Synopses

THWARTED AMBITIONS: This is the tragic and, in some sense, pathetic account of a young artist by name of Robert Harding who is so obsessed with advancing his career ... that he becomes blind to the sexual machinations of Henry Grace, a wealthy and influential art critic, to seduce him whilst ostensibly posing as his admiring patron. For Grace seems to be just the answer to Harding's professional ambitions, and the artist allows himself to be led from commission to commission by the older man without the slightest suspicion of what the latter is really all about. But it is Carol, Harding's modelling girlfriend, whose suspicions are first aroused and, together with both the writer Andrew Doyle, who is Harding's next-door neighbour, and a professional acquaintance of hers by name of Donald Prescott, she plots to thwart Grace's sexual ambitions - with tragic consequences for the critic, as things turn out in this far from implausible narrative!

SECRET EXCHANGES: An artist is invited by his girlfriend to visit her parents in the provinces and, failing to get on with her father, duly finds himself inviting her mother to his London studio where, to his shame, he allows himself to be seduced by her whilst apparently teaching her to meditate. Thereafter things go from bad to worse for Matthew Pearce, not to mention his girlfriend's mother, whose tetchy and ailing husband has discovered what he believes to be concrete evidence of her infidelity. Yet Deirdre Evans is determined to capitalize on Matthew's previous hospitality, just as the latter is having serious doubts not only about her but, thanks in part to their affair, about his relationship with her daughter, Gwendolyn, as well! Then, one evening, a female acquaintance of Gwen's turns up at his place and, before long, she precipitates him into a new and more passionate affair - in fact, the kind of affair he had been hoping for all along! So now it seems he can dispense with both Gwen and her mother and take up with Linda instead - provided, however, that she can secure a divorce from her husband on grounds of incompatibility. For Linda Daniels is also a married woman, and, like Mrs Evans, the man to whom she is married proves himself to be no friend of Matthew Pearce! Could that be the main motive for Pearce's willingness, bordering on recklessness, to enter into affairs with both women? The reader is left to decide this and so much else for himself in what is, by any account, an ironic commentary on human relationships and their social and ideological interactions!