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weretheir dreams and nightmares? How different it would be to see them now, slack in the jaw, bodies open. We might be able to say something truthful to one another instead of the usual rolled-up Goodmornings.
    I went to look at my sunflowers, growing steadily, sure that the sun would be there for them, fulfilling themselves in the proper way at the proper time. Very few people ever manage what nature manages without effort and mostly without fail. We don’t know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo sapiens. Who’s kidding whom?
    So what am I going to do? I asked Robin on the wall. Robins are very faithful creatures who mate with the same mate year by year. I love the brave red shield on their breast and the determined way they follow the spade in search of worms. There am I doing all the digging and there’s little Robin making off with the worm. Homo sapiens. Blind Nature.
    I don’t feel wise. Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?
    The facts of my case are not unusual:
    1
I have fallen in love with a woman who is married.
2
She has fallen in love with me.
3
I am committed to someone else.
4
How shall I know whether Louise is what I must do or must avoid?
    The church could tell me, my friends have tried to help me, I could take the stoic course and run from temptation or I could put up sail and tack into this gathering wind.
    For the first time in my life, I want to do the rightthing more than I want to get my own way. I suppose I owe that to Bathsheba …
    I remember her visiting my house soon after she had returned from a six-week trip to South Africa. Before she had gone, I had given her an ultimatum: Him or me. Her eyes, which very often filled with tears of self-pity, had reproached me for yet another lover’s half-nelson. I forced her to it and of course she made the decision for him. All right. Six weeks. I felt like the girl in the story of Rumpelstiltskin who is given a cellar full of straw to weave into gold by the following morning. All I had ever got from Bathsheba were bales of straw but when she was with me I believed that they were promises carved in precious stone. So I had to face up to the waste and the mess and I worked hard to sweep the chaff away. Then she came in, unrepentant, her memory gone as ever, wondering why I hadn’t returned her trunk calls or written poste restante.
    ‘I meant what I said.’
    She sat in silence for about fifteen minutes while I glued the legs back on a kitchen chair. Then she asked me if I was seeing anybody else. I said I was, briefly, vaguely, hopefully.
    She nodded and turned to go. When she got to the door she said, ‘I intended to tell you before we left but I forgot.’
    I looked at her, sudden and sharp. I hated that ‘we’.
    ‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘Uriah got NSU from a woman he slept with in New York. He slept with her to punish me of course. But he didn’t tell me and the doctor thinks I have it too. I’ve been taking the antibiotics so it’s probably all right. That is, you’re probably all right. You ought to check though.’
    I came at her with the leg of the chair. I wanted to run it straight across her perfectly made-up face.
    ‘You shit.’
    ‘Don’t say that.’
    ‘You told me you weren’t having sex with him any more.’
    ‘I thought it was unfair. I didn’t want to shatter what little sexual confidence he might have left.’
    ‘I suppose that’s why you’ve never bothered to tell him that he doesn’t know how to make you come.’
    She didn’t answer. She was crying now. It was like blood in the water to me. I circled her.
    ‘How long is it you’ve been married? The perfect public marriage. Ten years, twelve? And you don’t ask him to put his head between your legs because you think he’ll find it distasteful. Let’s hear it for sexual confidence.’
    ‘Stop it,’ she said, pushing me away. ‘I have to go