CHAPTER THREE

Following dinner early that evening, Gwen and Matthew went out into the large back garden to get some air and soak up a little of the sun which was now bathing it in a pool of soft light. They took a couple of deck chairs and found a pleasant spot over by an imposing cluster of rhododendrons, which stood to the right of the garden at a distance of some thirty yards from the house. It was really Gwen's decision to sit there, for she hated to sit in the centre of the garden, where there was a total absence of plant life and one felt exposed to prying eyes all around one. Only by its edges, where the flowers and bushes were reposing in loosely arranged beds, did she feel any degree of complacency, born of the privacy they appeared to provide. Besides, she liked the scent of the plants, which was particularly pleasant where they were now sitting. The centre of the garden, about which only pale grass grew, seemed to her relatively barren and devoid of life.

"I trust you didn't find dad too trying during dinner?" she gently inquired of Matthew, after a few minutes' respectful silence had fallen between them in the refreshing presence of temperate nature.

"No, not really," he replied, more out of a mechanical response to her probing statement than an honest answer. He looked at her half-humorously, as though in ironic deference to the fact that Mr Evans had been more upsetting before dinner than during it. Indeed, it might have been truer to imply that Mr Evans was pretty upsetting whether or not he was talking. But he had no real desire to compromise her over the thorny issue of her father, limiting himself, instead, to a good-natured dismissal of the matter, as though it were of small account. For anything more serious would probably have led him to get up and make his way back to the station there and then, in order to be free not only of Gwen's father but of Gwen herself, who wasn't exactly the most kindred of spirits, either. Yet he didn't want to make a scene of it, to treat this experience too seriously. Better, on second thoughts, to treat it with a kind of scientific detachment, as though one had been entrusted with the responsibility of studying, at relatively close-quarters, a species of life which, though personally abhorrent to one, it was nevertheless necessary to treat with a modicum of respect, if only to complete one's studies. It might, after all, lead to some as-yet unimagined revelation. At least it had already led to a better understanding of Gwen, which was something.

"I really ought to have warned you, in advance, of what my father was like," she remarked sympathetically. "But I wasn't altogether sure of how he would react to you. Besides, I was afraid that you might not have agreed to come here, had I given you prior warning about him."

Matthew smiled dismissively. "Oh, don't worry yourself about it," he advised her. "I didn't exactly expect him to be an exact replica of myself. He's entitled to his views, after all, even if I can't share them."

There ensued a further short period of silence, before Gwen asked: "What d'you think of my mother?"

It was a question Matthew had half-expected, but he still blushed slightly as he replied: "She seems quite pleasant really, quite polite and friendly; though I haven't yet had a chance to form a clear impression of her. Like you, she tends to keep quiet when Mr Evans is speaking."

"Yes, that's true enough," Gwen admitted. "She's not a particularly talkative person anyway, even given the fact that dad doesn't exactly encourage conversation. He mostly keeps to himself in the house."

"Don't your parents get on very well together?" Matthew asked, partly in response to this remark and partly from a vague premonition to the contrary.

"No, not for the past five or six years," Gwen revealed, blushing slightly. "Largely in consequence of dad's poor health - his fits of depression and bad heart, his liver and bronchial trouble - which seems to have come between them and isolated them from each other to a certain extent. Not that mum's health is entirely good. But she does at least fare better than him, as a rule."

"She certainly looks well," Matthew candidly opined. "And young, too. Indeed, I was more than a little surprised to learn that the woman who answered the door to us was in fact your mother. She seemed more like an elder sister."

Gwen smiled faintly and then said: "Yes, she's only seventeen years older than me actually. But that, too, is one of the reasons why my parents don't get on as well as they formerly did. For dad is ten years her senior and tends to behave as if he were a member of an older generation ... which, when you consider the nature of his health, effectively appears to be the case. It's as though he has already crossed the threshold into old age, while she has hardly entered middle age."

Matthew couldn't argue with that observation! "And you're their only child?" he conjectured.

"Yes, though mum lost two children prematurely, and I had a brother who died of pneumonia at six," Gwen answered on a note of sadness. "He was two years younger than me."

"I'm sorry to hear it," said Matthew, respectfully deferring to convention. "It must have been rather upsetting for you."

"Yes, for a while," Gwen admitted. "But more so for mum, who was very fond of him. She had always wanted a boy." There was a tinge of self-pity in her voice, as though indicative of the fact that, as a girl, she had rated lower in her mother's estimation and grown to resent it. But she didn't say anything else about the subject, and Matthew tactfully refrained from further inquiry.

Indeed, he was secretly gratified when, instead of continuing the conversation along other lines, his girlfriend relapsed into one of her characteristic silences, abandoning her face to the sunlight, which caused it to take on an almost angelic aura of transcendent spirituality, like Rossetti's Beatrice. To be sure, there was certainly something Pre-Raphaelite about her at this moment, something ethereal and not-quite-there. Yet such an illusion was quickly dispelled from Matthew's mind as she turned her face to one side and caught some shadow from the nearby rhododendrons. Now she was simply Gwendolyn Evans again, devoid of spiritual nobility, the daughter of a provincial bourgeois. Her attractiveness, suddenly released from transcendent pretensions, assumed more earthly proportions. But for her delicacy of build, one might have taken her for an average sensualist. Instead of which, one had no option but to acknowledge her for the dualistic compromise she was - both sensual and spiritual in approximately equal degrees.

Turning his gaze away from her impassive face, Matthew focused his attention on the detached house in front of them, the rear windows of which glinted in the soft sunlight. Its perfectly conventional middle-class respectability suddenly became a source of annoyance to him as he recalled, not without a pang of regret, that he had allowed himself to be drawn into a context for which he had no real sympathy and absolutely no desire to emulate in his own life - namely, the context of bourgeois compromise. For the fairly large house that his vision now embraced stood as a symbol to him of most of the things he was in rebellion against and preferred not to see. It stood, above all, as a symbol of the class which had come to power after the aristocracy and now prospered on the sweat of the proletariat. Yet it also stood as a symbol, in large measure, of the class which took the middle road between the aristocracy and the proletariat, and signified a kind of midway stage of human evolution. Not as materialistic as the former nor as spiritualistic as the latter, the bourgeoisie were resigned to a compromise formula which, while leaving them cognizant of the fact that excessive wealth was a grave obstacle to spiritual enlightenment, precluded them from relinquishing the benefits of materialism to any appreciable extent, least of all to an extent which made them candidates for spiritual enlightenment personally!

Quite the contrary, the bourgeois was very firmly, now as before, a creature of the middle road, the dualistic material/spiritual compromise which found its religious home in Christianity and its political home in parliamentary democracy. If his house wasn't as grand as an aristocrat's, well and good! He had no great difficulty living with that fact. But to suggest to him that he should go one stage further up the ladder of human evolution and relinquish private property altogether, resigning himself to life in a comparatively small council house or flat, would be tantamount to depriving him of his very existence, and such a suggestion would meet with very little approval! Indeed, it would probably meet with none! For the bourgeois was not an animal which could turn itself into a proletarian, any more than an aristocrat was an animal which could turn itself into a bourgeois. If a bourgeois was spiritually superior to an aristocrat, he was yet spiritually inferior to a proletarian, and could never alter himself one way or the other. By his very compromise nature, he was condemned to the twilight stage of human evolution in between the darkness and the light - a perfectly legitimate position while the twilight was inevitable, but an increasingly questionable, not to say untenable, one the more the twilight changed to light and society accordingly progressed away from its former dualistic compromise towards a stage of life that transcended dualism, a stage in which only proletarian criteria were relevant. As a creature that signified a kind of dovetailed combination of aristocratic and proletarian elements within him, the bourgeois could never emerge from the moral twilight. If it came to an end under the sway of an increasingly strong barrage of light, the bourgeois would perish too. He wasn't capable of living solely in the light, for it would be a refutation of his other half, an abnegation of his dualism. No, he could only flourish and perpetuate himself while the twilight prevailed. Once it had gone - whoosh, no more bourgeois!

Whatever pertained to the light was proletarian; was man become wary of materialism and living in smaller houses, smaller apartments, or flats because he was too evolved to require large-scale property, because, in other words, his superconscious predominated over his subconscious rather than existed in a balanced compromise with it; was man born and bred in the city, away from the sensuous influence of nature; was transcendental man. Yes, but not the bourgeois, not Christian man. There could be no question of his transformation. This house, sparkling in the sunlight, was destined to be superseded world-wide - and in a sense already had been - by a less materialistic scale-of-values.

In the overall progression of evolution through approximately three stages ... from a dominating materialistic class to a liberated spiritualistic class via a worldly compromise class, this house undoubtedly signified something morally better, higher, and more humane than the typical aristocratic dwellings which had preceded it. It was certainly less glaringly materialistic than the huge castles, palaces, and country houses favoured by the nobility. It was not the repository of so many possessions, and such possessions as it housed were generally of a less-ornate and expensive variety than those favoured by the overtly materialistic class. They were unlikely to distract the eye from spiritual preoccupations to anything like the same extent as those possessions which had been specifically designed to glorify matter. The library, for instance, would not be nearly so large or contain as many weighty and expensively-tooled, leather-backed books. On the contrary, it would be of moderate proportions, containing, at most, a few thousand books, and most if not all of those less-expensive hardbacks would have been read, not simply owned for the mere sake of collecting or signifying the extent of one's wealth and/or materialistic power.

Indeed, there may even be, among the ranks of such bourgeois tomes, a few paperbacks, as befitting an age in which the spiritual predominates over the material and a book is accordingly judged more by what it contains by way of intellectual or cultural nourishment than with what care or materials it was made. Yet it was highly unlikely that such a library would house any great number of paperbacks. For the bourgeois would not want to deprive himself of hardbacks to an extent which made his collection lack a certain amount of materialistic elegance. Oh, no! If he instinctively looks down on the extensive materialism of an aristocrat's library, he yet shies away from the prospect of relinquishing his taste for hardbacks to the extent required by a proletarian library, in which, one may surmise, only paperbacks would exist. Furthermore, he would not wish to reduce the number of books in his collection, either. For the few thousand he owns seems to him more becoming than the mere 500-odd books to be found in the average proletarian collection. After all, his house is somewhat larger than the average proletarian dwelling, and therefore it's likely that his library will have to be correspondingly larger, if it isn't to look ridiculously out-of-scale with its surroundings. As the man of the middle road, he knows exactly where he stands. His library, like just about everything else about him, is somewhere in-between the alternative extremes. It corresponds to stage two of human evolution.

Yes, and although Thomas Evans wasn't the most scholarly or bookish of middle-class people, it could certainly be said of his library - which Matthew had taken a glance at prior to dinner - that it represented the requisite compromise of scale and favoured books in-between the extensive materialism of the previous historical class and the intensive spirituality of the ultimate one. Nothing extreme would be found there!

A gentle sigh beside him caused the artist to abandon his philosophical reflections and turn his attention back towards Gwen who, with eyes closed, seemed perfectly resigned to the absence of conversation and only too happy for a chance to vegetate in the warm evening air, feeling the caress of the sun upon her upturned face, which had assumed a mellow glow. Watching her thus, seemingly oblivious of his presence beside her, Matthew experienced a moment of tenderness towards her and gently but firmly placed a hand on her nearest leg, just above the knee and below the rim of her pale-cream skirt, which she had drawn-up slightly in response to the sun. This presence of his hand on her flesh caused her to smile in a subtly sensual way, yet she kept her eyes closed. She looked perfectly complacent, like a softly purring cat - submerged in soft sensuality. At any other time Matthew would probably have raised the rim of her skirt until her thighs were completely naked and her panties exposed to view, content to focus his attention upon that part of them behind which her crotch would be gently stewing in its own sexual gravy, leading a kind of vegetable existence of its own - soft and languid. But in the back garden of her parents' house, what with the prospect of someone spying on them through one or another of the rear windows, he had to resign himself to gently patting her nearest leg instead, not exposing the outer reaches of her more private parts to his tender gaze.

And this he continued to do even after his thoughts had once more turned away from Gwen's body and become entangled in intellectual matters again, this time concerning the architectural innovations of Gottfried Semper, the nineteenth-century German architect who occasionally designed buildings with a view to reflecting different stages of architectural evolution - the façade beginning on the ground floor with a coarse appearance and ascending, through successive floors, to a smoother one, with a corresponding change of materials in the overall construction. At present, Matthew couldn't remember very much about the man from what he had read, some years before, in the local public library; though he knew that, if he were an architect bent on illustrating evolutionary transformations from one floor to another, he would adopt a somewhat different approach from Semper - one emphasizing the growing predilection for the light which characterized our evolutionary struggle.

Thus, taking the façade as its most representative component, his projected building would have a row of small windows on the ground floor spaced at regular, if quite distant, intervals, so that the overall impression was one of darkness or, rather, of the ego - that fusion-point of the subconscious and superconscious minds - under subconscious dominion. The subconscious would be represented by the concrete, the superconscious by the windows, and the ratio of the one to the other would be approximately in the region of 3:1. Thus the ego of pre-dualistic man would be represented as a predominantly dark phenomenon. Aristocratic materialism would have the advantage.

With the first floor, however, indicative of stage two of human evolution, the ratio of concrete to windows would be transformed into a dualistic balance, so that the increase in window space came to signify a greater degree of superconscious influence, commensurate with bourgeois consciousness, and the overall impression was accordingly of an ego balanced, in twilight compromise, between the dark and the light. In this section of the façade, the percentage which the material aspect had lost would have been gained by the spiritual one. Heaven and Hell would be kept in dualistic equilibrium.

Not so, however, with the second and final floor, representative of the third stage of human evolution, in which the ratio of concrete to windows or, rather, of windows to concrete had become the converse of that exhibited on the ground floor, and the light of the superconscious accordingly prevailed over the darkness of the subconscious in the ratio of 3:1, reducing the material part of this upper section of the façade to but a quarter of the total space. Here, then, it would be the turn of proletarian man to advertise his predilection for the light, his ego being decidedly under the sway of the superconscious and thus partial to a spiritual bias. Here, on the second floor, human evolution attained to its climax. And after that - well, it only remained for proletarian man to transcend his humanity altogether, namely by dispensing with the remaining influence of the subconscious, for him to enter the post-human millennium and thus become divine. In the meantime, however, a lot of work to be done, not least of all in using more window space than hitherto, which is to say, than the bourgeoisie could countenance!

Such, at any rate, was the plan Matthew thought he would put into architectural operation, were he an architect bent on expanding and refining upon the techniques first propounded by Gottfried Semper. Indeed, he might even do a variation on that, in which the façade of his evolutionary building, while retaining the respective ratios of concrete to windows on each floor, was less part of one house than indicative of three different buildings built one atop the other - the one on the ground floor, so to speak, three times as large as its top-floor counterpart, while the one in the middle, suggestive of bourgeois compromise, signified a sort of cross between the other two.... Or, alternatively, to conceive of such a wedding-cake building as one house in which three separate apartments, viz. an aristocratic, a bourgeois, and a proletarian, were arranged in vertical juxtaposition, the overall pyramidal shape of the building indicative of the diminishing scale of materialism as one approached the top floor. Thus one could speak of an aristocratic floor, a bourgeois floor, and a proletarian floor, each of which reflected the aforementioned evolutionary transformations in the psyche. It would be an evolutionary building more comprehensive and profoundly significant than anything of which Semper had ever dreamed!

The sight of Mrs Evans emerging from the house suddenly put a stop to further musings on Matthew's part, bringing him sharply back to the provincial surroundings in which he somewhat ironically found himself. She was crossing the lawn in their direction, heading, it appeared, for Gwen.

"It looks as though your mother has something to tell you," Matthew softly remarked, for the benefit of the tranquil figure beside him.

"Oh?" She opened her eyes and cast the approaching figure an inquisitive glance. She didn't appear too disconcerted by this interruption.

"Your friend Linda's on the phone," Mrs Evans informed her, as soon as she came within speaking distance.

"Oh, really?" Gwen responded in a genuinely surprised tone-of-voice. "I hadn't expected her to phone today." She got up from her deck-chair and turned towards Matthew, who was on the point of getting up himself. "You needn't disturb yourself, Matt," she reassured him. "I won't be long."

"No, and if Mr Pearce doesn't object, I'll keep him company in your absence, Gwendolyn," said Mrs Evans, simultaneously sitting herself down in the space just vacated by her daughter. "We mustn't allow him to feel neglected, must we?" She smiled at Gwen, who impulsively reciprocated, before setting off at a fairly brisk pace for the waiting call.

Strange things can happen, for all of a sudden Matthew found himself transformed from a rather bored and meditative dreamer into an alert and sensitive companion of Mrs Evans. It was as though, with the change of woman beside him, a new lease-of-life had suddenly been instilled into his veins, making him conscious of himself as a man for virtually the first time that evening.

"Just the perfect weather for being out here, isn't it?" Mrs Evans observed, as she turned her dark-green eyes on the artist.

"Most assuredly," he agreed, nodding profusely. He might almost have blushed with shame for the (what seemed to him) too conspicuous response to her sensual presence beside him, the too-lingering consciousness of her beauty, tempered, as it was, by a whiff of patchouli perfume which mingled almost surrealistically with the natural scents of some nearby shrubs. A little extra daring on his part and he would have cast a glance over her pale-blue skirt to the dark nylon-stockinged knees, as though to obtain a better idea of her beauty and achieve a more comprehensive assessment. But such daring, he felt, would expose his consciousness of her as a sensual being to an extent which could only have compromised him further, and he lacked the courage or audacity to indulge it. Besides, she might have taken offence, considered him ill-mannered, and embarrassed him as never before. No, it was not for him to play the gallant where Gwen's mother was concerned, even if she did possess an uncommon degree of feminine beauty.

"I must say, I was quite intrigued by some of the things you were saying to my husband before dinner," Mrs Evans revealed. "Especially by the types of transcendental motifs you're currently painting. It sounds rather fun."

Matthew felt agreeably flattered. "Yes, it's certainly a new direction in my art, as in my sculpture too," he averred.

"You're also a sculptor?"

"Well yes, at least to some extent. I mean, I'm first and foremost a painter and only secondarily a sculptor, so to speak. But I enjoy the one as much as the other." Which wasn't quite true, though he could hardly elaborate on his reasons for preferring painting to sculpture at the moment.

"What sort of things do you sculpt?" Mrs Evans wanted to know.

"Well, quite a number of things actually. Doves, for instance. Symbols, one might say, of the post-Christian religious impulse."

"Not copulating doves, by any chance?"

"Er, no. Not like the ones favoured by Jacob Epstein, and not particularly like Barbara Hepworth's, either. Exclusively single doves with outstretched wings, like they were gliding through the air. Spiritual doves rather than simply sensual ones."

"And how big are they?" Mrs Evans asked.

"Oh, about life-size, which is to say, quite small," Matthew informed her matter-of-factly. "But I occasionally vary the scale, sometimes making them as large as a football, sometimes reducing them to approximately the size of a cricket ball. The smallest ones are the hardest to do, but they provide me with a fresh challenge, which is basically why I do them."

Mrs Evans smiled admiringly. "And what else do you do?" she pressed him.

"Oh, figures meditating, seated cross-legged on a small pedestal or cushion, as in my paintings," he revealed, blushing slightly. "There are only a few of those at present, but they signify a development which I intend to expand on over the course of time, provided they meet with public approval. Otherwise I shall be stuck with an unmarketable product. However, all this is a comparatively recent development, not at all typical of my sculpture in general, which, in any case, tends to be less representational, as befitting the age."

"You mean, it's abstract?" Mrs Evans conjectured.

"Essentially biomorphic, like the sculptures of Henry Moore and Jean Arp, two of my principal influences," Matthew declared, smiling. "Like Arp, I generally tend to work to a small scale, using marble or lignum vitae. Yet, unlike him, I don't quite possess the talent for naming works with such poetic skill or imagination! His titles are really quite surreal, you know, usually having no apparent bearing on the nature of the work itself, which, in any case, is pretty nondescript. Besides, he's such a great sculptor - as, of course, is Henry Moore, who is really the sculptor of our time."

"Really?" responded Mrs Evans excitedly. "I'm afraid I know very little about either of them, though I've seen photographic reproductions of one or two of Moore's works, which, however, I could make neither head nor tail of. I mean, why so abstract?"

"Simply because it's relevant to the age," Matthew replied at once. "We've gone beyond the merely representational, the truth-to-nature school, as one might term the more traditional sculptors. Admittedly, there are exceptions - sculptors, for instance, like Jacob Epstein and David Wynne, who are generally more traditional in their approach to sculpture, more given to representations of one sort or another. But sculptors like Moore and Arp are, on the whole, more representative of the times. Indeed, even they are being surpassed now, since they pertain to a generation whose approach to sculpture was less transcendent than the leading sculptors of my generation, like Phillip King and Bruce Beasley, who, naturally enough, have taken sculpture one stage further in its evolution."

"In what way?" Mrs Evans queried.

"Well, it's not easy to say in a few words," Matthew confessed, frowning gently, for the reverse of a critic like Mr Evans was not particularly easy to accommodate either, "but, fundamentally, it comes down to the fact that they've dispensed with such natural materials as marble, stone, and wood, and constructed lightweight sculpture out of synthetic materials, like plastic, fibreglass, plexiglas, and acrylic, which tend to make their works transcendentally superior to those of their predecessors. Superior on account of the fact that they're made from synthetic materials and also because they're less heavy, less solid - altogether more lightweight in appearance. They often have an effect of expanding space and dissolving or disintegrating matter, making careful use of light and transparency, perspective and positioning. For instance, Dan Flavin has constructed sculpture from fluorescent tubes, which aptly illustrates what I mean by the more transcendental nature of contemporary sculpture. At times it tends to merge with Kinetic Art, and it can be difficult to tell them apart - Kinetics sometimes making use of light, as in the work of Takis."

"I'm afraid you're going way above my head," Mrs Evans protested, offering him a revealingly bewildered facial expression. "I've never even heard of such sculpture, never mind seen it! Yet what especially puzzles me is why the transcendental? Why the use of synthetic materials?"

Matthew had to smile slightly. It was always the same with average people. Why this, why that, why not something else? And, just as often, why not something better? In Mrs Evans' case it was evident that her ignorance was partly a consequence of her husband's hostility to such things, since an investigation of modern art and sculpture wouldn't have been encouraged or tolerated by the philistine in question. And, of course, some of his prejudices had rubbed off onto her in any case, making her almost as suspicious as him of contemporary trends. She was, after all, a bourgeois, even if a very attractive and relatively pleasant one. Yet the question she had raised was begging for an answer.

"Well, it just so happens that, being a comparatively recent development, synthetic materials haven't been used in this context before," Matthew obligingly informed her. "Now as the genuine artist is always ready to avail himself of new procedures, indeed is virtually compelled to, it follows that the use of synthetics appeals to him. However, one could also claim that the tendency towards enhanced artificiality is a consequence of modern man's environmental severance from nature, and is accordingly justified on that account. We live at such a remove from the country - and consequently from its influence - in our great cities, that it becomes increasingly difficult for us to relate to natural patterns and correspondingly unattractive. Hence the rise of non-representational art this century, with the use of synthetic rather than natural materials. We wish to achieve a victory over nature, and the more our cities evolve and the more civilized we become, the greater, by a corresponding degree, is the magnitude of that victory. You see, the city itself is essentially a victory over nature, a something apart from and in opposition to it, and everyone who lives in the city partakes of and, sooner or later, relates to that victory. At one time, in the far-off days of our earliest civilizations, we were dominated by nature, under the sway of sensuous phenomena to an extent which made us very little different from the beasts. But, fortunately, we continued to pit ourselves against it, to assert the uniquely human world over the impersonal and often hostile natural one, and gradually we got the better of it, evolved to where we are today - participators in an advanced civilization, anti-natural and/or transcendental men. Needless to say, most of this has come about within the past 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution and the consequent expansion of our towns and cities to their current gigantic scales."

"I think it's all evil," Mrs Evans opined, a gentle though earnest frown of disapproval on her brow. "All this severance from nature which urban life seems to signify, it isn't good."

"That's where I believe you're wrong," Matthew retorted, if in a relatively gentle way. "It isn't as bad as might at first appear." Yet he was conscious, once more, that he was speaking to a female bourgeois, a bourgeoise, not to a proletarian, and that his words were consequently wasted on her. For the bourgeoisie, he had little need to remind himself, were ever a compromise between nature and civilization, the sensual and the spiritual, and accordingly they had little taste for the big city, which, in both its extensive and intensive artificiality, constituted a threat to their integrity - indeed, a refutation of their very existence. The bourgeoisie could only tolerate life in the big city provided they had a country or suburban house to return home to in the evenings, after their office work was over and done with for another day. They were constitutionally able to manage this kind of compromise, and the bigger the city professional commitments obliged them to frequent, the more they preferred a correspondingly extreme rural retreat. Oscillating between essentially proletarian and aristocratic environments, they retained their class integrity and were relatively content.

Yet they would have been still more content if, as in Thomas Evans' case, business could have been conducted in a medium-sized town and it wasn't therefore necessary to oscillate between radical extremes - his house being situated in a pleasantly residential section of town and affording him a welcome relief from its busy main streets. For the bourgeois was traditionally a man of the town rather than the city, and although he could cope with the latter in small doses, i.e. for the duration of his working day, he felt much more at-home between the closer-to-nature walls of the town than in the large-scale artificial environments of the city. Having both nature and civilization within easy reach was, after all, more reassuring for a dualistic mentality than being isolated or threatened with isolation in one or the other. To a bourgeois, extremes were equally fatal. Not to be countenanced! And, as Matthew Pearce had been reminded, Mrs Evans couldn't possibly countenance them. She saw advanced civilization as evil - like D.H. Lawrence, who, in this respect, was fundamentally a bourgeois, despite his partly proletarian origins. And there was nothing that Matthew could do or say to convince her otherwise. No use telling her that the artificial environment was a passport to the post-human millennium, to the ultimate victory of the spirit. The post-human millennium wasn't something to which a bourgeois could relate. In the journey of man from the beastly to the godly, the bourgeois could go no further than two-thirds of the way up the ladder of human evolution, having a life-span, so to speak, that lasted throughout the time when the ego was in its twilight prime. Beyond that, he would cease to be a bourgeois - indeed, cease to live. No wonder the prospect of a post-human millennium met with no sympathy or encouragement on his part! It was a refutation of him!

"And do you also sculpt in or with the aid of synthetic materials?" Mrs Evans tentatively inquired of Matthew, as though the possibility that he did so was a kind of evil to be held against him.

"Naturally," the 'sculptor' replied, somewhat paradoxically. "After all, I'm a member of the younger generation of artists, and so I should be contemporary. There isn't much point in trying to emulate Moore or Arp now, if you see what I mean. As an artist, one should be a sort of spiritual antenna of the race, no matter in what medium one happens to work. For if you write or paint or sculpt or compose in a style that's outmoded, you're either a reactionary or a dilettante, and therefore not strictly necessary. In fact, you're more than likely to be a curse, assuming, of course, that you're given an opportunity to advertise yourself. So you've got to be up-to-date if you hope to achieve anything worthwhile, and one of the best ways - if not the only way - of assuring that you are up-to-date is to live in the big city and thus relate to the foremost spiritual thrust of the age. You can't reflect late twentieth-century civilization if you spend most of your time in a village."

"No, I suppose not," Mrs Evans conceded begrudgingly. "One would simply relate to the surrounding environment."

"Precisely!" Matthew confirmed. "So if you're to become a bona fide artist, you've got to relate to an advanced environment, it's as simple as that! And if, having once related to it, you subsequently abandon it for something lower, like, say, a small town, the chances are that you'll gradually come to relate more to the spirit of the town and consequently cease being an advanced artist. You might well end-up an unenlightened dilettante, consciously or unconsciously praising the shit out of nature and bourgeois values generally."

It wasn't too difficult for Matthew to see that Mrs Evans had been slightly wounded by this, though she did her best to conceal the fact by distancing herself from the latter part of his previous remark. But, as usual, he couldn't resist the temptation to be true to himself and speak his mind. If the bourgeoise in her had been offended, it was just too damn bad! He had no intention of betraying his allegiance to something higher on account of her! After all, people who did that remained victims of the status quo and not potential or actual victors over it.

"And do you have these, er, advanced works in your London studio?" she asked. "I mean, would it be possible for people to visit you and see them?"

"Yes, at least to see such of them as I haven't already sold," Matthew answered, somewhat surprised by the nature of her second question. "Why do you ask?"

"Simply because I'll be in London next week to visit a cousin of mine who has recently had a baby, and would be grateful for an opportunity to see these rather enigmatic works," she revealed, smiling. "I'm sure I'll profit from it."

Matthew was indeed surprised. "Well, please take the opportunity," he responded, a shade nervously under pressure of the regret that was now pervading his soul, like a dark cloud, for having mentioned the stuff in the first place. "I'll be at hand most of next week, so you can come whenever you like."

"Thanks," Mrs Evans responded with alacrity. "I look forward to seeing them," she added, principally alluding to his sculptures, though also unconsciously including his paintings. There was a pause, before she continued: "It will probably be on the Wednesday. It's in the Highgate area of north London that you live and work, isn't it?"

"Yes," confirmed Matthew, who then verbally supplied her with the address of his studio.

"Right," said Mrs Evans, making a mental note of it. "I shouldn't have any trouble finding my way there. I'll get a taxi up from the West End in the afternoon, after I've been to see my cousin, Stephanie. But don't say anything about this to Gwendolyn, else she might get silly ideas into her young head! If you could arrange not to see her on Wednesday, assuming that's all right with you, then I should be able to visit your studio without causing her to feel either jealous or suspicious."

Mrs Evans' blunt frankness had the effect of making Matthew blush slightly. "I don't normally see Gwen during the day in any case, because I have my work to do," he assured her. "She stays in her Chelsea flat or goes out visiting friends, only coming-up to Highgate or meeting me somewhere in the West End during the evening. Admittedly, she has spent a day or two in my flat, but the studio is situated in a different building, some two hundred yards away. So even if she were to be in Highgate during the day next week, I wouldn't see her until the evening. As it happens, I believe her new school term is due to start fairly soon, so she's likely, as a teacher, to be more preoccupied with preparing herself for that than with traipsing around after me. She has her own work to do, after all."

"Yes, I'm sure she has," Mrs Evans agreed, with what seemed to Matthew like a small sigh of relief. Then, turning her attention in the direction of the house, she exclaimed: "Ah, here comes Gwendolyn now! My word, that was quite a long phone conversation, wasn't it?"

"Just under twenty-five minutes," the artist estimated, consulting his digital watch.

Gwen arrived back fairly flushed. "Sorry to have deserted you for so long, Matt," she said in a lightly apologetic tone-of-voice, "but I haven't heard anything from Linda for a few weeks because she's been unwell, so I felt it incumbent on me, as her colleague, to chat her up a bit."

"No problem," he assured her, smiling thinly. "Your mother has kept me company." Which was, to be sure, obvious enough.

"Well, I'd better leave the pair of you to your private devices again, assuming, of course, you want to stay out here," Mrs Evans remarked, getting up from the deck-chair on her daughter's return. She looked at both of them with searching eyes.

"For a little longer, I suppose," said Gwen. "Provided you're not bored with it, Matt."

"No, not particularly," the latter responded. "While the sun's still up, we may as well continue to take heathen advantage of its vitamin-shedding warmth a while longer."

"Yes, I guess so," Gwen agreed. And with that, she sat down and closed her eyes upon her mother's retreating form.