The Nice and the Good (27 page)

At least this was what Ducane thought some of the time. At other moments the whole thing was a nightmare. He writhed at the idea of their seeing him as a liar and a traitor. His behaviour to Jessica, already so inconsistent and unkind, would seem, on this revelation, that of a shabby trickster. Jessica was certain to believe that Kate was his mistress. Ducane could face being thought a brute, but could not
face being thought a cold-blooded deceiver. Yet, he reflected, I
am
a cold-blooded deceiver. What I can’t bear is not being one but seeming one! As for Kate, he did not really know how she would take it, and at certain terrible times he pictured himself banished from Trescombe for ever. At these times the thought flashed on him for a second: perhaps after all it would be better just to go on paying McGrath. But Ducane knew that this was the way to hell, and that he should even envisage it showed that he was corrupted indeed.

And he thought about Biranne. He thought more and more intensely about Biranne, producing not clarity but darkness. Ducane’s particular sort of religious temperament, which needed the energy of virtue for everyday living, pictured the good as a single distant point of light. A similar and perhaps less accurate instinct led him to feel the evil in his life as also single, a continuous systematically related matrix, almost a conspiracy. This was perhaps the remnant in his mind of his ancestors’ vigorous and literal belief in the devil. So now he felt that the muddle with the two women, McGrath’s blackmail, Radeechy’s death for which in a curious way he was beginning to feel himself responsible, and the mysterious and in some way obviously wicked activities of Biranne were all intimately connected together. Moreover the key to it all was Biranne himself.

Ducane had begun to have dreams about Biranne and the dreams were odd. In the dreams Ducane was invariably the pursuer. He sought for Biranne with anxiety and yearning through huge empty gardens and bombed London streets. Familiar scenes were transfigured into ghastliness by a need, an absence, the need for Biranne, the absence of Biranne. Ducane, who was not accustomed to taking dreams seriously, attempted no interpretation of these. In his waking consciousness he was sufficiently obsessed with the man, and he could note how the sheer strength of the obsession had moved him beyond his former irritations and resentments. The enquiry was important and Ducane hated failure. But what Ducane now felt as Biranne’s involvement in Ducane’s own life was more important still. There is the love of the hunter for the quarry. Yet was Biranne entirely a quarry? Was he not also a centre of power, a demon?

These bizarre ideas haunted Ducane’s disturbed mind not as clear thoughts but rather as pressures and atmospheres. His discovery that Biranne had lied about Radeechy had started a process of development which seemed to have its own private chemistry. While Biranne was just an acquaintance who had been mockingly rude about Ducane many years ago, Ducane had simply felt a small wincing dislike of the man which he had condemned but been unable to lessen. As soon as Ducane found himself with the possibility of power over Biranne and in possession of discreditable facts about him, his interest gained not only in strength but in warmth. The mocking laughter of so many years ago had lost its power to hurt. Biranne as a sinner and as a man in a trap was no longer a menace to consciousness, and Ducane gave himself no credit for an interest which he recognized as having more to do with power than with compassion. However, the fact remained that he was becoming increasingly worried about Biranne and by Biranne. Had Biranne murdered Radeechy? This remained a possibility, and in returning to it Ducane felt a mounting anxiety. He had been putting off a direct confrontation in the hope of acquiring more information, but the sources of information now seemed to be dry. Ducane had no intention of being hustled by his own psychology. But after careful thought he had by now come to the point of deciding: I must see him. I shall have to bluff him, it’s risky, but I must see him. And this conclusion filled him with alarm and with a curious deep wicked pleasure. I shall see him tomorrow, Ducane was thinking as he listened to Willy going on talking about the people at Trescombe.

“Has Theo stopped sulking, Willy?”

“Yes. He comes up to see me again.”

“I wonder what happened to Theo in India. Well, I suppose one can imagine!”

“I don’t know. I thought you might know, John. You are father confessor to all of us.”

“Don’t, Willy!”

“You are our picture of the just man.”

“That’s right, mock me.”

“Seriously—”

“Chuck it, Willy. How are the twins?”

“
Herrlich
. They have great souls, those little ones. And they have been vouchsafed no end of flying saucers. They are the only people who are not in a turmoil.”

“Dear me, are the rest of you in a turmoil? Are you in a turmoil? I’m sure Mary isn’t in a turmoil. She never is.”

Willy hesitated, pulled his lame leg back towards him with both hands, sat up and leaned forward. He looked at the carpet and said, “You said I seemed cheerful. So I ought to be. I have had a proposal of marriage.”

“Good heavens, who from?”

“Mary.”

Ducane was about to say, Splendid, I told her to do that, but stopped himself in time. If he was to have the impertinence to play at being God he must also have the discretion to conceal the fact. How pleased I am, he thought.

“How marvellous!”

“You disapprove—”

“Of course not! So you said yes?”

“I mean you disapprove of her having been so foolish as to want to marry me.”

“Of course not, Willy. On the contrary, I—But you said yes, I may wish you joy?”

“I didn’t say yes, I didn’t say no. I was speechless with gratitude. I still am.”

“Willy—light out for happiness. Yes?”

“Happiness. I don’t know if that can be a goal for me, John.”

“Then make it a matter of faith. Mary is—well, Mary is an ace, you know that. What’s more, she needs you.”

“Mary is an ace, as you beautifully put it. I know that. And I presume to love her. But I have a soul like an old cracked chamberpot. I could give no joy to a woman.”

“Rubbish. Let her remake you. Have the humility to let her.”

“Perhaps. I will pray about it. The gods have promised me an answer.”

“Oh Willy, you lucky fool—”

I envy him, thought Ducane. He loves innocently and he is loved innocently. It is simple for him, for him and for his gods. Whereas I have tied myself up in this cat’s cradle of treachery and falsehood. But I am so glad I prompted
Mary here, I am sure she would not have dared to speak if I had not encouraged her. May I have made the happiness of two good people. But Ducane’s heart was strangely heavy. He thought to himself with a sort of desperation, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow I shall see Biranne.

J
ESSICA BIRD
rang the bell of John Ducane’s house.

A small man with a delicate brown face and a crop of white hair opened the door. Jessica, who knew that Ducane was at the office, took this to be the manservant.

In a firm official voice she said, “I am from Payne and Stevens, the interior decorators. I have come to take the measurements for the curtains in Mr Ducane’s bedroom.”

The small man murmured something and opened the door a little farther. Jessica marched in. She had decided that she could no longer live with her uncertainty about whether or not Ducane had taken a new mistress. Or rather, she had no uncertainty, she was sure that there was another woman. She wanted, to make her anguish complete, the absolute proof of it.

“Will you show me Mr Ducane’s bedroom, please? I am afraid I don’t know the house.” She drew a steel tape measure from her pocket and exhibited it.

“Yes, certainly, yes—”

The small man led her up the stairs and into the room in the front of the house above the drawing-room. Jessica, who had never penetrated into her lover’s bedroom in the old days, had conjectured that this must be the room, but it was better to be sure.

“Will you want anything, steps or anything?”

“No, no, I’ll be all right, you can leave me to it now, thank you. I’ll just be about ten minutes or so. I’ve got to make some measurements in the bathroom too. Don’t let me keep you.”

The small man murmured again and went away, closing the bedroom door.

Jessica, who had composed her plan of action carefully beforehand, now felt so giddy with emotion that she had to sit down on a chair. She had not realised how powerfully Ducane’s bedroom would affect her. The silence, his trousers neatly folded upon the counterpane, his brushes and collar studs upon the dressing table, the bare masculine
plainness of a single man’s room, the bitter-sweet sense of familiarity and absence made her suddenly sick with longing. The bedroom, unlike the drawing-room below, might have been any man’s room, yet it was full of the ghost of Ducane which, distilled now into a purer male essence than any she had ever encountered, assaulted her fainting senses.

Jessica’s rolling eye lighted upon the bed and jealousy pulled her together like a mouthful of brandy. It was not a narrow bed. It was not exactly a double bed, but it was one of those rather broad single beds with plenty of room for two. She leapt up and began her search.

Jessica was of the opinion that it is virtually impossible for a woman to inhabit a room, even for a short while, without leaving traces. If a woman had been in Ducane’s bed some sign would certainly have been left behind, some token from the transcendent region of Ducane’s love life, some glittering fragment of that Jessica-excluding super-world upon which her imagination had by now so finely worked. What she would do with this talisman, whether torment herself or torment him, she had not yet thought. What she wanted was simply to have the tiny thing in her possession.

Very carefully Jessica folded back the coverlet of the bed and drew down the bed clothes. She put her face close to the pillow sniffing attentively. She had taken care to wear no perfume herself that day. Her pale streaky hair fell forward on to the pillow. How unfortunate that she suffered from hay fever. She interrogated her sense of smell. There was a faint cosmetic odour but it might have been shaving cream or even disinfectant. Inconclusive.

Leaving the bed she moved to the wastepaper basket. It contained a screw of Kleenex, a toothpaste carton, an empty cigarette packet, half a comb and a good deal of human hair. Jessica picked out the ball of hair and began straightening it out and sniffing it. It was all dark brown and looked like Ducane’s hair. After a moment’s hesitation she stuffed the hair into her pocket. She opened the wardrobe. The neat line of Ducane’s sombre suitings confronted her in the darkness like so many shrunken male presences. The wardrobe smelt of wood and man. It was like a little enchanted house or the ark of some unfamiliar faith. Jessica stood in awe before it. Then, frowning with determination and
courage, she began quickly to go through the pockets of the suits. Ducane’s pockets were full of entities, papers of all sorts, parking tickets, cloakroom tickets, more hair, coins, several combs and numerous sea-rounded pebbles. There were two letters, but one was from the telephone company and the other from a plumber.

Jessica left the wardrobe and transferred her attention to the chest of drawers. Here, although there was much to make her gasp and sigh—neckties remembered from happier days, cuff links which she herself had given him—there was nothing at all in the way of ‘evidence’. There were no contraceptives. There was nothing feminine. Jessica, now in a flurried rush, slid into the bathroom. There was an indeterminate smell of bath essence. A black silk dressing gown covered with red asterisks hanging behind the door had masculine handkerchiefs in its pockets and smelt of tobacco. The bathroom cupboard revealed no perfumes, no face creams. The bathroom wastepaper basket contained a detective novel.

Jessica ran back into the bedroom. There must be something to find, she thought, and I
must
find it. Certainty was so much better than doubt, and with certainty would come power, the power to hurt and astonish, the power to create again, however perversely, a bond of living emotion. Jessica began to look into corners, to search the floor. Some tiny thing, a bead, a button, a hairpin, must be hiding somewhere in the carpet. She lifted the skirts of the bed-cover and crawled underneath the bed. There as she lay full length, feverishly combing the carpet with her fingers, she became aware that the room had darkened. Then she saw two male feet and two lengths of trousered leg which had come close up beside the bed. Jessica crawled out.

“You know, what you told me just now can’t be
quite
true.” The speaker who uttered these words rather apologetically was the small white-haired man who had let her in.

Jessica was so relieved that it was not Ducane that she sat down on the bed for a moment and just stared. Then she said, “I was just checking the power points.”

“To begin with,” the man went on, “I have been looking them up in the telephone book and there is no such firm as Payne and Stevens, and secondly Mr Ducane has just lately
had new curtains fitted in this room. And thirdly why have you taken the bed to pieces. That will do to begin with.” The small man took a chair, placed it in front of the closed door, and sat down on it expectantly.

Jessica looked at Ducane’s bed, with the bedclothes pulled down and the pillows disarranged. She looked at the chest of drawers, with every drawer open and ties and shirts hanging over the edge. Whatever was she to say? Jessica was not afraid of being sent to prison, she was afraid of being trapped by Ducane, of being kept there by force until he returned. She thought, any moment now I shall burst into tears.

“You see,” the small man went on in a gentle slightly foreign voice, “I can’t just let it go, can I? I mean, you might be a burglar, mightn’t you? And I have to defend my friend’s belongings, with which I must say you seem to have been making rather free.”

Jessica found her voice. “You’re not the—butler, chauffeur?”

“No. It’s the butler chauffeur’s afternoon off. I’m someone else. But that doesn’t matter. I’m still waiting for you to explain yourself, my dear.”