The Nice and the Good (8 page)

“Well, you know what’s the matter. They’re growing up.”

“I know. They do develop early these days. I thought somehow, having been together so much like brother and sister, they’d be sort of inoculated.”

“Nothing inoculates them against
that
,” said Ducane. And he realised as he spoke that he did not at all like the idea of Barbara being involved in
that
. He would have liked her never to grow up.

“But this poor chap,” said Kate, reverting to what they had been discussing earlier. “Why did he do it?”

Ducane had not spoken to Kate about the enquiry. Although he had received the news of his task coolly enough from Octavian he was feeling far from happy about it. It was the sort of thing which could turn into an awful mess. It might be very difficult to find out the truth quickly, and impossible to demonstrate that there was no security interest and no case for a more elaborate investigation. However, it was not just the prospect of failing and being discredited which daunted Ducane. He did not like the idea of investigating another man’s private life in this way. Moreover the personality of Radeechy, about whom he had
reflected considerably since his arrival in Dorset, now seemed to him both puzzling and sinister. He was sure that the spiritualism, or whatever it was, was connected with the suicide; and he felt instinctively that here, once he had started to pry, he would unearth something very unpleasant indeed.

“I don’t know why he did it,” said Ducane. “He lost his wife lately. That might have been it.”

By this time they had crossed the level lawn behind the house with its two tall feathery acacia trees, climbed over a low palisade of string and sticks which had something to do with the twins, and were climbing a path, made with great labour the previous year by Pierce and Barbara out of pebbles from the beach, between twin hedges of plump veronica bushes. Ducane’s hand passed caressingly over the compact curves of the bushes. At this moment his mind was divided into several compartments or levels. At one level, perhaps the highest, he was thinking about Willy Kost, whom he was so shortly to meet and whom he had not seen now for some time, since on Ducane’s last two weekends Willy had declared by telephone that he wanted no visitors. At another level Ducane was thinking in an upset nervous way about Radeechy and wondering what George Droysen would find out in Fleet Street. At yet another level, or in another compartment, he was miserably recalling his weakness at the end of the scene with Jessica and miserably wondering what on earth he was going to do about her next week.

However, he did not, today, feel too bad about Jessica. Ducane did not usually believe in waiting for the gods to help him out of his follies with miracles, but just today his worry about Jessica had become a little cloudy, softened by a steamy cloud of vague optimism. Somehow or other it could still turn out all right, he felt. This was possibly because, in an adjoining compartment, he was experiencing a pure and intense joy at the presence beside him of Kate, at the proximity of their two bodies, which touched occasionally with a pleasant, clumsy, friendly jostling as they walked along, and at the knowledge, with him as a physical aura rather than a thought, that he would kiss Kate when they reached the beech wood.

There was also elsewhere, at what was by no means the lowest level, though it was certainly the least articulate, a consciousness of his surroundings, a participation, an extension of himself into nature, into the compact curvy veronica bushes, into the spherical huge-leaved catalpa tree at the end of the garden, into the rosy sun-warmed bricks of the wall, through an archway in which they were now passing. These bricks were so old and worn and pitted, so edgeless and cornerless, that they looked like a natural conglomeration of red stones or playthings of the sea. Everything in Dorset is round, thought Ducane. The little hills are round, these bricks are round, the yew trees that grow in the hedgerows are round, the veronica bushes, the catalpa tree, the crowns of the acacia, the pebbles on the beach, the clump of small bamboos beside the arch. He thought, everything in Dorset is
just the right size
. This thought gave him immense satisfaction and sent out through the other layers and compartments of his mind a stream of warm and soothing particles. Thus he walked on with Kate at his side, conveying along with him his jumbled cloud of thoughts whose self-protective and self-adjusting chemistry is known as mental health.

They were walking now in a narrow lane with high sloping banks up which white flowering nettles and willow herb crawled out of a matrix of tall yellow moss, so dry and dusty-looking in the hot sun that it scarcely seemed like vegetation. There was an old thick powdery smell, perhaps the smell of the moss. A cuckoo called nearby in the wood above, clear, cool, precise, hollow, mad. Kate took hold of Ducane’s hand.

“I think I won’t come in with you to Willy’s,” said Kate. “He’s been rather down lately and I’m sure it’s better if you see him alone. I don’t think Willy will ever kill himself, do you, John?”

Willy Kost was given to announcing from time to time that his life was an unbearable burden and he proposed shortly to terminate it.

“I don’t know,” said Ducane.

He felt that he had not done enough for Willy. Most people who knew Willy felt this. But he was not an easy person to help. Ducane had first met Willy, who was a classical scholar living on a pension from the German
government and working on an edition of Propertius, at a meeting in London at which Ducane was reading a rather obscure little paper on the concept of
specificatio
in Roman law. He had been responsible for removing Willy from a bed-sitter in Fulham and installing him at Trescombe Cottage. He had often wondered since whether this was not a mistake. He had conceived of providing his friend with the protection of a household. But in fact Willy was able to be as solitary as he pleased.

“I don’t think that if he was really seriously contemplating suicide he would let the children come to him the way he does,” said Kate. While adult visitors were often barred, the children came and went freely at the cottage.

“Yes, I think that’s true. I wonder, when he won’t let any of us see him, if he’s really working?”

“Or just brooding and remembering. It’s awful to think of.”

“I’ve never felt any inclination to commit suicide, have you, Kate?”

“Good heavens no! But then for me life’s always been such fun.”

“It’s hard for people like us with ordinary healthy minds,” said Ducane, “to imagine what it would be like for one’s whole mode of consciousness to be painful, to be hell.”

“I know. All those things he must remember and dream about.”

Willy Kost had spent the war in Dachau.

“I wish Theo would try to see more of him,” said Ducane.

“Theo! He’s a broken reed if ever there was one. He’s just a bundle of nerves himself.
You
should see more of Willy. You can talk directly to people and tell them what to do. Most of us are afraid to.”

“Sounds awful!” said Ducane and laughed.

“Seriously. I’m sure it would do Willy good if he were just forced to tell somebody what it was like in that camp. I think he’s never uttered a word about it to anyone.”

“I doubt if you are right. I can even imagine how difficult that might be,” said Ducane. But the same idea had come to him before.

“One must be reconciled to the past,” said Kate.

“When one’s suffered injustice and affliction on the scale
on which Willy’s suffered it,” said Ducane, “it may just not be possible.”

“Not possible to forgive?”

“Certainly not possible to forgive. Perhaps not possible to find any way of—thinking about it at all.”

Ducane’s imagination had often wrestled in vain with the question of what it must be like to be Willy Kost.

“I used to think he’d somehow break down with Mary,” said Kate. “She really knows him best, apart from you I mean. But she says he hasn’t talked to her at all about—that.”

Ducane was thinking, we’ve nearly reached the wood, we’ve nearly reached the wood. The first shadows fell across them, the cuckoo uttered from farther off his crazed lascivious cry.

“Let’s sit down here for a minute,” said Kate.

There was a clean grey shaft of fallen tree from which a skirt of dry curled golden-brown beech leaves descended on either side. They sat down upon it, their feet rustling the dry leaves, and turned to face each other.

Kate took Ducane by the shoulders, studying him intently. Ducane looked into the intense streaky smudgy dark blue of her eyes. They both sighed. Then Kate kissed him with a slow and lingering motion. Ducane closed his eyes, turning his head now from the intensity of the kiss, and clutched her very closely against him, feeling the wiry imprint of her springy hair upon his cheek. They remained motionless for some time.

“Oh God, you do make me happy,” said Kate.

“You make me happy too.” He set her away from him again, smiling at her, feeling relaxed and free now, desiring her but not with anguish, seeing behind her the brown carpeted emptiness of the wood, while the sun glittered above them in shoals of semi-transparent leaves.

“You look more like the Duke of Wellington than ever. I love that little crest of grey hair that’s coming right in the front. It is all right, isn’t it, John?”

“Yes,” he said gravely. “Yes. I have thought about it a lot and I do think it is all right.”

“Octavian—well, you know what Octavian feels. You understand everything.”

“Octavian’s a very happy man.”

“Yes, Octavian
is
a happy man. And that
is
relevant, you know.”

“I know. Dear Kate, I’m a lonely person. And you’re a generous woman. And we’re both very rational. All’s well here.”

“I knew it was, John, only I just wanted you to say it, like that. I’m so glad. You’re sure it won’t be somehow painful for you, sad, you know—?”

“There will be some pain,” he said, “but pain that I can deal with. And so much happiness too.”

“Yes. One doesn’t want to be just painless and content, does one? You and I can
be
so much to each other. Loving people matters, doesn’t it? Really nothing else matters except that.”

“Come in,” said Willy Kost.

Ducane entered the cottage.

Willy was sitting stretched out in a low chair beside the hearth, his heels dug into a spilling of grey wood ash. The gramophone behind him was playing the slow movement of something or other. It seemed to Ducane that Willy’s gramophone was always playing slow movements. The noise immediately irritated Ducane, who was unmusical to the point of positively disliking the concourse of sweet sounds. His mood as he approached the cottage had been elevated and intense. The harmony generated by his scene with Kate, the perfect understanding so quickly reached between them, had enabled him to switch his thought with a peculiar singleness of attention to the problem of Willy. The music was now like an alien presence.

Willy, who knew how Ducane felt about music, got up and lifted the playing arm off the record and turned the machine off.

“Sorry, Willy.”

“S’all right,” said Willy. “Sit down. Have something. Have some tea or something.”

Willy limped into his little kitchen where Ducane heard the hiss and then the purr of the oil stove. The single main room of the cottage was filled with Willy’s books, some on shelves, some still in boxes. Kate, who could not conceive
of life without a large personal territory of significantly deployed objects, constantly complained that Willy had never unpacked. She had forgiven him his shudder when she once suggested that she should unpack for him.

The big table was covered with texts and notebooks. Here at least was an area of significance. Ducane touched the open pages, pretending to look at them. He felt a slight embarrassment as he often did with Willy.

“How goes it, Willy?”

“How goes what?”

“Well, life, work.”

Willy came back into the room and leaned on the back of a chair, observing his guest with amused detachment. Willy was a small man, delicate in feature, with a long thin curvy mouth which seemed always a little moist and trembling. He had a great deal of longish white hair and a uniformly brown rather oily and glistening face and sardonic narrow brown eyes. A velvety brown mole on one cheek gave him a curious air of prettiness.

“‘Day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night showeth knowledge’.”

Ducane smiled encouragingly. “Good!”

“Is it good? Excuse me while I make the tea.”

He returned with the tea tray. Ducane accepted his cup and began to perambulate the room. Willy with a large glass of milk resumed his chair.

“I envy you
this
,” said Ducane. He indicated the table.

“No, you don’t.”

It was true that he did not. There was always a period of time, more or less brief, when they met after an interval, when Ducane fumbled, flattered. He was patronising Willy now, and they both knew it. The barrier created between them by this spontaneous, this as it seemed automatic, flattery and patronage could be broken easily by Willy’s directness if Willy had the sheer energy to break it. Sometimes he had. Sometimes he had not, and would sit by listlessly while Ducane struggled with their meeting. Ducane in fact could overcome this automatic falseness in himself unaided, but it took a little time and a very conscious measure of seriousness and attention. Willy was always difficult.

“I envy something,” said Ducane. “Perhaps I just wish I had been a poet.”

“I doubt if you even wish that,” said Willy. He lay back and closed his eyes. It looked as if it was one of his listless days.

“To live with poetry is next best,” said Ducane. “My daily bread is quite other.” He read out at random a couplet from the open page.

“
Quare, dum licet, inter nos laetemur amantes: non satis est ullo tempore longus amor
.”

A physical vision of Kate came to him out of the words of Propertius, especially out of that final
amor
, so much stronger than the lilting Italian
amore
. He saw the furry softness of her shoulders as he had often seen them in the evening. He had never caressed her bare shoulders.
Amor
.