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 beep 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. 'Do 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? T '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 coexist 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 stepfather 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 UCU tiLAtl A. ilui11UC1 01 UliiCiciii UuSS. SLic htU Llicu O.ti a ilutiiber 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. 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 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
