youth. To the idea of doing them, at least. But first there was the Brenda side of the question to be settled. How much, if anything, was she to be told of the bits that didn't directly involve her? With the nocturnal mensurator his mind was made up for him by the impossibility of concealing it about his person on arrival back home, nor could he think of a plausible false description of it. And what after all did it matter? No accountability could be apportioned anywhere for how his tool behaved, or failed to behave, while he slept.
Its conduct in waking hours was a horse of another colour. Any woman, even the most severely rational in intention, a category that excluded Brenda, must feel slighted to some degree when the one she regarded as her own property was turned to a different sexual use, not by any means least in cases where her successful rival existed only on paper, so to speak, or in the mind. And he felt sure that all the talk he could devise about the entire point of it being the restoration of their sex-life, however well argued, however carefully listened to, would only end up with her asking him to promise to try not to enjoy it. Besides. sneaking off on the quiet with some pictorial pornographic material would be like old times.
The next morning looked like giving him as good a chance as he was likely to get; Brenda had gone off early with Alcestis to probe a new kickshaw-mart in New King's Road, an operation any male could have polished off in three hours at the most, bus there and back, but was going to last those two, travelling in the Mabbotts' Peugeot though they were, most of the day with lunch thrown in, no doubt at one of those places where they really worked on you to get you to have a glass of wine with your food. (Alcestis: he had whimpered and gone all shaky for a while at the thought—unentertained the previous day—of what would have happened without fail if she'd been at no. 47 when he got back from Rosenberg: him—Jake—flat on his back on the bamboo settee ballock-naked with the plastic whatsit round his john thomas and the other end of the flex plugged into the plugged-in nocturnal bloody mensurator in one minute flat.)
Once a keen buyer of tit-magazines, he realised as he left the house that he hadn't even glanced at one for what felt like about three years but was probably a bit more. He did know, though, that the old order, of Venus Films Ltd and Visart Dept 100, of 'Kamera, Pagan, Zoom, QT' and 'Solo' no. 3 (featuring Rosa Domaille) sold alongside science fiction in the little shop in Newport Court, had yielded place to the open and widespread sale of large glossy journals that went further and also elsewhere, in the sense that they included supposedly serious or at least nonruttish short stories and articles on probably cars and clothes. However widespread, their sale could hardly be universal; better make for the Blake Street end of Orris Park, by tradition the cheaper and nastier end. At first glance this wasn't apparent: the buildings were no grimier, the proportion of derelict shops with corrugated iron in the window-frames no higher, the amount and variety of litter underfoot no greater. Then he saw the hand-done poster on the door of the Duke of Marlborough—Pub Live Family Entertainment with Bridie on drums, The Cowboy Himself, Mick on Duovox—and reflected that not all distinctions had been effaced.
The shop was on a corner next to a place with a lot of corroded refrigerators and rusty gas and electric cookers on the pavement outside it. Jake pretended to peer at one of these while he spied out the land. Confectionery counter-kids' toys and things—greeting card stand—the stuff. In he went and started trying not to read what it said on the cards and looking the stuff over. Not easy: it was arranged in an overlapping row so that only the one at the end was fully visible. In Newport Court, under the head mistressy yet motherly eye of the white coated lady in charge, limited browsing had been the rule, half-a-crown's worth of purchase per five or six minutes. Here there were no other customers to give guidance, though some was provided by the look of the bloke behind the confectionery, just the kind of squat bald forty-year-old to jump at the chance of asking Jake menacingly if he could help him. So one fell swoop would have to do it. 'Mezzanine'—hadn't they seized a couple of issues of that in Australia recently? The rest of the lettering wasn't encouraging: The Gay Lib Game, Through the Insurance Maze, Exclusive-Britain's Secret Police Network. The picture was different. It showed a girl with the kind of angular good looks that suggested a sound business head and the kind of clothes, though in some disarray, that real girls wore. In one hand she held a tipped cigarette, but what counted for much more, especially on the cover, was where the other wasn't quite. One, thought Jake. Further along he caught sight of the fragment 'sington' and took it to be part of 'Kensington,' the name of a periodical recently described by its proprietor (in what connection Jake had forgotten) as entirely educational in character. Two. Directly to the side he caught a glimpse of half an outsize bare breast and decided that had better be three and the lot before the bald bugger asked him if he wasn't tiring his eyes with all that reading.
As it turned out he had been hard on this man, who politely didn't smile or leer when he saw Jake's selection, named a cash sum once and said Cheers five times, the first time when he noticed the approach of his customer, again when handed the magazines, again when he took the money, again when he gave change and the last time when bidden good-bye. Better than arseholes to you, thought Jake.
He set off home with quite a spring in his step. Dirty girls approached and passed him, overtook him, moved across his front. When he observed this it occurred to him to take stock of them and so lend some background and depth to the study he would shortly be making of the relevant portions of 'Mezzanine, Kensington' and whatever the other one was called—he hadn't liked to look and was carrying the things rolled up and back outwards. So, as the creatures cruised about him on the split and loosened paving-stones, advanced and receded between skips full of rubble at the kerb and fat black plastic bags full of rubbish against or near the shop-fronts, he took a bit of stock of them.
They differed from the ones he had used to know within quite a wide range and yet unmistakably, as a random bunch of passers-by in Prague would have differed from the Brussels equivalent. Apart from their dirtiness, which was often no more extreme than a look of entire neglect as in a hermit or castaway, they tended to have in common smallness of frame that wasn't quite slimness, smallness of feature that went with roundness of head, dark-blonde colouring and nothing to shout about in the way of tits, so much not so that the odd one here and there was probably a boy: anyhow, there were enough such to point to a large secret migration from (as it might have been) Schleswig-Holstein. The favoured attire suggested a lightning raid on the dressing-up chest or actual deprivation of clothing as normally thought of. They were wearing curtains, bedspreads, blankets, tablecloths, loose covers off armchairs and sofas. A sideboard-runner hung round one neck in the manner of a stole, a doubled-over loop of carpet round another in that of an academic hood. And somebody's fucking them, thought Jake.
The pageant continued unabated throughout the walk back to Burgess Avenue, so there had been no malign Blake Street influence at work. Perhaps there was one which embraced Orris Park in general and even, it could be, surrounding territories too; he must keep his eyes open on his travels and compare. Turning in at his gate he realised there was one thing shared by the whole crowd, the larger as well as the smaller, the ones in clothes no less than the ones in household textiles, the black and the white and the khaki: they had all not looked at him.
Jake wielded his latchkey and opened the front door slowly, cautiously. As soon as he had created an aperture wide enough for it to do so, a human head came into view at about the level of his knee and no more than a few inches from it. The eyes caught his and showed astonishment. He wanted to kick the head, which ascended and receded as part of a move from a crouching to a standing posture. It belonged to Mrs Sharp, the woman who came in three mornings a week to clean the house. He had told her about three-quarters of an hour earlier that he was going out for about three-quarters of an hour, so it was no more than natural that after about forty minutes she should have settled down (as he now saw) to polish the brass frame round the mat immediately inside the front door, nor that astonishment should have visited her to find him of all people entering the house at such a time and by such a route. It was sensing enough of this that must have led him to open the door in the way he had.
He had had plenty of practice at that kind of thing in the four years Mrs Sharp had been working here. Obviously she had been recommended by Alcestis and might even have worked for her at some stage. He was unsure about this and likely to remain so, since he had asked Brenda and forgotten the answer too many times. What he was sure of was that she (Mrs Sharp) bore marks of being Alcestis-trained or alternatively was Alcestis
