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I returned to Stoke Newington on Thursday, the 9th December. As the month progressed, the weather grew worse. The cold and the lengthening nights were perfectly in tune with my gloomy spirits. Sometimes I slipped into a fit of wild despair. When my mind was unoccupied, two faces rushed to fill the vacancy, those of Mrs Frant and Miss Carswall. I was amazed by my own folly: if it were ludicrous to pine for one lady so far removed from my own sphere of society, then how much more absurd to pine for two? Yet however much I brought philosophy to my aid, I could not expel those two lovely images from my thoughts.

“You are out of sorts, Tom,” said Edward Dansey one evening as we sat over the dying fire.

“It is merely a fit of the dumps. I beg your pardon – I do not wish to be a plague.”

“One’s spirits have their seasons, just as the weather has. What is it you are reading?”

I passed the book to him.

“The Carmina of Catullus?” He held the book up to the candle and turned over the pages. “Charming, charming,” he murmured. “All the passion of youth is here, and all its folly. I should not let Mr Bransby see you reading it, however.”

“I am re-reading the poems not for their matter but for their metre,” I said.

“Yes, there are elements of interest in Catullus’s use of phalaecians and scazons. As for the hexametric poems, it is undeniable that he handles the metre with far more elegance than Lucretius contrives, though to my mind a greater employment of enjambment would have improved them still further. His elegiacs, on the other hand, do not merit the compliment of imitation, and his pentameters are often positively uncouth.” He looked up, saw my face and turned his lopsided smile on me. “You must not mind me, Tom, I am a little out of sorts myself.” He returned the volume. “Have you heard the news? Quird is to be withdrawn from the school.”

“I cannot say I am sorry to hear it.”

“It appears that his father was badly hit when Wavenhoe’s collapsed. The family has lost nearly all it had.”

“It is, I’m afraid, a common enough story.” I held out my hands to the fire. “I hope they are not in actual want?”

“Not quite. It is a dreadful business.” Dansey’s eyes glowed orange in the candlelight. “But of course few have suffered as Mrs Frant has suffered. Is it true that she is entirely dependent on the charity of her cousin Mr Carswall?”

“I believe so.” I heard a trace of agitation in my tone, for I remembered that fatal codicil that had removed, with my unconscious assistance, her last hope of financial independence. I forced myself to continue: “And Charlie, too, of course.”

Dansey waved a long-fingered hand. “At least he is young. Youth has astonishing resilience. But Mrs Frant’s position must be truly wretched.”

I mumbled agreement, not trusting myself to speak.

“No doubt she loved him?”

I made no reply, though Dansey waited for one.

“Yes, but then love is a curious emotion,” he went on in a moment, as though I had answered in the affirmative. “We commonly use one word where at least three are required. When poets speak of love, they describe a passionate attachment to another individual. It is perhaps less an attachment than a form of hunger. However they dress it up in the language of sentiment, it is at bottom a physical appetite for the sexual act, a desire to enjoy the last favour. It is an extraordinarily powerful appetite, it is true, and one directed with remarkable intensity at a single individual, an intensity that may border on madness – as, perhaps, it did for poor Catullus with his Lesbia. Yet it is usually short-lived. I have known many young men who fall in love once a week. And when such a man marries the beloved of the moment, the passion rarely lasts at the pitch it attained before it was satisfied.”

I stared at the fire. Dansey’s voice had taken on a slow, dreamlike quality. I wished I were alone in a silent room.

“As to the second meaning,” he said after another pause, another opportunity for me to speak. “On many occasions love is little more than a respectable synonym for lechery, a universal appetite for copulation, for unbridled carnality. The word love casts a veil of propriety over it. It is an attempt to disguise its nature, to shield it from the strictures of moralists. But, truly considered, the phenomenon is no more lovely or unlovely than the behaviour of a pig at a trough.”

I stirred in my chair.

“Pray do not be uneasy,” he said quickly. “The taxonomy of the emotions should be the province of the natural philosopher, as well as that of the poet. And, to the unbiased observer at least, it is clear that a mature person may feel for – for – another person a category of emotion which may properly be called love; indeed it may be argued that it deserves the appellation more than the previous categories. This would be my third definition of the word. I refer to an individual’s calm and disinterested concern for the well-being of another.”

I suppressed a yawn. “It sounds remarkably like friendship. Or a mother’s feeling for a child.”

“No, Tom, not exactly. It does not exclude passion, you see. Passion may play a part, albeit guided by reason, by experience. One sees it sometimes in married couples, in whom it may flourish after their initial ardours have subsided. One sometimes sees it, too, in friendships between members of the same sex, very commonly in soldiers or sailors who have braved terrible dangers together. If one had to characterise this type of affection, one could, I think, usefully entertain the notion of completeness. The lover feels incomplete without the beloved. It is an emotion that may flourish unobtrusively in unexpected places. Though it may embrace the sexual sphere, it is not confined to it.”

He leaned forward, elbows on knees. I saw twin candle flames burning in his eyes. It is a terrifying thing to glimpse the depth of another’s need.

I pushed back my chair and stood up. “Ned – pray excuse me – it has been a long day. I shall fall asleep if I stay another moment. You will not take it amiss if I withdraw, will you?”

“No,” Dansey said. “No, of course not. You were falling into a doze. I warrant you hardly heard a word I’ve been saying.”

I wished him goodnight. At the door, he called me back.

“You will want this,” he said. “Your Catullus.”