girls, Anne Austin, June Palmer or Rosa herself, in a pose such as he had just seen would have constituted the summit of human (or at least male) felicity. Well, then no doubt it would have done. That had been 'then.'
He turned on yet again through various commemorations of the unfree good things in life until he came to the expected series of photographs with the girl on the cover as model. There was quite a lot of stuff alongside about her personal habits, including a clear statement in large letters and between quotation marks of what she regarded as the best thing in 'her' life. Jake found this slightly offensive; her holding such a view was at least unobjectionable but he would have preferred to reach that conclusion about her under his own steam. In some of the accompanying pictorial pornographic material her hand was quite where it hadn't been quite on its cover and her mouth was open and her eyes shut. Right. Now that should have been just what the doctor ordered. Why wasn't it? What made it, to a very small degree but unmistakably, off-putting? Before he could get his censor out of bed the thought popped up in his mind that she was no lady. By Gad sir, he said to himself, country's going to the dogs, time and place for everything, but without squashing that thought, which even attained the clarification that while what this girl was up to or at any rate was trying to be mistaken for being up to lay well within the scope of a lady, being so photographed didn't. But, he reminded himself, the girls he imagined to himself got up to things that were much more, more—come on, out with it: more degrading than this. Yes, but that was him. And those girls did what they did because, however perversely, they enjoyed it, not because they were getting paid. He had imagined better than he knew when he credited this one with a sound business head. All rationalisation and self-deception, he said to himself; you wouldn't have thought of any of that 'then.' Ah, but supposing it had been 'then' that you....
Jake did a mental about-turn. He had decided that the only picture of business-head that he really liked was one of her shopping (fully-clothed) in a vegetable-market and was about to junk the whole project when he remembered with a start what the flesh-and-blood doctor had ordered. Fifteen minutes had he said? Oh Christ. Well, knock off five for time already put in. He set himself to pore grimly over business-head and Carter-face in alternate bouts of two minutes each, fighting off as best he could the distractions of the possibly—Roman ring worn by the one, the pleasantness of the rural scene in which the other wallowed, the uncertainly identifiable ornament or utensil in the shadows behind the one, and so forth. After a while, this way or that he was getting interested. Then the dead silence was broken by a tremendous rattling of the lock on the door.
That fairly hurtled him back not far off fifty years. He went into a kind of throe and made wild self- defensive motions. 'What is it?' he asked. He had to ask most of it twice or more.
No answer, further rattling, but the door itself did seem to be holding for the moment.
'What do you want? Mrs Sharp?' This was louder and steadier. 'I told you I didn't want to be—'
'—thought your knob looked as if it could do with a polish.' No no, 'of course' she didn't say that, couldn't have done; she must have been talking about th' door-knob or y' door-knob, but it had sort of come through to him different.
'Oh I see. I mean it probably does, still surely there's no need for you to start on it—'
'—come back and finish it later if I'm disturbing you.'
'Yes do. No don't.' It would be anything from two to a hundred and two minutes later. 'No, finish it now you've—'
'-easily come back after I've—'
'No. No. Finish it 'now,' Mrs Sharp.'
'Well .... if that's what you really want, Mr Richardson.'
The buffeting resumed and went on for a minute or so, then stopped. Moving only his eyes, and them not much, Jake sat and waited for another half-minute. At the end of that time he executed a playful lunge, a feint. Instantly the buffeting resumed. He rocked triumphantly in his chair. 'Gotcha!' he hissed. 'Now try and tell me it's all imagination.'
But the funny part came when the polishing was well and truly over and he could go on where he had left off, or rather more or less where he had begun. As if acting on orders committed to memory and carried out many times in rehearsal he went to the top drawer of his desk, took out an unused long envelope, turned to the picture of Carter-face that he liked most of best, put the envelope so that it covered the less endearing part of her and went on from there.
Later he said out loud, 'And that's only the beginning. No. It's a start.'
6— Focusing Session
'What does it mean?' asked Brenda.
'Well, sensate ought to mean endowed with sense or senses, as dentate if it occurs must mean endowed with teeth, but I don't see how any sort of focusing can be endowed with any sort of sense. I think they wanted an adjective from sense and noticed or someone told them sensuous and sensual were used up and they noticed or someone told them a lot of words ended in -ate. Makes it sound scientific too. Like nitrate. And focusing, well. Homing in on? No? Concentrating? Something like that.'
'I see. But what does it mean?'
'Christ, love, I don't know. Getting you, getting one interested in the other person physically, something like that I should think. Anyway, we know what we're supposed to do.'
'Yes. Darling, you're not to be cross but I must ring Elspeth before we start. She said she'd ring me today or tomorrow and 'I know' it'll be while we're doing our focusing if I don't get in first. You know.'
'Check.' As just disclosed, Elspeth was of the Alcestis-Mrs Sharp sorority though, living as she did on the far side of London at Roehampton, less to be feared. 'You take as long as you have to. I'll be in the study.'
Jake finished putting the lunch plates in the rack on the metal draining board and went where he had said. The study had been made out of what had been not much more than a spacious box-room and the kneehole desk, the celebrated red leather armchair and a pair of Queen Anne bookcases left little space for anything else, but even he could see that the turquoise carpet was a pretty shade and went well with the wallpaper and Madras cotton curtains.
With the intention not so much of getting in the mood as of keeping up the good work he glanced at a couple of papers that lay on the desk, had been lying there in perfect security since the previous Thursday, even though it was now Monday and Mrs Sharp had by standing arrangement attended the house on the Friday and that very morning. For both times Brenda had been at home and, as in many a (or many another) case of hyper normal powers, Mrs Sharp's were severely curtailed or even curbed altogether by the presence of a third party. Jake picked up one of the papers.
'M27' (he read) I find the thought of sexual intercourse with a willing female somewhat under the age of
