The Nice and the Good

The Americans, who had come back hoping for another look at the Bronzino, retreated rapidly.
'Paula, I'm falling in love with you again, most terribly in love.'
'I've never been out of love with you, never for a second.'
'Look, Paula, do you mind if we go home at once? I want to kiss you properly, I want to '
They sprang up. Richard took a quick look at the attendant's back and approached the Bronzino. He drew luxurious fingers across the canvas, caressing the faintly touching mouths of Venus and Cupid. Then he seized Paula by the hand and pulled her after him. They left the Gallery at a run. The attendant turned about and began anxiously counting the pictures.

Thirty-nine

'Have a drink,' said Ducane. 'Thanks. A little sherry.'
'Do you mind the fire? It's not too hot for you?'
, No, I like it. Are you sure you're feeling all right?'
'I'm feeling much better. How's Pierce?'
'Pierce is in splendid shape. He sends much love, by the way. He said I was to remember to say much love.'
'Mine to him. Do sit down. It's so nice of you to have come.' Mary Clothier dropped her coat on the floor and sat down rather awkwardly, holding her glass of sherry stiffly in front of her as if it were something she was unaccustomed to holding, such as a revolver. Her hand trembled slightly and some drops fell on to the stretched blue and white check of her dress and softly moistened her thigh. She looked around the room with curiosity. It was a restrained dignified pretty room full, to Mary's taste over-full, of intense quietly coloured trinkets.
These lay about on polished surfaces looking more like toys than like ornaments. She looked out through the sun-drenched window at the cast-iron window boxes and brightly painted doors of the small neat houses opposite, and her heart sank.
She thought, how little I know him.
'Isn't it splendid about Richard and Paula?' she said.
'Marvellous.'
'I'm very glad,' said Mary. 'They're so happy, just like gay children.' She sighed. 'But weren't you surprised? I had no idea they were thinking of it. Paula is so secretive.'
'Mmm. Was a bit quick. Just goes to show. Life can be sudden. All that.'
Mary looked at Ducane who was trampling about on the other side of the room, in the space behind a tall armchair, like an animal in a stall, and leaning momently on the back of the chair to attend to her. He was wearing, and had profusely apologized for, a black silk dressing gown covered with spidery red asterisks, and dark red pyjamas underneath. The garb made him look faintly exotic, faintly Spanish, like an actor, like a dancer.
'John, what was it like in the cave? Pierce won't tell me any thing. And my imagination keeps on and on. I've been having awful dreams about it. Did you think you were going to die?'
Ducane said slowly, leaning over the chair, 'It's hard to say, Mary. Perhaps. Pierce was very tough and brave.'
'So were you, I'm sure. Can you tell me what it was like, could you describe it starting at the beginning?'
'Not now, Mary, if you don't mind.' He added, 'I saw your face there in the darkness, in a strange way. I'll tell you – later.'
His air of authority calmed her. 'All right. So long as you will tell me. Did you make that decision, John?'
'What decision?'
'You said you had to make a decision concerning another person.'
'Oh yes. I decided that.'
'And was it the right decision? T 'Yes. I tidied that business up. I've tidied up a number of things. In fact I've tidied up nearly everything!'
'Good for you.'
'You don't know what you're talking about!' said Ducane.
'Sorry. I'm still awfully nervy.'
Mary smiled a little uncertainly. Then she said with a sudden random bitterness, 'I don't know anything about you.'
'You've known me for years.'
'No. We've noticed each other as familiar objects on a landscape, like houses or railway stations, things one passes on a journey. We've said the minimum of obvious things to each other.'
'You do us less than justice. We've communicated with each other. We are alike.'
'I am not like you,' she said. 'No, you belong to a different race.' She looked about the room at the toy-like trinkets. outside the window the heavy sunny evening was husky with distant sound.
He looked puzzled, discouraged. 'I have a feeling that you are not complimenting me now!'
She stared at his thin brown face, his narrow nose, the parti. cular fall of the dry dark hair. Their conversation sounded to her hollow, like an intermittent rhythmless drum beat. She shivered.
, it doesn't matter. You are different. I must go.'
'But you've only just come.'
'I only came to see if you were all right.'
'Perhaps I ought to have told you I'm not! You hardly flatter me by rushing away so soon. I was hoping you would have dinner with me.'
'I'm afraid I have an engagement.'
'Well, don't go yet, Mary. Have some more sherry.'
He filled her glass. The black silk brushed her knee.
Why have I landed myself in this absurd and terrible position, thought Mary Clothier. Why have I been such a perfectly frightful ass? Why have I, after all these years, and contrary to all sense and all hope and all reason fallen quite madly in love with my old friend John Ducane?
The realization that she was in love with Ducane came to Mary quite suddenly on the day after the rescue from the cave, but it seemed to her then that she had already been in love for some time. It was as if she had for some time been under an authority the nature of which she had not understood, though she had had an inkling of it in the moment almost of violence when she had thrown her coat about the wet cold naked man.
On the following day, when Ducane had already been taken back to London by Octavian, Mary felt a blackness of depression which she took to be the aftermath of terror. She was weeding the garden in the hot afternoon. With a savage selfpunishing persistence she leaned over the flowerbed, feeling the light runnels of perspiration crawling upon her cheek. She had been thinking intensely about Ducane but without thinking anything specific. It was as if she were attending to him ardently but blankly. She straightened up and went to sit down in the shade underneath the acacia tree. Her hot body went limp and she lay down flat. As she relaxed she had a vivid almost hallucinatory image of Ducane's face, together with a physical convulsion like an electric shock. She lay quite still, collecting herself.
Realizing that one is in love with someone in whom one has long been interested is a curious process. What can it be said to consist of? Each human being swims within a sea of faint suggestive imagery. It is this web of pressures, currents and suggestions, something often so much less definite than pictures, which ties our fugitive present to our past and future, composing the globe of consciousness. We think with our body, with its yearnings and its shrinkings and its ghostly walkings. Mary's whole body now, limp beneath the tall twisted acacia tree, became aware of John from head to foot in a new way. She imaged him with a turning and hovering of her being, as