surface skin of the water. How that letter conjured Eric up, in all the detail which she had mercifully forgotten, like a demon figure in front of her shadowing the bright sea: his forced ecstasies, his mystical certainties, his blend, which she had once found so touching, of weakness and menace, the ruthless cunning of his egoism. Of course she had acted badly, not least in abandoning him so rapidly at the very end. But she had forever been emptied of love for him and of the ability to help him. That was her certainty. Was it true though, Paula asked herself, trying to steady her mind, could she still help Eric, ought she to try?
Perhaps he was right to say that there was still something which they had to do for each other. Her heart shuddered at it.
At the idea of seeing him again she felt nausea, a kind of sick never been Irlgntenea or rcicnaru, ai«ivugu iie was a uiau wuu was capable of violence. She knew now that she had been very very frightened of Eric. This was the quality of the love which she had so completely forgotten.
'It was an Abyssinian cat And on its dulcimer it sat,' chanted Edward, hauling Montrose out of the basket into which Mingo, repulsed by the cat's cold stare, had been making tentative and unsuccessful efforts to climb. Mingo climbed in. Affronted, Montrose escaped from Edward on to the stove and fluffed himself out into his bird look.
'May we have that seaweed in our bath tonight?' Henrietta asked Mary Clothier.
'Whatever do you want seaweed in your bath for?' asked Mary.
'It's our special cure for rheumatism,' said Edward.
'You aren't suffering from rheumatism, are you, Edward?'
'No, it's for Uncle Theo really, but we thought we'd better test it ourselves in case there were any toxic effects.'
'Last time you two had seaweed in your bath it all went down the plug and it was stopped up for days,' said Casie, who had just come in with a basket of lettuces and tomatoes.
'We promise we won't let it go down the plug this time!'
'All right then,' said Mary. 'Look, I do wish you'd take those stones out into the garden.'
Kate and Ducane who were passing by the kitchen door smiled at each other and went on into the hall. Ducane called back to the kitchen, 'Oh Mary. Kate and I are just going up to see Willy.'
'Well, don't be late for tea, it's special Sunday tea.'
'And how is my little nymph?' said Ducane to Barbara, whom they met in the doorway.
'Taimerais mieux t'avoir clans manually lit que le tonnerre,' replied Barbara primly. siuppeu for a rew paces vesiue Luem.
Barbara was round-faced, like her mother, and had the same shortish slightly fuzzy fair hair, only whereas Kate's unkempt mop shifted about her like a slightly crazed halo, Barbara's hair, much more carefully cut, cupped her head like an elaborate filigree head-piece. Her complexion was that of a child, rosy and shiny, with that delicious apple-like shininess which usually disappears in adolescence. Short-skirted, longlegged, barefooted, her prancing feet were the same smooth glowing golden-brown colour as her legs.
'Why don't you go and look for Pierce?' said Kate. 'I saw him down by the churchyard and he looked rather lonely to me.'
Barbara shook her head with a virtuous air. 'I must go and practise my flute. I'm going to give Willy a Mozart recital.'
'Aren't you going to give me a Mozart recital?' Ducane asked.
'No. Only Willy.' She skipped away into the house.
'How that child has grown!' said Ducane. 'She's as tall as you. And nearly as pretty.'
'Darling! I'm afraid Pierce and Barbara aren't exactly hitting it off since she came back.'
'Well, you know what's the matter. They're growing up.'
'I know. They do develop early these days. I thought somehow, having been together so much like brother and sister, they'd be sort of inoculated.'
'Nothing inoculates them against that,' said Ducane. And he realized as he spoke that he did not at all like the idea of Barbara being involved in that. He would have liked her never to grow up.
'But this poor chap,' said Kate, reverting to what they had been discussing earlier. 'Why did he do it?'
Ducane had not spoken to Kate about the inquiry. Although he had received the news of his task coolly enough from Octavian he was feeling far from happy about it. It was the sort of thing which could turn into an awful mess. It might be very difficult to find out the truth quickly, and impossible to demons45 trate that there was no security interest and no case for a more elaborate investigation. However, it was not just the prospect of failing and being discredited which daunted Ducane. He did not like the idea of investigating another man's private life in this way. Moreover the personality of Radeechy, about whom he had reflected considerably since his arrival in Dorset, now seemed to him both puzzling and sinister. He was sure that the spiritualism, or whatever it was, was connected with the suicide; and he felt instinctively that here, once he had started to pry, he would unearth something very unpleasant indeed.
'I don't know why he did it,' said Ducane. He lost his wife lately. That might have been it.'
By this time they had crossed the level lawn behind the house with its two tall feathery acacia trees, climbed over a low palisade of string and sticks which had something to do with the twins, and were climbing a path, made with great labour the previous year by Pierce and Barbara out of pebbles from the beach, between twin hedges of plump veronica bushes.
Ducane's hand passed caressingly over the compact curves of the bushes. At this moment his mind was divided into several compartments or levels. At one level, perhaps the highest, he was thinking about Willy Kost, whom he was so shortly to meet and whom he had not seen now for some time, since on Ducane's last two week- ends Willy had declared by telephone that he wanted no visitors. At another level Ducane was thinking in an upset nervous way about Radeechy and wondering what George Droysen would find out in Fleet Street. At yet another level, or in another compartment, he was miserably recalling his weakness at the end of the scene with Jessica and miserably wondering what on earth he was going to do about her next week.
However, he did not, today, feel too bad about Jessica.
Ducane did not usually believe in waiting for the gods to help him out of his follies with miracles, but just today his worry about Jessica had become a little cloudy, softened by a steamy cloud of vague optimism. Somehow or other it could still turn out all right, he felt. This was possibly because, in an adjoining compartment, he was experiencing a pure and intense joy at two ooates, wnicn toucnea occasionally witn a pleasant, clumsy, friendly jostling as they walked along, and at the knowledge, with him as a physical aura rather than a thought, that he would kiss Kate when they reached the beech wood.
There was also elsewhere, at what was by no means the lowest level, though it was certainly the least articulate, a consciousness of his surroundings, a participation, an extension of himself into nature, into the compact curvy veronica bushes, into the spherical huge-leaved catalpa tree at the end of the garden, into the rosy sun-warmed bricks of the wall, through an archway in which they were now passing. These bricks were so old and worn and pitted, so edgeless and cornerless, that they looked like a natural conglomeration of red stones or playthings of the sea. Everything in Dorset is round, thought Ducane. The little hills are round, these bricks are round, the yew trees that grow in the hedgerows are round, the veronica bushes, the catalpa tree, the crowns of the acacia, the pebbles on the beach, the clump of small bamboos beside the arch.
He thought, everything in Dorset is just the right size. This thought gave him immense satisfaction and sent out through the other layers and compartments of his mind a stream of warm and soothing particles. Thus he walked on with Kate at his side, conveying along with him his jumbled cloud of thoughts whose self-protective and self-adjusting chemistry is known as mental health.
They were walking now in a narrow lane with high sloping banks up which white flowering nettles and willow herb crawled out of a matrix of tall yellow moss, so dry and dustylooking in the hot sun that it scarcely seemed like vegetation.
There was an old thick powdery smell, perhaps the smell of the moss. A cuckoo called nearby in the wood above, clear, cool, precise, hollow, mad. Kate took hold of Ducane's hand.
'I think I won't come in with you to Willy's,' said Kate. 'He's been rather down lately and I'm sure it's better if you see him alone. I don't think Willy will ever kill himself, do you, John?'
Willy Kost was given to announcing from time to time that his life was an unbearable burden and he proposed shortly to terminate it.
