The Red And The Green by Iris Murdoch

was altered. Christopher’s money had come to him from his father, who had been a teacher of mathematics at Trinity, an amateur economist and an expert gambler on the Stock Exchange; which expertize had augmented an already comfortable family fortune. Christopher himself was neither rapacious nor mean and had not inherited his father’s taste for playing with money. Yet money was important to him, its presence was a deep source of security, and it was somehow a stuff through which he was vitally connected with the world. A part of his life-blood ran through it. And when he became financially connected with Millie some warmth passed from him to her with the connection. It was this primitive touching, more even perhaps than the more obvious sense of a power over her, which made him begin to fall in love.
    But of course these explanations, upon which he himself later meditated, were in a way otiose. Millie was a gorgeous desirable object. He wondered why all men were not in love with her, and soon began to suspect that they were. She was an overflowing vessel, a plump, gay, generous woman. There was some coldness, some shivering, shrewd thinness in Christopher which needed her desperately, which clung to her as to a source of warmth and life. He only half concealed his need, watching her with a large affectation of detachment, and enraptured by the cool amused gaze which, in the formality of their new relationship, she with equal affectation adopted. He remembered how, in the old quarrelling days, Millie would sometimes shout out, ‘But I adore Christopher!’ Now, as their poker-faced relation gradually broke down into tenderness and laughter, he realized that Millie was not only grateful, she was prepared in effect to adore him. This made Christopher very happy indeed.
    Time passed, and Millie’s affairs became more involved and difficult. Christopher lent her more money. He gave her advice too, but he was a prudent rather than an original capitalist and an ineffective helper. Millie took advice in other quarters, without revealing the seriousness of the situation, and merely increased the muddle she was in. She was incapable of economies. Christopher watched these developments with mixed feelings, and gradually an idea which seemed to him both sinister and delightful formulated itself in his mind. Millie’s difficulty would be Christopher’s opportunity.
    That he might ever ask Millie to marry him was a notion which, after he had fallen in love with her, he had early dismissed. He wanted to be happy, to enjoy the deliciousness of her company, not to ask too much; and it seemed clear that she could not possibly want to marry him. She was a spoilt girl, he was not by any means her only admirer, and she ostentatiously enjoyed her freedom. She ‘adored’ him, but she was not in the least in love with him. ‘Adoration’ was something different. Millie skipped about, bounded like a dog, shouted more than usual when Christopher arrived. But she let him depart without repining. She liked the intermittent character of their converse. He would have wished to be with her day and night. He coveted her body with a passion which his shrewd hedonism constantly quieted and checked. He did not care, at his age, to suffer the sleepless nights of unsatisfied desire, and he did not in fact suffer them. But he wanted Millie; and he knew that she did not, in that way, want him.
    Discretion about money had somehow cast a veil of secrecy over their whole relationship. It was not generally known that they were fond of each other or that they met so often; and Christopher kept up for the benefit of some of his relations the fiction that he found Millie ‘trying’. He did this partly out of an innate taste for the clandestine, partly because of the money question, and partly because Millie wanted it that way. Christopher was realistic and resigned about Millie’s desire for secrecy. A popular woman