continued by other means. A round-shouldered woman of about forty with prominent but otherwise rather good teeth and a trick of murmuring indistinguishably in tones of self-reproach or mild alarm, Mrs Sharp was always in the way, his way at least. On the stairs, on the thresholds of rooms, in the narrow bit of passage from between the foot of the stairs and the dining-room door to the kitchen door (especially there), dead in front of whichever part of whichever shelf held the book he wanted—always, always. She monitored his shits, managing to be on reconnaissance patrol past the lavatory door or standing patrol in sight of it whenever he went in and out; he couldn't have said why he minded this as he did. Keeping at him in this way meant so much to her that she took top an hour less than the going rate and so, in these thin times, rendered herself virtually unsackable.
Today offered her special opportunities. The first of course concerned the nocturnal mensurator. Debarred from what would have been old Smudger approach-direct questioning for as long as necessary-Mrs Sharp would if she could have led with something like 'I'm afraid I may have broken your record player or whatever it is, Mr Richardson, look. Would you see if it's still working, then I can get it repaired if it isn't.' At the moment the apparatus was in Jake's study, which he was able to keep locked on the vague grounds that it contained some rare books and without this precaution, supposedly, the milkman would rush up and pinch them. (In fact the rarest book there was a copy of his own early work on the first Greek settlements in Asia Minor: most of the small only edition had been pulped in the post-war paper shortage.) A locked door wasn't anything like a hundred-per-cent protection against Mrs Sharp—he wouldn't have been much more astonished than she just now if he had found her on the roof setting fire to petrol-soaked rags and dropping them down the study chimney—but it was a hell of a sight better than nothing.
On his entry she had flattened herself against the wall to allow him, and any twenty-stone friends he might have brought with him, to pass. He got out of range of her, so that if she fell over at this point she wouldn't be able to knock the magazines out of his hand in the process, and said weightily,
'I'm going up to my study now, Mrs Sharp'
'Yes, Mr Richardson.' (Already a most unusual exchange : it was her habit never to speak except while she was being spoken to.)
'I've got some very important work to do.'
'Yes, Mr Richardson.'
'I don't want to be disturbed for the next hour.'
'No, Mr Richardson.'
Somebody who knew her less well than he did might have thought that this would put ideas into her head. Perhaps, but they would have come of their own accord, born of that mysterious power, shared with Alcestis, of 'unconsciously' sensing how and when and where to be obstructive and acting on it. He had said what he had said merely to forearm himself against whatever way she might rise to her second special opportunity of the day, for rise to it she would: the readiness was all. The same somebody as before might have deferred matters till the afternoon or next day: no good: she would have stayed on to make up for hours not worked last week, come tomorrow so as not to have to come on Friday when her daughter, etc. 'And' he was fucked if he was going to, etc. He knew the Alcestis-Mrs Sharp gang counted a lot on that reaction but sod it.
As he went upstairs he sang under his breath a ditty learned in those Army days of his:
'Get older this ...'
'Get older that ...'
'When there isn't a girl about Yer feel so lonely,'
'When there isn't a girl about Yer on yer only .... Get older this (bash! bash!)'
'Get older that (boom! boom!) ...'
It certainly didn't take him back. Locking himself in with a load of new-bought wankery, on the other hand, did, as predicted, but the distance was far smaller in the second case. He settled down comfortably in his handsome brass-studded red leather armchair, a present from Brenda on his fiftieth birthday, and opened 'Kensington.'
After looking through it at colour-supplement speed he put it aside. It was full of chaps and parts of chaps, or rather of course it was full of girls but with chaps very much in the picture. 'Zoom' and its contemporaries had occasionally included the odd chap dressed as a policeman or rustic, only he had been dressed, and the point of him had been the mistaken though innocuous one of something like comic relief, and you could usually get rid of him or most of him by folding the page. No amount of ingenuity of that order would have got rid of the chaps here.
The journal he had picked up in the shop almost at random turned out to be called 'Agora, and the breast he had spied on its cover turned out to be part of a drawing, more precisely part of a drawing-within-a-drawing that a chap in the outer drawing was drawing. He was the only visible chap throughout 'Agora,' but there were dozens of his sex in the letterpress of which, apart from small or smallish advertisements and some more non-erotic drawings, it entirely consisted. The range was from she ran her dainty fingers up and down my, by way of the other night my girl friend took hold of my, to can anything be done to straighten out my. Some of it wasn't supposed to be true and some of it was.
Lastly and with renewed expectation he came to 'Mezzanine.' It was about the size of the Liverpool telephone directory but was printed on much nicer paper. As part of the fun-delaying ritual that was itself part of the fun, he began at the beginning. Car. Cigarette. Soft drink. Hard drink. Mezzanine Platform—this was some more on the lines of said she'd never seen anything like my. Cigarette. Car. Article on speedboats. Article on Loire wines. He was over halfway through this, finding it sound enough if rather jocosely written, when he so to speak remembered where he was. Guiltily he flipped over the page and came upon a small photograph and a large photograph, both a bit misty on purpose, of a very pretty girl who at the same time looked like President Carter, in the sense that her face looked like his face, and who had almost no clothes on without giving much away. Over the next page, three more photographs, arty angles, unlikely poses. Over the next page, well this is it folks. Wham. And (there being two such) bam. And thank you most awfully main.
Jake stared, though without amazement. Tit—was not what this magazine was. In one sense he was on very familiar territory, even if the familiarity was slightly dated; in another he'd never been there before. His mind searched slowly. It was all a matter of how you looked at it, in two senses again if not more. In itself it was a bit..... And for some reason you found you had to consider it in itself, even though most of the rest of her was there, including her face. In itself it had an exotic appearance, like the inside of a giraffe's ear or a tropical fruit not much prized even by the locals. He turned on and found more of the same, on again and found more art, again and came to an article on hairpieces. Men's. To put on their heads.
In the days of 'Zoom'—when, that is, 'Zoom'-style had been as far as you could easily, safely and not expensively go—he had believed that to come across, by some stupendous accident, one of his favourite 'Zoom'
