He folded the linen sheet to the bottom of the bed and plumped up the pillows. It had been unusually hot during the weeks leading up to Midsummer’s Eve and the English had, with their typical contrariness, begun to regard the sun as an enemy.

Friday, he said to himself. A day of prayers answered and dreams realised.

It was his habit to remind himself of the symbolism of the day when he woke every morning. There was much of this kind of clutter in his life, left over from the Sixties and Seventies. He paused in his chore to regard the unusual angle of the bed, remembering the day his wife had helped him move it to match the changing fluctuations of the Earth’s electromagnetic field.

“When the circadian rhythms are harmonised, the proper amounts of hormones are released while we’re asleep,” he had told her. Of course, he had long since moved through his biorhythmic fixation, but he didn’t have the heart to revise their sleeping arrangements again since he had overheard her repeating to a friend, “It suits the Caucasian rhythms of our bodies.”

He had married young, in the grip of biological tyranny. As a teenager, he had come across an erotic illustration by the artist Vargas and vowed that if he ever met a girl who looked like that he would marry her. He had. And he had.

Prudence wasn’t much of a talker, but she was a great kisser. And her passion and unexpected innovation had reduced him to mindless vapourings. He was married by the time he realised that this rapt lover—who listened so intently—did not understand very much of what was being said. When their daughter was born, he took steps to insure that she remained an only child: it was not so much that he didn’t want to have more children—he wasn’t sure he had the stamina to persevere with married life.

Zeno looked again at the large bed he had positioned for the summer equinox, and the mural he had painted on the wall behind it—a nude of his new wife. Was it so long ago? He remembered the erotic studies he had done of her when they had returned from their honeymoon; how he had pinned them around the walls. He found the memory stirring, and thought of the first time he had undressed her, every moment anticipating a flaw—and finding none.

“Kings kiss the dust whereof the fair spring from . . . ” he quoted to no one in particular. “I must make this marriage work,” he said firmly. It was a sentence he repeated regularly. Something he had picked up from a book which advocated frequent vocalisation as a way of making wishes become facts. Not that Zeno’s heart was in the statement, for by now it was only a habit, something he said automatically. Are all marriages this way? he mused.

Who’s asking this anyway? he wondered abstractedly. There were lots of such unanswered fragments behind his tall brow; phrases he didn’t understand, yet had committed to memory in the hope that the meanings would unfold by themselves. He had led most of his life this way—‘education by the senses’ was what he called it.