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of them golden, and a sliver of tench—registered my monstrous presence by flipping to their corner for food. I sprinkled some into the corrupt water. Must change it or they’d die. My son was in Spain.
    — One of the best-selected small private libraries I’ve seen.
    — Thank you, sir. I’ve forgotten how to read.
    Those books are wrong. They are often contradictory. I think there are important aspects of our nature that do not receive due consideration in them. Socrates was a lethal swine. We are rushing through crazy rapids. London sprouts radiant towers. The world has laryngitis. Love is, of course, a word. When Esther was living with Jim, I found a plaster nude there. An oddly-bent girl.
    — What is this statue? Who created it?
    — Jim did.
    — Jim is no sculptor.
    Esther was embarrassed. The figure crouched oddly. Its anatomy was dubious. Jim would surely have examined it critically.
    — The back’s not right.
    Jim would surely have studied it intently, alight with interest. But she said he had modelled it! Jim clammy with moist plaster?
    — Oh—you know—occupational therapy. Jim needed some thing !
    He had tried various things. Codeine.
    — One or two. Nothing impressive.
    Nocturnal coffee.
    — But, Jim, you can’t drink coffee all night and complain of insomnia.
    — No, it doesn’t affect me.
    He had come to depend on wine, a single glass, at dinner. Once or twice a week he might get drunk, his tall, corpse faceanimated above the crowd. Genial, patrician zombie extracting absurdity from the impact of instinct on convention, baring black stumps at some fetching girl. Codeine, coffee, alcohol, in moderation, the legitimate eccentricities and excesses of a balanced mind.
    I had continued to stare uneasily at the figurine as Esther hastened to the kitchen to make coffee. What was it saying? I had to be tamped into warped existence to keep Jim sane? Jim? The mind that effortlessly humbled mine, that I had never seen intimidated by another intelligence? Of course, Jim, we whispered that you were sterile, that your acute understanding would never be the matrix of achievement. I asked you once:
    — But ultimately—what do you ultimately want to do?
    Your face puffed like a frog’s, your chest expanded in parody of all pompous ambition:
    — Write a great, big book!
    Good, you were sound, impregnable. In ecstatic flight, I raged at your logic and exact knowledge. And took comfort from just those things. Superior intelligence is a corrosive neighbour. Desmond, armoured by substantial achievement, in the acid murk of the Vesuvius Club, smarting from your benign contact:
    — James Barraclough—with his intellect—I know all about his intellect !
    With Silvia, I defended you and, since a champion assimilates some portion of his hero’s merit, gained a little self-esteem by doing so. I said that the modes of achievement that we have institutionalized are not necessarily the highest and are certainly not the only ones. That a person’s achievement may be expressed in terms of the change he effects in others. Jim had certainly changed you, Silvia. And me. I said that it was arguable that all forms of acknowledged success represented pathological hypertrophy of a particular function or attribute, that beyond this might lie a realm of subtleachievement whose measure was the total effect of the immersion of a personality in a culture.
    We have talked so much, Jim, and deeply probed each other’s nature. No conventional barriers of shame, no restraint of class, race, origin have impeded our intimacy. But I never asked you about that plaster girl.

3
    T HE FLAT WAS not bad. We left it for a year, most of which we spent in Europe. We took the telescope with us and sold it in Venice. In Venice we walked through rosy autumn. There has been a hint of cameras turning throughout our love. We reached Greece.
    Behind us in the flat, the daughter of the professor of English Literature of Western Reserve University dwelt