I finished and hesitated on some vague foolish lie, “No,” I said, a little ashamed of the truth. “Do you? I’ve been too busy.”
“ I’m just beginning—just as we were then. Things happen.”
He sucked at his pipe for a space and stared at the plaster cast of a flayed hand that hung on the wall.
“ The fact is, Ponderevo, I’m beginning to find life a most extraordinary queer set-out; the things that pull one, the things that don’t. The wants—This business of s*x. It’s a net. No end to it, no way out of it, no sense in it. There are times when women take possession of me, when my mind is like a painted ceiling at Hampton Court with the pride of the flesh sprawling all over it. WHY?... And then again sometimes when I have to encounter a woman, I am overwhelmed by a terror of tantalising boredo
