The Nice and the Good

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 a

'I don't know,' said Ducane.

He felt that he had not done enough for Willy. Most people who knew Willy felt this. But he was not an easy person to help. Ducane had first met Willy, who was a classical scholar living on a pension from the German government and working on an edition of Propertius, at a meeting in London at which Ducane was reading a rather obscure little paper on the concept of specificatio in Roman law. He had been responsible for removing Willy from a bed-sitter in Fulham and installing him at Trescombe Cottage. He had often wondered since whether this was not a mistake. He had conceived of providing his friend with the protection of a household. But in fact Willy was able to be as solitary as he pleased.

'I don't think that if he was really seriously contemplating suicide he would let the children come to him the way he does,' said Kate. While adult visitors were often barred, the children came and went freely at the cottage.

'Yes, I think that's true. I wonder, when he won't let any of us see him, if he's really working?'

'Or just brooding and remembering. It's awful to think of. U 'I've never felt any inclination to commit suicide, have you, Kate?'

'Good heavens no! But then for me life's always been such fun.'

'It's hard for people like us with ordinary healthy minds,' said Ducane, 'to imagine what it would be like for one's whole mode of consciousness to be painful, to be hell.'

'I know. All those things he must remember and dream about.'

Willy Kost had spent the war in Dachau.

'I wish Theo would try to see more of him,' said Ducane.

'Theo! He's a broken reed if ever there was one. He's just a bundle of nerves himself. You should see more of Willy. You can talk directly to people and tell them what to do. Most of us are afraid to.'

'Sounds awful!' said Ducane and laughed. torcea to tell someway what it was nice in camp .1 tmnx he's never uttered a word about it to anyone.'

'I doubt if you are right. I can even imagine how difficult that might be,' said Ducane. But the same idea had come to him before.

'One must be reconciled to the past,' said Kate.

'When one's suffered injustice and affliction on the scale on which Willy's suffered it,' said Ducane, 'it may just not be possible.'

'Not possible to forgive?'

'Certainly not possible to forgive. Perhaps not possible to find any way of – thinking about it at all.'

Ducane's imagination had often wrestled in vain with the question of what it must be like to be Willy Kost.

'I used to think he'd somehow break down with Mary,' said Kate. 'She really knows him best, apart from you I mean. But she says he hasn't talked to her at all about – that.'

Ducane was thinking, we've nearly reached the wood, we've nearly reached the wood. The first shadows fell across them, the cuckoo uttered from farther off his crazed lascivious cry.

'Let's sit down here for a minute,' said Kate.

There was a clean grey shaft of fallen tree from which a skirt of dry curled golden-brown beech leaves descended on either side. They sat down upon it, their feet rustling the dry leaves, and turned to face each other.

Kate took Ducane by the shoulders, studying him intently.

Ducane looked into the intense streaky smudgy dark blue of her eyes. They both sighed. Then Kate kissed him with a slow and lingering motion. Ducane closed his eyes, turning his head now from the intensity of the kiss, and clutched her very closely against him, feeling the wiry imprint of her springy hair upon his cheek. They remained motionless for some time.

'Oh God, you do make me happy,' said Kate.

'You make me happy too.' He set her away from him again, smiling at her, feeling relaxed and free now, desiring her but not with anguish, seeing behind her the brown carpeted empti49 ness of the wood, while the sun glittered above them in shoals of semi-transparent leaves.

'You look more like the Duke of Wellington than ever. I love that little crest of grey hair that's coming right in the front.

It is all right, isn't it, John?'

'Yes,' he said gravely. 'Yes. I have thought about it a lot and I do think it is all right.'

'Octavian – well, you know what Octavian feels. You understand everything.'

'Octavian's a very happy man.'

'Yes, Octavian is a happy man. And that is relevant, you know.'

'I know. Dear Kate, I'm a lonely person. And you're a generous woman. And we're both very rational. All's well here.'