The Nice and the Good

smooth, like a cold line drawn upon the dark. Then he put his fingers to his lips. The fingers tasted salt. But they would taste salt any. way. He licked his fingers, warming them to a small agony.
Then he drew his cold dark line again and tasted again. Salt.
Or was he perhaps mistaken? Or were his fingers too soaked in the sea to lose their salty taste? He said to Pierce, 'I can't tell either.' He thought, it is better not to know.
'Put the jersey on now, please.'
'Listen, Pierce. Our chances of survival here, if we aren't drowned, depend on two things, your jersey and Mingo. It's just as well Mingo followed you in. He's a godsend. Where is he? Feel how warm he is. I suggest, if we can, that we both get inside your jersey and put Mingo between us. I'm afraid the rope isn't going to be much good to us now, but we may as well wrap it round, that's right. Now can you pull the jersey over my head and then come up inside it yourself? Mind you don't go over the edge. How much space is there?»
'There's about four or five feet, but the roof slopes. Lift your arm, can you. Shift over this way. Now over your head.'
Ducane felt the damp wool dragging on his shivering arm and then descending over his face. He nuzzled through it. He lay quiet as Pierce climbed up his body, driving his head up through the sweater. The neckline gave at the seams and Pierce's head was thrust against his own, bone to bone, and Pierce was fighting his arm into the other sleeve of the sweater.
'Pull it down as far as you can, John. I'll roll over a bit.
Damn, Mingo's the wrong way round. We don't want to stifle him between us. Could you pull him up towards me, just pull him by the tail.'
Unprotesting silent Mingo, warm Mingo, was at last adjusted with his bulky body between them, his head emerging at the bottom of the sweater. After a moment or two Ducane could feel the sparkling painful particles of warmth beginning to stream into him. A little later he felt something else, which was Mingo licking his thigh.
'Comfortable?'
'All right. You can't move any farther back?'
'No.'
The water was boiling at the bottom of the shaft, rushing up it and then retiring with a noise like a cork being withdrawn from a bottle. Ducane thought, at any rate we shall know pretty soon, one way or the other. He was lying on his right side, with Pierce's head propped against his, the hard cheekbone pressing into his cheek. They lay like two broken puppets, lolling head to head. Ducane felt a faint shuddering and a wet warmth touch his cheek. Pierce was crying. He put a heavy limp arm over the boy and made the motion of drawing him closer.
I wonder if this is the end, thought Ducane, and if so what it will all have amounted to. How tawdry and small it has all been. He saw himself now as a little rat, a busy little scurrying rat seeking out its own little advantages and comforts. To live easily, to have cosy familiar pleasures, to be well thought of. He felt his body stiffening and he nestled closer to Mingo's invincible warmth. He patted Pierce's shoulder and burrowed his hand beneath it. He thought, poor, poor Mary. The coloured images were returning now to his closed eyes. He saw the face of Biranne near to him, as in a silent film, moving, mouthing, but unheard. He thought, if I ever get out of here I will be no man's judge. Nothing is worth doing except to kill the little rat, not to judge, not to be superior, not to exercise power, not to seek, seek, seek. To love and to reconcile and to forgive, only this matters. All power is sin and all law is frailty. Love is the only justice. Forgiveness, reconciliation, not law.
He shifted slightly and his free hand, now moving behind Pierce's back, touched something in the darkness. His chilled fingers explored it. It was a small ridged pyramid-shaped excrescence on the rock. His moving hand encountered another one. Limpets, thought Ducane. Lim pets. He lay still again. He hoped that Pierce had not found the limpets.

Thirty-six

'How much longer? T 'Only a few minutes now.'

Voices were hushed.

The night was warm and the smell of the white daisies moved dustily across the water, laying itself down upon the still satiny skin of the sea's surface. A large round moon was turning from silver to a mottled gold against a lightish night sky.

The two boats floated near to the cliff. There had been every confusion, appeals, suggestions, plans. The villagers, thrilled by the mishap, had produced innumerable theories about the cave, but no facts. The police had been told, the coastguards had been told, the navy had been told. The lifeboat had offered to stand by. Frogmen were to come to take in aqualung equipment.

Telephone calls passed along the coast. Time passed. The frogmen were needed for an accident elsewhere. Time passed on to the consummation of the high tide. After that there was a kind of lull.

'Now we can't do anything but wait,' people said to each other, avoiding each other's eyes.

Mary was sitting in the stern of the boat. There had been other craft earlier, sightseers in motor boats, journalists with cameras, until the police launch told them to go away. There was silence now. Mary sat shuddering with cold in the warm air. She was wearing Theo's overcoat which at some point he had forced her to put on. The coat collar was turned up and inside the big sleeves her hidden hands had met and crawled up to clutch the opposing arms. She sat full, silent, remote, her chin tilted upward a little, her big unseeing eyes staring at the moon. She had shed no tears, but she felt her face as something which had been dissolved, destroyed, wiped into blank Hess by grief and terror. Now her last enemy was hope. She sat like somebody who tries hard to sleep, driving thoughts away, driving hopes away.

Near to her in the boat, and clearly visible to her although she was not looking at them, were Willy and Theo. Perhaps she could perceive them so sharply because their image had occurred so often during the terrible confusions and indecisions of the afternoon and evening. Willy and Theo, among the people from whom her grief had cut her off so utterly, the least cut off. Theo sat closest to her now in the boat, occasionally reaching out without looking at her to stroke the sleeve of the overcoat. Casie had wept. Kate had wept. Octavian had rushed to and fro organizing things and telephoning.

She supposed she must have talked to them all, she could not remember. It was silence now.

Mary's thoughts, since she had got into the coastguards' boat, now more than half an hour ago, had become strangely remote and still. Perhaps it was for some scarcely conscious protection from the dreadful agony of hope that she was thinking about Alistair, and about what Ducane had said about him, Tel qu'en lui-meme enfin 1'etenite le change. She formed the words in her mind: What is it like being dead, my Alistair?

As she said to herself, my Alistair, she felt a stirring of something, a sort of sad impersonal love. How did she know that this something in her heart, in her mind, where nothing lived but these almost senseless words, was love at all? Yet she knew.

Can one love them there in the great ranks of the dead? The dead, she thought, the dead, and formed abstractly, emptily, namelessly the idea of her son.

Death happens, love happens, and all human life is compact of accident and chance. If one loves what is so frail and mortal if one loves and holds on, like a terrier holding on, must not one's love become changed? There is only one absolute imperative, the imperative to love: yet how can one endure to go on loving what must die, what indeed is dead? 0 death, rock me asleep, bring me to quiet rest. Let pass my weary guilty ghost out of my careful breast. One is oneself this piece of earth, this concoction of frailty, a momentary shadow upon the chaos of the accidental world. Since death and chance are the material of all there is, if love is to be love of something it must be love of death and change. This changed love moves upon the ocean of accident, over the forms of the dead, a love so impersonal and so cold it can scarcely be recognized, a love devoid of beauty, of which one knows no more than the name, so little is it like an experience. This love Mary felt now for her dead husband and for the faceless wraith of her perhaps drowned son.

The police launch had come back and suddenly shone a very bright searchlight on to the cliff. Everyone started. The warm purple air darkened about them. The illuminated semicircle of the cliff glowed a powdery flaky