principle of which he had not grasped. They were not intended for contemplation and were soon destroyed.
Jessica taught painting and English at a primary school. She was twenty-eight and looked eighteen. Ducane, round-blueeyed, hook nosed, patchily grey, was forty-three and looked forty-three. They had met at a party. Falling in love surprised them both. Jessica, pale, thin, mini-skirted, with long brownish gold hair tangling over her shoulders or pony-tailed with in-twisted ribbons, presented to Ducane an almost unintelligible thing and certainly not his kind of thing. She seemed to him vastly talented and almost totally non-intellectual, an amalgam he had never encountered before. She belonged to a race of the young whose foreignness he felt and had never dreamt of penetrating. They had made each other puzzled and happy for a while. Ducane made her presents of books she did not read, jewellery she could not wear, and small expensive objets d'art which, placed among her tribal trinkets, took on a truly surrealist air of estrangement. He tried vainly to persuade her to work in permanent materials. She saw him as corrupted, fascinating, infinitely old.
Though Ducane did not fully realize it, his nervous uncertain sensuality needed some sophisticated intellectual encouragement, a certain kind of play, which Jessica was unable to provide. His profound puritanism could not in any case brook a long affair. He had not the temperament to be anybody's lover. He knew this. His adventures had been infrequent and fairly short. He felt a rational guilt too at keeping this young attractive girl for himself when he did not intend to marry her. Ducane, who liked his life to be simple, did not care for concealments and feelings of guilt. In time, the excitements of discovery diminished, he began to find her curious aesthetic more exasperating than charming, and was able to see her less as a rare and exotic animal and more as an eccentric English girl, not after all so young, and well on the way to becoming nothing more mysterious than an eccentric English middle-aged woman. He had then, ashamed of himself for not having had it earlier, the strength to end an affair which he months ago, that he ought to have sett her. tie auowea her tears to move him then and agreed that though no longer lovers they should remain friends, meeting almost as often as before. He was the readier to agree since he was still half in love with her.
There was perhaps in his passion more cunning than he knew, since when he had released himself from his primary guilt he found her freshly charming, contemplated and touched her with an unmarred delight, and half persuaded himself that he had acquired a child, a friend. He became gradually and sadly aware that she did not share his newfound liberty. He had not set her free. She was still in love with him and indeed still behaved as if she were his mistress. Her time consisted of seeing him, waiting, and seeing him again, of presence, absence, presence. She watched him anxiously, muting her love, instinctively afraid of making him feel trapped or guilty. She touched him very carefully with superficial lingering touches as if to extract some essence, some strong salve, to keep her through those empty absence times. The world still came to her only through him. He became aware of a wrought-up intensity of suffering which she could not forbear occasionally to let him glimpse. He began to dread his visits to her for fear of these death's head glimpses. They both became frightened, irritable, quarrelsome. Ducane at last decided that there was only one remedy, the brutal one of a complete parting. He had thought this into clarity. But since he had been talking to her, trying to explain, they were back again in the familiar muddled atmosphere of pity and passion.
'What have I done?» 'You haven't done anything.' 'Then why can't things go on, why do you suddenly say this now?' 'I've been thinking. It's a totally wrong situation.' 'There's nothing wrong. I just love you.' 'That's the trouble.' 'There's little enough love in the world. Why do you want to kill mine?' 'It's not so simple, Jessica. I can't just accept your love.' 'I don't see why not.' 'It isn't fair to you. I can't keep you cornered? T 'Suppose I want to be cornered.' 'What you want isn't the point. Be tough enough to see that.' 'You think you're acting in my best interests?' 'I know I am.' 'You've got tired of me, why not say so? T 'Jessica, you know that I love you. I just can't go on making you suffer like this.' 'I'll suffer less in time. Why should one live without suffering anyway?' 'It's bad for us both. I must take some responsibility – ' 'Damn your responsibility. There's someone else. You've taken a new mistress.' 'I haven't taken a new mistress.' 'You promised faithfully that you'd tell me if you ever did.' 'I keep my promises. I haven't.' 'Then why can't things go on as before? I don't ask much of you.' 'That's just it!' 'Anyway, John, I'm just not going to let you go away. I honestly… don't… think… I could stand it.' 'Oh God,' said Ducane. 'You're killing me,' she said, 'for something that's just –abstract.' 'Oh God,' he said, and got up, turning his back on her. He was afraid that the girl, who was kneeling on the floor in front of him, would throw herself forward and clasp his knees. The violence of his words, of her surprise, had kept them till now facing each other rigidly. Ducane said to himself, human frailty, wickedness in me, has made this situation where I automatically have to behave like a brute. She is right to say why kill love, there is never enough. Yet I have to kill this love. Oh God, why is it so like a murder. If I could only take all the suffering on to myself. But that is one of the punishments of wickedness, perhaps the last and worst one, that even if one wills it one cannot do it. She said behind him, her voice breaking, 'Well, I think there must be some special reason. Something's happened to you – ' The trouble was that this was true, and Ducane was weakened by a sense of the impurity of his motives. He knew the act was right, and perhaps he could have done it as a naked simple act, but the shadows of his own interests confused him. He wanted to set Jessica free, but he wanted even more to be free himself. For what had happened to John Ducane was Kate Gray. Ducane had known Kate for a long time; only lately with that easy shifting of consciousness in relation to the utterly familiar which is one of the privileges of growing older, he had found himself somewhat in love with her and had apprehended her as somewhat in love with him. The discovery brought him no dismay. Kate was very married. He was certain that there was no thought in her lovely head which she did not impart in their long nightly conversations, to her husband. He had no doubt that the married pair had discussed him. He would not have been mocked, but he might have been laughed at. He could hear Kate saying, 'John's a bit sweet on me, you know!' Whatever had so beautifully happened was something to which Octavian was privy. There was, in the situation, no danger. There was no question of a love affair. Ducane could tell Jessica truthfully that he had no mistress and no prospect of one. In fact, following some cautious instinct, Ducane had never mentioned Kate to Jessica, nor Jessica to Kate. He knew that Kate, in her new awareness of him, took him to be fancy free, and that this was an important belief. The irony of it was that he was fancy free. Only now that his feelings for Kate had become more urgent he felt the imperative need to rid himself of this last vestige of an entanglement. What John envisaged with Kate, and envisaged fairly clearly, was something which was new in his life, and in his vision of it there was a kind of resignation, an acceptance of himself as no longer young and no longer likely to marry. He needed a resting point, he needed a home, he needed, even, a family. He knew, without her having said it, that Kate understood this perfectly. She had told him, he had told her, in half passionate, often wholly passionate kisses which they now exchanged quite easily and spontaneously, smiling into each other's eyes, whenever they happened to be alone together. He knew that for Kate there was nothing but joy in the prospect of so caging him. For himself, the relationship would at times be painful, and had already been so. But he could embrace these exact, 
