Jake's Thing

The man in the raincoat, at liberty for a moment, ran back towards the lifts where the two nurses caught him again. Jake had a last glimpse of the captive's forefinger straining to reach, and being held back from reaching, the call-button with great intensity, as if this were no call-button but, TV-style, the means of activating a bank alarm or nuclear missile. Outside it wasn't quite raining but was damp and chilly. Rosenberg looked to and fro a couple of times in a furtive sort of way, swinging his unnaturally large black briefcase about, then he said,

"How were you intending to make the return journey, Mr Richardson?"

"Bus."

"Ah, it's not the weather for that. I have my car here, I'd be happy to give you a ride."

"That's very kind of you."

But the other stayed where he was a space longer, looking down at his disproportionately small feet. There was that in his manner which meant that it came as no complete surprise when he flung back his head and produced one of those stares he and Curnow went in for, had perhaps developed together as part of some research project. Jake met this one and waited. When Rosenberg spoke it was in a strained, almost querulous tone, as if he was at great moral cost dragging out a deeply overlaid memory.

"Am I quite mistaken or did you tell me you were sometimes known to take a glass of sherry before dinner?"

"I must have. It's true anyway."

"I thought so. I thought so. And it's before dinner now. Some time before, I grant you, but before. You see I find a small amount of alcohol at this time of day distinctly beneficial. Tell me, have you any objection to drinking in a public house?"

In its tone and much of its phraseology the last part of that so closely resembled the bagger's favourite question that Jake started to want to hit him, but he soon stopped and said, "Not in principle." He could have added that in practice he found the activity distasteful, especially of late; it was also true that nothing would have kept him from seeing the little psychologist in the proposed new setting.

With a peremptory sideways movement of his head Rosenberg led off at a smart pace. A minute's walk up towards the main road brought them to a pub called the Lord Nelson which Jake, occupied with his madwoman, hadn't noticed on the way down. The exterior, royal blue picked out in yellow, was promising, and the interior had no more than half a dozen youngsters in it, wearing their offensive perpetual-holiday clothes, true, but not laughing and talking above a mild shout. The noise from the fruit machine was that of an intermittent and fairly distant automatic rifle, and even the jukebox thumped and cried away well below the threshold of pain; all in all a real find. Of course it was early yet.

Rosenberg had said they might as well look in here, but any pretence of unfamiliarity was at once undone by the whiskered tee-shirted fellow behind the bar, who greeted him as doctor and without inquiry picked up a half-pint glass tankard and began to fill it with beer. When this was done he looked at Jake with a slight frown and narrowing of the eyes, as if less interested in what he might want to drink than in what form of lunacy possessed him.

"And you'll have a sherry, will you not?" asked Rosenberg. "Thank you, medium dry."

"Is sherry still the great Oxford drink or is that all folk-lore?"

Jake made some idle answer. At the mention of Oxford any hint of misgiving or antagonism left the barman's manner; he was evidently satisfied that his customers were not doctor and patient but doctor and colleague. His underlying assumption that having to do with Oxford somehow vouched for sanity might itself be said to imply derangement, but it would be more interesting to consider what had made Rosenberg a habitué of this place. One's first assumption, that being Irish he would naturally be rushing round the corner all the time to get a lot of strong drink inside him, wasn't borne out by that modest half of hitter. Could there be a convivial side to him? It seemed unlikely, though Jake couldn't have told why.

Again taking the lead, Rosenberg moved decisively across the room and sat down with his back to the wall on a padded bench enveloped in black artificial something. Jake, always in favour of getting a good view of anybody he might be talking to, looked round for a chair, but there was none to be seen, only long- and short-legged stools. He fetched a short-legged one, finding that its top was covered with the same stuff as the bench. Apart from being so covered it was too convex to suit a normal bum like his, pleasing as that convexity might well have been to the trend-blurred eye of whatever youthful fart had designed it. He sat regardless and faced Rosenberg across a circular table made of a semi-transparent amber-coloured substance. Huge photographs of Wild West people and scenes covered the walls.

"I had lunch recently with a friend of mine," announced Rosenberg.

"Oh yes?" said Jake encouragingly, but not just encouragingly in case what he had heard had been deemed worthy of remark in itself, which he thought was possible.

"Have you ever come across a magazine called 'Mezzanine?'"

"Yes, in fact—"

"This friend of mine is the editor. He's been in the job for about four years would be my guess. That's a long time in that sort of journalism, he says. The pace, you know. I doubt if he'll stick it much longer. I'll be sorry when he goes, because he and I have been fortunate enough to build up an excellent working relationship. In practice it benefits me distinctly more than him." The doctor gave his deep laugh; the present rendering gave an effect of reluctant self-congratulation. "Oh dear. Of course he has a very acute social conscience, which makes him anxious not to publish any material. that might in any way be harmful."

"What sort of material would that be?"

"Encouragement of anti-social fantasies involving violence chiefly but also such matters as simulated hanging which can be dangerous."

"You mean physically dangerous."

"I do. Death from that cause is not uncommon."

"Mm. So what people see and read in that way does affect their actions."

Rosenberg put down his glass, which was still nearly full. He laughed again slightly. "Why my dear sir, of course it does. If it didn't, my work would have to take a very different form. You must realise that, even from the little we've done together."

"I suppose I do. But going back—can't your editor pal spot what to steer clear of for himself? I mean for instance I can tell straight away that a chap whipping a girl involves violence."

"It's not always as simple as that," said the doctor rather peevishly, then went on in the sunniest of spirits. "Where I score is having access to the unpublished 'Mezzanine' correspondence, which is most valuable. They write things they'd never dare say to fellows like me."

"For fear of bursting out laughing in your face."

"Ah not at all, not at all. You can always spot the ones who're trying to take you for a ride."

"Always? How?"

"Let me put it to you the way my friend put it to me. If you say when you write, if you call something warm, or soft, or firm, or moist, or hard, or anything like that then you're not serious. You don't use adjectives when you're serious. Which brings us by a long way round to the fantasy you wrote for me, Mr Richardson. But first let me get you another drink."

"My turn. Same again?"

"No thank you, I'll just nurse this."

Jake would have cancelled his own drink at that but he wanted a couple of minutes to reflect. Standing at the counter he decided it was dull of Rosenberg to have moved with such speed and determination from what had sounded like the start of a nice credulity—stretching story or two about 'Mezzanine' to that bloody fantasy. And there had been something dull too, in a different sense, about the tone of voice in which he had mentioned the editor and the four years in the job and the pace and the working relationship. More than dull. In the act of ordering his sherry Jake became conscious that he had heard that very tone elsewhere in the last couple of weeks, and at the same time that Rosenberg reminded him of someone. He went on trying to think where and who until he got back to the table and saw that the typewritten pages of his fantasy were spread out on it.

"Uncontrollable passion. Irresistible desire." Rosenberg sipped slowly at his beer. "Colossal breasts. Quivering thighs. Delirious response. Do you know if I hadn't heard different from you I think I'd be wondering whether you'd ever performed sexual intercourse?"

At the first phrase Jake had looked hurriedly about. No one was in earshot, not yet, although the bar now held twice as many youngsters as before and an additional two, moustached and flat chested respectively, were entering at that moment. He sat down, spreading his arms slightly to try to screen off Rosenberg and his reading-matter. "Would you?" he said.

"I think I would. As the friend I was mentioning to you would put it, you're not serious."

"Good God, do you imagine I'd have come to you in the first place and gone through all that .... rigmarole this afternoon if I weren't serious?"

"Why did you come to me in the first place?"

Jake started to speak and then found he had to consider. "I realised something that used to be a big part of my life wasn't there any more."

"And you miss it."

"Of course I miss it," said Jake, instantly seeing that the next question ought to have to do with how he could be held to miss what he no longer wanted; you don't miss a friend you'd be slightly sorry to run into, do you? Can you miss wanting something?

Perhaps Rosenberg already knew the answers. "Any other reasons?" was what he asked.

"Well, there's my wife to consider. Obviously."

"There is, obviously. Very well. I didn't mean you weren't serious in your overall approach to your condition, I meant you weren't serious when you wrote this. You weren't in a state of sexual excitement."

"These days I very rarely am. That was in another sense why I came to see you in the first place."

"No doubt it was, but the state under discussion can be achieved with the aid of pictorial pornographic material, manual manipulation and so forth. You clearly omitted to use such aids. It's my view that consciously or unconsciously you avoided doing so. Because you sensed that if you did use them you'd almost certainly write something you'd have been embarrassed to let me see. You'd have used different words—none of your quivering thighs and delirious response. I'm sure you know the kind of words I mean."

For all the Irishman's ridiculous accent, his articulation was as distinct as ever and he had not lowered his ordinary conversational volume. Another glance over his shoulder showed Jake that the moustached shag and the flat-chested bint, whose skull as he now saw was about the size of a large grapefruit, had moved away from the bar with their drinks and were now standing just near enough, given goodish hearing and less than full absorption in each other, to catch some of whatever Rosenberg might say next. "I'm sure I do too," mouthed Jake faintly, rolling his eyes and raising and lowering his eyebrows and pointing through himself at the couple.

For the moment it was hard to tell whether the doctor had heeded or even read these signals. "We often find it best to avoid them in a consultation context for socio-psychological reasons," he said at his previous pitch, "especially in the earlier stages of therapy. But they tend to be useful in the kind of work you were doing here. I suppose I might have...." He dismissed without apparent trouble the thought of whatever it was he might have done and continued, "I strongly recommend you to use such words when you try again, which I want you to do between now and next Tuesday. They may help you to resolve your main difficulty. You see—"

With the effect of a great door bursting open the noise of the jukebox increased perhaps fourfold in mid-beat. Rosenberg's voice mounted above a swell of half-human howling and mechanical chirruping and rumbling. "As well as what you wrote, your attitude before our investigations this afternoon commenced, you remember, and your response to some of the stimuli during them—it all suggests to me that our society's repressive attitude towards sex has engendered an unrelaxed attitude in you. You've been conditioned into acceptance of a number of rigid taboos." Perhaps now he did notice Jake's expression, which had turned to one of impatience or weariness, because he went on to bawl, "You're suffering from guilt and shame."

"'What?'"

"I said you're—"

"I heard you. Look, can't we discuss this somewhere else?"

"Please let's finish. I know this is uncomfortable for you but that's why I brought you here. Certain states of feeling can be brought to the surface more efficaciously in this type of environment than in a consultation situation. Now just one moment if I may."

The clamour changed somehow, perhaps became more measured or emphatic. Rosenberg opened his briefcase and fingered through its contents, taking his time in a way that once more recalled Curnow. He was getting ready, Jake knew, to say or rather shout something unsayable at the instant when the noise ceased, which it must be on the point of doing. The instant came; Rosenberg was silent, but he had taken from his case and tossed down on the table between them a coloured magazine cutting pasted on to thin cardboard. The object landed with a soft click which seemed amplified in the first moment of silence. Jake saw that it was the photograph of the girl wearing just a straw hat, apart from which and in a way partly because of which she was without doubt completely stark naked and utterly nude. Her breasts were not in any true sense gigantic but they were large enough, and the rest of her made appropriate all manner of unserious adjectives. Everything about her for some reason struck him more forcibly here in the Lord Nelson than it had in the lecture theatre.

"That's the one you liked best," said Rosenberg with unimprovable clarity. "According to that clever little machine back there."

Jake sensed there were a number of people close behind him; he heard a movement, a grunt, a giggle, a whisper without knowing whether they referred to him or the picture or something quite different and naturally without turning to see. The temperature of the skin on the back of his neck changed, though he couldn't have said in which direction. He still had his 'Times' with him. In a manoeuvre that sent his sherry-glass rocking he shoved the newspaper over and round the picture and scooped it up and laid the package thus made on the floor. Then he gave a deep sigh.

"Guilt and shame." Rosenberg's voice was so low that it could have been audible only to Jake, who acknowledged in time that the little bugger could be effective whatever you might think of the effect. But for now all he said was,

"No. There are some things that are too..... No, you're wrong. You've got it all wrong."

10—Wanker!

That Saturday was the first day of the Oxford summer term. Jake had to go up there to supervise a collection, no charitable enterprise this, but an examination set and marked by himself and intended to assess the extent to which his pupils had done the reading set them for the vacation just ended, or more practically to deter them a little by its prospect from spending every day of that period working in a supermarket and every night fornicating and smoking pot or whatever they did now. A drag, yes; all the same, satisfyingly more of a drag for them than for him and over just in time for him to be back at Burgess Avenue for Saturday Night at the Movies, of course not actually 'at' the movies but in front of the television set.

The following Tuesday Jake went back to Oxford after he and Brenda had kept their appointment with Rosenberg in Harley Street and eaten something, in her case very little and in his not much more, at a place called Mother Courage's off the Marylebone Road. The food wasn't much good and they were rather nasty to you, but then it cost quite a lot. After walking part of the way in the interests of health, Jake got to Paddington a good twenty minutes before the departure of the 3.5, a train otherwise known to more than a few as the Flying Dodger for being the latest one even the most brazen and determined evader of his responsibilities would dare to catch at the "start" of the "working" week at the university, or "university", and in consequence much esteemed among senior members of that institution. It was sometimes not easy to get a seat for the neglectful philologists, remiss biochemists and other lettered column-dodgers who swarmed aboard it; hence part of the reason for Jake's early arrival. He stood in a queue that by its diversity would have served quite well as model for a Family of Man photograph, laid out his fifty quid or whatever it was for a second-class ticket and went along to the bookstall. Here he searched carefully among the paperbacks and in the end came up with something called 'The Hippogriff Attaché-Case' by an author unknown to him. He couldn't understand the jacket-design, which consisted chiefly of illuminated numbers and different-coloured little light-bulbs as well as a quantity of wasted space, and turned to the matter on the back of the cover.

To the heart of a vast computer complex buried miles deep in the earth's crust beneath America's Rocky Mountains come a brilliant cybernetics engineer, an international thief whose specialty is by-passing sophisticated alarm systems, a disillusioned CIA hit-man and the beautiful but enigmatic daughter of a US general who has disappeared in mysterious circumstances (he read). Their mission? To extract from the computer's banks the identities of American society's most dangerous enemies with the aim of unofficially executing them. Only trouble is .... 'one' of the team of four is a psychopathic killer.... .

Just the job, thought Jake as he handed over his few more quid: right up the street of a past-it ancient historian about to be on his way by unsophisticated train to one of England's premier seats of learning. Roll on wristwatch television.

Time to get aboard the train; it was already filling up, with younger persons for the most part, undergraduates, junior dons, petty criminals. Jake found a lucky corner seat in one of the dozen identical uncompartmented carriages of the type he had by now almost grown used to after years of vaguely imagining it to be a stopgap measure adopted while something less desolate was under construction. He wondered, not for the first time, about the irremovable tables between each pair of seats: what unbriefed designer, Finnish or Paraguayan, had visualised English railway travellers beguiling their journey with portable games of skill or chance, academic study, even food and drink? Well, he would beguile the first part of this one with reading, or letting his eyes run over, a 'Times' article on the Soviet armed threat to Western Europe. He kept at it until the train slid out of the station and begun to pass the rows of dreadful houses that backed on to the line and all his fellow-passengers had settled down. The chances were quite high that this particular mobile other-ranks" bun-shop held two or three people he knew well enough to talk to, and as high or higher that the moment

he saw who they were he wouldn't want that. When he lowered the paper he found he was safe enough with a young couple opposite in a loose half-embrace, eyes bent on vacancy, mouths and jaws slack to a degree that suggested heavy sedation, and next to him an old bitch with a profile like a chicken's who obviously hadn't talked to anyone for years.

He opened 'The Hippogriff Attaché-Case' but several things made concentration difficult: the small print, the sudden directionless lurches of the train, although it wasn't yet going very fast, and thoughts of the session with Rosenberg and the lunch that had followed. To get away from the last lot he started on thoughts of his job and his work, topics he seldom investigated consciously. The job side of life presented no difficulties, called merely for constant vigilance; it was perhaps the one such side he could afford to feel a tingle of complacency about. After years of effort and much nerve and resource he had got the job sewn up almost to the point of not being underpaid; one more work-shedding coup, to be mounted at an early opportunity, and for the next academic year at least lie would be able to consider himself well remunerated for his efforts—not counting inflation of course.

The work, in the sense of his subject and his attitude and contributions to it, gave less grounds for satisfaction. If challenged he would have said that he tried fairly hard and with fair success to keep up with developments in his chosen sphere, Greek colonisation from the first Olympiad to the fall of Athens, and did a sporadic something about the, to him, increasingly dull mass of the rest; but he hadn't revised his lectures and his seminar material except in detail, and not much of that, for how long?—well, he was going to say five years and stick to it. Learned articles? He must get that bit of nonsense about Syracuse off the ground again before too long. Stuff in the field? According to a Sunday newspaper, the kind of source he sneezed at less and less as time went by, two Dutchmen had found a pot or so near Catania and he was going to have a look in September, but since he knew there couldn't be much more to find round there and he wasn't an archaeologist anyway the look would be brief, its object far less the acquisition of knowledge than to get off tax his travelling expenses for a fortnight's holiday with Brenda. Books? Don't make him laugh: apart from the juvenile one about the sods in Asia Minor there had been three others, all solidly "researched", all well received in the places that received them, all quite likely to be on the shelves of the sort of library concerned, all combined still bringing in enough cash to keep him in bus fares. Three or, in the eye of charity, four books were probably enough to justify Dr Jaques ("Jake") Richardson's life. They were bloody well going to have to.

That life was unlikely to run much beyond the end of the present century. Never mind. Jake's religious history was simple and compact. His parents had been Anglicans and right up to the present day the church he didn't go to had remained Anglican. As far as he could remember he had never had any belief, as opposed to inert acquiescence, in the notion of immortality, and the whole game of soldiers had been settled for him forty-five years previously, when he had come across and instantly and fully taken in the Socratic pronouncement that if death was unconsciousness it was not to be feared. Next question. It, the next question, did bother him: how to see to it that the period between now and then should be as comfortable and enjoyable as could realistically be expected. The one purpose raised the problem of retirement, the other of sex. Oh bugger and bugger. Talking of sex, the girl across the table, moving as if buried in mud, had shifted round in her seat, put her arms across the young man and given him a prolonged kiss on the side of the neck. A perceptible lifting of the eyelids on his part was evidence that he had noticed this. Jake produced a very slight gentle smile, which just went to show what a decent chap he was, not turning nasty like some oldsters when they saw youngsters who were presumably having it off, on the contrary feeling a serene, wry, amused, faintly sad benevolence. Like shit—all it just went to show was how far past caring he'd got. Nought out of ten for lack of envy in colour-blind shag's feelings about other shag's collection of Renoirs.

These and related topics, together with another uninformative glance at 'The Hippogriff Attaché-Case' and a short involuntary nap, filled most of the journey. After the houses and the factories and the clumps of presumably electrical stuff standing in the open it was sometimes worth glancing out of the window. Much of what should have been green was still brown after the drought of "76, but past Reading it turned pretty decent, with the Thames running beside the track and once, for some seconds, a swan in full sight; bloody good luck to you, chum, thought Jake. Eventually the train stopped as usual outside Oxford station by the cemetery. This sight, although quite familiar enough, reminded him of his bus journey to Colliers Wood, or of that later part of it before the advent of the madwoman. He had been carried past mile after mile, probably getting on for two anyway, of ground given over to the accommodation of the departed, stretching away for hundreds of yards on one side of the road or the other, sometimes on both at once, interrupted by a horticultural place or one that sold caravans only to resume, covered with close-order ranks and files of memorial stone arranged with a regularity that yet never repeated itself, so extensive and so crowded that being dead seemed something the locals were noted for, like the inhabitants of Troy or Ur. The thought of shortly arriving in some such place himself and staying there meant little to Jake, as noted, but this afternoon there was that in what he saw which dispirited him. In the circumstances he was quite grateful for the yards of rusty galvanised iron fences, piles of rubble and of wrecked cars and, further off, square modern buildings which helped to take his mind off such matters.

The train pulled up at the platform at 4.29 on the dot, which was jolly good considering it often didn't do that till 4.39 or 49 and wasn't even supposed to before 4.17. Jake descended into the pedestrian tunnel that ran under the line to the front of the station; once, there had been an exit on this side too, but it had been discovered years ago, not long after he got his Readership, that the only people who benefited from this arrangement were passengers. An amplified voice blared something at him as he made the transit. He saw nobody he recognised in the taxi queue, not that he looked about for such. When his turn came he found himself sharing with a fat old man who said he wanted to go to Worcester College and a girl of undergraduate age who evidently made her needs known without recourse to speech. She had the other type of young female physique, the one being that of the bullet-headed shrimps he had identified on his visit to Blake Street: this genus was strongly built with long straight fair hair which, an invariable attribute, had been recently washed and, seen from the rear, hung down over not an outer garment but a sort of collarless shirt with thin vertical blue-and-white stripes. The old man shook slightly from distinction or drink or both. The driver put him down some yards short of the gate of Worcester, not, or not only, to disoblige but to avoid being inexorably committed by the city's one-way system to driving the two or three miles to Wolvercote before being permitted to turn right.

They were soon entering the north end of Turl Street and joining a line of traffic that moved forward a few seconds at a time. There were still forty or fifty yards between it and Jake's destination, the front gate of Comyns College, when the driver stuck his head out of his window and peered forward.

"Trouble there," he said.

"What is it?" asked Jake.

"Picket or demo or whatever you like to call it."

"Outside Comyns?"

"Right. Better if I drop you here."

"What's going on?"

"Some crowd." The driver pulled up. "Better if I drop you here. Forty."

Puzzled and annoyed, wishing he knew how to insist, Jake paid and got out. He approached cautiously, able to make out nothing at first for vehicles and passers-by and the slight curvature of the street, then caught glimpses of dull blue and straw colour and black and white. Peering through his bifocals from a few paces nearer he made out the blue and straw colour as belonging respectively to the clothes and hair of girls resembling the one in the taxi, who as he was soon to see might indeed have doubled back after being dropped round the corner. The black and white belonged to placards, one of which was turned in his direction for a second: it said Piss Off Comyns Pigs.

Jake knew where he was at once without liking it there. Before he could think further there was rapid movement ahead of him, a scuffle as somebody tried to enter or leave. At a brisk pace but without hurry, Jake crossed the momentarily clear road with the intention of recrossing it when opposite the gate, thus striking from an unexpected angle while attention was still diverted. This turned out to be a bad idea. With the sound and a touch of the speed of a smallish aeroplane, a motor-cycle, headlight glaring, rider got up like a riot policeman, seemed to be coming straight at him down the street, illegally too he fancied. As he hesitated, the girls round the gate, their erstwhile victim dispatched or escaped, all turned and saw him, seventeen or eighteen of them, blonde and wearing blue. Shouts arose.

"Admit women as undergraduates 1 "

"End medieval discrimination!"

"Down with élitist chauvinism!"

"I know that bugger!"

"Fall into line with other colleges!"

"Richardson! Bloody Richardson!"

"Wanker!"

"Wanker Richardson!"

Jake lost his head, though short of running away at once and creeping back after nightfall there wasn't a lot he could have done. With his suitcase held up in front of him he charged, to be easily halted by three or four muscular female arms. The uproar continued but in a changed form, that of cries of simulated passion or ecstasy, some involving low terms. Instead of the blows he had foreseen, kisses descended, breasts were rubbed against him and his crotch was grabbed at. There was a great deal of warmth and flesh and deep breathing and some of the time he could see no more than an inch or two: My Body Is Mine But I Share, he read at close quarters, holding his glasses on with his left hand and his case with his right. He felt frightened, not of any physical harm or even of graver embarrassment, but of losing control in some unimagined way. There seemed no reason why this jollification should ever stop, but after what felt like an agreed period, probably no more than fifteen or twenty seconds, he found himself released, stumbling over the wicket in some distress of mind but no worse off physically than for a couple of smart tweaks of the hampton.

The head porter Ernie, as fat and yet as pale as ever, stood in his habitual place at the entrance of his lodge. He gave Jake a savage wink that involved the whole of one side of his face and everything but the eye itself on the other.

"Nice little lot of young gentlewomen come up to our university these days, eh sir?"

"Wonderful." Jake put down his suitcase and straightened his tie and smoothed his hair.

"No problem to you though, I'll be banned." Bound was what most men would have said but this one came from Oxfordshire or somewhere.

"I don't quite see why you...." Oh Christ, he had forgotten again.

The porter chuckled threateningly and wagged a forefinger. "Nay nay, Mr Richardson, you know. what I'm talking abate. Plenty of people remember the way you used to weigh the girls, I can tell you. A ruddy uncraned king you were. You fancied something—pay! you got it. And I bet you still know how to mark "em dane."

The lodge entrance was only wide enough for one person, which was why it was Ernie's habitual place. He would vacate it at once on the approach of the Master, the Dean, some senior Fellows and luminaries like the Regius Professor of Latin, who happened to be a Comyns don, but almost anyone else could safely count on a minute or two of enforced conversation. Jake said rather slackly,

"We're all of us getting on, Ernie, you know."

"A itch! Don't remind me sir—we are indeed. And hay!"

Ernie still showed no sign of moving yet but just then the buzzer on the telephone switchboard sounded and with a grunt of something close to apology he turned on his axis, which showed a marked declination, like the Earth's, and creaked off towards the inner lodge. From behind the glass partition of this he was soon to be heard confidently declaring that someone was not in college, nor likely to be for an immeasurable time. All porters are the same porter, thought Jake as often before. By now he was at his pigeon-hole in quest of mail, driven chiefly by habit, not expecting that much or any would have arrived since his fair-sized pick-up on Saturday. But some had: the Historical Society's programme for the term, a publisher's catalogue and an oddly shaped package addressed in large light-green characters. The first two he threw away on the spot, the package he shoved unopened into his mackintosh pocket, for Ernie could bar his exit in a few strident strides. He picked up his case.

It was a hopelessly established tradition that Ernie should be licensed to chaff him about his amatory career, and in some senses a justified one. They were the same age; they had been

acquainted for over forty years, since Jake's arrival at Comyns as an undergraduate to find Ernie already employed as a servant in Hall and on staircases; elevation to junior porter had come just when Jake, first marriage about to collapse, was starting out on his most ambitious round of sexual activity since youth, using his college rooms to pursue parts of it too, discreetly enough to escape notice in every quarter that mattered but of course not in the lodge, by a larger tradition the clearinghouse of all internal gossip. Another bond between the two men was the similarity of their careers in the war, Jake rising in a rifle regiment to command one of its companies in France and Germany in 1944-5, Ernie becoming a warrant-officer of light infantry and picking up a decoration after Anzio. At his times of gloom, which were frequent, the ex-sergeant-major would use barrack-room catch phrases to describe his wonder at what the world was coming to. Jake, who was feeling a bit cross, united these two themes now in a mumbled monologue as he set off across the front quad.

"Assit, lad, give her the old one-two. Take your bloody finger eight and get stuck in. Lovely bit of crackling. Shit-hot slice of kifer. Go on Joe, your mother won't know, are you a man or a mace? There you are old boy, take a good look round, and if you find anything you fancy I'll buy it for you. You've seen the mighty piston-strokes of the giants of the CPR, with the driving force of a thousand horse so you know what pistons are, or you think you do. Better than pork. 'I am' the vicar. With his bloody great kidney-wiper and balls the size of three, and half a yard of...."

At this stage Jake was moving towards the arch communicating with the further quad where his rooms were and was passing the gift shop in the cloisters by the chapel. This popular source of revenue offered for sale all manner of authentic stuff, tea-sets with the Comyns coat of arms on them just like the Master drank his own tea out of, Comyns beer-tankards made from genuine English pewter, Comyns paperweights, Comyns corkscrew-cum-bottle-openers, not Comyns neckties on account of some stuffed shirt had put a no on that one but Comyns head-scarves and Comyns handkerchiefs and all kinds of Comyns postal cards showing the insides of some of the buildings, including the chapel, and different parts of the campus, and then there was this extremely interesting historical one of some document in old-fashioned writing supposed to be written by was it Edward II? A number of tourists were clustered round the doorway of the shop. As Jake drew level they all looked at him, very much as the girls outside the gate had done. This time there was a short pause before the shouting started, but it started.

"Da geht ja einer!"

"En v"là un!"

"Ach, man, daar gaan een!"

"Och dar har vi en!"

"Hey, there's one of them!"

"Ha, asoko nimo iruyo!"

They began to move towards him in twos and threes, slowly at first, the men unslinging their cameras with grim professionalism, the women pleased, all agog. Jake quickened up, got to the arch, in fact more of a short tunnel under the first floor of the library, and ran like hell through it and at an angle across the lawn of the quad beyond. Behind him he heard a babel of voices, more literally such than most and gaining added force from the echo-chamber properties of the tunnel. By the time he reached the shelter of his staircase the leaders were almost upon him, but before they could actually bring him down he was safe behind his oak, that outer door with no outer handle. The windows of his sitting room looked directly on to the quad. Through them he could see his pursuers walking or standing disconsolately about, shrugging their shoulders and shaking their heads, reslinging their cameras. All right, he thought.

He switched on his standard-lamp and moved it and a padded chair as far forward as he could, took a bottle out of the cupboard and poured a glass of what was semi-sweet sherry, not port—all one to them though. His academic cap lay where he had put it after Saturday's collection; in an instant he was wearing it, sitting in the chair, holding the glass up to the light. A muffled cheer sounded from outside and the cameras licked and fizzed once and again, one lot, then another. He gave them a simulated in-the-act-of-drinking pose, a here's-to-you pose and a glass-out-of-sight pose for the religiously scrupulous. Then he switched off the light to signal the end of the show and acknowledged the grateful smiles, waves and thumbs-up.

"No, not at all, fuck 'you,'" he said. "Fuck you very much, ladies and gents, fucks a million. And a fisherman's fart to all at home."

He had poured the untasted sherry back into the bottle, which was only there for visitors, and was going to hang up his raincoat when he noticed a bulge in the pocket—the thing he had collected at the lodge. He felt interest, curiosity, a nice change for one given to knowing all too well and at first sight whatever the post might have brought him. The outer cover, reinforced with sticky tape, was resistant. When at last he got it off he had come to a roughly cylindrical object wrapped in many thicknesses of purple lavatory-paper. After unwinding these he found himself holding an imitation phallus made out of some plastic material or other with the words Try This One, Wanker! written on it in the same large green letters as the outside. Moving faster than he had done for some years Jake locked the object up in his desk, then looked briefly and without result at the wrapper, went not at all fast to his armchair by the empty fireplace, sat down and put his hand across his mouth and sighed. All he needed now was a visit from the madwoman, dropping in on her way to catch Harry or June as they came off shift at British Leyland, or more likely find them on strike.

11—Academic Study

Jake didn't know how long he sat on in the armchair. He roused himself at the sound of a light step on the stone flags of the corridor outside. Anyone coming to visit him would clear off without further ado at the sight of the shut outer door, a convention that had stood him in unimprovable stead in the days Ernie had referred to but not wanted at the moment. He hurried to open that door, looked out and saw the figure of a girl retreating.

"Miss Calvert?"

She turned back. "I'm sorry, I thought...."

"No, my fault. The door must have...." He found he had started to suggest that half a hundredweight of forest giant had swung through something like a hundred and fifty degrees at a puff of wind, and changed tack. "I had to shut it to keep some tourists out."

"Tourists? Out?"

"Yes, they chased me from the gift shop. They wanted to photograph me. I mean not me in particular, just a don. Any don. An Oxford don. So I put my square on and let them. Photograph me, I mean. Might as well. Do sit down, Miss Calvert. Now I'll just find your essay—your collection paper."

They had moved into the sitting room, where his suitcase, containing Miss Calvert's collection paper and everybody else's collection paper and much else besides, stood on the otherwise empty dining table. He went over and put his hands on the corners of the case. Should he open it in here or take it through the communicating door into his bedroom and open it in there? The first would be quicker if the scripts were at or near the top, as he was almost certain they were. Or rather the first would be quicker wherever they were, only if they weren't near the top he would have to unpack a lot of his belongings on to the table and then at some stage put them back again before finally, unpacking in the bedroom. How certain was he that the scripts were near the top? Had he perhaps put them in first to make sure of not leaving them out? Realising that he must have been standing there with his back to the girl for close on half a minute, he unclicked the catches of the case and at the same instant became almost certain he had indeed put the scripts in first. Then he had better reclick the catches and do the necessary unpacking in the bedroom after all. But one of the catches, the left-hand one, was hard to fasten securely, always had been. Would the other one stand the strain if he carried the case by its handle in the normal way?—he didn't want his belongings all over the floor. So should he try to carry it held horizontally out in front of him? He could. Then he must. Quick. Now. He wriggled his forearms underneath the bugger and, no doubt looking rather like a man who risks his life to remove a bomb from a place of public resort, took himself and burden off at top speed. Thank Christ the communicating door wasn't latched.

The scripts were on top, as he could have seen earlier with little trouble. Miss Calvert's wasn't among them. Yes it was. There was something worrying about it but he took it straight back into the sitting room, where Miss Calvert had failed to sit as requested. Although she had been his pupil. for two terms he had never properly looked at her before. Now he did. He saw that her eyes were darker than most fair-complexioned girls" and that her jaw was firm, not much more than his original vague impression of generic blue-clad blondeness; he certainly made no progress in estimating whether she could be, should be, surely must be considered attractive or not. This failure wasn't the result of loss of interest, in the way that morbid failure of appetite for food might be expected to impair the palate: he had had no trouble over Professor Trefusis. That was because the comely scientist was in her middle thirties, well above the decisive age-limit. No, it wasn't an age-limit in the usual sense, because the ones just below it were getting older all the time. The whole thing was a matter of date, of year of birth : 1950 would be about right. So when he was seventy he wouldn't be able to tell whether any female under thirty-seven was attractive or not. A curious world that would be.

Enough. He tried to bring himself round. "Ah. Of course. Miss Calvert."

"Yes, Mr Richardson?"

The sound of his name reminded him of the last time he had heard it uttered by a female, not long ago and not far from here. Someone in the picket had known it, had recognised him, and he was an obscure person, never on TV or in the papers, in no sense an Oxford character, more or less of a stranger even to many undergraduates of his own college, one who taught a subject neither soft nor modish nor remunerative. Was it this girl who had identified him? And of course what had bothered him about her script was that it was written in green ink, like the words on the object he had locked up in his desk. He glanced at the script, saw immediately that the respective hands were quite different and even the ink was a bit different, then looked wordlessly at the girl.

"Are you all right?" she said, taking a short pace towards him.

The movement brought to mind what he must have noticed before, how slim she was, her middle hard looking and yet flexible, more like a thick electric cable than any thin living creature. He had embraced slim girls in his time and could remember consistently finding them more substantial then than the sight of them suggested. Perhaps fellows found the same thing today. "Oh—yes," he said. "Yes, thanks. Do sit down. Been rather a hectic day one way and another. Here we are."

He pushed the padded chair back to its usual place. It wasn't very comfortable and it certainly looked nasty but it was the second-best in the room to the battered old dining-chair at his desk, its leather scuffed by generations of academic bums. Everything else was wine- or ink-stained, fire- or water-damaged, extruding springs, possessed of legs or arms that fell off all the time, impossible to open, impossible to close and repulsive. For years lie had lived here most of the week, most weeks, not only in term-time, and without meeting Brenda's standards the place had been quite decent. Since then, by ruse, hard bargaining and straightforward theft-and-substitution the Domestic Bursar had plundered it into the ground. Well, not easy to complain when you spent no more than a tenth of the year in it.

"I hope you had a pleasant vacation?"

"Yes thank you."

"Settling down all right this term?"

"Yes."

"Good." He picked up a lecture-list. "Now I presume you went to Sir Clarence Frankis yesterday and will continue to do so."

"I didn't actually."

"Why not?"

"Well, there's a lot to do, you know, and a lot to get through, and it isn't in my special subject, Minoan, and you said yourself it would be more detailed than I needed." For some reason she had a deep voice.

"Yes. I did. But, er .... Minoan .... 'civilisation' is fairly interesting, and Sir Clarence is probably the most—er, rather good. It's not really a question of need, not totally. You ought to go. Sorry, I mean try to go whenever you can. No difficulty with the others? Right. Now your collection paper, Miss Calvert. I don't quite know what to say to you about it."

But he quite knew what he wanted to say to her about it and related matters. One, see if you can't work out some way of getting yourself just a bit ashamed and scared of not wanting to know anything about anything or to be any good at anything. Two, if that fails, at least try to spell a bit and write legibly and write a sentence now and then—you can forget, or go on never having heard, about punctuation. Three, when you see a word you recognise in a question, like Greek or Tyre or Malta, fight against trying to put down everything remotely connected with it that you may have—oh stuff it. And four, go away and leave your place at St Hugh's to someone who might conceivably—oh stuff it.

Jake didn't say any of this because he wanted Miss Calvert's benevolent neutrality at least in the coming struggle for power at his Wednesday lectures, where that little bastard from Teddy Hall seemed about to escalate his campaign of harassment into a direct bid to seize the lectern. So he said as gently as he thought he could,

"Your handwriting. You do realise, don't you, that we're allowed to ignore anything we can't read or else have it typed up and make you pay the typist?"

"Why could a typist read it if you couldn't?"

Once, he might have been able to tell if this was defiance or ingenuous inquiry. Now, he couldn't or couldn't be bothered.

"Because the typist would have you there with your script reading out to her what you'd written. With incidentally an examiner looking over your shoulder to see you didn't correct anything or put new bits in."

"Her? Why not him? Why shouldn't a typist be a man?" Oh for..... "No reason at all. It's just that in fact the typists in this case are as far as I know all women."

"I didn't know that. And I'm sorry, I didn't understand about the typing."

"That's all right. You do now. Don't forget either that I know your writing pretty well by this time, but it won't always be me reading it. Now your spelling. I'm quite tolerant about that," because a policy of being quite intolerant would multiply the failure rate by something like ten, which would never do, "but the same thing applies. I know some of these names are difficult; even so, I think it might pay you for 'instance' to remember that Mediterranean is spelt with one T and two Rs and not the other way round. Especially," he went on, striving not to shake from head to foot with rage and contempt as he spoke and summoning to his aid the thought that in the Oxford of the '70s plenty of his colleagues would share Miss Calvert's difficulty, "since it appears in the actual title of the subject and is very likely to come in the wording of some of the questions—four times on this paper, in fact." Was she listening? All right, call it the fucking Med! was what he wanted to shout, but for-bore. "I've put a wavy line under some of the other examples.

"In general, you clearly have a concentration problem," are an idle bitch, "and I was wondering whether there was anything in your personal life that..... I'm not asking you to tell me about it but you could mention it to your Moral Tutor. Or if you like I could—"

"No it's all right thanks. There isn't anything really. Except the point."

"What point?"

"The point of going on."

"With the subject."

"Well....

"With Oxford?"

"All sorts of things really."

Jake said in his firmest tone, "I think most people feel like that from time to time. One just has to hang on and have patience and hope it'll put itself right." He couldn't remember now why he had started to ask her; habit, something to say, show of concern to assuage possibly wounded feelings. Yes, habit, a carry-over from the days when he might have gone on to suggest discussing her problems under more informal conditions. Oh well. "Now you answered only two questions but I'm going to give you a beta-double-minus all the same," like a bloody fool. You must try for three next time. Now which of the other questions would you have tried if you'd had longer?"

Muttering to herself, Miss Calvert studied the paper for a space. At last she said, "I think "Culture is the most profitable export." Discuss with reference—"

"Oh yes. Well, suppose you take that as your subject for next week." This favourite tactic not only gratified his perennial need, strangely exacerbated today, to avoid having to think up essay subjects whenever remotely possible, it also relieved him, having just marked several exam answers on the topic, from the slightest mental exertion about it till next week came, if then. He tried to turn his complacent grin into a smile of friendly dismissal, but before the process was finished felt his face stiffen at the tone of the girl's next remark.

"Mr Richardson .... 'you' know that article of yours in JPCH you asked us to look at? On Ionian trade-routes?"

"Yes?"

"Well, the copy in the Bodleian's all .... well, people have been writing things on it."

"Writing things? What sort of things?"

"Like graffiti."

"Really."

"I sort of thought you ought to know."

Malice or goodwill? Those two should on the face of it be no trouble to tell apart, but not much thought was necessary to recall that in practice they mixed as readily and in as widely-varying proportions as coffee and milk, no sugar, no third element, needed. But then what of it? He would look in at the library on the way to or from his lecture the next morning; for now, he thanked Miss Calvert, gave her her script back and sent her off, noticing at the last moment that she bore a handbag like a miniature pack-saddle, all flaps and buckles. He watched out of the window to see if she tossed the script over her shoulder as she left, but she held on to it at least until after she had vanished into the tunnel. Her walk showed that their interview had entirely left her mind.

12—I Have Heard of Your Paintings Too

Jake stood at the window in thought, though not of any very purposeful description, for a couple of minutes. It took him as long to make quite sure that the locked drawer of his desk was indeed locked, secured, made fast, proof against anything short of another key or a jemmy. Then he collected himself and went into the bedroom to unpack. It was small and dark but dry and not particularly draughty, and had in it the only decent object in the set, the bed that filled about a third of it, his own property from long ago and as such safe from the Domestic Bursar's depredations. By the time he had finished in here and glanced through his notes for the next day, the chapel clock, the nearest among innumerable others, was striking six. He slung his gown over his shoulder and sauntered across the grass, looking about at the buildings, which had once been attributed to Nicholas Hawksmoor; recent research, after the fashion of a lot of recent research, had disproved this without producing any certain reattribution. Never mind: they were pleasing to the eye for two sufficient reasons—someone had put them up well before 1914, and no one, out of apathy, lack of money, instinctive conservatism or sometimes even perhaps deficiency of bad taste, had laid a hand on their exterior since except to clean them. Until about a quarter of a century back, Jake had had no architectural sense that he knew of but, like every other city-dweller in the land with eyesight good enough to get about unaided, he had acquired one since all right, had one doled out to him willy-bloody-nilly. So it was no great wonder that he halted and looked about all over again before entering the staircase in the far corner.

Here, on the first floor, there lived an English don called Damon Lancewood, like Ernie in being an almost exact contemporary of Jake's but unlike him in an incalculable number of ways. One of the fewer ways in which he was unlike Jake has already been mentioned: he lived where Jake only popped in and out. Lancewood belonged to the lonely and diminishing few who still treated college as home. It was true that he had a cottage near Dry Sandford and also true, while less well known, that he was joined there most week-ends by the owner of a small business in Abingdon, a man of fifty or so to whom he had been attached for the past twenty-two years.

Jake knocked at the door, which had a handsome brass fingerplate and other furniture on it, and obeyed the summons to come in. He saw that Lancewood had somebody with him and spoke up at once.

"I'm sorry Damon, I didn't realise you were—"

"No no no, my dear Jake, I was expecting you. I'd like you to meet a colleague of mine...."

Introductions were made. Jake failed to gather or shortly forgot the Christian name and college of the visitor, a tall longhaired sod in his thirties, but caught the surname-Smith. Lancewood, himself tall but with neatly cut white hair and a bearing and manner of dress that suggested a retired general rather than a don, turned his blank-looking gaze on Jake.

"I think you could do with a glass of sherry."

"I think so too. Thank you."

Quite possibly it was Jake's sherry: he brought Lancewood a bottle now and then, a much nicer arrangement for everyone than returning hospitality in his own place. It came in a solid bit of glass that went with the way the room was fitted up, which in turn reflected its occupant's military style: nothing overtly martial or imperial but suggestive of bungalow here, club there, mess somewhere else, the many pictures showing horses, dogs, an occasional parrot or monkey, what could have been a troopship, what could have been a cantonment, portraits of dark-skinned persons no one had the authority to say were not sometime servants. They even included three or four watercolours of aggressively English scenes given that niggling, almost effeminate treatment characteristic of men of action.

"Thank God," said Jake, sipping. "I've just been closeted with a female pupil."

Lancewood cocked his head. "Was that such an ordeal for you?" This question Ernie would have understood perfectly, though his phrasing of it would have been quite different.

"You don't know her." Jake was beginning to feel like an inefficient impostor, constantly putting his foot through his cover. "Attractive enough, I ..."—no, not suppose—"grant you, but—well, you know the sort. A kind of celestial indifference to being seen to be, oh, lazy, stupid, ignorant, illiterate, anything you please."

"Do you find the women worse than the men in that way?" asked Smith in an expressive adenoidal voice.

"I hadn't really thought about it," said Jake, who if he had been strictly truthful would have gone on to say that now he had had a second and a half to think about it of course he bloody did.

"Well I bloody do," said Smith. "As a matter of fact we were on that very point when you turned up. Naturally Damon was taking the opposite view. He seems to have some sort of thing about women."

"Indeed I have. Which reminds me of one of my favourite ones. How's my darling Brenda?"

"Fighting fit," said Jake. And hay, he added silently.

"John had a rotten cold with all this vile weather but he's fine again now."

This was of course the Abingdon chap. "Good, give him my love," said Jake, registering the adroit passing of the message that Smith knew about that. He (Jake) surmised that that sort of adroitness came in jolly handy for people like Lancewood, must be well worth the trouble of acquiring.

Lighting a French cigarette, Smith pursued his point. "I mean, the levels to which they'll sink. And go on sinking because they stay the same and the problem stays the same, which is: a whole literature, six hundred years" worth, and virtually all of it written by male chauvinists. So, Wordsworth was no good because he abandoned Annette Vallon, no good as a poet that is, the Brontes and George Eliot went over to the enemy by adopting male pseudonyms so they were no good, Doll Tearsheet is the heroine of 'Henry IV', Part 2 at least, and of course the real—"

Lancewood gave a guttural sigh. "Have a heart, she was joking."

"Not this one," said Smith firmly. "The one who told her might have been, but not this one."

"Well then somebody was or, or might have been. You really do—"

"Damon, it's nothing in 'them,' it's forced on them. The men would probably be just as bad if you could find a way of making them think of themselves as men all the time, if such a way were conceivable." Smith caught sight of Jake. "I say, this must be rather—"

"Go on, I want to hear."

"Well—the bright ones can't help seeing that, right, Sapho...."

"Who was untypical?" said Lancewood.

"And who's mostly folk-lore anyway. Then you really come to, as far as they're concerned, the Matchless Orinda. Sorry, Katherine Philips, born in the same year as Dryden, died young, not as young as Shelley though, for instance, anyway she's quite good. Of course she is. What would you? Having taken the precaution of not being born with the digits one nine in front of her decade, but that's a..... Anyway, after her, let's stick to poetry for the moment, you get the Countess of Winchilsea, even more of a household name, and then you sit around for a couple of centuries waiting for Christina Rossetti, who's quite good, and that's that. If no female had ever emerged they'd have been able to put it down to male oppression but Katherine spoiled all that. Back in the middle of the seventeenth century she showed it was 'possible'. As I say, it works down from the top, so that the ones who don't know what the seventeenth century was feel it as much as the others, well, insofar as they can, hence collective inferiority feelings, hence collective aggression. Admittedly with the novel it's not quite such a—"

"All this 'they' talk." Lancewood gestured with the decanter at Jake, who was all right as he was. then poured sherry for Smith and himself. "The ones and the others. From the way you go on, most people would say you were the one with the thing about women."

"Let's just nail that one right away. My relations with them, with women that is, have been and are normal to an unparalleled, even preternatural degree. Three-point-seven premarital affairs, the precise average, married at twenty-five-point-whatever-it-is, lived happily ever after, or since. Perhaps that's not so normal:

"It's probably a bit early to tell," said Jake. "What does your wife think about poetry?"

"She's a biologist," said Smith. He seemed puzzled at the question.

"Curious you should mention centuries," said Lancewood. "One of 'them', which you must admit sounds like something quite different, brought me a new interpretation of 'Hamlet' yesterday. Now this, I want you to understand, is a thoroughly sweet, good-natured, charming little girl, no aggression in the wide world. As to brightness, well you shall hear. Hamlet was a woman." He gave them both his blank look.

Smith gave a great groan but said nothing.

"Even I know that's not very new," said Jake. "Didn't Sarah Bernhardt play him, or her?"

"Indeed she did, and I'd said as much before I realised that of course my little girl would never have heard of her. Quite senseless to expect it. Cruel in a way. Well what could I do, great actress of the nineteenth century, quite natural she should want to play one of the greatest parts, different approach in those days, all that, but I indent have bothered because I'd lost her, as she would have expressed herself, at the nineteenth century. Now she'd clearly heard of it, she even knew it was something to do with a tract of time but all the same there was more to it than that, just as the Age of Johnson or the Nineties, say, don't refer merely to a pair of dates. To her it was, the nineteenth century I mean was, not exactly when old people were young because there can be no such period, but awful and squalid and creepy, with all sorts of things going on—she could easily have come across figures like Dracula and Frankenstein and Jack the Ripper and Dr Arnold and realised they were nineteenth century. Well, the look she gave me, you should have seen it." Lancewood half turned his face away, narrowed his eyes and peered out of their corners. "Suspicion and morbid curiosity and a hint of distaste."

"If you're doing it properly it was more like ungovernable lust," said Smith to Jake's agreement.

"In that case I'm not. She was wondering what I used to get up to with Sarah Bernhardt, whom I must have known at least or why bring her up? Actually quite funny it should have been the great Sarah, in view of her reputed..... I think if one actually challenged my little girl up to the hilt, as it were, she'd say that the years beginning with nineteen were in the nineteenth century up to about 1950, after which it became the twentieth. That would cover the years of birth of even her most senior contemporaries. One understands very well. All these references to people being dragged kicking and screaming into the twentieth century when it's agreed that that's the number of the century we're in, it must be most frightfully confusing. One does sympathise.

"Well. Her .... 'her' case was roughly that since Hamlet is far too nice and intelligent to be a man, he must be a woman because there's nothing else for him to be. I was ready to come back smartly with what about the way he treats Ophelia, male chauvinism if there ever was such a thing, but she'd thought of that—that was how all the men went on in those days, still do really, and it would have been suspicious if she, Hamlet, had behaved differently. What about old Hamlet and Gertrude?—you'd have expected them to notice. Old Hamlet had noticed, but he needed an heir, so he got Polonius to rig things, which gave Polonius the leverage he needed to be kept on at court when all he was fit for was talking balls. I liked that, quite as good as any other explanation I've come across if you think that's what he did talk. Gertrude hadn't noticed because women weren't allowed to bring up their own children then, any more than they are now really. I must say I thought that part was a little weak. Horatio guessed, naturally, but he couldn't say anything. And what did I suppose it was that had driven Ophelia mad? Obviously a sexual shock, eh?

"I shouldn't be going on like this because it'll only feed your prejudices, but, well, I said what about the whole of the play, there's nothing in it that suggests that things are any different from what they seem. She didn't know about that, she said; 'she thought' Hamlet was a woman."

"I hope you told her she needed weightier authority than that," said Smith. "A Radio 1 disc-jockey thinks Hamlet was a woman. An unemployed school-leaver in Wapping thinks Hamlet was a woman. A psychiatric social worker—"

"That's just sneering, my boy. What she also 'thought', in a different sense, was that Hamlet was a woman in some other .... realer sphere than the play or Shakespeare's sources or anything that might historically have taken place at Elsinore or any other actual spot. Some third domain beyond fiction and fact. That's the terrifying thing."

At the end of a short silence Smith said, "I used to get that from one of my three-point-seven as it might be after films. How did they get on when they started having kids in that place? Did she come back to him in the end? Not might, assuming for fun and for the moment that it's life we're talking about. No—did."

"Not too dull for you I hope, Jake?"

"It's exactly what they're like. I didn't know anybody else had realised, it's never been said, not in my hearing anyway. Absolutely hit it off to a T. When you get past all the poise and the knowingness and the intimacy there's a tiny alien particle that doesn't understand." It came to Jake that he had been speaking with some warmth and he altered his tone. "You'll have to bear with a very ancient historian who spends most of his time coping with drop-outs from Kettering Catering College. Well, what a rarity, listening to two dons discussing their subject," and so on and so forth.

Not long afterwards Lancewood suggested that they should go over. Smith asked for a quick pee and was shown where. As soon as possible Jake said,

"Damon, what's a wanker?"

Lancewood hunched his shoulders with a jerk, showing that as well as being amused by the question lie wasn't totally surprised by it. Again in a way uncharacteristic of dons, or perhaps of the popular idea of them, he spent no time on prolegomena but went straight to what was intended.

"These days a waster, a shirker, someone who's fixed himself a soft job or an exalted position by means of an undeserved reputation on which he now coasts."

"Oh. Nothing to do with tossing off then?"

"Well, connected with it, yes, but more metaphorical than literal."

"That's a relief. Up to a point. Well. I got called it today."

"No really? By that pupil of yours?"

"No, by that picket of women's-lib women at the gate."

"Oh yes of course. It's quite clever, all that, their campaign to make people feel old and senile and clapped out and impotent—that's where the literal part of wanker comes in.!

"Clever? As a means of persuading us to admit women?"

"Certainly. I can think of several colleagues of our sort of age who'd be troubled and frightened by such treatment and inclined to do what they could to put a stop to it. Can't you?"

"I suppose so."

"Have you had anything unpleasant though the post? I gather there's been a certain amount of that."

"Yes, today I was sent a...."

Although Jake considered Lancewood one of his closest as well as oldest friends he found himself perfectly unable to tell him what he had been sent that day. Luckily Smith came back just then and the three set off. In the quad a fine drizzle was falling, so fine that it hardly had the weight to fall and wandered almost horizontally. The zenith was a weak grey but the sun showed for a moment or two. Lancewood mentioned that the question had come up of the admission of women to men's colleges.

"Oh yes, you're one of the last-ditch trio here, aren't you?" said Smith. "Comyns, Merton and Oriel. Rather grand in a way."

"How long have you been letting them in at your place?" asked Jake.

"Oh, we haven't let them 'in,' what do you take us for? At the end of "75 we published a Declaration of Intent that declared our intent to do something or other about it some time, and since then we've been consulting away like mad, pretty well without stopping, the JCR, the porters and the rest of the staff, the other colleges in our awards group, and the women's colleges of course, bloody funny that, and it all seems to have cooled off. We might just ride it out until the next thing turns up, World War III or whatever it might be. I often think my namesake in Rhodesia could have done with a touch of the Oxford spirit."

"What's bloody funny about the women's colleges?"

"What? Oh, just our Governing Body is about as solidly against the idea as any, nearly all for Victorian anti-feminist reasons in effect, and there they are or were in a secret alliance with the crowd who want to block it for Victorian feminist reasons. Like something out of who, Damon, C. P. Snow?"

"Or Shaw. Jake," said Lancewood rather patiently, "letting women into the men's colleges will damage the women's colleges for ten or twenty years, perhaps longer, because they'll only get the men and the women the men's colleges don't want. 'Jake,' because no man or woman is going to go to St Anne's when he or she could go to Balliol."

"I'm sorry, I don't seem to have been keeping up with things."

"It's tough," said Smith, evidently alluding to the likely state of the women's colleges, "but overall the case in favour is unanswerable."

"I thought you didn't care for women undergraduates, at least in your own subject," said Jake.

"As they stand I don't." Smith seemed slightly cross. "That's the whole point. Living and working among the men is bound to improve them. It's the only way they'll ever forget they're women and start behaving like, I know, not students, but—"

"You make them all sound the same," said Lancewood, seeming slightly cross himself. "Anyway, it'll mean the end of this."

This must have been in the first place the Senior Common Room, where they had just arrived. Considerable parts of the building that embodied it dated from the fifteenth century; the room itself had been radically reconstructed in the 1870s under the influence of a Master of advanced artistic taste, and was well known to those interested in such matters for its carved pillars, multi-coloured floor tiles, authentic Morris wallpaper and pair of stained-glass windows depicting respectively The Progress of Art and The Progress of Science. There were also some paintings from that period, a Burne-Jones, two Poynters, a Calderon, a Simeon Solomon and others and, from an earlier one, a Romney of an otherwise unnoted Fellow of the college; recent research had been at that too, though so far without managing to dislodge the reputed artist. Jake had liked the room and its furniture on sight in 1936, when his tutor had invited him up to dessert, and still did, despite certain changes he could not now have defined.

Its occupants for the moment were rather less to his taste, starting with Roger Dollymore, the Senior Tutor, and an elderly chemist called Wynn-Williams. Jake went over to them not because he much wanted to but to give Smith and Lancewood, whom he hoped to sit with in Hall, a rest from him meanwhile. Little enough was required of him by the other two, who seemed quite happy, or not significantly more unhappy than might have been expected, telling each other about the plays they had seen in London during the vacation. Jake thought briefly how he hated plays, then tried to remember how each of them stood on the women-in-or-out thing. He knew how they ought to stand if they had any sense; all he could remember about Wynn-Williams's wife was that she was impossible, but he knew Naomi Dollymore fairly well, or had done in the days when there were dinner-parties, and could have gone on for quite a long time without repeating himself about her readiness to share most details of her experience, recent or remote, with whoever she might be talking to, not in Alcestis pseudo-sequential, fool's-anecdote style but by as free a process of association as you could hope to come across. So both husbands ought to be ready to lay down their lives for the status quo: the feminisation of college, once begun, would lead irresistibly to the taking-over of common-room and High-Table life, of college life, by the wives. Just imagine the Way....

"What?" said Jake. "I'm sorry?"

"I said," said Dollymore in his sheep's voice, the only one he had, "where are you going."

"What? Well at the moment I...."

"Away. Abroad." Wynn-Williams might have been a Shakespearean king or other hero encouraging his followers into the saddle but of course he wasn't really, he just sounded like an old-style actor. "We go to Venice at the end of June."

"Naomi and I have rather fallen out of love with Venice," said Dollymore. His interest in Jake's holiday plans had perhaps never been deep. "So commercialised and full of Americans. That is the perennial struggle, to find a place that isn't. Naomi and I have been moving on almost every year for .... years. We've been driven out of one Greek island after another. It seems Nisiros is still comparatively unspoiled." After a long pause he went on at a reduced speed, "Though I'm sure it's very different nowadays from .... from the time when..."

Wynn-Williams came in quite quickly. "The time when Jake's .... Jake's...."

"Jake's pals from the .... the..."

"From the long-ago were...."

"There. Were there."

"Were there, yes."

The two laughed in simple pleasure at having jointly recollected Jake's subject and succeeded in bringing that fact to utterance. He laughed too. It was at any rate nicer over here than it could possibly have been in the larger group by The Progress of Art. They were all young, under about thirty-five anyway: the philosopher who was co-editor of a London weekly paper, the political scientist who ran a current-affairs programme on TV, the historian of drama who put on plays full of naked junior members of the university torturing one another, the writer in residence with his look of eager disdain for his surroundings, somebody's guest with his look of unearned eminence—a wanker of the future, if when the future came it tolerated any judgements of worth.

"Good evening, Master," said Dollymore, and Wynn-Williams and Jake said something very similar.

They did this because the Master of Comyns, Marion Powle by name, had come up to them. He was fifty-five, a distinguished crystallographer, recent successor to a mad Graccist, serious, well liked even among the arts men: Jake quite liked him. Or didn't mind him. Not really. He opened his mouth with tongue against top teeth and held the pose for a few seconds, an effective way of calling for attention. Then he said,

"I must draw Jake aside briefly. I have to consult him about women."

The other two responded like two immensely respectful and discreet versions of Ernie, if such a thing could be imagined. Jake wondered how Don Juan would have stood up to this sort of thing. He also wondered whether recent research might not have uncovered a historical prototype of that character and found him to have been a timid, anxious recluse like Isaac Newton, ending up married to his cook.

"And the desirability of admitting them to this college," added the Master.

This time the two sighed noisily and flapped their hands, and Jake wondered what stopped them from seeing that, for good or ill, this was the most interesting matter ever likely to come their way, short of death.

"As you know, it's on tomorrow's agenda," said the Master when he and Jake had moved off.

"Yes," said Jake. Now he did. He had already known, though he had forgotten, that a College Meeting, i.e. of its Fellows, not of teachers and taught alike, was to take place the following afternoon.

"It's a bore, we agree, but we have to settle something before the end of the year. All I propose doing tomorrow is to announce a full discussion in two weeks" time and to nominate two Fellows to summarise the cases for and against just to set the ball rolling. A couple of minutes apiece, no more. I'm going to ask Roger Dollymore to put the anti point of view and I'd like you to put the pro. I thought of you partly because of your long experience and the fact that the small number of your pupils means you're not going to be personally affected either way. You won't have to say anything tomorrow except yes you'll do it, that's if you agree. I didn't want—to spring it on you."

Powle refrained from stating what another part of his grounds for asking Jake to do this job might have been, nor did he imply anything of the kind by his manner, which was entirely free from both jocoseness and its conscious avoidance. Jake agreed to serve.

"Good lad. Oh, you indent bother with any fact-grubbing, state of play in other colleges and such. I'll hand that to one of the youngsters. Yes, I think probably Whitehead. He's still a bit pleased with himself over the reception of that paper of his last year. Do him good."

Soon afterwards the members of the college and their guests went down the worn stone steps into Hall. Jake sat near the middle of the table facing the body of the room with Lancewood and Smith directly and diagonally opposite him and Dollymore beside him. Gossip started on the events leading to the premature retirement of the head of another learned foundation. Lancewood knew more than Dollymore about this and so was able to keep him almost completely quiet. Later, while host and guest conversed together, Dollymore got back by going on about rising prices in a markedly personal style, suggesting either that he was the first to have spotted the phenomenon or that the increases were being levied on him alone. Out of the idlest curiosity Jake began counting those recognisable as females on the benches before and below him, stopping before he reached ten. Bloody nice cheap trouble-free way of victualling your girl friend between pokes, he thought to himself with tremendously unwilling respect. The food and drink at High Table were excellent as usual. Over the savoury he considered whether or not to go on to dessert back in the SCR. If Lancewood hadn't had a guest there would have been no issue; as things were there was the risk of a further dose of Dollymore and/or, worse, of Wynn-Williams, fifteen minutes of whom might be thought enough to keep any man topped up. The Feisal Room it was, then.

In this chamber, adjacent to the main SCR, the Regius Professor of Latin, the Fellow and Tutor in Oriental Studies and the Principal Demonstrator of Anatomy were watching a colour-television screen on which a man with a woollen sort of mask over most of his face was using a pick-helve studded with nails to hit on the head an older man in a dark-blue uniform, or was at least feigned to be doing so. The Reader in Early Mediterranean History silently joined the audience.

About three hours later the gownsman just referred to descended the same stone steps as before but this time went out into the open. No so many years ago at this time, the right side of midnight, the place would have been alive with activity, undergraduates fighting, vomiting, illicitly playing pianos or gramophones, setting fire to the JCR, throwing bottles of brown ale at the Dean's window, wrecking the rooms of Jews or pinioning them to the lawns with croquet-hoops. So at least it seemed to Jake. Now all was quiet. What were they doing instead? Fornicating? Taking drugs? Working? Writing poetry? He had no idea and didn't want to know.

An obstruction in his ear, catarrh or wax, clicked in not quite exact time with his footsteps on the stone. It would probably get all right left to itself. He entered his staircase and then his bedroom without having had to turn on any lights on the way, a skill acquired during some barely recalled business of fuel economy or power cut. After taking his Mogadon and putting on his pyjamas he had a thought, decided to forget it and then decided there could be no harm in just making sure. He went into the sitting room and assured himself that nobody had burst or blown open his desk. Half a minute later he decided there could be no harm in just making sure, returned to the bedroom for his keys and opened the relevant drawer. The plastic phallus lay there snug as a bug in a rug, heart-warmingly undisturbed. Vowing to dispose of it the next day he turned off all the lights and settled down to sleep.

Time went by. Jake tried to remember some of the ladies who had shared this bed with him in the past and was quite successful in two or more cases, except that what he remembered was all a matter of their bracelets and their cigarette lighters, the way they sneezed or asked for a drink, where they lived and how he used to get there and they here, the time he and one of them bought an evening paper or he and another of them went into Blackwell's bookshop. For a few seconds he had lying beside him some sort of image of that fair-haired South African who had worked in the University Registry, but what there was of it went before he could pretend to himself that he was even touching it. He did no better with just a woman or with merely considering in a general way business head, Carter-face and the 'Zoom' stable: his mind kept drifting away to other things. So then there was nothing for it but to give in and have his attention turned to what had been lined up for it ever since it had happened, Brenda's convinced but unexcited statement before Rosenberg and him, somewhat amplified over whatever they (she and he Jake) had eaten at Mother Courage's, that she had had no pleasure or other benefit out of her marriage for a not very small number of years and only acquiesced in its continuance out of habit, laziness and dislike of upsets and, in particular, that she considered her husband to be at best indifferent to all women except as sexual pabulum. In fact she had put her point more shortly than that, adding that the biggest mistake of her life had been to understand her mother's maxim about men only wanting one thing as applying no further than to transactions with them outside marriage.

In the end he fell asleep, woke up about five and spent a couple of hours going over what Brenda had said and thinking about it, and then again fell asleep and dreamed he had to go on parade but couldn't find his boots, equipment, rifle or cap and didn't know the way to the parade ground.

13—Can I Take You Out to Dinner?

Not very long afterwards Jake got up and went over to the buttery for breakfast. The cafeteria system here was most efficient and in no time he had settled himself at one of the waxed oak tables with his plastic tray. Nor did it take him long to dispose of the sausages that went to coarse powder in your mouth, electric-toaster toast charred round the edges but still bread in the middle, railway butter and jam, and coffee tasting of dog fur. When he had he went back to his rooms, dictated some letters into a cheap tape-recorder and took the spool over to the College Secretary's office, where someone would eventually type its contents. As often he looked in on the Secretary's secretary, a woman of about Brenda's age called Eve Greenstreet. Years ago she had gone to bed with him for a few weeks, something which a great many members and ex-members of the university could say for themselves. When the time came for him to move over he had felt no resentment, probably wouldn't have even if he hadn't already started on another lady, but had missed and gone on missing what he clearly remembered as her liveliness and quick common sense. Since her marriage some time in the '60s (was it?) she had supposedly turned respectable, not that she had become sedate in her manner or stopped taking care of her slim dark good looks—marvellous teeth and nice way of holding herself too.

She was on the telephone when he put his head round her door but at once she frowned theatrically and beckoned him in. "Well, whoever seemed to think that seemed to think wrong, I can assure you: the Estates Bursar is the..... Yes, I can—extension 17..... Not a bit. Good-bye." After ringing off she looked wonderingly at the telephone and said, "I told the same bloody fool yesterday." Then she jumped up and came round her desk and kissed Jake, (whom she hadn't seen since before the end of the previous term. He asked after her husband and was told he was fine and she asked after Brenda.

"Fine."

"Oh? What isn't, then?"

"How do you mean?"

"Oh, come off it, love. What's she done, flown the coop with somebody?"

"Of course not."

"There's no of course about it the way you sounded." Her expression changed. "You're not ill, are you?"

"No, I'm fine. I mean really fine."

There was an awkward silence; then Eve said abruptly, "Sorry, I seem to have got off the mark a bit fast. I just thought you...."

He spoke abruptly too, without forethought. "Actually there is something. Could I talk to you about it?"

"Not now, I presume?"

"Can I take you out to dinner?"

They arranged to meet the following Tuesday at La Sorbonne off the High Street where the old Chinese place used to be. As Jake was going Eve said to him,

"Just one thing, my old Jayqueeze," and went on without pissily waiting to be asked what it was, "I'm Mrs Greenstreet now, Mr Greenstreet wife, if you get what I mean."

"I do."

"Because it would be such a shame, and so on."

He was going to trumpet something about anything like that being off the cards in a big way, but before he could thereby let out to Eve what he wanted to discuss with her a girl knocked and came in with a couple of folders, so he just declared that he thought so too and took himself off. He couldn't have stayed much longer in any case if, in order to heed the state of its copy of his JPCR article as mentioned by Miss Calvert, he was to look in at the Bodley before his lecture. With a pupil coming at twelve, he realised, there would be no time afterwards, and then there was lunch, and .... and anyway he somehow wanted to see what was in store for him as soon as he could. When he did see, he wished he hadn't been so keen. Apart from Wanker! rather tastefully executed in orange and Prussian blue and various more familiar obscenities, there were marginalia of an altogether different order. Copied from Grossman, PAHS, vol. xlvi, p.44—when he hadn't even heard of Grossman, let alone read his article. Not possibly before 900, unlikely before 800; see Nardini, MES, vol. xxx, p.524—when he knew pretty well the sort of thing Nardini would be saying and had no time for it. Refuted by Silvester, RHSF July 1969—when nobody could be expected to read everything. After a quick glance, or glare, round he ripped out the offending pages and hastened from the scene.

His lecture, delivered in a windowless room off Parks Road belonging to the Department of Criminological Endocrinology, went down like a bomb: well, he came through it with a whole skin. Even the little bastard from Teddy Hall had no very violent objection to his answer to a question about the Median legal system. When all was over for that week he walked back to Comyns through a shower of rain that stopped abruptly, like a tap being turned off, when he was a dozen yards from his staircase. "I he expected pupil turned up within half a minute, having followed in his wake from the lecture-room. He was a fat little fellow from Bradford who nevertheless showed both some curiosity about early Mediterranean history and some respect for Jake's standing in that subject, a combination so dazzlingly rare that Jake had come near to looking forward to their tutorials. Today discussion of the collection paper and of a single point from the lecture kept them going till they were interrupted by the chapel clock striking one. Still able to come occasionally that way, Jake thought to himself. He walked over to the SCR and ate some bright yellow soup with globules of oil on the top and a layer of farinaceous material on the bottom, two rectangles of ham of a greyish as well as pink complexion, a rudimentary salad and a segment of wrapped Camembert, and drank a tankard of beer because you couldn't get wine at lunch because that was easier for the staff. From halfway through the soup to the start of the Camembert, Roger Dollymore stood at his right rear and read out to him an article in 'The Economist' about the economy. After Jake had drunk his coffee, which tasted of liquorice and its own grounds more than dog fur, and glanced through the daily papers it was time to go into the Grade Room for the College Meeting. These conventions, held weekly in term, had once started at five o'clock and ended at a point which enabled the members of the college to stroll into the main SCR and drink a glass of sherry before going down to the best Hall, i.e. dinner, of the week. Now all that was changed and the thing started at two on the dot to let people bugger off as sharp as they could.

That afternoon's portion held nothing that lodged in Jake's mind after it was over except the Master's request, notified the previous evening, that he should briefly put the case for the admission of women into Comyns at the meeting to be held a fortnight on, and his saying he would. In fact the two utterances not only lodged in his mind, they weighed on it too, slightly but to a degree he couldn't put down to anything. It meant extra work, too little though to oppress even him. More likely he was not fancying the prospect of the rallying, chaffing, twitting, bantering smiles, winks, nudges and grimaces to be seen, or fancied to be seen, when he duly spoke for the ladies. There had been a touch of that this time.

He took tea in the SCR and bloody good it was as usual, one of the bits they hadn't got to yet, like the Halls: toasted bun, cucumber sandwiches and Jackson's Earl Grey. At five minutes past five he went over to his rooms, there to conduct his seminar on Lydia—the region of Asia Minor and ancient empire of that name. Doing that put him in just the right frame of mind to receive his guest for the evening at 6.3o. This was an ex-pupil, a graduate student from St John's who had been short-listed for an assistant lectureship at the University College of South Wales at Cardiff, largely no doubt on the strength of the laudatory but quite fair reference provided him by Jake. For a reason that will be seen in a moment, he had fought as hard and conscientiously as he could to clobber the chap's chances by praising him with faint damns, but in vain : integrity, curse it, had triumphed as it so often had in the past, long ago condemning him, with some assistance from laziness, to the non-attainment of a professorial chair. But in this case there was still a chance of undoing its ravages. Tonight he would tell his man that while Cardiff was a thoroughly respectable place there might be better things in store for him here in Oxford. If he stayed on and-point coming-ran or helped to run Jake's seminar for a year or so, he would be in a much stronger position to walk into Jake's readership when in due course it fell vacant. Integrity was going to demand that he made it clear to the chap that he would be warmly supported for that post whether he went to Cardiff or not, but he felt he could submit to that demand with a comparatively good grace.

When it came to it the operation was painless, though the young man gave no sign of being drawn towards or away from Cardiff. Jake took him on to dessert and gave him port; to help to seem to be giving rather than plying with he took a small glass himself. Not that plying with of various sorts and intensities wasn't raging about the two of them. Far to seek was the guest invited for his company rather than for some turn he might serve-back a candidate for a college place or a university lectureship, agree to publish a book of dolled-up learned articles, endow something, withhold support from something else-or perhaps had served: Lancewood, who might have provided an exception, hadn't been in Hall. Jake wondered what was being asked of the only woman in the room, distantly known to him as a fellow-historian with interests in medieval Scandinavia. There had been senior women guests at Comyns for years now; all things considered, among them her age and general condition, the present one was most unlikely to hurl herself diagonally across the polished walnut and snatch at his winkle; nevertheless he was put out to see her there, as if she knew something about him that he would have preferred to keep hidden.

The evening ended quite agreeably: guest thanked host and said he would think things over and let him know. Jake went to bed and, aided it might have been by the port he had drunk, slept much better than the previous night. He was up early, in good time to face a string of tutorials starting at nine, or rather 9.10. During the intervals he wrote a short note to whom it might concern that said here was a copy of the Ionian-trade routes thing for the recipient's personal use. This, together with an off-print of the article and a slip asking for 2o copies please, he took over to the Secretary's office and handed in at the place where they kept the photostat machine. Miss Calvert would probably talk around among her thick pals and the little bastard from Teddy Hall would probably whip across to the Bodley to go over the ground and hence to deduce further who must have mutilated the relevant number of JPCR and to laugh, if he ever laughed, but what of it?

Jake was between Didcot and Reading in the earliest of the three usual return Flying Dodgers (the choice was less confined than on the outward journey) when it came to him that the plastic phallus was still in his desk drawer. Unless somebody else had already taken it out, of course.

14—Sexual Act

"What exactly is it?" asked Brenda.

"It's like what we did before, only this time it's 'genital' sensate focusing, so down below is all right, in fact the whole point so to speak."

"I see. There is a thing called a feel-up, isn't there? I mean of course there is, but that is an expression, feel-up?"

"It certainly used to be. I expect it still carries on."

"Okay. Now: how is this genital what-name different from a feel-up?"

"It's a feel-up by numbers," said Jake in a sneering tone.

"Don't sound like that about it. What's by numbers? No, I see, so many minutes each, sort of like a drill."

"Exactly like a drill. They must think that takes the anxiety out of it, everything being predictable, no decisions to take."

"That seems quite sensible to me, as far as it goes."

"I don't know, perhaps it is. Well...."

"And we're allowed to have sexual intercourse but not required to."

"Yes. There goes predictability. I must have muddled it up, that part."

Jake and Brenda got up from their seats in the sitting-room at Burgess Avenue and clasped hands with an air little different from that of a couple shaking them before going off to face some minor social ordeal like boss to dinner or speech to local society. Upstairs they put the patchwork quilt on one side, she went out to the bathroom and he started undressing. At first he tried not to think of what was in store; then he decided that was silly and thought. Thinking passed quickly and imperceptibly into feeling. What feeling? Reluctance? Yes. Revulsion? No. Fear? No. Embarrassment? No. Boredom? Er, no. Dejection? Yes, but still not the right section of the thesaurus. Disfavour? Yes, but not much further forward. 'Dismay'—of a peculiar kind, one not encountered before in any of his admittedly unhabitual attempts to analyse his emotions: it was profound .... and .... unalloyed .... and .... absorbing .... and .... (Christ) .... very very mild, like so much else. Well, what did he know about that?

He finished undressing and got into bed with his back towards the door. Brenda pattered in and joined him. "Ooh ! Let's get warm first, shall we?"

"Sure."

"I've lost another five ounces. Mostly going without potatoes last night, that must be."

"Good for you."

"I am trying, you know."

"Of course you are. I said good for you."

"Will you remember the programme all right, do you think?"

"I won't have to, I've got it here."

"Oh marvellous." After a silence, Brenda said, "Well, shall we start?"

"Okay," said Jake cheerfully. "Now the first thing is five minutes each of sensate focusing, that's the non-alcoholic sort. Who's going to go first?"

"Me. Remember you're to say if I'm doing it right and what I'm not doing that you'd like me to."

"Check."

Brenda did it right rather than wrong and he couldn't think of anything she wasn't doing that he'd have liked her to, except for falling asleep, going to answer the telephone etc. Then he called time and took his turn. He put in a solid, conscientious performance that must have gone down quite well, because she evidently couldn't think of anything he wasn't doing that she'd have liked him to do.

"Right," he said at last, still cheerfully, reached for the xeroxed sheet on the bedside table and put his glasses on. "Yes—now you stimulate my nipples and breasts by stroking, tickling or gentle pinching, or the whole breast area may be gently rubbed. Off you go."

And off she went. After a couple of minutes he said,

"Let's scrub this. It says fifty per cent of males respond sexually to such stimulation. That probably means up to fifty per cent. Anyway, I must be one of the other fifty per cent. Now it's my turn or your turn. I'd better just...." He put his glasses on again. "Female breast area, here we are. Yes, you're supposed to explain to me just how you like it done."

This proved to be unnecessary. Brenda plainly liked it done how he was doing it, responded perceptibly more than last time. He was glad about that: he felt pleased, though without feeling pleasure. That was to be expected: if he had been getting pleasure out of what he was at there would be no need for him to be at it, or alternatively he would have been at it anyway without ever having heard of genital sensate focusing or been near bloody Rosenberg. But to have not the slightest expectation of any pleasure whatsoever undoubtedly eased the strain. Grating a carrot or polishing a spoon would be far more tedious if you had to keep on the alert waiting for it to "turn you on", as he had gathered it was called. Somehow, too, not talking helped. It made the whole business more serious, more like the Army. When he did say something it was out of the book.

"End of Phase I. Now with Phase II either partner can begin, so shall we swap around? It seems more...."

"If you like."

"Okay. That means I sit with my back against the head of the bed with my legs spread out and you sit between them with your back to me. Then I"—glasses—"I used gentle tickling, stroking or kneading movements in long, even, rhythmic strokes and you, well what it boils down to is you guide me and after a bit I .... yes, I conduct a gentle but persistent invasion .... and mustn't be afraid to stop for rests. That sounds pretty straightforward. Shall we go?"

The first part of Phase II was completed according to instructions. At its conclusion the partners changed their positions as follows: the woman sat with her back against the head of the bed with her legs spread out and the man faced her, put his legs on either side of her and lay back with his genital region accessible to her. After a period of stimulation, beginning with gentle tickling, stroking, pinching and scratching, the man showed signs of arousal and excitement. In due course an act of intercourse took place, in the course of which both partners achieved climax and evinced various signs of relaxation in course of time.

Afterwards the male partner lay on his side in a reposeful posture, his facial area in close proximity to the facial area of the female partner and his right upper limb partially surrounding her trunk. Well, he thought to himself, that (the taking place of the act of intercourse) ought to prove something. The question was what. That he could if he would, at any rate. What more? That there was nothing organically wrong with him. But he already had Dr Curnow's word for that.

As if she sensed that he was in a questioning frame of mind, Brenda kissed him warmly on the cheek. That was nice.

"You see?" she murmured. "All just worry and tension."

"Was it all right for you?"

"Yes." After a pause she added, "Like old times."

That was nice too, but the male partner didn't think much of it as a statement of fact, or at least of how he felt, he himself speaking personally as of then and there. What had finished a minute earlier had been pretty much like old times, physically at least and as far as he could remember—the remembering trouble having less to do with the oldness of the times than the inherent difficulty of remembering a lot about any such experiences or series of them; so at least plenty of people would say. But over the last minute, now extending itself to two or three more of the same, he could find in himself rather little, hardly enough to be worth mentioning, of the old-time mixture of peace and animation. That might be round the corner; early days yet, long way to go, walk before we can run etc.

"Would you like a cup of tea? he asked.

"Ooh, yes."

"And a slice of toast?"

"Oh 'darling,'" she said as if he had added a gold chain or something to his original offer of a diamond necklace, which was agreeably far from taking things for granted but also rather convicted him of having done bugger-all for the preceding decade. Then she added immediately, "I daren't. Guzzlers Anonymous would kill me."

"I won't tell them."

"I know, but

He tossed a coin in his mind and said sternly, "I didn't think, I shouldn't have suggested it. Of course you mustn't have toast."

"All right." She put her face under the bedclothes.

The post-coital cup of tea was very much an old-time institution, with assorted origins or purposes. It satisfied Jake's need at this stage to be up and doing instead of going on lying about; its making and fetching gave Brenda the chance for a short nap; it was a small token of his appreciation; drinking it together brought a pleasant cosiness. Or rather all these things had once been the case; at a more primeval period, the interval that ended with the laying down of cups had turned out to be just right for his thoughts to start returning whither they had started turning half an hour before. No surprise was expressed or felt when that didn't happen this afternoon, or more precisely early evening. After the tea was drunk Jake went and had a bath, as usual leaving the water for Brenda so as to save fuel. Then he dressed himself with a certain care in clean pale-pink shirt, mildly vivid tie, the Marks and Spencer suit he betted would fool anyone he had much chance of running into, and the grey suede half-boots that had been all the rage in some relatively recent era like that of Hitler's rise to power. He hadn't a lot of hair left on his head but he tidied what there was with the touch of complacency this exercise always tended to arouse in him: better bald as a badger than train it over from side or back and be afraid to sneeze. That done, he went downstairs and watched Crossroads. Just as it was finishing Brenda came into the room.

"Ready," she said in exactly the same way, eager and yet nervous, as he remembered from when he had taken her out to dinner in Oxford for the first time after they were married, at the Dollymores' house in St Margaret's Road; she had worn a sort of coppery-coloured dress of some shiny stuff and bright green slippers with gold clasps and pointed toes. Jake felt more than one kind of pang, at how time had gone by, what quantity and in what way, and at how long it had been since anything much about Brenda had struck him. He got up quickly.

"You look beautiful."

She smiled delightedly and without reserve. "That's good. You look all right yourself."

"It's the tie. Brings out the blue in my eyes."

"Off?"

"Yes"

They were indeed off that night, not however to anyone's house but to a fairly classy Chinese restaurant called the Bamboo Bothy and situated almost round the corner from them in Vassall Crescent, easy walking distance anyway so no trouble or expense over transport. The idea—in general: the choice of premises had been left entirely open—was Rosenberg's, indeed his instruction. Weekly until further notice, the Richardsons were to engage in interpersonal recreative sociality, in other words to "go out together". It had been and would remain Jake's part to initiate the enterprise, though Brenda had an equal voice in determining its nature. Since what he would have liked best, granted he had to leave the house at all, was a straight-there-and-back attendance at the most violent and/or horrific film on show in Greater London while what she would have liked best was drinks at the Ritz followed by dinner at the Connaught, things might seem to have gone her way of the two, if not by much, but he had really scored by vetoing the below-subsistence-level man's, the famine-relief-beneficiary's version of the Connaught that was all they could afford: cooling bad quasi-continental food served tardily and rudely in hot dark noisy smelly dirty crowded surroundings. "We won't go 'there' again," Brenda would say, but they did in all but name, admittedly less often in the last year or so.

The Bothy was almost empty, to Jake's knowledge its invariable state: turning up at eight or nine o'clock, walking past at eleven showed the same three unpeopled files of immaculate white tablecloths. It must be just the lid of an arsenal for use when. The proprietor's grandson or father greeted them pleasantly and showed them to a booth or berth at one side of the room. The composition covers on the benches or banquettes made your bottom give awful snarling, farting noises as you squirmed it along, forced so to squirm it by the overhang of the lowish table. Would they like a drink? No, they would like to order, though having done so they, in the person of Jake, also ordered a bottle of stuff called Wan Fu which they had tried and liked before. Among the welter of what must be Chinese on the label it said, in English, that this wine was specially selected to accompany Chinese dishes, and added reassuring references in French to negotiants, Bordeaux and cellars. Jake pictured a negotiant, or the appointee of one, walking round a cellar in Bordeaux with his mind bent hard on spare ribs, sweet and sour prawn, fried crispy noodle and chicken with bamboo shoots and every so often suddenly and infallibly selecting. Well worth the mark-up.

"Ooh, I was going to say, the garden's in a bit of a state I thought today," said Brenda.

"There's always rather a lot to do at the beginning of a term." It was true that he had a little more to do then than at some other times. "Anyway I've finished pruning the roses and I'll do the chrysanthemum fertiliser over the week-end. Weather hasn't been very inviting you must admit. Ah, thank you very much, that looks delicious." As soon as the waiter had gone Jake said, "Well, darling, we've got something to celebrate."

"Something, yes."

"Oh I agree it isn't very much, but...."

"No it isn't. Well, it's just something."

He groaned to himself. "It's only supposed to be a start."

"What is? What's 'it' exactly?"

"Well, a .... successful .... what Rosenberg would call act of intercourse."

"What's that? What's a successful one of those?"

"Just .... one where the man gets it up and eventually comes, and the woman comes too."

"How important is that, the woman coming too?"

"Very important, I mean it wouldn't..."

"It wouldn't be Grade A without that, would it? Not strictly kosher. Not quite all present and correct. It might mean you weren't able to hold back for the number of minutes and seconds laid down in Screwing Regulations for Mature Males section fourteen sub-section D."

"You know it's more than that," said Jake a little absently. He was going over in his mind what he had said since leaving the house, because it must have been since then.

"Nobody would have known it from the way you asked me just afterwards if it had been all right for me. You should have heard yourself. Talk about any-complaints-carry-on." Brenda had been looking down at the food through her spectacles, sorting out for herself the less calorie-crammed items; now her eyes met his. She had spoken and continued to speak in the same unheated tone she had used in Rosenberg's consulting-room when making similar points more generally. "I've taken in quite a lot of that Army stuff of yours. It might have been the best time of your life."

"If we're going to get on to that level we might as well—"

"That's not on a level, you think about it, not now, and you see if it wasn't. Anyway if it's of any interest, sorry no I know it's of interest, it was all right for me, just, what you might call technically."

"You said it was like old times."

"So it was. I meant it."

Jake's spirits fell sharply. "Gee thanks," he said.

"Don't misunderstand me, that's better than nothing, and I wasn't thinking of the real old times, when we started together. They were—"

"But you didn't sound as if you meant it, well, disappointedly then. You sounded friendly and affectionate then."

"That was then. Even after your any—complaints thing I wanted to make you feel as good as I could...."

"Which you're losing no time in duly reversing."

".... so that you might start showing a bit of physical affection to me, instead of which you shot out of bed and started getting some tea going."

"You didn't sound as if you minded the tea idea, quite the contrary, and surely you remember we always used to have tea afterwards, it isn't that long ago good God, and what do you think I'd been doing before but showing you physical affection—putting you in your place socially? I think you might—"

"I was making the best of a not frightfully good job, and I fancied a cup anyway, though a large gin would have been more like it just then quite frankly,"—Brenda was warming to her theme a little now—"and of course I remember how we used to have tea once, but that was different, and .... what was the other thing?"

"Er. ..." Jake looked away diagonally across the aisle of the restaurant and saw that the three youngish men he had vaguely noticed a couple of minutes earlier, men whom by their open necked shirts and pullovers or leather jackets he had vaguely taken for a group of gasmen or dustmen on emergency call, were peering at menus. One of them was in the middle of a tremendous unshielded yawn. 'Really', the way they..... "Er .... Christ .... physical affection."

"Oh yes. Well I don't count a poke as physical affection, I'm thinking of before that, the non-genital stimulation or whatever it's called. That's part of what that's meant to be, you realise, it's meant to be partly affectionate, or rather you don't realise, not like grooming a horse or more like pumping up a bicycle-tyre. You were like—I've never heard anybody gritting their teeth so loudly in my life, when you were doing it to me 'and' when I was doing it to you. And not saying a bloody word."

"I thought that would help us concentrate. And you didn't say anything yourself either."

"I took my time from you to start with and then I just hung on out of curiosity to see how long you were going to keep your mouth shut."

Jake started to speak with resentment and defiance, then checked himself. "Now look. I know I've said it before, I'm merely reminding you, this is all me or, all right, mostly me, largely me, it starts with me, not you. I'd be the same with anybody."

"I don't care about anybody. I'm meant to be special as far as you're concerned."

"You are, and that's bound to make a difference but it's not going to happen all at once, we must accept that. And we have made a start. After all, biologically we've—"

"Screw biologically. We've made one sort of start, but there's another sort we haven't made," said Brenda with an emphasis he had never heard her use before, or else had forgotten, "and this really is you. You've got to find out whether you feel any affection for me or whether you're the sort of man who can only feel affection for women he wants to go to bed with or wouldn't mind going to bed with or thinks of in a sort of bed what-name, context. If you're not that sort, if you do feel some affection for me even though you don't want to go to bed with me you'd better start working on it and trying to show it. And remember I can tell."

"What about your affection for me?" he asked after a silence.

"It's there but it's keeping itself to itself. It tends to watch its step a bit after the knocks it's taken."

"When did it last take a knock?" This was playing for time while he tried to recover a memory.

"Ooh, about two hours ago, when I kissed you and tried to start talking to you and you came back with any complaints and put your arm around me as if I was an old sow you were having to keep warm till the vet arrived."

"I didn't mean it like that."

"I don't say you 'meant' it like anything. I just might as well have been an old sow."

"I suppose you think this is a good time to bring all this up."

"Yes I do. Check. An excellent time. After you've taken the first step towards getting your, well, your confidence back and before you sell yourself the idea that that's all you have to do. I mean before you absolutely stop wondering what went wrong. Dr Rosenberg seemed to think they go together, you know, screwing and being affectionate, as far as I could make out what he meant, and so do a lot of other people."

"Yes of course." Jake had remembered. "You believed me when I said you looked beautiful in the sitting-room just before we came out."

"I believed something. Something nice. What made you say it?"

"Just remembering how things used to be, sort of suddenly."

She dropped her gaze to her plate, which was now quite empty, and pushed her hand out towards him between the dish warmer and the soy sauce. He took the hand and squeezed it, telling himself it was amazing how after all these years one went on forgetting the old truth that women meant things differently from men. They (women) spoke as they felt, which meant that you (a man) would be devastated forever if you took them literally. (The compensation, in fact bonus on aggregate, was that they thought you operated in the same way, so that they forgave and forgot the devastating things you said to them. He had once, in the course of one of their rows about her relations, called Brenda an illiterate provincial, which had gone down at least as badly as expected at the time but had never since been thrown in his face, thank God; just think what he would have done about and with an accusation of remotely comparable nearness to the bone. And felt about it too.) So what she had said last Tuesday to Rosenberg and him, what he had lain awake going over in his mind in the medium-sized hours the following day, what had then seemed to him to write or at any rate rough-draft finis to their marriage—all that that had boiled down to was saying in bold sans-serif Great Primer italics that she was seriously fed up with him and he had bloody well better stop feeling sorry for himself and take a bit of notice of her for a change. And she had been and was absolutely right. So there they were.

"I think all this might sort itself out in the end with a bit of luck," he said.

"So do I, darling."

"Good. .... We must have earned at least a beta-double-plus from Dr Rosenberg for this evening's work."

"If not beta-alpha query."

"If he could see us now he'd be nodding his little head in approbation."

"Rubbing his tiny hands with satisfaction."

"Showing all his miniature teeth in a benevolent smile."

"Dancing on the tips of his microscopic toes."

"Shaking his filter-passing buttocks."

"I quite like him really."

Jake lifted the corner of his lip and sighed. "What's this do he's got lined up for us next week-end?"

"The Workshop?"

"Oh 'Christ,' I'd forgotten it was called that, I must have censored it out of my memory."

"What's wrong with it?"

"Wrong with it? If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the War, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is."

"Darling, you are a silly old oxford don, it is only a word."

"Only a word?—sorry. No, this whole thing is all about language."

"Whole thing? What whole thing?"

"Well, the .... you know, bloody Rosenberg and his jargon, and beyond that, the way nobody can be bothered to..... Anyway, what is this fucking Workshop? I may say that if it's a 'fucking' Workshop you can all count me out. I'm buggered if I'm going to start taking part in exhibeeshes in my condition, or even trying to."

"It's nothing like that, it's a sort of group where everyone has a different sort of problem and says what it is and the others talk back to them. It's meant to help you unburden yourself and gain insight. But Dr Rosenberg explained it to us. Weren't you listening?"

"I suppose unburdening yourself might be a good thing in some cases. No, I was too bored."

"You must try and make it a success, you know, and take it seriously."

"I promise you I'll try, but at this distance it does give off a distinct smack of piss."

15—At Mr Shyster's

The following day week, Saturday, at a quarter to ten of an overcast but so far not actually wet morning, Jake and Brenda made their way on foot to a house in Maclean Terrace some five hundred yards from their own. The events of the intervening eight days may be briefly summarised. There had been two further sessions of genital sensate focusing, the first slightly, the second considerably less successful than the initial one; the consultation with Rosenberg had thrown further light on Jake's sexual behaviour and attitudes but made visible thereby nothing in particular, or so it seemed to the patient; Brenda had told Jake, this time over tandoori chicken and bindhi gosht at the Crown of India in Highgate, that if he wanted to show affection for her he must try harder and then had discussed their holiday plans for September; Eve Greenstreet had cancelled her dinner with Jake because it looked as if her mother had started dying; and Mrs Sharp had tried to break down Jake's study door in order to admit a woodworm authority while he (Jake) was deeply engaged with business-head and Carter-face. Oh, and Brenda had had lunch and been to a film about peasants with Alcestis.

The house that was to house the Workshop was a little older and, to judge by its front, a little larger than the Richardsons". That front had also had nothing done to it but in a bigger way: parts of the stucco facing had fallen off and there was a quite interesting-looking crack running down from the corner of an upstairs window. The front garden had no flowers or shrubs in it but quite enough in the way of empty beer-tins, fag-packets and cardboard food-containers thrown over the low hedge by tidy-minded passers-by and not removed by the inmates. What were the latter going to be like? Jake, who would have had to confess unwillingly to suffering slight twinges of curiosity and expectation as well as uneasiness at what might be in store for him, felt the uneasiness start to mount and become better defined. He noted successively the broken window-pane mended with a square of linoleum, the lidless dustbin in which a thick slightly shiny off-white vest with shoulder-straps and a bottle that held Cyprus sherry caught the eye, the bucket half full of what you hoped was just dirty water and the comfortable-looking two-legged armchair in the passage that led to the rear. Agoraphobic stockbrokers, dentists afflicted with castration anxiety, anally-fixated publicity consultants he had been prepared for; mixed-up berks from building sites or off those lorry things that pulped your rubbish were quite a different prospect. Nor was he one whit reassured by the child's bicycle propped against the side of what was doubtless known as the porch.

No knocker or bell push was to be seen on or near the peeling front door, so Jake pounded on it with the side of his fist. In the interval that followed he and Brenda embraced, briefly and without looking at each other. Then the door opened quite normally to reveal a longhaired middle-aged man holding a glass of what looked like whisky and water, which he swirled all the time.

"Yer?"

"We're looking for something called the Workshop," said Jake.

"Doctor you wanted, was it?"

"Yes. Yes, I suppose so,"

The fellow motioned with his head, his locks flying. He said in a lowered tone, "Second on the left down there," stood aside and carefully shut the door behind the Richardsons. Apart from what might perhaps have been a bead curtain the interior was featureless, also rather dark; there was a faint sweetish smell, not unpleasant; in the distance an organ, probably but not certainly through one or another means of reproduction, could be heard playing something a bit religious. In the past, Jake thought to himself, this would have made quite a plausible setting for a down-market spiritualist séance, though there of course your feelings would have been rather different-more certitude of tangible benefit and so on.

The room he and Brenda went into made much the same impression, but with more emphasis on things being dirty and damp. It also had Rosenberg in it. The little psychologist slipped to the floor from the sofa-like object on which he had been perching and shook hands with the curious warmth he always showed on meeting, not quite false and yet not right, off target, appropriate to some other relationship, perhaps that of a nephew.

"And how are we now?" he asked. "Do make yourselves comfortable."

In the circumstances this was self-evidently out of the question but Jake and Brenda made no demur about taking off their topcoats and throwing them across a chair that could have come from his rooms at Comyns, and then settling themselves side by side on a kind of bench that had the attraction of being not far from a tall electric fire. This gave off a hasty buzzing sound from time to time.

"Whose house is this?" asked Jake.

"It belongs to Mr Shyster," Rosenberg seemed to say. He spoke with an air of self-satisfaction.

"Does he run the ..."—Jake set his teeth—".... Workshop?"

"He does not," said Rosenberg, shocked that anybody at all should need to be set right on this point. "The facilitator is called Ed."

"The what?" asked Jake delightedly, having heard quite well.

"Facilitator. We like to avoid words like organiser and leader. They have the wrong associations."

"Whereas facilitator has exactly the right ones. I see."

Brenda looked hard at Jake. "Does it matter what he's called?"

"Oh indeed it does, Mrs Richardson, indeed it does. Words embody attitudes of mind."

"I was making the very same point the other day," said Jake with a respectful nod of the head. "And who is Ed? Apart from being the facilitator of the Workshop, that is."

"Well, he had a brilliant and extremely creative career in the United States and came to this country just over a year ago. He says he thinks it's his duty to stay because the need for him is greater here. They're streets ahead of us over there in this field, as you might imagine."

Jake had sub vocalised an oath. Funny how everything horrible or foolish was worse if it was also American. Modern architect modern American architect. Woman who never stops talking—American ditto. Zany comedian. Convert to Buddhism..... "Oh yes," he said when Rosenberg passed.

"I asked you both to come a few minutes early to tell you a little about this work. First of all I take no part, I merely observe. End's object is to induce the participants to express their emotions, to confess what he or she thinks he or she is really like or what's wrong with him or her, or to say what he or she feels about another participant. Or the others may help him or her to a more intense experience. Things of that nature. The essential point is that the emotion should be expressed in full—no holds barred, as we say. Also it must be 'emotion:' Ed'll be listening not to what you say but how you say it."

"So it's all right if I talk nonsense," said Jake.

"Oh indeed, Ed wants to know how you 'feel.'"

"I don't think I can feel much about nonsense except that it is nonsense."

"You were saying just now what we said was meant to be important," said Brenda. "Words embodying things."

"That's the mental aspect. It's the emotions we're on to now."

"Oh."

"Now the purpose of Workshop activity is twofold. The first applies in equal measure to every participant. It enables him or her to achieve release and gain insight into himself or herself. The second purpose is individual and is different for every participant. It helps him or her to overcome his or her special problem. In your case, Mr Richardson, it's the overcoming of sexual guilt and shame. You'll find that by—"

"You keep saying that," said Jake in some irritation, "and I keep telling you I don't—"

"I keep saying it because it's true and you won't accept it. Look at yourself at the McDougall."

"I have, and what of it? Anyone would have felt the same."

"Wrong. As you'll come to see. You think it's disgraceful that your libido has declined. Yes you do. As you'll come to see it's no more disgraceful than catching cold. But I mustn't lay too much stress there, that's just on the surface. Deeper down you feel that the slightest little deviation from any sexual norm is cause for guilt and shame, as your fantasy showed. There are parts of your sexual make-up you still refuse to let me see."

Jake slowed himself down. "Look, Dr Rosenberg, if I have got any parts like that I don't know what they are. As I've explained to you before, I don't particularly object to oral sex or anal sex or the rest of the boiling, I just don't enjoy that kind of thing as much as the .... straightforward stuff. Didn't enjoy it, I should say. No desire to be a voyeur or be at the receiving end of one. Et cetera. And what of it if I had? And I had to eke out my fantasy with adjectives and so forth because what I was imagining was too simple to run to the number of words you asked me for."

"Please just listen. Deepest down of all you think everything about sex is unpleasant as a result of your puritanical upbringing."

"Good .... God."

"Excuse me but we must get on. Mrs Richardson, your problem is inferiority feelings. You agree with that, I think."

"You bet I do. I feel completely hopelessly—"

"Save it for the Workshop. The only other thing I have to say—well, two things. You two are the only participants with directly sexual problems, and everyone is selected with great care—vetted. Some people will try to enter this kind of work for the wrong motives: to acquire a sexual partner or just to enjoy the dramatic aspect or plain curiosity. One of the ways in which Ed is so good is lie can detect those fellows as if it's by taking one look at them. Ah."

A muffled thumping indicated a new arrival and a series of loud creaks the progress up the passage of Mr Shyster, if indeed it was he. A double series of creaks coming the other way duly followed, there was a light tap at the door and a girl of about twenty came in. She was dressed rather unfashionably (Jake decided) in a terracotta-coloured trouser-suit and frilly green shirt and carried a long umbrella with a curved handle.

"This is Kelly," said the doctor. "All Christian names is the rule here. Kelly, this is Jake and this is Brenda."

"How do you do Jake, how do you do Brenda," said the girl in a pleasant expensive-upbringing voice, shaking hands firmly and looking each of them straight in the eye. Considering her ease of manner, healthy skin and teeth and at least perfectly adequate features (good unsoft mouth), hair (reddish) and figure (far from flat-chested), he found it hard to imagine what her special problem could be.

While Rosenberg was filling in about what Jake did and where Kelly lived (just where Orris Park merged into Hampstead) another person's approach was heard. It proved to be that of Geoffrey Mabbott. He showed not the least surprise at finding the Richardsons there, a very Geoffrey-like reaction but so total that Jake's first thought, soon to be corrected, was that he had been told of their recruitment. Jake's next thought, rounded out later that day, was that he wasn't as surprised to see Geoffrey as he ought by rights to have been, and not just because after all Geoffrey was a bit touched and lived locally. No, the real reason was that Rosenberg always reminded him of Geoffrey. Since bringing to light at their first session that Rosenberg didn't know where Freud functioned, what had happened in 1848 or who James Bond was, he had established with varying degrees of certainty that Rosenberg had never heard of the ''Titanic, haggis, T. S. Eliot, plutonium, Lent, Vancouver (city, let alone island or chap), Herodotus, Sauternes, the Trooping of the Colour, the 'Times Literary Supplement', the battle of Gettysburg, Van Gogh, Sibelius, 'Ulysses'—(a) good going for an Irishman (b) and no doubt Ulysses too-chlorophyll, Florence Nightingale, the Taj Mahal, pelota, lemurs, Gary Cooper and Hadrian's Wall; theoretically, on the face of it, in the strict sense there was no reason why you shouldn't never have heard of one or other or even all of that lot and still be a good psychologist; after all, he hadn't never heard of pornography, parents, marriage, erections and sex; and yet somehow..... (By the way, how had he ever got to hear of sherry-and-Oxford, even sherry and Oxford?) Geoffrey wouldn't never have heard of most of the items on the list but he would tend not to have much idea of who or what they were, scoring not very near misses with the same consistency as Rosenberg showed in not recognising the target at all. In Geoffrey's world Eliot would be a famous actor, of Victorian times, Vancouver a lake in Rhodesia, chlorophyll a newish health food, Florence Nightingale a campaigner for female suffrage. These magpies of his were seldom associated with the wrong bullseye, Eliot not being taken for a female novelist nor chlorophyll for an antiquated anaesthetic; Jake would never have felt easier in his mind about them and about Geoffrey if they had been.

This morning he had dressed in the dark as usual: chocolate-brown corduroy trousers, navy-blue cable-stitch pullover, black shoes and the jacket of his dark-grey suit. His manner was friendly but slightly restless, again a familiar combination. Jake lost no time in asking him whether Alcestis was expected to join them.

"Alcestis?"

"Yes. Is she joining us?"

Geoffrey frowned and shook his head. "No," he said with an upward inflection. "Where did you get that idea from?"

"I didn't get—"

"I mean why should she be joining us?"

"Well, Brenda's here, and I thought—"

"I know, Jake, I know Brenda's here, I've just this moment spoken to her," said Geoffrey, gently enough but with some triumph at having so readily diagnosed the acute senile dementia that must have caused Jake to be brought to this place.

To distract himself from restraining himself from kicking Geoffrey in the balls Jake said, "What's whatsisname like, Ed, the fellow who runs these do's?"

First Geoffrey dilated his eyes. Then he drew in his breath in a long hiss, slowly pouting his lips as he did so. Next he clenched his fists, raised them slowly again to shoulder level, lowered his head until it was between them and pounded his cheekbones rhythmically, meanwhile slowly once more expelling his breath. After that he unclenched his hands, indeed made them quite flat, pushed them out horizontally in front of him to the length of his arms and cut the air with them a number of times. Finally he dropped them to his sides and gave Jake a nod that showed he had finished.

"Oh 'I see,'" said Jake. "My goodness, he does sound an interesting sort of chap."

When the facilitator arrived a few minutes afterwards he was at once distinguishable as such from the two or three other men who turned up at about the same time. Jake didn't quite know what he had expected beyond somebody designed to be as offensive in his sight as possible: hairiness, uncleanliness, youthfulness, jeans, beads, hat etc. The reality was the opposite of all that without being in consequence the least bit more encouraging. Ed turned out to be in his late thirties, heavily built, dark after a Spanish or Italian fashion, wearing an oddly cut oatmeal-coloured suit that was none the less a suit, moving in a way that put you in mind of a cross between an experienced actor and a man well used to responsibility. He soon showed he had a trick of stroking his face in detail while he peered at you. When he spoke it was in a deep slightly wheedling voice.

"All right everybody, let's get to work," he said. "We have a couple of new participants today, Brenda and Jake. Hi Brenda, hi Jake."

Salutations of differing amplitude came from the rest of the company, now seated in a rough square with Ed on his feet in the middle. Counting him and Rosenberg there were twelve persons present, seven men and five women.

"Now let's just introduce you around. This is Lionel, who steals things out of stores and says he can't help it, and this is Winnie, who's so shy she can't stand to talk to anybody even although she comes here every week, and this is Ivor, who's afraid of the dark and being alone and a whole raft of other things, and I have word you know Geoffrey, who gets worried because he's figured out he's an asshole, and this is Ruth, who doesn't have anything to do except cry all the time, and this is Chris, who doesn't like the human race, and this is Kelly, who can't run her life, and this is Martha, who has to look after her mother and says her mother is mean to her."

It wasn't that Ed recited this in a lifeless or even a neutral tone, it was simply that Jake couldn't tell whether he was amused or compassionate or bored or contemptuous or generously indignant. Those so briskly characterised showed no signs of surprise or resentment: Lionel, who stole things, even blinked and pursed his lips in a self-deprecatory fashion as if he thought Ed had in his case been somewhat over-gracious.

After a moment, Ed went smoothly on. "What's with Jake is that he can't get it up any more, and what's with Brenda is she thinks it's her fault for having gotten middle-aged and fat, so she feels bad." (Jake knew they were all looking at him but he didn't look back at any of them.) "Now since we have our two new participants we'll make today a salad. For openers, scanning pairs. Jake, Brenda, that means each of you looks another

person over and they do the same with you but no intimate physical contact. You start with the eyes—the others'll show you. All right—Ivor, Winnie...."

In due course Jake found himself standing near the window and facing Martha, the one with the mother. Her eyes were fixed on him in an unbroken stare. He stared back for quite a long time on the view that this must be what was required but in the end got fed up with it and shifted his gaze. Ed appeared at that very juncture and caught the tiny movement.

"No no no," he said, and again he might have been feeling impatient or sympathetic or anything else. "Hold it at eye to eye until I give you the word to break."

It went on for a period that could have contained without substantial cuts the whole of an evening's viewing from Batman to Closedown, or strictly speaking that was how it seemed to Jake. Strange things happened to his vision: at one stage Martha's face went two-dimensional, became a rough disc floating against a background of dark clouds or water, at another it receded a whole mile but grew in size proportionately so that the space it occupied was unchanged. His mind could do nothing but announce its distress to itself: silent recitation of Catullus or poems from the Anthology was about as useful an idea as thinking about sex. When, hardly looked for any longer, the word came to break it suggested at short notice a breaking wave of relief, but as waves do this one quite soon receded. He felt shaken up, uncoupled from the outside world. If Ed had wanted to do that thoroughly but without resorting to shock tactics he had succeeded to the full.

He had also, perhaps without meaning to, stated a major theme of the Workshop's activities, namely that every single one of them without any exception whatsoever lasted for very much longer than you would ever have thought possible. The next stage was a first-rate case in point. It was called free scanning, which meant in practice that you and your yoke-fellow inspected each other's faces with a thoroughness that would have made it possible to count the pores on them if required. Martha's was the face of a woman of forty or so, neither pretty nor ugly. Subjecting it to this kind of scrutiny meant that conventional details of general shape of nose or mouth went unregarded; if Jake were to pass Martha in the street the next day he would have been less not more likely to recognise her as a result of this experience.

The face business was not of course the end of it: Martha took and examined each of Jake's hands in turn, and he hers. Then she walked very slowly round him like an exalted tailor. He looked out of the window on to a patch of knee-high grass with things like discarded clothes—horses and oil-stoves showing here and there and said quietly,

"What does your mother—"

"No talking," said Ed, "there'll be plenty of time for talking in a little while."

There was, though the bit about the little while turned out to be relative. At last Ed clapped his hands above his head and called on Chris to make the rounds.

"Make the rounds?" It came out high-pitched and querulous. "Yeah, you know. Start with Winnie and end with Jake and Brenda."

Chris was the one who didn't like the human race, young, pale and (happily) on the small side. He went and stood in front of Winnie, swaying backwards and forwards slightly in apparent thought. Then he got off the mark, telling her she was a bloody bitch and Christ he'd be shy if he was her and much more of the same. It was a full six minutes by Jake's watch before Chris moved on. At that rate it would be close to an hour before the rounds were finally made, and at 'that' rate, not allowing for intervals, it would be close to ten hours before everybody had had or done his (or her) turn, but long before then one participant at least would have suffered irreversible brain-damage from rage and boredom. Chris's tirades were repetitive in the extreme, but of course it was the tune that mattered, not the words. By the time Chris had moved on again Jake had spotted a periodic element in that tune, a repeated decline from the expression of apparent fury to a mere ill-natured jeering. But was it jeering? More significant, was it fury? Would Ed know?

Jake's interest perked up when Chris turned his attention to Geoffrey, on the basis that even the unobservant couldn't fail to observe a few things about him that would be just right for a truculent harangue, if only his witty clothing, but there was nothing worth attention apart from an all-too-short passage of Joycean word-play about assholes towards the end. Geoffrey appeared dumbfounded at most of it, but then he would have found your visiting card a pretty tough nut to crack. Kelly was next and Jake's interest perked back up for a different reason—what reason? Oh, just interest. She stood perfectly still with her arms folded and stared Chris in the face throughout his speech to her. The folded arms brought her bosom into prominence. It was good all right. There was something about her, perhaps starting with the clothes, that separated her from others of her age, made her the opposite of Miss Calvert, helped him to see that she was attractive. He went on looking at her after Chris had shifted to Lionel, had his eye caught and looked away. When he looked again, sidelong this time, she was giving Ivor one of the cautious bits of appraisal he had earlier noticed her sending him and Brenda. Kelly wanted to know what Ivor felt about what was taking place between Chris and Lionel. Ah.

Chris finished with Lionel and started on Ruth, who was the oldest person there and was sobbing within seconds. Jake wanted to stop it and went on wanting more and more. So did Brenda, he could see. Kelly he thought did, but wasn't sure. Nobody else showed the smallest sign. Rosenberg didn't look up from the journal he was reading; Ed was peering and squeezing his chin. Suddenly he looked at his watch and said in his usual tone.

"All right, cut it, Chris. Go to Jake."

Chris did as he was told at once. He said nothing for much longer than he had said nothing to any of his previous victims, his small features working their way through a limited range of expressions of loathing.

"Who do you think you are, you old bastard?" he inquired finally. "Who gave you the bloody right to be so fucking superior? You think I'm dirt, don't 'you?' Bloody dirt. Don't you? Come on, don't you?"

Jake thought it was rather clever of Chris, considering Chris, to have worked that out but kept the view to himself. "I haven't any particular—"

"Not talk-back, Jake," said Ed.

Without turning round Chris made a shushing gesture that told of ingratitude or preoccupation. "Eh haven't ennair pahtierkyawlah ballocks. You know what you are, don't you? You want to know what you are, what you really are? You're just one big lump of shit." After that he descended to personal abuse. So far from waning in vigour as before his displeasure mounted. Then he fell abruptly silent. When he went on it was a tone he hadn't used before, one unmistakably (to Jake) indicating real anger and so reducing all his earlier behaviour to some kind of charade. "If you don't take that look off your face right away," he said slowly and quietly, "I'm going to..."

It helped Jake that he had once been quite a good tennis player and was still pretty nimble for his age, also that he had noticed Chris glance over towards Ed for an instant; anyway, when the punch came he was almost ready for it, just managed to deflect it past his ear. Ed was there in no time and gave Chris a tremendous slap across the face so that he cried out and nearly fell. That was about when Jake saw what a good thing it was that Chris was undersized. He felt a sudden sharp twinge of total lack of pity for him.

"Bad boy," said the facilitator blandly. "Around here we don't play it that way, okay?"

"You didn't see the look on his face." Chris was close to tears. "He was looking at me as if he thought I was a lump of shit—you should have seen him, honestly."

"Well, you called him one." (The feat of memory, for Chris had used quite a number of other expressions, impressed Jake. He realised he hadn't seen Ed take a single note.) "Maybe he does think you're a lump of shit. Maybe you 'are' a lump of shit. Now get yourself together and go to Brenda."

Not going to. Not fair." (Twenty-five if he's a day, thought Jake.)

"You are going to. In my Workshop people do as they're told." That was believable. Chris's resistance crumbled within ten seconds. In ten more he had gone to Brenda and rather perfunctorily set about calling her old, fat etc. She faced him with a look of open contempt; Jake's contempt had not been open, or so he believed.

The next ingredient of the salad was called Winnie in the cool seat. Each participant participated in making her feel better, more relaxed, more 'wanted.' One by one they told her nice things and were allowed to stroke or hug her but not to enter the sexual area. Chris mildly surprised Jake by being no worse at this than anyone else, telling Winnie first that she was great and then that she was, you know, great. When it was Jake's turn he took her hands and said.

"The thing to remember is that a good half of the people you meet are shy too, it's just that they don't show it, or rather don't show it in front of you. There was a famous—"

"Hold it right there Jake," said Ed. "That's thought bullshit. You have to get away from reason and logic. No because or although or if. The only good conjunction is and."

So Jake reproached himself for forgetting Rosenberg's warning and told Winnie a lot of things he didn't mean much because they didn't mean much and everybody else seemed satisfied. When she finally vacated the cool seat Ruth replaced her as the centre of attention, though Jake missed the official title of what she was doing or being. Not that that could have mattered: she told them in the simplest terms that she had nothing to live for and went on to explain just as simply the circumstances that had brought about this state of mind. She was seventy-one and her husband was dead and her son had been killed in an industrial accident and her daughter was in a home for the feeble-minded and she lived in one room and nobody came to see her and she couldn't afford to go out or to have television and she'd never taken to reading (Jake took this to mean she was illiterate or near enough). She wept frequently during this recital and so in varying degrees did all the other women and Lionel and Ivor. Jake found that this time he could turn his mind to Catullus and the Anthology. When Ruth had apparently got to the end Ed made her start again. This he did twice more. Then he put Ivor in the hot seat. Ivor gave an unannotated list of the things that frightened him, which besides the dark and being alone included underground railways and any other form of tunnel, lifts, buses and large buildings, and after that the others took it in turns to reprehend him as severely as they could for being cowardly, spineless, ridiculous and babyish. When Jake started on him he gave him as many furious Ernie-sized winks as he could before Ed, warned perhaps by something in Ivor's expression, moved round so that he could see Jake's. Ivor, who had looked pretty hangdog at the outset, was showing healthy signs of boredom before the end.

To limit the danger of cardiac arrest from indignation and incredulity Jake had made an agreement with himself not to look at his watch, but while Brenda was gamely trying to sound as if she despised Ivor he (Jake) looked out of the window and saw, not the Queen-Moon on her throne, but bright or brightish daylight. Soon after that Mr Shyster came in with a tray of food and Jake relaxed his rule: two minutes past one. Night must have come and gone unnoticed. A queue formed. It was soon established that Mr Shyster was supplying sardine or cheese sandwiches at Sop each Jesus Christ, cardboard cups of coffee at 25p each Jesus Christ, and a lot of whisky-vapour free. Jake and Brenda had one of each sort of sandwich each-she contriving to leave most of the bread—and agreed in due time that the sardine ones were better or less bad than the cheese ones because the nasty sardine still eluded modern science for the moment. But that agreement was not yet, for Ed accosted Jake, Ed with Rosenberg at his side, both chewing savagely as if they were a couple of those Third-Worlders you read about who earn $15 a year.

"Well, Jake, what do you think of our work so far?"

"I think it's interesting."

"Interesting. I do like that word, don't you, Frank? It's a great word. Yes, Jake, your hostility was very evident. That happens."

After a stage of wondering who Ed thought Rosenberg was Jake remembered that poxing stuff about Proinsias/Francis and was able to answer fairly normally.

"What happens?"

"Hostility. Happens a lot. Don't worry about it."

"I'm not," said Jake. It was all that training with Miss Calvert and some of his other pupils, all that not going for them with the sitting-room poker at each new display of serene apathy, which restrained him now, he would have alleged, from jumping feet first at End's face.

"Well anyway don't worry about it. Now I expect you've got a few questions you'd like to ask, Jake."

"Yes, I have, but I'm not sure this is the right time and place."

"It is. I say it is."

"Very well. Except right at the end that fellow Chris didn't seem to me to be really .... cross at all"

"Hey, he got that, Frank, how about that? Very good, Jake, you're coming on. Chris is just frightened. He's small and he's not a raving beauty and he's afraid he doesn't count, so he gets his blow in first. The more I make him act aggressive the more he sees he doesn't feel it. I'm just showing him to himself. Oh and he wasn't really what you called cross at the end either. What it was, Jake, you got him a little annoyed and he tried harder, which was useful."

All this, at any rate on immediate hearing, sounded so appallingly reasonable that when Jake spoke next it was with something less than the perfect self-possession he had been trying for. "I suppose you were showing Ruth to herself too."

"That's right. This is only the third time she's been along and it's going to be pretty painful for everybody for a while yet, but they're a nice gang and they'll take it. You see, Ruth is all eaten up with self-pity-okay, she has plenty to be unhappy about, though not everything she says is true, right Frank?"

"That's quite correct. People in the same house visit her now and then and Lionel has called on two occasions. The second time he found she'd been invited in to watch her landlady's TV."

"Which isn't a hell of a lot, but..... She needs to be shaken up and made to do things, Jake, go out and find friends, it's possible, there's plenty going on in a neighbourhood you don't have to pay for, nothing wrong with her physically, she rides free on the buses—and so on. I'm going to wait until everybody knows her story by heart and then put her in the hot seat and have the group tell her she bores the balls off them. And if you're worried about Ivor, Jake, he's ashamed of his fears, thinks he ought to face up to them like a man, pull himself together. Which is impossible. You don't know how his psychiatrist had to work on him to come here at all. He has to learn he has a troublesome but not very serious sickness which he acquired through no fault of his and which can be cured, and he can't learn that until he sees how fucking stupid it is to call him a coward or whatever. Which we just made some progress in showing him."