Jake's Thing

"Yes, Geoffrey: 'sign'. The generic name for flat objects, often rectangular in shape, on which instructions or as in this case information—"

"Do please shut up, Jake," said Brenda.

Jake held his peace. After about another three minutes" driving they came off the motorway and found to their surprise an authentic old-fashioned family and commercial hotel where it proved possible to dine. All the dishes were firmly in the English tradition: packet soup with added flour, roast chicken so overcooked that each chunk immediately absorbed every drop of saliva in your mouth, though the waterlogged brussel sprouts helped out a bit there, soggy tinned gooseberry flan and coffee tasting of old coffee-pots. Jake wasn't hungry anyway: foreboding had driven out his earlier feelings of looking forward and there was some tension among the party, no doubt as a result of his surely pretty mild brush with Geoffrey in the car, so he didn't say much. The only one who did was Ivor, whose prowess behind the wheel had made them early and who had filled in the spare time with a few large gin and tonics.

"I don't think these psychiatrist chaps are much good," he said a couple of times in his agreeable full modulated voice. "Or perhaps the phobia lot are particularly lousy. I'm on my third and none of them have made a blind bit of difference. In fact .... well never mind. Do you know what my latest one tried to tell me the other day? You don't mind me going on about this do you? I don't often get the chance."

"You go on as long as you like, my dear."

"Thanks, Brenda. Well—do you know what this bloke tried to tell me?"

"No," said Geoffrey on brief consideration.

"Well you wouldn't would you Geoffrey? Now you've heard me go on about how I don't like the Tube, the Underground. Right, he took me down there the other week, we went all the way from Warren Street up to Hampstead and I was fine, didn't turn a hair. Next go—off, next day I've got to make the return trip on my own. I went down in the lift and on to the platform and in half a minute I was absolutely terrified. I got myself over it in the end with that deep breathing, but it wasn't funny. So I said all this, and he was 'surprised', because I'd done so well when we went together. And him with a syringe in his pocket with half a gallon of tranquilliser in it, enough to calm down King Kong. And he's 'surprised' it makes a difference. That wasn't it though, the really marvellous thing he told me. Now .... I'm an only child, it was a difficult birth, looks as if my mum and dad decided not to take any chances, I don't blame them. We've been through all that. Anyway, he asked me, when I said I'd been frightened he asked me if there was anything in particular I was frightened of, and I said yes there was, there was nothing on the indicator, no train signalled, and I thought, oh my God it'll never come, I'll be down here forever. And he said, now this is it, he said, me being afraid of nothing arriving in my Underground was all to do with my mum being afraid of something arriving in her Underground. Isn't that marvellous? Especially nothing being the same as something. I tell you, that cheered me up, it really reassured me, I thought, I may be a bit peculiar but at least I'm not as bloody barmy as to come up with that."

Jake, who had enjoyed the opening of this speech too, laughed a good deal, more than either Geoffrey or Brenda. Soon afterwards Ivor said they still had to find the house and he'd like to get there in the light, so the bill was called for. To Geoffrey's perplexity but without eliciting anything from him in the way of protest, thanks or contribution, Jake paid it; he considered that to save every spare penny for his retirement, every penny, every time would do its bit towards shortening that retirement. They went off. In less than ten minutes, before the sun was quite down, they had pulled up in the large asphalted front yard of a fair-sized redbrick building that must have dated from about the year 1900. Various creepers ran up its walls and there was an ochre-coloured lichen on part of its tiled roof. It was situated near the top of a slight depression that ran down from the main road to Salisbury. Ivor said interestedly that it looked a bit on the big side, to which Brenda demurred; Jake heard later that the place had once been a nursing home and was now hired out for conferences and other enterprises of that kind, many of them no doubt perfectly serious and useful. They went inside.

In another ten minutes the four were reassembled in one of a pair of rooms run together by the disposal of folding doors. Both had the look of meagreness attached to being used rather than lived in: large table to discuss business round, dark-green leather armchairs to hold informal discussions in, reproductions of abstract paintings to do what with? Surely not look at; perhaps to be flattered by, flattered into fancying yourself a cultured person. Ed was on hand to greet them, giving Jake a smile not so much of geniality as of amusement; Rosenberg, little legs atwinkle, must still be pedalling gamely down the M20. The others already arrived were Lionel (stealing), Martha (mother), Winnie (shyness) and three men and a woman Jake had never seen before and whose names he didn't bother with for the moment because he would get to know them so very well the following day. After the introductions he stuck to Ivor, whom he had rather taken to and who seemed to need to talk to somebody.

"We're going to be sixteen altogether and that won't fill this house. It really is big."

"Is that bad?"

"Not as such, but it means parts of it will be empty so that I can't sort of account for them."

"I think I can see what you mean. But there's bound to be quite a large staff at a joint like this, and offices and so on."

"That's true, I hadn't thought of that. Thank you, Jake."

"Don't pills help? Tranquillisers?"

"Yes, but my bloke's made me give them up. Just gloss over the problem, he says. I take his point in a way, but I'm the one that needs them, not him."

"Is there anything I can do?"

"It would be good if you could tell me you wouldn't mind if I came up to you and started talking rather fast and saying some pretty silly things."

Jake had just told Ivor he wouldn't mind when a taxi drew up outside the window near which they were standing. It delivered Ruth (despair), Rosenberg, Kelly (you name it), an unnecessarily tall young woman with a head designed for somebody almost as short as Rosenberg, and not Chris (aggression or something), which was nice. When in due course Kelly came into what called itself the conference-room with the other new arrivals she had just the same easy, amicable manner as on first meeting Jake. She greeted everyone in turn, leaving him till last and taking a step or two beyond him so that he had to turn about to face her. Over his shoulder she gave Ivor a superb experienced-hostess look that apologised for removing Jake and at the same time indicated her confidence that the need to do this would be understood.

"Jake, we may only have a second or two so please don't interrupt, all right?"

His mental alarm-bell started up. It was some comfort that the chatter of other voices and the opportune arrival of a trolley with coffee and sandwiches would prevent their being overheard for the moment; not a lot, though. "All right, but make it quick."

"I'm in room 33, second floor just next to the landing. There's something I want to show you. It won't take long, five minutes, ten at the very outside, but I think it really must be in private. Will you come to my room, number 33, and look at it for me? Leave it till everyone's bedded down, midnight or later, I won't mind, I've got something to read."

"You must be..... You must think I'm off my head."

"Listen Jake, did I enjoy you turning me down? Would I enjoy it any more the second time? .... Well there you are."

"What do you want to show me?"

"A letter. Well, a kind of letter. I'd like you to read if for me."

"Brenda's a light sleeper, I'd be almost certain to wake her up."

"Has your room got a loo attached to it? Mine hasn't."

"No."

"Well there you are. Only five minutes. I'll expect you. Hallo Brenda, hallo Geoffrey, isn't this marvellous weather?"

Geoffrey understood without apparent trouble and said it was, but Brenda said in that colourless voice of hers, "How are you getting on with your plans for exposing Ed? It's been a long time since we discussed them."

"Oh, that." Kelly laughed in a relaxed, way. "More or less on ice these days."

"Really. You were quite keen on them before."

"Yes, I do rather act on impulse, I'm afraid. I get crazes."

"I see."

"But it's not only that. I've pretty well completely changed my mind about Ed. I've come to the conclusion he's rather good. He's helped me."

Jake would have chuckled if he had dared. The girl might be a bit touched but nobody could have improved on the deftness with which she had taken the initiative away from Brenda by forcing her into agreement. Add to that the way Geoffrey was looking from face to face, not merely unable to deduce anything what-so-bloody-ever from what he had heard but seeming to think that not to be in prior possession of every relevant fact about anything at any time was a novelty, and a shocking one—add this and you had the makings of quite a jolly party as long as you didn't add anything else. After constraining Brenda to extol End's qualities an extra couple of times Kelly took herself off, first to the snacks trolley and not long afterwards out of the room, presumably in the direction of bed.

Other people were drifting away too, just as presumably to allow for the early start promised for the morning. Jake's bedtime was at least an hour ahead, preferably more. He was about to go up and fetch his week-end reading (another slice of sizzling suspense by the author of 'The Hippogriff Attaché-Case' when he caught sight of what looked like, and proved indeed to be, a TV set in the further conference-room. To his considerable surprise it was in working order and could be switched on. He was soon settled down to a just-about-endurable film about Paris in 1944; it had in it Kirk Douglas, whom he didn't mind, and Charles Boyer, whom he minded a lot, and there was also some female. Two of the strangers and Martha and Ivor watched with him. Unusually for her, Brenda sat up too, but she was in the other room talking to Geoffrey. Ed and Rosenberg were also to be seen there. It was after midnight when the party dispersed. Before it finally did, Jake told Ivor he was to come and wake him at any time if he wanted company. Their rooms turned out to be on different floors—Jake's on the first, Ivor's on the second—but there wasn't a lot to be done about that.

Upstairs was a little more homely than downstairs but not much. The Richardsons" room had twin beds, plain curtains, a plain rug, papered walls that would have been nicer plain, a dressing table of military (World War II junior officers" quarters) appearance and a few other things. Jake sat on his bed and told Brenda what Kelly had asked him to do, wishing he had also told her of the Oxford encounter at the time: too late now.

"Whether you go or not is entirely up to you," said Brenda in a friendly tone, answering his question. "You remember I told you to feel free; that still holds. But you know what she's like, or rather I don't think you do quite, not as well as I do, seeing her every week. Of course a straight pass is what it looks like but with somebody like that you can never be sure. This five or ten minutes business... If she's got it in for you for any reason, and people like that don't need a proper reason, then she might do anything. Rush about screaming you tried to rape her, anything. But it's up to you, completely."

In the end, what with one thing and another, he didn't go.

25—Increased Insight

"Jake, Jake, wake up!"

It was Ivor. The light was on. Jake got out of bed very fast saying things like steady and calm down, but Ivor said there was nothing wrong with him, it was Kelly. Brenda sat up in bed. The two men ran out and up the stairs, where it was dark, and into another room with the light on. Kelly was lying in bed on her side with her eyes shut and breathing deeply. Ivor handed Jake a page torn from a pocket diary with a few words written on it in ballpoint in a rather neat script. They were Sorry everybody, but it's better this way. Then Ivor handed Jake a small empty bottle made of brown glass. The label said Mogadon—Miss J. V. Gambeson.

"Do you know where Rosenberg's sleeping?" asked Jake.

"No."

"Go into every room till you find him. I'll call an ambulance."

He remembered seeing a telephone near the front door and hurried down to it. The emergency-services operator answered in three seconds. Within another twenty or so he had passed his message and was walking back upstairs when he noticed it wasn't completely dark outside. He looked at his watch: thirty-one minutes past four. And still hot, or hot already. In Kelly's room he found Brenda and Rosenberg. Kelly was lying on her back now. Brenda came over and squeezed his hand but didn't speak.

"Ambulance on the way," he said. "Any idea of her chances? Doctor?"

Rosenberg shook his head. In pyjamas and with his hair ruffled he looked about nine. "I don't understand, there's something crazy about the timing. We'll have to wait for Ivor. Oh, her chances, we don't know how many she took or how long ago she took them so medically nobody could say at this stage. If that bottle was full when she started it would have held around eighty of the things, quite enough to do for her."

"I thought you couldn't die of an overdose of those," said Brenda.

"I grant you it isn't easy but it can be done, that is if you've been taking other pills as well, which she no doubt was. The trouble is it's very widely believed that there is no fatal overdose. If she believed it...."

Jake made an effort. "I noticed she was one of the first to go to bed. She could have been swallowing them by ten-thirty."

"If so they'll be well into her by now. She can't have wanted that."

"How do you mean?,

"Her object was not to die but to punish someone or call attention to herself or both. Unfortunately...."

He stopped speaking as Ed hurried in with Ivor. The note and the bottle were produced. Ed stood still for a moment and looked at the floor. Then at the sound of approaching voices he went active, moved to the threshold and said, "Hold it there, fellows. Kelly's been taken sick and will have to be moved to the hospital but she's going to be okay. And that's all."

"Anything we can do?" asked somebody who sounded to Jake like Lionel.

"Yes there is. There's an ambulance coming—you go down to the front door on the double to let the men in. You stay right where you are and don't let anyone past. I don't want a crowd in here. Thanks." He shut the door and looked round the room, at Brenda in an unluxurious armchair, Jake standing near the head of the bed, Rosenberg sitting on its foot, Ivor by the boarded-up fireplace. "All right Ivor, let's have it all and in the right order."

"Jake kindly said I could wake him up any time I felt bad," said Ivor at a brisk rate, as one who has worked out in advance the best and shortest way to impart a set of facts. "I woke up suddenly and I was frightened because it was a strange place. I started to go to Jake but his room's on the floor below and I needed somebody at once. So I went into just the nearest room, I didn't know whose it was, and I turned on the light and it was here and she was like that and I saw the note and the bottle. So then I stopped feeling frightened about myself and fetched Jake and he sent me for Frank and I found him almost straight away."

"So: she had no way whatever of knowing that you even might come bursting in at four a.m."

"None."

"What woke you?" asked Rosenberg.

"I don't know, I just woke, found I was awake."

Ed rubbed his cheeks alternately with one hand after the other. "It's off pattern, Frank."

"I agree. What's worrying is that you can kill yourself with those things but hardly anyone—"

"Is that right, I didn't know that."

"There you are, if you didn't know there's a good chance she didn't either."

"So she goes for a cut-me-down, a joke, a phoney attempt without knowing what she's using can be deadly."

"She could have found out about that," said Jake, hoping even as he spoke to be taken as stating a rather obvious general possibility rather than showing special knowledge.

"Maybe. We'll know more later. You did well, Ivor. You too, Jake. Now you can all go along to bed. Frank and I'll take care of everything here."

It struck Jake then that he wanted to stay and see Kelly safely taken off the premises, but he felt he couldn't argue the point so he glanced at her, saw that one of her cheeks was reddened, where Rosenberg might have slapped it to try to arouse her, but nothing else of significance and left with the other two. When asked, Ivor said he would be fine now because it was nearly light. As soon as he had gone Brenda said,

"You're not to blame for that in any way at all."

"If she dies I'll be responsible. That stuff has had three or four more hours to work on her because of me."

"You're not responsible. Either she is or God is or nobody is, not you. It's nothing to do with you except in the sense that she did it to get you involved with her and make you feel awful about her, and she picked you because she knows you quite like her or have a bit of time for her and nobody else does."

"All right, but poor little bitch."

"You can't afford to think that. Dangerous little lunatic is the only safe thing to think about her. Remember, it's 'not your fault'. You couldn't possibly have foreseen what she was going to do, how could anyone?"

They heard the ambulance approaching. Neither spoke while it came up and halted outside the building and, after what seemed a remarkably short time, drove off again. Jake had heard no voices or footfalls in that time and wished he had, feeling that that would have been some sort of guarantee of Kelly's actual departure. By now he and Brenda were tucked up in their beds, or rather lay there in the hot twilight each covered by a single sheet.

"Do you think I did right not to tell them about her asking me to go and see her?"

"I should think so, darling. I suppose it might be a bit awkward if it ever came up, but I can't see why it should. And it doesn't make any difference, does it?"

"Not now."

"I'm going to rest. I shan't sleep but I must rest or I'll feel terrible in the morning. I mean later on. Try not to worry. As I said, you're not to blame in the least."

Jake agreed with Brenda about resting and sleeping but got it wrong: he dropped off almost at once and was woken by the heat four hours later. Much the same turned out to have happened to her. On the feeling-terrible front his achievement was well above par, nothing on the scale of the morning after Eve but with similar all-round coverage of the physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, moral. As for worrying he was well into that by the time his eyes were open, so far that he couldn't get round to considering whether he was to blame or not: perhaps he was an innocent instrument but there was no doubt whatever that he was an instrument.

If breakfast was to be had at all he must do no more than dress, comb hair and pee before plunging downstairs. With Brenda at his side, full of complaint about how ghastly she looked, he found something called a dining room. The sun shone brightly on the non-prestige furniture, plastic tablecloths and haircord carpeting. There was a kind of sideboard with doll's-house packets of cereal, quarter-pints of milk, "sachets" of sugar and other easier-for-them items that recalled the Comyns buttery. No cooked food was available. You got your coffee out of a machine, and having done that you couldn't get it back in.

The room was set with tables for four, only about half of which were to any degree laid, so Ivor had been right in his estimate of the non-fullness of the house. Here he was now, hurrying over to them.

"Ed and Frank would like to see you in the committee-room as soon as you're ready-same side of the hall as this at the back," he said and was gone.

Brenda had agreed with Jake that it would be more comfortable to discuss Kelly's case as little as possible, so they picked the table already part occupied by Ruth and Winnie, an ideal pair for the present purpose at any rate. On his left Jake had a window that gave him a view of a stretch of lawn in need of cutting, a tall thick hedge and then nothing until some low hills with a few trees and dumps of bushes and what looked from here like smooth densely growing grass, and sky of course, in no way remarkable but quite grand on such a bright day. And yet not so grand, he felt, as the same scene would have looked to him five or ten years ago. 'Then' it would have been apparelled in ti-tum ti-tum, the glory and the freshness of a dream. Was that what Wordsworth had been on about without knowing it? How old had he been when he wrote the Ode? Thirty-something? But then he aged early in other respects. Get on to Lancewood.

Within five minutes both Jake and Brenda had had enough "breakfast", he not wanting much, she not allowed much. They soon ferreted out the committee-room, which might well have once been the office of the chief administrator of the nursing home, though most likely not designed by him: it was low-ceilinged and, even on a morning like this, dark enough to need artificial light. A minor obstacle to the natural sort was afforded by the panel of stained glass that took up the top third of what there was of a window. Although several degrees below the ones at Comyns it was the only thing in the entire place, large or small, inside or out, that might stick in the mind for ten seconds after the eye had passed over it. Human figures were represented but making out who they were, if anybody in particular, wasn't easy, at least to Jake.

Rosenberg and Ed, who was wearing sunglasses of the deepest dye, sat together behind a table with a telephone on it and enough in the way of notebooks and pens to establish them in a business-conducting posture. Ivor was in attendance, also, unexpectedly, Geoffrey. As he took one of the identical straight-backed chairs with dark-green seats, Jake asked if there was any news of Kelly.

"Not yet," said Rosenberg. "There won't be for hours."

"Have her parents been informed?"

This time Ed answered. "She has no parents. Not in any real sense. Her father died of drink and her step-father, who lives with her mother in Belfast, won't have her in their home after she tried to burn it down the second time."

"Everybody please understand that's confidential," said Rosenberg.

"The only person to inform," Ed went on, "is her landlady in Hampstead, and that can certainly wait until we know more."

Jake nodded his head. He looked at the stained-glass panel. It was divided vertically into three scenes: a kneeling girl above whom a heavily robed male figure was raising a sword, the same figure with lowered sword contemplating a quadruped about the sire of a large dog, and the girl from the first scene accompanied by someone of uncertain sex carrying a curved wand and directing her towards a classical portico. He knew the subject but couldn't place it.

"We asked you to stop by," Ed was saying, "to let you know we decided on a cover-story for Kelly. Suicide, even a fake one, well, it depresses a lot of people, just the thought of it, and we want the folks to get on with their work without being bothered. Frank and I have staked a lot on this Workshop and we want it to be a success. So we pass it around that Kelly's suffering from an acute allergy that needs hospital attention but isn't dangerous."

"With a very high fever as the main symptom," put in Rosenberg.

"She woke up, knew she was sick, found Frank, he got her back to bed to wait for the ambulance. Long as we all tell the same tale if we're asked we'll be okay." Ed gave a quiet reflective laugh. "Isn't it great? Allergy. They'll swallow anything. And I go for that, it solves our Kelly problem nice and neat."

The last phrase made Jake speak more sharply than he had intended. "I take it you have been in touch with the hospital?"

"Like Frank said, Jake, they won't know anything for a long time."

"You mean you haven't rung them up."

"That's what I mean, Jake."

"Well I suggest you ring them now. They'll know whether she's alive or dead, I imagine.

"If she was dead we'd know soon enough."

"Quite possibly. All the same I'd like to be told one way or the other."

"Anybody else like to be told?" asked Ed, looking round the room.

Brenda didn't speak. Geoffrey had obviously seen through the cunning attempt to betray him into indiscretion, and likewise kept quiet. Ivor said he'd like to be told.

"All right." Ed looked through a ring-spine notebook, drew the telephone towards him and began to dial. While he was doing so he said without looking round, "Ivor, go tell the folks we'll be starting late, like fifteen minutes. We're having .... administrative problems. That'll hold "em..... Good morning, I'm inquiring after a Miss Gambeson, a Miss Janet Gambeson who was admitted as a casualty around five o'clock this morning..... No, I'm afraid I don't." He turned towards Jake. "Her name isn't Kelly. I doubt that it's Janet either. Or Gambeson. Not that it matters worth a damn what she calls herself..... Yes?..... Thank you." He rang off. "She's still unconscious. Just like we said."

Ivor had come back in time to hear this. "Well, that's something."

After a pause, Ed said pleasantly, "That's all we need you for, Brenda, but we'd like Jake to stay." When she looked inquiring, he added, "There's a little bit of digging we'd like to do about Kelly."

"I wouldn't mind staying for that too, unless you...."

"No no, fine, you stay if you want, you'll probably be able to help. Now Frank, do you want to carry the ball for a bit?"

"Thank you, Ed." Rosenberg did want to. He didn't actually grasp the lapels of his unsightly cream-coloured linen jacket, but his tone made up for that. "Now as some of you may know, when a person of this kind enters a suicidal situation there are two main aims or objectives. One is to arouse attention and concern, the so-called cry for help. The other objective is to carry out an act of revenge on some other person, usually for a sexual or family reason, to make that other person feel guilty, anxious and so on. An invariable accompanying feature is that the subject takes very careful precautions against dying. If that does happen, it's an accident. Something has gone wrong—the person in the next room doesn't smell the gas, the rope round the neck doesn't break."

Jake had now identified the subject of the window. The curved wand was a bow, its bearer was Artemis, the portico was that of her temple at Tauris, the girl was Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, and the beast was the deer supernaturally substituted for her by Artemis to forestall her sacrifice at Aulis. Shockingly rendered, but then. For a moment he felt pleased with himself.

"Now I strongly suspect," continued Rosenberg, sounding very Irish for some reason, "that that was what happened in this case, but I don't know what went wrong. If that second person, the one on whom an act of revenge was intended, if he exists, who is he? He might be somebody we don't know of, somebody who was supposed to telephone at midnight, say, but telephones are too unreliable and I just don't believe it. Since this happened here, I strongly suspect that the second person—if he exists—is also here. Here in this room. I've .... eliminated Lionel."

"I'm your man," said Jake at once. "She asked me to come and see her some time after midnight to be shown what she called a kind of letter. Which it was in a sense. I talked it over with my wife and decided it would be safer not to go."

There was silence. Ivor looked incredulous, Geoffrey puzzled for once in his life. Brenda glanced at Jake and gave him an approving nod and smile. Ed did the same in his thank-Christ-quite-different manner and said,

"Good, Jake. Excellent. I hope you're not feeling bad about it? We all understand why you didn't go along. None of us would have—I hope. You were absolutely right not to."

"How can you say that after what's happened? 'Of course' I'm feeling bad about it."

"Jake, you mustn't, you mustn't!" Ed spoke with great and impressive earnestness. "Can't you see, you idiot, it's what she wants, it's her malice and her awful..... You're falling for it, you're playing it her way by feeling bad. She's 'sick' Jake, it's not like you've mistreated some normal human being as we all do all the time and pay the penalty. See it for what it is, a vicious child's game with you cast as loser. Have the flexibility to.... oh, God."

"She won't die, darling," said Brenda. "You can be quite certain of that. I'm sure there are accidents as Dr Rosenberg says, but Kelly isn't going to have one, she's too bright in the way she's bright. You said last night, I mean earlier this morning, you said she'd have found out about the dose. Indeed she would, she'd have found out what was a completely safe dose, and it doesn't matter to her if it's a laughably safe dose and everybody knows it was that 'afterwards'. She'll have had her hour and made her point and be on to something else by then."

"Right, Brenda. Very good."

For a moment Jake tried to push out of his mind the memory of a weeping face, then stopped trying. He had wondered at the time what Kelly had been "expressing" at Mr Shyster's; now he knew. Hatred. Of whom or what? Of self. But there could be no such thing: all that could be meant was the hatred felt by one part of the self for another. Perhaps in her that hating part was powerless, able to do no more than look on aghast at the acts the other displayed and to grieve at them. How dismal, if true.

"Er, may I ask a question?" This was Geoffrey. He was frowning. "There's something I'm afraid I can't quite follow." (Like the arrow to the Gents, you sodding moron, thought Jake.) "If, er, if Kelly was revenging herself on Jake, what was she revenging herself for, I mean because of what? Had Jake offended her or something?"

"Yes I had. She tracked me down in my rooms in Oxford and offered herself to me, Christ, bloody well tried to rape me, and I .... fended her off in a very ungraceful, ungracious way, and she called me every filthy name she could lay her tongue to and said everything she could think of that she thought might hurt me...." He turned to Brenda and said, "I'm sorry I didn't tell you before, I wish I had. I was going to and then it sort of got too late."

"I understand perfectly."

There was an edge to her tone he didn't much care for but he forgot about that when Ed, who had been nodding slowly and sapiently in time with Rosenberg, butted in by saying,

"Then I guess we got the hysterics and tears and self-reproaches bit, right?"

"Right, I mean yes. And then, I suppose it was the pathetic bit."

More nodding. Geoffrey held up his hand like a schoolboy. "Er..... It must have been a very unpleasant experience for you."

"Good, I'm glad I managed to get that across."

"Well then, why did you come here when you must have known you'd be bumping into her?"

"Because she asked me to," said Jake, raising his voice. "Because she came round and saw me and did her pathetic 'bit.'"

"After what had happened in Oxford?"

"Precisely. That was the order of events."

"All right, you two," said Ed. "We're all finished here. Very good Jake, you seem to have it straightened out now. And thank you for straightening us out, me and Frank. We have everything we need. Case dosed. Come on everybody, let's go do some work."

"Just a minute if you don't mind." Jake's voice was back to its normal level. "What exactly do you mean by case closed?"

"That there's nothing more to be said. With your help we have assembled one classic sortie of one type of hopeless neurotic."

"I can think of one or two more things to be said. Doesn't either of you feel any sense of responsibility for what's happened?"

"We feel concerned, of course, since she's our patient, in very different senses in our two cases."

"Do you now? But I was talking about responsibility. Anyway, how long has she been your patient in very different senses?"

"Just over a year," said Rosenberg. He seemed curious to know where this discussion might lead.

"Since March." Ed seemed to know roughly where and not to mind.

"And has she made one of these suicide attempts or phoney suicide attempts before?"

"Not that I know of," said Rosenberg.

"Well you know of one now. Doesn't it strike you at all that that means she's got worse while you've been "treating" her? While she's been undergoing your "therapy"?"

Ed squeezed his chin and said rather wearily, "It might have happened at any time. Any time at all."

"And you've always been and always will be quite powerless to prevent it or render it to the slightest extent less likely. Which matters a bit, some people might think, because even a phoney suicide attempt is quite a serious matter, not just a fairly interesting example of something, which is all you seem to see in it. As your mate was saying, they do sometimes succeed. Kelly isn't alive yet."

"No let him finish, Frank. After all, he's our patient too, remember."

"Only for the next couple of minutes, and that only in case I may say something I'd prefer to be privileged, if that still counts at all. Let's try a spot of adding up. You've done less than nothing for Kelly. How about Ivor? Ivor, have you improved since you started going to Ed?"

"I think I'm about the same, thank you Jake."

"Nothing for Ivor. What about Chris? Perhaps you cured him and sent him on his way rejoicing. Did you?"

"Jake, I don't deal in cures." Ed sounded angry but in full command of himself. "Did I offer you a cure? I aim to release checks on emotion and to improve insight, that's all."

"Funny how it's got about that both of those must be good. Stop bottling up that emotion that makes you want to hit your wife with a sledgehammer. Gain insight, you're bound to like what you see. To prefer it to what you couldn't see before. Let me tell you, 'Ed', there's no such thing as a totally phoney suicide attempt. They all want to be at least a little bit dead for a little while. If you were Kelly and found out more about yourself, how would you feel? More likely to knock yourself off or less? And talking of Kelly, there's a small piece of her that can see properly, of course there is or what is it that's gaining insight, but you'll never reach it, not with your methods. Methods, Christ. You just make it up as you go along, which I suppose you call being empirical if you know the word, and there'll always be plenty of applicants, lonely pansies like Lionel who want a nice chat and poor old dears like Ruth who want a good cry and fatheads like Geoffrey who want to show off. What you're up to is hideously boring to anyone without wants or needs of that sort. But then on the other hand it's intellectually beneath contempt—I should have made it dear that the whole of this bit applies equally to your undistinguished colleague. As against all that what you do is dangerous in the extreme. And yet when you come to weigh it up it's funny too, in other words it would be impossible for anyone with a grain of humour in them. All you have, but in abundance, is arrogance and effrontery. Oh, and a certain amount of greed."

"Have you finished?" asked Ed.

"I think so. Should there be more?"

"You're the best judge of that, Jake. I've let you run on because anybody can see you have this most painful conflict between concern for a martyr-figure and anger at having been made the victim of a—"

"I'm not letting you run on, old boy, I can't have you explaining me, that would be, as you would certainly say, too much. I cease to be your patient as of this moment. And also, in a very different sense of course, junior's patient too."

"Mr Richardson," said Rosenberg, "may I talk to you in private for just a few minutes?"

"Certainly. Hang on." Jake moved across to Brenda and tried to signal or will her to leave the room with him, using every means short of verbal directive, but she sat on in her chair next to the doorway and looked at him without curiosity. It occurred to him that in the last couple of minutes he had rather pissed on the proceedings, thereby breaking a promise, and pissed on Geoffrey, shown himself to be at least momentarily against him, too. "Sorry," he said to her, feeling hard up for words. "Things sort of got on top of me. I'd better be off, get a train. Sorry."

"I understand," she said as before.

"Well .... cheerio, love. See you when? Tomorrow night? Okay, fine."

As he made to kiss her cheek she seemed to relent and kissed him on the mouth with some warmth. He waved in a general fashion at the rest of the room, looking at nobody, and went. After a word to Ed to start without him, Rosenberg followed.

"I suggest we move outside," said Jake. "You probably wouldn't want us to be overheard."

There was a door near by. A gravel path with bald patches took them to a rough lawn that was much larger than the one to be seen from the dining room. It gave extensive hospitality to buttercups, daisies, dandelions, chickweed, groundsel, charlock, viper's bugloss, plantain, moss and couch. Near its middle stood a large elm tree which might well have been on the point of toppling over from disease but for the moment kept the sun off satisfactorily.

"It's most important—" began Rosenberg.

"First me, then you," said Jake. "I don't want to hurt your feelings unnecessarily or say anything I might regret, so I'll just tell you you're a disgrace to the medical profession, which admittedly is saying something. As practised by you, sexual therapy doesn't exist. There are things that are merely treated as parts of a figment called that, the pathetic bits and pieces of machinery and pornography and genital and non-genital sensate focusing and early sexual experiences and fantasies and Christ knows what that you've tried to make me mistake for a technique, a coherent method. Yes, those fantasies. You were quite right about them, not that it matters in the very least, that stuff I wrote for you wasn't "serious" at all. I told you I have no homosexual feelings, no sadism or anything like that, I'm not a voyeur, anyway not in the usual sense, but I am given to thoughts of subjecting women to certain indignities, I'll say no more than that. Except that I've never put those thoughts into practice and never will now I knew none of it would have shocked you, but that's not the point: it's private, you see. And I don't think the fact that I was born in 1917 has any bearing. Plenty of my contemporaries wouldn't have minded telling me all about such matters, let alone you. And there must be the same division among youngsters, though I'm sure you apply the same "method" to everybody People's behaviour changes, "society" changes, but not feelings. And while we're on "society" let me remind you of something you said to me in that terrible pub, something about repressive attitudes making me feel sexually unrelaxed. Repressive? In 1977? I was doing fine when things really were repressive, if they ever were, it's only since they've become. oh, permissive that I've had trouble. In the old days a lot of people, men as well as women, didn't know what to expect of sex so they didn't worry when it didn't work too well. Now everybody knows exactly what's required of them and exactly how much they've fallen short down to the last millimetre and second and drop, which is frightfully relaxing for them. No wonder you boys have got enough trade.

"Hence guilt and shame at inadequacy—all quite superficial according to you. Do you still think so? As regards the other lot, your lot, I mean my alleged deep-down guilt and shame about sex itself, what makes you think that what's deep down is more important than what's up top? Anyway, I suppose it is possible they'd been there all the time but totally screened by my libido, which eventually receded and left them in full view. But if that's what they are they're only the foundation of something quite different, as I tried to explain when I was telling you about that woman I had in Oxford." He paused again. "What outlandish bits of anatomy, what an extraordinary thing to do, what curious reactions you keep saying to yourself. It's like being a child again, when an older boy's telling you the story and it all seems too unlikely for words. And when you do it, any of it, it's as if it's abnormal, almost monstrous. I know it isn't really. You can't imagine how you ever...."

Jake gave it up. A scream sounded from the house, no doubt uttered by a participant occupied in self-draining or ensconced in the hot seat.

"And you wouldn't have minded being overhead telling me any of this?" Rosenberg had received Jake's strictures with a composure that indicated an extreme of either humility or complacency.

"Good for you, Frank. No, because I won't be seeing any of them again."

"Except your wife."

"Yes, but that's rather different. Now you must excuse me."

"What about my turn to speak?"

"I've cancelled it. Nothing you could say would interest me."

"Mr Richardson, if we were to go on from where you've just brought us, I'm sure we could make a very—"

"No we couldn't, you'd never reach me, I say, that sounds like one of your words, any more than you could reach Kelly. Not really the same sort of person as I am. I'd think about that if 1 were you, doctor."

"I'd be glad to recommend other practitioners with different approaches."

"Thank you, but for one thing they'd all be too unconventional and unpuritanical for me. Good-bye." There was a handshake. "You know, now it comes to it and I realise I shan't be coming to see you any more I can't help feeling, how shall I put it, full of fun."

Jake's last sight of Rosenberg had his little figure standing under the elm in sad thought for a moment, then violently slapping the back of his neck at the assault of some serviceable insect. It was the only human thing he had ever seen him do and it seemed to show up his total nullity as a person. The house was very dark after the glare of outdoors. No sound came from the conference-room. Jake telephoned for a taxi, went upstairs, shaved and packed his bag. He thought of writing a note for Brenda but soon decided against it: if he was to say anything he would have had to say a great deal, and he would be seeing her the next evening.

Shortly after five o'clock that afternoon a nurse told him that Miss Gambeson was now sleeping normally. He said thank you, declined to leave a message, went to the station and was back home for a full Saturday evening's viewing.

26—What, and Miss Television?

Brenda didn't get home till midnight on the Sunday. She explained that there had been a little party after the official closure of the Workshop, nothing very wild, just a few bottles of Italian wine. Thanks to Ivor's abilities and the lack of traffic they had made an amazingly quick journey. Yes, all things considered the weekend had been a great success. These and other matters were treated with the affable remoteness he had begun to observe in her recent behaviour. Soon they agreed that it was getting late and retired to their separate rooms as usual.

The next morning Jake awoke rather before his usual time, but feeling more rested than he had for weeks, so instead of turning to and fro on the off-chance that a girl would cross his mind he got up, put on dressing-gown and slippers and went down to the kitchen. While he waited for the kettle to boil he opened the back door. It was going to be another hot day, though with that faint heaviness of or in the air that can betoken the imminent end of a fine spell, especially to someone who has just read in the paper that unsettled weather is forecast. He looked at the garden, advanced a step or two into it. Rain or shine the grass would have to be cut soon, the chrysanthemums staked and all the roses dead-headed, and ideally much else done besides, but in the last four or five years even this tennis-court sized plot had begun to be too much for him, not physically but mentally or morally—he couldn't be fucking bothered. These days what he did do he did largely to prevent it being said that he had let the place go to rack and ruin. Once, Brenda would have given him a hand with the light jobs just as he had done his bit indoors; now, their respective spheres were theirs almost exclusively.

Thinking of things being too much for him stirred the thought that he was going to be sixty the following week. This seemed to him an indefensibly ludicrous proposition; there must be some mistake. If, when he was in his twenties, anybody had advanced to him, except as a puerile joke, the notion that one day he would be sixty-not survive to be, just be—he would have told him not to be a bloody fool. Sixty was what all those old people were. It was something he ought to have taken steps to postpone indefinitely, if not evade altogether, while there was still time. Six-oh. LX. What a silly bugger. Well, at least no one could say he was wiser or more sensible or understood anything better along with it.

He made tea, poured some of it into Brenda's favourite Diamond jubilee mug, remembered with a morsel of self-satisfaction not to add milk or sugar as formerly and carried the filled vessel to her, once their, bedroom. She sat up as he entered the room, thanked him and asked if he was doing anything special that morning.

"Not really. I thought I might stroll down to the bookshop in Philby Road. The fellow there has got some stuff for me."

"What stuff?"

"Eh? Some 'Greece end Rome' back numbers I've been after. Why?"

"Just wondered. There's something I'd like your advice about before you go, if that's all right."

"Attend me in my sanctum."

When he turned the corner at the top of the lowest flight of stairs he saw that Mrs Sharp, having let herself into the house with her own licensed latch-key, was standing in the passage with her back to him, a most sensible position to take up if what you wanted was to enshrine in your memory the look of the inside of the front door. As he went down the flight Jake trod more heavily than was his habit and cleared his throat a couple of times, but to no avail. The female turned, saw him and jumped, the third verb to be understood in a more literal sense than the context would suggest. She managed not to cry out, however. Her response would have been about right for one faced by a spectral Cavalier with his head firmly on his shoulders.

"Morning, Mrs Sharp. Sorry I startled you." Perhaps a leper's bell fastened irremovably round the neck, he thought. Or were those hand-bells they had?

"Good morning, Mr Richardson. Don't worry, it's just my silly way."

This said, she moved to her favourite station between the foot of the stairs and the kitchen, again hard to find fault with if you assumed that he had been intending to make for the street attired as he was.

"Excuse me."

"Can you—"

"Just a—"

"There we are."

"Thanks."

There were further evolutions in the kitchen while he assembled his grapefruit and coffee and toast and she collected brooms, buckets and other materiel from this cupboard and that, but he got away in the end, even managing to dive into the bog under less than full scrutiny. He was feeling quite good when, shat, shaved, showered and wearing his green lightweight crease-resistant suit, he went into his study to find Brenda already there looking out of the window.

"Sorry the garden's in such a mess," he said. "I'll try and make a start on it tomorrow."

"Good. Darling I don't actually want your advice, I just wanted to make sure of talking to you."

He nodded, inwardly squaring up. There was a certain amount of ground to be covered and no mistake, not all of it coverable in any cosy spirit.

"I wish I hadn't got to say this. I'm leaving you."

"Oh," he said, and went and sat down behind his desk. He saw that she was trembling slightly.

"I'm going away with Geoffrey."

"'What?'"

"I know exactly what you're thinking and please don't say any of it or it'll make me hate you, and I don't want to do that."

"All right."

"You see .... he can perform, or he wants to, anyway he does."

"Thanks very much."

"Jake, I'm not a fool, not completely, I can understand how hard it must be not to take it that way, and of course it is the way, so..... But I'm only stating a fact, no I'm not only doing that but it is a fact. You've lost interest, your sex-drive, but I haven't, and I'm going to be forty-eight in October. I shouldn't think any sort of adventure will ever happen to me again. And it isn't only that. He's interested in me."

"He's changed tack pretty fast then. At that Workshop I went to he said there were people he liked but they didn't interest him. His very words."

"You mustn't take things so literally, he was having a gloom. Anyway he pays attention to me and he talks to me."

"About himself. Sorry."

"You used to talk to me about yourself and it was fine with me. I used to enjoy it, I didn't mind why you did it, I expect it was mostly because you wanted to impress me, like a clever schoolboy who's still a bit excited by finding out he's clever. In that sort of way you hadn't grown up and you still haven't, which was all right in those days, really rather nice, but it's not so hot when somebody's getting on. Anyway—it wasn't all like that, you talking to me. You thought it would interest me too, sometimes you probably even wanted to know what I thought. There's none of that these days. Do you remember, it must be three or four months ago, you brought a bottle of wine home and Allie was here and she asked for some and you did something in the kitchen, swapped the bottle or—"

"Got you to offer her some actually, and what I did was pour—,

"Don't tell me now, I don't want to know now. In the old days you'd have told me the whole story and we'd have enjoyed it together. But you couldn't be bothered, could you? And just this morning, an hour ago, you said you were going to the bookshop and I asked you on purpose what you were going to pick up there, and you answered as shortly as you could and wondered why I wanted to know. You'd have been sitting on the bed before I had a chance to ask and telling me all about it and what you needed it for, that's what you'd have done then. When you still fancied me. In the days when you used to take me out. Before you stopped wanting to talk to me."

Jake was paying very close attention, but things from outside kept occurring to him, motives, explanations, even why when last seen Geoffrey had been garbed like an adult Caucasian.

"But what decided me was the Kelly business. Going back again, about eight weeks I suppose, that's right, I was talking about the Workshop and I mentioned her, and I've forgotten what was said but there was a moment when if you'd wanted to you could have..... I know, I asked you if she'd come round here again and you said no and I knew you weren't lying, you've always been a hopeless liar. I suppose it's because you've always thought the truth was very important, that's one of the things I respect about you. Anyway there was something, I thought afterwards there was something I didn't know, but then I thought there couldn't be, because you'd have told me."

"Well, it would have been embarrassing, and I didn't want to—"

"I'm sure it would have been a lot of things, but the chief thing it would have been was boring. For you to tell me about it. A mad girl hunts you down in Oxford and tries to go to bed with you and has hysterics and God knows what else happens, and you'd rather watch television than tell me about it. Even though she might come round here in any sort of state at any moment, indeed 'did' come round to con you into the weekend, I wonder how she made sure I wasn't going to be here, no don't bother. And even though you 'knew I' wouldn't be angry or anything like that if you did tell me. Why should I live with someone who thinks I'm as bloody unrewarding as that?"

Jake didn't say anything.

"When I went on about you to Frank that time and when I gave you that lecture about being affectionate to me and how I'd be able to tell if you were one of those men who only take notice of women when it's to do with sex, that was all .... theory, Jake. A comparison. An awful warning. I'd met plenty of men like that, what woman hasn't, but I never thought you were going to turn out to be one. In the end. To have always been one, I couldn't believe that of you. I went through bits of thinking you were getting slack and a bit selfish in your old age and needed gingering up, being told if you weren't careful you'd find yourself turning into one of 'them'. That's when I wasn't thinking it was all me. Well I've gone off physically but not all that much it seems, and I can't have got so many times more boring in just a couple of years, I worked that out over the weeks, and after I thought I'd warned you as dearly as I could and you went on just as before not talking tome except when you needed an audience and putting up with stroking me and me stroking you twice a week, well, the Kelly business just clinched it. Incredible."

"Why did you keep on with those pissing sensate sessions?" asked Jake after a moment.

"Well, you know I love massage, I don't really care if it's badly done. And I'm like you, I tend to do what doctors tell me. And I sort of couldn't not go on without a showdown. And I kept thinking it might conceivably start to come right next time."

"So did I."

"Did you? Looking back I'd have thought you'd made up your mind none of it was going to be any good from the word go. You expect too much of people." Brenda looked at him consideringly. "You've changed, Jake. In other ways too I mean. Kelly again. I can't see you getting involved with a screwed-up little bitch like that in the old days."

"I wasn't involved with her."

"Emotionally you were, and still are I imagine. No, you'd have seen through her from the start, because you'd have been observing her that much more closely. You'd have asked yourself what it would be like to get physically involved with her and have said no thanks, not with those complications round the corner. As it was, well, if it had been anyone else I'd have said they were a bit soft. It's odd, in one way you'd have expected a man in your position to see things as they are, especially women. Take away love or sex and the impression ought to be clearer, not distorted by emotions and wishful thinking and so on. But it's the other way round. You used to see as most men see, now you don't. Or it's more like. .... What's that stuff they put in ships to keep them from going all over the place?"

"What? Oh .... ballast?"

"That's right. People's sex-drives are like ballast, they keep them steady. It sounds wrong, but they do. So as I say, you're worse equipped to deal with Kelly than you would have been before, not better."

Brenda had long since ceased to tremble. With every sign of ease she sat down in the red-leather chair and went on talking in an interested tone, as if they had been sitting in a restaurant together. Her manner had lost what he now saw as the false amiability of the preceding weeks.

"So much so, in fact," she said, "that you virtually take her side against Ed. Now Ed has too good an opinion of himself I quite agree, but he does help people, or lets them help themselves which is just as good. I'm sure there are good reasons for saying he couldn't or he shouldn't or he doesn't really, but he does. For instance Martha now regularly tells her mother where to get off, goes out at night and all that. Anyway. I've got over it now, but I felt rather jealous of Kelly at one stage. Indignant too. You cared more about a destructive delinquent than you had about me for years. Not your fault and not the same sort of thing, I know. But let me give you a parting piece of advice—she's spilt milk, Jake. If she comes here again, chuck her out. Call the police if necessary. Do you think you can do that?"

"I don't know. I haven't thought. When are you off?"

"Probably about the end of the week. Geoffrey thinks he has a temporary place for us in Highgate. Are you going to stay on here?"

"I haven't thought about that either."

"No of course you haven't. I should if I were you, stay on."

"It would cost quite a bit to set up a new place."

"That too. I mean I might come drifting back one day."

"And put up with being found unrewarding?"

"Oh, I shouldn't be surprised. I like you and I don't care for being on my own as much as you do. And we might get on better with neither of us expecting you to find me rewarding. The thing is, Geoffrey hasn't said anything about divorces and Alcestis has always had a pretty strong grip."

"On Geoffrey or in general?"

"Both really."

"I thought her first husband left her."

"Only physically. Allie gave him the boot."

"I didn't know that. You must tell me the story before you go.,

"Actually there's not a hell of a lot to it."

"Pity." Jake got up from his seat at the desk. "I'll miss you."

"Without any malice in the world, darling, it'll be interesting to see how much." Brenda too rose. "Frank Rosenberg told me you said you weren't going to go to anybody else for treatment."

"I probably said that in the lukewarmth of the moment."

"I hope so. Another piece of advice. Don't let yourself not mind being as you are. Do a lot of thinking about the old days. Will you be in to lunch?"

"I expect so. I mean yes."

"See you then."

When she had gone he went on standing by his desk for a time. What hurt him most, and also shamed him, was her not having said she would miss him because she wasn't going to. Then he started remembering a holiday they had had in 1971 in Bodrun, where a gang of Danes had been excavating a fresh part of the ancient Carian city of Halicarnassus that had stood on the site and by so doing had involuntarily made it possible for him and Brenda to semi-diddle the taxman over their expenses, Brenda too because she had been designated his research assistant. The weather had been lovely, the Turks very agreeable and the scrambled eggs with tomatoes one of the best dishes he had ever eaten. They had stayed part of the time in a sort of private house infested with mosquitoes and Germans and, to anybody reared in the West and no doubt others besides, most remarkable for its lavatory. The night sound-track had been remarkable too : goats, chickens, donkeys, cattle and naturally dogs separated from them at times only by the thickness of the outside wall, together with, towards dawn and some yards further away, scooters. But they hadn't really minded any of that. To look back on it now was a bit like looking at a museum postcard of some archaic wall-painting or mosaic: you knew the official version of what the figures were up to and unquestioningly believed it, but found it hard to imagine with any clarity how they had felt about what they had been up to. So perhaps it wasn't really in order for him to be hurt a lot about Brenda not going to miss him.

Eventually Jake decided he might as well go and pick up the back numbers as he had planned. He needed them, the walk would do him good and it would probably be raining tomorrow.

27—Smudger Turns up Trumps

The week passed in a flurry of tedium. There was the money to be settled: all four parties had some, Jake what there was from his academic posts and the odd bob from his books, Brenda a little from her family, Geoffrey a competence from the recklessly spendthrift chutney-merchants, Alcestis something from her terrifying tenure of a post as a social worker and perhaps something too from shares. What held things up was everyone being decent; a touch of rapacity here or stinginess there would have worked wonders. As it was they got no further than deciding that for the moment you hung on to what you had. In the same sort of way the furnishings of 47 Burgess Avenue were to be left as they were down to the last china cat till Brenda had somewhere else to put them, or rather a yet-to-be-agreed proportion of them. She could have the bloody lot as far as Jake was concerned but he couldn't say so.

Several times he considered getting the hell out and making for Oxford, not just for now but for the rest of his time there, letting the house despite Brenda's guarded forecast and doing up his rooms in Comyns and perhaps finding a cottage later. But he always came up against the thought that Oxford wasn't very nice really, not any more, and he had as many or as few friends in both places, and he might not enjoy the garden exactly but he wouldn't like to be without it, and there was the dub, and above all he was used to being here, though admittedly not on his own.

There was some minor hitch in Geoffrey's arrangements when it came to it and Brenda didn't leave till the following Monday. The days in between had been normal to a degree that might have been comic: television, desultory work, the dub, to the Thomsons" for drinks Sunday midday, the garden, television. Finally he was standing in the bedroom among her packed suitcases.

"That's the lot for now," she said. "I'll be back tomorrow for another load if that's all right. I'll ring you first."

"Yes of course. Er, it's a bit late, but you remember that evening we went to the Bamboo Bothy?"

"How long ago?"

"Well, it must have been the same night you gave me the pep-talk about affection. I was waiting for you downstairs after we'd had a..... You came in and I said you looked beautiful."

"Yes, I remember that all right. What about it?"

"You were touched and so was I. I thought if that could still happen, after all it's only a few weeks ago, then we still have something, and we could sort of build on it and make more of it. Oh I mean have your fling now but perhaps in a month or six weeks...."

"We'll always still have something darling, after all those years but it wouldn't be enough, it wouldn't, you know, come round often enough. It would be very nice when it did, but at the moment I honestly can't see...."

"No, I suppose not, you're right. I thought I ought to mention it, though."

"Yes, I'm glad you did. It was sweet of you."

"Good. Well I'll get this stuff down."

"I can take these two."

"No, leave the zip one to me. You take that one there."

There was a horrible interlude in the sitting-room while the driver of the pre-ordered minicab sat in traffic, couldn't find the house, stopped for a hamburger, chatted-up a bird, anyway didn't appear. In the end of course he did appear and proved most surprisingly willing to deal with the luggage. While he did so Brenda walked round the room crying. Jake knew that she was crying because of the room and the house and her life there rather than because of her life with him. That part didn't take very long. When it was over he went out into the front garden with her. The air was cool and the sky covered with loud but no rain was falling.

"I'm sorry," he said. "For it and about it."

"You are a silly old Oxford don."

"Off you go now. Good luck. Hey, hold it. I've just thought, we're mad. You have the house, you've put so much into it and made it so nice, you must have it. I'll find a couple of rooms somewhere and you can move back in. Give me a week or two to look round. Thank Christ I thought of it. Insane."

"What about you and the garden?"

"Well I'll miss it but nothing like the way you'd miss the house. That's decided then. Ring me tomorrow. I'll be here all day."

Back in the sitting room he thought about Geoffrey properly for the first time since hearing that Christendom's premier fucking fool had taken his wife off him. Not that there was a great deal to be said about that circumstance, because it was so hard to imagine anything of what it must be like. Geoffrey and Brenda out to dinner at a restaurant, Geoffrey handed the menu, Geoffrey baffled not by the language or by where a Dover sole came from but by the concept of choosing what he wanted to eat from a proffered list of available dishes. Geoffrey and Brenda off on a trip to the land of the mango and the tamarind, Geoffrey with his papers at the airport—incidentally there must be someone at his office who knew which way up to hang a map of the world and had the authority to stop him darting off to the Yukon or Monte Carlo to do his shopping. Jake's mental two-shot of Geoffrey and Brenda regularly cut to a close-up of Geoffrey frowning as some aspect of reality came to his attention. That was just as well; long might it remain so.

One o'clock: nearly time for lunch. What had Brenda—but Brenda had gone. All the same she might well have left something for him in the larder, in fact now he came to think of it she had said as much. He went out to the kitchen and found a saucepan of brown soup (oxtail? chocolate?) on the electric stove. He turned the ring under it on full, thus ensuring it would be warm enough to eat by nightfall. The larder revealed most of a cold leg of lamb and a salad; he carved the meat and made a dressing, then uncorked the remains of the Medoc they had shared the previous evening. All this was very fine but things would assuredly take a turn for the worse in a few days. In pursuance of the principle that those who are always about when they're not wanted are never about on those admittedly very rare occasions when they are wanted, Mrs Sharp, who had been known to collect the odd pound of sausages on her way to work here, was going to be on holiday for the next three weeks; her usual replacement had fallen out at the last minute and Jake didn't know how to find a replacement for the replacement, at least he knew how to summon candidates for the situation but not how to separate the thieves and arsonists from those at the other end of the scale, the merely idle and inefficient. But perhaps he would find a lodging before any of this should start to matter; he had no idea how long it would take.

While he was assembling his lunch things, which included a jar of sweet pickle with the name of Geoffrey's firm on it, on the little round table Jake heard the doorbell chime. His immediate thought was of Kelly, Kelly couched till a moment ago in a hide in a neighbour's garden and now, with Brenda well and truly gone, moving in if not for the kill (and better not be too bloody sure about that) then certainly for the fuck-up. But it wasn't Kelly, it was Alcestis.

"Christ," he said in simple surprise and dismay. He had thought vaguely that one (on its scale considerable) offset against Brenda's departure would be to see no more of the Mabbotts, by which term he would really have meant Alcestis, because Geoffrey was quite good value for the mean-minded, but of course that was, well, wrong.

She looked at him with her eyes slightly narrowed and her mouth bunched up in an awful Churchillian grimace about finest hours and fighting on the beaches. "Hallo, Jake," she said gruffly and with a tremendous amount of quiet courage packed into three syllables. "Mind if I come in?"

He minded a lot but was still too taken aback not to go along with convention. "No, no of course not, do come in."

"Am I interrupting your lunch?"

"I was just going to start, but I haven't actually .... started."

In she surged; he noticed she was carrying a supermarket plastic bag. 'Christ', he thought, that's her nightie in there, she's come to start the other half of the wife-swap, and fought down a squeal of panic. Not knowing quite what else to do he followed her out into the kitchen, where a lifetime of experience showed in the way she grasped the state of his soup. With that on the record she sat down at the table next to the place he had laid himself and here eventually he had to join her. Asked if he could get her anything she shook her head slowly, staring out into the garden with eyes that were now slightly wider than normal and looking like some picture of a hundred years before called 'The Bereaved'.

"Well, Jake, there's not a great deal to say, is there?"

"Almost nothing."

"Except perhaps this." As Alcestis paused, the sound of a jet engine began to be audible. At the exact point where it prevented you hearing anything else she started to speak again. Jake watched fascinated as her expression and movements went from tender to grim and back again, from indignant to forgiving, wistful, desolated, philosophical, wry, brave, as amid the huge uproar she bit her lip, clenched her fist, bowed her head, lifted it, frowned, raised her vestigial eyebrows, sighed, half-smiled. He nodded and shrugged and so on repeatedly and farted once. As the jet started to wane she said, "Which as far as I'm concerned is an end of the matter."

"Well, I don't think anyone could put it better than that, Allie."

"No. Thanks. Well. Now. Right. Go. Here."

She stood up and successively took out of the supermarket bag and planked down on the table a pork pie, a packet of cereal, half a pound of butter, a tin of tomatoes and half a dozen other unelaborate foods. Finally and more ceremoniously she produced a tear-off pad with a hard back and a pencil attached by a cord.

"Don't know what you've got," she said, "don't know what you want. Get a copy of your front-door key made and drop it through my letterbox. Anything you need, just whack it down here and leave it on the table. I've got to fetch my own stuff, no point in two of us at it and I've got a car. Yes, I've been left that. However. Settle at the end of the week or whenever you like. You can be in your study when I deliver, no need for us ever to meet. We can't help each other emotionally but I can help you practically, so why not?"

"Well, Allie, that is most kind of you, I do appreciate it very much."

"Rubbish, man, nothing to it. So long. No, I can see myself out."

And in a moment the front door banged. Curious thing, human nature, Jake thought to himself as he started on his cold meat and salad. You get someone like that, by no means the most attractive of women, in fact pretty plain and full of irritating mannerisms, to all appearance entirely self-centred, and then she comes in at the end, so to speak, to show that underneath it all as so often there's more than a spark of decency-and of shrewdness too. Yes, that was certainly a legitimate view. On the other hand it might be tentatively argued that old Smudger was still just as much of a raving monster as she had ever been, or rather substantially more of one with her "shrewdness" seeing him as a threat to her charter to talk balls all the time and her "decency" trying to make him feel bad with a coals-of-fire job. He was delighted at this confirmation that she knew he hated her like hell and hoped devoutly that shopping for him would cause her great inconvenience. What about a couple of hundredweight of cement for a birdbath or something in the garden? It had begun to look as if finding somewhere to stay, somewhere really satisfactory and also cheap, would be no easy matter. He poured out the last of the wine and took it in front of the television set.

28—Physical after All

Later that year, in the November, Jake became troubled with excessive shitting. He would have to go seven or eight times a day and between those times his innards were never quiet, popping, chuckling and fizzing their heads off and emitting moans of poignant grief that attracted the concern or the interest of his classes and pupils. A preliminary exploration of his bum by Dr Curnow proved inconclusive; he must pay another visit in the third week. So one afternoon he duly made his way through rainy gusts to the bus stop and, preceded on board by two pairs of coffee-coloured children, the first in the charge of a white woman, the second of a black man, was soon being carried towards Harley Street.

Not much had happened to him in the intervening months. He had cancelled his holiday in Sicily in favour of a trip to Crete with Lancewood and his chum. There he had accused the hotel staff corporately of having stolen his money, traveler's cheques and passport a sufficient time before their discovery under his mattress, where it could only be that he had stowed them out of some freak of caution put beyond recapture by retsina and Mogadon. Brenda was settled in the Burgess Avenue house with Geoffrey, Jake in a perfectly bearable couple of rooms in Kentish Town, nearer the centre on the 127 route. He often wondered how much he missed her but never for long at a time. Wynn-Williams fell down dead. Two days before he (Jake) moved he had had a very brief visit from Kelly, first in what Brenda had called her investigative-journalist persona and on being told to go away straight into the apologising self-accusing waif he had had two previous doses of. Then bugger pity, he had said to himself, lest you let a fiend in at your door. But he was always going to feel he had let her down, or rather not always, what crap, just to the end of his days, not nearly as long. He finished his article about Syracuse and sent it in.

The bus passed between the tiled facade of Mornington Crescent station and the roughly triangular paved area with the statue of Cobden near its apex, pitted and grimy and lacking its right hand, Richard Cobden the corn-law reformer and worker for peace and disarmament, too famous for his Christian name and dates to be needed in the inscription. Almost at the foot of the plinth what looked like the aboveground part of a public lavatory, black railings draped with black chicken wire, bore a notice saying London Electricity Board—Danger Keep Out and gave a limited view of a stairway with ferns growing out of it and its walls. Two bollards painted in rings of black and white were to be seen not far off, their function hard even to guess at. Weeds flourished in the crevices between the paving stones, a number of which had evidently been ripped out; others, several of them smashed, stood in an irregular pile. Elsewhere there was a heap of waterlogged and collapsed cardboard boxes and some large black plastic sheets spread about by the wind. Each corner of the space was decorated with an arrangement of shallow concrete hexagons filled with earth in which grew speckled evergreen bushes and limp conifer saplings about the height of a man, those at the extreme ends crushed by traffic and the greenery run into the soil along with aftershave cartons, sweet-wrappers, dog-food labels and soft-drink tins. Turning south, the bus stopped at its stop across the road from Greater London House, through the windows of which fluorescent lighting glared or flickered all day. It stood on ground filched from an earlier generation of dwellers in the Crescent who had woken one morning to see and hear their garden being eradicated.

Fifteen minutes later Jake was walking down Harley Street, buffeted by damp squalls as he went. He noticed a man and a woman in Western dress before he got to Curnow's place and was admitted. Thanks perhaps to the default of a bashaw or begum the receptionist showed him in straight away.

"Sit down, would you please?" The doctor made it sound as if this procedure would quite likely be painful and was certainly unusual but would turn out to serve his patient's interests better than any alternative soon come by. "And how have things been?"

"Oh, not too bad. A slight improvement on the whole."

"You've kept to your diet?"

"Pretty well. I've laid off the fruit and the spices but I have backslid a couple of times with the wine."

"You must cut it out altogether. You've passed no blood or

mucus or anything of that character or nature?"

"No, nothing of that category or description."

"Any pain? Good. Now if you'll just take down your trousers and pants and lie on the couch."

Curnow pushed a light up Jake's bum and had a look round there while Jake made hooting noises to relieve his fairly marked discomfort. When Curnow came down again it felt as if he had brought far, far more than his light with him but this proved not to be the case. Soon Jake was back in his chair and very glad of it too.

"Well, there are some unformed stools up there but nothing abnormal. Keep on with the Lomotil and the diet and it should clear up. But remember: no wine," said Curnow doggedly, adding with extreme reluctance, "for the time being. If you must drink stick to spirits." He paused, following up a memory perhaps set off by a glimpse of Jake's genitals a few minutes before. "Ah-your libido. I sent you to Dr Rosenberg, didn't I? What was the result?"

"Nothing whatever. No, that's not quite true. My .... libido declined further during the "therapy" and has gone on doing so since."

"I gather from that that you have ceased the therapy. Why?"

"Things like it being offensive and nonsensical."

"I could recommend you elsewhere. There are others in the field."

"If any of them could help me I shouldn't need to go to them."

The doctor said impressively, "Let me suggest an altogether different approach. When I measured the level of your testosterone in the spring, it was average."

"You mean that hormone test you did?"

"Yes. It's been established more recently that what is significant is not the crude testosterone level but the level of that part of it that isn't bound to plasma protein. It would be perfectly simple to establish what yours is. If it's below average it can be supplemented artificially."

"You mean it may be physical after all? And cured just by taking something?"

"Yes. As I said, we'll have to run tests."

Jake did a quick run-through of women in his mind, not of the ones he had known or dealt with in the past few months or years so much as all of them: their concern with the surface of things, with objects and appearances, with their surroundings and how they looked and sounded in them, with seeming to be better and to be right while getting everything wrong, their automatic assumption of the role of injured party in any clash of wills, their certainty that a view is the more credible and useful for the fact that they hold it, their use of misunderstanding and misrepresentation as weapons of debate, their selective sensitivity to tones of voice, their unawareness of the difference in themselves between sincerity and insincerity, their interest in importance (together with noticeable inability to discriminate in that sphere), their fondness for general conversation and directionless discussion, their pre-emption of the major share of feeling, their exaggerated estimate of their own plausibility, their never listening and lots of other things like that, all according to him.

So it was quite easy. "No thanks," he said.

THE END