'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. U '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. torcea to tell someway what it was nice in camp .1 tmnx 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 empti49 ness 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.'
