The Nice and the Good Read Online Free PDF

her narrowhead and pointed face and the well adjusted surfaces of her cropped brown hair. Kate, herself undefined, was a definer of others, the noise, the heat, the light which flattered them into the clearer contours of themselves. Kate spoke with a slight stammer and a slight Irish accent.
    “Octavian isn’t coming tonight after all.”
    “Oh dear,” said Mary, “he won’t be here for Barb.”
    “I know, it’s too bad. Something’s happened at the office.”
    “What’s happened?”
    “Some chap killed himself.”
    “Good heavens,” said Paula. “You mean killed himself, there in the office?”
    “Yes. Isn’t it awful?”
    “Who was he?” said Paula.
    “I don’t know.”
    “What was his name?”
    “I didn’t think to ask. He’s not anyone we know.”
    “Poor fellow,” said Paula. “I’d like to have known his name.”
    “Why?” said Edward, who was experimenting with the tendons of one of the chicken’s legs.
    “Because it’s somehow easier to think about somebody if you know their name.”
    “Why?” said Henrietta, who was dissecting the other leg with a kitchen knife.
    “You may well ask,” said Paula. “Plato says how odd it is that we can think of anything, and however far away it is our thought can hit it. I suppose I can think of him even if I don’t know his name—”
    “You are right to think of him,” said Kate. “You are so right. You reproach me. I feel reproached. I just thought of Octavian and Barbara.”
    “Why did he kill himself?” said Edward.
    “I’ll do Ducane’s room now,” said Mary to Casie.
    “No, you won’t,” said Casie.
    They got up together and left the kitchen.
    The lazy sun, slanting along the front of the house, cast elongated rectangles of watery gold on to the faded floral wallpaper of the big paved hall, which served as the dining-room at weekends. The front door was wide open, framingdistant cuckoo calls, while beyond the weedy gravel drive, beyond the clipped descending lawn and the erect hedge of raspberry-and-creamy spiraea, rose up the sea, a silvery blue, too thin and transparent to be called metallic, a texture as of skin-deep silver paper, rising up and merging at some indeterminate point with the pallid glittering blue of the midsummer sky. There was something of evening already in the powdery goldenness of the sun and the ethereal thinness of the sea.
    The two women swept round the white curve of the stairs, Casie clumping, Mary darting, and disputed briefly at the top. Mary let Casie go on to the spare room and turned herself in the direction of Barbara’s room.
    Mary Clothier and her son Pierce had lived for nearly four years now at Trescombe House. Mary’s father, a sickly defeated man, had been a junior clerk in an insurance office, and he and Mary’s vague gentle mother had perished together of double pneumonia, leaving their only child, then aged nine, to the care of an elderly and rather needy aunt. Mary had managed, however, by means of scholarships, to win herself a good education, in the course of which she encountered Kate. Kate admired Mary and also quite instinctively protected her. They became firm friends. Much later, at some point in Mary’s wanderings of an impecunious and socially uncertain widow Kate had suggested that she should come and live with them, and Mary had come, with many misgivings, for a trial period. She had stayed. Kate and Octavian were well off and enjoyed the deep superiority of the socially secure. Mary, a deprived person who had sometimes come near, rather romantically, to thinking of herself as an outcast, appreciated both these advantages in her friends, and was prepared to be herself propped up by them. But of course she could not have accepted this act of rescue had it not been for an indubitable virtue of generosity in both her hosts, a virtue somehow expressed in their roundness, in Octavian’s big spherical bald head with its silky golden tonsure, in Kate’s plump face and fuzzy