I dutifully suggested we take Angela. Touched, Milord thanked me for that thoughtfulness, but declared there was another female going with us instead. Now, John: our autocratic 5th Stage really has been in full noxious flower since I wrote you last, even though (thank God) Bea Golden had not returned from that Farm after the Doctor’s “funeral.” But for all I knew she might be back in town with Prinz, and now I wondered: Was I really expected to… But no, he was joking! My avant-gardist, it seems, has conceived a passion for old Samuel Richardson (the first to speak of the Death of the Novel, it turns out, in a letter to Lady Barbara Montague dated 1758): the third member of our ménage à trois was to be R.‘s Clarissa!

All four volumes, dear? Sure, and a six-pack of National Premium, two beach towels, and our suntan lotion. Ambrose cannot bear reading that endless novel, you understand: he likes hearing me read him the table of contents and Richardson’s chapter summaries.

Chacun à son goût. He was in good humour (not good enough to let me wear my own clothes; he decked me out in a Roaring-Twentyish cotton middy blouse with black silk sailor kerchief, rather fetching actually, Lord knows where he found it); I was in middle month and wondering whether we might manage the Zeus-&-Danaë trick up in that tower, seeing more conventional deposits had so far failed to yield interest. The weather was of course steamy and threatening thundershowers, which the soybean and corn fields needed; on the other hand, below-normal rainfall had kept the mosquito population down. The campus was deserted. We understand that A. B. Cook has already occupied my office — may be there as I write these lines — but he was not in evidence: only a few student groundkeepers and, over by the Media Centre, a van that we recognised as belonging to Prinz’s crew. We sped past, not to be recognised in turn, parked on the far side of Schott’s Folly, and let ourselves quickly through the padlocked cyclone fence into the construction site.

The scene was dead quiet: one could hear the Stars and Stripes and the flag of Maryland flapping in the damp breeze at their staffs a hundred yards off, and a few desultory cicadas. Round about the site were paper sacks of, of all things, Medusa Cement. We were duly amused, but the coincidence prompted, instead of erotic associations with Danaë’s brass tower, a re-remarking by Ambrose that whereas Medusa turned everything into stone, Mensch Masonry (whose cement it was) could be said to turn stone into everything, except money. Indeed, though allegedly cracked as the House of Usher, the stone-masonry base of the tower is handsomely done, in the same random rubble as the brothers’ camera obscura. The rest of the shaft is a rough-finished reinforced concrete eyesore.

We climbed, A. reminiscing about the alphabet-block towers they’d built together as boys: compromises, not always successful, between Peter’s interest in their engineering and Ambrose’s in what they spelled. I went first up the fire stairs, pausing at unglassed windows less to look at the not-much-of-anything than to give Ambrose occasion to “do a verbena,” as was his wont back in sexy April. (Do you know Maupassant’s tale “La Fenêtre,” about the verbena-scented lady who invites her suitor to her country château but will not yield to him? He consoles himself with her chambermaid and, discovering this latter one morning leaning out a turret window — so he supposes, from his position below and behind her — he resolves to surprise her by slipping up the stairs lifting her skirts, and kissing her knickerless derrière. The little prank succeeds; he quickly plants his lover’s kiss; is confounded by the scent there, not of the maid’s familiar odeur naturel, but of her chaste mistress’s perfume! Scandalised, the lady sends him packing; but — ah Guy! ah, France! — years after, as he retells the tale, it seems to the narrator that he can still summon to his moustaches la senteur de verveine…)

Nothing doing.

We attained the top: dusty concrete floor and a sultry view of loblolly pines, parching grass, Marshyhope U., and white crab-boats on the distant creeks. A view (Ambrose declared after one perfunctory conning, and I agree) better mediated by camera obscura than viewed directly. Exam time again: Do you know Gossaert’s 16th-Century Danaë? A winsome, moon-faced teenager half wrapped in open indigo drapery, she perches on tasselled red cushions in a Renaissance campanile, ankles crossed but bare knees parted, and looks up with puckered unsurprise at the shower of gold which rains past the plump little breast that will one day suckle Perseus, onto the folds of her robe, and out of sight between her thighs. So presently perched I (changes changed) on a pair of clean 50-lb. sacks of Medusa, the only unsoiled seat thereabouts. Ambrose likewise, and fetched out… his beer and his Richardson.

It is the final tyranny of tyrants that, when on occasion they behave like decent chaps, we are inordinately grateful. Milord was merry. Roused already (and knees tentatively ajar), I was roused further by his mere friendliness for a change; further still by our rehearsal of Clarissa’s table of contents. Her mother connives at the private correspondence between her and Lovelace… Her expedient to carry on a private correspondence with Miss Howe… A letter from her brother forbidding her to appear in the presence of any of her relations without leave. Her answer. Writes to her mother. Her mother’s answer. Writes to her father. His answer… Her expostulatory letter to her brother and sister. Their answers… Copies of her letters to her two uncles, and of their characteristic answers… An insolent letter from her brother on her writing to Solmes… Observes upon the contents of her seven letters… Her closet searched for papers. All the pens and ink they find taken from her… Substance of her letter to Lovelace… Lays all to the fault of her corresponding with him at first…

Et cetera. These from the mere 99 letters of Volume 1, with yet to come the 438 of the other three volumes! But we never came to them — Clarissa’s protracted rape and even more protracted repining unto death. For if, admixed with Ambrose’s mirth, was professional envy of his great predecessor’s wind (and the stamina of readers in those days), admixed with mine was a complex sympathy for Clarissa Harlowe — yea even unto her employment (Vol. IV, Letter XCVI, Belford to Lovelace) of her coffin for a writing table! I recalled that Clarissa’s “elopement” with Lovelace had been a major event in Mme de Staël’s girlhood, when, as 15-year-old Germaine Necker, she had doted breathlessly upon Richardson’s novels. And now she was dead, as presently Ambrose, André, I, and all must be, the most of us having done little more, in Leonardo’s phrase, than “fill up privies.” Before I knew it I was weeping instead of laughing, there in my antic getup on my cement sacks: half a century old, childless, husbandless, wageless, surely a little cracked (as Schott unkindly alleged), and stuck on Redmans Neck with an unsuccessful writer and petty despot instead of flourishing in Paris or Florence with some Benjamin Constant…

He kissed me, God bless Ambrose for that: a proper loving and consoling buss before he touched between my legs. Then I did go a bit mad: moaned at him to take me as he’d taken Magda in Peter’s cellar a quarter-century ago. Dear God, I wanted to conceive by him, to get something beyond my worn-out self! And by God we tried, on that hard bed of Medusa Portland. Let Danaë do it her way; I’ll get my Perseus with a regular roger! If there’s connexion between the ploughing and the crop… Comes then the golden shower, not a drop wasted on the draperies; surely that should turn the trick, if we’ve one in us to turn; my joy poured out as A. poured in—