'Sixty,' said Rosenberg as he wrote.
'Well, it is actually fifty-nine, not that there's a lot of difference, I agree.'
'We always enter the age next birthday. We find it makes for simplicity.'
'Oh I see.'
'Your profession.'
'I teach at a university.'
'Any particular one?'
'Yes. Oxford. I'm Reader in Early Mediterranean History there and a Fellow of Comyns College. And by the way I have got a doctorate but I don't normally use the title.'
'So it's 'Mr' Richardson. Now your trouble is that your libido (lib-eedo) has declined.'
'My what?' asked Jake, though he had understood all right. 'Your libido, your sexual drive.'
'I'm sorry, I'd be inclined to pronounce it lib-eedo, on the basis that we're talking English, not Italian or Spanish, but I suppose it'll make for simplicity if I go along with you. So yes, my lib-eedo has declined.'
'Are you married?'
'Yes.'
'How much does your wife weigh?'
'What? No I beg your pardon, I heard what you said. How much .... I don't know. But you're right. I mean she weighs a lot. She's quite tall but she weighs a lot. Fourteen stone? I don't know. How did you know?'
'Oh, it's just one of the most statistically common reasons why men lose sexual interest in their wives. I couldn't say I knew.'
'All right. I mean I see. But it isn't that, or rather it may well be that too, or 'there' may well be that too but it's general, I simply don't—'
'Your wife's age?'
'Forty-seven.'
'Does she know you've come to see me today?'
'Good God yes, of course. We're still, well, on close terms.'
'It's important she starts losing weight as fast as it's safe to do so. May I telephone her?'
'No, don't do that. Write her a letter, but leave it a couple of days. Not that I can see it having much effect.'
'Ah, one never knows, one can but try.' The doctor hurried on; the conversation about weight, however necessary, had been an obvious check to his interest. 'You were saying you'd suffered a general loss of drive.'
'That's right. I don't fancy anyone, not even girls I can see are very attractive. And it wasn't always like that, I promise you.'
'I think Mr Richardson, before we go any further you might tell me when you first—'
'Let's see, I first noticed something was wrong,' began Jake, and went on to talk about the year or more he had spent in continual, at times severe gastric pain being treated by Curnow for an ulcer, drinking almost nothing, watching his diet, taking the antacid mixture prescribed him and telling himself that pain, discomfort, general below-parness had temporarily reduced his desires to some unestablished low level. In the end he had developed jaundice, had had diagnosed a stone in the common duct (that into which the canals from the liver and the gall-bladder unite) and had had this removed by surgery, another set of experiences decidedly not associated with satyriasis. Out of hospital his recovery had been steady but slow, marked by periods of fatigue and weakness, a third period in which it seemed to him natural to postpone sexual dealings with his wife, let alone going in pursuit of other ladies. He had still somehow not got round to either branch of activity, though admittedly beginning to feel rested and fit, when there came that fatal Saturday in late February—the night of 'Thunderball.'
There was no point in telling Rosenberg the full story, but Jake remembered it with great vividness. Brenda had gone to stay with her grand cousins in Northumberland, one of the places where by tradition he didn't go with her. She had left on the Thursday; she was due back on the Monday evening; she had actually telephoned that lunchtime to ask him to find and read over a recipe for quenelles she had meant to take with her. Given ten years of his precept and example in the matter of each being kept informed of where the other was at all times, her dislike of changes of plan, the non-existence of anything likely to bring her back prematurely which he wasn't bound to hear of first, she couldn't have been away in a more armour-plated, hull-down, missile-intercepting fashion. Arriving back from Oxford on the Thursday night he had found her already well gone, had spent most of Friday self- indulgently and yet dutifully writing to some of the old friends and ex-pupils who had fled from the England of the 1970s and had made Saturday a remorseless build-up to the time at which, an avocado pear with prawns, a trout with almonds supported by brussel sprouts and chestnuts and a bottle of his beloved Pouilly Fume (?1.99 while stocks last) before him, he would settle down to watch the film of 'Thunderball' on television.
When, twenty minutes before the off, the telephone brought him hurrying from the bog he had felt no premonitory stirrings: Brenda most likely, checking that it was indeed six pinches of powdered baboon's balls in the sauce, and if not, even Alcestis could hardly talk him out in Brenda's deluxe absence. A female voice he at once recognised but couldn't at once name had asked him if he was there.
'Speaking.'
'Jake! You stinker. This is good old Marge. Remember me?' Christ yes, as what seven years earlier had been a bosomy thirty-five-year-old from Baltimore, the source of a strenuous and reprehensible couple of months before some now-forgotten necessity had plucked her away across the ocean. He had gone on to say enough to show he did remember her. 'You sound as if you're alone.'
'I am.'
'Completely?'
