The Nice and the Good

First published in 1968

To Rachel and David Cecil

A head of department, working quietly in his room in Whitehall on a summer afternoon, is not accustomed to being disturbed by the nearby and indubitable sound of a revolver shot.

At one moment a lazy fat man, a perfect sphere his loving wife called him, his name Octavian Gray, was slowly writing a witty sentence in a neat tiny hand upon creamy official paper while he inhaled from his breath the pleasant sleepy smell of an excellent lunch-time burgundy. Then came the shot.

Octavian sat up, stood up. The shot had been somewhere not far away from him in the building. There was no mistaking that sound. Octavian knew the sound well though it was many years since, as a soldier, he had last heard it. His body knew it as he stood there rigid with memory and with the sense, now so unfamiliar to him, of confronting the demands of the awful, of the utterly new.

Octavian went to the door. The hot stuffy corridor, amid the rushing murmur of London, was quite still. He wished to call out 'What is it? What has happened?' but found he could not.

He turned back into the room with an instinctive movement in the direction of his telephone, his natural lifeline and co

'Sir, Sir, something terrible has occurred!'

The office messenger, McGrath, a pale-blue-eyed ginger= haired man with a white face and a pink mouth, stood shuddering in the doorway.

'Get out.' Richard Bira

'What on earth is it?' said Octavian.

Bira

'Thanks, but I'd better stay myself. Poor devil, I wonder why he did it.'

'I don't know.'

'He was a pretty odd man. All that conjuring with spirits.'

'I don't know,' said Bira

'Or perhaps – Of course, there was that awful business with his wife. Someone told me he hadn't been the same since she died. I thought myself he was getting very depressed. You remember, that terrible accident last year '

'Yes,' said Bira

'Kate, darling.' Octavian was on the telephone to his wife in Dorset.

'Darling, hello. Are you all right?'

'I'm fine,' said Octavian, 'but something's happened in the office and I won't be able to get down till tomorrow morning.'

'Oh dear! Then you won't be here for Barbie's first evening home!' Barbara was their daughter and only child, aged four teen.

'I know, it's maddening and I'm very sorry, but I've just got to stay. We've got the police here and there's a terrible to-do.'

Two

'You must put all those stones out in the garden,' said Mary Clothier.

'Why?' said Edward.

'Because they're garden stones.'

'Why?' said Henrietta.

The twins, Edward and Henrietta Bira

'They aren't fossils. There's nothing special about them.'

'There's something special about every stone,' said Edward.

'That is perfectly true in a metaphysical sense,' said Theodore Gray; who had just entered the kitchen in his old red and brown check dressing-gown.

'I am not keeping the house tidy in a metaphysical sense,' said Mary.

'Where's Pierce?' said Theodore to the twins. Pierce was Mary Clothier's son who was fifteen.

'He's up in Barbie's room. He's decorating it with shells. He must have brought in a ton.'

'Oh God!' said Mary. The sea-shore invaded the house. The children's rooms were gritty with sand and stones and crushed sea-shells and dried up marine entities of animal and vegetable origin.

'If Pierce can bring in shells we can bring in stones,' reasoned Henrietta.

'No one said Pierce could bring in shells,' said Mary.

'But you aren't going to stop him, are you?' said Edward. 'If I'd answered back like that at your age I'd have been well slapped,' said Casie the housekeeper. She was Mary Casie, but since she had the same first name as Mary Clothier she was called 'Casie', a dark pregnant title like the name of an animal. 'True, but irrelevant, Edward might reply,' said Theodore.

'If it's not too much to ask, may I have my tea? I'm not feeling at all well.'

'Poor old Casie, that was hard luck!' said Edward.

'I'm not going to stop him,' said Mary, 'firstly because it's too late, and secondly because it's a special occasion with Barbara coming home.' It paid to argue rationally with the twins.

Barbara Gray had been away since Christmas at a finishing school in Switzerland. She had spent the Easter holidays skiing with her parents who were enthusiastic travellers.

'It's well for some people,' said Casie, a social comment of vague but weighty import which she often uttered.

'Casie, may we have these chicken's legs?' said Henrietta. 'How I'm to keep the kitchen clean with those children messing in the rubbish bins like starving cats '

'Don't pull it all out, Henrietta, please,' said Mary. A mess of screwed up paper, coffee beans, old lettuce leaves and human hair emerged with the chicken's legs.