Jake's spirits fell sharply. 'Gee thanks,' he said.
'Don't misunderstand me, that's better than nothing, and I wasn't thinking of the real old times, when we started together. They were—'
'But you didn't sound as if you meant it, well, disappointedly then. You sounded friendly and affectionate then.'
'That was then. Even after your any—complaints thing I wanted to make you feel as good as I could....'
'Which you're losing no time in duly reversing.'
'.... so that you might start showing a bit of physical affection to me, instead of which you shot out of bed and started getting some tea going.'
'You didn't sound as if you minded the tea idea, quite the contrary, and surely you remember we always used to have tea afterwards, it isn't that long ago good God, and what do you think I'd been doing before but showing you physical affection—putting you in your place socially? I think you might—'
'I was making the best of a not frightfully good job, and I fancied a cup anyway, though a large gin would have been more like it just then quite frankly,'—Brenda was warming to her theme a little now—'and of course I remember how we used to have tea once, but that was different, and .... what was the other thing?'
'Er. ...' Jake looked away diagonally across the aisle of the restaurant and saw that the three youngish men he had vaguely noticed a couple of minutes earlier, men whom by their open necked shirts and pullovers or leather jackets he had vaguely taken for a group of gasmen or dustmen on emergency call, were peering at menus. One of them was in the middle of a tremendous unshielded yawn. 'Really', the way they..... 'Er .... Christ .... physical affection.'
'Oh yes. Well I don't count a poke as physical affection, I'm thinking of before that, the non-genital stimulation or whatever it's called. That's part of what that's meant to be, you realise, it's meant to be partly affectionate, or rather you don't realise, not like grooming a horse or more like pumping up a bicycle-tyre. You were like—I've never heard anybody gritting their teeth so loudly in my life, when you were doing it to me 'and' when I was doing it to you. And not saying a bloody word.'
'I thought that would help us concentrate. And you didn't say anything yourself either.'
'I took my time from you to start with and then I just hung on out of curiosity to see how long you were going to keep your mouth shut.'
Jake started to speak with resentment and defiance, then checked himself. 'Now look. I know I've said it before, I'm merely reminding you, this is all me or, all right, mostly me, largely me, it starts with me, not you. I'd be the same with anybody.'
'I don't care about anybody. I'm meant to be special as far as you're concerned.'
'You are, and that's bound to make a difference but it's not going to happen all at once, we must accept that. And we have made a start. After all, biologically we've—'
'Screw biologically. We've made one sort of start, but there's another sort we haven't made,' said Brenda with an emphasis he had never heard her use before, or else had forgotten, 'and this really is you. You've got to find out whether you feel any affection for me or whether you're the sort of man who can only feel affection for women he wants to go to bed with or wouldn't mind going to bed with or thinks of in a sort of bed what-name, context. If you're not that sort, if you do feel some affection for me even though you don't want to go to bed with me you'd better start working on it and trying to show it. And remember I can tell.'
'What about your affection for me?' he asked after a silence.
'It's there but it's keeping itself to itself. It tends to watch its step a bit after the knocks it's taken.'
'When did it last take a knock?' This was playing for time while he tried to recover a memory.
'Ooh, about two hours ago, when I kissed you and tried to start talking to you and you came back with any complaints and put your arm around me as if I was an old sow you were having to keep warm till the vet arrived.'
'I didn't mean it like that.'
'I don't say you 'meant' it like anything. I just might as well have been an old sow.'
'I suppose you think this is a good time to bring all this up.'
'Yes I do. Check. An excellent time. After you've taken the first step towards getting your, well, your confidence back and before you sell yourself the idea that that's all you have to do. I mean before you absolutely stop wondering what went wrong. Dr Rosenberg seemed to think they go together, you know, screwing and being affectionate, as far as I could make out what he meant, and so do a lot of other people.'
'Yes of course.' Jake had remembered. 'You believed me when I said you looked beautiful in the sitting- room just before we came out.'
'I believed something. Something nice. What made you say it?'
'Just remembering how things used to be, sort of suddenly.'
She dropped her gaze to her plate, which was now quite empty, and pushed her hand out towards him between the dish warmer and the soy sauce. He took the hand and squeezed it, telling himself it was amazing how after all these years one went on forgetting the old truth that women meant things differently from men. They (women) spoke as they felt, which meant that you (a man) would be devastated forever if you took them literally. (The compensation, in fact bonus on aggregate, was that they thought you operated in the same way, so that they forgave and forgot the devastating things you said to them. He had once, in the course of one of their rows about her relations, called Brenda an illiterate provincial, which had gone down at least as badly as expected at the time but had never since been thrown in his face, thank God; just think what he would have done about and with an accusation of remotely comparable nearness to the bone. And felt about it too.) So what she had said last Tuesday to Rosenberg and him, what he had lain awake going over in his mind in the medium-sized hours the following day, what had then seemed to him to write or at any rate rough-draft finis to their marriage—all that that had boiled down to was saying in bold sans-serif Great Primer italics that she was seriously fed up with him and he had bloody well better stop feeling sorry for himself and take a bit of notice of her for a change. And she had been and was absolutely right. So there they were.
