He was making curious grimaces, closing up his eyes in a way that involved wrinkling his nose and dilating his nostrils. He looked, while doing this, as unselfconscious as an animal in the zoo. Perhaps he was shortsighted and was trying to focus on my face.
«Are you all right, Brad?»
«Yes, of course.»
«You've got a funny look.»
«What do you want?»
«Do you mind if I go out and have some lunch?»
«Lunch? I thought it was the evening.»
«It's after twelve. There's only baked beans in the kitchen. Do you mind-«
«Yes, yes, go.»
«I'll bring some light stuff in for Priscilla.»
«How is she?»
«She's asleep. Brad-«Yes?»
«Could you give me a pound?»
«Here.»
«Thanks. And, Brad-«
«What?»
«I'm afraid that bronze thing got broken. It won't stand up properly.»
He thrust the warm bronze into my hand and I put it down on the table. One of the water buffalo's legs was crumpled. It fell over lop-sidedly. I stared at it. The lady smiled. She resembled Rachel. When I looked up Francis was gone.
I went softly into the bedroom. Priscilla was sleeping high up on her pillows, her mouth open and the neck of her blouse pulling at her throat. Relaxed in sleep, a softer less peevish dejection made her face look a little younger. Her breath made a soft regular sound like «eschew… eschew…» She still had her shoes on.
Very gently I undid the top button of her blouse. The neck fell open, revealing the badly soiled interior of the collar. I eased off her shoes, holding them by the long pointed heels, and pulled the blankets over her plump sweat-darkened feet. The breathing-murmur ceased, but she did not waken. I left the room.
I went into the spare room and lay down on the bed. I thought about my two recent encounters with Rachel and how calm and pleased I had felt after the first one, and how disturbed and excited I now felt after the second one. Was I going to «fall in love» with Rachel? Should I even play with the idea, utter the words to myself? Was I upon the brink of some balls-up of catastrophic dimensions, some real disaster? Or was this perhaps in an unexpected form the opening itself of my long-awaited «break through,» my passage into another world, into the presence of the god? Or was it just nothing, the ephemeral emotions of an unhappily married middle-aged woman, the transient embarrassment of an elderly puritan who had for a very long time had no adventures at all? Indeed it is true, I said to myself, it is a long time since I had an adventure of any sort. I tried to think soberly about Arnold. But quite soon I was conscious of nothing except a flaming sea of vague undirected physical desire.
It is customary in this age to attribute a comprehansive and quite unanalysed causality to the «sexual urges.» These obscure forces, sometimes thought of as particular historical springs, sometimes as more general and universal destinies, are credited with the power to make of us delinquents, neurotics, lunatics, fanatics, martyrs, heroes, saints, or more exceptionally, integrated fathers, fulfilled mothers, placid human animals, and the like. Vary the mixture, and there's nothing «sex» cannot be said to explain, by cynics and pseudo-scientists such as Francis Marloe, whose views on these matters we are shortly to hear in detail. I am myself however no sort of
