CHAPTER NINE

It was in mid-September, a week or two after the beginning of the new school term, that Linda Daniels literally responded to Matthew's invitation to visit him, whenever she liked, by calling at his Highgate flat, one fine evening, following a brief pre-arrangement over the phone. To Matthew's satisfaction it happened to be an evening when Gwen had decided to stay at home to mark school work, while to Linda's satisfaction it happened to be an evening when her husband had apparently gone to a journalist's conference, leaving her relatively free to please herself.

Thus it was to their mutual satisfaction that Matthew answered the door to his small ground-floor flat. He had so looked forward to seeing her again, and she, for her part, had not been without a similar desire in regard to him - one fostered as much on her interest in modern art as on a need to get away from the oppressive conservatism of Peter Daniels and expand her somewhat limited social horizons, which, until then, had been mostly confined to the conflicting currents of fellow-teachers and journalistic colleagues of her husband. So the advent of Matthew into her life, coming completely out-of-the-blue, wasn't without its secret allurements, especially as she'd had so little contact with anyone even remotely resembling him in the past.

"Did you tell Gwen you'd be coming up here this evening?" he asked, as soon as she was comfortably seated in one of the two small armchairs in his living room.

"In point of fact, I hardly saw her at all today," Linda confessed, blushing slightly. "But when she did briefly cross my path, I made no mention of any intention of visiting you. Why, are you afraid she might disapprove?"

He smiled dismissively in response to her ironic humour, and said: "No, but I'd rather she wasn't given grounds for becoming jealous, that's all. You never know how she might decide to take it out on me in future."

Linda giggled a bit. "Perhaps she's already taking it out on you by staying in tonight," she remarked.

"What d'you mean?" he ejaculated, wondering if she could have found out about Mrs Evans through Gwen or something.

"Oh, nothing in particular," Linda chuckled. "Just a little private joke. Though, now I come to think of it, she did seem somewhat distant and ... abstracted today. Yes, it was as if something was troubling her and she didn't want to discuss it or commit herself to the usual social camaraderie which is all the time going on between her and various other members of the teaching staff, myself included. I recall someone else remarking that she wasn't quite her usual self."

Matthew became puzzled and vaguely worried on Gwen's behalf. "Maybe she still hasn't got used to being back to school," he suggested half-facetiously.

"Yes, that could be it," said Linda, nodding ironically. "It's certainly the case with me, at any rate! However, let's not discuss school now. I usually try to forget about my work in the evenings."

"I'm sure you do," he sympathetically responded, smiling. "What would you like to drink - a beer or a cola?"

"I think I'll have a beer," she answered, without much hesitation.

Matthew disappeared into the kitchen and, in view of the fact that Linda was wearing a skirt, came back with two full glasses of lager in his hands. There then ensued a brief silence while they tasted their respective drinks, though it wasn't that often he had recourse to anything alcoholic these days, since he preferred cola in view of his transcendental predilections.

"Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?" Linda inquired of him in due course, the lager evidently to her taste.

"Not at all," he replied, licking some froth from his upper lip.

The P.E. teacher cleared her throat and swallowed hard, so to speak. "Are you in love with Gwen?" she asked.

The artist almost choked with astonishment. "Good God, no!" he exclaimed impulsively.

"I see." Linda seemed slightly relieved.

"Why, were you afraid I might be?"

"No, not specifically. Though, to be honest, I didn't think you were."

Matthew gently smiled his approval. "And what about you?" he asked. "Are you in love with your husband?"

"No, although there was a time, shortly before and after our marriage, when I thought I was. But, these days, I rather doubt it." She felt consumed, all of a sudden, by a piercing stab of self-pity and remorse, took a large gulp of beer, as though to drown her feelings, and stared ruefully at the afghan carpet just in front of her feet.

"Somehow I didn't think that you and he were really cut-out for each other," Matthew opined, desiring to break the slightly oppressive silence which had fallen between them, like a ton-weight of psychological debris. "You strike me as being an altogether more radical person. Or perhaps I should say less conservative?" he added, as an afterthought.

Linda had to smile at this remark, which struck her as slightly impertinent. "Frankly, I don't consider myself at all conservative - at any rate, not politically," she revealed. "On the contrary, my political bias tends towards the Left, but such a bias isn't encouraged by my husband, as you well know. Unfortunately, I only discovered that after I'd married him. Had I realized what his true inclinations were before our marriage, I would never even have got engaged to the sod!"

"How come you got involved with him in the first place?" Matthew wanted to know, becoming intrigued by the apparent implausibility of their marriage.

"Well, I had the ill-fortune, I can now say, to be invited along to a party, shortly after I'd graduated from college, at which we met," Linda confessed, blushing faintly in spite of her apparent calm, "and as he rather took a fancy to me and was quite good-looking, I allowed things to develop from there. Coming from a relatively poor background, both my parents being Jamaican immigrants, I allowed myself to become foolishly impressed by his wealth and social status. For I thought it would open up new doors to me and at last bring happiness within my grasp. His father was a prosperous banker actually, and when he died, a few years ago, he left most of his wealth to Peter, including a large detached house in Dulwich. Personally, I dislike the place because it's too big and requires so much upkeep. But since I'd never lived in anything even remotely resembling such a place before, I suppose it appealed to my curiosity and sense of adventure, not to mention my pressing desire to escape from the rather cramped flat I'd been sharing with a couple of fellow-undergraduates. So I plunged into the deep end, as it were, only to belatedly discover that I couldn't swim there. Unfortunately there's a lot of me that I have to suppress when in Peter's company, including my penchant for modern art. Yet even if I am of a relatively socialistic disposition, I can't pretend that I'm as left-wing as you seemed to be when in conversation with him the other week. I don't think I could go as far as sanctioning purges or dictatorships!"

Matthew smiled understandingly and quaffed back some more beer. He was by no means surprised to hear this, since it stood to reason that the conservative environment in which she lived wouldn't permit her bias for socialism to develop particularly far. The worldly influence of the monied bourgeoisie would always be around her, thwarting her political development. Given a change of environment for the better, that is to say, within a less materialistic and naturalistic context, one needn't be surprised if her political orientation underwent a corresponding transformation, and thus became more radical. As things stood, however, she was fundamentally a victim of her suburban milieu, and consequently what she said would have to be evaluated in terms of that. It wasn't something which any radical socialist need be impressed by, anyway. "Well, most of what I said to your husband was inspired by an uncharitable impulse to shock and bewilder him," the artist at length confessed, placing the by-now near-empty beer glass by the side of his chair, "in that I took an immediate dislike to the bugger and thought it fitting to display my contempt for his politics. I didn't imagine that he'd feel very comfortable, under the circumstances of my professed allegiance to socialism, so I tried my best to make him feel damned uncomfortable. Which, as you'll doubtless recall, he most certainly did feel after a while!"

"Yes, you needn't remind me," sighed Linda, a mock frown in attendance. "Had it not been for my restraining influence, he'd probably have come to blows with you or stamped out of the room or something. For I'd never seen him lose his cool so quickly before."

"How flattering for me!" exclaimed Matthew, feeling perversely proud of himself. "Still, I had to impress upon him my extreme distaste for his politics somehow, and an unabashed advocacy of something closer to what I believe in seemed to me the best way of doing so. It's good to speak out, to give one's thoughts free rein when the need or opportunity presents itself.... Not that I believe in free speech as such. Oh, no! The society I want to see come about certainly wouldn't encourage people of a reactionary turn-of-mind to air their capitalist views - assuming there were any such people left. But the society in which we're living at present hasn't evolved to a stage where the capitalist/socialist dichotomy which characterizes it has been transcended in favour of socialism, or ownership of the means of production by a politically sovereign proletariat. And so a situation prevails in which the mouthpieces of the bourgeois right continue to promulgate their capitalist policies at the proletariat's expense. Yet, one way or another, the future belongs to the proletariat, and consequently you can rest assured that the said mouthpieces won't be able to continue in their well-worn tracks for ever. At present, however, free speech still prevails, and so one is obliged to tolerate the views of people whose politics run contrary to one's own and who, by their grasp on power, effectively prevent the advent of a better and fairer society - one in which there are no privately owned firms but only publicly owned ones, in line with the impersonality of the Holy Ghost. Although the balance of free speech is tipped against people like us, that's no reason why we should abdicate our principles and better knowledge to suit the vested interests of a fundamentally immoral status quo, in which some individuals can become extremely wealthy, while the great majority of people languish in abject poverty and neglect. The struggle for a better world can only be an uphill one, since contrary to the materialistic grain of life ... with its predatory roots, and therefore it behoves us to carry-on with it, no matter how tough the going in this respect. Good things take time, after all, and we cannot expect a social revolution to come about without an immense struggle, one of probably global dimensions."

He realized, by now, that he must have sounded somewhat pompous, if not conceited, to her. Yet, despite his intense dislike of entering into political discussions with women, he knew that her husband's extreme conservatism had, even in recollection, carried him away in a torrent of righteous indignation ... such as he usually succumbed to within the concealed confines of his mind. When such a torrent assailed him, as unfortunately it all-too-often did these days, he would end-up cursing his lucidity and status as an ideological outsider, an Irish-born though English-raised outsider who, owing to circumstances which had catapulted him through both a Catholic and a Protestant upbringing in painful succession, could take neither the Father nor Christ seriously but only the Holy Ghost, the third and, as yet, unrealized part of the Trinity, each of whose components he believed to be subdivisible into autocratic, democratic, and theocratic parts, with Communism signifying the autocracy of the Holy Ghost no less than Social Democracy its democracy and, for all he knew, some kind of socialistic transcendentalism its future theocracy. He would see himself as a kind of martyr and dissident, obliged, through ideological lucidity, to turn his gaze towards a brighter future and take the existing state-of-affairs, with its liberal democracy of Christ and protestant theocracy of Christ (the Cromwellian autocracy of Christ having been consigned to the rubbish heap of history some three centuries ago), with a considerable pinch of sceptical salt. He couldn't enter into the spirit of this existing state-of-affairs - it just wasn't for him, the Christic British never having done much for his native land, neither autocratically, democratically, nor theocratically. All he could do was look down on it from what he regarded, not without moral justification, as a higher vantage-point, namely that of the Holy Ghost, and hope that, one day, it would be swept away, so that the more progressive and enlightened people could be delivered from their current political spleen, and enter into a positive relationship to society which would both redeem and save them.

However, Matthew was anxious not to spoil the rest of the evening for both Linda and himself with any more such weighty talk, being mindful, by the rather pained expression on the young P.E. teacher's ordinarily passive face, that most of what he had said must have sounded somewhat strange to someone who lived in a detached house and, despite an inclination towards socialism, was the recipient of much conservative influence. No doubt, she would have come to appreciate it better had she been living with him for any length of time! For there was certainly something about her that suggested a kindred spirit. But she was a kindred spirit, alas, who had come to experience such a dissimilar pattern of environmental and social influence, in recent days, that one might have taken her for a bourgeois philistine, might have taken her for someone whose spiritual orientation was fundamentally contrary to and, hence, incompatible with one's own - not perhaps diametrically opposed to it (for she wasn't an aristocrat and therefore aligned with either the royalist autocracy, the peerist democracy, or the anglo-catholic theocracy of the Father), but certainly of an order which could never be transmuted into something higher! However, bearing in mind her dissatisfaction with her husband's conservative lifestyle, it seemed indisputable that Linda Daniels was essentially a proletarian intellectual who'd had the grave misfortune, through her exceptionally fine looks, to get herself tied-up with a damned bourgeois, a man who related, in his parliamentary disposition, to the democracy of Christ. At least she was progressive rather than reactionary.

"Can I get you another beer?" Matthew offered, by way of seeking to conciliate her in some measure. For he didn't like to see her consumed with self-pity.

"Yes, I'd like that very much," she said, holding out her glass to him.

Within less than a minute he was back from the kitchen with two further full glasses of ice-cold lager, the fridge being well-stocked with cans of beer and soft drinks at present. Returning to his armchair, he asked: "Does your husband drink regularly?"

"No, not in my company," she replied. "But he does drink both light ale and wine quite heavily at times. Like his intellectual hero, Oswald Spengler."

"Who also smoked cigars, I believe?"

"Well, fortunately, Peter smokes nothing worse than small cigars, so I don't have to put-up with too much nasal inconvenience or tobacco pollution - not at table, at any rate! His drinking and smoking mostly take place in private, or in the company of some of his journalistic colleagues from 'The Cultural Heritage', who occasionally pay us a visit."

Matthew self-consciously gulped down a rather large mouthful of beer, since the habit of drinking from a glass was foreign to him these days, and he felt uncomfortably bourgeois in a liberal sort of way, which reduced him, in his own estimation, to the level of Peter Daniels or, at least, to how he supposed Daniels would drink. Nevertheless, he managed to shrug off his subjective qualm sufficiently to be able to ask: "And are the people who contribute towards this 'Cultural Heritage', or whatever its called, all like himself, meaning principally strait-laced conservatives?"

"Mostly," Linda admitted, smiling in her customary ironic fashion. "Though they aren't all neo-Nazi, Bible-punching, tight-lipped paragons of bourgeois respectability, by any means! One or two of them are even dandy in appearance and behaviour. I mean, Peter was himself a kind of dandy at one time, always wearing bright velvet suits and sporting flash silk ties. However, the influence of Spengler and various other right-wing intellectuals evidently diminished his taste for such garish apparel. But he was decidedly beau himself before his conversion to a sort of political activism. He admired the Decadents and Symbolists immensely, and was all for turning himself into a late twentieth-century version of Oscar Wilde, albeit a Wilde minus the socialism. His sophisticated aestheticism even extended to an admiration of Huysmans' Against Nature, which, for a time, he regarded as a kind of Bible. Fortunately, he never went quite as far as its reactionary protagonist, Des Esseintes, in his disdain for and rebellion against modern trends. But it's not altogether surprising that he subsequently gravitated from Huysmans to Spengler and took refuge in The Decline of the West. After all, the lamentation over the collapse of Western and, in particular, Catholic culture, in the last chapter of Against Nature, isn't exactly irrelevant to the latter work, is it?"

"No, I guess not," Matthew conceded, endeavouring to recall the said chapter to mind; for he was in fact familiar, through past reading, with Huysmans. "But I'm surprised to learn that your husband was a kind of dandy," he continued, his mind turning somersaults of intellectual daring, as it began to conjecture the likelihood of a bourgeois dandy appertaining to the bureaucracy of Christ in worldly femininity. "I would never have suspected such from his appearance and conversation last week. He looked very plain and sounded even plainer. I couldn't detect anything effeminate about him. It seems that Spengler must have made a man of him."

"Yes, up to a point," Linda confirmed, smiling. "Though he still wears a bright velvet suit from time to time and indulges in a limited amount of aestheticism, including a taste for various fin-de-siècle artists and writers. Then there are twentieth-century aesthetes like Drieu La Rochelle and Phillippe Jullian for whom he still has a taste. He recently read the latter's book on the Symbolists."

Matthew winced slightly. He didn't care much for the Symbolists personally, nor for the Aesthetes and Decadents, whose pseudo-aristocratic refinements and cultural snobbery struck him as constituting but another instance of the reactionary. Even Baudelaire, that arch-dandy and forerunner of fin-de-siècle decadence, had been tarred by the aristocratic brush. Excellent as an advocate of the modern, a champion of the new in art, he was yet tied to the past in a way which Zola, with his strong advocacy of socialist progress, never had been. He would have preferred Schopenhauer or Nietzsche to Hegel or Marx, the monarchical system to the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, if he was politically reactionary, he was spiritually progressive, a believer in the new, the city, the anti-natural, the contemplative - in a word, the transcendent. And so Matthew found himself forced into an ambivalence of mind over him - as, for that matter, over most of his decadent successors, whom he admired so far as the anti-natural, and hence pro-artificial, was concerned, but despised for their allegiance to the aristocratic.

The cult of the artificial - witness Wilde and Huysmans - was thoroughly modern and indicative of spiritual progress, of a sophisticated response to large-scale urban civilization. But the snobbish belief in and insistence on caste, the emphasis on aristocratic detachment and privilege, was somewhat antiquated, and thus indicative of social regress and rebellion against the city. To have been artificial and socialist, like Oscar Wilde, seemed to him a more consistent approach to the problem of modernity than that adopted by, say, Mallarmé, Huysmans, Pater, or, indeed, Baudelaire himself. On the other hand, there were those who were socialist or, at any rate, in favour of socialism, but not artificial, like Zola and Nordau, and even some who, strictly speaking, were neither socialist nor artificial, like the great Leo Tolstoy, who of course became a Christian, if a rather anarchic one!

"I used to be a bit of an aesthete myself, at one time, though that was before my conversion to transcendentalism and its modernist implications," Matthew confessed, blushing faintly from recollective shame of the fact that he had once worn purple pants and written short lyric poems in deference to female beauty, which subsequently served as a springboard to art. "Nowadays, however, I try not to have anything to do with works of art, whether literary, musical, or plastic, that pertain to the pre-modern. I find they are largely irrelevant to me, since somewhat anachronistic. Either they're too sensuous or too Christian or too dualistic or too romantic or too naturalist or something of the kind. They don't speak to me personally - unlike, for example, the abstract works of Piet Mondrian and Ben Nicholson. They would only confuse me and weaken my modernism in some way, were I to become seriously involved with them. So, as a rule, I confine myself to twentieth-century art, occasionally going back as far as the late-nineteenth century, but rarely or never beyond. I imbibe whatever speaks to the man of the big city - the post-cultural man of a superconscious bias. 'The truly modern artist', wrote Mondrian in 1918, 'sees the metropolis as the supreme form of abstract life; it stands closer to him than Nature.' And, in consequence, whatever he does should pertain to the anti-natural and pro-spiritual, whether it is to exclude representational elements from his canvas or to advocate, in suitably modern terms, the importance of light. He must avoid the reactionary at all costs, and one of the best ways of ensuring that he does so ... is to turn his gaze away from the art of the past and concentrate solely on the contemporary. Not an easy thing to do, by any means, since I often feel tempted to study paintings by Rubens, Rembrandt, Titian, Raphael, Tintoretto, etc., but certainly not impossible! In the future, it will doubtless come more easily. But, at present, what with so much transitional activity going on around us all the time, it's often an uphill struggle. After all, none of us is, as yet, that transcendental, even granted all the spiritual progress which has been made during the course of the past century. We all have reactionary tendencies of one sort and degree or another, even if only in terms of preferring hardbacks to paperbacks or materialistic architecture to idealistic architecture. And how many of us are fully committed to the idea of laser beams as the relevant weapons for transcendental man?"

"Not I, for one!" Linda replied, with a facial show of distaste for the subject.

"No, but the fact is that the use of light for military purposes corresponds to our growing allegiance to the spiritual, and must inevitably come to replace the old, materialistic modes of weaponry," Matthew averred confidently. "Intensified beams of light would certainly constitute a more transcendental mode of defence than the use of, say, bullets or missiles. However, all that is simply by way of saying that, as yet, we're by no means as transcendentalist as we might be and will doubtless eventually become. We still have a long way to go to the post-human millennium, the coming time of a transcendental lead!"

"In certain respects, that's probably just as well," Linda averred. "Though I'm still not quite sure what this post-human millennium of yours exactly signifies?"

"Simply the ultimate point of spiritual triumph, the ultimate triumph, on earth, of the spiritual principle," Matthew informed her, "and thus the reign of light, peace, bliss - in a word, Heaven. Yes, that's what it signifies to me, at any rate! A kind of transcendent state in which man, having thrown off the last vestiges of his traditional dualism and thereby transcended nature, becomes godly, becomes something above and beyond man - as far above dualistic man as that man was above the beasts. But such a metamorphosis is by no means in sight at present, even given the recent spurt in spiritual progress. All we can be certain of is that man is a phenomenon in the process of evolving towards something greater, not a fixed form. The changes he creates in his environment guarantee that he continues to evolve, not remain static like a beast. The difference between us and the caveman is really quite considerable. Unlike him, we aren't living under a subconscious dominion but have evolved to a point, the other side of the ego, where the superconscious increasingly prevails."

"And so the chances are that we'll evolve even further and eventually enter a post-human millennium?" Linda deduced with, in spite of herself, a hint of scepticism in her voice.

"I can't see why not," Matthew affirmed, smiling optimistically. "Unless, of course, we're all killed in a nuclear apocalypse and no-one survives to continue our progress. Personally, however, I'd find that very difficult to believe. After all, we haven't evolved this far just to blow ourselves to smithereens, have we? Nuclear weapons may be terrible things but, given our transcendental progress generally, they would seem to be relative to the times, to an age which is splitting the atom and thus effectively engaged in the process of severing the proletariat from bourgeois and/or aristocratic control. It's highly unlikely that any future world war would be waged solely with conventional weapons anyway, since, quite apart from the fact that one couldn't risk allowing one's own nuclear installations to be overrun, they would be largely irrelevant to the global nature of the conflict and inadequate, moreover, for purposes of permitting one side to achieve an ascendancy over the other."

"Yes, I suppose so," Linda wearily conceded, resigning herself, it seemed, to the logic of post-atomic modernity. However, it wasn't a subject she particularly cared to dwell on, not really believing in the possibility of future world wars anyway, least of all of a nuclear order, so she made an effort to find something more congenial and, catching sight of an abstract painting behind Matthew's head, inquired of him whether it was one of his works.

"Actually it's a variation on one of Mondrian's paintings, based on a square and colour composition," the artist replied on what sounded like a more cheerful note, "like the one over there in fact." He pointed to a small painting hung above a table across to Linda's right, which was of similar abstract design. "I did them both earlier in the year, principally because I couldn't get hold of an original Mondrian and wanted at least a copy or a variation on one of his themes to-hand. I flatter myself to think that they could be mistaken for the genuine article, and a number of people have in fact subsequently mistaken them for it."

"Really?" Linda exclaimed, looking intently from the one to the other. She was indeed intrigued by them. Their simplicity and purity of colour endowed them with a certain classicism which she found agreeably reassuring. They blended-in well with the overall neatness and cleanliness of the room, which was itself mostly in white, like an Ivres Klein void. "You evidently think very highly of Mondrian's art," she at length remarked, refocusing her increasingly beer-clouded attention upon him.

"Yes, that has to be admitted. In fact, I regard him as the finest painter of the early-twentieth century, the most consistently and systematically modern painter."

"Even finer than Ben Nicholson?"

"Yes, though not perhaps a great deal so! Despite his considerable achievement, however, Nicholson wasn't as systematically abstract or transcendentalist, as his drawings, usually done in a kind of minimalist representational style often focusing on landscapes, adequately demonstrate. Then, of course, his reliefs, which are undoubtedly his main claim to fame, could be described as a sort of cross between painting and sculpture rather than pure painting. Maybe even as a kind of decadent, quasi-sculptural painting in which aesthetic considerations are compromised by materialism. But Mondrian never deviated from painting, and, once he attained to his mature abstract style, what he painted was spiritually streets ahead of most other painters, even if, on the surface, its simplicity and impersonality superficially lead one to regard it as of a lesser importance than, say, the relatively complex, personal work of artists like Dali, Spencer, Ernst, Delvaux, Bonnard, et al. Yet that, paradoxically, is precisely why it's so significant; because it has abandoned the old cultural criteria of greatness and wholly adapted itself to the abstract, post-egocentric and, hence, less-complex standards of transcendental man. The greatness of someone like, say, Salvador Dali owes more than a little to the past, and to the aristocratic past not least of all, whereas Mondrian's importance is largely if not entirely relevant to the present."

"I recall your having said something similar at Gwen's place the other week," Linda declared, alluding to his statement concerning the relative merits of Spencer and Nicholson on the basis of contemporary relevance. "Yet what you're saying also presupposes that the more abstract or transcendental an artist's work becomes, the more significant he is in relation to the present, so that anyone who produces work of a consistently more abstract order than Mondrian's should rank higher than him as an artist."

Matthew nodded with alacrity. "To be sure, someone currently at work in Mondrian's footsteps might well be producing - if he hasn't already done so - a corpus of work which excels his in transcendental standing, bringing the late-twentieth century to a painterly climax," he averred. "But as far as his generation is concerned, I can't think of anyone who stands above him. To the best of my knowledge, none of his contemporaries, not even Kandinsky, Klee, Miro, Bomberg, and Balla, related to the urban milieu in quite such positive and philosophically systematic terms. In fact, it would be truer to say that most of them were in rebellion against the city. However, I don't wish to sound unduly pedantic or presumptuous. Suffice it to say that, like life itself, art is ever a source of ambivalence and complexity, even when it endeavours to clarify or simplify itself! It could well be that Mondrian's art, with its geometrical patterns and black grids, signifies not so much a religious as a secular greatness, which might well find itself taking second place to a predominantly religious art-form in the eyes of future generations - an art form giving greater attention to the Light and the correlative significance of the Holy Ghost to the modern mind."

"Such as your art?" Linda suggested light-heartedly.

"One shouldn't entirely rule out that possibility!" Matthew chuckled. "Though I'm perfectly resigned to standing in Mondrian's shadow at present." He realized that the beer had gone to his head, making him slightly waver in his judgement and shed some of his intellectual inhibitions. The extent to which Mondrian's art could be regarded as secular was indeed open to debate; though it seemed unlikely that such paintings as Broadway Boogie-Woogie and Foxtrot A could be classified as religious. Abstract they might well be, but that didn't necessarily have any bearing on the Holy Ghost, the mystic's focal-point for ultimate divinity, even granted their creator's avowed commitment to theosophy. The lines and colour areas of his Compositions, for instance, seemed rather to suggest an in-between realm of moral illegibility which could be interpreted neither solely in terms of the secular nor of the religious. The two were somehow fused together - products of both a positive response to the urban environment and a spiritual aspiration towards the Infinite. There was little in the individual paintings to suggest that the artist was endeavouring to portray, in somewhat skeletal terms, an outline of the city or, alternatively, to lead one towards a contemplation of the Infinite. Their abstraction was complete.

Yet this indeterminate status, born of their inscrutability, was precisely what Matthew had decided to turn against off late, preferring to be a specifically religious painter, and so draw the viewer's attention, by means of such transcendental symbols as doves, globes of infused light and meditating figures, towards the Holy Ghost. If Christianity had its painters, then he saw no reason why transcendentalism shouldn't also be served by art, though, of necessity, in a much-less representational way.

To be sure, the concessions to representation which the symbolic illustration of superconscious fidelity had forced upon him were not without their shortcomings in relation to contemporary abstraction, yet seemed impossible to surmount without necessarily appearing vague and indeterminate again. Unfortunately, the production of bright monochromatic canvases wouldn't automatically have connoted with transcendental meditation and the claims of the spiritual life, but might just as easily have been confounded with Kleinesque experiments in spatial reality - pertinent and valid as such experiments undoubtedly were. No, he somehow wanted to put people in mind of the fact that they were living in the age of the Holy Ghost, and to do this he felt he had to have recourse to a limited amount of symbolic representation. Time would doubtless tell whether or not he had made a mistake. For the present, however, he was convinced of the validity of this specifically religious orientation.

But what of Linda? Was that a hint she had given him that she wanted to see his art, since he had promised to show it to her at Gwen's place? He felt a sudden qualm at the prospect of having to go to the trouble of taking her over to his studio and then go through the rigmarole of pointing out and explaining what was what, especially as he was beginning to succumb to beer-induced lethargy and muddle-headedness. Surely she wasn't expecting him to take her over there now?

No, it would be too inconvenient under the circumstances. Besides, the alcohol would doubtless be having its effect on her too, making her unsteady on her legs and slightly incoherent. Now was hardly the time to explore the studio! Better, perhaps, to play some music in his flat and just take things easy. That way no-one would be any the worse off - least of all himself!

He returned his empty glass to the table and ambled across to his midi system, which stood next to his bookcase immediately in front of the brighter of the room's two side walls. "Would you like to listen to some music?" he asked.

"Hmm, what have you got?" Linda wanted to know, automatically depositing her own empty beer glass on the same table.

"Come and see for yourself!" he advised her, stooping down in front of the racks which housed the bulk of his music collection.

Obediently, she vacated her chair and knelt down beside him. "Hmm, mostly modern jazz," she observed, as her eyes scanned the titles of a number of albums by musicians such as Narada Michael Walden, Jean-Luc Ponty, Chick Corea, Al DiMeola, John McLaughlin, and Herbie Hancock.

"I imagine your husband doesn't approve of or relate to this kind of music."

"No, unfortunately not! He avoids modern jazz of any description - religious, secular, or in-between."

"And presumably that means you have to avoid it too, does it?"

Linda sighed her indignant confirmation of this inference and said: "Yes, generally speaking; though I occasionally tune-in to some good soul or rap music on my radio, when he's out. But he certainly wouldn't approve of my buying this kind of music and playing it on a regular basis - not while he's in, at any rate! It has to be Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, or nothing. He's even against modern classical, as a rule, with the exception of stuffy composers like Elgar and Walton, who aren't really that modern anyway."

Matthew smiled ironically, almost in imitation of Linda. "Do you have to listen to them with him, then?" he asked her.

"Not if I can avoid it, I don't! For I usually contrive to be elsewhere, in some other part of the house. But he occasionally takes umbrage at that and obliges me to keep him company while he listens to Mozart or Beethoven for the umpteenth frigging time! Fortunately for me, he doesn't indulge in his musical tastes more than once or twice a week, so I don't have to put-up with it too often. Yet he seems not to accredit me with any taste at all! The mention of soul and he throws a fit! There's no compromise in him. Either one sacrifices oneself to him completely or he takes umbrage and flies into a reactionary rage."

"Sounds positively Victorian!" Matthew objected, wincing slightly in involuntary revulsion. "Bourgeois snobbery could hardly go any further!"

"So it would seem," sighed Linda, who by this time had her hands on a cassette by Narada Michael Walden. "Do you think we could play this?" she requested, holding it out to him.

"Sure," he agreed, taking it from her. Although it wasn't one of his modern jazz tapes as such, its musical excellence was beyond dispute and highly appropriate, he thought, in view of Linda's close proximity to him at this moment, her close-fitting leather miniskirt having ridden up her black-stockinged thighs to a degree which made it impossible for him to ignore their seductive appeal. The cassette in question, with its soulful fervour, seemed to him an excellent choice on her part and, no sooner had he set it in motion and knelt down beside her again, than he felt a consciousness of her sexuality growing inside him, pervading his mind and senses with a suggestibility it would have been not only impossible but imbecile to ignore. She was indeed a beautiful woman, and the longer he was close to her, the more beautiful she seemed to become. So much so, that he soon found himself irresistibly drawn, like a magnet, to the alluring oasis of her dark flesh; found himself endeavouring to quench a thirst from which he had too long suffered, even given his brief affairs with Deirdre and Gwen Evans. It wasn't sex as such ... so much as sex with the right person, sex with someone one could genuinely respect and feel proud to possess - in a word, love. And now, with Linda, it seemed possible this thirst would be quenched and an old nagging want finally laid to rest.

Instinctively, he drew himself still closer to her and, putting an arm round her slender waist, slowly brought his lips to bear on her face, applying himself to her nearest cheek and then, as she impulsively turned towards him, gently switching to her lips and mouth. She made no protest, not even verbally, but submitted to his attentions with a willingness which suggested that she had been waiting for this all along and was only too relieved that he had finally got round to expressing his desire for her in more concrete terms.

She gave him responsive access to herself and he pursued his desire to the very best of his ability, caressing and kissing her in a mounting crescendo of passionate embraces which had the effect of diminishing whatever reserve may still have existed between them and precipitating each into the sexual clutches of the other. It wasn't long before his hands had reached under her vest and up her skirt to more pressing objectives, freeing her from her underclothes and exposing the totality of her flesh to his sturdy advance. They made love in the centre of the room, on the afghan carpet between the armchairs. It was superior to anything he had known with women before, much better than with Gwen or her mother; better even than it probably would have been with the two of them together. Linda was an altogether different kind of woman - more responsive and sensitive, less bashfully self-conscious, tougher and slicker, altogether more to his liking. She was neither frigid nor lascivious. And to judge by her capacity for carnal pleasure, she was in earnest need of what he had to give her, in need of a reprieve from her bourgeois husband.

He thrust himself upon her in a frenzy of quickening lust and humped her like he had never humped anyone before, catching hold of her buttocks and driving himself deep inside her convulsed flesh with what seemed like a determination to get to the very centre of her womb, the kernel of her sex, which was the final goal of all passion, the resolution of all earthly desire, the heavenly resting place of the world. The contrast between his white skin and her black skin only intensified his passion. For it seemed like they were opposites who had come together to cancel each other out in the culmination of their coupling, thereby achieving a golden mean which would signify the overcoming of thesis and antithesis in a dialectical synthesis of perfect racial harmony. He held nothing back, but gave it all to her. For he had no shame in his commitment to her and would gladly have accepted a child in the event of her becoming pregnant, far as the thought of pregnancy was from his mind that evening! He ejaculated every last globule of sperm into her with a thoroughness which completely drained him.

The Narada tape had progressed to side two by the time he relaxed his ardour for her body and, satisfied by his carnal achievement, duly abandoned the pursuit of further pleasure. They lay quiet and still for some time in each other's arms, listening to the remaining tracks and just savouring the sensual warmth in which they basked, like softly-purring cats. However, it was Matthew who eventually broke the silence by asking if she had expected him to make it with her that evening?

"Yes, I suppose so," she smilingly confessed, blushing in spite of everything.

He smiled back at her. "So you hadn't come all the way up here just to look at paintings and talk about modern art, then?" he teased.

"No, I was under the impression that you wouldn't have invited me all the way up here just to discuss art," she bluntly declared.

"Even after what I'd said about my transcendentalism, or the spirituality to which I aspire?"

"Even then. I could tell you had a crush on me."

Matthew had to chuckle. "And what about Gwen, could you tell that I was bored and frustrated by her?" he asked.

"Of course! You wouldn't have been so keen on my conversation had that not been the case. Besides, I learnt from Gwen that she was under the impression that you were somehow disappointed in her and consequently less than happy in your relationship."

"Oh?" Matthew was instantly intrigued. "When did she tell you that?" he pressed her.

"On the phone one day."

"I see." He meditated in silence a moment, but didn't desire to inquire any further into the matter. Frankly, the subject of Gwen rather bored him, especially as there was another one on his mind which he realized would have to be dealt with in due course, since it would almost certainly lead to unfortunate complications if neglected. But, in the meantime, there was Linda, who was something else or, at least, he hoped so. "Tell me, this little affair of ours - is it a once-only thing, or are you prepared to visit me again in the near future?" he asked.

"Well, if you really want to see me again, I'm more than prepared to come here," she replied, smiling faintly. "Or to go anywhere, for that matter, where we can be alone together."

He heaved a sigh of gratified relief and hugged her tenderly. "Good!" he cried. "Then we'll see a lot more of each other in future."

She smiled tenderly, happy in the knowledge that he was genuinely interested in her. It seemed that love had returned to her life. "But the next time we meet, I'd like to see your studio and examine some of your works, if that's okay," she reminded him.

"Sure. I had intended to take you over there tonight, but, what with the beer and everything, it seemed somehow inappropriate." He was still feeling a bit tipsy, despite the fact that he had drunk only two full glasses of beer. It was doubtless due to his relatively high metabolism and habitual abstinence. Due, too, in some measure, to the presence of Linda and the delightful experiences he had shared with her. Yet he was not so tipsy, all the same, that he couldn't see through the optimism their evening together had engendered and wonder whether they would, in fact, be able to see very much of each other in future? After all, Linda's husband still had to be taken into consideration. He would doubtless become suspicious if she were away from home too often. And what about tonight - would he still be at the journalist's conference he was apparently attending? Matthew glanced at his watch and, noting it was now 9.30pm, turned to Linda for reassurance.

"Fortunately, he won't get home till around midnight," she informed him, "so you needn't worry. Provided I leave here by ten, I should get back in good time."

"And the future?” Matthew asked. "I mean, do you think he'll prove a major obstacle?"

She had risen from the carpet and started to dress, putting on her pink bra and matching panties. It wasn't a question she particularly cared to answer. Speculation seemed futile to her, since it partly depended on Matthew in any case, on whether he would be prepared to marry her if she got a divorce; on whether he would be prepared to put himself out a little in the meantime - to visit her after school hours or go down to Dulwich with her. It depended on a lot of things, not least of all her husband's social and professional commitments. But she couldn't see why, if he was really determined, they couldn't arrange to see each other quite regularly. After all, Peter Daniels might be her legal spouse but he wasn't her gaoler. He couldn't prevent her from going out. She could always plead school commitments or invitations from Gwen. Besides, she had a few relatives in town, including a rather ailing mother, who could serve as useful alibis if necessary. Thus Matthew needn't worry himself about it, and, having imparted as much to him, Linda ventured to relieve her own mind of a nagging doubt by saying: "I take it you won't be seeing Gwen so much in future?"

"No, not if I can help it," he smilingly assured her, pulling up his black jeans, which were the tightest pair of denims he had ever worn. "I don't want to arouse your jealousy, do I?"

She giggled her approval of this rhetorical question and quipped: "As long as I know who you really want, you're unlikely to do that!"

He advanced towards her half-dressed, his T-shirt still hanging loose, and kissed her tenderly on the lips, proceeding to caress her backside in a correspondingly tender fashion with both hands, one of which gradually worked its way back around and under her short skirt to rest, palm upwards, against her pantied crotch in a gesture of sly intimacy such that would convey his tender respect for her. To his further pleasure, she accepted without demur. It seemed that she was his woman, after all, and that nothing could alter the fact of their mutual trust and admiration. They had a pact with each other, and it was not between incommensurables but, on the contrary, partners in love.

It had just gone 10pm when Matthew Pearce closed his door behind Linda's departing car and returned to an empty living room. He was relieved beyond words to have obtained an assurance of trust from her, and simultaneously proud of himself for having behaved so romantically. He hadn't expected the evening to turn out nearly so well, even given his awareness of the fact she was naturally sympathetic towards him. In inviting her up to Highgate, he hadn't specifically intended to become intimate with her but, rather, to extend his previous conversation on art and thus establish their friendship on a firmer footing. If the possibility of becoming her lover had occurred to him before, it had only done so tentatively, as a consequence, the way he saw it, of a gradual intimacy, a broadening of their relationship, rather than as a kind of lightning strategy of peremptory seduction. He had not expected himself to get so carried away by her and, notwithstanding the influence of beer and music, propelled into one of the quickest and easiest affairs of his life. He could still hardly believe he had in fact succeeded with her; though, at the back of his mind, a little intuitive voice had intimated to him the unlikelihood of such an attractive woman dragging herself all the way up to his Highgate flat just to discuss art. And when, from nagging curiosity, he had put the question of motivation to her, that little voice had received exactly the confirmation it required!

Yes, so now he was her lover, more or less, and what he had done with her had given him one of the most gratifyingly memorable evenings of his entire life. He was her lover, and what he would do with her in future would be no less gratifying! He would have plenty of time to gaze in voyeuristic rapture at her suspender-sporting thighs, if that was what turned him on. Or remove her bra and fondle one or both of her mouth-watering breasts. Or take instamatic photos of her in a variety of erotic poses. Or make a video with her which, together with the photos, might serve him usefully in old age when, lacking the will or ability to maintain coital relations with anyone, he was obliged to enter into the comparative salvation of a theocratic sexuality, and thus allow himself to be served by a combination of erotic material and plastic vibrator, his penis encapsulated, in centripetal smugness, by it vagina-like contours. As yet, however, there was no real need or desire, in his life, for such a sexual salvation but, rather, a pressing desire to continue seeing Linda and thus maintain a democratic sexuality on suitably socialistic terms. Certainly, there could be no question of a masturbatory autocratic one, least of all since the collapse of Stalinism in Eastern Europe! Besides, he had no desire to treat the inner light of the world in a disrespectful fashion, shooting it off into thin air. That was for jerks and other such moral cretins.

Yet Linda's entry into his life did mean that he would not now be in a position to carry-on seeing Gwen, as though nothing had happened. He would have to get rid of her and, no less importantly, her mother as well. Indeed, especially Deirdre Evans, who, on the strength of the importunate letter he had recently received from her, was becoming rather too demanding. He could not have three women 'on the go' at once, nor even two, considering his dedication to the spirit and the exacting claims of transcendentalism. Even one woman was, according to the highest spiritual authorities, more of a hindrance than a help to the spiritual life, a worldly omega which, especially if she was so sensuously attractive as to demand too much of one's time, could become an end-in-itself, to the exclusion of the heavenly omega or, at any rate, the possibility of leading an idealistic lifestyle in pursuit of heavenly goals.

Of the three women in his life at present, Linda was certainly the one most suited to himself, the one with whom he would be most likely to succeed in seeing eye-to-eye on a variety of issues, not to mention in getting to meditate with him as well as to discuss art, politics, religion, etc., and have satisfying sex to a background, if mutually desirable, of soulful or funky music. She was the promise of companionship and understanding. The others, being fundamentally middle class, would have to go. He would not be swallowed-up or suffocated by the flesh, even if he wasn't spiritually earnest or strong enough to be able to completely turn his back on it. His art would only suffer, and that wouldn't serve his transcendental purposes one little bit. Had he not been so celibate in the past his art would never have evolved to the extent and in the way it had, following, in Mondrian's sacred words, 'The path of ascension; away from matter'. But prolonged celibacy had not left him free from depression and self-deception, nor was it something he particularly wanted to live with for ever. Provided he could keep his sexual commitments in moderation, he was perfectly resigned to fairly regular contact with at least one woman, and Linda, with her beauty and intelligence, struck him as being the most suitable of the three. Therefore the letter from Mrs Evans would have to be answered, and preferably as soon as possible. If he wrote to her straightaway, that evening, and sent his reply off to her early the following day, she would almost certainly receive it by Monday or, at the very latest, Tuesday, and thus have no excuse for turning-up at his studio, as she had threatened to do, on the Wednesday afternoon.

Quickly, impatiently, he rummaged through the top drawer of his writing desk and extracted her letter which, out of undue prudence, he had hidden beneath a pile of envelopes. Reading it through once more he was assailed by a momentary qualm and pity for the woman, reminded of the sweet scent of her perfume and the generous curve of her hips. He was almost persuaded not to write to her and so grant her the pleasure of another visit, especially as she still seemed interested in learning to meditate. Yet he was afraid that if he gave way to her request now he would do the same in future too, thus jeopardizing and perhaps even destroying his budding relationship with Linda. Frankly, he couldn't risk further involvement with her, despite her obvious attractions and urgent desire to please him. The next time she would be a little more ardent, a little more persuasive in her caresses, and, in all likelihood, a little more possessive as well. If she wasn't already emotionally involved with him, the chances were pretty high that she would almost certainly become so on or following her next visit. And then where would he be? Shackled to a provincial bourgeois in monoracial heterosexuality the equivalent of liberal democracy?

No, he would have to write to her, giving as excuse that he would be out of the country for a number of weeks on overseas business and therefore unable to comply with her request. Anything would do, just as long as she didn't continue to pester him. And if she was foolish enough to ignore his response, she would find herself making the trip down to London in vain. For he definitely wouldn't open his studio door to her, not even if she rang its frigging bell for an hour! No, if she really wanted to learn how to meditate, he could send her an Alan Watts book and let her do it by herself. However, despite what she had said in her letter, he rather doubted that meditation was really uppermost on her mind, especially where the 'as we got on so well together on Wednesday, I can't see why we shouldn't get on still better, if you follow me, in future' was concerned. And neither was he convinced that they would both be able to 'keep a cool head about it', even if he could teach her 'to meditate properly' which, on a number of counts, seemed somewhat unlikely.

Yet he was subject, all the same, to a certain amount of regret, as he reached for his writing materials and began to wield his felt-tipped pen, that he had to disappoint her, particularly as she was by no means bereft of feminine charms. Had she been closer to him in spirit, he would almost certainly have succumbed to her influence. But, bearing in mind her provincial background and philistine mentality, not to mention the prolonged and virtually ineradicable influence of her irascible husband, he was under no uncertainty concerning the right course of action. The pleasure she had given him would be more than adequately replaced by the pleasure he would obtain from Linda. And if her husband got his hands on the letter, it would be no loss to him. On the contrary, it could only serve his purposes the more!