CHAPTER FIVE

Wednesday afternoon came all too quickly and Matthew Pearce was resigned to awaiting the arrival of Mrs Evans at his Highgate studio to see ('view' would hardly be the appropriate word in her case) the works, finished or unfinished, which he kept there. In all, there were at least thirty canvases and twenty pieces of sculpture to-hand, as well as an indefinite number of drawings and a few engravings.

Indeed, now that he had cleaned and tidied the studio up a bit, brought some of his old canvases out of hiding and hidden some of his new ones away, it seemed to Matthew that it was not so much a studio as an art gallery in which he was standing, even though there was still sufficient evidence of his painting utensils and a pervasive smell of stale paint about the fairly large ground-floor premises which left one in no doubt as to its actual purpose!

However, the rearrangements which he had seen fit to make, earlier that day, were not without some justification, in view of the customary anarchic state of his studio - a thing which Mrs Evans, with her provincial tidiness, would hardly have welcomed! Recalling the poor impression it had made on Gwen, a week or so previously, he thought he might as well do what he could to save her mother from such a fate. After all, if she was prepared to travel down from Northampton via the West End, she might as well be provided with something decent to look at, be given an opportunity to learn something about contemporary art in relatively congenial surroundings, assuming, of course, that she was really interested in doing so - an assumption which, Matthew had to admit to himself, was by no means guaranteed!

For it had occurred to him more than once during the past couple of days, and even before he arrived back from Northampton on the Monday, that Mrs Evans might well have an ulterior motive for visiting him which was less concerned with his art than with himself as a potential or actual lover. After all, she had certainly done her best, over the weekend, to make a favourable impression on him, and, despite his distaste for her provincialism and comparative ignorance of modern art, she hadn't entirely been without some success in that respect. She was unquestionably a very attractive woman, superior to her daughter in some ways, and not simply because she was older or more sexually mature. One also had to take account of the fact that she was better-proportioned, which is to say altogether more fleshy and buxom without being flabby or fat.

Such, at any rate, was how she seemed to Matthew, who had taken a certain low-key interest in her physical person, despite the ten-year age gap between them. And he was mindful, moreover, of what Gwen had told him about her parents' growing estrangement from each other, the fact of her father's ill-health having an adverse effect on their marriage. Was it stretching the imagination too far, therefore, to deduce from this the existence in Deirdre Evans of a degree of sexual frustration which resulted from her husband's inability to satisfy her any longer and consequently sought release elsewhere? No, he didn't think so; though he wasn't prepared to jump to any over-confident conclusions either.

Besides, he wasn't sure he liked Gwen's mother enough as a person to risk succumbing to carnal intimacies with her, even if what he supposed was true and she was only too willing, in consequence, to throw herself into the arms of the first able-bodied man who presented himself as a suitable replacement for her ailing and, in may ways, distinctly irascible husband, whether or not the two were connected. Wasn't she a bourgeois, a member of a class which, with his artist's independence and self-determination, Matthew instinctively despised? Yes, all too palpably! Yet, there again, so was her husband who, if his lifestyle and opinions were anything to judge by, was even more bourgeois than herself, and consequently all the more despicable from an artist's standpoint.

Would it not be a kind of revenge, therefore, to 'have' Mr Evans' wife behind his back, more satisfying even than 'having' his daughter? There was indeed a vague possibility that it would be, though deep down Matthew wasn't particularly impressed by the idea, which seemed of him somehow too mean and underhand. Better to 'have' her simply because she appealed to him and genuinely desired to be 'had', rather than from a desire for cold-blooded revenge. But that would depend on what happened when Mrs Evans arrived, how they got on together, what she said to him, and so on. He had no intention of raping the woman just because she might happen, in due course, to be available and at his mercy. If she kept him at a distance and only desired to see his art, well and good! He had no intentions of forcing anything upon her, least of all himself.

It was almost two o'clock when the doorbell rang and Mrs Evans presented herself to his hospitality in a tight-fitting red cotton dress. He was politely pleased to hear that her taxi had found its way to his address without undue difficulty or hold-up in the traffic, and duly escorted her through the narrow passage which led from the front door to his studio at the rear. She seemed delighted to be there.

"My, so this is it!" she exclaimed, as they stepped across the threshold.

Matthew felt under no obligation to answer, so he simply closed the door behind her and, disdaining ceremony, walked slowly across to the nearest canvas - a large white one with the outlines of a seated figure painted in black. It was one of his meditation illustrations.

Mrs Evans automatically followed him across the intervening space and stood beside him to contemplate it. She smelt strongly of patchouli, as before, and wore eye shadow and face powder. There was more than a hint of bright red lipstick about her mouth. Her fine dark-brown hair, framed by two large turquoise earrings, was tied-up in a thick plait at the back of her head. Her nape, pale and slender, bore evidence of a thin gold chain that obviously formed part of a personal necklace. Her arms were bare but for a gold bracelet. "So this is one of your Western meditators, I take it?" she commented, after a short inspection of the canvas.

"In a kind of minimalist technique," he confirmed. "Just the bare outlines."

"Hmm, I quite like it actually," Mrs Evans admitted.

He felt strangely nervous with the woman standing so close to him, and also slightly unsure of how best to conduct proceedings. He reckoned he ought to have offered her a seat before drawing attention to this painting, asked how her cousin was and what the baby was like, whether it was a boy or a girl, etc. But partly through nervousness, and partly because of the nature of some of his previous reflections, he had felt strangely inhibited before her and curiously shy, as though afraid to appear guilty of more than met the eye. The painting in question served as a kind of support for his verbal impotence at this moment, but only for a short while. For already the woman was showing signs of impatience with it and turning her head in the direction of some of the others. He would have to act. "Well, would you like a cup of tea or something else to drink prior to your cultural sightseeing, as it were, or would you prefer me to show you around the, er, studio now?" He was aware that he sounded false to himself and still more than a little nervous.

"I think you'd better show me round first and give me a cup of tea afterwards," she replied without hesitation. "I really ought to earn it."

"Yes, I suppose you ought," he half-humorously agreed, cackling understandingly, and immediately led her past a couple of similar cross-legged meditating figures to a small canvas on which a brightly painted white dove appeared to be flying in a silvery-blue sky, as though in a halo of mystical transcendence.

"Ah, so this is your propaganda of the Holy Ghost!" Mrs Evans deduced, recalling what he had told her husband on the subject over the weekend. "My, it's really quite beautiful!"

Beauty hadn't been Matthew's intention, but he graciously thanked her for the compliment all the same, which was only to be expected from somebody who had only a conventional notion of the meaning and purpose of art. "This is one of my more successful versions ... unlike the one to its right, which is a shade too animated," he went on. "The objective of transcendent tranquillity in optimum truth hasn't quite been achieved there, owing to the fact that the dove appears to be flapping its wings rather than just gliding or hovering."

"I can't honestly see any great difference," she confessed, going up to the second version and scrutinizing it close-up. "Unless you're alluding to the higher angle of the wings and to the forward position of its head in relation to the neck."

"Partly that, but partly also to the size of the wings, which are a shade too short, too contracted, it might seem, with the muscular effort of flying," Matthew informed her, unable to suppress another cackle which was partly a result of the good lady's powers of observation.

Already Mrs Evans had grown tired of doves and slight variations in their physical deportment and was heading, to her host's horrified surprise, in the direction of the next related theme - one that took the form of an intensely pure globe of silver paint at the centre of a predominantly gold surround, which could be said to serve as a transcendent halo for the self-contained globe. Matthew thought she would remember what this type of painting was supposed to signify, but she hadn't. Or, at least, she appeared not to have done.

"This is a more abstract painterly interpretation of the millennial Beyond," he crisply informed her, as they came to a sudden halt in front of the work, Matthew fairly proud of his achievement, Mrs Evans somewhat puzzled and even dazzled by it. "Another symbol of ultimate reality, universal consciousness, or whatever you prefer to call that which pertains to pure superconsciousness - the spiritual focus of transcendental man." He could tell she was quite impressed by the concept, if still somewhat puzzled. She stared intently at the painting's mystical cynosure for some time, as though looking for a clue as to the nature of ultimate reality, but made no constructive comment, evidently because it wasn't something to which she could properly relate.

There were one or two other equally puzzling versions of the theme in question to pass before they arrived at the next variation on a transcendental theme - a medium-sized canvas painted silver. To Mrs Evans it came as something of a let-down after the globular one, a thing to be slightly irritated about. "And what, exactly, does this signify?" she asked in a faintly condescending tone-of-voice.

"It's one of my rare experiments in spatial reality," he calmly replied. "After the manner of the late Yvres Klein, who painted monochromes with a view to creating real space, in which the viewer becomes mystically and optically immersed rather than simply passively curious. It isn't a form of abstraction so much as a delineation of space. Hence in this kind of work one is a spatial realist."

"Really?" Mrs Evans responded half-sceptically, the hint of a smirk upon her luscious lips. For it wasn't a work she was prepared to take seriously. To her, space was exclusively of the air and sky, not something one could immerse oneself in on a canvas! She didn't much care for the idea of looking too intently at a bright silver monochrome, nor, for that matter, at the gold and pale-blue ones beside it. There wasn't much there to look at, after all.

Sensing her impatience, Matthew drew the woman in the direction of his sculpture, some of which he knew she would appreciate, if only because, in taking the forms of doves and meditating figures, it was largely representational. He didn't think it expedient to impose the plexiglas and acrylic biomorphic sculptures inspired by the more transcendental sculptors, like Gabo and Beasley, upon her at this point, so led the way, instead, to his overtly religious works, which stood together on a small table to the right of his paintings. Mrs Evans seemed decidedly pleased at the sight of them all.

"So these are you sculptured doves!" she exclaimed, automatically picking up the nearest one to-hand and gently stroking its smooth back. "I'd quite forgotten about them, actually." She suddenly became self-conscious of her action and blushed slightly. "I do hope you don't mind my picking it up," she apologized, fearing that he would be offended.

"Not at all," he assured her. "They ought to bear being stroked, considering that sculpture is fundamentally a tactile art."

She smiled her appreciation of this esoteric fact and turned the small dove over and over in her hands, looking at it from a variety of angles.

"That one, as you doubtless realize, happens to be in marble," he remarked. "But I've also done one in lignum vitae ..." he pointed it out "... and another in bronze ..." which he also pointed out. "More recently, however, I've constructed one out of nylon strings and a steel frame ..." again he pointed to the relevant sculpture "... which, from a transcendental viewpoint, I regard as my best work to-date." He was conscious, as he spoke, that he had lost his initial nervousness and become almost overbearing in his eagerness to inform her of his cultural achievements, to impress his creative significance upon her. She was no longer someone to be feared as a potential critic, but simply someone to instruct, enlighten, and convert. Yet this consciousness, momentarily intruding itself between the sight of his religious sculptures and his comments on them, caused him to lose a little of his didactic absorption, his self-confidence, and grow conscious of the figure standing beside him as a woman again, and a very attractive and sweet-smelling one, to boot! However, he was not to be thrown off course but continued: "Hopefully I shall be able to proceed to more transcendent versions of the dove and, for that matter, the beatific meditators in due course, making use of transparent plastic materials and possibly acrylic to obtain the desired effect. At present I'm not altogether satisfied with the use of marble, bronze, and wood, which seem to me somewhat outdated. I need to bring the symbol of the Holy Ghost more up-to-date, to spiritualize it as much as possible. Else I'll be working at cross-purposes, if you see what I mean."

"Yes, I think I do," Mrs Evans assured him, returning the marble dove in her hand to its space beside the others on the table. "At least I recall what you told me in the garden of my house about it - in other words, of the need to use synthetic materials in accordance with the artificial nature of the contemporary urban environment."

"Precisely," Matthew agreed, not a little surprised by the fact that she had in fact remembered all that, despite the manifest paradox of the phrase 'artificial nature'. "It's a matter of responding to the environment in which one lives in an appropriately relevant way. And the modern city inspires a degree of transcendentalism quite unprecedented in the history of man. Whether one is talking of acrylic, biomorphics, punk rockers with green or blue hair, computer dating, light shows, lasers, contraceptives, skyscrapers with more window-space than concrete or metal infills, supersonic aircraft, digital watches, or cassette recorders, it all comes down to the same thing - namely, our growing severance from the sensual and greater predilection for the spiritual, for the superconscious as opposed to the subconscious. That's why our art, no less than everything else these days, is generally what it is, and why an ever-increasing number of us are more inclined to meditate than to pray."

"Presumably including you," Mrs Evans commented, turning her attention away from the small sculptures of meditating figures to the man beside her.

"Yes, from time to time," he admitted, breaking into a mild blush at what appeared to be a gently mocking look in her bright eyes. "Not that I'm a fanatic. But I do find it pleasant to indulge in when the mood takes me. It's a form of relaxation, you know."

"Really?" Mrs Evans seemed interested. "And do you come face-to-face with the Holy Spirit or whatever when you do it?" she asked.

"Yes, in a manner of speaking I suppose one does," he replied. "At least one gets into a state of mind in which peace, tranquillity, stillness, even bliss predominate, and that seems to me very heavenly. It brings one into contact with the reality beyond appearances, beyond verbal concepts in the ego-bound self, which mystics tend to equate with the Godhead. One gets out of one's shadow and into the light. That's the important thing about it, and that's essentially why one does it - to get away from the illusory and strive to experience undiluted truth. One tunes-in to one's superconscious mind and is lifted above the petty worries and miseries of diurnal life. Lifted above the sway of the subconscious to the realm of pure spirit. It's a pleasant experience, believe me, this wavelength of tranquillity and blessed peace!"

"Well, seeing as you've intrigued me about it, perhaps you'd be kind enough to give me a lesson," Mrs Evans proposed, gently smiling. "If it's not a mode of religious solemnity but a form of spiritual relaxation, I don't see why I shouldn't give it a try. Unless, however, you've got better or more pressing things to do?" She stared at him half-curiously, half-mockingly.

Matthew Pearce was indeed surprised! This was the last thing he had expected her to say! He didn't quite know how to reply, never having been confronted with the prospect of teaching a woman to meditate before - least of all in his studio! It was rather unnerving. But there were, after all, a couple of cushions on the floor not far from where he stood, large puffy velvet-covered cushions which he habitually used when meditating or just resting prior or subsequent to work. So there was no reason to suppose it wasn't possible to utilize the studio for purposes of spiritual instruction. He had no real alternative, therefore, but to consent to her proposal and teach or, at any rate, make a stab at teaching her to meditate.

"And you say it's easy," Mrs Evans murmured, as he led her across the intervening space to where the cushions lay.

"Very," he affirmed, bending down to arrange them in an acceptable manner, one in front of the other at a distance of about three feet; though, in point of fact, he wasn't so confident where she was concerned. Perhaps she would be too egocentric?

She put her white handbag onto a table not far from where they were now standing and then proceeded to survey the area in which Matthew proposed to instruct her in meditation. It was perfectly clean and brightly lit by a large window which gave on to a neatly trimmed and secluded back-garden - all in all, quite a pleasant prospect! The weather, fortunately, was still unusually fine.

"Now, ideally, you should sit down upon one of these cushions, like this, and cross your legs," he averred, leading the way with an unselfconscious demonstration. "Though if, on account of your close-fitting dress, you would prefer to kneel ..."

But Mrs Evans had already taken to her cushion in a manner similar to Matthew and made an effort to cross her legs, exposing, to his startled gaze, the greater part of her copious thighs, which were not without a certain seductive potency. Indeed, her dress had ridden so far up her legs, as she sat down, that he could see more than a little of her nylon panties, which were pale pink, about the area of her crotch. He was unable to prevent himself from blushing a similar colour at the sight of them!

"Perhaps I ought to remove my dress," Mrs Evans suggested, realizing that its displacement had become both a source of distraction for Matthew and not altogether comfortable for herself. "It might be better if I had a bit more physical freedom."

"Well, it isn't absolutely necessary for you to sit cross-legged," he reminded her, blushing a shade deeper. But before he could say anything else she had got to her feet, turned her back on him, and started to unzip her dress which, because of its tightness, she was obliged to ease to the floor, revealing, to his astonished gaze, one of the most attractive figures the mind of man could ever hope to rest upon - a figure in which rump and thighs conspired to seduce the eye to a mouth-watering appreciation of the flesh. Then as she bent down to pick up her dress, threw it in the direction of the nearby table, and bent down again to remove her high heels, Matthew became so conscious of the curvaceous seductiveness of the flesh in question ... that he could scarcely take his eyes off it, especially since she was wearing but the skimpiest of briefs through which the mound of her pubic bush was darkly visible. He was almost drooling with incipient lust as she turned around to face him again and, aided by a no-less skimpy brassiere, confronted him with frontal charms the likes of which he hadn't seen in years.

"Sorry to have kept you waiting," she nonchalantly remarked, as she sat down in front of him in the rudiments of a cross-legged position. "Now, what do I do next?"

Matthew wasn't altogether sure. Or, rather, he was beginning to wonder whether she could still be serious. But he made an effort to pretend that he had been unaffected by her impromptu striptease, and duly proceeded with a word of advice concerning the necessity of emptying the mind of distracting thoughts. "Just relax as much as possible and listen-in to such thoughts as still occur to you without passing judgement on them, as though they weren't really yours." He felt peculiarly self-conscious with her sharp eyes directly focused upon him, drilling, it seemed, into the depths of his mind. He wondered if she was secretly mocking him now, what with that cool regard. Did he look more distracted than he felt? Somewhat embarrassed perhaps? He tried not to dwell on the possibility. "Now that you are aware of your thinking mind as a kind of separate entity," he continued, ignoring his subjective insecurity as best he could, "you can listen-in to your breathing as though that, too, came from outside you and wasn't strictly dependent on your conscious control. Just let your breathing take care of itself. Let it happen to you." He felt even more self-conscious under the resolute fixity of her stare, which seemed to indicate a certain disappointment in him, an impatience with the pedantic course of events. He wanted to escape from it, to hide from her. "And as you become aware of your breathing, er, happening to you, you'll find that you can increase its flow, making it gradually deeper with the inhalation, smoother and more precipitant with the exhalation, allowing your breath to tumble out of you, so to speak, of its own accord." His words were sounding increasingly false and strained to him, especially as her posture was insufficiently straight. In fact, it appeared to have sagged slightly forwards, causing the upper halves of her breasts to become more conspicuous than before. A little further and she might have toppled over onto him, her eyes still fixedly staring into his face, as though for a clue to the millennial Beyond.

Abandoning the relative physical comfort of his cushion, he crawled over to a position immediately behind her, as much to escape her Zen-like stare as to correct her posture, and advised her to straighten up a little, placing a hand on her back to encourage such an adjustment. He was made acutely aware, in the process, of her perfume, which teased his nostrils and gave him a degree of nasal pleasure he had rarely experienced from standard perfumes before. It seemed stronger and sweeter than anything Gwen was in the habit of using. "Now continue to breathe more consciously with the inhalation and less consciously with the exhalation," he advised her, as soon as she had responded to his previous advice, "using gradually deeper and deeper breaths, in and out, in and out, in ... and ... out." He adjusted his position slightly and, as though partly in response to his breathing instructions and partly in response to the inviting proximity of her body, slid his hands under her arms and around to the bulging contours of her breasts, cupping them in each hand and applying a little extra pressure in accordance with the demands of the in-breaths, relaxing his pressure with the out-breaths, so that the steady "in ... and ... out, in ... and ... out" of her breathing routine acquired physical support. He realized, all too soon, that her breathing was becoming progressively quicker as well as deeper, doubtless due to his presence immediately behind her and the effect of his physical assistance. It was also acquiring, in response to the variable pressure of his hands upon her breasts, a certain vocal accompaniment not ordinarily associated with meditation - a sighing and moaning which suggested the onslaught of sensual abandon. He wondered whether he hadn't better draw away from her before he got too physically involved. But, as though in anticipation of some such retreat, Mrs Evans suddenly reached her hands back behind herself and unclipped her bra, with the inevitable consequence that, following further promptings on her part, it slid away from her breasts, leaving his hands stranded, as it were, on the heaving mounds of naked flesh. "In ... and ... out, in ... and ... out" he continued, growing all the time more excited and sensuously committed to her physical beauty himself.

Yet now that he felt the soft, smooth surface of her naked breasts against his fingers, it was only a matter of time, more precisely a few seconds, before they closed over her nipples and he proceeded to caress them gently and slowly, backwards and forwards, to the mounting accompaniment, now somewhat more uninhibited, of her sighings and moanings. Already she had turned her head back towards him, resting it on his nearest shoulder, and he found himself kissing her neck and shoulder blade, becoming ever more turned-on by the sweet perfume behind her ears. From the neck to the cheek, the cheek to the mouth, and the mouth to the tongue ... required only a slight adjustment of their respective limbs, an adjustment which made it perfectly beyond doubt that he had been successfully seduced by Mrs Evans and was now unequivocally committed to exploring the potential for sensual gratification which her maturely attractive body held out to him.

"Ah, Matthew, you shouldn't ...” she gently reproved him, as he became progressively bolder, stretching out a hand to caress her between the thighs while simultaneously applying his tongue to the protruding nipple of one of her breasts. "You mustn't do this," she added. "I thought you were teaching me to meditate, to gain spiritual insight. You're not going to fuck me surely, not after what you said you'd do? Really, Matthew, I don't know how ..."

But he had already removed from her heaving body the final flimsy obstacle to his sexual objective, and was now struggling to remove his own rather more substantial obstacles to it, whilst endeavouring to maintain the impetus of his carnal assault and thus keep her sexually aroused. He knew enough about the devil in woman not to be impressed by Mrs Evans' low-key reproaches, which seemed, in any case, specifically designed to channel and further inflame his passion. He knew exactly what she wanted and, as much from the promptings of the demon in himself as from the devil in her, he intended to let her have it, to make her squirm in an ecstasy of sensual abandon, forgetting who or where she was and even who she was with. If her husband, with his failing health, had been unable to satisfy her, then Matthew Pearce would make doubly sure he did, applying to her body the physical commitment which recent circumstances had prevented him from applying to Gwen. He wouldn't let her go until he had fully expended himself on her, avenging himself not only on her beauty but on her husband as well - indeed, on the entire bourgeois establishment of which this woman was but an epitome, a microcosm of the whole. If it was sensuality she was really after, he would do his level best to make sure she got it, even if he had to go through hell in the process!

"Ah, Matthew ..." she was moaning as, freed from his constricting jeans and underpants, he applied himself to her distended sex with a vigour he never suspected himself capable of, so long was it since he had really screwed a woman - a real sensuous woman and not a frigid simulacrum of one, like Gwen. "You'll kill me, Matthew. You'll break me. Ah, no, not so violently, not so deeply!" Mrs Evans feebly protested. "My God, I never thought you'd be so virile! You'll rupture me. Ah, free me, take me, do it harder, Matthew! Still more, aaaaahhhgh ..." Her delirium mounted in intensity, reached a peak of unintelligibility, and slowly trailed off after she had succumbed to her orgasm and been freed from the mounting tension which his thrusts, ever quicker and deeper, imperiously inspired. She took his climax with scarcely a murmur, submerged, as she already was, in a sea of warm sensual gratification. Her body had become sex from head to feet, not just in the pubic region where it was focused. Rather, it had been subtly diffused throughout her, like a ray of bright sunshine, causing sensations she hadn't experienced in years to float to the surface and bask in its gentle warmth. She was left agreeably speechless as his passion reached its consummation and began to ebb away, gradually withdrawing from her as from a foreign beach. It was withdrawing, yes, but it had left its mark on her, left the imprint of its flow! She hadn't known this degree of cathartic release in years. She could hardly recognize herself. "Don't leave me, darling," she murmured, reaching out a restraining hand to her lover's neck as he began to disengage himself from her tender flesh. She was afraid that his total withdrawal would cause her to plunge back into the memory of her old self, the self from which she had temporarily escaped.

Gently he bent down over her again and kissed her lengthily on the mouth, allowing his tongue to meet hers in a whirlpool of sensual caressing. He felt that he could choke her with the force of his pressure on her tongue; that, by a renewed burst of passion, he could drive his tongue down her throat whilst simultaneously driving his penis deeper into her cleft vagina under the perverse notion that the one would eventually meet-up with the other somewhere in the pit of her stomach, and so bring him into the utmost physical and even metaphysical intimacy with her. It was as though, with the python-like tightening of her grip about him and his sexual responses to it, they were desperately trying to merge their separate bodies into one writhing being, to become fused together in an ecstasy of undifferentiated carnality. But, of course, he knew there were strict limits to the degree of his carnal commitment to her which could not be transgressed without the desire for increased sexual gratification turning into a form of sadism, so he wisely refrained from choking her with his tongue and began, instead, to playfully caress it in response to her wishes. He, too, was afraid to abandon her and face-up, albeit from a different angle, to the immediate consequences of his actions. It was easier, for the time being, to sample a little more of her body, to play along with the pretence of innocence which now prevailed between them.

Yet it wasn't long before he felt obliged to desist from his attentions and repulse her renewed attempt to kindle the dying embers of his passion. The weariness of having expended oneself and done what there was to do with a woman of her sort had come upon him, rendering the pursuit of further pleasure all but impossible. The limit of sensual gratification had been reached. Beyond it, barring the possibility of sadism, there was only the madness and futility of superfluous kissings and fondlings, of a mere physical engagement without enthusiasm or passion, a fall from metaphysical grace. Sated as he now was, her body had suddenly become a repugnant thing to him, unable to perpetuate further pleasure.

He pushed her unreasonably imploring hands away from himself and stumbled towards his clothes, which lay heaped together on the floor not far from hers. He got dressed quickly and quietly, almost self-consciously ashamed of his nudity and the concomitant fact that he was, after all, a separate person, different and remote. He didn't want his body to be exposed as the repugnant thing Mrs Evans' body had suddenly become to him. He was conscious of a sort of fall from spiritual grace. Conscious, too, that he had allowed himself to be seduced by her at the very time when he was most intent upon teaching her to meditate. It came as a kind of condemnatory blow to him, this secondary consciousness, and made him feel both ashamed and humiliated. It was as though the illusion of his spiritual probity had been shattered by the ease with which Mrs Evans had achieved her carnal objectives. Hitherto, no such temptation had presented itself, least of all from an attractive married woman, and he was accordingly able to sustain a comforting belief in the earnestness of his spiritual endeavour and the commendable extent of his fidelity to it. Yet now that he had succumbed to the flesh at the very time when he ought to have shown loyalty to the spirit, he was less confident that he was in fact as spiritually earnest as he had previously imagined himself to be! Perhaps, on the other hand, his spiritual pretensions were largely a consequence of the regrettable fact that social, professional, ideological, and financial circumstances had not hitherto particularly favoured his romantic or sex life, making it necessary for him to seek compensation for and oblivion from his solitary plight in spiritual strivings?

No, that couldn't be! He refused to acknowledge the possibility! It was far too humiliating, altogether too self-effacing! He had always known himself to be a predominantly spiritual being, an extreme ectomorph, or thin man, with intellectual motivations. There could be no question of his being confounded with L'homme moyen sensuel, the average sensual man. But why, then, had he succumbed to Mrs Evans' seductive influence with so little hesitation or resistance? Was it simply because of her exceptional good-looks? Or was it because of the ten-year age gap between them which, besides exciting his curiosity, endowed her with a sort of moral authority over him? Or was it, perhaps, because of her bourgeois status and a correlative desire, on his part, to avenge himself on her in some way, either on account of her husband or Gwen or indeed, by association, the bourgeois establishment in general? In all probability, all three considerations had played a part and possibly one or two others besides, though he couldn't determine to what extent. All he knew for certain was that he felt somewhat ashamed of himself and deeply humiliated by what he had done. If his religious pretensions could be shattered so easily, what hope was there that he could prevent the same thing from happening again in future, either with Mrs Evans or someone like her?

Indeed, how would those pretensions now appear to the woman herself, she who had so easily succeeded in overcoming them? How convinced would she be, on the evidence of his carnal appetite, that he was in fact as spiritual as, largely through his paintings and sculptures, he made himself out to be? She would probably be laughing at him behind his back, mocking him for his inconsistencies. Yes, why not? Hadn't she won a victory over him and exploited his moral weakness at the very time when it would be most vulnerable to attack, when his spiritual pretensions were most clearly exposed and a victory over them prove correspondingly more gratifying? Yes, indeed she had! Her sensuality had overcome his spirituality at the very moment when it was most exposed to its own pretensions and had gobbled it up - lock, stock, and fucking barrel. No wonder she had implored him to stay with her longer!

Turning round to face her, he saw, with resentful eyes, that she had got to her feet and was in the process of getting dressed, pulling her slender briefs into place over the mound of dark pubic hair that crowned her sex. She appeared perfectly content with herself, which wasn't altogether surprising really, considering that she had got what she wanted. To a certain extent she had no further need of him, just as he had no further need of her. No further sexual need, at any rate; though he couldn't help admiring the ample bulk of her thighs and the generous curve of her hips, as she lowered her dress over her head preparatory to covering them. There could be no denying her physical attractiveness!

She smiled warmly at him as she eased her dress back into place and invited him, with an appropriate twist on her heels, to zip her up, which he obligingly did, though not before taking one last lingering look at her smooth back, the smooth nature of which both charmed and fascinated him. "You aren't angry with me, are you?" she asked, turning around to face him and placing an affectionate, almost maternal hand on his arm.

"Of course not!" he automatically replied, a faint blush suffusing his cheeks in telltale self-abnegation, as he fought against the sordid temptation to reveal what he really felt. It was no use being frank with her.

"And not angry with yourself, I trust?" she inquired.

"No."

"Good! That's as it should be. I was a little worried about you actually."

"Oh, in what way?"

Mrs Evans resumed her warm, teasing smile and lightly squeezed his arm, as though to kindle a spark of his former passion from it. "About the extent of your spiritual commitment principally," she revealed. "The degree of your spiritual earnestness."

Matthew blushed more deeply, almost like a shy adolescent. "I don't quite understand," he said.

"Well, I thought perhaps you were a little too spiritual for your own good, a little too ascetically earnest," Mrs Evans informed him, vaguely waving a hand in the direction of the paintings and sculptures to their right. "I was afraid, from the nature of your work, that you were rather too preoccupied with transcendentalism, virtually obsessed by it. But I'm glad to say that you aren't altogether immune to fleshy enticements, and that I was accordingly able to broaden your horizon a little. And I'm no-less glad to say that you gave me more sexual satisfaction than my husband has done, over the past five or six years. You're not at all a bad lover, actually."

Matthew didn't know whether to be grateful for this unexpectedly frank piece of information or further ashamed of himself, so overwhelmed was he by conflicting emotions. To some extent it delivered him from a number of pessimistic suppositions concerning himself or, rather, his sexual performance. But, all the same, it didn't exactly flatter his spiritual integrity! It was like a kiss and a slap on the face at the same time. He had been set up as a lover, only to be knocked down as a sage. Her frankness disarmed him.

"Yet all these doves and meditating figures had me worried for a time, I must confess," Mrs Evans resumed, ignoring his ambivalent facial expression, "and got me to thinking that perhaps you weren't really a man at all but a kind of deity or angel or something. At least I now know that, even with all your transcendental loyalties and noble strivings, you're essentially a man, and a jolly good one too! For what is man, after all, but a creature balanced between the sensual and the spiritual in harmony with the laws of what mankind should be?"

Matthew winced perceptibly with this paradoxical comment. For it was almost painful for him to have to listen to it. "Man isn't a creature that's fixed in its ways or being, like an animal," he sternly countered, "but an evolutionary experiment, a continuous transformation. If he began as a beast, he must end as a god. Or, to put it more concretely, he must slough off more and more of his beastliness as he evolves towards a higher state of being, one in which only the spiritual counts for anything."

"Now you're talking nonsense!" Mrs Evans opined half-jokingly. "You're trying to contradict your own manhood no sooner than five minutes after I've had first-hand experience of it."

"Not at all!" Matthew protested. "I'm merely saying that this balance you refer to is an illusion, a temporary situation, and that man needn't necessarily be forced into any particular mould." Yet, once again, he realized that he was speaking to a bourgeois, a species of 'man' whose mean it was to be balanced in the aforesaid manner, and that she could no more be expected to share his view than he ... hers. What she understood by 'man' was essentially egocentric man, man in his prime as man - the middle stage in the spectrum of human evolution. It was the mean of D.H. Lawrence, as of Rampion, the Lawrence-like character in Huxley's Point Counter Point, a mean that signified a sensual/spiritual integrity, an all-roundedness of being which fought shy of saints and sinners alike, being prepared to brand all those who didn't or couldn't subscribe to its dualistic integrity as failures or perverts. To go beyond the dualistic mean was, to its devotees, just as bad as, if not worse than, failing to come up to it. Either way, one would not be a man, which, in a sense, was true. That is to say, one would not be man in his prime as man - a bourgeois. No, one would be either an early or a late man, a subman or a superman. If early, then one would be lopsided on the side of the subconscious and thus ... predominantly sensual, fundamentally pagan. If late, on the other hand, one would be lopsided on the side of the superconscious and thus ... predominantly spiritual, essentially transcendental. The subman, being closer to the beasts, would be inferior to the balanced, egocentric man. The superman, being closer to the godlike, would be his superior. Now, naturally, if one is in-between these two extremes one isn't going to endorse the superiority of the spiritually lopsided man, even if, at least tacitly, one inclines to look down upon the pagan. No, as a bourgeois, one remains loyal to oneself, since anything else would be self-defeating.

Accordingly one dismisses the lopsided as failures or perverts, content with the assumption that the mean is ever dualistic and cannot be bettered. Yet the fact is that, contrary to the bourgeois' complacent entrenchment in relativity, it can and is being bettered, and by no less than the spiritually lopsided! If they are not yet godly, testifying to the complete sovereignty of the superconscious over the subconscious, they are at least on the road to eventually becoming such, being a good deal closer to the culmination of human evolution in the millennial Beyond than ever their egocentric detractors or bourgeois predecessors were, and consequently of a more fortunate disposition.

But Matthew had to admit to himself that such knowledge was hardly likely to make a profound impression on Mrs Evans, who seemed to be too resigned to the dualistic mean to have any use for whatever stood above it. And so he refrained from launching out in defence of lopsided spirituality, contenting himself, instead, with an ironic smile and shrug of the shoulders, as though to impress upon her the futility of their arguing about it. Besides, hadn't his passion for her body demonstrated that he was not all that far removed from such a balanced dualism himself, but only incipiently transcendental or, at any rate, of a consciousness which was probably compounded of no more than two-thirds superconscious mind and one-third subconscious mind, leaving room for a fair amount of sensuality? As it happened, he wasn't exactly in the strongest of positions to defend transcendentalism from the claims of dualism. Neither, for that matter, were the vast majority of latter-day transcendentalists, who were probably little further advanced than himself along the long and narrow road that led to the post-human millennium, and thus to the possibility of ultimate salvation. Yet at least one had the consolation of knowing that one belonged to a class of persons which would eventually reach paradise, even if it took a number of decades or even centuries.

Meanwhile Mrs Evans had put on her black high-heels, straightened her nylon stockings, and tidied her hair, using the small portable mirror she habitually carried in her handbag to check and modify her facial appearance into the bargain. She seemed to have grown tired of discussing the nature of man too, since more interested in herself and the application of a smear or two of lipstick to her sensuously pouting lips. Then she turned back to Matthew and, with gentle application of a paper tissue, wiped some lipstick from his face, commenting all the while on his funny appearance. "You could be taken for some kind of half-arsed punk," she joked in quasi-American fashion, as the last traces of its smear were gently removed from his cheeks.

For an instant he wanted to kiss her anew, so attractive did she seem all of a sudden. But he realized that he would only succeed in getting her to reciprocate and thereby mess-up his face all over again.

"Now we wouldn't want Gwen to discover you've been making love to a woman who wears bright-red lipstick, would we?" she added, with a teasingly conspiratorial look in her eyes.

"No, I guess not," he conceded. "Especially when that woman was her mother."

"Quite!" Mrs Evans agreed. "It wouldn't help to improve your relationship any." She turned away from him and, with nervous hesitation, duly returned the crumpled, lipstick-smeared tissue to her handbag. Her face in profile appeared exquisitely refined, more so than her daughter's ever did. A sudden beam of light shooting through the window caused the bright red of her dress to be momentarily intensified, making it appear as though she were on fire. A hairgrip on her piled-up mass of hair sparkled like a diamond. She turned back towards him, losing some of the otherworldly significance which the sun had gratuitously and even paradoxically granted her. "Now then," she murmured, "what about that cup of tea you promised me earlier?"