Why did Radeechy kill himself? And why did he leave no note? And why did he do it in the office? I can’t help feeling that’s significant.”

“Had to do it somewhere, poor devil! It’s interesting that you think McGrath might have been blackmailing him. Couldn’t that be the reason?”

“I don’t think so. But I’ll soon know.”

“You sound very confident. Have you got another lead?”

Ducane suddenly began to feel cautious. It disturbed him to see Biranne sitting in the chair from which the multi-coloured image of McGrath had not yet entirely faded. There came to him again that faintly thrilling feeling of mingled unworthiness and aspiration which had been occasioned by the putting of McGrath to the question. Yet Ducane had no power over Biranne. Biranne was not a prisoner in the dock.

He felt an impulse to mystify his visitor. He replied, “Yes, I’ve one or two leads. We’ll see, we’ll see.”

Now he could feel, almost physically, his familiar be-devilment merging with his old dislike of Biranne. He must, at last, forget the quality of that mocking laughter. He himself had often mocked at harmless men, and indeed meant by it but little harm. The puffed up and affronted self must
cease its importunities at last. He recalled Biranne’s distinguished war record. Here was another motive for envy, another source of this thoroughly unworthy dislike. As Ducane gazed at Biranne, who was now preparing to depart, the dusty sunshine in the room brought a vision dazzling into his eyes of Paula and the twins, as he had last seen them together on the beach in Dorset. It had never occurred to Ducane, who liked and admired Paula, to doubt that in their divorce Biranne had been the guilty party. He had heard Biranne talking about women. But what he felt now, as he watched his visitor’s departure, was something more like pity: to have had a wife like Paula, to have had children like the twins, and to have wilfully and utterly lost them.

“D
O
anything you like,” said Jessica, “only don’t say the word ‘never’. I should die of that word.”

John Ducane was miserably silent. His timid hangdog look had made him into another person, a stranger.

“I just don’t understand,” said Jessica. “There
must
be some way round this, there
must
be.
Think
, John,
think
, for Christ’s sake.”

“No way,” he mumbled, “no way.”

He was standing beside the window in the thick afternoon sunlight, shrunken up with wretchedness, rendered by misery physically appalling and strange, as if he were barnacled over with scabs and scales. He moved his head very slowly to and fro, not significantly but as an animal might, twitching its shoulders under a painful yoke. He cast a quick shrewd hostile glance at Jessica and said, “Oh my God.”

Jessica said, “You want me to make it easy for you to leave me, don’t you. But I can’t. I might just as well try to kill myself by stopping breathing.”

“My poor child,” he said in a low voice, “don’t fight, don’t fight, don’t fight.”

“I’m not fighting. I’m just wanting to stay alive.”

“It’s become such a bloody mess, Jessica—”

“Something in you may have become a mess. I haven’t changed. John, why can’t you
explain
? Why are you doing this to us?”

“We can’t go on in this sort of emotional muddle. We’ve got no background, no stability, no ordinariness. We’re just living on our emotions and eating each other. And it’s so rotten for you.”

“You aren’t thinking of me, John,” she said, “I know it. You’re thinking of yourself. As for ordinariness, why should we be ordinary? We aren’t ordinary people.”

“I mean we can’t co-exist and take each other for granted. We aren’t married and we aren’t just friends either. It doesn’t work, Jessica, it’s a bad situation.”

“It’s been bad lately, but everything would calm down if you’d only stop making a fuss.”

“We’ve got to simplify things. One has got to simplify one’s life.”

“I don’t see why. Suppose life just isn’t simple?”

“Well, it ought to be. All lives ought to be simple and open. With this thing going on our lives can’t be either. We’re like people living on drugs.”

“There isn’t any
thing
that’s going on except that I love you. This
thing
’s in your mind.”

“All right, it’s in my mind then. I ought never to have let this relationship start, Jessica. The responsibility is entirely mine. I acted very wrongly indeed.”

“Starting this relationship seems to me one of the better things you’ve ever done, however it ends.”

“We can’t separate it from how it ends.”

“Why can’t you live in the present? You live everywhere but in the present. Why can’t you just be merciful to me now?”

“We are human beings, Jessica. We can’t just live in the present.”

Jessica closed her eyes. Her love for John was so intense at that moment it was like being burnt alive. She thought, if I could only perish now and fall at his feet like a cinder.

His sudden decision not to see her any more was utterly incomprehensible to the girl, it was a death sentence from a hidden authority for an unknown crime. Nothing had changed, and then there was suddenly this.

John Ducane had been the first great certainty in Jessica’s life. She had never known her father, who died when she was an infant. The working class home of her mother and step-father had been a place which she endured and from which she ultimately escaped into an art school. But her life as a student now seemed to Jessica to have been substanceless, seeming in retrospect like a rather casual drunken party. She had been to bed with a number of different boys. She had tried out a number of new and fashionable ways of painting. No one had tried to teach her anything.

Like most of her fellow students Jessica was, to an extent which even John Ducane did not fully appreciate, entirely outside Christianity. Not only had she never believed or
worshipped, she had never been informed about the Bible stories or the doctrines of the Church in her home or school. Christ was a figure in a mythology, and she knew about as much about him as she knew about Apollo. She was in fact an untainted pagan, although the word suggested a positivity which was not to be found in her life. And if one had been disposed to ask for what and by what Jessica had lived during her student days, the answer would probably have been ‘her youth’. She and her companions were supported and united by one strong credo, that they were
young
.