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Three
John Ducane looked into the eyes of Jessica Bird. Jessica's eyes slowly filled with tears. Ducane looked away, sideways, downward.
He had not left her then, when he ought to have done, when the parting would have been an agony to him. He was leaving her now when it was less than agony, when it was almost relief. He ought to have left her then. The fact remained that he ought to leave her now. He needed this thought to strengthen him against her tears.
He looked up again, past her blurred suffering head. His imagination, already alienated from her room, perceived its weirdness, Jessica's room was naval in its austerity. No homely litter of books or papers proclaimed its inhabitant and the pattern of clean hard colours and shapes was not merged into any human mess or fuzz. If furniture is handy manadjusted objects for sitting, lying, writing, putting, the room contained no furniture, only surfaces. Even the chair on which Ducane was sitting, the only chair, was just a sloping surface bearing no friendly curved relation to the human form. Even the bed wherein he had once been used to wrangle with Jessica looked like a board, its rumpled shame ironed smooth. Formica shelves, impersonal as coffee bar table tops, supported the entities, neither ornaments nor works of art, which Jessica made or found. She wandered the rubbish tips at night, bringing back bricks, tiles, pieces of wood, tangles of wire. Sometimes she made these things into other things. Sometimes they were allowed to remain themselves. Most of the entities however were made of newspaper by a method perfected in Jessica's bathroom at a cost of regularly blocked drains. A halfdigested mush wherein newsprint was still partly visible was solidified to form neat feather-weight mathematical objects with pierced coloured interiors. These objects, standing inscrut ably in rows, often seemed to Ducane to belong to a series the principle of which he had not grasped. They were not intended for contemplation and were soon destroyed.
Jessica taught painting and English at a primary school. She was twenty-eight and looked eighteen. Ducane, round-blueeyed, hook nosed, patchily grey, was forty-three and looked forty-three. They had met at a party. Falling in love surprised them both. Jessica, pale, thin, mini-skirted, with long brownish gold hair tangling over her shoulders or pony-tailed with in-twisted ribbons, presented to Ducane an almost unintelligible thing and certainly not his kind of thing. She seemed to him vastly talented and almost totally non-intellectual, an amalgam he had never encountered before. She belonged to a race of the young whose foreig
Though Ducane did not fully realize it, his nervous uncertain sensuality needed some sophisticated intellectual encouragement, a certain kind of play, which Jessica was unable to provide. His profound puritanism could not in any case brook a long affair. He had not the temperament to be anybody's lover. He knew this. His adventures had been infrequent and fairly short. He felt a rational guilt too at keeping this young attractive girl for himself when he did not intend to marry her. Ducane, who liked his life to be simple, did not care for concealments and feelings of guilt. In time, the excitements of discovery diminished, he began to find her curious aesthetic more exasperating than charming, and was able to see her less as a rare and exotic animal and more as an eccentric English girl, not after all so young, and well on the way to becoming nothing more mysterious than an eccentric English middle-aged woman. He had then, ashamed of himself for not having had it earlier, the strength to end an affair which he months ago, that he ought to have sett her. tie auowea her tears to move him then and agreed that though no longer lovers they should remain friends, meeting almost as often as before. He was the readier to agree since he was still half in love with her.
There was perhaps in his passion more cu