The Nice and the Good

either. He also felt that he ought not to talk to her, though he was not too sure why. He was aware that his refusal to explain now, and his inability to explain at the time, probably made the thing look graver and weightier than it was.
Yet was it not grave and weighty enough? He had made it seem a small matter by deliberately chilling his own feelings and dimming his own thoughts while permitting Jessica to continue in the fantasy world of her wishes. It was easy to see now that it had been wrong. In receiving the force of Jessica's sense of possession Kate was scarcely receiving a wrong picture.
Jessica's condition was a fact. And if Kate retained the impression that he and Jessica were still lovers, or practically lovers, this was not a completely false impression.
When McGrath had rung Ducane up at the office, Ducane had of course told him to go to the devil. Their conversation had lasted about forty seconds. Ducane had meanwhile been trying desperately to get in touch with Jessica. He had telephoned her ten times, and sent several notes and a telegram asking her to ring him. He had called three times at the flat and got no answer. This from Jessica who, as he knew with a special new pain now, had been used to sit at home continually in the hope that he would write or ring. The feelings with which he turned away from her door strangely resembled a renewal of being in love. He had had, after the third telephone call, no doubt that she had been the first recipient of McGrath's malice; and it had occurred to him to wonder whether she might not have killed herself. An image of Jessica in her shift, pale and elongated, stretched out upon the bed, one stiffening arm trailing to the ground, accompanied him from the locked door and reappeared in his dreams. However, he did not on reflection really think this likely. There had always been a grain of petulance in Jessica's love. A saving egoism would make her detest him now. It was a very sad thought.
His thoughts of Jessica, though violent, were all as it were in monochrome. His imagination had to fight to picture her clearly. It was as if she had become a disembodied ailment which attacked his whole substance. Very different were Ducane's thoughts about Judy McGrath. He remembered the scene in his bedroom with hallucinatory vividness, and seemed to remember it all the time, as if it floated constantly rather high up in his field of vision like the dazzling lozenge which conveys the presence of the Trinity to the senses of some bewildered saint. With a large part of himself he wished that he had made love to Judy. It would have been an honest action, something within him judged; although something else in him knew that this bizarre opinion must be wrong. When one falls into falsehood all one's judgements are dislocated. It was only given this, and given that, and given the other, all of them things which ought not to be the case, that it could seem plausible to judge that making love to Judy would have been an honest action; There is a logic of evil, and Ducane felt himself enmeshed in it. But the beautiful stretched-out body of Judy, its apricot colour, its glossy texture, its weight, continued to haunt him with a tormenting precision and a dreadfully locaz lined painfulness.
And this is the moment, Ducane thought to himself, in this sort of degrading muddle, in this demented state of mind, when I am called upon to be another man's judge. He had been thinking constantly about Biranne too, or rather a ghostly Biranne travelled with him, transparent and crowding him close. The wraith did not accuse him, but hovered before him, a little to the right, a little to the left, becoming at times a sort of alter ego. Ducane did not see how he could let Biranne off; The idea of ruining him, of wrecking his career, of involving him in disgrace and despair, was so dreadful that Ducane kept, with an almost physical movement, putting it away from him.
But there was no alternative and Ducane knew that, in a little while though not yet, he must make himself into that cold judicial machine which was the only relevant and important thing. Radeechy's confession could not be suppressed. It was the completely clear and satisfactory solution to the mystery which Ducane had been briefed to solve. In any case, and quite apart from the inquiry, a murder ought not to be concealed, and it was one's plain duty not to conceal it. Since these conside rations were conclusive, Ducane could be more coolly aware of the danger to himself which would be involved in any concealment. Ducane did not care for guilty secrets, and he did not want to share one with Biranne, a man whom he neither liked nor trusted. And there was also the hovering presence of McGrath, who might know more than Biranne imagined. Ducane knew that if it emerged later that he had suppressed that very important document he would be ruined himself.
'Are you all right, John?'
They had walked up the lane in silence. The variety of witlow herb which is known as 'codlins and cream' filled the narrow closed-in lane with its sickly smell. A wren with up lifted tail moved in the brown darkness of the hedge, accompanying them up the hill.
'I'm fine,' said Ducane in a slightly wild voice. 'It's just that I have bad dreams.'
'Do you mean dreams at night, or thoughts?'
'Both.' Ducane had dreamed last night that he had killed sonle woman, whose identity he could not discover, and was attempting to hide the body under a heap of dead pigeons when he was detected by a terrifying intruder. The intruder was Biranne.
'Tell me about them,' said Mary.
Why do I always have to be helping people, thought Ducane, and getting no help myself? I wish someone could help me. I wish Mary could. He said, 'It's all someone else's secret.'
'Sit down here a minute.' They had reached the wood. Mary sat down on the fallen tree trunk and Ducane sat beside her. He began hacking away with his foot at some parchment-coloured fungus which was growing in wavy layers underneath the curve of the tree. The delicate brown undersides of the fungus, finely pleated as a girl's dress lay fragmented upon the dry beach leaves. Along the bank beside them a pair of bullfinches foraged ponderously in the small jungle of cow parsley and angelica.
'Have you quarrelled with Kate?' asked Mary. She did not look at him. She had put the basket on the ground and regarded it, rocking it slightly with a brown sandalled foot.
She is observant, he thought. Well, it must be fairly obvious.
'Yes. But that's not really – not all.'
'Kate will soon come round, you know she will, she'll mend things. She always does. She loves you very much. What's the other thing, the rest?'
'I have to make a decision about somebody.'
'A girl?'
Her question slightly surprised him. 'No, a man. It's a rather important decision which, affects this person's whole life, and I feel particularly rotten about having to make it as I'm feeling at the moment so – jumbled and immoral.'
'Jumbled and immoral.' Mary repeated this curious phrase as if she knew exactly what it meant. 'But you know how to make the decision, I mean you know the machinery of the decision?'
'Yes. I know how to make the decision.'
'Then shouldn't you just think about the decision and not about yourself? Let the machinery work and keep it clear of the jumble?'
'You are perfectly right,' he said. He felt extraordinarily calmed by Mary's presence. Ina curious way he was pleased that she had not disputed his self-accusation but had simply given him the correct reply. She assured him somehow of the existence of a permanent moral background. He thought, she is under the same orders as myself. He found that he had picked up the hem of Mary's dress and was moving it between his fingers. She was wearing a mauve dress of crepe-like wrinkled stuff with a full skirt. As he felt the material he thought suddenly of Kate's red striped dress and of Judy's dress with the blue and green flowers. Girls and their dresses.
He said quickly, letting go of the hem, 'Mary, I hope you won't mind my saying how very glad I am about you and Willy., 'Nothing's – fixed, you know.'
'Yes, I know. But I'm so glad. Give my love to Willy. I won't delay you now and I think I won't come any further.'
'All right. You will talk to Paula, won't you, and to Pierce?'
'Yes. I'll do it straightaway. Whichever of them I meet first!'
They stood up. Mary turned her lean sallow head towards him, brushing back her hair. Her eyes were vague in the hot dappled half light. They stood a moment awkwardly, and then with gestures of salutation parted in silence.