"When I go back? I don't know what I will do. I loved her, you see." He had the sort of classical beauty that became inhuman when attacked by grief, a Greek façade meant only for sunlight. Gothic was best, John thought, looking at the face prepared to crumble into snivels, Gothic was built for storms. He said quickly:

"You should read Burton. Listen." And he began to recite the one paragraph of the Anatomy of Melancholy he had committed to memory. " 'Love is blind, as the saying is, Cupid's blind, and so are all his followers. Every lover admires his mistress, though she be very deformed of herself, ill-favoured, wrinkled, pimpled, pale, red, yellow, tanned, tallow-faced, have a swollen juggler's platter face, or a thin lean chitty face, have clouds in her eyes, be crooked, dry bald, goggle-eyed, blear-eyed, or with staring eyes, she looks like a squised cat, hold her head still awry, heavy, dull, hollow-eyed, black or yellow about the eyes, or squint-eyed, sparrow-mouthed, Persian hook-nosed, have a sharp fox-nose, a red nose, China flat, great nose, snub and flat nose, a nose like a promontory, gubber-tushed, rotten teeth, black, uneven, brown teeth, beetle-browed, a witch's beard, her breath stink all over the room, her nose drop winter and summer, with a Bavarian poke under her chin, sharp chin, lave-eared, with a long crane's neck which stands awry too, her dugs like two double jugs, or else no dugs, bloody-fallen fingers, she have long filthy unpared nails, scabbed hands or wrists, a tanned skin, a rotten carcass, crooked back, she stoops, is lame, splay-footed, as slender in the middle as a cow in the waist, gouty legs, her ankles hang over her shoes, her feet stink, she breed lice, a mere changeling, a very monster, an oaf imperfect, her whole complexion savours, an harsh voice, incondite gesture, vile gait, a vast virago, or an ugly tit, a slug, a fat fustilugs, a truss, a long lean rawbone, a skeleton, and to thy judgment looks like a mard in a lanthorn, whom thou couldst not fancy for a world, but hatest, loathest, and wouldst have spit in her face, or blow thy nose in her bosom, remedium amoris to another man, a dowdy, a slut, a scold, a nasty rank rammy filthy beastly quean, dishonest peradventure, obscene, base, beggarly, rude, foolish, untaught, peevish – if he love her once, he admires her for all this, he takes no notice of any such errors or imperfections of body or mind, he had rather have her than any woman in the world.' "

Even the Romans had been listening from about halfway through the catalogue, openmouthed. One old man said "Bravo" at the end. Elton goggled at Keats, his face restored to handsomeness, very vacuous.

"Why?" he said: "Why did you learn all that?"

"I like it," John said. "Besides, it's a manner of warning. Not to fall in love."

"But the whole drift is, as I see it, that love is strong and mighty and overcomes reason."

"Yes yes, I see, I know. Shakespeare was shorter with his brow of Egypt. Alma Venus works through madness." He drank. The wine took fire from the lantern on its shelf on the roughcast wall beside them. "Sour. I used Burton's book once to a very practical end. I used advice he gives for the stemming of lust. It was difficult for me at that time, you see. I was sharing a house with a man, and he was sharing his bed with the Irish maidservant. I could hear them every night and sometimes in the afternoon. And there was I in love, and desirous, and not able – Burton advised the thinning out of the diet. I took no meat, no wine. I was a very Hindoo with my mess of greens. It subdued desire and I was able to concentrate on love. What kind of a world is it that denies the goddess to us? Alma Venus, indeed, ruling all. She does not rule the way we of the middle sort must love."

Elton's face began unbecomingly to crack again. "It is not just any body, not just any breasts or buttocks or – It is hers under the muslin. Hers, hers only. Now Major Kettering will thrust in."

"Is this the Harry she speaks of?"

"I know him, I know the swine. We were at Rochester together. God curse, God damn -"

"For God's sake think of it as mere madness. Something that must be cured."

"Are you cured?"

John thought about that. "Perhaps," he said at length, "if you ate a beefsteak."

"Here? Beefsteaks here in this town? It's all veal. Their calves never reach bullockhood."

"That's good, that's well put. Here, read this. It is a translation I have done from the holy Roman." And he drew the tailed sonnet from his bosom and handed it to Elton. Elton read it with gloom as though it were a move-order back to St Helena.

"Coarse. I know all of these words for the member save that one – dumpendebat. That you made up."

"It's a holy word from a holy hymn."

"Major Kettering with his holy dumpendebat, thrusting it in. There were some of us after supper, pissing in the garden of the mess at Rochester, with the orchestra coming through very clear and the swish of the dancers, for it was our summer ball. Pissing under the stars and on the bole of the great elm that's there. One said, Captain Freebody I believe it was, there's an unholy great red rod you have on you, Harry. And Kettering says: made great with use. It all comes back to me now. God, God, surely that's where they met. And Augusta so demure in her spotted muslin ballgown, and her arms so tender and plump." Elton began to cry.

"Stop that," John said sharply. "We all have cause for it. It's not a man's way."

"Man's way." Elton stiffened. "Damn you, I'm a soldier," he cried, then drank off his wine, shuddered, poured himself all that was left in the fiasco and, before drinking again, called: "Hey grandma, more of this piss." The Romans heard that – thispis – with the respect due to an older and more authoritative tongue than their own, perhaps Greek, and tried it out (dispis) while the old woman, with a gummy garlic cackle, went to refill. "How did you get yours?" Elton asked.

"My what?"

"The thing we both have."

"I was nursing my brother," John said. "Tom. A mere boy. I caught it from him."

"And how did he catch it?"

"I don't know. But it can be a very catching thing, God help us."

"But not everybody catches it. The doctors don't seem to catch it. You know what I was told? I was told that all depends on the state of health of the mind of him who is exposed to it. And that if you are in love – if you are thwarted -"

"Please. Try not to think of it." The wine came. "Grazie."

"I put this as a general proposition, you understand, a general proposition." He took comfort from the words and quaffed like a soldier. "What was I saying then?"

"You were, sir, enunciating a general proposition."

"Good. The thwarting of desire, I said. His desire was thwarted. Yours also. And of course mine." He lowered his forehead almost as far as his wine-gripping hand and growled: "Desire."

"You speak better than you know," John said. "There was a fool, his name was Wells, not that it matters. No, it does. Wells of stupidity, of malice, wells of the rank stinking water of inhumanity. He convinced poor Tom that a foreign lady was madly in love with him. She did not, I may say, exist. But Tom in his fever cried out for her. I should have thrashed Wells before I left England."

"I had a corporal named Wells. He was a corrupt man and a drinker. No, his name was Willis. But it is near enough. I'll thrash this Wells for you when I reach home." Erect again, he nodded at John casually, as though he had offered to deliver a parcel. Then: "I have a confession to make."

"Make no confession to me. There's that chewing nodding priest at Trinity Church we see on the Steps. He hears confessions."

"Now you joke again and laugh at me. No, no, this is a confession that concerns only you. I lied to you, you see. I was never at St Helena. It was my cousin Jenkins that was there."