‘Charles, please don’t be so strange and awkward. You know what I came to say. At one time it just looked as if our,’ she hesitated, ‘our thing hadn’t got a chance. It looked as if there was simply no way of going on. But things have altered, altered so strangely.’

Mentally he translated this into: You’re rich now, you’re doing as well as Roderick. And you’re fifteen years younger.

‘I don’t really see how things have altered,’ he said obstinately. ‘Between you and me, I mean.’

She looked at him quietly and possessively, rebuking him, making him feel ashamed of his foolish temporizing.

He stood up and walked to the centre of the room. If an animal who was tame, or born in captivity, went back to what should have been its natural surroundings, it never survived. If it was a bird, the other birds killed it, but usually it just died. Here was his cage, a fine new one, air conditioned, clean, commanding a good view, mod. cons., main services. And she had snapped the lock and was calling him out into the waving jungle. When he got there, he would die.

That was Con. What was Pro?

Pro was that she was beautiful, and he loved her, and to accept her with death and catastrophe in the same packet would be no trouble at all, thank you, anyone would have done the same, don’t mention it. Pro was that he could not bear it that she should sit casually in the armchair, talking to him across half the width of the room, when he knew every contour and texture of her body under its demure clothing. Pro was that I a twister love what I abhor.

It was dusk now. He crossed the room and turned a switch. The light sprang suddenly into every corner, dramatizing each outline, emphasizing the shape of the furniture and the shape of their predicament.

They looked at each other, baffled and inquiring.

THE END

About the Author

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John Wain was born in 1925 in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire. He attended St John’s College, Oxford, earning a BA in 1946 and an MA in 1950. A prolific author and man of letters, Wain wrote poetry, novels, criticism, and biographies during a writing career that spanned more than forty years.