The Nice and the Good

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 realizing 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 on 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.

Ten

There 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. ratuer a guuu 1:a1Ce allu 1111 l:el L41111y P1UPUS111g was CAL IL.

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 contradic89 tory theories between which she vacillated. There was a shallow reassuring theory to the effect that