:35:01
l'm jealous, Hesther.
:35:05
Jealous...
:35:07
of Alan Strang.
:35:10
That's absurd.
:35:12
-ls it?
-Yes, utterly.
:35:15
Utterly!
:35:17
l go on about my wife.
Have you thought about the husband?
:35:21
The finicky, critical husband,
with his art books on mythical Greece?
:35:25
What real worship has he known?
Without worship, you shrink!
:35:29
lt's brutal. l shrank my life.
No one can do it for you.
:35:32
l settled for being pallid and provincial
out of my eternal timidity.
:35:35
The old story of bluster, and do bugger-all.
:35:40
l didn't even dare to have children...
:35:42
didn't dare to bring children into
a house and marriage as cold as mine.
:35:49
l tell everyone Margaret is the puritan,
l'm the pagan.
:35:52
Some pagan. Such wild returns l make
to the womb of civilization.
:35:57
Three weeks a year in the Mediterranean.
:35:59
Beds booked in advance,
meals paid with vouchers...
:36:02
cautious jaunts in hired cars,
suitcase crammed with Kaopectate.
:36:07
What a fantastic surrender to the primitive.
:36:11
The ''primitive.'' l use that word endlessly.
:36:13
''The primitive world,'' l say,
''what instinctual truths were lost with it.''
:36:18
While l sit baiting that poor,
unimaginative woman with the word...
:36:23
that freaky boy
is trying to conjure the reality.
:36:26
l look at pages of centaurs
trampling the soil of Argos.
:36:29
Outside my window, that boy is trying
to become one in a Hampshire field.
:36:33
Every night l watch that woman knitting,
a woman l haven't kissed in six years.
:36:38
And he stands for an hour in the dark,
sucking the sweat off his god's hairy cheek.
:36:46
ln the morning,
l put away my books on the cultural shelf...
:36:49
close up my Kodachrome snaps
of Mount Olympus...
:36:53
touch my reproduction statue
of Dionysus for luck...
:36:58
and go off to the hospital
to treat him for insanity.