For Love or Money by Tim Jeal Read Free Book Online

originally followed this question were not of the same order. Why did there have to be so many Bs in anatomical description? Somehow ‘Baroque buttocks, button eyes’ had been a staccato cadence out of keeping with the swelling curves of his cornucopian gambollers.
    It had always been a grief to Andrew Matthews that God had not given him slightly softer features. His nose was thin and sharp, his cheek-bones too pronounced and his chin definitely too pointed. He looked around his room with satisfaction before sitting down behind his table. The warm glow of his gas fire nicely counteracted the colder and more ethereal light cast through his bottle-green lampshade.
    He was wearing a polo-neck sweater which conveniently covered his slightly protruding Adam’s apple. Occasions which demanded a tie always annoyed him.
    A couple of minutes later David knocked and entered.
    Andrew gave no trace of his appreciation of this new arrival, but curtly offered him a seat.
    ‘I thought today we would talk about Book IV generally rather than getting down to translation straight away.’
    David nodded assent. He had only managed to translate fifty of the required two hundred lines.
    ‘First of all I’d like to ask you a few questions. I expect you’ve read the book in translation?’
    David nodded again.
    ‘Don’t you think Aeneas behaves rather badly to Dido?’
    ‘She does kill herself because he goes away.’
    ‘So you think he should have stayed?’ Andrew smiled benevolently, the perfect pedagogue.
    ‘Yes, if … if what happened …’
    David was blushing delightfully.
    ‘Go on‚’ said Andrew encouragingly.
    ‘If what happened in the cave is what seems to have happened.’
    Andrew listened amazed. What an incredibly mature appraisal, put with such delicate reticence and charming embarrassment .
    ‘So you think that after what happened in the cave he had pledged himself?’
    ‘Well, he shouldn’t have gone in there if he was going to leave Carthage and he must have known he would have to. I mean, he went to Carthage by mistake. He was shipwrecked.’
    ‘What you’re saying then is that he was selfish to try to find temporary consolation in a chance encounter when his destiny lay elsewhere.’
    ‘Yes … I mean … I think so.’
    Andrew looked at him sitting awkwardly on the edge of the sofa, and studied him more carefully … of course it would be ridiculous to feel sentimental at this early stage, but this boy was certainly unusual. It would be impossible to try and convince him of Aeneas’s higher role of founding Italy, after so deep an apprehension of the most intimate details of Aeneas’s relationship with Dido. He decided to try another topic.
    ‘You may perhaps remember that after Dido has fallen in love, Vergil represents her as a deer in flight running with the huntsman’s deadly barb still in her side, doomed although she runs. Why do you think this is such a good simile?’
    ‘Because she didn’t ask to fall in love, just like animals who don’t ask to be shot at.’
    ‘I like that‚’ said Andrew slowly.
    No mere textbook reiterations here. Fools like Crofts would label such freshness of appreciation ‘scholarship material’ and leave it at that. But here was what he had once been, before being choked by the cumbersome machinery ofacademic theories and pretentions. Andrew had always been keen on the idea of successors at school: boys who would keep up the fight against oafish heartiness and enthusiasm for games that stifled sensitivity. For a moment he forgot his Adam’s apple, and the angularity of his features. Now, exactly as he had wished, here was somebody seeing as he had seen, reacting as he had reacted, somebody almost reenacting his lost years.
    Andrew went on questioning and, as the half-hour drew towards a close, he became still more convinced that this was what he had come to Edgecombe for, to remember the past with all the love and self-pity of a dying man.
     *
    David was