For if that mind supported the body, the body would have been—awful.

No. I was unfair. She did not like lying, tried not to. She tried to steer a course between what she knew Rick wanted and what she knew was right—she was a moral being and who was I to be critical of that? She did not like me. Who was I to be critical of that? She had not read the great works of Wilfred Barclay. Well. There were others, after all. Oh, she was still in the trance of marriage! She was still full of secret delight in what she knew and nobody else had ever known, the feminine delight of giving, of knowing yourself a possession, a chattel, and knowing you must keep that a secret from your man in the very moment that you delight in it, let him believe you play at what you know is the core of all human life. That dullness of mind, slowness of reaction, which I had interpreted as the measure of her intellect might be no more than her indifference to a man three times as old as she was but to whom for her husband’s sake she must remain, at all costs, polite.

It was time I had a sleep before the rigours of eating dinner. I undressed and lay down. The old men chirred like grasshoppers on the city wall as they watched the girl go by. Small wonder that such a girl should be at the heart of so much trouble and sorrow. Small wonder young men should be willing to risk so much for her love. Nevertheless, let her go back to her own country before she is the cause of death to more young men. Old men. Old clowns, old bastards.

Chapter VII

I dreamed a lot which is supposed to be healthy, but I remembered my dreams which healthy or not is unusual with me. Elizabeth used to say I had no unconscious mind but that everything was accessible. In her world that meant I was like a stall with nothing but knick-knacks for sale and shoddy. Why did we ever meet? A Hindu doctor I used to know said we should continue to meet until we learnt but he never said what.

My dreams were about femininity tout court. I also dreamed myself out of bed and through the french windows on to the balcony. I dreamed myself watching the great glacier on the other side of the valley; and under some confused memory of what Elizabeth had said, I saw that it was my own consciousness that hung there. I understood what a wearisome business it was, this dancing awareness, this glitter of the mind from which I constructed my implausible but amusing stories. But then I dreamed myself into a state of worry because the balcony was revolving outwards and would tip me off at a certain angle; so whether unconscious or conscious, my dreaming mind flipped and I knew I was one of a series of butterflies that Mr Halliday had pinned into a showcase though the pin didn’t hurt and I couldn’t read the Latin name written under me. So I woke up with an uneasy feeling that I’d done a very poor prose and old Zonkers would be mifty! There was what the psychological boys (and the theological boys) call considerable affect left over from the dreams. That is to say, I woke up in a lather of sweat and was very glad to be sixty years old and in the Weisswald. The happiest days, ha et cetera. Some “sacré monster”, as Liz would have called me.