'Yes.'
'Oh, that being so, why don't I just grab a cab and come toddling up to your place and we could get along with kind of renewing our acquaintance if you've nothing better to do?'
'Fuck me wept!' he had cried, regressing to an oath of his Army days; he had dapped his hand over the mouthpiece in the nick of time. 'Shit!' he had added. And then he had been filled with alarm and horror.
'You're telling me it was a failure, is that right?' asked Dr Rosenberg.
'Not in the sense you probably mean, no. I .... performed. Not with any distinction, but adequately. No worse than many a time in the past. No, the striking thing was afterwards, immediately afterwards. I kept thinking about the trout and whether we could—'
'Hunger is a normal reaction on completion of sexual intercourse.'
'I'm not talking about hunger, I was thinking about missing my dinner or it being spoilt or there not being enough for the two of us, no, it was more there being enough for me if she had some too and what else could she have. In fact the evening as I'd planned it for myself, very much including what was left of 'Thunderball.' I reckoned that if—'
'I wonder if you'd kindly explain about this thunderball thing you've been constantly referring to. I don't believe I—'
'Well, you know, 'Thunderball.' Film, didn't I say? Sean Connery. James Bond. Ian Fleming. Barbara something, was it?'
'Ah to be sure, James Bond,' said Dr Rosenberg without producing much conviction in Jake. 'Do you want to tell me what happened later?'
'I will. We lay around for a bit, not very long, and then she said brightly she was hungry and what about dinner, and I said we could eat at home, and she said if I didn't mind what she felt like was a long lazy rather greedy evening somewhere with a lot of pasta and a lot of vino, and so that's what we did, and it was quite good fun really, and we said good night in the restaurant. She was marvellous, she did it very well. The only thing she couldn't do was make me think she didn't know. Of course she couldn't. They always know things like that, not that much acumen was called for in this case. Yes. She knew I knew she knew I knew she knew.'
Rosenberg seemed to think this last part was important; at any rate he went in for a good deal of writing while Jake's memory fastened against his will on the hours he had lain awake that night and on how he had spent most of the next day: unable to read, unable to attend to radio or television, eating almost nothing, staring into space, hardly thinking, trying not so much to accept what had happened to him as just to take it in. To distract his mind from this he glanced round the small and by now slightly overheated room with artificial interest. He saw a couch of a height inconvenient for anyone much under eight foot (to use it himself the doctor would pretty well need a rope ladder), a green filing-cabinet, no books beyond diaries and directories and, on a fluted wooden pedestal, a life-sized human head in some shiny yellowish material with the surface of the skull divided into numbered sections. That distracted his mind like mad.
'Right,' said Rosenberg at last, 'I think I have that clear. And you've had no intercourse at all since then. Have you masturbated?'
It took Jake a little while to get the final participle because the Irishman had stressed it on its third syllable, but he did get it. 'Er .... yes. Well, a couple of times.'
'Do you have early-morning erections?'
This time Jake responded at once, with a desire to tell the bugger to mind his own business. Then he saw that that sort of wouldn't do and said, 'Yes. Usually anyway.'
'Do you have fantasies?'
'Sexual fantasies. A bit. Not much.'
'Have you over these last weeks used written or pictorial pornography or visited a sex movie?'
'No to the lot. I haven't read any pornography for years and I've never been to a, a sex movie.'
'I see. Going back now to before your illness, how was your libido in those days?'
'Well, not what it was when I was a youngster, obviously, but my wife and I were having a—performing sexual intercourse at least once a week and more at special times like holidays, and I worked out that in '74 I had two affairs, one of them only a couple of, er, occasions but the other lasting several months on and off.'
'And longer ago, how active were you sexually in your forties and thirties?'
'Just put it this way, in my time I've been to bed with well over a hundred women.'
Rosenberg had made some notes of the answers to all his questions until this last one, at which to Jake's distinct annoyance he merely nodded. More questions followed and more notes were taken. Parents, characters of, probable sex-life of, attitude to; knowledge of sex, how acquired; masturbation, frequency of (high); homosexual activities (none); first sexual experience, to what degree a success (bloody marvellous, thanks very much); then, at a less leisurely pace, subsequent sexual experience, marriages, divorces, causes of, present wife, relationship with, sexual and non-sexual. As far as he knew Jake kept nothing back here, but he had the feeling that a series of negatives was all that was established; still, necessary work, no doubt. At last the scientist of mental phenomena looked at his watch and said,
'Ah now, just one or two final points. What is your height, Mr Richardson?'
'Five foot eleven.'
'And your weight?'
'Twelve stone six'—noted by Jake only the previous week to be exactly right for his height and age, according to whatever chart it had been.
Rosenberg gave a small frown. 'Is that all?'
'Yes, that's all.'
