The Nice and the Good (13 page)

Jessica thought, or had thought, that she was talented as an artist, but she could never decide what to do. From her education in art she had acquired no positive central bent or ability, nor even any knowledge of the history of painting, but rather a sort of craving for immediate and ephemeral ‘artistic activity’. This had by now become, in perhaps the only form in which she could know it, a spiritual hunger. She and her comrades had indeed observed certain rules of conduct which had something of the status of tribal taboos. But Jessica had never developed the faculty of colouring and structuring her surroundings into a moral habitation, the faculty which is sometimes called moral sense. She kept her world denuded out of a fear of convention. Her morality lacked coherent motives. Her contacts with her contemporaries, and she met no one except her contemporaries, and her very strict contemporaries at that, were so public and so free as to become finally without taste. She even became used to making love in the presence of third and fourth parties, not out of any perversity, but as a manifestation of her freedom. After all, accommodation was limited, and nobody marked, nobody minded.

Jessica had thought herself in love on a number of occasions but in fact her attention had been very much more concentrated upon not having a baby. Perpetual change and no hard feelings was the general rule, and one which had kept Jessica, who religiously obeyed it, both inexperienced and in a sense uncorrupted and innocent. There was a kind of honesty in her mode of life. Her integrity took the form of a contempt for the fixed, the permanent, the solid, in general ‘the old’, a contempt which, as she
grew older herself, became a sort of deep fear. So it was that some poor untutored craving in her for the Absolute, for that which after all is most fixed, most permanent, most solid and most old, had to express itself incognito. So Jessica sought to create and to love that which was perfect but momentary.

This was the zeal, this the fanaticism, which she attempted to communicate to the children whom she taught at school. She taught them to work with paper, which could be crumpled up at the end of the lesson, with plasticine, which could be squeezed back into shapeless lumps, with bricks and stones and coloured balls which could be jumbled together again; and if paint was ever spread upon a white surface it was to move like a river, like a mist, like the changing formations of the world of clouds. No one was ever allowed to
copy
anything; and a little boy who once wanted to take one of his paper constructions home to show his mother was severely reprimanded. “So it’s all
play
, Miss?” a child had said to Jessica at last in a puzzled tone. At that moment Jessica felt the glowing pride of the successful teacher.

Jessica’s refusal to compromise with ‘the fixed’, which was for her the analogue of, which perhaps indeed was, pureness of heart, and which had once made her feel so spiritually superior, had become, by the time she encountered John Ducane, something about which, although she was just as dogmatic, she was a good deal less confident. Her earliest conversations with Ducane had been arguments in which he had expressed surprise at her ignorance of great painters and she had expressed disapproval of what she regarded as the flaccid promiscuity of his taste. It appeared that he liked almost everything! He liked Giotto
and
Piero
and
Tintoretto
and
Titian
and
Rubens
and
Rembrandt
and
Velasquez
and
Tiepolo
and
Ingres
and
Renoir
and
Matisse
and
Bonnard
and
Picasso! Jessica was not far from thinking that a taste so catholic must be guilty of insincerity. When pressed by John she would cautiously admit to liking one or two individual pictures which she knew well. But really she only liked what she could immediately appropriate and use up in her own activity, and this, as the years went by, seemed to be becoming less and less.

Ducane had been the most serious event of her life. He
had made her entirely uncertain of herself while at the same time providing what seemed the only possible complete healing for that uncertainty. Jessica’s disguised longing for a place of absolute rest, the longing which had been running out through her feverishly active finger tips, found a magisterial and innocent satisfaction in John. The girl loved him without reservation. His particular stability, his alien solidness and slowness, his belongingness to the establishment, his
age
, above all his puritanism now seemed to her what she had been seeking for all her life. His puritanical shyness and reserve shook her with passion. She worshipped his seriousness about the act of love.

In fact John and Jessica never really managed to understand each other at all, and this was chiefly the fault of John. If he had been a wiser man, or a man with a kind of nerve which he was too fastidious to possess, he would have taken young Jessica firmly in hand and treated her as if she were his pupil or his disciple. Really Jessica longed for John to instruct her. Of course she did not know what kind of instruction she craved; but it was in the nature of her love to think of him as wise and full and of herself as foolish and empty. And John apprehended this hunger in her too, but he instinctively feared it and did not want to find himself playing the role of a teacher. Scrupulously, he shrank from ‘influencing’ his young and now so docile mistress. As soon as he sensed his great power he shut his eyes to it, and herein was guilty of an insincerity more grave than that of the aesthetic promiscuity attributed to him by Jessica. This denial of his power was a mistake. John ought to have been bold enough to instruct Jessica. This would have created a more intelligible converse between them and would also have forced Ducane to reveal himself to the girl. As it was John withdrew in order not to cramp Jessica, in order to make a space into which she should expand; but she was unable to expand and worshipped across the space without understanding him. While she was almost completely concealed from him by the word ‘artist’, which he associated with a conventional idea to which he expected Jessica to conform, not realising that she was a new and completely different species of animal altogether.

Jessica was thinking, I can’t bear this pain, he must take
this pain away from me. It must be all a nightmare, just a bad dream, it can’t be true. When we stopped being lovers I thought it meant that I was to be in his life forever, I accepted it, I went through it because I loved him so much, because I wanted to be what he wished. And he let me go on loving him and he
must
have been glad that I loved him. He can’t go away from me now, it’s impossible, it’s a fantastic mistake.

The summer afternoon London sunshine made the room hot and hazily bright and desolate and hid John’s figure behind a sheet of dusty light, making it insubstantial as if it was a puppet out there that spoke his words while the real John had merged into her tormented body.

Ducane had been silent for some time, looking out of the window.

“Promise you’ll come again,” said Jessica. “
Promise
it or I shall die.”

Ducane turned, bowing his head under the light. “It’s no good,” he said in a low toneless voice. “It’s better for me to go away now. I’ll write to you.”

“You mean you won’t come again?”

“It makes no sense, Jessica.”

“Are you saying that you’re leaving me?”

“I’ll write to you—”

“Are you saying that you are going to go now and not come back?”

“Oh God. Yes, I’m saying that.”

Jessica began to scream.

She was lying on her back on the bed and John Ducane was lying beside her, his face buried in her shoulder and his dry cool hair touching her cheek. Jessica’s two hands, questing across the dark stuff of his jacket, met each other and clasped, holding him in a tight compact embrace. As her hands interlocked across his back she sighed deeply, gazing up at the ceiling which the slanting golden sunlight of the evening had made shadowy and dappled and deep, and the gold filled her eyes which seemed to grow larger and larger like great lakes brim full of peace. For the terrible pain had gone, utterly gone, and her body and her soul were limp with the bliss of its departing.

T
HERE
was a loud crash upstairs, followed by a prolonged wailing sound.

Mary rather guiltily tossed Henrietta’s copy of
The Flying Saucer Review
, which she had been perusing, back on to the hall table, and ran up the stairs two at a time.

The scene, in Uncle Theo’s room, was much as she had expected. Theo was sitting up in bed looking rather sheepish, holding Mingo in his arms. Casie was crying, and trying to extract a handkerchief from her knickers. Theo’s tea tray lay upon the floor with a mess, partly on it and partly round about it, of broken crockery, scattered bread and butter, and shattered cake. The carpet had not suffered, since the floor of Theo’s room was always thickly covered with old newspapers and Theo’s underwear, and into this fungoid litter the spilt tea had already been absorbed.

“Oh Casie, do stop it,” said Mary. “Go downstairs and put the kettle on again. I’ll clear this up. Off you go.”

Casie went away still wailing.

“What happened?” said Mary.

“She said she was a useless broken-down old bitch, and I agreed with her, and then she threw the tea tray on to the floor.”

“Theo, you just mustn’t bait Casie like that, you’re always doing it, it’s so unkind.”

Mingo had jumped down and was investigating the wreckage on the floor. The woolly fur which stuck out on either side of his mouth, and which he was now fluttering over the broken china, resembled moustaches. His wet pink nose quivered as he shot out a delicate pink lip and very daintily picked up a thin slice of bread and butter.

“Don’t let Mingo get at the cake, please,” said Theo. “It looks rather a good cake and I’m certainly proposing to eat it. Would you mind putting it on to this?” He held out a sheet of newspaper.

Mary picked up the larger fragments of the cake and put them on to the newspaper. Then, with her nose wrinkling
rather like Mingo’s, she began to collect the debris on to the tray. Uncle Theo’s room, which he rarely permitted anyone to clean, smelled superficially of medicines and disinfectants, and more fundamentally of old human sweat. This rancid odour was alleged by the twins to be the basis of the affinity between Uncle Theo and Mingo, and Mary had come vaguely to believe this, although she regarded the aroma more as a spiritual emanation from the dog-man pair than as a mere physical cause.

The dog was on the bed again now, clasped about the waist by Theo, his four legs sticking out helplessly, his woolly face beaming, his tail, on which he was sitting, vibrating with frustrated wags. Theo was beaming too, his face plumped out with a kind of glow which was too pervasive and ubiquitous to be called a smile. Looking at them sternly, it occurred to Mary that Mingo had come to resemble Theo, or perhaps it was the other way about.

Uncle Theo puzzled Mary. She was also rather puzzled by the complete lack of curiosity about him evinced by other members of the household. When informed, as if this were part of his name or title, that Theo had left India under a cloud, Mary had, as it seemed to her naturally, asked what cloud. No one seemed to know. At first Mary imagined that her question had been thought improper. Later she decided that really no one was much interested. And the odd thing was that this lack of interest seemed to be caused in some positive way by Theo himself, as if he sent out rays which paralysed other people’s concern about him. It was like a faculty of becoming invisible; and indeed Uncle Theo did often seem to have become almost imperceptible in a literal sense, as when someone said, “There was nobody there. Oh well, yes, Theo was there.”

Why did Uncle Theo paralyse other people’s concern about him in that way? On this problem Mary held two contradictory theories between which she vacillated. There was a shallow reassuring theory to the effect that Uncle Theo had so much animal placidity and so few thoughts that he was just not very noteworthy, in the same way in which a spider in the corner might not be noteworthy. It was true that he behaved like an ill person, at any rate he spent an inordinate amount of time in bed, always taking
breakfast and tea there, sometimes lunch and dinner as well. He talked a lot about familiars whom he called his ‘viruses’. But no one had ever believed that Theo had any definite, indeed any real, illness. And although he was sometimes sharp-tongued and often morose his glooms had a positive slightly buffoonish quality which forbade their being taken too seriously. Theo also had a considerable gift for being physically relaxed. He seemed a totally non-electric, nonmagnetic person. Perhaps it was this air of blank bovine ease which made his neighbours rightly so incurious. There was nothing to know.

Yet there were times when Mary favoured another and more unnerving theory according to which Uncle Theo’s invisibility was something more like an achievement, or perhaps a curse. At these times Mary apprehended his laziness and his relaxation not exactly as despair but as something on the other side of despair of which she did not know the name. It was as if, she thought, someone had had all his bones broken and yet were still moving about like a sort of limp doll. It was not that she caught, through the mask of Uncle Theo’s behaviour, any momentary flash or flicker from some other region of torment. There was no mask. It was simply that the ensemble of Uncle Theo’s particular pointlessness could take for her the jump into a new
gestalt
which showed him to her as a man who had been through the inferno and had by the experience been deprived of his will.

Mary looked at Uncle Theo now as he was, by a familiar technique, exciting Mingo by sniffing over his fur with the audible eagerness of a terrier after a rat. Unlike his younger brother, to whom his resemblance was minimal, Theo was a gaunt man and rather tall. He was partly bald, with longish strings of greasy grey hair curling down his neck. He had a large brow but the features of his face were cramped and concentrated well to the front, as if the hasty hand of his creator had absently drawn them all toward the point of his rather long nose. So although he had a large head his face looked small and poky and canine. Mary could never determine, even on fairly close inspection, the colour of his eyes. Tidying his room once she had found an old passport, and opening it to see what colour Theo himself
considered his eyes to be, had found the description: ‘Mud’.