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his demeanour: he could have been desperate to get in.
    In the end he needed the gate to keep him upright, so intoxicated was he, not by Libor's wine, though it had been plentiful enough for three grieving men, but by the sensuousness of the park's deep exhalations. He opened his mouth as a lover might, and let the soft foliaged air penetrate his throat.
    How long since he had opened his mouth for a lover proper? Really opened it, he meant, opened it to gasp for air, to yell out in gratitude, to howl in joy and dread. Had he run out of women? He was a lover not a womaniser, so it wasn't as though he had exhausted every suitable candidate for his affection. But they seemed not to be there any more, or had suddenly become pity-proof, the sort of women who in the past had touched his heart. He saw the beauty of the girls who tripped past him on the street, admired the strength in their limbs, understood the appeal, to other men, of their reckless impressionability, but they no longer had the lamp-post effect on him. He couldn't picture them dying in his arms. Couldn't weep for them. And where he couldn't weep, he couldn't love.
    Couldn't even desire.
    For Treslove, melancholy was intrinsic to longing. Was that so unusual? he wondered. Was he the only man who held tightly to a woman so he wouldn't lose her? He didn't mean to other men. In the main he didn't worry much about other men. That is not to say he had always seen them off - he was still scarred by the indolent manner in which the Italian who repaired sash windows had stolen from him - but he wasn't jealous. Envy he was capable of, yes - he'd been envious and was envious still of Libor's life lived mono-erotically ( eloticshrly was how Libor said it, knitting its syllables with his twisted Czech teeth) - but jealousy no. Death was his only serious rival.
    'I have a Mimi Complex,' he told his friends at university. They thought he was joking or being cute about himself, but he wasn't. He wrote a paper on the subject for the World Literature in Translation module he'd taken after fluffing Environmental Decision Making - the pretext being the Henri Murger novel from which the opera La Boheme was adapted. His tutor gave him A for interpretation and D-for immaturity.
    'You'll grow out of it,' he said when Treslove questioned the mark.
    Treslove's mark was upgraded to A++. All marks were upgraded if students questioned them. And since every student did question them, Treslove wondered why tutors didn't just dish out regulation A++s and save time. But he never did grow out of his Mimi Complex. At forty-nine he still had it bad. Didn't all opera lovers?
    And perhaps - like all lovers of Pre-Raphaelite painting, and all readers of Edgar Allan Poe - an Ophelia Complex too. The death betimes of a beautiful woman - what more poetic subject is there?
    Whenever Julian passed a willow or a brook, or best of all a willow growing aslant a brook - which wasn't all that often in London - he saw Ophelia in the water, her clothes spread wide and mermaidlike, singing her melodious lay. Too much of water had she right enough - has any woman ever been more drowned in art? - but he was quick to add his tears to her inundation.
    It was as though a compact had been enjoined upon him by the gods (he couldn't say God, he didn't believe in God), to possess a woman so wholly and exclusively, to encircle her in his arms so completely, that death could find no way in to seize her. He made love in that spirit, in the days when he made love at all. Desperately, ceaselessly, as though to wear down and drive away whichever spirits of malevolence had designs upon the woman in his arms. Embraced by Treslove, a woman could consider herself for ever immune from harm. Dog-tired, but safe.
    How they slept when he had done with them, the women Treslove had adored. Sometimes, as he kept vigil over them, he thought they would never wake.
    It was a mystery to him, therefore, why they always left him or made it