Spencer suit he betted would fool anyone he had much chance of running into, and the grey suede half-boots that had been all the rage in some relatively recent era like that of Hitler's rise to power. He hadn't a lot of hair left on his head but he tidied what there was with the touch of complacency this exercise always tended to arouse in him: better bald as a badger than train it over from side or back and be afraid to sneeze. That done, he went downstairs and watched Crossroads. Just as it was finishing Brenda came into the room.
'Ready,' she said in exactly the same way, eager and yet nervous, as he remembered from when he had taken her out to dinner in Oxford for the first time after they were married, at the Dollymores' house in St Margaret's Road; she had worn a sort of coppery-coloured dress of some shiny stuff and bright green slippers with gold clasps and pointed toes. Jake felt more than one kind of pang, at how time had gone by, what quantity and in what way, and at how long it had been since anything much about Brenda had struck him. He got up quickly.
'You look beautiful.'
She smiled delightedly and without reserve. 'That's good. You look all right yourself.'
'It's the tie. Brings out the blue in my eyes.'
'Off?'
'Yes'
They were indeed off that night, not however to anyone's house but to a fairly classy Chinese restaurant called the Bamboo Bothy and situated almost round the corner from them in Vassall Crescent, easy walking distance anyway so no trouble or expense over transport. The idea—in general: the choice of premises had been left entirely open—was Rosenberg's, indeed his instruction. Weekly until further notice, the Richardsons were to engage in interpersonal recreative sociality, in other words to 'go out together'. It had been and would remain Jake's part to initiate the enterprise, though Brenda had an equal voice in determining its nature. Since what he would have liked best, granted he had to leave the house at all, was a straight-there-and-back attendance at the most violent and/or horrific film on show in Greater London while what she would have liked best was drinks at the Ritz followed by dinner at the Connaught, things might seem to have gone her way of the two, if not by much, but he had really scored by vetoing the below-subsistence-level man's, the famine-relief-beneficiary's version of the Connaught that was all they could afford: cooling bad quasi-continental food served tardily and rudely in hot dark noisy smelly dirty crowded surroundings. 'We won't go 'there' again,' Brenda would say, but they did in all but name, admittedly less often in the last year or so.
The Bothy was almost empty, to Jake's knowledge its invariable state: turning up at eight or nine o'clock, walking past at eleven showed the same three unpeopled files of immaculate white tablecloths. It must be just the lid of an arsenal for use when. The proprietor's grandson or father greeted them pleasantly and showed them to a booth or berth at one side of the room. The composition covers on the benches or banquettes made your bottom give awful snarling, farting noises as you squirmed it along, forced so to squirm it by the overhang of the lowish table. Would they like a drink? No, they would like to order, though having done so they, in the person of Jake, also ordered a bottle of stuff called Wan Fu which they had tried and liked before. Among the welter of what must be Chinese on the label it said, in English, that this wine was specially selected to accompany Chinese dishes, and added reassuring references in French to negotiants, Bordeaux and cellars. Jake pictured a negotiant, or the appointee of one, walking round a cellar in Bordeaux with his mind bent hard on spare ribs, sweet and sour prawn, fried crispy noodle and chicken with bamboo shoots and every so often suddenly and infallibly selecting. Well worth the mark-up.
'Ooh, I was going to say, the garden's in a bit of a state I thought today,' said Brenda.
'There's always rather a lot to do at the beginning of a term.' It was true that he had a little more to do then than at some other times. 'Anyway I've finished pruning the roses and I'll do the chrysanthemum fertiliser over the week-end. Weather hasn't been very inviting you must admit. Ah, thank you very much, that looks delicious.' As soon as the waiter had gone Jake said, 'Well, darling, we've got something to celebrate.'
'Something, yes.'
'Oh I agree it isn't very much, but....'
'No it isn't. Well, it's just something.'
He groaned to himself. 'It's only supposed to be a start.'
'What is? What's 'it' exactly?'
'Well, a .... successful .... what Rosenberg would call act of intercourse.'
'What's that? What's a successful one of those?'
'Just .... one where the man gets it up and eventually comes, and the woman comes too.'
'How important is that, the woman coming too?'
'Very important, I mean it wouldn't...'
'It wouldn't be Grade A without that, would it? Not strictly kosher. Not quite all present and correct. It might mean you weren't able to hold back for the number of minutes and seconds laid down in Screwing Regulations for Mature Males section fourteen sub-section D.'
'You know it's more than that,' said Jake a little absently. He was going over in his mind what he had said since leaving the house, because it must have been since then.
'Nobody would have known it from the way you asked me just afterwards if it had been all right for me. You should have heard yourself. Talk about any-complaints-carry-on.' Brenda had been looking down at the food through her spectacles, sorting out for herself the less calorie-crammed items; now her eyes met his. She had spoken and continued to speak in the same unheated tone she had used in Rosenberg's consulting-room when making similar points more generally. 'I've taken in quite a lot of that Army stuff of yours. It might have been the best time of your life.'
'If we're going to get on to that level we might as well—'
'That's not on a level, you think about it, not now, and you see if it wasn't. Anyway if it's of any interest, sorry no I know it's of interest, it was all right for me, just, what you might call technically.'
'You said it was like old times.'
'So it was. I meant it.'
