Jake's Thing

Jake's Thing

Kingsley Amis

First published in 1978

To Pat Kavanagh

1—This Is It

"When did you first notice something was wrong?"

"Well, notice, it must be five or six weeks, I could give you the date if I had to. But then as soon as I did notice I realised something had been wrong much further back than that."

"How much further back?"

"Oh..... A year? Year and a half?"

"About the time your other trouble started to become acute, in fact."

"Yes. There must be a link."

By way of answer the doctor gave a quiet sigh. His patient, a round-faced bespectacled man called Jake Richardson, was left to wonder whether this meant that the link was all too grimly real, that only a fool would suppose one existed or that the task of explanation seemed altogether daunting. Jake didn't wonder for long. To have gone on doing so would have been to concede the doctor (Curnow by name) too much importance. When asked why he persistently went to a man he had so little time for, Jake would say that disliking your GP was a good insurance against getting dependent on him.

Now Dr Curnow shook his head a few times and swallowed. In the end he said, "There's nothing I can do for you."

"Oh, but surely you must have a—"

"No. The only way is for me to send you to someone."

"That was rather what I—"

"Excuse me a second, would you, please?"

Funny how it's got ruder to say please than not, Jake thought to himself as the doctor began to turn slowly through a small leather-bound book on his desk. He seemed to find its contents of unusual interest, even novelty. One page in particular absorbed his attention for longer than would have been necessary if he had been doing no more than reading the whole of it with care. After this interval he lifted his head abruptly and looked Jake straight in the eye for a quarter of a minute or so. Then he returned his gaze to the book before him, keeping it fixed there while he reached for his telephone. It had buttons instead of a dial.

"Dr Rosenberg? Dr Curnow here." This information was enough to provoke a considerable speech from the other end, though Jake couldn't make out anything of what was said. "I have a patient you might be able to do something for," said Curnow at last. "I have him here in the room with me. Name of Richardson, J. C. Richardson..... Well, you'll remember the Mr Pickering I sent to you last autumn..... Oh did he, I'm sorry to hear that..... Yes, I'm afraid so...." What Curnow heard next made him stare at Jake again but more consideringly, look him over rather than look at him. "Certainly not. No question of anything like that...." Curnow's face changed, except for the direction and quality of his stare, and he started nodding emphatically. "Oh yes, very much so..... Yes, the perfect description..... Oh really? You will? .... I'll ask him." Curnow arranged an appointment for the following week, listened with a grave, responsible expression to a final passage of words from far (from not all that far, actually, just a couple of hundred yards up Harley Street) and rang off.

"A very able man, Dr Rosenberg. Very able."

"Good," said Jake. "Rosenberg. Presumably he's some sort of—"

"Would you excuse me a second, please?" Curnow lifted a switch on what he no doubt called his intercom, which had started to hum hoarsely. "Yes, what is it?"

"Sheikh Qarmat bin Ezzat el Sha'ket is here," said a version of a girl's voice.

"Bring him in in thirty seconds precisely and cash as he leaves of course," said Curnow, getting up. "Well, Mr Richardson, you'll be letting me know how things go. Insides behaving themselves?"

"Oh, mustn't complain."

"That's right. No pain in the abdomen?"

"Just a twinge or so, nothing out of the way."

"Urine satisfactorily pale?"

"Yes thank you."

"Faeces satisfactorily dark?"

"Yes."

"What about the haemorrhoids?"

"You mean piles. I haven't got piles," said Jake truthfully. "I don't have them."

The doctor chuckled and shrugged his shoulders, tolerant of his patient's nervous or whimsical avoidance of the topic. "Getting plenty of exercise?"

"I thought I was supposed to take it easy."

"Mild exercise. Walking. Gardening. Didn't you say you gardened?"

"Yes I did. I do."

"Keep on with it. It can't fail to do you good. Whatever's wrong with you."

"Thank you, Dr Curnow."

In the hall the man of the East, clad quite as if he had just arrived from there, without even time to freshen up after the journey, was approaching across a carpet that looked as if it had once taken a similar course: no doubt the gift of some grateful emir or caliph. The receptionist, a girl of twenty or twenty-five, was in attendance. Jake noticed that her breasts were either remarkably large or got up to seem so by a professional. He tried to reckon the chances of Curnow's knowing which and felt downcast for a moment, because any chance at all was too much. But almost at once he cheered up again: between the front door and that of the waiting-room there moved a fellow-patient he had seen at least once before under this roof, moved with new and extreme labour, one leg straight and stiff, the other bent and stiff. Teach him, thought Jake. Not me yet, he also thought.

As one who did what doctors said while still rather looking down on them, he decided to walk to Warren Street and catch a 127 bus instead of taking a taxi. That in any case wouldn't have been as easy as winking in this area. No sooner had one black, brown or yellow person, or group of such, been set down on the pavement than Americans, Germans, Spaniards were taken up and vice versa. It was just after four o'clock on a fine afternoon early in April. Jake lengthened his stride and crossed the road in front of a double-parked car, large, black and with CD plates. An unmistakable witch doctor, in equally manifest need of outside help, was doing his best to alight from it.

Portland Place turned out to be easily as full of north-bound vehicles, most of them cars, as might have been expected at this hour on Wednesday in Holy Week, no less so than it would doubtless turn out to be on 23rd December or, this year, more likely 22nd. Despite their intermittent and slow progress, Jake waited for the lights to change before he left the kerb. He had made this a rule ever since a momentously near miss by a motorbike the previous year. The traffic going the other way was much lighter but no faster, thanks to some extensive road works with nobody working on them.

By contrast, though not altogether by contrast, Euston Road resembled a motor-racing track, or a network of such. Jake felt some relief at reaching the northern side undamaged. He waved and smiled cheerily at an old friend he couldn't have named for the moment and the old friend, who had just come out of Thames Television House, waved and smiled cheerily back a couple of seconds before Jake realised he wasn't an old friend but the chap who played the superintendent in that police series. Oh Christ, thought Jake; still, the bugger must get a lot of that.

Half an hour later, having been carried up through Camden Town, Chalk Farm and Hampstead, Jake got off the 127 at the stop outside the Orris Park National Westminster Bank. He was about to start the five-minute walk to his house when his eye fell on the window of Winesteals Ltd and an ill-written notice that nevertheless clearly proclaimed Crazy Cuts: 10p in the £ off everything this week only. He hesitated only a moment. He had brought himself to go and see his doctor, he had responsibly taken a bit of exercise, he had saved something like £1.20 by not taking a taxi home, and he was fed up with Tunisian Full-Bodied Red Table Wine (Dry) every night of his life. Into the shop he darted and over to the French corner. Côtes de Nuits Villages 1971 at £2.05 less presumably 20-1/2p? Beaune Clos de la Mousse 1972 at..... To hell with it: Château Talbot 1967 at £4.09 less whatever the fuck. On his way to what people probably meant by the check-out he noticed a pile of boxes of liqueur chocolates and hesitated again, longer this time. £2.17, but that wasn't what was at stake. In the end he took a box.

Ahead of him at the till stood a customer in very dirty whitish overalls smoking a cigar and chatting to the senior of the two shopmen present while the junior cast up what he was buying.

"Is it worth it?" he asked a couple of times. "This is it. If it isn't, I don't want to know. If it isn't, I'm not interested. If it is, then this is it. I mean, this is it. Right?"

"Right."

"And it is. It bloody is. Like everything else." As he talked the overalled man took a roll of £20 notes from his side pocket and counted some out; Jake thought five but wasn't sure. "It bloody is. Twelve-year-olds better than eight-year-old and '61's going to be better than '62. I mean, you know, this is it. Ever tried Jack Daniel's Green Label?"

"No."

"Worth trying." Change was handed over, not much. "Ta. Yeah, worth trying. Shows you the Black's worth it. Green's good, though. Well, cheers."

"Cheers."

Jake moved along, put his two items down on the stub of counter and set himself to see which buttons on his machine the junior shopman would prod. 3, then one he missed, so he gave up and waited for the receipt slip to be torn off and wordlessly handed to him. He screwed up his eyes. 003.69, 002.17, 006.86. He went on looking while the senior shopman drew in air through his nose.

"Er, the..... You've charged the full price for the chocolates."

"Right."

"But your notice says 10p in the pound off everything."

"Everything bar chocolates and smokes."

"But it says everything."

"It means everything bar chocolates and smokes."

"But...."

"You want them, do you, squire?

".... Yes."

"Right."

After a short pause, during which he took a blow on the kneecap from the corner of a wire basket in the hand of a man in a blue boiler-suit, Jake paid, picked up his goods and left, remembering he should have said Cheers just as the exit door swung shut after him. Out in the street he noticed that away from the sunlight the air was chilly: the spring had begun late and wet. There were still a few dead leaves half beaten into the triangular patch of bare earth bounded by concrete, probably due to become a communal flower-bed any day, at the corner of the High Street and Burgess Avenue. The near end of the latter consisted of two longish brick terraces put up a hundred years before to house the workers at some vanished local industry and these days much in demand among recently married couples, pairs of homosexuals and older persons whose children had left or never existed. Jake had bought no. 47 in 1969; he couldn't have afforded to now.

2—The Farting Ploughboy

The house stood out among its neighbours by not having had anything done to its outside: no stucco, no curious chimneys, no colourful shutters, no trailing ferns in wire baskets, front door and window-frames and drain-pipes not painted cinnabar or orpiment or minimum or light mushroom, and garden neither turned into a tiny thicket nor altogether removed to accommodate a car. Having no car had made it comparatively easy for Jake to prevent that last option but some of the others had taken toll of his powers of resistance. He opened and then shut the gate, which was not of wrought iron or imitation bronze, walked up the eight yards of gravel path and let himself in.

A great deal had managed to get itself done to the inside of no. 47 because so much of it was in items small in themselves and capable of being introduced a bit at a time. He was also at the mercy of the view that whatever rights a man might have over the exterior of his dwelling lapse by definition once its threshold is crossed. The place was full of things. It had to be admitted that some of these weren't as small as all that, like the heavy-duty cheval glass near the front door and the giant's coffin-sized Dutch (or some such) clock in the alcove by the sitting room fireplace, but a lot were. No flat surface except the ceiling and parts of the floor was free of ashtrays bearing quotations from poem and song, serious souvenir mugs and antique paperweights, and screens supplemented the walls for the hanging of small pictures enclosed in large mounts and photographs of dead strangers. It was hard to find a square foot that hadn't been made nice.

The person who had brought all this about was Jake's fat wife Brenda, who stood up, brushing cake-crumbs off her knee-length fisherman's-knit cardigan, to be kissed on the cheek by him. He went over and greeted similarly her old friend Alcestis

Mabbott, who was fat too, not as fat as Brenda but short with it. And then Alcestis' hair stood away from her head in a stiff dun froth while Brenda's, though no more vivid, was smooth and abundant, so that almost anybody would have decided that Brenda had the better of things between the two of them.

"Hallo, Allie dear," said Jake. "What a nice surprise."

"I told you she was coming," said Brenda.

"Did you, darling? I must have forgotten."

One way or the other the presence of Alcestis was certainly a surprise to Jake. If it hadn't been he wouldn't have come carting his recent purchases into the sitting room like a boy back from the fair. It was on them, as he could have predicted without the least trouble, that Alcestis round-eyed gaze instantly fell.

"Been shopping, have we?" she asked gruffly. It wasn't a tone or vocal quality adopted for the occasion. On their first meeting, round about ten years earlier at a dinner-party in some cultural crapper south of the river, Jake had come really close to congratulating her on a marvellous imitation, unasked for though it was, of the way retired colonels were supposed to talk. All that had deterred him was puzzlement about why she thought it went well with the detailed account she was giving him of how she had made the unpleasant dress she had on. Then, soon after she had switched the focus of attention to the new wallpaper she was going to have in her dining room and kept her voice the same, he had got it. Whenever he considered he had done something particularly foolish, which wasn't often, he would cheer himself up by remembering that at least he'd never made a pass at Alcestis ("Smudger" to him in his thoughts).

He answered her question, or anyhow spoke while looking at her. "Just one or two odd things."

"One of them looks to me like a very odd thing indeed." She meant the bottle which, though wrapped in brown paper, was obviously either a bottle or an object shaped just like a bottle.

Forewarned of he knew not quite what, Jake put it down on a tiled coffee-table slightly to his rear and said to his wife, "Got you a little something."

"Ooh...." Brenda moved her spectacles from the top of her head to the region of her nose and uncovered the liqueur chocolates. "Oh, darling, you really shouldn't."

"Nonsense, everybody deserves a bit of a—"

"I mean you shouldn't, darling," said Brenda. Her eyes, unlike her friend's, were long from corner to corner and also bright, both in the intensity of their greenish colour and in the shining of their surfaces even through glass. Jake had never forgotten the first time they had been turned full on him: not where or when, just how they had looked. "You know, this is exactly what I'm not supposed to have because they're sugar and booze and I can't resist them. It's very sweet of you but honestly."

"You haven't got to dispose of the whole—"

"I'm sure good old Janelle give you a hand if you're well and truly stuck. Always ready to help out, our Jake, eh, what?" Alcestis didn't actually utter the last two words but they were there in the way she rocked her long head to and fro and pushed her lips up afterwards.

"I should jolly well hope so, I can tell you," said Jake, and saw Brenda give him a sharp glance over the top of her glasses. He added hastily, "I mean that's right, I can always—"

"What absolutely fills me with the most burning curiosity is the question of what's inside the other parcel, the chappie over there."

"Well, it's a .... a 'bottle' actually of all things, Allie. With drink corked up inside it."

"Absolutely agog."

The two women waited. Jake reached out and snatched up the bottle and tore the paper off it as fast as he could. In wine-waiter style he displayed the label to Alcestis, who nodded several times and gave a grunt or so of approval. There was another pause.

"I wonder...." said Alcestis. "Of course it is a bit on the early side."

"Would you like a glass?" asked Brenda.

"Well, I must say, I don't normally, I—"

"Come on, do you good, why not, fill your boots, great stuff, that's the spirit." It wasn't (Jake saw) that Alcestis had guessed he had been going to give himself a treat which she had maliciously decided to impair, nor that she had simply fancied a glass of wine: she had sensed, without realising that she had sensed, that he hoped she wouldn't ask him for one and so naturally had asked him for one, or better still had got herself asked to have one. "Shan't be a jiffy."

Along in the kitchen he got going fast. Off with the vile plastic foil they put round the necks of bottles these days and out with the cork; same treatment for a bottle of Tunisian Full-Bodied Red Table Wine (Dry). Now a jug, or rather pair of jugs.

"I remember as if it were yesterday," he said as he worked. "Jerry had given our lads a fearful pasting round St Quentin and Compiègne and most of us thought that when the big push came in the spring we'd be done for. Not a word of a lie. Literally. I said done for and I meant done for." He raised his voice. "Where's the bloody corkscrew? Oh, here it is—all right—got it."

By this time he had the two wines in jugs of their own and was pouring the Château Talbot into the Tunisian bottle. A jet aircraft came into earshot.

"There were men in my battalion who'd gawn six months without sleep and the average life of a subaltern in the front line was thirty seconds. Absolute gospel. Literally. Then one day in the shithouse at Division I ran into old Bugger Cockface who I'd known at Eton and Sandhurst and in the Crimea and at Spion Kop." The jet was almost overhead. "And I said to him, I said, "Are we done for, Bugger?" and he said, "By George not yet, Smudger," and I thought, damn fine soldier, damn fine Englishman, damn fine feller, what? What? 'What?'"

"I said what on earth are you doing? You've been simply ages."

Brenda had spoken. Alcestis was at her side. The two must have stolen up on him under the noise of the aircraft, which had begun to recede. Jake hoped he hadn't turned round too abruptly. There stood near him the two bottles each filled with what had been in the other and the jugs not noticeable. He said,

"Just..... It took me a while to find the—"

"Two bottles," said Alcestis. "I say, are we having a piss-up?"

"That one's for dinner-time. These cheap plonks, if you take the cork out a couple of hours before you—"

"Tunisian Full-Bodied..... This is good enough for me."

"No really, it won't have—"

"Suit me down to the ground. I'm not a connoisseur chappie like you."

"No, the other one's much—"

"No, you have that with your dinner. Able to appreciate it, mm?"

"I'd far rather—"

It was no good: she had noticed, again unconsciously, that he now wanted her to have what a minute earlier he hadn't wanted her to have, and maintained the appropriate reaction. (She must have grasped too that something was going on in the kitchen because he hadn't been out there that long.) Back in the sitting room she took a sip and raised her unabundant eyebrows.

"I think this is awfully good, Jake. What did you pay for it if you don't mind my asking?"

He took a gulp. Although he much preferred drink with food he was fucked if he was going to, etc. "I don't know," he said a little wildly. "One twenty-five .... ten...."

"Where? No don't tell me, no point, memory like a sieve. Of course, I suppose with your experience and your palate, easy. Brenda love, aren't you drinking?"

"No, I'm cutting down," said Brenda. She went to the tea-tray, poured herself a cup and added milk and three lumps of sugar.

"But you're ..." said Jake and stopped.

"I'm what?"

"You're .... entitled to break the rules once in a way." He was acting on the principle that every drop of claret outside

Alcestis was a drop saved. "Let me get you a glass."

"No thank you." She spoke sharply. "What have you been up to today, Jake?".

Distracted by Brenda's tone, which had led him to start reviewing his words and actions in the short time since he'd entered the house, he answered Alcestis without thinking. "Seeing the doctor."

"Oh." She drew him down to sit beside her on the padded bamboo settee. "Anything .... troublesome?"

"Not really," said Jake, who had recovered his wits enough to try to spread a little embarrassment. "What you might call a man's thing."

"I see."

"I don't expect to die of it exactly."

"Good," she said, laying her hand on his shoulder for a moment. "Do you care for Curnow terribly?"

"No, but I trust his judgement."

"Neither do I, but Geoffrey swears by him." She referred to her husband. "He's Cornish, Curnow, you know. Like Michael Foot."

"Is he?"

"Oh yes my dear, in fact his name's Cornish for Cornish. Worse than the Welsh. Oh yes."

"Ah."

"Can I finish my story now, Brenda love?"

"Oh yes Allie, do." This time Brenda's tone was warm but the warmth was firmly vectored on her friend.

"I was just getting into it when you turned up, Jake."

"Sorry."

"Well, just to put you in the picture very briefly, Brenda's probably told you about the trouble we had with our drains last year. Well, the plumber was simply charming. Young fellow, very good-looking, extremely intelligent, all that. Now I can't quite explain it, but he rather fell for old Geoffrey and me. Nothing was too much trouble any hour of the day or night, brought us some little cake affairs his wife had made cookies, brought 'her' along one evening, said she'd been making his life a misery, always on at him to take her to see the people he'd told her so much about. Anyway, some time in the summer he said he'd had enough, of this country that is : no freedom, take all your money off you, won't let you work harder and better yourself. If you want to put it crudely, he felt his initiative was being strangled. Well, to cut a long story short he got a job in Nigeria and went off there with wife and two young kids for good. Emigrated. Out. Gone. Bang. This was last October, that's nearly .... six months .... ago."

Alcestis paused, put the palms of her hands together and rested her chin on her thumbs. Jake asked himself which way it was going to go: Minister of Plumbing, uranium strike, massive diamond find, fleet of Cadillacs, gold bed? Surely not, and preferably not too in the case of a moron and pervert on the present scale: wild-life reserve trip, safari camp, freedom fighters, tribal ritual, cut off his, forced to eat....

"And then, just last week, we had some news. A letter. I knew straight away who it was from by the stamp. I mean we don't know anyone else out there. I just opened it without thinking, as one would. No idea what was in it. Geoffrey was with me. And what it said, quite simply and straightforwardly, was this. Everything had gone fine, they have a lovely house, got on splendidly with all the people there, job's evidently exactly what he wanted, the whole thing. Now don't you think that's marvellous?"

"Oh how exciting," said Brenda.

Jake was dose to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust. He was glad when, two or twenty-two minutes later, Geoffrey Mabbott turned up, and not just because the fellow's purpose was to take Alcestis away; he was actually glad to see Geoffrey himself, even offered him wine. By now this seemed almost natural, unimportant: Jake's feelings of self-identification with Graham Greene's whisky priest, who sat helplessly by while greedy berks drank the wine he had meant to use at a communion, had reached their peak when old Smudger, what there was of her eyebrows again raised, silently held out her glass for a second dose after bringing her plumber story to its climax.

Rotten bastards might have said that Geoffrey was Alcestis third husband just as Brenda was Jake's third wife, but they would have been getting the just-as part all wrong. Just as was just as it wasn't. Jake had had two unsatisfactory former wives, or so he would have put it; Alcestis had exercised a mysterious attraction and then an unmysterious repulsion on two former husbands, the second of whom had had to resort to fatal coronary disease to get away from her. It was to be presumed that Geoffrey was in some uncertain intermediate state. That would at any rate be typical: he was in uncertain states of one sort or another far more than not. One of his specialities was the inverted pyramid of piss, a great parcel of attitudes, rules and catchwords resting on one tiny (if you looked long and hard enough) point. Thus it was established beyond any real doubt that his settled antipathy to all things Indian, from books and films about the Raj to Mrs Gandhi, whom by a presumably related crotchet he took to be a daughter-in-law of the Mahatma, was rooted in Alcestis second husband's mild fondness for curries. His preference for Holland's gin over the London and Plymouth varieties, often-mentioned partiality for cream cakes and habit of flying by KLM had been less certainly connected with his possession of a sketch by Van Dyck, whom on a good day lie might very well have supposed to have been a Dutchman. How he managed to be a buyer for a firm of chutney-manufacturers, or indeed be paid for doing anything, was an enigma, a riddle. His taste in clothes was odd too.

He frowned, as he so often did, when he looked at the wine-bottle, and said nothing at first. Jake waited expectantly, running his eye over Geoffrey's conventional dark-grey suit, self-striped orange shirt, pink bow-tie and thick-heeled white shoes: what far-distant event, rumour or surmise was plodding on its way to decide the issue for him?

"It's frightfully good, darling," said his wife.

"Mm." Then all at once his brow cleared and he spoke with his usual liveliness. "First-rate notion. Thanks, I'd love some. You know, these Middle East wines are about the best value there is these days. Algerian, of course. And some very, very decent Moroccan red I had the other day." (He must have remembered being annoyed by a Jew, or meeting or seeing one, thought Jake as he handed him his glass.) "Oh, thanks most awfully. Mm. Well, it's no vintage claret, but it's a good honest drink. Better than tequila, anyway."

"It's certainly that," said Jake. "But aren't they rather different types of drink?"

"Aren't which?"

"Wine and tequila."

"Well of course they are, that's what I'm saying. Wine comes from grapes and tequila comes from cactuses."

"Well actually it's a—"

"Vile stuff. Make it in the Argentine, don't they?"

"Mexico, I think."

"Really? Ever been there?"

"No, never," said Jake lightly, and added even more lightly,

"You, er .... you been there, Geoffrey?"

"Me? But..... Why should I have been there?" Geoffrey's frown was turning his forehead white in patches. "I've never even been to the States, let alone South America."

"Actually Mexico's in—"

It must have been that Alcestis felt she had done enough in the way of holding her mouth open in a smile and blinking her eyes quickly to show how bowled over she still was by her husband even after all these (five? seven?) years. Certainly she changed her expression to one of a kind of urgency and said, "Some of this modern architecture they've got in Mexico City, finest in the world you know, especially the museums and the university. 'And' some of the blocks of flats and offices. Something to do with the use of materials. Just nothing like it anywhere."

She ended up looking at Jake, so he said, "How did you, er .... ?"

"Common knowledge." Oh I see."

"How are you, Brenda dear?" Geoffrey spoke as if in greeting, but the two had exchanged warm hugs and several words on his arrival; it was just that he hadn't noticed her since then. "Fat," said Brenda, and everyone laughed; Jake saw that Alcestis put her head back further than usual, to show that she knew what had been said was 'a joke'. Brenda went on to ask Geoffrey how he was.

"About the same, thanks. Yes, very much the same. Well, no, actually, not really. All right if I have a slice of this? One of my weaknesses, this sort of stuff."

On Brenda's nod he picked up a large slice of cream cake and ate it carefully, his eyes fixed straight ahead of him. He was concentrating either on what to say next or on the cake, a small problem cleared up when he swallowed finally, said "Quite delicious" and emptied his glass.

"In what way aren't you the same?" asked Brenda. "Not what?"

"You said you weren't—"

"Oh, that's right. Well, that's a jolly good instance. Physically no problem, just getting older as who isn't. It's concentration.

You know the sort of thing I mean—you go up to your bedroom to get a clean handkerchief and when you get there you've forgotten why you've come and have to go back downstairs to where you started. Quite normal up to a point. But with me, I've got to the stage where I take a cup over to the stove to pour some tea into it and find there's one there already, from .... half a minute before. And then I have to taste it to see if I've put sugar in. Now that's still just annoying. As I say, it just adds on a few seconds to some of the things I do. But .... er .... the .... silliest part is what I'm thinking about instead of what I'm doing. It's me I'm thinking about, and that's not a very interesting subject. I mean, if a chap's thinking about his, er, his mathematics instead of his teacup, or his .... symphony, then that's all right, that's reasonable. It's in proportion. But me—I ask you!"

Geoffrey had not departed from his cheerful tone. The two women laughed affectionately. Jake held up the wine bottle, which still held about a glassful, but Geoffrey smiled and shook his head and went on as before.

"And the stupidest thing of the lot is, I don't think poor old me, or poor old me in the financial sense, though I jolly well could like everybody else these days, and certainly not 'brilliant' old me. Just, just me. It's not enough, you know."

"It certainly is not by a long chalk," said Alcestis, going up to her husband and putting her arm through his. "I only married you because you were the most boring chap I knew so nobody but me could stand you. Now I'm going to take you home, or rather you're going to take me home and we'll leave these good people in peace."

"Why don't you stay to supper?" asked Brenda. "There's nothing very much but I'm sure you and I could knock something up, Allie."

.. .Yes, do," said Jake.

"No, sweet of you, but we've tried your patience long enough already." Alcestis embraced Jake briefly. "Come along Mabbott, let's hit the trail."

By custom Brenda saw the visitors out while Jake stayed behind in the sitting room. Normally at such a time he could count on a good five minutes to himself, but today it was only a few seconds before he heard the front door slam and his wife approach along the passage.

3—Domestic Interior

"When the bishop farted we were amused to hear about it," said Jake. "Should the ploughboy find treasure we must be told. But when the ploughboy farts .... er .... keep it to yourself."

Brenda had started putting the tea things together, not very loudly. With her back turned she said in her dear soprano, "Did you make that up?"

"Free translation of one of Martial's epigrams."

"Quite good, I suppose."

"It enshrines a principle poor old Allie would do well to—"

A saucer whizzed into the empty fireplace and broke. "You leave Allie alone! You did quite enough when she was here l"

"What? I didn't do anything at all."

"Much! I know you can't be expected to like my friends, that isn't reasonable, why should you, we can't all be the same, I don't necessarily like your friends." Brenda was talking very fast, though not for the moment quite at the pitch to be expected from someone who had reached the crockery-throwing stage. Now she paused and bit her lower lip and gave a shaky sigh. "But I don't see why you feel you have to make your low opinion of my friends so devastatingly crystal-clear!"

Jake heard the last part with annoyance and some self-reproof. He had thought his behaviour to the Mabbotts a showpiece of hypocritical cordiality. And now he came to think of it, hadn't Brenda said something of this sort the last time they had seen Alcestis, or the time before? "I haven't got a low opinion of Allie," he said with an air of slight surprise, "I just find her a bit of a—"

"She knows exactly what you find her, she's not a fool whatever you may think, though even a fool could tell. The way you imitate her and take the mickey out of her and the way your face goes when she tells a story and the way you 'sit,' I didn't think it was a very terrific story either but she wouldn't have told it if you hadn't shut her up and absolutely sat on her about the doctor and brought the whole conversation to an absolute full stop. You used to quite like her, I can't understand it."

"I didn't want to discuss the doctor with her, obviously." Jake poured out the last of the wine. He longed for a smoke but had given it up four years previously and was determined to stick to that. There were no cigarettes in the house anyway.

"You still had no need to sit on her and be crushing," said Brenda in about the same tone as before. Although she was standing above him she talked with her chin raised, a mannerism that had stood her in good stead since she began to put on weight. "And I don't know what she thought when she finished her story and you just 'sat' there as if you hadn't heard a word, or rather 'I do'."

"I didn't realise it was over at first. I honestly thought that couldn't be the end. And what do you mean she wouldn't have told it if I hadn't shut her up about the doctor? She'd already started to tell it to you before I got back, that was quite clear."

"I meant she wouldn't have gone on with it. She'd been telling it to me because it was a tiny little thing in her life that she thought might interest me for about five seconds. That's what old friends do when there's just the two of them together, or didn't you know that? I tell her the same sort of thing all the time. We don't go on swapping translations of epigrams by Martial hour after hour."

"No of course you don't, I quite see," said Jake mildly, as opposed to saying harshly that that would be all right if the story didn't take fifty times as long as it was supposed to be interesting for.

Brenda's expression softened in response but a moment later it had hardened again. "And the way you treat poor old Geoffrey, as if he's off his head or something."

"I think he is a bit off his head, always has been as long as I've known him. Look at those bloody silly clothes he—"

"That's no excuse for treating him like that. You should have seen the way you were looking at him."

"When?"

"'When?' Whenever he said anything or was getting ready to say anything, when he said he'd like some wine... And what was all that about the wine in the kitchen? What were you up to?"

"Nothing, just opening it. The other bottle was...."

"No, you were up to something but I know it's no use going on about it. When he said something about Mexico and when he said he was absent-minded, Allie saw the way you were looking at him, and then when I asked them to stay and after about five minutes you said what a good idea as if it was your own funeral. You should have heard yourself."

She paused. Jake looked up at his wife. Her breasts were about as large as Curnow's receptionist's but her hips were large too. And, partly concealed by the loose-fitting cardigan, one of her favourite forms of dress over the last couple of years, her waist, her thighs and her upper arms were also large and her paunch was fairly large. But her face, as he had recently noticed from a photograph, had hardly changed in ten years: it was still the face of a woman anxious not to miss anything good or happy that might come her way in the future. That anxiety in it had been the second thing he had observed about her, after her eyes. She turned their glance on him now. He reached out his hand and she took it; he considered getting up and putting his arms round her but somehow decided not to. Without hostility she soon withdrew her hand.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'll try to do better next time." Of course he meant do and nothing more: how could anyone change his attitude to a pair like the Mabbotts? But next time was going to have to include next time they came up in conversation as well as in person, and that meant fewer of those jocular little sallies about them which had so often cheered up his half of the breakfast or lunch table. A few moments earlier he had thought of telling Brenda that in fact the idea of those two having noticed anything in the least objectionable was a load of rubbish and that she was cross with him for what she knew he felt about them, not for how he had behaved to them, but that too he decided against.

She had moved to the fireplace, he now saw, and was carefully picking up the pieces of china. "How did it go with the doctor, darling? I should have asked you before."

"That's all right. Oh, he .... asked me the sort of questions one might have expected and said he couldn't do anything and fixed up an appointment for me with some fellow who might be able to do something."

"When? I mean when's the appointment?"

"Tuesday. Right after Easter."

"Good," said Brenda, going back to the tea tray. "Anybody interesting at the club?"

The dub was a long way from St James's in more than the geographical sense and existed for the benefit of unprosperous middle-aged and elderly men of professional standing. In order to survive it had recently had to sell half of itself, of its premises that is, to a man who had constructed a massage parlour there. "Just the usual crowd," said Jake, accurately enough.

"I see. Ooh, the Thomsons have asked us round for drinks one evening next week," she said, mentioning one of the comparatively few couples in Orris Park who didn't go on about their cars or their children the whole time. "I've put it in the diary."

"Well done."

"You know, we ought to give a party some time. We can't go on just taking other people's hospitality."

"I quite agree, but it's so bloody expensive. Everybody drinks Scotch or vodka these days."

"They can't do much about it if you just offer them wine."

"I suppose not."

"I was thinking." Brenda stood with the tray held in front of her stomach. "I thought we might give that new Greek place a try."

"Tonight?"

"I just thought...."

"I don't really like Greek food. I always think Greek food is bad Turkish food and Turkish food isn't up to much."

"What about Sandro's? We haven't been there for ages."

"They charge the earth and they never seem to change their menu. Isn't there anything in the house?"

"Only the rest of that chicken."

"Sounds fine. You could fix up a salad, couldn't you?"

"I suppose so..... Then we could go to a film."

"There's nothing very marvellous on, I looked at the 'Standard' yesterday. Oh, apart from that thing about Moloch turning up in the crypt of a San Francisco church and having children fed to him alive, 'The Immolation,' that's it, I wouldn't mind seeing that."

"Well I would."

"You are funny, I keep telling you it's all pretend. Look love, I vote we pull up the drawbridge tonight. I know it's selfish of me but I don't honestly feel quite up to stirring out and that probably means I shouldn't, don't you think? Let's be absolute devils and have the heating on and huddle round the telly."

So when the time came, Brenda went and sliced the chicken and made a salad and a dressing and got out the rather swarthy Brie that needed eating up and put it all on trays and brought them into the sitting-room. The TV was a colour set, small but all right for two. On it she and Jake watched episode 4 of 'Henry Esmond,' the News, including film of a minor air disaster in which a good half of those involved hadn't even been hurt, International Snooker, with a commentary that laid great stress on the desire of each player to score more points than the other and so win the match, World Outlook, which consisted largely of an interviewer in a spotted bow-tie being very rude to a politician about some aspect of nuclear energy and the politician not giving a shit, and Rendezvous with Terror: 'The Brass Golem.' Or rather Jake watched that far; Brenda gave up at the first soccer result and opened her Simon Raven paperback. At the start of the collegno violin passage advertising the approach of the rendezvous just alluded to, she got up from the sofa which she had herself covered with crimson velvet.

"You off, darling?" asked Jake. "These things are always innocuous ballocks, you know. About as frightening as Donald Duck."

"No, I'll be off anyway. Still the spare room?"

"I think while we're still sleeping badly."

"Mm. Ooh, I'm sorry I didn't thank you properly for the chocolates."

"The..... Oh yes. Oh, I thought you did."

"If the scales aren't too bad in the morning I might treat myself to one tomorrow night. Well...."

"Good night, love."

She bent and kissed him on the cheek and was gone. Jake washed down his Mogadon with some of his second glass of what was supposed to be claret. He was sorry now that he hadn't done what impulse and habit had suggested and told Brenda about the abortive wine-switch. Done properly the tale would have amused her, its confessional aspect given her pleasure, the row over the Mabbotts been prevented or disposed of, not merely broken off. But to have done it properly would have meant taking trouble, not much, true, but more than he had on the whole felt like taking at the time. Well there it is, he thought.

Despite everything the background bass clarinet could do, and it did indeed get a lot done in quantity, terror as expected failed altogether to turn up at the prearranged spot. Summoned by an ancient curse but otherwise unaccounted for, the metalloid protagonist ran his course in twenty minutes less commercials. His most mysterious endowment was the least remarked: that of always coming upon his quarry alone, out of sight and hearing of everyone else, in a blind alley, in a virtually endless tunnel, in a room with only one door and no usable window, etc. He ground to a halt finally through gross overheating of the lubricants in the Turkish bath where Providence, in the form of total chance, had led his last intended victim to take refuge. Very neat.

As he went round the room turning everything off, Jake reconstructed the brief script conference at which the creative producer had outlined the story to his colleagues. "Right," he snarled, stabbing at the air with an invisible cigar to point the turns in his argument, "got this guy made of like brass, see, buried somewheres for a coin's age, okay, comes like an earthquake or explosion or whatever, right, anyways he done get gotten dug up, see, this old like parchment says any motherfucker digs me up gets to done get gotten fucked up good, okay, he fucks up three—four guys around, right, chases the last guy into somewhere fucking hot, see, now the brass guy done gotten oil like instead of blood, okay, so 'he' gets to done get gotten fucked up, right, Zeke and Zack get on it right away, see, they don't get to done get gotten done it by tomorrow, they lose their asses, okay, and any number of cunts all over the world who know a bloody sight better will watch the bloody thing. Right."

Upstairs, Jake unhurriedly cleaned his teeth and peed, feeling a comfortable drowsiness at the edge of his mind. Light showed under Brenda's door: she liked to read for a time before settling off, which he didn't. He went into the spare room and undressed. There were pictures in here no less than everywhere else, most of them non-modern black-and-white unoriginals; in almost every case he could have said whether or not a given one belonged to the house but he would never have missed any of them. He put on his pyjamas, turned off the light and was about to get into bed, then changed his mind and went to the window.

Looking out, he remembered with no great vividness doing the same thing one night some shortish time after Brenda and he had come to live here. Then as now there had been plenty to see, mainly by the street-lamp that stood no more than twenty yards off: houses, trees, bushes, parked cars, the bird-table in the garden diagonally opposite. Then, too, some of the windows must have been illuminated and it was quite possible that, as now, the only sounds had been faint voices and distant footsteps. After some effort he remembered further his feelings of curiosity, almost of expectation, as if he might find himself seeing a link between that moment and things that had happened earlier in his life. He remembered, or thought he did; there was no question of his re-experiencing those feelings, nor of his wishing he could. What was before him left him cold, and he didn't mind.

4—Thunderball

The next Tuesday morning when Jake set off down Burgess Avenue it was raining, but not very hard. Even if it had been very hard he would have more or less had to set off just the same. Four or five years ago there had been a taxi-rank at the end of the High Street by St Winifred's Hospital and a telephone-call fetched one to the front door within a few minutes in any weather. The sign and the shelter were still there but they served only to trap the occasional stranger into a fruitless wait. Minicabs either didn't come or had drivers you had to pilot street by street to places like Piccadilly Circus. And there was the expense. And the Underground was only worth while for long journeys, over the river or out to Chelsea: Jake had established that 47 Burgess Avenue NW16 was about as equidistant as anywhere could be from the stations at Golders Green, East Finchley, Highgate and Hampstead. He had several times read, though not recently, of plans to extend one or other branch of the Northern Line to a contemplated Kenwood Station in the 1980s.

Every 6-7 mins was how often 127s were supposed to turn up at the stop by the Orris Park Woolworths, so to be given the choice of two after only 10-11 was rather grand and certainly welcome in the increasing rain and squirts of cold wind. Jake got on to the second bus, one of the newish sort distinguished by a separate entrance and exit. The doors closed after him with a swish of compressed air that resembled to what was almost a worrying degree the sound of the off-licence bugger and his overalled customer saying Cheers to each other. The conductor too was one of the newish sort, which in this case meant that he chucked you off if you hadn't got the exact money. But Jake made a great point of not being caught out by things like that.

Whenever he could he liked to sit at the back on the offside, where there was a niche just wide enough for an umbrella between the emergency door and the arm of the seat, but someone from Asia was there that morning so he took the corresponding position upstairs. Among the people he had a good or fair view of, there was none he remembered having seen before. They were divided, as well they might have been, into those older than him, round about his age and younger than him. In different ways all three groups got him down a bit. Only one child seemed to be about the place but it was making a lot of noise, talking whenever it felt like it and at any volume it fancied. Far from admonishing or stifling it, its mother joined in, talked back to it. Like a fool he had forgotten to bring anything to read.

Although there was no shortage of his fellow human beings on the pavements and in and out of shops, other places and spaces were altogether free of them, so recurrently that his mind was crossed by thoughts of a selective public holiday or lightning semi-general strike. A railway bridge revealed two or three acres of empty tracks and sidings; large pieces of machinery and piles of bricks stood unattended on a rather smaller stretch of mud; no one was in sight among the strange apparatuses in what might have been a playground for young Martians; a house that had stayed half-demolished since about 1970 over-looked a straightforward bombsite of World War II; nearer the centre, the stone face of a university building was spattered with rust-stains from scaffolding on which Jake had never seen anybody at work. Even Granville Court, Collin wood Court and the others, angular but lofty structures of turd-coloured brick resting on squat stilts, seemed to be deserted. Even or especially.

Warren Street was at hand; he climbed warily down the stairs, holding on with all his strength when a deeper cavity than usual in the road-surface lifted him heel and toe into the air. He got off by Kevin's Kebab, crossed over and fought his way westward against a soaking wind that blew now with fatuous indignation. 878 Harley Street. Proinsias Rosenberg MD, MA (Dip. Psych). The door opened in his face and an Englishman came out and stepped past him and was away. A small woman in a white housecoat showed Jake into a room where folk from many lands and of nearly as many creeds sat in chintz-covered armchairs reading 'Punch' and 'Private Eye'. But it was no more than ten minutes before she came back, took him along a corridor to another room and shut him in.

Jake found himself closeted with a person he took to be a boy of about seventeen, most likely a servant of some kind, in a stooped position doing something to an electric fire. "I'm looking for Dr Rosenberg," he said.

It was never to cut the least ice with him that the other did not in fact reply, "Ah now me tharlun man, de thop a de mornun thoo yiz"—he might fully as well have done by the effect. ("Good morning" was what he did say.)

"Dr Rosenberg?" said Jake again, a little flustered. He saw now that the youth was a couple of years older than he had supposed at first, short-haired and clean-shaven, wearing a sort of dark tunic-suit with a high collar that gave something between a military and a clerical air.

"Rosenberg it is. How do you do, Dr Richardson." Jake got a hearty handshake and a brown-eyed gaze of what looked like keen personal admiration but in the circumstances could hardly have been the genuine article. "Do come and sit down. I hope this room'll be warm enough—such a wretchedly cold spring we've been having so far, isn't it?"

When he failed to add what Jake was in a way expecting and would certainly have accepted, that his master or father if not grandfather would be down in a minute, things eased quite quickly. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I...."

"You're not the first by a very long chalk indeed, Dr Richardson, I can assure you of that." He who must after all be conceded to be Dr Rosenberg didn't really talk like an O'Casey peasant, his articulation was too precise for that, but he did talk like a real Irishman with a largely unreconstructed accent, even at this stage seemed no more than twenty-one or -two and had shown himself, between finishing with the fire and sitting down behind his desk, to be about two foot high. He said in an oddly flat tone, "I understand very well how strange it must be to hear my style of talk coming out of a man with a name straight from Germany."

"Or Austria." Which would be rather more to the point, thought Jake, and thought too that he had conveyed that meaning in his inflection.

"Or Austria." The doctor spoke as one allowing a genuine if rather unimmediate alternative. Jake went back to being flustered. No sooner had he managed to bring himself to have this tiny Emerald Isler palmed off on him instead of the bottled-at-the-place-of-origin Freudian anybody just hearing the name would have expected than he was being asked to believe in a student of the mind who didn't know where Freud had come from. He said quickly, "Dublin man, are you?"

"Correct, Dr Richardson," said Dr Rosenberg, in 'his' inflection awarding his new patient a mark or two for knowing that many Irishmen were Dubliners and virtually all Dubliners Irishmen. "Perhaps it might be of interest," he went on, though not as if he had any very high hopes of this, "if I were to explain that an ancestor of mine was a German consular official who liked the look of the old place, married a local girl, and no doubt you'll be able to fill in the rest of the story for yourself. I charge seventeen pounds fifty a session—is that acceptable?"

"Yes," said Jake. Christ, he thought.

"Good. Now Dr Curnow has sent me a report on you." The psychologist's manner had changed and he opened a file with an alacrity that would have been quite uncharacteristic of his colleague. "There's just one point I'd like to have clearly understood before we get down to business. You do realise that in our work together I shall be asking you a number of questions."

"Yes."

"And you have no objection."

"No," said Jake, suppressing a different and longer answer.

"Good. First question then. What is your full name?"

"Jaques [Jakes] Cecil Richardson." Jake spelt out the Jaques. And I reckon I got seventy-five per cent on that, he thought, in mind of a comic monologue a decade or two old.

"Jaques. Now that's an uncommon name for an Englishman."

"Yes. 'My' ancestor came over from Paris in 1848.

"18481 You must have made a close study of your family history."

"Oh, I wouldn't say that. After all, 1848 was 1848."

"Just so, but the date would seem to have lodged in your memory."

"Well, they did have a spot of bother there in that year, if you—"

"Ah, when did they not the horrible men? Do you know, Dr Richardson, I think those French fellows must have caused 'nearly' as much trouble in the world as we Irish?" Rosenberg gave a deep-toned laugh, showing numerous very small white teeth. "Oh dear. Your age."

"Fifty-nine."

"Sixty," said Rosenberg as he wrote.

"Well, it is actually fifty-nine, not that there's a lot of difference, I agree."

"We always enter the age next birthday. We find it makes for simplicity."

"Oh I see."

"Your profession."

"I teach at a university."

"Any particular one?"

"Yes. Oxford. I'm Reader in Early Mediterranean History there and a Fellow of Comyns College. And by the way I have got a doctorate but I don't normally use the title."

"So it's 'Mr' Richardson. Now your trouble is that your libido (lib-eedo) has declined."

"My what?" asked Jake, though he had understood all right. "Your libido, your sexual drive."

"I'm sorry, I'd be inclined to pronounce it lib-eedo, on the basis that we're talking English, not Italian or Spanish, but I suppose it'll make for simplicity if I go along with you. So yes, my lib-eedo has declined."

"Are you married?"

"Yes."

"How much does your wife weigh?"

"What? No I beg your pardon, I heard what you said. How much .... I don't know. But you're right. I mean she weighs a lot. She's quite tall but she weighs a lot. Fourteen stone? I don't know. How did you know?"

"Oh, it's just one of the most statistically common reasons why men lose sexual interest in their wives. I couldn't say I knew."

"All right. I mean I see. But it isn't that, or rather it may well be that too, or 'there' may well be that too but it's general, I simply don't—"

"Your wife's age?"

"Forty-seven."

"Does she know you've come to see me today?"

"Good God yes, of course. We're still, well, on close terms."

"It's important she starts losing weight as fast as it's safe to do so. May I telephone her?"

"No, don't do that. Write her a letter, but leave it a couple of days. Not that I can see it having much effect."

"Ah, one never knows, one can but try." The doctor hurried on; the conversation about weight, however necessary, had been an obvious check to his interest. "You were saying you'd suffered a general loss of drive."

"That's right. I don't fancy anyone, not even girls I can see are very attractive. And it wasn't always like that, I promise you."

"I think Mr Richardson, before we go any further you might tell me when you first—"

"Let's see, I first noticed something was wrong," began Jake, and went on to talk about the year or more he had spent in continual, at times severe gastric pain being treated by Curnow for an ulcer, drinking almost nothing, watching his diet, taking the antacid mixture prescribed him and telling himself that pain, discomfort, general below-parness had temporarily reduced his desires to some unestablished low level. In the end he had developed jaundice, had had diagnosed a stone in the common duct (that into which the canals from the liver and the gall-bladder unite) and had had this removed by surgery, another set of experiences decidedly not associated with satyriasis. Out of hospital his recovery had been steady but slow, marked by periods of fatigue and weakness, a third period in which it seemed to him natural to postpone sexual dealings with his wife, let alone going in pursuit of other ladies. He had still somehow not got round to either branch of activity, though admittedly beginning to feel rested and fit, when there came that fatal Saturday in late February—the night of 'Thunderball.'

There was no point in telling Rosenberg the full story, but Jake remembered it with great vividness. Brenda had gone to stay with her grand cousins in Northumberland, one of the places where by tradition he didn't go with her. She had left on the Thursday; she was due back on the Monday evening; she had actually telephoned that lunchtime to ask him to find and read over a recipe for quenelles she had meant to take with her. Given ten years of his precept and example in the matter of each being kept informed of where the other was at all times, her dislike of changes of plan, the non-existence of anything likely to bring her back prematurely which he wasn't bound to hear of first, she couldn't have been away in a more armour-plated, hull-down, missile-intercepting fashion. Arriving back from Oxford on the Thursday night he had found her already well gone, had spent most of Friday self-indulgently and yet dutifully writing to some of the old friends and ex-pupils who had fled from the England of the 1970s and had made Saturday a remorseless build-up to the time at which, an avocado pear with prawns, a trout with almonds supported by brussel sprouts and chestnuts and a bottle of his beloved Pouilly Fume (£1.99 while stocks last) before him, he would settle down to watch the film of 'Thunderball' on television.

When, twenty minutes before the off, the telephone brought him hurrying from the bog he had felt no premonitory stirrings: Brenda most likely, checking that it was indeed six pinches of powdered baboon's balls in the sauce, and if not, even Alcestis could hardly talk him out in Brenda's deluxe absence. A female voice he at once recognised but couldn't at once name had asked him if he was there.

"Speaking."

"Jake! You stinker. This is good old Marge. Remember me?" Christ yes, as what seven years earlier had been a bosomy thirty-five-year-old from Baltimore, the source of a strenuous and reprehensible couple of months before some now-forgotten necessity had plucked her away across the ocean. He had gone on to say enough to show he did remember her. "You sound as if you're alone."

"I am."

"Completely?"

"Yes."

"Oh, that being so, why don't I just grab a cab and come toddling up to your place and we could get along with kind of renewing our acquaintance if you've nothing better to do?"

"Fuck me wept!" he had cried, regressing to an oath of his Army days; he had dapped his hand over the mouthpiece in the nick of time. "Shit!" he had added. And then he had been filled with alarm and horror.

"You're telling me it was a failure, is that right?" asked Dr Rosenberg.

"Not in the sense you probably mean, no. I .... performed. Not with any distinction, but adequately. No worse than many a time in the past. No, the striking thing was afterwards, immediately afterwards. I kept thinking about the trout and whether we could—"

"Hunger is a normal reaction on completion of sexual intercourse."

"I'm not talking about hunger, I was thinking about missing my dinner or it being spoilt or there not being enough for the two of us, no, it was more there being enough for me if she had some too and what else could she have. In fact the evening as I'd planned it for myself, very much including what was left of 'Thunderball.' I reckoned that if—"

"I wonder if you'd kindly explain about this thunderball thing you've been constantly referring to. I don't believe I—"

"Well, you know, 'Thunderball.' Film, didn't I say? Sean Connery. James Bond. Ian Fleming. Barbara something, was it?"

"Ah to be sure, James Bond," said Dr Rosenberg without producing much conviction in Jake. "Do you want to tell me what happened later?"

"I will. We lay around for a bit, not very long, and then she said brightly she was hungry and what about dinner, and I said we could eat at home, and she said if I didn't mind what she felt like was a long lazy rather greedy evening somewhere with a lot of pasta and a lot of vino, and so that's what we did, and it was quite good fun really, and we said good night in the restaurant. She was marvellous, she did it very well. The only thing she couldn't do was make me think she didn't know. Of course she couldn't. They always know things like that, not that much acumen was called for in this case. Yes. She knew I knew she knew I knew she knew."

Rosenberg seemed to think this last part was important; at any rate he went in for a good deal of writing while Jake's memory fastened against his will on the hours he had lain awake that night and on how he had spent most of the next day: unable to read, unable to attend to radio or television, eating almost nothing, staring into space, hardly thinking, trying not so much to accept what had happened to him as just to take it in. To distract his mind from this he glanced round the small and by now slightly overheated room with artificial interest. He saw a couch of a height inconvenient for anyone much under eight foot (to use it himself the doctor would pretty well need a rope ladder), a green filing-cabinet, no books beyond diaries and directories and, on a fluted wooden pedestal, a life-sized human head in some shiny yellowish material with the surface of the skull divided into numbered sections. That distracted his mind like mad.

"Right," said Rosenberg at last, "I think I have that clear. And you've had no intercourse at all since then. Have you masturbated?"

It took Jake a little while to get the final participle because the Irishman had stressed it on its third syllable, but he did get it. "Er .... yes. Well, a couple of times."

"Do you have early-morning erections?"

This time Jake responded at once, with a desire to tell the bugger to mind his own business. Then he saw that that sort of wouldn't do and said, "Yes. Usually anyway."

"Do you have fantasies?"

"Sexual fantasies. A bit. Not much."

"Have you over these last weeks used written or pictorial pornography or visited a sex movie?"

"No to the lot. I haven't read any pornography for years and I've never been to a, a sex movie."

"I see. Going back now to before your illness, how was your libido in those days?"

"Well, not what it was when I was a youngster, obviously, but my wife and I were having a—performing sexual intercourse at least once a week and more at special times like holidays, and I worked out that in "74 I had two affairs, one of them only a couple of, er, occasions but the other lasting several months on and off."

"And longer ago, how active were you sexually in your forties and thirties?"

"Just put it this way, in my time I've been to bed with well over a hundred women."

Rosenberg had made some notes of the answers to all his questions until this last one, at which to Jake's distinct annoyance he merely nodded. More questions followed and more notes were taken. Parents, characters of, probable sex-life of, attitude to; knowledge of sex, how acquired; masturbation, frequency of (high); homosexual activities (none); first sexual experience, to what degree a success (bloody marvellous, thanks very much); then, at a less leisurely pace, subsequent sexual experience, marriages, divorces, causes of, present wife, relationship with, sexual and non-sexual. As far as he knew Jake kept nothing back here, but he had the feeling that a series of negatives was all that was established; still, necessary work, no doubt. At last the scientist of mental phenomena looked at his watch and said,

"Ah now, just one or two final points. What is your height, Mr Richardson?"

"Five foot eleven."

"And your weight?"

"Twelve stone six"—noted by Jake only the previous week to be exactly right for his height and age, according to whatever chart it had been.

Rosenberg gave a small frown. "Is that all?"

"Yes, that's all."

"Mm. Well I think all the same you'd do well to lose a few pounds. Try to get down to twelve stone. Cut down on starchy foods and take more exercise. And of course, how much do you drink?"

"Sometimes a glass of beer with lunch, sometimes a glass of sherry before dinner, three or four glasses of wine with dinner rising to a whole bottle on special occasions, say once every three or four weeks." This was the exact truth.

Rosenberg frowned more deeply. "No more than that? No spirits?"

"I haven't drunk any spirits for over thirty years. I found they didn't agree with me."

"Try not to go beyond three glasses of wine in future."

"All right."

"Would you care to make a note of those points? There'll be more to come."

"Okay." Jake scribbled on the back of his chequebook in his shameful handwriting. "Starch. Exercise. Wine."

"Good. Now Mr Richardson, there is a certain programme of tasks you have to work through with me. We call it inceptive regrouping. Is this time next week convenient? Very well. Between now and then I want you to do the following. Buy some pictorial pornographic material and study it on at least three occasions for a minimum of fifteen minutes at a time. See that this leads to masturbation at least once, preferably twice. Write out a sexual fantasy in not less than six hundred and not more than a thousand words. Oh, and fill this in—there we are—making sure you give only one answer to each question. I'm not going too fast for you, I hope? Good. I also want you to have a non-genital sensate focussing session with your wife. You understand what I mean by non-genital?"

"Yes, I understand that."

"In a non-genital sensate focusing session the couple lie down together in the nude and touch and stroke and massage the non genital areas of each other's bodies in turns of two or three minutes at a time for a period of up to half an hour. They don't perform sexual intercourse. That's exceedingly important: sexual intercourse is strictly forbidden at this stage. You'll find it all set out here." He handed over a second sheet of sleek paper. "Now we come to the use of the nocturnal mensurator. If you'd just step over here, Mr Richardson."

Dr Rosenberg turned and took from a narrow table behind him an object Jake had not noticed before, a heavy wooden box outwardly of much the sort women keep sewing or embroidery in. When the lid was raised it could be seen that a black composition panel covered most of the inside. On the panel were a brass turntable with a short thick spindle, an arm on the gramophone principle with a stub of pencil in place of the needle, a two-point socket, two electric switches and two lengths of double flex with various attachments at each end.

"If you'll pay attention," said the doctor, "you'll find this is quite straightforward. Mains here." He put the plug at one end of the fatter length of flex into a socket in the side of the box and the plug at the other end into a socket in the wall behind him. "Mains on." He snapped one of the switches. "This in here." He put the much smaller plug at one end of the thinner length of flex into the socket on the panel and showed that attached to the other end was a broken hoop of light plastic an inch and a half or so across and apparently stiffened with wire. Then, neatly enough but with rather more force than might have been expected, he tore off a corner of paper, pushed a ballpoint pen through it and fastened it by way of the hole just made to the spindle. "You'll be wanting to run up nice neat little discs like gramophone records for your own use but this'll show the general idea. Now we lower the pencil on to the paper so, press the other switch so, and the turntable is now revolving, too slowly for you to see, but you can take it from me it is. Now: this fellow here"—he held up the plastic loop—"is what they call a circuit breaker. At the moment the wires in it are touching and so the circuit is closed. Now watch the pencil when I pull the wires apart and break the circuit." The pencil together with its arm moved an undramatic but definite tenth of an inch inwards, towards the centre of rotation. "Close." The pencil moved back. "Break. Close. And so on. So: when you go to bed you fasten the ring round the root of your penis, you go to sleep, the turntable revolves maybe half an inch, you get an erection, which pushes the wires apart and breaks the circuit and bingo! the pencil moves and stays in the same position until the erection passes. And so on. And in the morning, there we have a complete record of your nocturnal erections. Ingenious, don't you think?"

"Very. What use is it?"

"It's of use, or I wouldn't be asking you to go through all this riddle-me-ree, now would I? Every night, please, until further notice. Bring the discs with you when you come next week. Oh, and be sure to keep a note of the times you go to bed and wake up. Erections when you're awake don't count. And don't forget to turn off 'both' switches when you get out of bed."

While he talked the doctor had been swiftly dismantling the nocturnal mensurator. He shut the lid and put the box into a Harrods plastic carrier, explaining with a smile that Jake wouldn't be wanting to have people in the Tube or wherever ask to see his tape recorder. On request, Jake supplied his address and telephone number, taking a visiting card in exchange.

"Proinsias. Is that a German name?"

"Irish. It's pronounced Francis. The correct Gaelic spelling. I take it you've no objection to exposing your genitals in public?"

"I hadn't really—"

"It's only semi-public. All qualified personnel. We have a first-rate sex laboratory at the McDougall Hospital in Colliers Wood. I venture to say it's the finest in the world at this time. Professor Trefusis runs a splendid team. We'll be running the rule over you.,

"Will you?"

"I will, I'll be there too. It'll take a few days to fix it up—I'll let you know. And I'll write to your wife."

"Just one question, doctor, if I may. Can I take it that there is a connection between my illness, convalescence and so on and my loss of, er, lib-eedo?"

"We don't generally find it helpful to talk in those terms."

"Perhaps you'd talk in them this once just to please me. Connection?"

"Physical pain and fatigue do not in general inhibit libido."

"Thank you."

5—Business-Head and Carter-Face

It was almost with eagerness that Jake embarked on his programme of inceptive regrouping. A kind of savour attached to the official, by-order-in-council doing of things often thought inappropriate, even unseemly, in those past their first youth. To the idea of doing them, at least. But first there was the Brenda side of the question to be settled. How much, if anything, was she to be told of the bits that didn't directly involve her? With the nocturnal mensurator his mind was made up for him by the impossibility of concealing it about his person on arrival back home, nor could he think of a plausible false description of it. And what after all did it matter? No accountability could be apportioned anywhere for how his tool behaved, or failed to behave, while he slept.

Its conduct in waking hours was a horse of another colour. Any woman, even the most severely rational in intention, a category that excluded Brenda, must feel slighted to some degree when the one she regarded as her own property was turned to a different sexual use, not by any means least in cases where her successful rival existed only on paper, so to speak, or in the mind. And he felt sure that all the talk he could devise about the entire point of it being the restoration of their sex-life, however well argued, however carefully listened to, would only end up with her asking him to promise to try not to enjoy it. Besides. sneaking off on the quiet with some pictorial pornographic material would be like old times.

The next morning looked like giving him as good a chance as he was likely to get; Brenda had gone off early with Alcestis to probe a new kickshaw-mart in New King's Road, an operation any male could have polished off in three hours at the most, bus there and back, but was going to last those two, travelling in the Mabbotts" Peugeot though they were, most of the day with lunch thrown in, no doubt at one of those places where they really worked on you to get you to have a glass of wine with your food. (Alcestis: he had whimpered and gone all shaky for a while at the thought—unentertained the previous day—of what would have happened without fail if she'd been at no. 47 when he got back from Rosenberg: him—Jake—flat on his back on the bamboo settee ballock-naked with the plastic whatsit round his john thomas and the other end of the flex plugged into the plugged-in nocturnal bloody mensurator in one minute flat.)

Once a keen buyer of tit-magazines, he realised as he left the house that he hadn't even glanced at one for what felt like about three years but was probably a bit more. He did know, though, that the old order, of Venus Films Ltd and Visart Dept 100, of 'Kamera, Pagan, Zoom, QT' and 'Solo' no. 3 (featuring Rosa Domaille) sold alongside science fiction in the little shop in Newport Court, had yielded place to the open and widespread sale of large glossy journals that went further and also elsewhere, in the sense that they included supposedly serious or at least nonruttish short stories and articles on probably cars and clothes. However widespread, their sale could hardly be universal; better make for the Blake Street end of Orris Park, by tradition the cheaper and nastier end. At first glance this wasn't apparent: the buildings were no grimier, the proportion of derelict shops with corrugated iron in the window-frames no higher, the amount and variety of litter underfoot no greater. Then he saw the hand-done poster on the door of the Duke of Marlborough—Pub Live Family Entertainment with Bridie on drums, The Cowboy Himself, Mick on Duovox—and reflected that not all distinctions had been effaced.

The shop was on a corner next to a place with a lot of corroded refrigerators and rusty gas and electric cookers on the pavement outside it. Jake pretended to peer at one of these while he spied out the land. Confectionery counter-kids" toys and things—greeting card stand—the stuff. In he went and started trying not to read what it said on the cards and looking the stuff over. Not easy: it was arranged in an overlapping row so that only the one at the end was fully visible. In Newport Court, under the head mistressy yet motherly eye of the white coated lady in charge, limited browsing had been the rule, half-a-crown's worth of purchase per five or six minutes. Here there were no other customers to give guidance, though some was provided by the look of the bloke behind the confectionery, just the kind of squat bald forty-year-old to jump at the chance of asking Jake menacingly if he could help him. So one fell swoop would have to do it. 'Mezzanine'—hadn't they seized a couple of issues of that in Australia recently? The rest of the lettering wasn't encouraging: The Gay Lib Game, Through the Insurance Maze, Exclusive-Britain's Secret Police Network. The picture was different. It showed a girl with the kind of angular good looks that suggested a sound business head and the kind of clothes, though in some disarray, that real girls wore. In one hand she held a tipped cigarette, but what counted for much more, especially on the cover, was where the other wasn't quite. One, thought Jake. Further along he caught sight of the fragment 'sington' and took it to be part of 'Kensington,' the name of a periodical recently described by its proprietor (in what connection Jake had forgotten) as entirely educational in character. Two. Directly to the side he caught a glimpse of half an outsize bare breast and decided that had better be three and the lot before the bald bugger asked him if he wasn't tiring his eyes with all that reading.

As it turned out he had been hard on this man, who politely didn't smile or leer when he saw Jake's selection, named a cash sum once and said Cheers five times, the first time when he noticed the approach of his customer, again when handed the magazines, again when he took the money, again when he gave change and the last time when bidden good-bye. Better than arseholes to you, thought Jake.

He set off home with quite a spring in his step. Dirty girls approached and passed him, overtook him, moved across his front. When he observed this it occurred to him to take stock of them and so lend some background and depth to the study he would shortly be making of the relevant portions of 'Mezzanine, Kensington' and whatever the other one was called—he hadn't liked to look and was carrying the things rolled up and back outwards. So, as the creatures cruised about him on the split and loosened paving-stones, advanced and receded between skips full of rubble at the kerb and fat black plastic bags full of rubbish against or near the shop-fronts, he took a bit of stock of them.

They differed from the ones he had used to know within quite a wide range and yet unmistakably, as a random bunch of passers-by in Prague would have differed from the Brussels equivalent. Apart from their dirtiness, which was often no more extreme than a look of entire neglect as in a hermit or castaway, they tended to have in common smallness of frame that wasn't quite slimness, smallness of feature that went with roundness of head, dark-blonde colouring and nothing to shout about in the way of tits, so much not so that the odd one here and there was probably a boy: anyhow, there were enough such to point to a large secret migration from (as it might have been) Schleswig-Holstein. The favoured attire suggested a lightning raid on the dressing-up chest or actual deprivation of clothing as normally thought of. They were wearing curtains, bedspreads, blankets, tablecloths, loose covers off armchairs and sofas. A sideboard-runner hung round one neck in the manner of a stole, a doubled-over loop of carpet round another in that of an academic hood. And somebody's fucking them, thought Jake.

The pageant continued unabated throughout the walk back to Burgess Avenue, so there had been no malign Blake Street influence at work. Perhaps there was one which embraced Orris Park in general and even, it could be, surrounding territories too; he must keep his eyes open on his travels and compare. Turning in at his gate he realised there was one thing shared by the whole crowd, the larger as well as the smaller, the ones in clothes no less than the ones in household textiles, the black and the white and the khaki: they had all not looked at him.

Jake wielded his latchkey and opened the front door slowly, cautiously. As soon as he had created an aperture wide enough for it to do so, a human head came into view at about the level of his knee and no more than a few inches from it. The eyes caught his and showed astonishment. He wanted to kick the head, which ascended and receded as part of a move from a crouching to a standing posture. It belonged to Mrs Sharp, the woman who came in three mornings a week to clean the house. He had told her about three-quarters of an hour earlier that he was going out for about three-quarters of an hour, so it was no more than natural that after about forty minutes she should have settled down (as he now saw) to polish the brass frame round the mat immediately inside the front door, nor that astonishment should have visited her to find him of all people entering the house at such a time and by such a route. It was sensing enough of this that must have led him to open the door in the way he had.

He had had plenty of practice at that kind of thing in the four years Mrs Sharp had been working here. Obviously she had been recommended by Alcestis and might even have worked for her at some stage. He was unsure about this and likely to remain so, since he had asked Brenda and forgotten the answer too many times. What he was sure of was that she (Mrs Sharp) bore marks of being Alcestis-trained or alternatively was Alcestis continued by other means. A round-shouldered woman of about forty with prominent but otherwise rather good teeth and a trick of murmuring indistinguishably in tones of self-reproach or mild alarm, Mrs Sharp was always in the way, his way at least. On the stairs, on the thresholds of rooms, in the narrow bit of passage from between the foot of the stairs and the dining-room door to the kitchen door (especially there), dead in front of whichever part of whichever shelf held the book he wanted—always, always. She monitored his shits, managing to be on reconnaissance patrol past the lavatory door or standing patrol in sight of it whenever he went in and out; he couldn't have said why he minded this as he did. Keeping at him in this way meant so much to her that she took top an hour less than the going rate and so, in these thin times, rendered herself virtually unsackable.

Today offered her special opportunities. The first of course concerned the nocturnal mensurator. Debarred from what would have been old Smudger approach-direct questioning for as long as necessary-Mrs Sharp would if she could have led with something like "I'm afraid I may have broken your record player or whatever it is, Mr Richardson, look. Would you see if it's still working, then I can get it repaired if it isn't." At the moment the apparatus was in Jake's study, which he was able to keep locked on the vague grounds that it contained some rare books and without this precaution, supposedly, the milkman would rush up and pinch them. (In fact the rarest book there was a copy of his own early work on the first Greek settlements in Asia Minor: most of the small only edition had been pulped in the post-war paper shortage.) A locked door wasn't anything like a hundred-per-cent protection against Mrs Sharp—he wouldn't have been much more astonished than she just now if he had found her on the roof setting fire to petrol-soaked rags and dropping them down the study chimney—but it was a hell of a sight better than nothing.

On his entry she had flattened herself against the wall to allow him, and any twenty-stone friends he might have brought with him, to pass. He got out of range of her, so that if she fell over at this point she wouldn't be able to knock the magazines out of his hand in the process, and said weightily,

"I'm going up to my study now, Mrs Sharp"

"Yes, Mr Richardson." (Already a most unusual exchange : it was her habit never to speak except while she was being spoken to.)

"I've got some very important work to do."

"Yes, Mr Richardson."

"I don't want to be disturbed for the next hour."

"No, Mr Richardson."

Somebody who knew her less well than he did might have thought that this would put ideas into her head. Perhaps, but they would have come of their own accord, born of that mysterious power, shared with Alcestis, of 'unconsciously' sensing how and when and where to be obstructive and acting on it. He had said what he had said merely to forearm himself against whatever way she might rise to her second special opportunity of the day, for rise to it she would: the readiness was all. The same somebody as before might have deferred matters till the afternoon or next day: no good: she would have stayed on to make up for hours not worked last week, come tomorrow so as not to have to come on Friday when her daughter, etc. 'And' he was fucked if he was going to, etc. He knew the Alcestis-Mrs Sharp gang counted a lot on that reaction but sod it.

As he went upstairs he sang under his breath a ditty learned in those Army days of his:

'Get older this ...'

'Get older that ...'

'When there isn't a girl about Yer feel so lonely,'

'When there isn't a girl about Yer on yer only .... Get older this (bash! bash!)'

'Get older that (boom! boom!) ...'

It certainly didn't take him back. Locking himself in with a load of new-bought wankery, on the other hand, did, as predicted, but the distance was far smaller in the second case. He settled down comfortably in his handsome brass-studded red leather armchair, a present from Brenda on his fiftieth birthday, and opened 'Kensington.'

After looking through it at colour-supplement speed he put it aside. It was full of chaps and parts of chaps, or rather of course it was full of girls but with chaps very much in the picture. 'Zoom' and its contemporaries had occasionally included the odd chap dressed as a policeman or rustic, only he had been dressed, and the point of him had been the mistaken though innocuous one of something like comic relief, and you could usually get rid of him or most of him by folding the page. No amount of ingenuity of that order would have got rid of the chaps here.

The journal he had picked up in the shop almost at random turned out to be called 'Agora, and the breast he had spied on its cover turned out to be part of a drawing, more precisely part of a drawing-within-a-drawing that a chap in the outer drawing was drawing. He was the only visible chap throughout 'Agora,' but there were dozens of his sex in the letterpress of which, apart from small or smallish advertisements and some more non-erotic drawings, it entirely consisted. The range was from she ran her dainty fingers up and down my, by way of the other night my girl friend took hold of my, to can anything be done to straighten out my. Some of it wasn't supposed to be true and some of it was.

Lastly and with renewed expectation he came to 'Mezzanine.' It was about the size of the Liverpool telephone directory but was printed on much nicer paper. As part of the fun-delaying ritual that was itself part of the fun, he began at the beginning. Car. Cigarette. Soft drink. Hard drink. Mezzanine Platform—this was some more on the lines of said she'd never seen anything like my. Cigarette. Car. Article on speedboats. Article on Loire wines. He was over halfway through this, finding it sound enough if rather jocosely written, when he so to speak remembered where he was. Guiltily he flipped over the page and came upon a small photograph and a large photograph, both a bit misty on purpose, of a very pretty girl who at the same time looked like President Carter, in the sense that her face looked like his face, and who had almost no clothes on without giving much away. Over the next page, three more photographs, arty angles, unlikely poses. Over the next page, well this is it folks. Wham. And (there being two such) bam. And thank you most awfully main.

Jake stared, though without amazement. Tit—was not what this magazine was. In one sense he was on very familiar territory, even if the familiarity was slightly dated; in another he'd never been there before. His mind searched slowly. It was all a matter of how you looked at it, in two senses again if not more. In itself it was a bit..... And for some reason you found you had to consider it in itself, even though most of the rest of her was there, including her face. In itself it had an exotic appearance, like the inside of a giraffe's ear or a tropical fruit not much prized even by the locals. He turned on and found more of the same, on again and found more art, again and came to an article on hairpieces. Men's. To put on their heads.

In the days of 'Zoom'—when, that is, 'Zoom'-style had been as far as you could easily, safely and not expensively go—he had believed that to come across, by some stupendous accident, one of his favourite 'Zoom' girls, Anne Austin, June Palmer or Rosa herself, in a pose such as he had just seen would have constituted the summit of human (or at least male) felicity. Well, then no doubt it would have done. That had been 'then.'

He turned on yet again through various commemorations of the unfree good things in life until he came to the expected series of photographs with the girl on the cover as model. There was quite a lot of stuff alongside about her personal habits, including a clear statement in large letters and between quotation marks of what she regarded as the best thing in 'her' life. Jake found this slightly offensive; her holding such a view was at least unobjectionable but he would have preferred to reach that conclusion about her under his own steam. In some of the accompanying pictorial pornographic material her hand was quite where it hadn't been quite on its cover and her mouth was open and her eyes shut. Right. Now that should have been just what the doctor ordered. Why wasn't it? What made it, to a very small degree but unmistakably, off-putting? Before he could get his censor out of bed the thought popped up in his mind that she was no lady. By Gad sir, he said to himself, country's going to the dogs, time and place for everything, but without squashing that thought, which even attained the clarification that while what this girl was up to or at any rate was trying to be mistaken for being up to lay well within the scope of a lady, being so photographed didn't. But, he reminded himself, the girls he imagined to himself got up to things that were much more, more—come on, out with it: more degrading than this. Yes, but that was him. And those girls did what they did because, however perversely, they enjoyed it, not because they were getting paid. He had imagined better than he knew when he credited this one with a sound business head. All rationalisation and self-deception, he said to himself; you wouldn't have thought of any of that 'then.' Ah, but supposing it had been 'then' that you....

Jake did a mental about-turn. He had decided that the only picture of business-head that he really liked was one of her shopping (fully-clothed) in a vegetable-market and was about to junk the whole project when he remembered with a start what the flesh-and-blood doctor had ordered. Fifteen minutes had he said? Oh Christ. Well, knock off five for time already put in. He set himself to pore grimly over business-head and Carter-face in alternate bouts of two minutes each, fighting off as best he could the distractions of the possibly—Roman ring worn by the one, the pleasantness of the rural scene in which the other wallowed, the uncertainly identifiable ornament or utensil in the shadows behind the one, and so forth. After a while, this way or that he was getting interested. Then the dead silence was broken by a tremendous rattling of the lock on the door.

That fairly hurtled him back not far off fifty years. He went into a kind of throe and made wild self-defensive motions. "What is it?" he asked. He had to ask most of it twice or more.

No answer, further rattling, but the door itself did seem to be holding for the moment.

"What do you want? Mrs Sharp?" This was louder and steadier. "I told you I didn't want to be—"

"—thought your knob looked as if it could do with a polish." No no, 'of course' she didn't say that, couldn't have done; she must have been talking about th' door-knob or y' door-knob, but it had sort of come through to him different.

"Oh I see. I mean it probably does, still surely there's no need for you to start on it—"

"—come back and finish it later if I'm disturbing you."

"Yes do. No don't." It would be anything from two to a hundred and two minutes later. "No, finish it now you've—"

"-easily come back after I've—"

"No. No. Finish it 'now,' Mrs Sharp."

"Well .... if that's what you really want, Mr Richardson."

The buffeting resumed and went on for a minute or so, then stopped. Moving only his eyes, and them not much, Jake sat and waited for another half-minute. At the end of that time he executed a playful lunge, a feint. Instantly the buffeting resumed. He rocked triumphantly in his chair. "Gotcha!" he hissed. "Now try and tell me it's all imagination."

But the funny part came when the polishing was well and truly over and he could go on where he had left off, or rather more or less where he had begun. As if acting on orders committed to memory and carried out many times in rehearsal he went to the top drawer of his desk, took out an unused long envelope, turned to the picture of Carter-face that he liked most of best, put the envelope so that it covered the less endearing part of her and went on from there.

Later he said out loud, "And that's only the beginning. No. It's a start."

6—Focusing Session

"What does it mean?" asked Brenda.

"Well, sensate ought to mean endowed with sense or senses, as dentate if it occurs must mean endowed with teeth, but I don't see how any sort of focusing can be endowed with any sort of sense. I think they wanted an adjective from sense and noticed or someone told them sensuous and sensual were used up and they noticed or someone told them a lot of words ended in -ate. Makes it sound scientific too. Like nitrate. And focusing, well. Homing in on? No? Concentrating? Something like that."

"I see. But what does it mean?"

"Christ, love, I don't know. Getting you, getting one interested in the other person physically, something like that I should think. Anyway, we know what we're supposed to do."

"Yes. Darling, you're not to be cross but I must ring Elspeth before we start. She said she'd ring me today or tomorrow and 'I know' it'll be while we're doing our focusing if I don't get in first. You know."

"Check." As just disclosed, Elspeth was of the Alcestis-Mrs Sharp sorority though, living as she did on the far side of London at Roehampton, less to be feared. "You take as long as you have to. I'll be in the study."

Jake finished putting the lunch plates in the rack on the metal draining board and went where he had said. The study had been made out of what had been not much more than a spacious box-room and the kneehole desk, the celebrated red leather armchair and a pair of Queen Anne bookcases left little space for anything else, but even he could see that the turquoise carpet was a pretty shade and went well with the wallpaper and Madras cotton curtains.

With the intention not so much of getting in the mood as of keeping up the good work he glanced at a couple of papers that lay on the desk, had been lying there in perfect security since the previous Thursday, even though it was now Monday and Mrs Sharp had by standing arrangement attended the house on the Friday and that very morning. For both times Brenda had been at home and, as in many a (or many another) case of hyper normal powers, Mrs Sharp's were severely curtailed or even curbed altogether by the presence of a third party. Jake picked up one of the papers.

'M27' (he read) I find the thought of sexual intercourse with a willing female somewhat under the age of consent, say 14-15 yrs

1 very pleasant

2 fairly pleasant

3 a little unpleasant

4 very unpleasant

In so far as he could make himself address his mind to the problem, he found he thought all four. The age thing didn't come into it: the attractiveness of any willing female past puberty depended for him on her attractiveness, though as far as he knew he had in practice confined himself to those of 16 yrs and over. What counted was the immediacy or lack of it. Some time or other in Hawaii or somewhere, very pleasant; on his next trip to Italy, fairly pleasant; by the end of next month in Orris Park, a little unpleasant; here and now, very unpleasant. Even that wasn't quite right because of the difference between the thought of sexual intercourse and the thought of the thought of it. If he could snap his fingers and boof, there he was in mid-job, very pleasant; if she were really actually in fact standing a yard away on the precise point of starting to show how willing she was, very unpleasant. Not unpleasant, either, just as much as his old man needed to set it trying to haul itself up into his abdomen. But he couldn't write all this down, especially since the question was obviously nothing to do with any of it. Like the good examinee he had always been (best classical scholarship of his year at Charterhouse, First in Mods, best First of his year in Greats) he asked himself what was expected here, what was being looked for. A means of sorting out the child-molesters from the gerontophiles, why yes, and no doubt of making the finer distinction between the inhibited who welcomed any accepted restriction and the robust sturdy husky hardy hearty etc. He ticked 2 and picked up the other paper.

A fantastically beautiful girl with an unbelievable figure wearing a skin-tight dress cut as low as it possibly could be is looking at me with eyes blazing with uncontrollable passion (he read). With lazy languorous movements she peels off the dress and reveals herself as completely stark naked and utterly nude. Her breasts are so enormous that there is hardly room for them on her thorax. They are rising and falling with irresistible desire as with her shapely hips swaying lazily she glides over and stands insolently before me with her hands on her curving hips and her colossal breasts jutting 100 words out at me. I tear off all my clothes and she gives a tremendous gasp of astonishment and admiration and awe. She lies down on a bed which is there.

There was more, but he was still 73 words short of the 600 minimum set by Rosenberg and had already been compelled to introduce two additional girls, the first with immense breasts, the second with gigantic ones, for the sake of variety. He felt that this must violate some important canon of the genre but could find no other alternative to direct repetition. It was not that he had been idle; this was the fourth draft. The first, which had said all he really wanted to say on the matter, had consisted only of nouns, verbs, prepositions, pronouns and articles and been 113 words long; gamma minus at best. Well, he had to find those 73 somewhere before setting off for Harley Street the next morning. What about a black girl? With Brobdingnagian breasts? No no, with gleaming ebony skin. Mm..... The trouble was that being white himself he tended to think about white girls when he thought about girls at all.

Brenda tapped softly at the open door. "All right?"

"Right."

He followed her across the small landing, where a Bengal rug lay, and into their bedroom. Here, in a drill they had been through many times together, they lifted off, folded and laid down on an ottoman the patchwork quilt she had expertly made. Again by tradition, lapsed in this case, she slipped off to the bathroom and he quickly undressed and got into bed. He felt calm and yet uneasy, quite resolved to carry out orders but unable not to wish that something harmless in itself would prevent what was in prospect. After a minute he turned over so that he would have his back to Brenda when she reappeared. She had treated with exemplary seriousness Rosenberg's letter about her need to lose weight, had joined the local group of Guzzlers Anonymous at the first opportunity and had already taken off six ounces, but that wasn't going to be enough to make her feel all right about being seen naked, which she had avoided for the past year or more, he supposed.

There was a patter of arrival behind him (she moved lightly for so large a woman) and she got in and snuggled up to him with wincing and puffing noises.

"Ooh! It's freezing. It's supposed to be the middle of April and it's like January."

"Would you like to turn the other way?"

"No, this is fine for me. Had you heard of comfort eating before?"

"What?"

"Comfort eating. What Dr Thing said I'd been going in for because of feeling sexually inadequate. Had you heard of it?"

"I think so, anyway it's dear enough what it's supposed to mean, which is all balls. If there's anybody who feels sexually inadequate it's me and I haven't started eating my head off. Just another example of thinking that if you name something you've explained it. Like .... like permissive society."

"I don't think you're always meant to go in for comfort eating when you feel sexually inadequate. And in any case what makes you think you're the one who feels it so terrifically you leave everybody else standing, how adequate do you think I feel when I think about things and look back, that's what I'd like to ...."

Brenda, who had started talking at some speed, stopped altogether because a jet was passing and even at this range she would have to shout rather and she was bad at shouting. A part of the window-frame buzzed for a short time as it always did on these occasions. Eventually Jake said,

"My fault. I just got fed up and guilty and ashamed. Of course you must feel inadequate if we have to use the word, but I can tell you there's no need for you to, it's all me, we went into that."

"I know we went into it, but we decided it must be me as well as you."

"You may have thought so, but it wasn't what we decided."

"Well I think it was. And of course it is, it's obvious. Anyway I'm warm enough now. Hadn't we better get on with it?"

"All right." Grunting, Jake turned over so as to face his wife.

They intertwined their legs in a friendly way.

"Tell me again what we're meant to do."

"We take it in turns to stroke and massage each other anywhere but what you used to call down below."

"Did I? Anyway I bags you start."

"Okay. Lift up..... Put your arm..... That's right."

He started stroking the back of her neck and her left shoulder and upper arm. She sighed and settled herself more comfortably, moving her head about on the pillow. A minute or so went by. "Is that nice?" he asked.

"Yes. Are we meant to talk?"

"He didn't say we weren't to, the doctor, so I suppose it's all right."

"Good."

But neither did any more talking for the moment. With his glasses off, Brenda's face was a bit of a blur to Jake but he could see her 'eyes' were shut. By his reckoning, the second minute was just about up when she said.

"Did the doctor say we weren't to have a kiss?"

"No.,

"Let's have one then."

He couldn't have said how long it had been since they had kissed each other on the mouth, probably less than twenty-four hours, but it was longer since he had noticed them doing that. Their mouths stayed together for a time, again showing friendliness, this time roughly of the sort that, on his side, he would have shown an amiable acquaintance in public at a New Year's party. He thought Brenda was putting about the same into it. The kiss ended by common agreement.

"Well, that was all right ..."he said.

" .. as far as it went. We'll get better, darling. Lots of ground to be made up."

"Yes—your turn now."

"To what?"

"Stroke me the way I was stroking you."

"Oh yes. Will the same sort of place suit you? Round here?"

"Fine."

"I'm sorry I'm so fat," said Brenda after a moment.

"That's all right, I mean you couldn't help it and you've started doing something about it."

"Yes. Do you think I ought to do something about my hair?"

"What's the matter with it"

"Matter with it? It's all grey, or hadn't you noticed?"

"Of course I'd noticed. It's a very nice grey. A, an interesting sort of grey."

"Wow, you make it sound terrific. I could have it dyed back to something like what it used to be. They do jolly good dyes these days."

"Oh but you can always tell."

"Not if it's done properly. And supposing you can tell, what about it, what's wrong with that?"

"Well, it looks a bit...."

"A bit what? A bit off? A bit bad taste? A bit not quite the thing? A bit mutton dressed up as lamb?"

"Of course not. Well yes, a bit, but that's not really what I .... I just think it looks ugly. Because it's unnatural."

"So's make-up unnatural. So's shaving armpits. So's you shaving."

"All right, just ugly then."

"I wasn't going to have it bright red or bright yellow or bright purple, just something like what it used to be like, which was brownish mouse if you remember. No I think you think it's sort of out of place."

"I doubt if we're supposed to talk as much as this."

"Not that you care."

Jake looked mildly startled. "What do you mean?"

"You're not enjoying this are you, me stroking you? Your face went all resigned when I started. Are you?"

"I'm not disenjoying it."

"Thanks a 'lot,'" said Brenda, stopping stroking.

"No don't. What else could I have said? You knew anyway.

And it isn't you. With this it really isn't you. You said we'd got a lot of ground to make up. We've only just started."

"All right, but I reckon it's your turn again now."

"Fair enough."

"Did the doctor say you weren't to stroke my tits?"

"No."

"Well, you can stroke them then, can't you?"

"I suppose so."

"Only suppose so? They aren't down below are they?"

"No, but they're sort of on the way there. Put it like this, if down bellow's red and your arm's green, that makes your tits amber."

"Yes, I see. Perhaps we'd better be on the safe side and not."

"On the other hand of course, it's be a natural mistake to make, so if it is, if it would be a mistake you'd think he'd have made sure of saying so, you know, oh and by the way nongenital includes tot's, excludes them rather, I should say breasts. No, mammary areas."

"You mean we can?"

"I don't see what harm it could do, do you?"

"Fire away."

He fired away for a full two minutes. She stayed quite passive, eyes again shut, breathing slowly and steadily, giving an occasional contented groan. No doubt what he was doing, or how he was doing it, bore a close resemblance to its counterpart of a couple of years before, but there was no means of comparison because he had felt so different then, in particular felt more. What he felt now was an increasing but still never more than mild desire to stop doing what he was doing. In itself each motion he made was unequivocally if only by a little on the pleasant side of the pleasant/unpleasant borderline; the snag was there were so many of them. Patting a favourite child on the head or indeed stroking a beloved animal (to single out two activities he had never felt much drawn to) became unnatural if continued beyond a certain short time, however willing child or animal might be to let things go on. My God, another twenty-five minutes of this?—it was a good job he was such a faithful doer of what doctors told him to do. Hadn't Rosenberg told him to carry on with this bleeding sensate-focusing carry-on for up to half an hour? Twenty minutes was that, wasn't it? So was ten. And five. But to argue so was to use advertiser's mathematics. Amazing reductions at Poofter's, up to twenty per cent on all furnishings. Daily brushing with Bullshitter's fleweridated toothpaste reduces cavities by up to thirty per cent, in the case you happen to be looking at by only point-noughtone of one per cent but what of it, and also of course helps fight (not helps to fight) tooth decay, alongside drinking things and not eating toffee all day long. Daily brushing with candle wax or boot-polish would also reduce cavities by up to something or other and help fight tooth decay. There were enough laws already but surely there ought to be one about up to, restricting it to, oh, between the figure given and half of it. Helping fight things would be rather more of a—

"Isn't it about time for my turn?" asked Brenda.

"Oh, er .... yes I suppose it is. I sort of lost count of time."

"Carried away. No I don't mean that darling, forget I said it, I was just being frightfully silly. Now on this round I think we might...."

"Hey ! "

"What's the matter?"

"Supposed to be non-genital."

"That's non, isn't it, there?"

"Well yes, but only—"

"Genitals genital and non's non."

"But the spirit of the—"

"Sod the spirit. And even the spirit doesn't say you're not supposed to enjoy it."

"I don't think we ought to—"

"Shut up."

After a little while, Jake began to breathe more deeply, then to flex and unflex his muscles. Forgotten feelings, located in some mysterious region that seemed neither body nor mind, likewise began to possess him. Brenda sighed shakily. He pressed himself against her and at once, try as he would, the more irresistibly for his trying, which was like the efforts of a man with no arms to pick up a pound note off the pavement, the flow reversed itself. In a few more seconds he relaxed.

"Oh well, that's that," he said.

"No it isn't. Only for now. It shows there's something. What do you expect at this stage?"

"What I expect at 'this' stage, and what I shall no doubt get, is about twenty more minutes of an experience I wasn't looking forward to and which has turned out to justify such .... mild forebodings. It isn't you, it's me."

"Don't think you're the only one, mate. It isn't you, it's me cuts both ways, you know. You're not blaming me, that's how you mean it, but you're not taking me into consideration either. What about that?"

"Yes. Yes, you're right."

"If you had—been considering me, you might have wondered what I was doing telephoning Elspeth when all I needed to do to make sure we weren't interrupted was take the receiver off. That's right. Putting off the evil hour. Giving way to mild what names. It wasn't you, it was me. Now you'd better start stroking again, uncongenial as it may be. The doctor said you were to."

"It's not 'uncongenial,' it's just—"

"No, not there. Do my back."

He started doing her back. "You said it was nice before, when I was on your shoulder and arm. Was it? Is this?"

"Oh yes. Not tremendous, but nice."

"Sexy?"

"No," she said as if he had asked her whether she had said yes or no. "Nice all the same. I like all that sort of thing, massages and sauna baths and whatnot. You don't, do you?"

"Never been able to see the point of it."

"I suppose it's just how you're made. I suggest what we do now is go on for however long it is and not mind too much how we get there, talk or recite or sing as long as we put in the time."

"Yes. The idea must be to get us used to touching each other again."

"Start to get us used."

7—Are You Disturbed?

That was on the Monday. On the Tuesday Jake went down to see Rosenberg again, taking his homework with him: the completed questionnaire, the sixth and final draft of his fantasy and the paper discs that recorded the doings of the nocturnal mensurator. These troubled him slightly. Each disc bore a faintly pencilled arc with, at intervals, a thicker line or perhaps a pair of contiguous ordinary lines in a radial position. They were no more than a millimetre or two long and must represent movements of the metal arm on the breaking and making of the electrical circuit. But by this time Jake had forgotten which way the thing was supposed to go when, so he didn't know whether he had had a series of virtually continuous erections, broken only by breathing-spaces in a continuous-performance dreamland orgy, or half a dozen flickers of mild interest per night.

Though he inspected the discs thoroughly, Rosenberg made no comment on this or any other point about them and Jake didn't care to ask him. He took even longer over the questionnaire, nodding as he looked through it with a slow regularity Jake began to find offensive: was he (Jake) such a predictable mess? He had only just begun to find this when the doctor suddenly raised his head and, Curnow-like, stared at him for God knew how long. Could this be a reaction to the breach of discipline in his answer to 'M41' I think children should receive sex education 1 as soon as they can understand 2 before puberty 3 at puberty—'never' scrawled at the bottom? More likely it was his regarding '(M49)' the thought of being watched while engaged in sexual intercourse as not very pleasant nor fairly pleasant nor even a little unpleasant but very unpleasant that had produced the stare, on this view a signal much less of hostility or alarm than of wonder, of a desire to fix in the mind something to tell one's grandchildren.

It was soon clear that the fantasy was altogether on the wrong lines. Rosenberg's chubby little features filled with deep disappointment. Once or twice he screwed up his eyes and frowned as if in actual pain, whether bodily or mental. But in the end he laid aside the neatly typed sheets with a muttered promise to take a more careful look later and asked Jake a lot of questions about his childhood and adolescence, some on new topics like any dreams, wet and non-wet, he remembered from that period and how he had felt about the physical changes he had experienced then, others over already-traversed ground, his parents" relationship and suchlike, in the evident but vain hope of eliciting significant contradiction of previous responses. Together with his detailed account of the non-genital sensate focusing session, interspersed with further questions from Rosenberg which continuing to listen in silence would in most cases have rendered needless, these activities filled tip the hour. Or very nearly: there was time at the end for three momentous directives. One—Jake and Brenda were to go on to practise genital sensate focusing, a term which Rosenberg explained with a wealth of well-known words derived from the classical tongues. Two—Brenda was to accompany Jake on his next visit to the consulting-room. And three—before that could come to pass, the following Thursday afternoon in fact, Jake was to visit the sex laboratory at the McDougall Hospital. By way of reassurance Rosenberg again asked him to say, virtually with his hand on the book, whether he had any objection to exposing his genitals in public and was given the answer no.

The nearer it got to Thursday afternoon the less that answer squared with the truth. In the past he had been very willing indeed to carry out such exposure to selected individual females in private, though not of course just like that, but in the Army, in sports changing-rooms and so on he had been one of the majority who preferred where possible to keep themselves to themselves. At the time he had followed that policy without thinking of it as a policy or as anything at all, but now it looked as if he had better start thinking of it as something. This change of approach was just part of the steady progress towards more sophisticated awareness which had come to fuck up (so it seemed to him) most kinds of human behaviour in the last however many years it was. Preferring to keep himself to himself must be allied to the quirk whereby he regarded the thought of being watched while engaged in sexual intercourse as very unpleasant. And that was going to have to do for the minute.

His bus map told him that having taken the 127 to Gower Street he could change there to a 163 and, via Chelsea, Putney Bridge and Southfields, be transported to Colliers Wood. That was what he did. On this journey he had remembered to bring the 'Times' crossword puzzle but the lurching and plunging of the vehicle at the various irregularities of the highway, together with the difficulty of the dues, led him to stop it soon. He was also distracted by the very loud unsteady wailing noise to be heard whenever the driver used his brakes. The view out of the windows south of the river, after the 163 had passed under a couple of dozen railway bridges in a mile or so, was definitely less attractive than what was to be seen from the 127. Here were derelict churches covered with grime, yards of hoardings with no posters on them, dining-rooms and small draper's shops such as he hadn't seen since the "30s, waste lots big enough to accommodate a shopping complex barely to be dreamed of and, beyond them, hulking greyish towers of offices or dwellings that loomed in the smoky distance. He supposed that people who lived here might well vote for or against somebody at an election, neither of which he had bothered to do since 1945 (Liberal). The ones he saw had an archaic look too, dumpy, dark-clothed, wearing hats: the infiltrators from Schleswig-Holstein had not reached here yet.

Sitting near the front of the bus on the upper deck he became aware by degrees that a sort of altercation was going on behind him, the sort, as it soon proved, in which only one voice was to be heard, a woman's, deep and powerful, projected with that pressure of the diaphragm used by actors.

"It isn't right, is it? I mean do you think it's right? After all these years and all I been through? I said I've had enough, I done everything you told me and I've had enough, I said. I told him straight. What's in it for me, I said, yeah, what's in it for me? I've had e-bloody-nough. Now that's my rights, isn't it? I reckon that's my rights, don't you? I said don't you?"

He looked over his shoulder to see what kind of unfortunate was having to put up with this, and found that nobody and everybody was, staring hard out of the window or at a newspaper or into space. The speaker wore a dark-brown coat flecked with green and a very pale lilac-coloured silk scarf round the neck. That neck looked too slender for the job of connecting the broad-shouldered trunk to the large round head. The woman's complexion was dull, her chin pointed, her nose thin, her hair straight and dry, standing out and up from her scalp. While she continued to talk she seemed never to look directly at anyone, always between people.

"I'm not going to say there," she repeated several times in the same tone as before, accusing rather than angry. "I told him so. I said, I don't mind coming along, well I do, but I will. I don't mind coming along but I'm not going to stay. I've had enough of that. Where's it got me, that's what I'd like to know. It's not fair, it's taking advantage, that's what it is. He's got me where he wants me and there's nothing I can do about it. I been given a raw deal, haven't I, a raw bloody deal. Don't anybody think I've been given a raw deal?"

Jake had turned back to face his front after one good look. The sound-quality of the last couple of dozen words told him that the woman had got up and was moving towards the top of the stairs, presumably on the way to getting off the bus. On an impulse he didn't at once understand he shifted round in his seat and said, "Yes, I do."

Now she did look straight at someone and he saw with unusual clarity that everything about her face was wrong. The tip of her nose was a narrow white peak above a pair of ill-matched nostrils partly outlined in red; her eyes didn't so much protrude or glare as have no discernible sockets to lie in; her eyebrows were irregular streaks of bristle; her ears were set a little too far back on her skull; the borders of her lips were well marked at one corner and blurred at the other; the state of her skin showed him for the first time what it really meant to say that someone was pale and drawn. That's right, he thought to himself: they're not just mad inside their heads, they're mad to their fingertips, to the ends of their hair. And he had spoken to her to make her give him the straight look he had needed in order to see that in her.

What might have been the beginnings of a smile showed on the woman's face in the second before she stepped clumsily to one side and passed out of view down the stairs. Soon afterwards the bus stopped and from his position above the pavement he saw her walk away, swinging her arms a lot. Some distance ahead lay a small piece of park or public garden, a grassy triangle where, with a show of energy unexpected in these latitudes a group of men in helmets and jerkins were attacking some trees. Products of their labours were strewn about them in the shape of much sound timber and vigorous foliage. The peevish wavering groan of their saws could be clearly heard through the noise of the traffic. At first idly, then with concern, Jake took in a rusty street-sign that said Trafalgar Place. Distracted by the incident of the madwoman, he was about to overshoot the stopping-point he had picked out on his deluxe 'A to Z.' He toiled his way downstairs at his best speed but no kind of speed shown by him would have affected the progress of the bus, which finally dropped him a couple of hundred yards beyond the turning he wanted.

It was raining slowly but, with his umbrella and navy-blue light mackintosh, he found this no great infliction and set off with a brisk stride, a touch elated at having successfully brought off what was for him an out-of-the-way journey. There were six minutes to go before his appointment, which should be enough if the hospital was reasonably close to the main road. He had nearly reached the corner when he saw something he did find a great infliction, a figure he recognised standing on the opposite pavement and looking at him. Of course the McDougall was a psychiatric as well as a psychological joint; of course those who attended it regularly knew the nearest bus stop to it; of course chaps who were fool enough to speak to people like that deserved all they got. And of course his first thought was of flight, but he loathed being late for anything. If he had known the district even slightly he might have risked a detour but again he didn't. So he turned the corner and quickened up to light-infantry speed.

"Excuse me!"

It was harsh and hostile and he ignored it.

"Excuse me."

This time he thought he detected a note of appeal and found himself half-turning and slowing down so that the woman could catch him up. "Yes?"

"I seen you on the bus, didn't I?"

"I believe so, yes."

"You said you thought I been given a raw deal."

"Yes, I .. .

"Why d'you say that?" she asked merely as if she wanted to know.

"Well, I thought you seemed a bit upset and I wondered if I could cheer you up, that's all."

"You're the first one as said I been given a raw deal for I don't know how long. They all say I get the best attention and all they want to do is take care of me but they got a funny way of showing it is what I say. I was in the hospital for five months and all they done was boss me around. The doctor just give his orders and never took a blind bit of notice of how I felt or what I thought. It's not fair, it's taking advantage."

All this had been said in a tone that showed a sense of injury but none of the bitterness noticeable on the bus. Poor devil, thought Jake, a complete stranger throws her a kind word and she calms down immediately—these bloody doctors are all the same. Not that he had stopped looking for the hospital, of which at the moment there was no sign.

"Are you disturbed?" went on the lunatic.

He grasped at once that to her there could be no other reason for coming this way than her own. "No, just, er, tension."

"I been disturbed for .... a long time. Ever since my mum died but they say it's nothing to do with that. Do you think it's to do with that?"

"I don't know. It must have something to do with it, I'd have thought."

"You're the first one as ever said I been given a raw deal." She turned her head towards him and smiled, showing a wide variety of teeth. "That was real nice, that was. Real nice."

"Oh I think most other people would have done the same," he said, trying not to gabble it, to stay calm, to work out what to do if she pounced on him.

"I get very lonely. I'd like someone to come and see me. After I've had my tea, that's when I wouldn't mind someone, that sort of time. They don't, though, not them, no fear, they got better things to do, the lot of them. Dead selfish, the lot of them. Six weeks it's been since Harry come, and as for that June...."

Just then there was a sign of the hospital in the form of a hospital sign, and the monologue on selfishness kept up satisfactorily while the two approached Reception—All Patients, stopping only at the swing doors. Inside, Jake's companion, swinging her arms in her awful way, went straight on without a word or a look while he made for the desk. A girl in a grey uniform standing behind it called over his shoulder,

"Excuse me dear, are you sure you know where to go?"

The words were delivered with unimpeachable gentleness but it was as if—no, to hell with as if: the madwoman had heard something different. She stopped dead and sent towards the desk a look of great fear and hatred. In that moment Jake recognised that, with the sole exception of the three words he had spoken on the bus, she had heard nothing of what he had said to her; he also withdrew what he had been thinking a couple of minutes earlier about bloody doctors.

"Who are you going to see, dear?"

"Holmes. Dr Holmes."

"Good, he'll be waiting for you." The girl blew out her cheeks as she turned to Jake. "I'm new—they told me everyone was supposed to report here. Sorry—can I help you?"

"I was told to ask for Professor Trefusis." He squared his jaw, took darting glances round the hall and tapped his rolled newspaper against the palm of his hand, trying to look like the vital, dynamic, thrusting head of a giant transcontinental sex consortium. "I'm Dr Richardson."

"Oh yes, doctor, room 35, third floor."

In the lift, he asked himself what the hell he was doing there. Then he realised he hadn't noticed anything at all about what the girl at the desk had looked like except for her grey uniform, and told himself what.

8—Informal Basis

"Mr Richardson? Do come in. I'm Professor Trefusis."

After the Rosenberg business no mere Yap Islander or Kalahari Bushman going under that name would have disconcerted Jake in the least, but a woman did rather, especially one that even he in his reduced state could see was very attractive, in her middle thirties probably, with thick blonde hair parted at the side, blue eyes and a figure that would not have thrown 'Zoom' into abject disgrace. Her manner was quiet and friendly. In succession she introduced him to Dr Thatch, a boyish-looking boy with mnemonically helpful abundant long hair, Dr something he missed, another boy but still distinguishable from his colleague by being nearly bald, Miss Newman, a lumpish, gloomy girl of about twenty(?), and Mr something he couldn't believe was a name, which didn't matter much because the man it referred to, tall and of dignified bearing, stood out at once from everyone else in the room by being black; he was said to be a citizen of Ghana and present only as an observer. Oh, so everyone else was going to twiddle with him, hey?

"And Dr Rosenberg of course you know."

Seen by Jake for the first time in the company of others, the Irishman looked unexpectedly less small than on his own; he could have been as much as five foot, even perhaps an inch or two more. He shook hands and gave a cheerful smile.

"The purpose of this preliminary encounter," said Professor Trefusis in the tones of a lecturer, but of an outstandingly good lecturer, one interested in the subject, "is to establish amicable relations on an informal basis. We find the quickest way of doing this is for me to quote a few personal details relating to each member of the team. Now we know about you, Mr Richardson, that your first name is Jaques or Jake, that you're sixty years old, you're married, you're employed at Oxford University and you have a house in Orris Park. My first name is Rowena, I'm thirty-six years old, married to a photographer, we have two children in their teens and we live just up the road from here in Tooting. Dr Thatch is called Bill..."

Jake stopped listening then. He meant to switch on again to hear the bald doctor's name but forgot to. This part was easy enough; what was to come? What 'sort' of thing? Before he could ask, Rowena Trefusis (Daphne du Maurier? No, more like Barbara Cartland) got there on her own.

"...people you're going to work with in a relaxed atmosphere. The work itself is quite straightforward. We hook you into an electric circuit—the current passed is minute, so even if everything went wrong at once you'd be in no danger even of discomfort—and then we present you with a series of sexual stimuli and measure your responses to them. It's an essentially simple process and the procedure is totally informal."

"That's good," said Jake, thinking it was something to be spared a totally formal procedure of measuring his responses.

"We try to use dress as a way of promoting informality. No white coats here, you'll have noticed."

He just about had; now that he looked further he saw that the boys were wearing zipped-up jackets of imitation leather and trousers of some stuff like oakum or jute, Miss Newman the same sort of trousers and a light pullover with a Union Jack on it and the head of the team a smartly cut suit in what might have been highbrow mackintosh material. The African of course was turned out like a Japanese businessman. Jake made some approving noises.

"Well, I think we might as well—"

"Just one moment if I may, Professor Trefusis." Rosenberg's manner had turned grave. "You're sure, Mr Richardson, you've no objection to exposing your genitals in public?"

If you ask me that again, my little man, Jake thought to himself, I'll expose yours right here and now and your weeny bum for good measure. He said, "Quite sure."

"Very well, so let's be getting along to the theatre."

"The what?" Images of operating tables and surgical masks rose in Jake's mind. "Isn't that going to be rather..."

All of them except Miss Newman laughed. Professor Trefusis stopped them almost at once and looked self-reproachful.

"I'm sorry, Mr Richardson, we've made that mistake before.

Have no fear—you won't have to face any spotlights or rolls of drums. Dr Rosenberg meant the lecture theatre."

"The what? Look, if you think I'm going to .... expose my genitals to a whole crowd of God knows—"

"There'll be no crowd, I promise you. The number is eight, and one of those is doubtful."

"All medical students," said Thatch. "Think of them as doctors, like us."

"They won't get in anybody's way," said Rosenberg. "They've been carefully briefed on being as unobtrusive as possible and things are so arranged that you'll hardly know they're there."

Jake reflected: there were six of them here; another seven or eight wouldn't make much odds, true, but it was a bit thick to be treated as mid-Victorian for not favouring a come-one-come-all admissions policy at the impending show. When he signified that on consideration this could go ahead they switched to treating him like a child just bravely out of its mopes or dumps. So, as the party trooped along a corridor that had the look of being identical to several hundred others in the place, he was not best pleased when Rosenberg moved him a little apart from the others and said,

"I found your attitude just now quite interesting."

"Oh you did, did you?"

"You reacted somewhat violently to the notion of a large number of persons witnessing our investigations."

"Mm.,

"Why?"

"Well, to start with, it's not inconceivable I might be recognised."

"Would that be so disastrous?"

"Most things people object to aren't so disastrous or even disastrous, doctor. I object to somebody who knows me seeing me having this done, whatever it may be."

"You mean the exposure itself?"

"Well-needing treatment for sexual .... inadequacy."

"Really now? You wouldn't object to being known to need treatment for, er, diabetes, which arises from insulin inadequacy?"

"Of course not. That's different."

"Would you call that a mature attitude?"

"Perhaps I wouldn't and then again perhaps I would, and either way it's my attitude. Like my genitals."

"We'll discuss this again, Mr Richardson," said Rosenberg as they approached an unluxurious lift in which the others already stood.

The lecture-theatre was of a type familiar to Jake chiefly from American films: semi-circular tiers of seats rising up from a level space on the other side of which were blackboards and a projection-screen attached to the wall. Near the middle of the space there stood a metal framework mounted on struts and castors and with electric cables attached to several of its components; Jake assumed that what he saw was the back of the apparatus, which as he soon gathered bore dials or other measuring devices on its front. He found himself sitting on an ugly and expensive-looking straight-backed chair without his trousers and underpants. Otherwise he was neatly, almost formally dressed on the clean-linen-for-the-scaffold principle: dark-grey suit jacket, cream shirt, well-knotted regimental tie, grey socks and much-polished black shoes. The promise of immunity from spotlights given him a little earlier had been kept in the letter but not so much in the spirit: though there were several sources of light, all of them overhead or somewhere near it, their illumination was concentrated on him and the couple of dozen square yards round him; the one exception shone on the faces of Thatch and his bald colleague as they peered at their machine and clicked a switch here and there. Professor Trefusis stood near Jake at a metal table taking folders, typewritten sheets and a hard backed file-cover of some kind out of a briefcase and arranging them on the table. Her expression was serious almost to the point of grimness, like that of an official about to announce a threat to the security of the kingdom. What was her husband like? What did he photograph? Did she do this instead of sex or was she so barmy about it that she had to spend her whole working day on this sort of substitute or semblance, keeping herself quiet, so to speak, until she could scuttle off for several uninterrupted hours of the real thing? Could anyone really tell? What about the visitor from Ghana, the only other person in plain sight? Which raised a question.

"Are your students here, Professor Trefusis?"

"Yes, all eight of them."

"So the doubtful one made it after all; I'm so glad. Tell me, how can they see to take notes?"

"They don't have to. All the technical information and a full account of the procedure have been circulated to them already. From—their point of view, this session provides an opportunity to watch the work actually being carried out under field conditions."

"Oh I see."

"I think we're about ready. Miss Newman?"

Miss Newman came into the light carrying a length of flex that ended in what looked to Jake like a classier version of the plastic hoop on the old nocturnal mensurator. Without looking him in the eye she hung it on him and withdrew. Was that all she did?

"Bill?"

"Okay."

"Now Mr Richardson, I want you to try and concentrate entirely on me, on what I tell you and on what I show you. Forget about everybody else. If there's anything you don't like for any reason you're to say so immediately, and you can stop the whole session at any time simply by saying Stop. Right? Now. Shut your eyes. Have a sexual fantasy. Think of something that really turns you on."

What Jake wanted to say immediately was that nothing really did that and if anything within reason really did then he wouldn't be there and hadn't Rosenberg told her so, but he followed doctor's orders and thought away like mad. Or tried to. Girl. Beautiful girl. Fantastically beautiful girl with an unbelievable..... No. 'Girl.' Girl with slinky dress which she slowly draws up over her head. Underclothes and stockings. No, tights these days. Bugger these days. She slowly takes off one stocking. But he'd never been one for that kind of thing: off with the lot in short order had been his way. Off with the lot, then. Kiss. And so forth. He was well, or as well as he could manage, into the so forth when Professor Trefusis said,

"All right, Mr Richardson, hold it and relax for a moment. Bill?"

"Point-nine and thirty-three point-nine."

Perhaps these figures displeased or disquieted the boss; anyway, she went over and joined the two at the apparatus, behind whom Jake could now make out two or three or more dim shapes. He could tell there was at least one other person to his left rear but didn't look round. Only the Ghanaian observer was now in full view; he had got in a lot of observing when Miss Newman did her bit and even now was still at it on and off. Jake wanted to tell him to pull up a prayer mat or whatever he fancied and be his guest. He yawned and stretched. It could hardly be that he had broken the machine by overloading it—no, no, here came Professor Trefusis with a satisfied expression.

"Sorry about that." She picked up the file he had noticed and passed it to him. "Would you read aloud what it says on the first page? I should explain that the object is to make sure you're turned off after each stimulus."

"Ah." He found that the thing was actually a loose-leaf book containing sheets of typescript." Clear enough. He read aloud,

"Apart from the peculiar tenets of individual thinkers, there is also in the world at large an increasing inclination to stretch unduly the powers of society over the individual, both by the force of opinion and even by that of legislation; and as the tendency of all the changes taking place in the world is to strengthen society and diminish the power of the individual, this encroachment is not one of the evils which tend spontaneously to disappear, but, on the contrary to grow more and more formidable. The disposition of mankind, whether as rulers or as fellow-citizens, to impose their own opinions and inclinations as a rule of conduct on others, is so energetically supported by some of the best and by some of the worst feelings incident to human nature that it is hardly ever kept under restraint by anything but want of power; and as the power is not declining, but growing, unless a strong barrier of moral conviction can be raised against the mischief, we must expect, in the present circumstances of the world, to see it increase."

He shut the book and handed it back, aware as he did so that no more observing was going on in his immediate neighbourhood. Whatever was next came out of one of the folders and was held up so that the group near the machine could see it. A moment later the professor was showing him a magazine photograph of one of the business-head-Carter-face sisterhood displaying her giraffe's ear.

"I don't like that," he said.

It was out of sight in an instant. "What don't you like about it?"

"It's ugly."

"You find the model ugly?"

"No, not at all. I mean her .... parts."

"They repel you?"

"Yes. What I see there repels me."

She hesitated and glanced momentarily to his left. That must be Rosenberg standing there, perhaps among others, and were those questions his, put on his behalf instead of directly out of what, etiquette? Never mind: with no more said the second exhibit was exhibited after the same fashion as the first. It was much more up Jake's street, a nice-looking girl who also looked nice, possible too in the sense that you met girls like her, and arranged or shown in what might be called 'neo-Zoom' style-advantage taken of some of the freedoms of the last few years without the surrender of decency.

"Better?"

"Fine."

"Concentrate on it." Trefusis leaned towards him, lowered her voice and said kindly, "And remember this: by now nobody's thinking of you as an individual or a person. You're just an object."

"Thank you."

He concentrated and quite soon it started being rather a success, nothing to cause any wild surmising at the instrument panel, but still. This part went on for some minutes. Then he was told to forget about that and given the book open at a different page. He read aloud,

"If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."

The third offering showed two girls being familiar with each other, no more than that, on a piece of very dean and neat garden furniture. That went down reasonably well too. Before his third bout of reading Jake said,

"May I ask a question?"

"Certainly."

"I'd just like to make it clear"—he resisted the temptation to look over his shoulder—"that what, well, appealed to me there wasn't what they were getting up to really, it was just the fair one, the look of her face and her breasts."

"I'm sorry, what's your question?"

"Oh. Oh well I haven't really got one, I just wanted to say that."

There was no reply apart from an undecided nod of the head, which he felt was quite as much as his non-question had deserved. Why had he bothered? Perhaps the same problem was exercising others: he heard whispers from the far side of the apparatus and a murmur behind him. But in a short time he was reading aloud,

"We take care that, when there is a change, it shall be for change's sake, and not from any idea of beauty or convenience; for the same idea of beauty or convenience would not strike all the world at the same moment, and be simultaneously thrown aside by all at another moment. But we are progressive as well as changeable: we continually make new inventions in mechanical things, and keep them until they are again superseded by better; we are eager for improvement in politics, in education, even in morals, though in this last our idea of improvement chiefly consists in persuading or forcing other people to be as good as ourselves. It is not progress that we object to; on the contrary, we flatter ourselves that we are the most progressive people who ever lived. It is individuality that we war against: we should think we had done wonders if we had made ourselves all alike; forgetting that the unlikeness of one person to another is generally the first thing which draws the attention of either to the imperfection of his own type, and the superiority of another, or the possibility, by combining the advantages of both, of producing something better than either. We have a warning example in China."

The next thing was that the lovely Rowena was showing him a photograph of a girl doing what he didn't want to see any girl doing ever except to him—school of 'Kensington,' in fact.

"I don't like that," he said. "And what I don't like about it isn't the activity itself, far from it, but being shown it going on between other people. It's not that I disapprove. Well yes actually come to think of it I do disapprove rather. Of that photograph being published I mean."

"Fair enough," she said, but spent the next minute or so looking through her folders, presumably in search of material that wouldn't offend his susceptibilities. At last she handed him a sheaf of seven or eight pictures and asked him to pick the two he liked best. That was easy: he chose one girl who, by the look of her, could have had no idea in the world why those men had asked her to lean against a tree wearing just a straw hat, and one with a faintly intellectual expression who reminded him of a 'Zoom' favourite of his. The procedure had an end-of-session feel to it and some nuance of the professorial manner, he thought, suggested the same thing. So he was surprised and a little fed up to be told, after both girls had been disposed of, that he could take a short rest.

He put on a smile. "Before what?"

"Before the second part of the programme. Do smoke if you want to, Mr Richardson."

"No thanks, I've given it up." The same thing only live? "What happens in the second part?"

"We stimulate you artificially."

"As opposed to—"

"With an artificial stimulator," explained the professor.

"Oh I see."

She went across and seemed to confer with the group by the machine. Although they were so near he couldn't hear a word of what they were saying. Rosenberg came strolling out of the shadows, followed by the Ghanaian.

"Well now, and how's it going?"

"I thought you were supposed to tell me that."

"I meant your personal reaction in mental and emotional terms."

"How I feel, you mean. Well, I suppose one can get used to anything. Look here, what's this stimulator?"

"Ah, there's a cunning little gadget if you like."

"No doubt, but what is it?"

"Let's see, it's metal, and it's powered by electricity, and it .... revolves rapidly."

"You brave man," interposed the observer.

Jake gave up Rosenberg and nodded appreciatively, hoping to be told what for this fellow said him brave man.

"Your ego has been subjected to a massive onslaught. Of the events in detail inducing you to set your foot on the path that has brought you here this afternoon, I know nothing; but of this I am quite sure, that they were of a sort to injure your pride most severely. So it must have gone with all the intervening events. Today, given among other factors your age and class, was the supreme test. I confess to having done a little to aggravate it; I apologise, and can plead only the excuse of scientific curiosity. I salute you, sir, and would ask you to do me the honour of allowing me to shake your hand."

They shook; Jake had been about to get up from his chair to do so but remembered the state of his clothing, which indeed had seldom been far from his thoughts over the past half-hour and which now, for some reason, decided him against getting up. He was still most interested in the question of the artificial stimulator and was satisfied soon enough. Professor Trefusis, with Miss Newman at her side, again stood before him. She was holding up an object of yellowish metal about the size of a pepper pot with a small protuberance at the top.

"This," she said, "is the artificial stimulator."

With a neat movement she tripped a switch on the device and a thin high-pitched whine started up. To Jake it sounded like a dentist's high-speed drill and some of his reaction to the thought must have shown in his face, because Trefusis smiled and spoke reassuringly, took his hand and laid the metal protuberance, which he now saw was spinning rapidly, against it.

He felt an agreeable stroking sensation, not intense, as if something between a fingertip and a feather were being applied with superhuman regularity. He nodded appreciatively again.

Part II now went ahead with businesslike dispatch. Artificial stimulator in hand, Miss Newman knelt before him. Professor Trefusis looked quickly through the contents of one of her folders and said,

"You'll now be subjected to the same stimuli as before while also being stimulated genitally. No doubt you'll appreciate that should your response come to climax the programme would have to be discontinued."

"Yes," said Jake, thinking this was a bit mealy-mouthed of her in the circumstances.

"So if you raise your hand the genital, stimulation will cease at once."

"Fine."

What followed was physical pleasure in its purest form, unaccompanied, in other words, by any of the range of feelings from tenderness to triumph normally embodied with it. Even the desire for its continuance was missing, so that every minute, every dozen seconds he had to strive not to send the damned contraption 'flying' and run for the door, no trousers or no no trousers. How can she do it? lie kept asking himself, not rhetorically: what sort of woman does it take to measure what happens to chaps" willies for a living? What does your mummy do? And how can her husband cope? The she he meant was entirely the fair professor; Miss Newman never entered his thoughts. It was that, he saw afterwards, that made the whole shooting-match bearable: by luck or amazing judgement they had passed over for the artificial-stimulator-wielding spot all the impossible kinds of person, to wit males, attractive females and unattractive females, and come up with somebody as near nobody as anybody could be, somebody totally unmemorable, somebody who did nothing at all except as ordered. Or perhaps her behaviour, or absence of behaviour, was the result of her having been carefully briefed in the interests of relaxation of atmosphere and total informality.

The girl in the straw hat went back into the folder and the whine of the cunning little gadget sank in pitch and disappeared. Jake sighed and swallowed. His eyelids felt heavy; in fact so did most of the rest of him. Professor Trefusis came and muttered into his ear,

"Would you like a climax? We can give you one, not out here of course, or we can arrange for you to give yourself one in private."

"I don't think I will, thanks very much all the same."

When they parted a few minutes later she said to him, "I hope to see you again soon."

"Again? Soon?"

"After the successful completion of Dr Rosenberg's treatment."

9—Guilt and Shame

Jake and Rosenberg went together across the hospital hall, which had a fight going on in it near one of the sidewalls. Two medium-sized men in white suits were struggling to hold a largish man in a fawn raincoat who seemed to be doing no more than trying to free himself from them. Not many of the people standing about or passing through bothered to watch.

"If it's been like that all the way here," said Jake, "those two are earning their money."

Rosenberg smiled leniently. "They're ward staff. The poor fellow's objection must be to being made to leave. There, you see?"