Chapter 3
The narrator, Mrs Midas, begins a late‑September evening by pouring wine and cooking vegetables while the kitchen steams. She observes her husband standing under a pear tree, snapping a twig that turns to gold, and plucking a pear that glows like a light bulb. He enters the house, the doorknobs gleam, and he draws the blinds, evoking images of the Field of the Cloth of Gold. Sitting like a king on a burnished throne, his face is wild and vain. She asks what is happening; he laughs. She serves a starter of corn on the cob, which he spits out, and he toys with the cutlery before demanding wine. She pours a bone‑dry Italian white; he drinks from a golden chalice and then collapses to his knees, prompting her to scream. After they calm, she finishes her wine, forces him to sit on the opposite side of the room, locks the cat in the cellar, moves the phone, and notes the toilet. She muses on his wish for gold, explaining that gold feeds no one and cannot quench thirst. He tries to light a cigarette; she comments that he could quit. She places a chair by the door, noting his obsession with turning the spare room into a tomb of Tutankhamun. Their earlier passionate days now feel threatening, as his “honeyed” embrace could turn her lips into art. She dreams of bearing a child of pure gold, with amber eyes and a burning milk, which awakens to sunlight. Consequently, he moves out to a caravan in the wild; she drives him away under cover of darkness, then returns home alone as “the woman who married the fool who wished for gold.” She later visits his former home at odd times, parking far away and walking in, noticing golden trout on the grass, a hare hanging from a larch (“a beautiful lemon mistake”), and glistening footprints beside a river. He appears thin, delirious, hearing Pan’s music, which becomes the final straw for her. She concludes that his selfishness, not his greed, drove her to sell all the house’s contents and move away, yet she still misses his warm hands.’