Although there was no shortage of his fellow human beings on the pavements and in and out of shops, other places and spaces were altogether free of them, so recurrently that his mind was crossed by thoughts of a selective public holiday or lightning semi-general strike. A railway bridge revealed two or three acres of empty tracks and sidings; large pieces of machinery and piles of bricks stood unattended on a rather smaller stretch of mud; no one was in sight among the strange apparatuses in what might have been a playground for young Martians; a house that had stayed half-demolished since about 1970 over-looked a straightforward bombsite of World War II; nearer the centre, the stone face of a university building was spattered with rust-stains from scaffolding on which Jake had never seen anybody at work. Even Granville Court, Collin wood Court and the others, angular but lofty structures of turd-coloured brick resting on squat stilts, seemed to be deserted. Even or especially.
Warren Street was at hand; he climbed warily down the stairs, holding on with all his strength when a deeper cavity than usual in the road-surface lifted him heel and toe into the air. He got off by Kevin's Kebab, crossed over and fought his way westward against a soaking wind that blew now with fatuous indignation. 878 Harley Street. Proinsias Rosenberg MD, MA (Dip. Psych). The door opened in his face and an Englishman came out and stepped past him and was away. A small woman in a white housecoat showed Jake into a room where folk from many lands and of nearly as many creeds sat in chintz-covered armchairs reading 'Punch' and 'Private Eye'. But it was no more than ten minutes before she came back, took him along a corridor to another room and shut him in.
Jake found himself closeted with a person he took to be a boy of about seventeen, most likely a servant of some kind, in a stooped position doing something to an electric fire. 'I'm looking for Dr Rosenberg,' he said.
It was never to cut the least ice with him that the other did not in fact reply, 'Ah now me tharlun man, de thop a de mornun thoo yiz'—he might fully as well have done by the effect. ('Good morning' was what he did say.)
'Dr Rosenberg?' said Jake again, a little flustered. He saw now that the youth was a couple of years older than he had supposed at first, short-haired and clean-shaven, wearing a sort of dark tunic-suit with a high collar that gave something between a military and a clerical air.
'Rosenberg it is. How do you do, Dr Richardson.' Jake got a hearty handshake and a brown-eyed gaze of what looked like keen personal admiration but in the circumstances could hardly have been the genuine article. 'Do come and sit down. I hope this room'll be warm enough—such a wretchedly cold spring we've been having so far, isn't it?'
When he failed to add what Jake was in a way expecting and would certainly have accepted, that his master or father if not grandfather would be down in a minute, things eased quite quickly. 'I'm sorry, I'm afraid I....'
'You're not the first by a very long chalk indeed, Dr Richardson, I can assure you of that.' He who must after all be conceded to be Dr Rosenberg didn't really talk like an O'Casey peasant, his articulation was too precise for that, but he did talk like a real Irishman with a largely unreconstructed accent, even at this stage seemed no more than twenty-one or -two and had shown himself, between finishing with the fire and sitting down behind his desk, to be about two foot high. He said in an oddly flat tone, 'I understand very well how strange it must be to hear my style of talk coming out of a man with a name straight from Germany.'
'Or Austria.' Which would be rather more to the point, thought Jake, and thought too that he had conveyed that meaning in his inflection.
'Or Austria.' The doctor spoke as one allowing a genuine if rather unimmediate alternative. Jake went back to being flustered. No sooner had he managed to bring himself to have this tiny Emerald Isler palmed off on him instead of the bottled-at-the-place-of-origin Freudian anybody just hearing the name would have expected than he was being asked to believe in a student of the mind who didn't know where Freud had come from. He said quickly, 'Dublin man, are you?'
'Correct, Dr Richardson,' said Dr Rosenberg, in 'his' inflection awarding his new patient a mark or two for knowing that many Irishmen were Dubliners and virtually all Dubliners Irishmen. 'Perhaps it might be of interest,' he went on, though not as if he had any very high hopes of this, 'if I were to explain that an ancestor of mine was a German consular official who liked the look of the old place, married a local girl, and no doubt you'll be able to fill in the rest of the story for yourself. I charge seventeen pounds fifty a session—is that acceptable?'
'Yes,' said Jake. Christ, he thought.
'Good. Now Dr Curnow has sent me a report on you.' The psychologist's manner had changed and he opened a file with an alacrity that would have been quite uncharacteristic of his colleague. 'There's just one point I'd like to have clearly understood before we get down to business. You do realise that in our work together I shall be asking you a number of questions.'
'Yes.'
'And you have no objection.'
'No,' said Jake, suppressing a different and longer answer.
'Good. First question then. What is your full name?'
'Jaques [Jakes] Cecil Richardson.' Jake spelt out the Jaques. And I reckon I got seventy-five per cent on that, he thought, in mind of a comic monologue a decade or two old.
'Jaques. Now that's an uncommon name for an Englishman.'
'Yes. 'My' ancestor came over from Paris in 1848.
'18481 You must have made a close study of your family history.'
'Oh, I wouldn't say that. After all, 1848 was 1848.'
'Just so, but the date would seem to have lodged in your memory.'
'Well, they did have a spot of bother there in that year, if you—'
'Ah, when did they not the horrible men? Do you know, Dr Richardson, I think those French fellows must have caused 'nearly' as much trouble in the world as we Irish?' Rosenberg gave a deep-toned laugh, showing numerous very small white teeth. 'Oh dear. Your age.'
'Fifty-nine.'
