Henry and Cato by Iris Murdoch

glowed under triangular eyebrows. His stubby chin was neat and round and (perhaps too) small. There was a deep runnel above his lips. The small lips were finely grained with close vertical lines. Behind the head the brightly lit lozenges of the faded wallpaper hung like a shabby harlequin’s dress.
    Assuaged drunken Henry turned out the light, then by the glow of the electric fire pulled back the curtain and opened the window. He leaned out. There was an overwhelming smell of wet earth and plant life as the warmer air from outside rushed into the room where the electric fire had made scarcely any impression upon the archetypal coldness. Henry stretched out his hand into the windless night and thought he could feel a faint misty rain. He listened. There was a soft regular dreadfully familiar sound, the murmur of the little river descending to the lake. Clouds must have covered the moon. Leaning out, he could just see the lower façade of the main house, lightless, just outlined against the dark sky. His mother’s bedroom was on the other side. He remembered with disgust the presence of Lucius. A light came on in a room just above him, on the maids’ floor, and he moved back and partially closed his window and drew the curtains. He was reeling on his feet. He got his trousers off, then collapsed onto his bed and fell instantly into deep sleep, leaving the electric fire burning. When he awoke in the morning it had been turned off.
    â€˜Copperbottomed?’
    â€˜Copperbottomed, Mr Henry.’
    â€˜Good. That’s all I wanted to know.’
    â€˜Shall I show you—?’
    â€˜No, thank you, Mr Merriman, the details can wait.’
    It was the next morning. After having dismissed Merriman, Henry continued to sit, quite still, at the red-velour-covered round table in the library gazing at the big tapestry of Athena and Achilles: Flemish work, probably of the late seventeenth century. Recording this, it occurred to him how much he had learnt about art in America, after having left England as a barbarian. Seeing the tapestry for the first time, he studied it now in the bright sunless northern light of the morning. The goddess, her long-tailed helmet thrust back over her curls, wearing a much-pleated robe with the aegis rather carelessly falling off one shoulder, was striding out of a large-foliaged shrubbery which took up most of the left side of the tapestry. A determined sandalled foot, heel-down, emerged from the swinging skirt. The right hand held a tall vertical spear which divided the sky above the shrubbery, while the left, in an elaborate and implausible pattern of flowing locks and crooked fingers, grasped from behind the bright hair of the helmetless hero, who was also represented as moving away to the right, holding a sword and a foreshortened shield and wearing extremely brief glittering fishscale armour beneath which a fancy undergarment fell in pleated flounces so as barely to cover his private parts. The long brazen-grooved muscular legs, glimpsed through the foliage, were lovingly rendered. Both figures were in profile, the goddess impassive and stern, the hero, his head not yet turning to his patroness, very large-eyed, very beautiful, very young, with parted lips, registering a mild surprise. The plain of windy Troy was suggested by a foot or two of golden sward edged by a pattern of elegant flowers; then the shrubbery began again with, beyond it, the pallid turrets of the city. The sky was a very, very light radiant brownish blue. ‘Why hast thou come, O daughter of Zeus?’
    I wish I had a goddess to grab me by the hair and tell me what to do, thought Henry. It was eleven o’clock. He had breakfasted in bed. (Gerda brought the tray this time.) He had asked to see Merriman, and his mother, who regarded the family solicitor as a servant, had summoned him to come at once. Henry’s purpose in seeing Merriman was simply to discover whether the will was clear and sound. It