Cold, Lone and Still

Prologue

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A week before I married Jane and moved with her into the house I had bought, I was sorting out the last odds and ends in my bachelor flat when I came upon some poems which I must have written to Hera in the early days of our love affair. One of them was only a rough draft, but I do not think I would have altered it much before I sent her a copy. I wonder whether she has kept it? I must have been head over heels in love with her at the time, or I would never have committed myself to praising her in verse. As I read the poems, two thoughts came into my mind. One was the memory of a quotation from an early novel by Aldous Huxley in which he causes a young writer to say, ‘Ah, what genius I had then!’ The other was that I had better tear up the poems. It would never do for dear little freckled Jane to come across them after we were married. She would know that those passionate evocations could never, in this world or the next, apply to her. I suppose I should have known better than to submit to Hera’s rulings about our conduct towards one another on the tour, but I was so besotted with her at the time that I suppose I would have agreed to anything she suggested. I was foolishly, fatally in error. As John Gay has said so rightly:

‘Youth’s the season made for joys;

Love is then our duty.

She alone who that employs

Well deserves her beauty.’

Perhaps Hera did employ it while we were in Scotland, but, if she did, it was with Todd, not with me. She denied that she had done more than hold conversations with him, but I have never believed her. What man, finding a ripe peach nestling in the palm of his hand, would hesitate to gather it? From what I know of him, Todd would have had no scruples, and who shall blame him? Certainly not I.

He may have been an opportunist; I was undoubtedly a fool. The prayer book appears to make no distinction between the sins of commission and those of omission, so, in our different ways, I suppose Todd and I are equally guilty. Anyhow, Nemesis, with whom there is no arguing, has caught up with both of us, although I suppose most people would say that I am luckier than I deserve to be.