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By Root 5294 0

available to casual passers-by in the street than it is to you, whose job it is to foot the bill for her food, lodging and general maintenance. True, the husband or lover has the added gratification of a range of intimacies usually denied to the passer-by. But look here! The effect produced by a beautiful woman is visual … touching her does not bring you any closer to her beauty than touching the paint of a Botticelli brings you closer to the beauty of his painting. It might even be argued that the closer you get to this painting or this woman the less you are able to appreciate its or her beauty, or even what makes each different from others of its kind. In the most intimate position of all, with your eyeball, so to speak, resting against the paint itself you would be hard put to it to tell any difference at all between this one and another. What had happened in the case of beautiful women, Matthew reflected, was that lust and aesthetic pleasure had got hopelessly mixed up. As a result, men felt obliged to marry beautiful women when in many cases they would have been better advised to marry a plain woman with a pleasant disposition and acquire, perhaps, some compensatingly beautiful object such as a piece of T’ang porcelain.

Matthew tried to engage the Major in conversation on the nature of feminine beauty. Very likely the Major had had more practical experience in these matters than he had. But the Major was distraught and plainly found it hard to give his full attention to disentangling the lustful from the aesthetic. The Major did try to cheer Matthew up, though, explaining to him that depression was bound to follow such a fever, never failed to do so. Matthew, unshaven, had taken to sitting all day with his feet on his father’s desk, spinning the chamber of a revolver he had found in one of its drawers.

‘A young man like you should think of getting married, you know,’ said the Major who found the appearance of the revolver disquieting.

‘Well, you never got married yourself, did you, Major?’ asked Matthew accusingly.

‘Ouf, well, no, I suppose not,’ agreed the Major, taken aback by this frontal assault. ‘Just between you and me, though, there have been moments when I’ve rather regretted it, just now and then, you know. After all, when all’s said and done …’ The Major lapsed into silence and at the same time felt himself invaded by loneliness and despair, so that the muscles of his face which was still wearing a cheerful expression began to ache with the effort of holding the expression in place and, severely pruned though it was, the moustache on his upper lip felt as heavy as antlers. ‘Anyway,’ he said at last, ‘if you don’t want to get married I think it might be a good idea to mention it to the Blacketts in the not-too-distant future.’

Matthew could see that there was something in what the Major said. Monty had dropped in the previous afternoon, explaining that he had had to escape from his family whose conversation these days was limited to talk of wedding arrangements. Nor was it simply ‘bridesmaids and all that rubbish’; now, a prey to this new and, in Monty’s opinion, sickening obsession, his family really had ‘the bit between their teeth’ … There was endless talk of recipes for wedding-cakes, of patterns of wedding-dresses and of printers who would have to be consulted about suitable invitation cards. ‘They really have it in for you, old boy,’ Monty had warned him. ‘Mark my words!’

‘But I don’t think I even said I wanted to marry her,’ protested Matthew apathetically. ‘I mean, good gracious …’

It was true, he really must do something about it but just at the moment he felt he could not quite face having it out with the Blacketts. And, after all, why not get married? Matthew wondered, grimly scratching his itchy scalp with the barrel of the revolver. After all, it is what everybody does. He was thirty-three, no longer a young man, really. All his Oxford friends and contemporaries except Ehrendorf were long since married and many of them had swarms of children into the bargain. His life certainly had not