Jake's Thing

Ed stopped speaking abruptly, thus exploiting his advantage over Jake, who was thoroughly taken down by his further discovery that the facilitator at least seemed to want to facilitate mental health rather than bloodshed and raving lunacy, much too thoroughly to set about questioning on the spot the practicality or wisdom of the measures taken and proposed. Trying for a loftily non-committal tone, he said, "Thank you very much for the various explanations," but it came out a bit lame.

"Any time, Jake."

16—At Mr Shyster's (continued)

The afternoon session began with Lionel's roundtable. Ed stage-managed or rather produced it more closely than any of the morning's events, calling on Lionel himself to answer questions like whether or how far he thought stealing was wrong and one or other of the rest to comment positively (bear-oil him) or negatively (crap on him). The emotional temperature again was lower than before but without any more sense being talked as a result. Several comparatively interesting things did emerge in passing, however: that Lionel was head of a small building firm, for instance, that he was forty-three years old, that he lived with his mother, of whom he was fond, that he stole things he liked the look of, that sometimes he went weeks without stealing so much as a paperclip and then spent a couple of days stealing away like billy-ho-things like that. Jake also noticed a couple of inconsistencies in Lionel's account of himself and more than a couple of hesitations when somebody pressed him for details of when and where and the like. Nothing came up to challenge the surmise that Lionel had never contemplated theft for a moment and was probably an inactive queer in search of a like-minded companion, having picked on kleptomania for his cover as simple and unobnoxious. In that case what happened to End's renown as a sham-detector?

The round table was dismantled and Geoffrey's self-draining announced. Jake's curiosity flared up at once, nor did it ever burn low during what followed. Geoffrey began with some information new to Jake, and perhaps to all the others too, namely that he had been educated at home because of his elderly father's adherence to the doctrines of Charles Bradlaugh. Asked to explain the rationale of this he disappointed Jake slightly and surprised him a lot by not stating that Bradlaugh had been, say, a pioneer of vegetarianism, and then again by not classing as a freethinker an opponent of the corporate state. The home educator, by some associated twist of paternal whim, had been not a tutor but a governess (who must have taught him everything he "knew" from T. S. Eliot's Victorian—thespian status onwards and downwards—wrong, as it was to turn out). There followed a passage in praise of women so intense, categorical and of course long that a confession of hyperactive homosexuality seemed almost boringly inevitable. Wrong straight away, or straight away by the standards of the occasion: women had one defect—they could be loved, they were there for men to love them, but they couldn't be heroes. Geoffrey gave one of his frowns at this point as some verbal or other nuance swam towards his ken and away again. Hero-worship, he now affirmed, was an integral part of any lad's growing-up but it should be worked out or through or off at the normal time and place: school. He hadn't been able to start his hero-worship till he got to Cambridge and that had been too late, in the sense that once acquired the habit had proved impossible to shake off—none of this had been clear to him at the time and for long after, and he had only recently identified its consequences.

Where on earth Geoffrey's narrative would lead was quite obscure—perhaps it would bend back to buggery after all—but it was making a bit of a kind of sense in itself, at any rate enough, it might have been supposed, for Ed to have denounced it as thought bullshit; no, he held his peace and massaged the side of his neck. What, Geoffrey went on to ask, had those heroes of his in common? Strong individuality. They were unlike the mass of mankind, and also one another, in many of their opinions, their interests, their likes and dislikes, even their tastes in food and drink. A would wish the United Kingdom to apply for admission one day to the United States, B spend his week-ends studying the behaviour of social insects, C endlessly re-read 'Pilgrim's Progress,' D refuse all dealings with Roman Catholics on principle, E eat only fish and fruit and F mix alcoholic cordial of cloves with his Scotch. With a humility that might have disarmed some people Geoffrey admitted he hadn't the talents to belong to the A-F class but was so vain that he wanted to seem to belong to it. He must therefore light upon some views and practices that were unusual without being too outlandish and also hadn't been pre-empted by the A-Fs. No easy task, this, and one complicated by the fact that, as he soon found, he held no views and neither practised nor hankered after practising any practices that weren't conventional to the point of banality. To create the right sort from scratch had been tough, too (for him at any rate), so he had left things to chance and kept his eyes and ears open. Almost at once—this must have been while he was still at Cambridge, or soon after—Fate had smiled on him. He had accidentally barged into a nurse in a crowded street and knocked a bag of groceries out from under her arm and she had called him a clumsy oaf. At a stroke he was in possession of a whole network of A-F-type material that had extended itself over the years from simple antagonism towards nurses and the mention or portrayal of them in print or on screen to points of view about the National Health Service, pay increases, equal opportunities, the right of those operating essential services to strike and even immigration. His biggest stroke of luck, and one of the happiest passages of his life, had come a year or two before with the success in London of a film representing unfavourably a nurse in a mental hospital; he had felt a sense of vindication. So he had become a sort of G, the chap with the terrific thing about nurses.

(The inverted pyramid of piss exposed, confirmed, systematised! For Brenda's benefit Jake worked like a black at dissembling his fascination and glee, hoped he had started to in time, went on listening just as closely. There must be more where that came from. Perhaps there was to be a definitive pronouncement on the Hollands gin/KLM/cream cakes question.)

No such luck, though Geoffrey did let fall that his supposed admiration for the works of Dvorák, always likely to be proclaimed when music, the nineteenth century or Hungarians '[sic]' came up, rested on nothing more substantial than a pubescent crush on an American film actress of that surname. Well, that was the end, he implied, of Part I. In Part II he talked about his ignorance, a subject that could have kept them there all night and well into the next day, but he was commendably brief. About the time of his setting out to acquire simulated individuality it had dawned on him that the A-Fs, and plenty of others too, were always referring to things—places, works of art, important events—and men and women living and dead, especially though not by a big margin dead, that he'd never heard of. So he had started to read through the encyclopedia, not every word or every article but essential subjects like .... history—English history. When after some years he was about a third of the way through he had experienced another dawn: to put it more succinctly than he did, he still knew very, very little more about Africa and the battle of Bosworth and Charlemagne and 'Dombey and Son' than he did about Xenophanes, Yaksas and Zoutpansberg (and had stopped reading forthwith). Until quite recently he had put this unalleviated uninformedness down to a bad memory. That brought him to Part III.

One evening he had been extolling Dvorák in the musical context when a woman had asked him, to all appearance quite innocently, if he didn't think that the something sharp minor melody in the middle of the something movement of the, er, the New World Symphony was as fine in its way as the famous tune played by the something in the first section and that only the .... the syncopations and the something elses in it, which made it hard for the uninitiated to sing, had stopped it being as famous. He had said quickly (and Jake could imagine with what stiffness) that in such matters he always followed the popular view and the subject had dropped. But afterwards he had started thinking and had realised that, although the existence of the New World Symphony and Dvorák's authorship of it were as firmly settled in his mind as the establishment of the principle of evolution by (steady) Darwin, he knew nothing about it, of how it might differ from its composer's old-world symphonies if any, of how the least part of it went, or how many decades had gone by since he had last heard it, assuming he ever had. How then had work and musician come to hold their curious importance to him? For the first time since God knew when the lovely Ann Dvorák had returned to his mind and it was in that moment (he must have read a book or two of a sort at some point) that he understood how he had acquired what he had thitherto thought of as his opinions. All these disappeared as such instantly and reverted to what they had always been : things he said so as to seem to be someone.

"But I wasn't anyone and I'm not anyone," said Geoffrey. "I don't just mean I'm not important, though I'm certainly not that. I'm completely cut off. Oh I don't mean in a personal sort of way—I've got a wife whom I adore and we get on very well and I have some very nice friends." He looked affectionately at Brenda and Jake. "But they're all like just sort of comforts, marvellous to have around but I don't want to know anything more about them than I do already. They don't interest me. Nothing ever has—I've never wanted to know anything at all. That's why I couldn't remember what I read in the encyclopedia: I had no reason to and I wasn't concerned with knowing for the sake of knowing. It was different with my governess and exams and so on. But now I've got nothing to think about and I realise it, nothing except myself and that's very dull. There's nothing in me. I'm contemplating my own navel—I remember reading that or being told it, I suppose everybody has to remember some things or we—couldn't read at all or even speak or function in any way—and my navel's a pretty boring subject."

That seemed to be all for now. From the familiar lively manner of his in which he had talked of his dealings with nurses and Dvorák, a manner quite reconcilable with a keen curiosity about himself and the workings of his own mind, Geoffrey had in the last minute or so fallen with some abruptness into a hollow, lugubrious mode of speaking that matched the content of what he said. This—the tune, not the words—recaptured the attention of his audience which, apart from Jake, Brenda and Kelly, and in a different way Ed and Rosenberg, had stopped listening at about the Bradlaugh stage. Even Chris might well have noticed the change. There was a pause, during which facilitator and psychologist conferred inaudibly; then Geoffrey was thanked for his efforts rather as if he had just failed an audition by a small but distinct margin. Poor old bugger, Jake thought to himself, at least you're a cut above Miss Calvert and that lot. To them, the failure of things like knowledge to win their interest constituted a grave if not fatal defect in the thing itself.

Martha's one-to-one followed. She was herself and you were her mother and there were slanging-matches which she always won. Jake did his best when it came round to him but he was a bit distracted by wondering, and also beginning to nourish a man's-hand-size-cloud-type suspicion of, what the good Ed might have in store for him. He also wondered, not so hard but still quite a bit, what would be required of the person whose turn must intervene between Martha's and his—Kelly.

Time, plenty of it, came to the rescue here: Kelly was to engage in self-expression. In Jake's vocabulary this was a vague term applied to activities like swearing and children's art but in the present context it evidently meant something more specific. The girl at once left her chair, sat down on one of the more affluent patches of carpet and clasped her knees.

"All right, Kelly." The note of coaxing in End's voice was intensified. "Your assignment is to give us yourself. You gave us a whole lot last time but now you're going to try to give us all of it, the piece, Kelly. Whenever you're ready."

After half a minute of inert silence she uttered the first of a great number of loud howling noises. If this was self-expression it was hard to name the part of the self being expressed, its fear, its rage, its grief, its pain, its hatred or its disappointment or some other thing. Jake had never heard the cries of a maniac, far less those of a damned soul, but he thought there might be some common ground in both cases. The girl thrashed about on the floor, arching her backbone to a degree a trained gymnast might have envied and thrusting her trunk forwards and down between her parted thighs. The movements of her head were so rapid that it was hard to catch anything interpretable in her face, though there was a moment at which he saw clearly what he had seen only once before in his life, when the small child of a colleague had fallen in a Summertown garden and cut its knee: a tear spurting from a human eye. Next to him Brenda shivered or shuddered and reached out and took his hand.

At last the howls were reduced to moans and then to long gasping breaths; Kelly wiped her cheeks with her fingers and Ed helped her to her feet and told her that maybe that wasn't quite all of it but it was damn near and congratulations. Jake was bracing himself for the fray when Mr Shyster, fetched as it now seemed by means of a bell push beside the disfigured fireplace, came in with more refreshments. This time there were cups of tea at the everything-must-go price of 10p and biscuits Jake didn't bother with. He saw that Geoffrey was unattended and crossed over to him.

"I thought that took some doing, what you did."

"Took some..... Oh. Oh, it wasn't all that difficult. Did you think it went down all right?"

"Who with?"

"End's in a funny mood, he didn't seem at all impressed, not even with the last bit, and that really was rather difficult. I was really trying then."

"To express emotion, you mean."

"But then he said hardly anything to Lionel either. It's probably just his mood. He's only human like the rest of us, after all."

"Geoffrey, there's just one thing that—"

"Yes."

"Er, well I was just going to say there was one thing that sort of puzzled me a bit in what you said—which was all absolutely fascinating, I don't mean that. It was about .... you not going to school because of your father's ideas, which I quite...."

"No no, my father was 'against' my going to school, any sort of school. It would have been contrary to his principles for me to be taught scripture and go to chapel. I thought I'd explained all that."

"Oh I think I understood. But what I was going to ask you, I took you to mean you wished your father had let you go to school, because if you had, you'd have been able to get your hero-worshipping done while you were still there. Surely if you had, you'd have seen through the whole thing that much sooner and realised that much sooner, which is quite a long time, that you only got your opinions and all that from imitating the way your hero-worship chaps went on. Which wouldn't have been at all a good thing, would it, because you'd have seen you were whatever you said, nobody in particular, years, decades before you did in fact. In reality. As it happened."

"Jake—everything you advance as an argument is quite true," said Geoffrey weightily. "But with respect you seem to be missing the point. It was 'because' I didn't go to school that 'I failed' to meet all those people. If 'I had' gone to school I'd have met them 'sooner.'"

"And realised you were imitating them sooner, that was my whole—"

"No no, if you go over it in your mind you'll see I'm right."

What Jake did see was that he had fallen into his old error, still quite common with him even when dealing with pupils, of supposing that because somebody used things like verbs and conjunctions he (or she) could follow what others said. Changing tack he said, and meant it, "Amazing how you managed to get that much insight into yourself and not be afraid to follow it up."

"How do you mean?"

"Realising how you'd come by all your views and that you've got no thoughts of your own. It took courage to face that."

"Oh well, there we are." Geoffrey had been frowning but now his features relaxed and he smiled cheerfully. "I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about. Just not my day."

"How's Allie?" asked Jake to cover his renewed wonderment. "Allie?"

"Yes. How is she?"

"She's all right. Why?"

"Nothing, pure interest."

"She's never been better as long as I've known her. Why shouldn't she be?"

"No reason. If you'll excuse me I must just have a word with Brenda," said Jake, who at that stage would have welcomed a word with Ernie, Mrs Sharp, anybody at all. But he didn't get his word because Ed declared it was time to be getting on, nor was the least disagreement voiced. After the teathings had been collected and removed, he said,

"All right, Jake, strip."

An expected or, as in this case, not really unexpected piece of nastiness is not thereby rendered less nasty; so at least it seemed to Jake at the time. Another point that struck him with almost equal force at about the same moment was that a piece of nastiness that has been preceded over a period by several other roughly comparable pieces of nastiness is not thereby rendered less nasty either. He said he wouldn't (do as he was told) and was disconcerted to hear how petulant and fatuous it seemed to sound.

"Wasn't I just telling you about yourself suffering from sexual guilt and shame?" This of course was Rosenberg, his little nose lifted in triumph.

"It isn't that, it's just embarrassment. For a .... with a female with sex in mind, that's a different matter."

"Why so? You may have forgotten, but you once gave me an assurance that you had no objection to exposing your genitals in public."

Imprecations suggested themselves in such profusion and variety that Jake was silent quite long enough for Ed to say in his calmest tone.

"Cut the bullshit. Jake, I said take off your clothes. So take off your fucking clothes."

He caught Brenda's eye, which stated with the utmost clarity of diction available to eyes that it would be measurably better for him if he complied with the facilitator's request. Everyone else was clearly expecting it too. So in the end he complied, marvelling a certain amount that he had had the unconscious predictive power or something to make that a clean-underclothes day. Well there he was, grey-and-white chest-hair, elliptic areolas round the nipples, some broken veins on the chest, a perceptible if less than gross pot-belly, pimple-scars on the thighs, yellow toenails and all, not forgetting those parts that had once so interested him and from time to time others. For a moment it didn't feel too bad, and then it felt too bad.

Acting on End's orders, the nine other participants came up to him successively and stroked or squeezed various parts of him though avoiding the genital area oh I say how frightfully decent; in practice his shoulders and upper arms got most attention. While they were doing that they were supposed to tell him things like he was all right. Kelly looked and sounded sorry for him, Chris, whom he had been looking forward to least, told him that he was all right and then that he was definitely all right, and Brenda seemed pleased with him, but he didn't take much notice of any of them because he was concentrating so hard on stopping himself from trembling all over. That was a help in a way. When they had all finished and he got dressed what struck him was how much less better he felt now he had got dressed than he had expected. He had some difficulty in giving his full attention to Brenda when, complying with End's request to conduct a self-draining (so you could have two of the same sort of thing in the salad), talked for twenty-five minutes about how unattractive and stupid and incompetent and ignorant and unattractive and useless and silly and unattractive she felt all the time. But he got the main drift.

17—Exposing Ed

When the Workshop broke up at half-past six Brenda asked Geoffrey if he would like to come with her and Jake for a cup of tea and a drink. He understood her fully and at once and thanked her but said he had to be off to his own home to change and take Alcestis to a theatre. However he showed no disposition to be off in a hurry, hanging about in the room they had spent so long in and near the front door (at a spot from which another room was to be seen with only a wicker-covered carboy and a ping-pong table in it) and asking the other two if they didn't think that one or another part of the proceedings had been particularly good and saying he thought it had been. This minor delay made them the last to leave, just behind Rosenberg and Ed, who were exchanging farewells in the "porch". On their conclusion Rosenberg startled Jake by wheeling 'away' the child's bicycle that had been parked there, mounting it at the kerb and riding off on it—startled him till he saw that of course a child's bicycle and a Rosenberg's bicycle would be indistinguishable for practical purposes. And any bicycle would be quite effective in today's traffic and was much cheaper than a car, especially one modified for a two-foot-high driver.

Geoffrey promised to be in touch soon and went, walking with his characteristic head-down gait-because he doesn't want to see anything, thought Jake. He said to Brenda.

"I'd give a few bob to know what he's changing into."

"What? A suit, I imagine. Why?"

"He's got half a suit on already. For the theatre I should think he'd go for, er .... a safari jacket with a frilled shirt and velvet bow-tie, jeans, tartan socks...."

"What are you talking about?"

"Well you must admit he does dress extraordinarily."

"Honestly, just because he doesn't dress like anybody else...."

"You don't overstate the case. No, it's more than that. It's one of his character-trait-substitutes like pretending to hate nurses and like Dvorák. No .... it's not that either, if that was what he was after it would be much easier and less ridiculous if he just always wore white or bright red or had a collection of outlandish ties, say. Ah, you were right after all, not dress like 'anybody' else. Perverseness! An instinct, a compulsion to get things wrong. That's why...." Jake's voice trailed off, he understood now about Geoffrey's magpies, Lake Vancouver and Florence Nightingale throwing herself under the King's horse at the Grand National, results of an endless series of drawn battles between memory and the will to err, but as he felt at the moment he couldn't face explaining all that from the start. He went on fast instead, "That's why he's such a pest to talk to, always on the look-out for chances of getting at cross-purposes with you. In fact there was the most amazing—"

"Why are you so against him?"

"Darling I'm not 'against' him, I'm just interested in him. You never know, we might even be able to help him." (It was true enough that Jake didn't consider himself to be more against Geoffrey than any reasonable man ought to be and was indeed interested in him, but the mention of helping him was pretty pure hypocrisy.) "You saw I was talking to him in that tea-break? Well, I congratulated him on sort of seeing through himself—that's what he said he'd done if you remember, there was nothing in him, he said. Anyway, he said he couldn't make out what I was driving at. That really staggered me, because I thought, when he said that all his views and everything were just to make him seem interesting, which struck me as absolutely dead right, perhaps it was sheer chance he got it right, he didn't really mean it, all he was doing was saying another thing that was supposed to make him seem interesting."

"Bit of a coincidence, wouldn't that be, or have I got it wrong? I expect I have. I just thought he was terrifically brave."

"Perhaps he was. I told him I thought so, which can't do any harm, I suppose, though he didn't seem to take it in much."

They were nearly home now, hurrying through the rain that had begun to fall. Two carloads of Asians dawdled past. Brenda said hesitantly.

"What did you think of the other stuff, the other people?"

"Oh I really don't know, don't ask me yet. I'm what Ed would do doubt call too close to it."

"All right. But you were good. Can't have been much fun."

"Thank you darling."

As soon as they were indoors Brenda slipped out to the kitchen and put the kettle on; Jake followed.

"You can't have tea at this time," he told her, "it's a quarter to seven."

"Oh can't I, you just watch me. It's either that or gin and it had better not be gin. Not for a bit anyway."

"What I could really do with is a cigarette."

She gave him a glance of sympathy but said nothing. After a moment he picked up her discarded coat and headscarf and put them with his own hat and coat in the hall cupboard, which had a floral china doorknob on it. An aeroplane went slowly by, or rather not slowly at all but staying in earshot for about three-quarters of an hour. With greater intensity than ever before he wished he still had his "libido", because if he had he and Brenda would be on their way upstairs now to make love. Of course they would; nothing like the Workshop had ever come their way before but of course they would. The thing about you and your wife making love was that it made things all right, not often for ever but always for a time and always for longer than the actual love-making. In that it was unique: adultery could make life more interesting but it couldn't make things all right in a month of Sundays. And as for booze you must be joking—as well expect a fairly humane beating—up to do the job.

He went back into the kitchen where Brenda was spooning the Jackson's Earl Grey, one of their few indulgences, into the teapot, which was floral too.

"Look at me not making buttered toast," she said.

"I do so, and I admire."

"Twelve pounds I've lost in just three weeks. The Guzzlers say that's as fast as it's safe to go."

"I'm sure they're right."

The doorbell chimed. Jake always wished it wouldn't do that but would ring or be a buzzer instead; the trouble was it counted as being outside the house, which was his province, and he couldn't be bothered so it went on chiming. Anyway, when he opened the door he found Kelly was there, though she wasn't for long; she furled her umbrella and stepped across the threshold so promptly and confidently that he at once assumed that Brenda had invited her during one of the breaks at Mr Shyster's and for some odd reason neglected to mention it. Standing now by the cheval glass the girl nodded and smiled inquiringly at him.

"We're in the kitchen," he said; "Brenda's just making a cup of tea."

"Oh marvellous. Is it this way?"

Brenda had entered upon the very act of tea making. The look she gave reversed Jake's understanding as fast as it had formed: the appearance of Kelly was a surprise to her, and not a particularly welcome one either. If the second half of this was noted it wasn't reacted to; Kelly walked over to the sink and stood her umbrella up in it to drain, talking eagerly the while.

"It's so kind of you both to let me just barge in on you like this, I hope you don't mind too much. You may be wondering how I found you, well I simply followed you from that frightful house. At a respectful distance, so I wasn't quite sure which gate you went in at but I got it on the second try. It's the most awful cheek on my part but I did so want to have a chat with you both."

"What about?" asked Brenda in a colourless tone.

Kelly seemed to find this an unexpected question. "That ghastly session and the incredible things that happened and that criminal man Ed." When neither Richardson responded immediately she hurried on, "Of course if you're busy or anything I quite understand, I'll take myself off in a flash, you've really only to say the word."

Something like sixty-three and a half per cent of this last bit was directed at Jake, who didn't say the word. What he did say (and when taken up later on the point by Brenda said truthfully that when he said it disinclination to chuck someone, anyone out with no decent excuse in sight came first among whatever motives he might have had) was, "No no, we're not doing anything special, stay and have a cup of tea with us."

"Oh thank you, you are nice. You see, the reason I've come to you two like this is there's really nobody else I can talk to. The others are all very sweet people, even poor little Chris, his bark's worse than his bite, but they're not what you'd call intellectual giants, well, Ivor's no fool and Martha's quite sensible except about her mother, but you can't sort of 'talk' to them, so up till now I've had to work on my own."

"Work at what?" asked Brenda as before.

"It may sound silly to you both but I want to expose Ed. Oh not so much Ed personally but the whole Workshop bit. So I, what do you call it, I infiltrated this one. Jolly easy it was too. I just went to my GP, who's a silly little man and I spun him a yarn about not being able to keep a job or settle to anything and having rows with my parents, and he passed me on to that even sillier little man Rosenberg who passed me on to Ed, and there I was, simple as that. I've been going to these get-togethers for six weeks now. Oh I say what a beautiful room, it must have taken you absolute years to get it like this, Brenda, I do congratulate you."

The room in question was naturally the sitting room into which, Jake carrying the tea tray, the three had now moved. General praises were followed by plenty of particular ones lavished on glass paperweight, trailing plant, some sort of candlestick, some sort of miniature and like lumber. It all went down well enough with Brenda, though it fell some way short of winning her over. Jake put up with it as long as he could before moving back towards a matter that had started to interest him, not a lot, but more than any bleeding paperweight or miniature was going to.

"This business of exposing the Workshop," he said in a slender interval between such articles. "You mean publicly? In court, for instance?"

Brenda, as she was apt to. whenever he tried to take a conversation back to an earlier point, gave a look attributing to him either slowness on the uptake or pedantry; for her, things must run on, not back, unless of course Alcestis had a "story" to finish. But Kelly turned eager again at once and he was touched with surprise and gratitude as the variegated awfulness and fatuity of the day sank for the moment out of sight.

"Well yes," she said. "Well, I don't know, I haven't found out enough yet, but how it began, a friend of mine at work went to another Workshop round Sloane Square, and it was absolutely appalling she told me, people beaten up and, you know, group sex and everything, so she stopped going. Then I heard from someone else about Ed, don't repeat this either of you because it may not be true, but this person said that after one of End's sessions a chap had gone straight home and killed himself with sleeping pills. So I thought somebody had better look into it, so I joined as I said and, well, you've both just seen for yourselves."

"Seen what?" asked Brenda.

"Well, him, Ed, encouraging Chris to be aggressive when what he needs is a damn good smack-bottom and being told not to be so boring, and poor Ruth, you're not going to tell me being made to do all that crying does any good, 'made' to do it, four times over, and Lionel, after this afternoon the only thing he can be is more confused than when he started. And Ivor ought to stick to proper treatment and not..... And making Jake strip,"—straight to Brenda in a relaxed informal interested conversational tone—"just to humiliate him. He did the same thing to Chris two weeks ago after he'd ticked Ed off without being told to. I noticed you talking to him when we stopped for lunch, Jake—how did you hit off with him?"

"He said it was obvious I was hostile."

"Exactly. Getting back at you. But he doesn't really need that, even, something to set him off. It's just power, hurting and embarrassing and generally abusing everybody and all in the name of therapy and no one to stand in your way."

Jake offered more tea and was accepted. "I think in fairness I ought to remind you of what Rosenberg said to me when I resisted. About .... shame and guilt. You could say there was a connection."

"In this business everything's connected with everything else. I forgot why it was supposed to be good for Chris to strip but I could soon run up an explanation, couldn't you, either of you?"

"Another thing it might interest you to know is that during our chat in the lunch-break he told me his plan for Ruth. What she needs is a shake-up, you see, so when the time comes she'll be put in the hot seat and told what a bloody bore she is. A great help to be told that when you're old and lonely and frightened."

"The swine. Anyway, thanks for telling me. One more bit of information."

"He can be very plausible, though. He had me thinking it might be a good idea, and the same with Chris and Ivor."

"Exactly."

They looked at each other in silence for a moment, Jake on the corner of the velvet-covered sofa and Kelly sitting animatedly forward on what had used to be called a pouf or pouffe but obviously couldn't be these days; she reminded him for an instant of someone he had recently met, he had no idea who. Brenda had been standing by a carved plant-table near the window; now, announcing by her move that she would join the conversation for a strictly limited period and purpose, she perched on the arm of the chair in which she normally watched TV or read. Her voice was rather livelier than before when she said,

"Er ..."—leaving an empty space where Kelly's name would have fitted—"do you mind if I ask you a question?"

"No, Brenda, of course not."

"You say you, what was it, you infiltrated the Workshop so as to show it up, so that means you faked being somebody who needed therapy, psychotherapy."

"Yes, I went to quite a lot of trouble actually, but I indent have bothered, it was as easy as pie, as I said."

"So when Ed asked you to do whatever it was and you cried and writhed about and so on, you were faking that too."

"Oh absolutely."

"But you really were crying. real tears, I saw them. And you still look slightly weepy, as if you've been crying."

"Do I? Oh yes, they were real tears all right, but I was faking them at the same time. What I mean is, it was a performance that included crying. I can cry at will, always have been able to. My dad says I get it from him, he's in the theatre, he says it's all a matter of being self-centred enough. I studied acting for a year until I realised I couldn't stand the people."

"I see," said Brenda. "How can we help you?"

"Well really just knowing I've got the two of you on my side is a big help in itself. And you can both keep your ears open for anything you may hear, from Rosenberg and so on, and if I can't make it one Saturday I'll need someone to watch Ed for me. That sort of thing."

"And when you've got enough information you'll decide whether you're going to sue him or not."

"I might sue him or I might write about him in a newspaper."

"What would you sue him for?"

"Well, I'm no legal expert, I'd have to find out about that but I'd have thought one could get him for fraud. After all he is a fraud isn't he?"

Brenda said nothing to that. Jake hesitated before he came in.

"An intellectual fraud certainly. All this stuff about getting away from logic and reason which he isn't even consistent about. And 'of course' when a crowd of people tell you on instruction that you're nice you're not going to feel in the least less shy when you meet a crowd of other people you've never seen before. And whatever any of them may have got off their chests will all be back on their chests by now. 'And' he makes a hundred and fifty quid a time out of us and God knows how many other lots he runs. But he hasn't got a contract with me, he hasn't even said he might be able to help me. So I don't really see quite how we...."

"Neither of you know the first thing about it so I think it's be better if you shut up and give him a chance." Brenda spoke in a livelier style than ever. "You say you've been six times and today was our first, it seems to me perfectly ridiculous to expect any results for several months, Dr Rosenberg said we shouldn't. And there are always rumours about these sorts of things which I don't think should be passed on. And I don't care what rot anybody talks if they make me feel better and I dare say you won't believe me or think it matters but I felt really better after saying my piece even if it didn't last very long."

She got up from her chair-arm and not very quietly began putting the tea-things together. The speed with which Kelly delivered thanks and good-byes, fetched her umbrella from the kitchen, made for the door and vanished, all without appearance of hurry, impressed Jake. In the passage he had to step lively to avoid being run down by Brenda with the tea tray before her and no eye for him.

"What's the matter?" he called after her.

"Nothing."

"Oh Christ."

Again he followed her out to the kitchen, where she dropped the tray on to the draining board from a height of several inches and turned round with the speed of a wide-awake sentry. Then she slowed down.

"I suppose it's not your fault."

"Oh bloody good, what's not?"

"What do you think she wanted? Would you like another cup?"

"Yes I would, thank you. What do you mean? To get us on her side—I don't know how serious that was. Or just to have a chat."

"To get the pair of us, both of us, the two of us, the couple of us on her side, you mean. She overdid it there. No, it was you she was after."

"After?"

"Some girls like old men. I'm not being nasty, you're not an old man to me but you obviously are to her. She could see you thought the Workshop was a joke at best and didn't like Ed, oh don't be ridiculous, anybody could have in five minutes, so she cooked up this story about exposing him as a fraud and wanting our help. Sod that."

"Fancy me when she'd seen me starkers? Thanks." They were for his fresh tea.

"That probably gave her the idea. No really darling, I should say you're pretty good for your age group. What?"

Jake was shaking his head. "Just..... You see I was thinking the other day, before this business came along, girls, women would look me over a bit, I don't mean send me an invitation but at least look at me. Now they don't. Literally. Well they do when they have to, when I'm talking to them, pupils and so on, but only the minimum. Obviously the normal man sends out little signals all the time, not lecherous glares, just saying he's not against the idea. So I must be sending out signals saying I am against it, and they pick them up, without realising it of course. So if you're right, why hasn't Kelly?"

"Because she's a howling neurotic with all her wires crossed. Do you honestly believe what she did back there was faked by as much as one per cent? Ed said she couldn't run her life."

"Mm. But wouldn't she have held back a bit if she was planning to get us to believe she was faking?"

"She got carried away, or she reckoned we'd take her word for it. Or she just forgot."

"Mm. She's so bright. Seeing that in End's world everything's connected with—"

"Neurotics very often are bright—Dr Rosenberg said. By the way, what happened to you being too close to it to discuss it, the Workshop? You were discussing it pretty openly with her just now."

"I know, but that was her, she was the one who brought it up, for Christ's sake."

"You still indent have. Do you fancy her?"

"Darling, have I got to tell you again I don't fancy anybody?"

"Funny you brought up signals, anyway I just thought the ones she was sending you, because she was even though she was trying not to in front of me and thought she wasn't, I thought you might have picked them up and that would sort of take you back. I wouldn't mind. She'd be a dangerous girl to get involved with but that would be up to you. What I mean is you wouldn't have me to worry about. However this business ends up neither of us are going to have that kind of thing coming along much more in our lives. And if you did get interested in her it might be a way of you getting interested in me again."

Jake put down his cup, went across the kitchen and embraced her, mouth against neck.

18—Eve's Thing

"So that's life as lived by me at this moment in time," said Eve Greenstreet. "No worse than that of many under late capitalism, I'm sure. Not very onerous tasks in the Secretary's office, bun-fights in Rawlinson Road attended by ladies who wear hats indoors, actually I can't remember when I last went to a bun fight in Rawlinson Road or anywhere else but it's that 'kind' of thing and in point of actual fact the percentage of ladies wearing hats indoors will probably be down to single figures by the end of the year, like inflation, or rather not like inflation, and, said she still miraculously keeping her balls in the air, being married to Syd."

"Syd?" said Jake with a grin. "I thought lie was called—"

"Oh, he has a name for formal occasions and when I'm putting him in his place but in a non-variform-conditions situation he's Syd. Can it be that the fact has failed to penetrate you? After Sydney Greenstreet as the extremely wicked and extremely fat man in the star-studded cast of famed movie classic 'The Maltese Falcon'. You remember. Upon my soul sir you are a character. Said to one-time screen idol Bogie-bogie. I'm sorry but I just can't resist calling him that. Shiddown. shweethat, and shtart shingin. That's enough. End of nostalgia bit. Syd, my Syd that is, what is Syd? Well to begin with of course he's Syd. Then he's a bank manager, no connection with the university except as customers, nothing queer about our Syd. And when you're looking at him you're looking at a bank manager. But hey there Jacob old boy, you have already received notification of this phenomena among others. We had you and your charming wife come for dinner at our delightful Headington home one time shortly after our marriage."

"That's right, of course." He had completely forgotten and didn't remember anything about it now.

"Well, as I say, when you look at Syd you see a bank manager.

Unless that is you happen to have cultivated one of the strange powers of the mind that man has possessed since the dawn of his days but some hidebound and blinkered scientists continue to deny. If you 'had,' cultivated and so on, you'd see not just a bank manager but a bank manager with a noticeable and most efficient distinguishing organ of sex, one with an unusually low-turn-around time too. You better believe it, Jayqueeze buddy, when Syd fucks you you stay fucked."

"Really." Jake poured wine.

In one sense he was able to do this because he and Eve were dining in a restaurant, not as planned La Sorbonne, which had been booked up when telephoned, but a perhaps rather Spanish place recently opened in the strange quarter sprung into being after most of the oldest part of the city had been gleefully hauled down a few years before. Here, where once you could have sworn there was nothing but a couple of colleges, some lodgings and an occasional newsagent or tobacconist, stood hairdressers" and clothiers" and trumpery-bazaars of a glossy meanness formerly confined to the outskirts of the large cities. Here, within these walls, were dons and undergraduates and others in statu pupillari dressed for fishing expeditions or semiskilled work on the roads, and most of them had females with them, but Jake took no notice of any: other matters filled his attention.

It was the evening of the Tuesday after the Workshop, Eve's mother having proved not to be starting to die for the moment. They (he and Eve) had met at the restaurant at seven-thirty, and at seven-forty he had ordered a second sherry, with a third destined to follow before the arrival of the sort of paella—yes, it must be Spanish—and the bottle of red wine. Or rather the first bottle of red wine: they were now halfway through the second. Three-quarters of the amount so far drunk was inside him. She had remembered his habit of moderation and asked him if he had changed his ways and he had said not in general but this evening was a special occasion.

Eve told him a little more about her husband's abilities, then dilated her eyes and clapped her hand to her forehead. "Hold it right there," she said in vibrant tones. "Rewind." She stabbed with her forefinger as at a button or switch and made high-pitched gibbering, quacking noises that were not so very much unlike those made by a tape revolving at high speed. After a time she made more finger-motions, saying, "Clunk. Replay. Clunk," then went on in the baritone register and in an accent Jake thought over-refined, "Eve old girl, there's something I'd like to chat to you about. Would you do me the honour of letting me take you out to dinner—Well yes Jake that would be extremely nice of you thank you very much indeed," the last series of words delivered in the kind of whining monotone to be loosely associated with imitations of footballers interviewed on television. The performance ended with switching-off noises and motions.

Jake gave a laugh. "That's a new one, isn't it? Yes, I remember the scene you so vividly evoke, but there's nothing to it really. It was just an excuse to take you out to dinner after these God knows how many years."

"Cock," said Eve firmly. "Uh-uh. No, as they say, way. It was a sadly shaken and deeply disturbed Jake Richardson who, that cold, rainy, windy morning in April, encountered his one-time close friend Evelyn Greenstreet at her place of work and sepulchral was the gloom wherewith he answered her polite inquiry as to the well-being or otherwise of his wife, right?"

"Well, we had had quite a nasty row, it's true, but once I'd—"

"Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom," said Eve, this time like a tommy-gun and with appropriate arm-vibrations. "You talk now or you talk later, but understand one thing, just one thing. You talk."

And Jake did talk, though not till he had ordered cheese and a third bottle of wine. Eve demurred at the wine and asked if he was trying to get her drunk; he said he wasn't trying to do that, that these Spanish reds were very light and that they indent drink it all.

"I'm worried about Brenda," he eventually said. "She goes on complaining I don't show her enough affection."

"Are you showing her enough erect male member?"

"What?" He half turned away from her as if he had thought for a moment that somebody across the room had waved to him. "Oh yes I think so. I don't think that's the problem."

"You say you think." Eve was now peering at him over phantom half-moon glasses of a forensic stamp. "Am I to take that as indicating that there is doubt in your mind on this head?"

"No, that would be..... No. Of course none of us are what we were."

"Not each and every one of us at all events. No, I asked because affection and the erect male member tend to go hand in hand, if you'll pardon the expression."

"That's just the trouble."

"Eh? eh?"

"I mean .... they probably do for most people. Yes, I quite agree they do for most people. The, er, the thing is they don't seem to for me. At least that's what Brenda says. According to her I'm the type of man who hasn't really got much time for women except as creatures to go to bed with. In fact I only want one thing, always have. According to Brenda."

Jake's demeanour now was rather that of a motorist in an unfamiliar town who, after a couple of wrong turnings and the odd near-collision, suddenly finds himself on a route that will get him there after all. If Eve saw any of this she didn't make it known, instead examining him from a wide variety of angles, at one moment with her cheek and ear almost resting on the tablecloth, at the next bolt upright with her head thrown back so that she stared at him down her cheeks. While she did this she clicked her tongue at different pitches. He used the time, which must have been getting on for a minute, to appraise more fully than before the degree to which she had kept her looks. Pretty high, he decided: the streaks of grey in her hair only witnessed to the genuine blackness of the rest, her skin still had a pale glow to it, and nothing had gone wrong with what he could see of her neck, which wasn't its entirety because of the very jolly reddish blouse or shirt she was wearing. It had gold bits on the collar and cuffs. Compiling this inventory made his eyes feel tired. They also felt hot when he closed them, or perhaps it was that his eyelids were cold. But why should they be?

Eve finished her inspection. "I wouldn't have thought, well as you know all too thoroughly I always wouldn't have thought given half a chance, that's just poor little Evie for you, but I wouldn't have 'thought', balls in the air again, that our Brenda had very much there or thereabouts. From what various purblind and reactionary elements would no doubt regard as my somewhat discreditably wide experience I would have said, and as you know equally well I would always have 'said', that my old compeer and associate the Reader in Early Mediterranean History, how about that, woman's got a mind like a razor, was, balls yet again, and I would wager still is, one of those whose interest in womankind extends well beyond the small central area designated by that notoriously short and unattractive little word. You managed to put up with me with great good cheer when bedtime was far far away and I was in full verbal flight—oh yes, little Evie knows she makes considerable conversational as well as other more shall I say corporeal demands on her swains. So I venture to suggest, paying due regard to the interests of our partners in the European Economic Community, the provisions of Phase III of the Incomes Policy, the recommendations of the Race Relations Board and the findings of the Budleigh Salterton Tiddleywinks and Action Sculpture Committee, that on the matter at issue our trusty and well-beloved Brenda is talking through her sombrero."

"Let's have some brandy," said Jake.

19—That Lazy Feeling

Jake woke up suddenly in total darkness. At first he thought he was in bed in his rooms in Comyns. Certainly and more pressingly he had a severe headache, his mouth was dry, he needed a pee and he knew something awful had happened. He was also lying in an uncomfortable position and unwontedly was naked. As soon as he moved he found that the pillow under his head was thinnish where his Comyns one was fattish and the bed itself, the mattress, was slightly concave where his Comyns one was very slightly convex. He was on his right side with, as it soon proved, one edge of the bed within a few inches of his chest. What about the other edge and, more to the point, the intervening space? At the speed of a foot a minute he pushed his left hand out behind him. When the back of his middle finger touched what was probably a bare bottom he didn't do what instinct might have led him to do and recoil as from a nest of serpents, because he had already made up his mind that he could hardly be anywhere else but in Eve's bed with Eve; he drew his hand back in good order and adjusted his position as far as he could without setting off the fear that he might wake her, which wasn't at all far, hardly any distance really.

Memories, half-memories, inferences, questions, emotions, prospects, interrupted now and then by self-abandonment to passive suffering, came at him in great profusion. To methodise the inextricable, he determined that he had began to feel drunk, as opposed to merely recognising with benefit of hindsight that he must have been drunk, some time before they left the restaurant. Then they must have left the restaurant. Then he had tried to insist that they should go to a pub not only to have another drink but also to buy a bottle for later, with what success in either regard he had no idea. There had also been something about getting a bottle from the Comyns buttery instead because the pub was shut or too far or unwilling to sell bottles, or might have turned out to be one or other of these, but quite likely the thought had never attained action or even utterance. Later there had been the interior of a taxi or other vehicle of that size and general construction with him kissing Eve in it, and after that a room that also had him kissing her in it—a downstairs room, with a clock. Then he had found himself lying naked half on top of her on a bed, doubtless this bed, and doing the most extraordinary things to her with his hands and mouth. He knew he had done closely similar things to her and other women innumerable times in his life, in the fact the two sets of things were virtually identical except for the recent one being so extraordinary, not seeming, being: what on earth could have possessed him? He had wondered that then and he wondered it now, on and off.

Finally, or rather "finally", since it came circling round his mind every half-minute or so, the awful part. He knew nothing about it except how it felt, but that was quite enough. Oh, he did know it was awful in a non-new way, so he hadn't strangled Eve or pleaded with her to tie him up and whip him or pee on him. That was something, though again it didn't feel like much. Reason pointed to fiasco-plus-reproach, fiasco-plus-her-being-decent-about-it and fiasco as the most promising contenders; emotion pointed away, anywhere away from speculation about what it was. On each of its reappearances he tried vainly to assure himself he was better off in ignorance.

Actually there was one more thing he knew about the awful part: it asserted without fear of contradiction that he must do all he could to go on seeing to it that Eve stayed asleep as long as possible, till there was light enough for him to find his clothes, the door, the stairs, the kitchen at least. He wasn't going to go off without facing her but he must face her as his daytime self. A close consequence of these necessities was that any sortie for the discharge or intake of fluid, with its entailed voyage across a totally uncharted bedroom, was ruled out. Iuppiter irrumator o tetrakopros. Oh bugger. Wait a minute. In fact it was two or three before his inquisitive hand, moving as slowly as it could while still describable as being in motion, found a glass of something, presumably water, on something or other. Ah—but then he hesitated. To drink would alleviate one of his discomforts, but wouldn't it aggravate another? Not so's he'd notice: in his present condition the liquid would be doing fine if any of it reached his stomach, let alone his bladder. So he drank (it was water), and sure enough by the time he had settled the glass back again he could feel the first faint dryness returning to his tongue and throat. Just then his headache gave him something to think about for a change by taking a turn for the worse. From the start it had been one of the localised sort, well entrenched above the right eyebrow and the area slightly to the left of there; now it started pushing downwards into the top of his nose and the inner corner of his eye-socket. He rubbed and squeezed at the place, finding that the pain and the action together did a little to divert him from the short mental loop he was constantly tracing and retracing.

Where was Syd? Not around; that much was plain and little more seemed needed—Eve could be trusted to have seen to it that he wasn't going to cease to be not around at any sensitive stage. In fact that little more was all there was going to be: Jake never knew where Syd was that night and so likewise never knew whether his absence had been engineered or merely taken advantage of. He wondered about that for a bit till he saw it didn't make much odds. Where was here? He had forgotten anything Eve might have said to him or the taxi-driver that indicated which direction it was or how far it was from wherever they had picked up the taxi, though he could well remember having been in the taxi for at least fifteen seconds. When he listened he heard a distant vehicle, then another—no clue there. She had mentioned Headington, sure, but in a connection that implied past rather than present domicile. He wasn't approaching the problem in a spirit of pure disinterested inquiry. In the end there could presumably be expected to be a morning; when it came he would be all right if he was in Rawlinson Road, but if he was in a cottage half-way between Thame and Aylesbury he might find some difficulty in getting back to Comyns and picking up his lecture-notes in time to make it to Parks Road by eleven, this on the assumption that Comyns, lecture-notes and the like still existed.

Round about this point something he hadn't bargained for happened: a light went on at the other side of the bed. He went into a distinguished underplayed imitation of a man sound asleep, breathing deeply and regularly nearly all the time, not being lavish with grunt, sniff and swallow. So matters seemed to rest for a couple of minutes; not having sat up or made any other detectable move she could hardly be reading. When the minutes were up she got out of bed without the flurry he had half-expected and was to be heard walking away. A swift blink showed her naked back-view going out by a doorway in the far corner. He looked about: his clothes, or most of them, seemed to be on and around a chair next to a dressing table at the window. And he now knew where the door was, but to gather up clothes and exit either instantly or later, in the dark, wasn't worth considering, so he looked about the room further. It was quite a big room with a certain amount of probably expensive furniture in it, and some pictures, paintings—he did notice them. Clever old Syd and lucky old Eve.

He heard a cistern flush and revivified the role of sound-asleep man. Quietly but audibly she came back into the room and over to the bed, this time to his side of it. Silence and stillness. What was she doing? He opened his mouth a little and shut it again. Nothing continued to happen. The moment at which he would have to scream and thrash about approached and arrived and prolonged itself. After he had given up hope she sighed, made a small wordless noise that might have indicated contempt or affection or sadness or pity or almost anything else but pleasure, went around the bed, got carefully back into it and switched off the light.

The return of darkness had the effect of informing him authoritatively that he wasn't going to sleep again that night. The soporific effect of the alcohol he had drunk had long since been dissipated, his Mogadons were far away and the bottom sheet had become strewn with little irregular patches of hot semi-adhesive sand. More than this, his recent struggles to breathe regularly had fucked up some neural mechanism or other so that he now seemed to be breathing by conscious control alone: in, hold it, out, hold it, in. He kept trying to yawn but couldn't fill his lungs to the point where he could turn the corner, get over the hump and exhale naturally. So exhale anyhow, hang about and try again. He didn't know whether to be glad or sorry that he hadn't looked at his watch while he had had the chance.

In the end he came to a state of which it could be said with more truth than of any other in his experience that it was between sleeping and waking. He had thoughts; no, there were thoughts, each one of an unmeaningness, of a neglect of any imaginable kind of order that caused him leaden wonderment, numb doubt whether he would ever be able to go back to proper thinking. They came along at a regular moderate pace, each one a dozen or twenty words or word-semblances long and lasting a few seconds before being overlaid by the next. Most of them posed as statements of remarkable fact or hitherto unformulated views and beliefs, though a few were pseudo-questions that it was out of his power to begin to try to answer; the nearest comparison was the sort of stuff they gave you to read in dreams.

They receded sharply at an abrupt clashing sound and a voice saying Tea but didn't go away altogether for the first few seconds after he opened his eyes and at once started to come back when for excellent reasons he shut his eyes again. He struggled up to a sitting position, having to take his time about it because of the way his head rolled about like a small baby's unless he concentrated hard, and concentrating at all was no light matter. The curtains had been drawn back and it was full day, in fact, as he saw when he had hauled and crammed his glasses on to his face, seven-forty. There was indeed a cup of tea on the bedside table and he got it to where he could drink from it without spilling a drop outside the saucer. The state of his bladder had become something he could live with, given his present standard of living, so he sat and sipped and felt the hot sweet brew sinking into his tissues and doing him no good at all. When he had finished he got up, put on his trousers, soon found the bathroom and thank Christ. After that he drank, by way of tap and tooth-glass, something approaching his own weight in water. There was a metal cabinet above the basin, in the mirror of which he gained a first-rate view of his face. It looked as if it had been seethed in a salt solution for a time and then given a brisk buffing with sandpaper, but it felt as if it had also been lashed with twigs. He bathed it gently, which left it none the worse. More extensive ablutions would have meant deferring the time when he should be fully clothed and that would never do.

Back in the bedroom he got trousers off, pants on, trousers back on double-quick, then slowed right down, his head pounding. The ache in it was now firmly established in the top of his nose and had even moved on to the inner end of his left eyebrow, but it had relinquished a little of its former territory on the other side of his forehead. As he started to get up after easing on his shoes a wave of giddiness pushed him forward in a sudden crouching run that, if not checked, might well have sent him out of the window. The move brought him a view of what looked very much like part of North Oxford: one fear disposed of. He tied his tie and combed his hair, thereby making his arms ache a lot, put on his jacket and went.

He found Eve in a large well-equipped kitchen reading the 'Daily Telegraph,' which she lowered when she saw him. Her glance and tone were pointedly neutral.

"You look bloody awful," she said.

"Yes."

"How do you feel?"

"If you don't mind I think I'd rather not try to answer that question."

"Spirits don't seem to agree with you."

"They differed from me sharply this time."

"Would you like some breakfast?"

"No thanks, I must be on my way."

"Cheero then."

"Look, I'm sorry about last night."

"Which part of it?" When he didn't speak she went on, "You don't remember much about it, do you? I might have known. Well, at your urgent insistence we went to bed, an act of sexual intercourse duly took place, and you immediately turned—"

"Oh really?"

"Yes really. If that's what was bothering you you can forget it—honour was satisfied. In fact considering how pissed you were you did quite well. It was what happened afterwards that you might consider feeling sorry about."

He waited but in the end had to say, "What was that?"

"Fuck-all. You said Good night love, turned over and went to sleep."

"I was tired. And pissed."

"That's when we show what we're like. You practically went on your knees to get me to play, when you'd promised not to try when you first asked me, right? and I told you twice at least I'd be breaking eight years of being faithful to Syd, yes we've been married quite a bit longer but it took me a while to give up my old ways, and then you do that. A nice man would have tried to make a girl feel it had been worth while, however tired and pissed he was. No that's not fair, a man who sees more in women than creatures to go to bed with, a man who doesn't only want one thing. So you see I've rather come round to Brenda's way of thinking. Suddenly. Before last night I couldn't have agreed with her less."

Again he could think of nothing to say, though on a larger scale than before: he had the awful part squarely in front of him now.

"Don't worry about me." Eve picked up the paper again. "I'll get over it. You're the one with the problem. Turn right outside and you'll be in the Banbury road in three minutes."

He found his raincoat in the hall and saw himself out. When he got to the Banbury road he saw he was only about half a mile north of St Giles", say a mile all told from Comyns. It wasn't actually raining and a walk would do him good. It did, in that it brought about in him an additional form of physical exhaustion to help take his mind off his other troubles. He stepped through the wicket with what alertness he could muster: he must not run into Ernie, be found by him entering college at a quarter to nine in the morning. At first sight there was nobody about. He tiptoed over to the lodge and had a peep: one of the tinder porters behind the glass partition. Moving quite naturally now he went in, nodded good morning, wished he hadn't nodded anything, went to his pigeon-hole and was turning over a couple of pieces of mail when he heard the approach of a familiar and dreadful creaking sound. Perhaps he could just..... He was still a yard or two from the doorway when Ernie was there, filling it, well not filling it but making it hard for any creature much larger than a rabbit to get past.

"Morning, Ernie," said Jake, taking a half-pace diagonally forward as if he somehow expected the porter to make way for him.

"Morning, Mr Richardson." Of course he didn't budge. "You're up early." He looked more closely; it wasn't going to do Jake any good not to have been actually witnessed at the gate.

Had a night on the tain have you sir?"

"Staying with, with friends."

"Yes, you always were a bit of a night-ale, like, but never much of a .... If I didn't know you better I'd have said you'd been draining your sorrows. I just hope you don't feel as lazy as you look."

"Oh yes. No. Now if you—"

"Oh well, in for a penny, in for a bloody—" Ernie advanced suddenly and with a loud creak, his head twisting round over his shoulder. "Sorry sir, I didn't know you was there."

"Well, now you do, now you do. Morning, Jake."

It was Roger Dollymore, looking offensively fit and spruce. The sight of him was an instant reminder of the College Meeting to be held that afternoon and the hortations to be delivered there for and against the admission of women. No doubt Dollymore's was already prepared. Jake's wasn't. He stumbled off to his room to see if he could think of anything to say.

20—Girls Everywhere

He thought of something quite soon and wrote it down on the spot, and that was a good idea, because not long afterwards he was just wondering whether he could possibly feel worse, given present circumstances, in other words not given epilepsy or impending execution, when he put his mind at rest about that by starting to feel not only worse, but worse and worse. The newcomer among his sensations was anxiety. By the time he reached the lectern in Parks Road it was advanced enough to reduce his entire audience, the little bastard from Teddy Hall along with the rest, to immobile silence. They were all keyed up for the moment when he should collapse and die or start screaming and tearing off his clothes. But he disappointed them. When he had finished he cancelled his tutorial with the Bradfordian, savoured an all-too-brief moment of self-congratulation at his own sagacity and fought his way back to Comyns through a medium that seemed appreciably denser than air. In his sitting room he ran his eyes over the print of some of 'The Hippogriff Attaché-Case'. He wanted to lie down but what he didn't want was another dose of those bloody thought-substitutes.

Having (purposely) missed breakfast he decided he had better try to eat some lunch and managed to get quite a decent way through a portion of steak-and-kidney pie with cabbage and mashed potatoes. It was slow work but he left the SCR in bags of time to get over to his rooms, throw up and stroll back so as to arrive in the Grade Room on the stroke of two. Inside him there continued to lie a dissolving Mogadon, taken with the object not of inducing sleep, which your true-to-form College Meeting could do on its own, but of soothing his nerves: Curnow had said when prescribing the stuff that it was a muscle relaxant, which surely must mean that it relaxed the muscles, and offhand he couldn't think of any muscle of his that couldn't have done with some relaxation bar his sphincter, which for the last four hours or so had notably excepted itself from the tension that possessed him.

Lancewood was already settled in his usual place, half-way down the left-hand vertical, so to speak, of the hollow square of baize-covered tables, at the top horizontal of which sat or shortly would sit the Master, the Dean, the Senior Tutor and other holders of office. Jake went round and joined Lancewood, who at first sight of him said,

"Hallo, how terrible you look."

"Ernie was saying much the same thing this morning."

"Even Ernie is right sometimes. I think it's your eyes mostly. No, that's too easy—it is your eyes, but it's your mouth mostly. Its shape has changed. What have you been up to?"

"Oh Christ. Are you in to Hall?"

"Yes, and at a loose end afterwards. Skip dessert and come straight over to my rooms."

"Christ. I mean thanks."

Very soon afterwards Marion Powle came in and took his place at the centre of the top table. He announced that the minutes of the last meeting had been circulated and asked if he might sign them as correct. Jake could find no more objection than anybody else. Then Powle recited the names of lazy bastards who had said they weren't coming. After that part the Estates Bursar was called upon to introduce Agenda Item 3. (They mean Agendum 3, thought Jake.) The item or agendum in question concerned the sale of some college property in a part of the kingdom that had until just the other day borne the name of an English county but was now known by some historically authentic title that meant as good as nothing to anyone. The price quoted ran into six figures and was immediately agreed by those assembled. It was a very different story when the next item—agendum came up. This time the focus of attention was the proposed new chairs for the library, the joint proponents of the proposition being the Domestic Bursar and the Mods don who doubled as the Librarian of the college. A prototype was brought in by a menial and examined with some closeness, several leaving their own chairs to see it better. At first it seemed to gain some approval, and when Wynn-Williams sat on it and it didn't collapse its adoption looked almost certain. But then the cost was asked for and given at £125 and all over the room there were wincing noises, rather like but in sum louder than those made by Brenda on getting into a cold bed. For a chair! they all kept saying—for a chair? Not quite all. 'Of course' it seems a lot, said Jake to himself, but haven't you noticed that 'everything' seems a lot these days, you fucking old fools? In the end the Domestic Bursar, after he had made it plain that it would be no use going back to the maker and trying to beat him down, was instructed to do just that.

The next topic was described simply as Stanton St Leonard Churchyard. All Jake knew about Stanton St Leonard was that it was a village to the north-west of Oxford, that the living of its church was in the gift of Comyns and that 'by way' of consequence a part of its churchyard was set aside for the remains of Fellows of the college, an amenity not much in use for however long it was since they had been permitted to marry. Probably the local authorities wanted the place concreted over and a community centre or skateboard park built on the site.

The Master looked round the meeting with a serious expression. "Now I'm afraid I have a rather serious matter to draw to the attention of Fellows," he said seriously. After explaining about Stanton St Leonard for the benefit of the recently elected, he went on, "During the vacation a certain Hoyt H. Goodchild, a citizen of the United States, was visiting relatives in the village when he suddenly died. It seems that these were his only relatives; at any rate, there was silence on the other side of the Atlantic and the family in Stanton decided to bury Mr Goodchild in the churchyard there. By a most unfortunate and grievous coincidence the rector was away at the time and the, sexton ill, and evidently neither had briefed his substitute in full, because on returning to their duties they found Mr Goodchild buried at the Comyns end."

There was a general gasp of consternation, almost of horror, in which Jake couldn't quite prevent himself joining. Funny how we all overact at these get-togethers, he thought to himself: what ought to be of mild, passing interest attracted passionate concern or a facsimile of it, ordinary care for the interests of the college came out as crusading zeal. All part of being donnish.

Powle was continuing, "Both men have expressed their profoundest apologies but that's hardly the issue. I must have some guidance here. Senior Tutor?"

"No difficulty that I can see," said Dollymore. "He'll have to come up, won't he?"

Wynn-Williams and some of the other senior Fellows showed their agreement.

"I don't really think we can quite do that," said Powle.

"We won't have to do anything, Master, it's up to those two in Stanton to set right their mistake."

"There would have to be an exhumation order, which might not be easy to obtain. And there are the feelings of Mr Goodchild's relatives to be considered, surely."

"They'll be village people, I don't expect much obstacle there. And as for the exhumation, the authorities are bound to understand our historic right not to have a total stranger, and an American at that, in our own sacred ground. Why, some of those graves go back to the time of the Civil War."

"I think everybody here understands that, Senior Tutor, but I very much doubt if the authorities would, to the point of taking action that is. They'd be nervous of the publicity and I couldn't blame them."

"It's out of the question, sir," said the political scientist who ran a current-affairs programme on TV.

"Out of the question to do what is fully within our rights and in conflict with no law?"

"I'm afraid that in this case we'll have to bow to the opinions, the prejudices if you like, of .... outsiders," said Powle.

"Good God," said Dollymore. "What a world it's become."

"You're proposing that no action be taken at all, Master?" asked Wynn-Williams.

"Not necessarily. Are there any suggestions?"

There were none for half a minute. Then a natural scientist of some sort asked where Goodchild's grave was in relation to the others and was passed a marked plan of the churchyard. On examining it he said,

"As one might have expected it's at the end of a row and it also happens to be near the yew hedge. One might be able to plant a section of hedge, or transplant one, better, so that the intruding grave is as it were segregated from the others."

This suggestion was debated at some length; in the end it was agreed upon. But Roger Dollymore hadn't finished yet. He said defiantly,

"It'll be all very well until the autumn."

The writer in residence, who had often declared that he had done no writing at all as yet and had no plans for doing any while in residence, and who was wearing a red-and-black upper garment the material of which had been fashioned by human ingenuity, and who had uttered a loud yelp of deprecation on hearing Dollymore's first proposal for the treatment of the offending cadaver, said, "What happens in the autumn then?"

Dollymore said as to an imbecile, "The leaves fall."

"And?"

"And cover the ground."

"So?"

"So somebody has to clear them eh-way."

"Like?"

"Like? Like?"

"I mean who, you know."

"Oh who. Well not the sexton is what I'm suggesting."

"Why not?"

"Because his responsibility is to us, not to Mr .... Goodchild or his relations. He must have nothing to do with that grab and it'll be an ugly sight by Christmas."

"I think we can probably come to some compromise arrangement there," said the Master with a confident smile. "Now—Garden Committee to report on the south lawn."

So it went. Nearer and nearer came 12: Admission of Women, and step by step Jake's anxiety mounted, some of it now detaching itself and identifiable as anxiety about his anxiety. What the bugger was wrong with him? He hadn't had a hangover for thirty years but he could have sworn that today's was a radical departure. Well, thirty years were thirty years, weren't they?

Finally, by way of closed scholarships, a report from the Wine Committee, a discussion of a vile sculptured thing some people wanted put in the front quad and stuff like the recommendation from the historian of drama (the one who put on plays full of naked junior members of the university torturing one another) that the library should start a sexism section, 12 arrived. It opened innocuously enough with a summary of what the other colleges had done in the matter of admitting women and what their policies for the future were, as far as these could be discovered or inferred, all ably presented by young Whitehead. And it went on, if not innocuously then at any rate not leading to physical violence, with Dollymore back in the limelight outlining what he saw as the case against admission. Quite radiant with hypocrisy he led off with the point made by Smith in Jake's hearing a couple of weeks earlier, that to let women into men's colleges reduced the status of the women's colleges. After that he mentioned the harm he thought would be done the academic performance of Comyns undergraduates by the distraction from their studies he thought they would suffer. Then he unwisely stressed the opposition of the college staff to the scheme, unwisely because it was hard to think about the college staff without thinking first and foremost of Ernie, and if there was anything that could have united that motley Governing Body it was that whatever Ernie was opposed to you were for. As his final argument he dilated on the incompatibility between a mixed college and the kind of intimate communion which members of Comyns had enjoyed for seven centuries; undergraduates came and went, but Fellows lived their lives here. "All that," he ended, the dramatic effect heightened rather than the reverse by his bleating tones, "all .... 'this' .... would be lost—for ever."

There was a general murmur of appreciation of a case well put or at least strongly felt even if not necessarily found convincing. "Thank you, Senior Tutor," said the Master. "Now I call on Mr Richardson to put the other view."

"We are dealing here with an example of something we have all encountered more and more often over the last twenty or thirty years: a trend." Jake spoke a little inexpressibly because most of his attention was concentrated on getting the words out with their syllables in the right places. "I would say two things about trends. One is that while many or most may be undesirable and on those grounds to be resisted, a trend is not undesirable per se. The other is that while no trend can be said to be irresistible until it is altogether dominant, there are trends to which resistance seems likely or very likely to be vain. In such cases it may be better, more advantageous, to yield at once rather than fight on. So we don't resist a policy of admission just because admission is the trend, nor do we resist it if we have no or virtually no chance of winning. In my view that chance disappeared five years ago or more if it had ever existed. I therefore appeal to the anti-admission party to yield at once, thereby giving itself the chance of doing what it would no doubt call salvaging something from the wreck rather than being finally compelled and so losing the option.

"Such is the pragmatic case, and discussion there will turn on the resistibility or irresistibility of the trend. But before we come to that let me briefly state the human case. I see it as divided into three. One, from what we were hearing earlier, both men and women undergraduates are overwhelmingly in favour of admission in general. As with trends, this is not sufficient grounds for resistance. Two, when they arrive here these young people still have some growing-up to do, and to be able to do it in close daily proximity to members of the opposite sex is a clear and considerable benefit." (There was a faint stir of rallying, chaffing etc. at this but Jake didn't notice it.) "Three, admission to men's colleges is the only way so far devised of providing more places for women while leaving relatively intact the present collegiate and university structure."

It was done. He found he was panting and leaned forwards over the table, head lowered, while he tried to recover his breath unnoticed. There was a handy interval before and while Dollymore asked if he might ask a question, was told he might and asked it.

"I'll take up Mr Richardson's 'relatively' intact collegiate structure in a minute; for now I'd like him to tell me if he would whether he regards the provision of more places for women as a, as a clear and considerable benefit."

"Indeed I do," said Jake, grinding it out. "Mr Whitehead's figures show clearly the disparity against women."

"I take that point: women candidates are competing for a proportionately smaller number of places. What assurance have we that to increase that proportion will reveal a similar or comparable increase in the proportion of those found acceptable?"

"I'm afraid .... I suppose...."

"More fundamentally, doesn't Mr Richardson's clear and considerable benefit rest on what I will persuasively call the faith that academically acceptable women are as numerous or about as numerous as their male counterparts?"

Jake's fists were tightly clenched under the table. "In posse if not in esse."

"A dangerous concession, surely, but let that go. May we hear some evidence for this academic parity or approximate parity?"

"The view I'm advancing can't be supported by figures or by self-sustaining facts, only by an adequate number of individual indications that woman is the intellectual equal of man, that her powers of observation, analysis, induction and so forth are on a level with his, and that her admittedly inferior performance numerically .... er .... results from a number of .... social factors of which one is that they can't, I mean she can't get into a university as easily as a man."

The writer in residence spoke. "Look, are you trying to tell us—" He checked himself at something said to him by the philosopher who was co-editor of a London weekly paper, then went on, "Sorry, got it wrong. Is—what?—is Mr Richardson trying to tell us he believes that? About women being equal to men? Does he believe it?" He looked round the room as if pleading for enlightenment. "I mean, you know, like really 'believe' it?"

"I think—" began the Master but Jake rode over him. He didn't know or care whether the writer in residence was trying to do more than, demonstrate the impartiality of his contempt and/or simply draw attention to himself: he (Jake) saw in him a slight physical resemblance to the little bastard from Teddy Hall, who was little in worth, not size, but who by some association led him to think of Chris at the Workshop and even of Rosenberg. Rage and dizziness struck him together.

"Of course I don't believe it, you...." He stopped just in time to avoid technically calling the Master what he had been about to call the writer in residence. "I was asked to put a case and I put it, that's all. No doubt they do think, the youngsters, it's be more fun to be under the same roof, but who cares what they think? All very well for the women no doubt, it's the men who are going to be the losers—oh, it'll, it'll happen all right, no holding it up now. When the first glow has faded and it's quite normal to have girls in the same building and on the same staircase and across the landing, they'll start realising that that's exactly what they've got, girls everywhere and not a common-room, not a club, not a pub where they can get away from them. And the same thing's going to happen to us which is much more important, Roger's absolutely right, all this will go and there will be women everywhere, chattering, gossiping, telling you what they did today and what their daughter did yesterday and what their friend did last week and what somebody they heard about did last month and horrified if a chap brings up 'a topic' or an 'argument'. They don't mean what they say, they don't use language for discourse but for extending their personality, they take all disagreement as opposition, yes they do, even the brightest of them, and that's the end of the search for truth which is what the whole thing's supposed to be about. So let's pass a motion suggesting they bugger off back to Somerville, LMH, St Hugh's and St Hilda's where they began and stay there. It won't make any bloody difference but at least we'll have told "em what we think of "em."

Only then, when he had in a sense finished, did Jake become aware of just how hard Lancewood had been squeezing his arm, of the pantomime of apology, helplessness, agreement and doubtless more that the writer in residence was putting on, and of what sort of silence had fallen. The Master thanked him with preternatural composure but Jake felt he couldn't very well stay after what he had said and how he had said it, matters on which he was already not quite clear. His headache drove and twisted at his brows. He asked to be excused, hurried out and stood in the main SCR with both hands on the back of a chair. Lancewood was only a couple of seconds behind him.

"I'll just see you over to your rooms."

"No I'm all right, you go back."

"Don't be silly, it'll only take a second."

"No Damon, if you don't go back straight away they'll think there's something really wrong. Tell them, say it's side-effects of some new pills. Please, Damon."

"If you're really sure. But we'll talk later."

"Yes. Yes, we will. Thanks."

As Jake approached his staircase he met Ernie coming out of it. The porter gave one of his fiercest winks.

"There you are after all, sir," he said. "I told your visitor you probably wouldn't be arraigned for a bit, with the College Meeting and all, but she said she'd wait if that was allayed, and

I couldn't find it in my heart to say her nay. She really does you credit, Mr Richardson, at your time of life—take a bay!"

"What? Oh yes."

He hurried into his sitting room, unable to venture even a surmise.

"Hallo, Jake," said a strange girl in a green trouser-suit.

21—I Can Help You

The next moment he saw it wasn't a strange girl at all but Kelly, smiling, coming up and shaking hands. It bothered him, made him think himself senile, that even with the trouser-suit due he hadn't recognised her at first, though he tried to cover this.

"Kelly, how nice to see you. What are you doing in Oxford?"

"Paying a call on you, Jake. Actually I've been staying with an aunt in Woodstock, so I thought I'd look you up on my way back to London."

"Jolly good idea, I could do with a bit of lively company. I've just come out of a meeting of such boredom...."

"You don't look well, Jake. I know one isn't supposed to say such things, but you don't."

"Had a rotten night. I feel as if I hadn't slept a wink."

"Bad luck. Of course if you're used to sleeping with someone else it is that much more difficult on your own."

"Yes," he said, keeping to himself the fact that his troubles had come about in the opposite way. "How did you track me down?"

She smiled again. "Oh, I'm good at that sort of thing. Remember how I ran you to earth in Burgess Avenue?"

"Finding me here must have been a damn sight more difficult."

"Not really, Jake. Not to me."

"You're a clever girl." He looked at his watch. "We could go out and have some tea soon."

"It's a little early, isn't it?"

"I suppose it is, but I've got to be back here at five o'clock to talk to some undergraduates."

"Can't you put them off?"

"Not possible, I'm afraid."

"You could ring them up," she said coaxingly, nodding towards the telephone on his desk.

"They're not in the same place, they're all over Oxford. I couldn't hope to reach them in the time."

"Oh, what a bore."

"I'm sorry, but if you'd let me know you were coming...."

I still wouldn't have done anything about it, he finished in his mind. At her remark about the demerits of sleeping alone a little alarm-bell of uneasiness had sounded there; it continued to purr away as he came to recognise that she was talking and behaving in an entirely different style from the one she had used at Burgess Avenue the previous Saturday. No cheerful confidence or confidingness now, no long eager speeches; instead, languor with a querulous edge to it. Above all, the Kelly of Saturday would never have tried to get him to cancel his seminar, would on the contrary have offered to leave at once in case he had preparations to make. So he had been half justified in not recognising her straight away. He had meant what he had said about being glad to see her; he only hoped that the uneasiness would turn out to be misplaced, that things were going to take a turn for the better after the last twenty hours or so, that she was no more than tired or perhaps shy without Brenda's diluting presence. Ah!-Saturday—Kelly would certainly have—

"How's Brenda?"

"Oh .... she's fine, thanks."

"I bet she doesn't come here much, does she? No, I thought not, she wouldn't be able to stand it and quite frankly I'm surprised you can, Jake. I mean look at this, pretend you haven't seen it before and look at it properly." Kelly indicated the padded chair she had just got up off. "Isn't it absolutely revolting?"

"I know it's not very nice, but I don't spend much time here, so...."

"What happens when you entertain?—oh of course you're going to tell me you don't entertain. I can't understand how a cultivated man like you can bring himself to live in such, well I can't call it squalor because it isn't actually dirty or damp or anything but it's pretty damn slummy you have to admit. Not even a picture to take your eyes off it. And honestly these curtains, you'd have thought .... Oh I say that really is something. How gorgeous."

Jake joined her at the window where she was apparently admiring the buildings on the far sides of the quad. "Yes it is pretty good, isn't it?"

"What is it, early eighteenth century?"

Christ, he thought mildly. "Yes, about then."

"It must make up for a lot, having that out there in front of you all the time. What's the other way?"

She turned and made for the open bedroom door, past which daylight was to be seen. He followed her.

"There's not a great deal, but...."

"Do you mind?"

"No, go ahead."

The bedroom window showed a stretch of wall and part of the rear quad of Jesus College. Kelly looked appreciatively at them for a few moments and started to back to the sitting room, or so Jake thought till he made to follow her and found she had shut the door and was facing him with her back to it.

At first he felt only mild surprise and puzzlement. "What...."

"Jake, listen to me, this is important and we don't have very much time. We haven't known each other very long but I feel we appreciate each other and I don't know about you but I can say I trust you. It's an old-fashioned expression but I wish you well, and that's good because I can do something for you, I can help you with your problem. You might not think so but I've had a lot of experience, you could almost call it training. You put yourself in my hands and it'll all work out. You just leave everything to me and I mean everything. Okay? Right, let's go."

All this was said in such a friendly, reasonable tone that Jake couldn't believe she meant what he knew she meant until she crossed the room, a matter of no more than a couple of strides, quick ones in this case, and dosed with him, her arms round his neck and what Ed and Rosenberg would call her pubic area pushing into his. Jake had had to evade or discourage amorous females before, though admittedly none as forceful as this, and without Ed and Rosenberg and all that, and in particular without Eve, he would probably have done better than do what he did do, which was to pull Kelly's arms away and thrust her from him and call on her in a frightened voice to leave him alone, leave him alone.

She showed her teeth; as he had noticed before they were good enough teeth, white and regular, but this time he saw something about the way they were set in the gums that told him beyond all doubt who it was she had reminded him of on Saturday. He was horrified and got ready to defend himself, crouching with his balls tucked between his thighs, but she didn't come at him, didn't even throw anything at him, perhaps because there wasn't a lot to throw, no ashtray, no water-jug or tumbler and again no pictures. All she did was shove the bedside lamp on to the floor, which did no more than knock the shade off its frame, and abuse him verbally. She used not only what is often called foul language in great copiousness and diversity but also foul ideas, and produced surprising variations on the themes of old age and its attendant weaknesses. After some minutes she stopped all at once in mid-incivility and seemed taken by a fit of violent shivering. By degrees she moved to the side of the bed and sat down on it with her hands on her knees. Then she started to weep.

Jake had come across lachrymose females before too, but never one like this, never one who gave such a sense of intolerable pressure within, as if what was being wept over was growing faster than it could be wept away. "Sorry," she said as the tears flew from her eyes, "sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry...." She must have said it a hundred times, each time if possible with a different inflection. Jake sat down next to her, though not very close to her, gave her a clean handkerchief out of his drawer, and kept telling her it was all right, and in the end she stopped saying sorry and merely sobbed continuously.

"You aren't planning to expose Ed or anything like that, are you?" he asked as soon as he thought she might be listening.

She shook her head violently.

"You're just one of his patients, and Rosenberg's, aren't you?"

This time she nodded so hard it involved her whole body.

"Were you just after me when you came to the house?"

Another nod.

"There isn't any aunt in Woodstock, is there? .... Is it true what Ed said, that you can't run your life? .... Have you been like that for a long time? .... What's just happened here this afternoon, has it happened to you before? .... Often? .... But you have had a lot of men? .... Have you enjoyed it? .... Where do you live?—I mean you do live with your parents? .... They're kind to you, are they? .... But your father isn't in the theatre and you haven't studied acting?"

Each time he got the answer he expected. He looked at his watch: he had half an hour to get this creature fit to move and to move her before his class started to assemble. But none of it could be hurried. Meanwhile there was another question he wanted to ask, for no good reason that he could see, another yes-or-no question in form but to which he hoped for a more than yes-or-no response. When the sobbing had become intermittent he said.

"You came up from London just to see me? Just for this to happen?"

"I suppose in a way," she said in a dazed blocked-up voice. "But it wasn't all I did. I came up quite early and had a look round the shops and found a good place for lunch in that street where there are no cars, and then I thought I couldn't come and see you right away, so I went for a nice walk by the river first."

He would very willingly have done without this information. "But you did .... expect me to turn you down?"

"In a way." She sobbed for a little before she went on, blinking at the floor. "I didn't used to get turned down much but now I nearly always do, but I still go on. Dr Rosenberg says that's what's wrong with me, I don't learn from experience, but I'm quite intelligent and I'm young, he says, so I might get better one day. I'm sorry I said those things, they were horrible and I'm ashamed. I didn't mean any of them."

"I know, I could tell that. I didn't listen, I couldn't tell you what they were now."

"I must go, I've wasted enough of your time, and with you feeling rotten after your bad night."

"That's nothing. I'll get you a taxi."

"No don't bother, I can walk."

"Not in this rain. It's about a mile to the station."

"I've got my umbrella."

"No, listen, you come along here." He took her slouching and subdued into the small bathroom that occupied the space of what until not at all long ago had been part of the bedroom. "You freshen up while I telephone for a taxi."

It sounded plausible enough; the trouble was that a telephone, a British telephone of the 1970s, came into it. Following procedure he dialled 9 and got to the exchange, then started on the number of a taxi firm he always used. After the first digit a kind of steady cooing noise sounded, which meant that according to the telephone tens of thousands of people in the Oxford area had had their line communications cut by fire, accident or flood or in consequence of mass non-payment of bills. Further attempts brought the same absence of result. He tried to raise the lodge with the idea of getting the porter to dial direct—no reply. A last go at the taxi number succeeded, granted that being told there would be a delay of twenty minutes was success. Well, he had better treat it as such: if all parties went strictly by the dock, taxi and seminarists would coincide at the lodge, but he was unlikely to be able to improve on the present offer in the time, so he said yes thank you and rang off.

Kelly didn't reappear for quite a while, which was bad because he wanted to be sure of getting shot of her, but good because he didn't want to have to talk to her or deal with her in any way before getting shot of her. He was about to go and give her a knock when she stepped quite briskly out of the bathroom, collected her long-handled umbrella from where he hadn't noticed it and came and stood in front of him.

"I'll go whenever you want me to," she said.

He looked her over to see if she was presentable and then just looked. In general her skin was even better than at first glance, but there was some roughness near the eyes that he didn't think had arrived in the last half-hour, and he noticed a broken blood vessel or two in her cheek.

"How old are you, Kelly?"

"Twenty. Twenty-one in September."

It seemed a bit soon. "Now I want you to know that when I turned you down it was nothing to do with you, it would have been the same with anybody. Ed got it wrong, it's not that I can't, I can but I don't want to. With anybody. It wasn't you, I think you're very attractive."

"Don't worry, I shan't bother you again, I never try twice with the same person. You're quite safe."

"That's not what I mean. If I fancied anyone I'd fancy you, believe me. I'm just old and past it. Ten years ago I wouldn't have turned you down."

"You really haven't got to worry."

"But..... Oh very well, let's be off."

"You've no need to come, I'm perfectly okay now. I expect you'd like to have things ready for your students."

"I just want to make sure you get the taxi all right," and also make sure you don't go and lay about you with your umbrella in the chapel or, more important, in the gift shop.

She used it for its intended purpose as they moved across the quad, protecting him from the light drizzle as well as herself. In a way that might have been natural she took his arm.

"If only I had a bit of sense," she said thoughtfully, "I could have quite an enjoyable life. For instance today, when you said let's go out and have some tea I could have said yes let's, and we could have had a nice talk and perhaps we might have arranged for me to come up another day and you show me round Oxford or something, and we could have been friends, and now we can't."

"It would have been difficult anyway," said Jake, not knowing a hell of a lot about what he meant.

They reached the lodge and stood about outside in the dry for a minute or two. The Bradfordian, always inclined to be early, came through the wicket, saw Jake and hesitated. He didn't look at Kelly.

"Carry on, Mr Thwaites," called Jake. "I'll join you in just a moment."

"You'll have to go." She had moved some feet away and spoke without looking at him, presumably in an effort to spare him the embarrassment of being associated with her. "I can manage, honestly I can."

It was true he would have to go in the end, but the taxi might not come for another twenty minutes or ever, and for some reason he shrank from the thought of her walking to the station after all. At that point Ernie appeared in the lodge entrance. Jake made straight for him.

"Ernie, I want a word with you."

The porter made a half-revolution as smartly as a guardsman and with Jake closely following retreated into the inner lodge, behind the glass partition. "Sir?"

"The young lady is a little upset. I've ordered her a taxi. I have a lass in two minutes. Would you see she gets off all right?"

"Receiving you laid and clear, Mr Richardson. Send her in here to me and I'll do the necessary, you may be sure—skate's honour, sir!"

Outside again, Jake told Kelly the porter would look after her and then hesitated.

"Thanks. Good-bye," she said, shaking hands. Her eyes were smaller than when she had arrived but not very red. "Sorry again."

"That's all right..... Good-bye."

"See you Saturday," she said as he turned away.

Saturday? Saturday! Dies irae, dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla. And ballocks. Real ballocks. Very serious ballocks indeed.

22—Phallus's End

"Eve, Eve, what is Eve? Well of course when we've looked at the books and got our sums right and done our bigs and wiped our bottoms and at the end of the day, Eve is Eve is Eve is Eve is Eve, and I don't mean the mother of mankind or any such form of words inconsonant with the meaningful and relevant vocabulary of our secular society in these the dosing decades of the second millennium, no sir, no siree, ya bedder believe it, right on, daddio, you cotton-picking bastard, get with it, stay tuned as leading Oxford campus hostess and elegant conversationalist Eve Greenstreet, wife of uncontroversial ithyphallic banker Syd Greenstreet, goes on about what she's sorry but she simply can't avoid describing as her endlessly fascinating self, and why don't you piss off?"

Lancewood screamed quietly, as if half to himself. "No. No. It can't be. It's not in nature."

"I assure you I've reproduced it with toiling fidelity, the most aridly pedantic literalism conceivable. Except of course in point of duration. You'll have some idea if you imagine what you've just heard lasting about three hundred times as long."

"I daren't, I'd go mad."

"I'd had as much as flesh and blood could stand after five minutes," said fake. "My most obvious counter was feigning illness, but that's not as straightforward as it may well sound. Any really serious disorder is ruled out—heart-attack, stroke, apoplexy, all of them alluring, and in the circumstances extremely plausible, but quite apart from how you deal with the doctor you find you can't face the upset, the ambulance and all that. At the other end of the scale, headaches and so on have been worked to death. So you need a dose of something incapacitating but not dangerous, in the "flu mode let's say. The trouble with that is you can't just suddenly start quivering like a jelly and saying you've got to go home—well actually in this case I'm pretty sure I'd have got away with it, but I didn't know that then. I thought then I'd need acting ability, again wrongly, and a reasonable build-up, call it an hour at least from the first passing shiver to deciding to pack it in, plus time for getting the bill, finding a taxi and being loyally seen home. And time was the very thing I couldn't spend any at all of, so I went on the booze.

"Now as you know Damon, I don't enjoy getting drunk and I absolutely hate being drunk, riot understanding what you're saying and feeling as if you're moving about on the sea-bed but still able to breathe. But I didn't think it would come to that when I started off, you see. I was working on the principle of lowering the old critical faculty, blunting the responses and such to the point where she'd merely be boring the arse off me. But I never got there, I can't have done, I mean I can't remember what happened late on or even latish on and I can only reconstruct bits of it, but I must have got utterly smashed and found I still couldn't stand her and threw a pass purely and simply to shut her up, which I'd as soon have thought of doing before she turned up, throw a pass I mean, as fly in the fucking air, as you shall hear. I don't know why I didn't just go home instead because it must have been quite late by then and I don't know where I did the throwing but I do remember it worked, that's to say it shut her up. And also to say it was accepted, or since short of rape it's always the woman who decides, it was encouraged, never mind she hung out a don't-try-anything sign when I invited her and a rotten-sod-for-taking-advantage one this morning. This morning, Christ. Anyway .... encouraged. She couldn't have got it all worked out as a conscious strategy could she? If you want cock talk balls kind of style? No of course she couldn't.

"It wasn't just balls though, as I hope I conveyed to you. One's used to that. This is Oxford, let's face it, as she'd say screwing up her nose to show she was being witty. No, it was her thinking she was the thinking man's rattle that made me want to watch her being eaten alive by crocodiles. You know, don't be so dazzled by how terrifically brilliant it all is with all those frightfully clever little cameo parts and absolutely marvellous imitations and accents, don't be carried away by all that so that you don't see that underneath it's 'bloody good stuff,' wickedly observant and cruelly accurate and actually very concerned about the state of the language and of our society too. Like Mencken only sexy with it. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. And the insensitivity. I've been given to understand in the last few weeks that I'm not as good as I used to think I was at disguising my feelings, especially when they're feelings of contempt, hatred, weariness and malicious hilarity as they are most of the time these days. Well with Eve, for the first hour or so, until my face got tired, I smiled and nodded and twinkled and tried to laugh, and then, but this was well 'after' I'd realised she was going to bat through to the end, then I stopped bothering. Cold. And she didn't notice a thing. Brenda would say of course she'd noticed and that made her nervous so that she couldn't think of any other way of going on. Well I've had my nervous moments but I doubt if I've ever been so frozen with terror that the recourse of shutting my trap has fled my mind. But then Brenda's been...."

Jake paused. After a moment Lancewood got up and put two more logs on the fire, then went out carrying the electric kettle. The room was pleasantly warm and Jake's chair, his every time he came here, more comfortable than any in his own rooms or at Burgess Avenue. Beside it stood a small table bearing a teapot with an embroidered cosy, a Minton cup and saucer and plate, a silver dish with shortbread on it and a glass that had held Malmsey, the only after-dinner wine he really enjoyed. The lights were too low for him to see any of the pictures in detail but he liked them to be there. Outside he could hear rain and wind and nothing else. Physically he was almost himself again, and though it would be different soon enough he felt completely safe, not just secure from harm but in some positive sense he couldn't define. A passage of Horace stole into his mind unbidden, so he booted the bugger out again a bit sharp, and quite right too.

All manner of clocks started striking ten-thirty. Lancewood came back and plugged the kettle in at his side of the fireplace. He was wearing what he called his upper crust old queen's smoking jacket in mulberry-coloured velvet.

"One or two questions occur to me," he said. "For instance, since you seem to have started hating the lady very much almost as soon as she arrived, why didn't you just tell her you found you had a headache and must leave at once?"

"Oh, Damon. Chivalry. And a long way behind that, memory of the fact that I see her every other day I'm here in the course of duty. To have walked out then and there would have been an insult, whereas my later behaviour in taking advantage of her did no more than damage her self-respect a lot. And I didn't know what my later behaviour was going to be until later, if then."

"Very well, why did you invite her to dine with you? Had you forgotten all about her? Or I suppose she'd changed out of all recognition, had she?"

"That's more like it, as a question I mean, or questions rather. I invited her because I wanted to confide in her on a matter soon to emerge. As regards her revoltingness, I did try the Marx-Brothers theory briefly, that she had been great fun then and had stayed exactly the same but the lapse of time, it must be fifteen years or more, had made me see her as bloody awful. Change of taste in the world at large, not just in me. It's tempting but I'm afraid it won't do."

There was a longer pause. Lancewood made tea; it was a China blend you never saw anywhere else but in this room. Even before he had expected, Jake's sense of safety began to slip away from him. He said without much solid intention that he must be going soon.

"Soon or late, you're not going till my curiosity is entirely laid to rest, and if that takes another three hours, so be it. Drink your tea."

Jake obeyed, which is to say he took a sip; it was delicious. "Quite amazing, the consistency with which I saw everything about her as what it wasn't, I'm talking about the past. I mistook her egotism for sparkle, her knowingness for judgement, her cheap jeering for healthy disrespect and her .... vulgarity for plain speaking. Oh, Christ, and, something I haven't mentioned up to now, her habit of saying I know I talk too much and then going on talking too much, I thought that was engaging insight and disarming frankness instead of bullshit. She gets things wrong all the time too. Now the reason I never even rose to the level of giving her the benefit of a couple of dozen doubts whenever she did or said anything .... let's take it in stages. I hardly knew her before I started having a successful affair with her, I mean we suited each other physically. But it wasn't that, because I went on seeing her after it was over, on at least one occasion for a whole evening, and I thought I'd forgotten all about it but later on I remembered one thing, or realised one negative thing, I hadn't started wanting her to be dead the moment she opened her mouth—that would have stuck in my mind. And I'm sure, this I can't remember but I'm sure from experience with other ex-girl-friends that I didn't sit there goggling at her tits and thinking about how it used to be and what fun if we tried it again. No, it was just that in those days I was a normal man with a normal interest in women and now I'm not. Yes Damon, I've lost all desire, though funnily enough not all performance, so last night might have been worse. Different, anyway. But since I can't remember anything about it, not a hell of a lot. I'm undergoing "therapy" for my condition, needless to say without the slightest effect.

"You see the really awful part about last night wasn't anything that happened during it. I'll have to go back a bit. Without ever really thinking about it I'd been working on the assumption that the only reason women were tolerated was because the world was run by men, normal men who by definition didn't see them as they really were because they were looking at them through, er, a kind of distorting—"

"Horn-rimmed spectacles."

"Sod you. Yes. Once I even played with the fantasy that the point of women being in season all the time with only brief interruptions, and even those aren't treated as interruptions among primitive peoples I read somewhere, anyway if they were like dogs or rather bitches with intervals of several months during which they aroused no sexual feelings at all then most of "em wouldn't make it, they'd get their bloody heads kicked off before they could come on heat. Well that was all very well, quite harmless, the sort of thing a lot of men say on the understanding that they don't really mean it, "not really, especially men who are ones for the ladies.

"Now we come to last night, the awful part about it. The reason I could be so wrong about her wasn't so much that I'd been looking at her through horn-rimmed spectacles as that I hadn't been listening to her at all, not a word she ever said, she just didn't interest me. And I could have sworn she did, I could have sworn I'd identified her as what did I say, lively and clever and plainspoken and so on. But I'd really-only-wanted-one-thing. She told me so this morning and that's when I saw it. I don't even like them much. Women. I despise them intellectually—as the Governing Body now knows. Christ, that reminds me, I must write to the Master."

"What about?"

"What about? Me blowing my top at the College Meeting, that's what about."

"Oh, that. You did cause a bit of a stir at the time but these things soon blow over as you know, or rather as you would know if you'd always attended as regularly as I have. Behaviour that would be taken as evidence of madness or brain damage or the utmost malignity outside is just something that helps to make life interesting when we do it. Comes from being in college. Rather like the Army. For instance Wynn-Williams and the Jehovah's Witnesses, were you there or did you ever hear about it? I'll tell you another time. Go on about not liking women."

"Yes. Well, last night was a sort of illustration of it. I think in a nasty way I quite enjoyed it, at least until I got pissed, watching that female make an exhibition of herself. The thing is, it's not them, it's me. I don't see them as they are any more than I did before. I haven't got those spectacles any more but that doesn't mean my sight's improved. Is it possible to be objective in a case like this? What I feel is imagine me thinking I liked them all those years when I didn't really care for them one bit. Rather sad. Makes you wonder, too. I mean can it be only me? Eve used to screw around a lot at the time I knew her, so there must have been plenty of other blokes who failed to notice she was intolerable company. And blokes who screw girls who screw around a lot are usually blokes who screw around a lot, like me or rather me as I was. More support for the idea that womanisers don't like women. Whereas in fact, in fact they are nice, aren't they Damon? You ought to know, you've never fancied them for an instant and you like them."

"As you say, but Jake love, you're depressing yourself, it's not as bad as you think, you're still suffering from the various tolls that have been taken of you."

"I'd better go to bed."

"Not in your present mood. I understand now why your final contribution this afternoon was so emphatic. A lot of what you said was true but only as far as it went. There's one thing you ought to try to remember. Men have their own ways, just as efficient ways, of being evasive and overbearing and dull and thoroughly unsatisfactory. Perhaps I see some of them a little more clearly than you do. That ought to make me more tolerant when a girl tells me she thinks Hamlet was a woman. I don't say it does but it ought to. What about Brenda? She's the only one who matters."

"She says I only want one thing too. Of course I don't know how far she...." Jake spread his hands.

"Oh dear. That is rather untoward, I do see."

"I'm supposed to be working out what I feel about her. I don't dislike her, which is a start of a kind. I like having her about the place. I like chatting to her, but I don't find myself wanting to tell her things—I remember in the old days whenever I read or heard or thought of anything funny or striking or whatever it might be, my first thought was always, I must tell Brenda about that. Not any more. I suppose I ought to tell her just the same—my "therapist" works on the principle that the way of getting to want to do something you don't want to do is to keep doing it. Which seems to me to be a handy route from not .... pause .... wanting to do it to not wanting, wanting not, to do it. But I am paying him to know best. Brenda wants affection, physical affection. She also needs it and ought to have it. My chap is always on at me to go through the motions of it on the principle I've described. I'm a bit scared of being shifted from not-pause-wanting to do that to not wanting to do it. Do you know what I think I am, Damon. A male chauvinist pig. Until the other day I'd never have dreamt of saying that about anybody, least of all myself. Just goes to show, doesn't it? I think if you don't mind I will bugger off, before I depress myself into a decline. But thank you."

It was of Kelly, not Eve or Brenda, that Jake was thinking as he trotted through the rain to his rooms. How did she fit in? He didn't think he felt any affection for her, which might have had something to do with what she had said about things like his dick—easy to forgive, not so easy to forget—but he couldn't be sure while his main feeling for her was still pity. She certainly aroused his interest, genuine interest as opposed to the testosterone—fed substitute that had graced his sometime dealings with Eve, but again that interest might well attach to her as a phenomenon rather than as a person. Oh well. On arrival he shut his outer door in case Mrs Sharp should be on her way into college to hear from his very lips whether he wanted his study curtains washed, and took the plastic phallus out of the drawer where it had lain for the past fifteen days, out of sight all the time and out of mind too except when he had been in London or on his way there. With a paper-knife, a razor-blade and his bare hands he eventually reduced it to fragments too small for it to be made recognisable again by anyone but a three-dimensional-jigsaw-puzzle grandmaster, should such a person exist. As he worked Jake muttered to himself.

Ah now me poor owld bogger, sure it's athackun your own masculinithy yiz are. Ochone, ochone, yiz do be performun an acth of sexual self-thesthroction, do yiz know. Guilth and shame have been rakun havoc wid yiz so dey have, acushla machree. Jasus, Mary and Joseph, de resolth of inorthinathly sthricth thoileth-thrainun thoo be sure, wid maybe a spoth of sothomy ath your poblic school trown in. And bethath and be-fockungorrah, loife's a soighth aisier dis way if yiz ron tings roighth."

23—Extreme Bourgeois Puritan Conventionality

As well as Kelly's visit to Oxford, that day had seen ball lightning in Glasgow. Later in the month the weather improved, with long spells of sunshine that reminded Jake of one of his summer terms as an undergraduate before the war, he couldn't remember which. At the beginning of June, while Brenda stayed with her Northumberland cousins, he spent a couple of nights with Lancewood and his friend John at their cottage near Dry Sandford, sitting out on the lawn with them till an advanced hour. It didn't last: the rain came back, accompanied by cold and thunder, in nice time to damage Eights Week and plague examinees scurrying to and from the schools. The last day of term, the last of that academic year, was one of the worst.

Even so, the Oxford end of Jake's life over those weeks had been normal, even satisfactory to the limited degree possible: he hadn't trampled Miss Calvert to death. the little bastard from Teddy Hall had taken to cutting (no doubt it was called boycotting) his lectures and it looked as if Thwaites, the Bradfordian, was going to get his First in Part I, as against which the Cardiff man had been offered the job and had accepted. The London end, beyond question the larger one, had in the meantime not done too well. Jake kept up his visits to Rosenberg who displayed, whether or not he really felt, great interest in the Eve episode; it was possible that his mill had been getting a little hard up for grist. Naturally he tended to concentrate on his patient's fragmentary recollections of the act of sex he had performed, trying to elicit more of them from him.

"Let's go over the whole thing again at a snail's pace," he would say.

"I honestly don't think I can do it more slowly than last time."

"Ah, you can try. Now you commenced manual manipulation of her breasts."

"Yes, I thought pedal manipulation was ruled out one way or another," Jake ventured to reply on one such occasion. "For instance etymologically."

"I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't quite follow."

"Never mind. Yes, manual manipulation of her breasts was just what I did commence."

"And what were your feelings as you did so?" Rosenberg would pursue.

"I've told you. That it was odd, that it was bizarre."

"You mean you found it disgusting."

"No, again as I've told you, all I found it and everything else I can remember was odd or bizarre."

"You suffered feelings of shame."

"No, and not of guilt either. Not even whatever you called it, personally orientated guilt about my wife. I wasn't thinking of her at the time."

Another recurrent theme had to do with Jake's fantasies, in the sense not of his private daydreamings but of his commissions of these to paper for Rosenberg's inspection. Each fresh attempt brought the same response, the same as the very first, the one about the fantastically beautiful girl with the unbelievable figure. The holder of that MA (Dip. Psych) shook his small head, drew in his breath and sighed, cleared his throat repeatedly and in general behaved much as Jake would have done if confronted by an essay attributing the origin of Mediterranean civilisations to colonists from outer space. There was the same effect of not knowing where to start.

"I'm a doctor," was a favourite opening of Rosenberg's. "I'm 'your' doctor, Mr Richardson. I'm not going to be shocked, you know, by anything you think or say or write."

"No, I believe that."

"If you do—I beg your pardon, seeing that you do, why don't you come clean? Or rather"—it was well worth watching, the deliberation with which he steeled himself the first time he leaped the yawning semantic chasm in front of him—"come 'dirty!?'"

"Well, that's the dirtiest I could do. You must admit I've made progress, cutting out all the soft and warm stuff and being heavy on the Anglo-Saxon."

"True, true, but it's all too normal, too straight. I've never worked with anybody who hadn't some slight deviation, often more than one-voyeurism, fetishism, a very wide field there, sado-masochism, even more so...."

"I'm sorry to disappoint you, I must be a very straight man."

"In some ways indeed you are, to the point of extreme bourgeois puritan conventionality partly resulting from your having attended a single-sex school."

"Oh come off it, man." Jake never quite got over his incredulity at this accusation.

Twice at least Rosenberg tried to support his view by referring to the goings-on at the McDougall. "Several of the photographs that were shown to you there you found offensive. In particular one featuring the female sex organ."

"Yes, I remember. I said it was ugly and so it was, to me, and I bet a lot of other men would say the same and to find it an ugly sight in a photograph isn't the same as finding the whole idea disgusting which I know is what you're working towards."

That usually stopped that one, though Jake's eccentric and psychologically sinister dislike of undressing in mixed company was sometimes taken into consideration. Like all Rosenberg's others, this line of inquiry was continuously and abundantly boring but at least, by the relaxed standards of the matter in hand, it had some observable relevance. The same could not be said of an occasion when Rosenberg produced a machine either called something like a GPI or designed to do something called something like GPI. It was somewhat smaller than the nocturnal mensurator (itself long since returned to him and never mentioned since) and was supposedly designed to measure nervous tension. The thing worked by in the first place measuring something else, sweat, perhaps, or changes in skin temperature; Jake, who didn't listen to Rosenberg whenever it seemed legitimate, wasn't listening. Pads connected by wires to the machine were fastened on his thumb and middle finger, a switch clicked and a different sort of dick, as from a small loudspeaker, followed. It proved to be the first of a series of such dicks, one every five or six seconds. Rosenberg took him on an imaginary stroll round Orris Park and the clicks stayed the same, sat him in his study and the rate increased slightly, put him in the bedroom with an undraped Brenda and the machine behaved like a Geiger counter in a plutonium shop. They didn't try that again.

Actually that happened on the first Tuesday of the summer vacation. The dating was fixed in Jake's mind because something much more extraordinary happened then too: there was a moment of mild interest, nothing to do with the "therapy" of course. He had mentioned the end of the Oxford term as he sat down on arrival.

"Ah yes," said Rosenberg, "to be sure. That means you'll be having several months at your disposal which you'll be able to devote exclusively to research because of your freedom from teaching responsibilities."

He spoke with marked reluctance, indeed with sullenness, as if he had been offered too good a price for reciting those couple of dozen words to be able to turn down the job but wasn't going to throw anything in the way of pretending to care. Jake came back with something like Yes and the psychologist's manner changed completely, became just that, in fact, as he set the ball rolling with a fervid inquiry after his patient's early morning erections.

He must have got an answer but Jake knew nothing of it. His mind had sped back to their very first encounter when Rosenberg had used the same grudging tone in talking of his ancestry, then forward again a week and a bit to their convivial chat in the Lord Nelson. There had been an air of resentment, almost of hatred, about the way he had planked down that couple of miserable facts about his friend (friend? friend?) the editor of 'Mezzanine' and how long he might or might not go on editing it—yes, in that way worse for Rosenberg in the pub, because pubs were places where you were supposed to have real convivial chats, not like consulting-rooms or hospitals where you ran the show and need only waste a few seconds on tittle-tattle before getting on with 'what really mattered'.

"No, no erotic dreams," he said to Rosenberg. Another one was what he was saying to himself, another fucking displaced egotist. As the ordinary sort cared only for maintaining or advancing their own position, judging always in terms of what was useful, never of what was interesting, so this sort put a cause or subject in place of self, identified with it to a degree seldom envisaged by those fond of that term and made everything an example of something, some theory, generalisation, set of facts already in their keeping. He had run across plenty of them in his time at Oxford, as he had half-remembered while he ordered his drink in the Lord Nelson: atheistical religionists who talked, not all that much better than Eve had done, about the hidden powers of the mind, philosophasters, globalequality persons—all or any of whom Rosenberg had reminded him of on the same occasion. That was today and yesterday; the day before yesterday had been far less daft, with Marxists of various sorts predominant or thought to be: as an undergraduate he had had pointed out to him a not very old man at Exeter to whom all evils flowed from what he still called Bolshevism.

Some of this occurred to Jake on his way home after the consultation. It was then too that he reconsidered Rosenberg's fitness for his job. He had tentatively decided, that time when the Workshop was assembling, that a psychologist could afford not to know a great deal outside his subject and still do well enough within it. What about a psychologist who didn't care in the least for the world outside it, even resented its existence? There were fields of study in which indifference or antipathy to all other matters could be no handicap, those fields in which the presence of an observer had a negligible effect on what was observed—astronomy, for instance. Jake felt that psychology must be a different case, so much so that he now doubted his earlier view. Any student of the mind would surely be a good deal hampered by lack of all acquaintance with some of its more noteworthy products—art, for instance. But he didn't bother to pursue the thought because whatever conclusion about Rosenberg he might arrive at he was stuck with him.

And that was because of Brenda. It would be unfair to say that she had faith in Rosenberg; to her, he was simply the expert whose instructions must be followed regardless. No, a little more, in that to query any of those instructions was seen as captious at best, as showing less than a burning desire for sexual betterment. Other things were similarly seen, most of all Jake's persistent refusal to accompany Brenda to the Workshop after the first try. Ed had it in for him, he said; there was no knowing what the man might get up to next, given the chance. He also said he was uncertain, unhappy, unconvinced, things like that about the procedures followed, pale versions of his real feeling that if Rosenberg was a bit suspect Ed was a ravening charlatan. (Didn't Rosenberg's readiness to send his patients to work with Ed make Rosenberg worse than a bit suspect? Not quite necessarily: he might find he gained fresh insight that way, might be standing by to intervene should the facilitator require one of the participants to be disembowelled by way of smartening him up. He—Rosenberg—got a mark for not having put any pressure on Jake to resume attendance.)

Another thing Jake didn't tell Brenda was as much as the bare fact of Kelly's call on him in Oxford. His silence was variously motivated. Admitting in effect that she had been right and he wrong about the girl would have gone against the grain, though he minded that sort of thing less than most men. It would have distressed him too to recount the incident in full, and although some people might have consented to be fobbed off with a fifty-word synopsis, Brenda was certainly not one of them. There was also the good rough rule that said that telling one female anything at all about your dealings with another was to be avoided whenever possible. And there was a fourth reason which eluded him at the time. Anyway, keeping quiet was another discouragement from changing his mind and starting to go to the Workshop again: one little extra apology for having invaded him, accidentally or accidentally-on-purpose within Brenda's hearing, and that would be shit. Well, he wasn't exactly palpitating with hunger for Kelly's company but he did want to know how she was getting on, for which his only source was Brenda-Rosenberg had gone all professional ethical on him when approached. Since he couldn't hurry things up by admitting his interest he had to sit through Brenda's weekly bulletins with the best grace he could muster, and recent experience made him see to it that his best was pretty bloody good.

"Well, we started with scanning pairs and free scanning as before," she said on the first Saturday evening, "and then we did parents and children."

"What's that?"

"First you're your father and then you're your mother and then you're yourself as a child."

"How do you mean?"

"You act it. You pick somebody of your own sex and talk to

them as if you were your father talking to you."

"Oh yes?" said Jake, leaning forward eagerly. "What about?"

"Whatever Ed decides. About your father, about sex-you try and remember what he did say. Telling you off. A good deal of that."

"Really. It must call for quite a bit of acting ability."

"You'd be surprised how good some of them are. Lionel was marvellous as his mother, he even managed to look like her. Well you know what I mean."

"Yes of course." He gave himself a mental pat on the back for having detected intimations of queerdom in Lionel.

"Martha was very interesting when she was her mother—you remember her mother's horrible to her, but Martha wasn't horrible at all, when she was being her mother I mean. You know, reasonable and kind and everything. Most odd."

"Mm. It sounds absolutely—"

"Your friend Kelly was really the star turn."

"Was she?"

"As herself as a child. Honestly it was quite frightening. The voice particularly. If you'd shut your eyes you could have sworn it was a child speaking. She was different from the time before. Much madder. Of course she wasn't putting on a show for you today. She asked after you in the lunch-break."

"That was nice." Quite safe, he thought; Brenda wasn't one to save things up, very much the contrary.

"She hasn't been round here since last Saturday has she?"

"Good God no," he said, sounding shocked. "Whatever gave you that idea?" He wasn't acting; his shock had come from the immediate perception that only the luck of the draw had made Brenda ask what she had asked instead of whether Kelly had dropped in on him, say, and from the thought of how he might have reacted if the draw had gone against him. Anybody would think I was having an affair with the bloody girl, he said to himself irritably.

"Just the way she asked after you. I expect that was to get at me."

"Why should she get at you?"

"Because she's after you, or was. Probably moved on to somebody else by now. You're not still falling for that investigative journalist impersonation, are you?"

He frowned in thought. "I don't know. Anyway, if you're right she sounds a rather pathetic character."

"Oh yes she is, some of the time."

"Sorry darling, I'm afraid I don't quite get you."

"I mean she has a pathetic act to go with her bright act and all her other acts. She's never genuine. That's what's wrong with her."

He didn't dispute this aloud and the talk moved on, eventually reaching Geoffrey and causing Jake momentary but keen regret at not having been there to see for himself. Perhaps Brenda had sensed his interest in Kelly, because in subsequent Saturday debriefings she would tend to mention her late and cursorily or not at all. To take it out of him deliberately in such a way didn't quite fit her character as he had come to know it over the years, but then she seemed as the weeks went by to be changing in other ways too, nothing spectacular or even easy to pin down, in fact the nearer he got to doing that the sillier it sounded. She was becoming more friendly and at the same time less intimate; amiable and talkative, never anywhere near chucking crockery about and yet not, or not so much, or not so often, or perhaps indeed not turning her eyes on his in the full deep glance he had known before. He found something comparable in her behaviour during the non-genital sensate focusing sessions on which, after the almost total failure of two successive genital dittos, Rosenberg had ordered them to fall back.

"Is that nice?" she would ask, stroking his chest. "Or at least comparatively nice, I know this isn't your kind of thing much but there must be degrees, quite good and not so good. How is it?"

"Oh, quite good."

"Or would you like it sort of harder, you know, pressing down more?"

"No, that's fine as it is."

"You're meant to be really relaxed to benefit from it. I'm sure it's beneficial anyway, in general, I mean. Anything that reduces stress must be, don't you think?"

"Well, so people keep saying."

"I think it's generally accepted..... Right, my turn, but let's have a kiss first..... Now you do my hip. Let me show you. All the way from here down to here and up again, slowly. Try it..... That's it but not quite so lightly. I find it helps at first to shut your eyes and think of something peaceful, like a garden or a lake. You ought to try that."

This matter-of-factness helped Jake. He still didn't look forward to the focusings but the gloom their prospect had aroused in him was somewhat alleviated. The hard work he put in each time not to seem to be gritting his teeth seemed to have its effect: there were no more complaints of lack of affection. On the two occasions when Brenda went with him to see Rosenberg in Harley Street and was asked what she thought of her marital situation, she answered in summary that it could be better but was coming along not too badly. Even her reproaches for not coming to the Workshop fell away. He began to feel occasional stirrings of hope, though his relief each time Rosenberg didn't order a return to genital sensate focusing was as heartfelt as ever. Funny how it had worked all right with Eve, he thought to himself more than once, or perhaps the difference was simply that then he had been free, responsible to nothing and nobody.

Over the weekend after the end of term the same small thing happened three times: the telephone rang, Brenda went to or across the kitchen to answer it and was hung up on as soon as she spoke. She mentioned burglars; Jake said they'd be wasting their time. He would have forgotten all about this if a not-quite-so-small-thing hadn't happened on the Monday evening while he was watching the nine o'clock news on BBC 1. The telephone rang; cursing mildly he made his way out and answered it.

"Is it possible to speak to Mrs Richardson please?" asked a very hoarse voice with at least two accents in it, one foreign, another perhaps regional, and a couple of speech impediments.

"I'm afraid she's out." Earlier, Brenda had said she was going to a film about gypsies with Alcestis, the sort of thing she had done two or three times recently, if not a spiffing scheme in itself then a bloody sight better one than bringing Alcestis here.

"Can I get her later?"

"She won't be back till eleven at the earliest. I suggest you—" Click. Jake would have forgotten all about this too if, ten minutes later, the doorbell hadn't chimed and it hadn't turned out to be Kelly who had caused it to do so.

"Jesus Christ," he said.

"It's all right, no trouble I promise you, I'm perfectly okay, I can only stay a minute, can I just come into the passage?"

He looked at her. She seemed to have shrunk a good deal since he left her to Ernie, perhaps because of the head-scarf that flattened her hair against her skull and the tightly drawn raincoat, but her manner was much what it had been then. Anyway, what could he do? He stood aside and shut the door after her.

"What do you want? Was it you on the telephone just now?"

"Yes. Brenda hates me. She's probably quite right. Have you told her about me coming to see you in Oxford?"

"Certainly not."

"Good, I didn't think you would have done. I haven't told anybody, not even my parents. What I wanted to ask you was about this week-end Workshop."

"What? What week-end Workshop?"

"Didn't Brenda tell you?"

"No. You'd better..... You can't just stand there, take your things off and come and sit down."

"It's okay, honestly."

"Do as I tell you. Now what's this all about?"

"It's the week-end after next, starting on the Friday evening, the 8th, at least that's when we're supposed to get there so as to be able to start work in good time in the morning. The place is near Salisbury."

"I see." He saw more clearly that she had had her hair cut very short like a kind of rufous helmet. It took three or four years off her apparent age.

"Funny Brenda not telling you, Ed and Dr Rosenberg announced it last Saturday week. I...."

"What?"

"I expect it slipped her mind. Why did you stop coming after just the one time?"

"It simply struck me as frightful rubbish and a complete bore."

"Oh I quite agree, but..... What I wanted to ask you, do you think you could possibly come to it, the week-end Workshop I mean?"

So many expressions, most of them impure, tried to get out of Jake's mouth at once that for the moment he said nothing articulate.

"You see I'm absolutely dreading it, I can't tell you how much, but my parents want me to go and they're so sweet to me I really can't not go, and I thought if you were there, just there, somebody I trusted, I wouldn't feel so bad. I wouldn't, you know, do anything, I couldn't with Brenda about all the time, could I?"

"I'm sorry, Kelly, but you must realise it's quite impossible."

She got up at once from the corner of the settee where she had been sitting for less than a minute. "Never mind, it doesn't really matter, I'm sure I'll manage all right, it was just a thought, of course it was ridiculous to expect you to, I quite understand."

"I am sorry," he said, following her into the passage.

"No no, don't be, forget it, I shouldn't have asked, put you in an embarrassing position, just thinking of myself as usual." Being an erstwhile successful womaniser Jake had acted against his better judgement a number of times, but never more directly and more consciously than when he said, as he did now, "All right, sod it, I'll see if I can fix it up."

24—Something I Want to Show You

Fixing it up was not straightforward. To approach Brenda—yes, why 'hadn't' she mentioned it?—with stuff like thinking of popping up to Dry Sandford again about the 8th or 9th would be to put in an urgent request for trouble. Luckily the next day was Rosenberg day, though here again care was needed: no Kelly-told-me or Rosenberg might in his innocence or whatever it was drop that one in front of Brenda. After a resume of his latest self-abusive adventures Jake casually let fall that he was thinking of another try at the Workshop, not on the Saturday to come because he had to be in Oxford then, but on the one after, the 9th. Expressing no surprise at either his ignorance or his change of mind and not the heartiest approval of the latter, perhaps because it damaged his guilt-and-shame thesis, Rosenburg gave some particulars of the proposed weekend and went straight on, or rather straight back since they had been there several times before, to Jake's early sexual feelings and experiences. Of these he had managed to remember a very fair amount he thought he had forgotten without thereby changing his condition in the slightest.

When he brought the week-end up with Brenda she did express surprise, saying she had told him about it on the evening of the day she had herself been told, but now she came to think of it it had been at the end of the evening, most likely after he had taken his Mogadon and so was in a drowsy inattentive state. Her approval was a shade warmer than Rosenberg's but not unqualified: he had always said the Workshop was rubbish so what had happened to change his mind? Well, he had been thinking, and couldn't help being impressed by the fact (it was a fact) that she constantly said she was the better for the experience, and a weekend in the country would be nice. All right, but he wasn't to piss on the proceedings; he promised not to.

No sooner was the thing fixed up than the tonic effect of the actual fixing-up subsided and his qualms began to mount. It was true that Brenda's reports had included much activity that was daft, pointless, unpalatable and (wait for it) boring but nothing positively unsafe, lewd or illegal; just give that Ed bugger a free hand for forty-eight hours though, in a house as comparatively remote as the one designated seemed to be and for openers, as he would say, you'd be getting off lightly with gladiatorial games. And what might Kelly get up to? He turned his mind away from that, concentrating it on the thought that whatever dire possibilities occurred to him he couldn't fail her, not appear. Once, he was hard at it when he fancied he recognised the extra reason why he hadn't told Brenda about Kellyin-Oxford: if he had he would never been able to get away with wanting to join in on the weekend. Funny what you could see coming without knowing it.

As the day approached it began to look less baleful. He had found out by indirections that Geoffrey was to be of the party, so a touch at least of entertainment and satisfaction of malice was guaranteed. Then there was plain curiosity. And then there was the weather, hot and sunny all week long. When Friday arrived with more of the same and the time began to move along to six o'clock Jake felt little tingles of expectation, as he had once done before every out-of-the-way journey with the prospect of someone new and wonderful at the end of it.

Almost dead on the hour a fair-sized yellow car of foreign manufacture drew up as arranged outside 47 Burgess Avenue. It was driven by Ivor, whom Jake wouldn't have recognised after their one meeting a couple of months before. He turned out to be in his thirties, tallish, fairish, serious-looking and doing quite well in a building society. Beside him was Geoffrey. As could be seen when he emerged and came to the front door, he was most peculiarly got up in a sports jacket and flannel trousers, a shirt with an unobtrusive check, a plain woollen tie that matched his socks, and brown brogues; it was almost as if he had 'tried' to choose clothes appropriate to a week-end in the country. Mind you, he must be bloody hot in them, there was that to be said. While giving a hand with the Richardsons" luggage, shutting the boot, getting in beside Jake at the back and waiting for Brenda, he explained with a thoroughness such as to defeat all misunderstanding that he had left Alcestis their car, his and her car, to do with as she pleased; this one, this car, the car they were sitting in, belonged to Ivor, was Ivor's car.

Jake remembered very well the senile-dementia treatment he had had meted out to him at the original Workshop and wondered whether Geoffrey intended his last few hundred words as more of the same with more yet to come. If so, he was going to be in trouble quite soon, but before Jake had fixed on just what kind he caught sight of Brenda hurrying up the tiny garden path and forgot all about Geoffrey for the moment.

After so many weeks of conscientious dieting she had lost something like two and a half stone and could no longer be called fat. With the weight she had taken off some apparent years too and would have passed for forty. She was wearing what must be a new dress in pale green silk, some not very serious brown-and-white shoes and an openly frivolous white hat. How fetching, how pleasant, how 'nice' she looks, Jake thought to himself; must remember to tell her so at first opportunity.

There was some trouble with the hat when she got in beside Ivor but it passed off easily enough and they were soon on their way across town to get on to the M20. The traffic was thickish, though not so bad as it would have been if most of the people motoring out of London to the West of England countryside and resorts hadn't downed their shit-shovels about noon (Jake decided).

"What a glorious day," said Brenda in a dreamy voice. "And how lovely to be driving; just think of fighting one's way on to a train at Paddington in this heat. I mean to be driven. It is kind of you to take us, Ivor dear."

"Not at all Brenda, I had three empty seats, and this is the only way I can travel. Has that come up, incidentally? My psychiatrist says it's quite common, chaps who can't face any kind of public transport or even a car or even being driven by someone they trust in their own car aren't bothered at all driving their own car. To do with being in control apparently. Isn't that interesting?"

It interested Jake, who remembered now about Ivor's phobias, in more than one way. As soon as they reached the M20 they moved into the fast lane and stayed there. Jake wasn't at all a nervous traveller but after a few miles he did start wondering what substantial fraction of the speed of sound they had reached. The object seemed to be to overtake everything else going in their direction: container trucks, articulated lorries, quite serious-looking private cars appeared in the far distance, swelled hectically in size and in effect hurtled past them like express-trains. Beside him Geoffrey stirred, shifted and made sudden darting movements with his head in pursuit of items that, seen clearly enough for long enough, might prove to arouse his puzzlement or dissatisfaction. At one point the momentary placing of a tall vehicle in an inner lane meant that he clearly missed a sign that Jake had happened to catch.

"Services in so many miles," he said, pretending to be trying to be helpful. "I couldn't see how many."

"What?"

"Services some distance ahead."

"What distance?"

"Services," Jake began, then noticed that Geoffrey's frown, in being from the start, deepened slightly at this third utterance of the noun. "Services are things like food, cups of tea, facilities for—"

"Wouldn't it be better to push on until we're nearer the other end?"

"I'm sure it would, I was just explaining about Services. As well as food and tea they have petrol and probably—"

"Are we low on petrol, Ivor?"

"No, I had a full tank when I picked you up, Geoffrey."

"There you are, Jake." Geoffrey gave a hesitant smile. "Right as rain. Nothing to worry about at all."

"I wasn't worrying for Christ's sake, I was telling you about Services because of that sign."

"Sign?"