'That's right. This is only the third time she's been along and it's going to be pretty painful for everybody for a while yet, but they're a nice gang and they'll take it. You see, Ruth is all eaten up with self-pity-okay, she has plenty to be unhappy about, though not everything she says is true, right Frank?'
'That's quite correct. People in the same house visit her now and then and Lionel has called on two occasions. The second time he found she'd been invited in to watch her landlady's TV.'
'Which isn't a hell of a lot, but..... She needs to be shaken up and made to do things, Jake, go out and find friends, it's possible, there's plenty going on in a neighbourhood you don't have to pay for, nothing wrong with her physically, she rides free on the buses—and so on. I'm going to wait until everybody knows her story by heart and then put her in the hot seat and have the group tell her she bores the balls off them. And if you're worried about Ivor, Jake, he's ashamed of his fears, thinks he ought to face up to them like a man, pull himself together. Which is impossible. You don't know how his psychiatrist had to work on him to come here at all. He has to learn he has a troublesome but not very serious sickness which he acquired through no fault of his and which can be cured, and he can't learn that until he sees how fucking stupid it is to call him a coward or whatever. Which we just made some progress in showing him.'
Ed stopped speaking abruptly, thus exploiting his advantage over Jake, who was thoroughly taken down by his further discovery that the facilitator at least seemed to want to facilitate mental health rather than bloodshed and raving lunacy, much too thoroughly to set about questioning on the spot the practicality or wisdom of the measures taken and proposed. Trying for a loftily non-committal tone, he said, 'Thank you very much for the various explanations,' but it came out a bit lame.
'Any time, Jake.'
16—At Mr Shyster's (continued)
The afternoon session began with Lionel's roundtable. Ed stage-managed or rather produced it more closely than any of the morning's events, calling on Lionel himself to answer questions like whether or how far he thought stealing was wrong and one or other of the rest to comment positively (bear-oil him) or negatively (crap on him). The emotional temperature again was lower than before but without any more sense being talked as a result. Several comparatively interesting things did emerge in passing, however: that Lionel was head of a small building firm, for instance, that he was forty-three years old, that he lived with his mother, of whom he was fond, that he stole things he liked the look of, that sometimes he went weeks without stealing so much as a paperclip and then spent a couple of days stealing away like billy-ho-things like that. Jake also noticed a couple of inconsistencies in Lionel's account of himself and more than a couple of hesitations when somebody pressed him for details of when and where and the like. Nothing came up to challenge the surmise that Lionel had never contemplated theft for a moment and was probably an inactive queer in search of a like-minded companion, having picked on kleptomania for his cover as simple and unobnoxious. In that case what happened to End's renown as a sham-detector?
The round table was dismantled and Geoffrey's self-draining announced. Jake's curiosity flared up at once, nor did it ever burn low during what followed. Geoffrey began with some information new to Jake, and perhaps to all the others too, namely that he had been educated at home because of his elderly father's adherence to the doctrines of Charles Bradlaugh. Asked to explain the rationale of this he disappointed Jake slightly and surprised him a lot by not stating that Bradlaugh had been, say, a pioneer of vegetarianism, and then again by not classing as a freethinker an opponent of the corporate state. The home educator, by some associated twist of paternal whim, had been not a tutor but a governess (who must have taught him everything he 'knew' from T. S. Eliot's Victorian —thespian status onwards and downwards—wrong, as it was to turn out). There followed a passage in praise of women so intense, categorical and of course long that a confession of hyperactive homosexuality seemed almost boringly inevitable. Wrong straight away, or straight away by the standards of the occasion: women had one defect—they could be loved, they were there for men to love them, but they couldn't be heroes. Geoffrey gave one of his frowns at this point as some verbal or other nuance swam towards his ken and away again. Hero-worship, he now affirmed, was an integral part of any lad's growing-up but it should be worked out or through or off at the normal time and place: school. He hadn't been able to start his hero-worship till he got to Cambridge and that had been too late, in the sense that once acquired the habit had proved impossible to shake off—none of this had been clear to him at the time and for long after, and he had only recently identified its consequences.
Where on earth Geoffrey's narrative would lead was quite obscure—perhaps it would bend back to buggery after all—but it was making a bit of a kind of sense in itself, at any rate enough, it might have been supposed, for Ed to have denounced it as thought bullshit; no, he held his peace and massaged the side of his neck. What, Geoffrey went on to ask, had those heroes of his in common? Strong individuality. They were unlike the mass of mankind, and also one another, in many of their opinions, their interests, their likes and dislikes, even their tastes in food and drink. A would wish the United Kingdom to apply for admission one day to the United States, B spend his week-ends studying the behaviour of social insects, C endlessly re-read 'Pilgrim's Progress,' D refuse all dealings with Roman Catholics on principle, E eat only fish and fruit and F mix alcoholic cordial of cloves with his Scotch. With a humility that might have disarmed some people Geoffrey admitted he hadn't the talents to belong to the A-F class but was so vain that he wanted to seem to belong to it. He must therefore light upon some views and practices that were unusual without being too outlandish and also hadn't been pre-empted by the A-Fs. No easy task, this, and one complicated by the fact that, as he soon found, he held no views and neither practised nor hankered after practising any practices that weren't conventional to the point of banality. To create the right sort from scratch had been tough, too (for him at any rate), so he had left things to chance and kept his eyes and ears open. Almost at once—this must have been while he was still at Cambridge, or soon after—Fate had smiled on him. He had accidentally barged into a nurse in a crowded street and knocked a bag of groceries out from under her arm and she had called him a clumsy oaf. At a stroke he was in possession of a whole network of A-F-type material that had extended itself over the years from simple antagonism towards nurses and the mention or portrayal of them in print or on screen to points of view about the National Health Service, pay increases, equal opportunities, the right of those operating essential services to strike and even immigration. His biggest stroke of luck, and one of the happiest passages of his life, had come a year or two before with the success in London of a film representing unfavourably a nurse in a mental hospital; he had felt a sense of vindication. So he had become a sort of G, the chap with the terrific thing about nurses.
(The inverted pyramid of piss exposed, confirmed, systematised! For Brenda's benefit Jake worked like a black at dissembling his fascination and glee, hoped he had started to in time, went on listening just as closely. There must be more where that came from. Perhaps there was to be a definitive pronouncement on the Hollands gin/KLM/cream cakes question.)
No such luck, though Geoffrey did let fall that his supposed admiration for the works of Dvorak, always likely to be proclaimed when music, the nineteenth century or Hungarians '[sic]' came up, rested on nothing more substantial than a pubescent crush on an American film actress of that surname. Well, that was the end, he implied, of Part I. In Part II he talked about his ignorance, a subject that could have kept them there all night and well into the next day, but he was commendably brief. About the time of his setting out to acquire simulated individuality it had dawned on him that the A-Fs, and plenty of others too, were always referring to things—places, works of art, important events—and men and women living and dead, especially though not by a big margin dead, that he'd never heard of. So he had started to read through the encyclopedia, not every word or every article but essential subjects like .... history—English history. When after some years he was about a third of the way through he had experienced another dawn: to put it more succinctly than he did, he still knew very, very little more about Africa and the battle of Bosworth and Charlemagne and 'Dombey and Son' than he did about Xenophanes, Yaksas and Zoutpansberg (and had stopped reading forthwith). Until quite recently he had put this unalleviated uninformedness down to a bad memory. That brought him to Part III.
