The Nice and the Good Read Online Free PDF Page B

ball of touchable yellow hair. There was a careless magnanimity about them both, something too of the bounty of those who might have been magnificent sinners magnificently deciding for righteousness. They were happily married and spontaneous intheir efforts to cause happiness in others. Mary was untroubled by the thought that she was in fact extremely useful to them. Mary ran the house, she controlled the children, she was the one who was always there. But she knew that the benefits to herself were infinitely greater.
    The presence, more recently, of foxy-faced Paula was something about which Mary had been, at first, not too certain. Paula was a college friend of Mary’s, and not known to Kate until the time, after her divorce, when Paula came to stay. “Everyone invites a divorced woman,” Paula had said. Mary had invited her and Kate had adored her. Kate had suggested that Paula should stay with them indefinitely, Octavian had started to make the joke about his harem, and the matter had been fixed up. Paula had been Mary’s older and revered college friend. Mary thought it possible that Paula at close quarters might prove exacting; also she was afraid of becoming jealous. Paula was an uncompromising person and at times Mary had experienced her as a sort of unconscious prig. The strength and clarity of her being, her meticulous accuracy and truthfulness, operated as a reproach to the mediocrity and muddle which Mary felt to be her own natural medium. Paula had a hard cool dignity which had been quite unimpaired by her divorce, the details of which Mary never learnt, though it was generally known that Richard Biranne was an irresponsible chaser of women. That both Kate and Paula ‘adored’ Mary was of course taken, a little too much, for granted. Mary was prepared to watch, in her nervous hyperconscious way, their interest in each other, and in the first few months of Paula’s sojourn Mary suffered acute pains of anticipation. However, in the end it was Paula’s coolness, her detachment, her peculiar virtue which soothed Mary’s nerves, and even provided Mary with the energy which she needed to see the situation exactly as it was. She soon concluded that there was nothing to fear. The mutual affection of Kate and Paula held no threat to her. There was nothing hidden and no possibility of a plot. With this acceptance came a special pleasure in their existence as a free trio which she knew that the others shared.
    The quartet of children had also got on reasonably well. They all went away to school now, Pierce to Bryanston, thetwins to Bedales and Barbara to La Résidence in Switzerland. Their presence, their absence, together with the alternation of week and weekend made of Mary’s existence a chequer-board of contrasting atmospheres. When the children were away Kate often spent part of the week at the Grays’ house in London, if she was not absent on a trip with Octavian, who treated airline timetables as most people treat train timetables. The arrival of the weekend changed the house with the introduction into it of the mystery of a married pair. Kate and Octavian, charmingly, ebulliently wedded, took, as it were, the thrones which awaited them. Paula and Mary then wore their status of women without men. They laughed at Octavian’s harem jokes and heard late at night behind walls the ceaseless rivery murmur of the conversing couple. When the children were at home the weekend was a less intensive matter just because the house was fuller and more anarchic and less private. But the children too were altered by it, Barbara becoming suddenly “the child of the house”, a somewhat purdah-like condition, half privilege, half penalty, the nature of which was never questioned by the other three. The presence of men, Octavian and of late John Ducane (it occurred to no one to count Uncle Theo as a man), also made the conduct of the children not exactly more disciplined, but more coherent and self-conscious.
    On the whole