have their own ways, just as efficient ways, of being evasive and overbearing and dull and thoroughly unsatisfactory. Perhaps I see some of them a little more clearly than you do. That ought to make me more tolerant when a girl tells me she thinks Hamlet was a woman. I don't say it does but it ought to. What about Brenda? She's the only one who matters.'
'She says I only want one thing too. Of course I don't know how far she....' Jake spread his hands.
'Oh dear. That is rather untoward, I do see.'
'I'm supposed to be working out what I feel about her. I don't dislike her, which is a start of a kind. I like having her about the place. I like chatting to her, but I don't find myself wanting to tell her things—I remember in the old days whenever I read or heard or thought of anything funny or striking or whatever it might be, my first thought was always, I must tell Brenda about that. Not any more. I suppose I ought to tell her just the same—my 'therapist' works on the principle that the way of getting to want to do something you don't want to do is to keep doing it. Which seems to me to be a handy route from not .... pause .... wanting to do it to not wanting, wanting not, to do it. But I am paying him to know best. Brenda wants affection, physical affection. She also needs it and ought to have it. My chap is always on at me to go through the motions of it on the principle I've described. I'm a bit scared of being shifted from not-pause-wanting to do that to not wanting to do it. Do you know what I think I am, Damon. A male chauvinist pig. Until the other day I'd never have dreamt of saying that about anybody, least of all myself. Just goes to show, doesn't it? I think if you don't mind I will bugger off, before I depress myself into a decline. But thank you.'
It was of Kelly, not Eve or Brenda, that Jake was thinking as he trotted through the rain to his rooms. How did she fit in? He didn't think he felt any affection for her, which might have had something to do with what she had said about things like his dick—easy to forgive, not so easy to forget—but he couldn't be sure while his main feeling for her was still pity. She certainly aroused his interest, genuine interest as opposed to the testosterone—fed substitute that had graced his sometime dealings with Eve, but again that interest might well attach to her as a phenomenon rather than as a person. Oh well. On arrival he shut his outer door in case Mrs Sharp should be on her way into college to hear from his very lips whether he wanted his study curtains washed, and took the plastic phallus out of the drawer where it had lain for the past fifteen days, out of sight all the time and out of mind too except when he had been in London or on his way there. With a paper-knife, a razor-blade and his bare hands he eventually reduced it to fragments too small for it to be made recognisable again by anyone but a three- dimensional-jigsaw-puzzle grandmaster, should such a person exist. As he worked Jake muttered to himself.
Ah now me poor owld bogger, sure it's athackun your own masculinithy yiz are. Ochone, ochone, yiz do be performun an acth of sexual self-thesthroction, do yiz know. Guilth and shame have been rakun havoc wid yiz so dey have, acushla machree. Jasus, Mary and Joseph, de resolth of inorthinathly sthricth thoileth-thrainun thoo be sure, wid maybe a spoth of sothomy ath your poblic school trown in. And bethath and be-fockungorrah, loife's a soighth aisier dis way if yiz ron tings roighth.'
23—Extreme Bourgeois Puritan Conventionality
As well as Kelly's visit to Oxford, that day had seen ball lightning in Glasgow. Later in the month the weather improved, with long spells of sunshine that reminded Jake of one of his summer terms as an undergraduate before the war, he couldn't remember which. At the beginning of June, while Brenda stayed with her Northumberland cousins, he spent a couple of nights with Lancewood and his friend John at their cottage near Dry Sandford, sitting out on the lawn with them till an advanced hour. It didn't last: the rain came back, accompanied by cold and thunder, in nice time to damage Eights Week and plague examinees scurrying to and from the schools. The last day of term, the last of that academic year, was one of the worst.
Even so, the Oxford end of Jake's life over those weeks had been normal, even satisfactory to the limited degree possible: he hadn't trampled Miss Calvert to death. the little bastard from Teddy Hall had taken to cutting (no doubt it was called boycotting) his lectures and it looked as if Thwaites, the Bradfordian, was going to get his First in Part I, as against which the Cardiff man had been offered the job and had accepted. The London end, beyond question the larger one, had in the meantime not done too well. Jake kept up his visits to Rosenberg who displayed, whether or not he really felt, great interest in the Eve episode; it was possible that his mill had been getting a little hard up for grist. Naturally he tended to concentrate on his patient's fragmentary recollections of the act of sex he had performed, trying to elicit more of them from him.
'Let's go over the whole thing again at a snail's pace,' he would say.
'I honestly don't think I can do it more slowly than last time.'
'Ah, you can try. Now you commenced manual manipulation of her breasts.'
'Yes, I thought pedal manipulation was ruled out one way or another,' Jake ventured to reply on one such occasion. 'For instance etymologically.'
'I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't quite follow.'
'Never mind. Yes, manual manipulation of her breasts was just what I did commence.'
'And what were your feelings as you did so?' Rosenberg would pursue.
'I've told you. That it was odd, that it was bizarre.'
'You mean you found it disgusting.'
'No, again as I've told you, all I found it and everything else I can remember was odd or bizarre.'
'You suffered feelings of shame.'
'No, and not of guilt either. Not even whatever you called it, personally orientated guilt about my wife. I wasn't thinking of her at the time.'
Another recurrent theme had to do with Jake's fantasies, in the sense not of his private daydreamings but of his commissions of these to paper for Rosenberg's inspection. Each fresh attempt brought the same response, the same as the very first, the one about the fantastically beautiful girl with the unbelievable figure. The holder of that MA (Dip. Psych) shook his small head, drew in his breath and sighed, cleared his throat repeatedly and in general behaved much as Jake would have done if confronted by an essay attributing the origin of Mediterranean civilisations to colonists from outer space. There was the same effect of not knowing where to start.
'I'm a doctor,' was a favourite opening of Rosenberg's. 'I'm 'your' doctor, Mr Richardson. I'm not going to be shocked, you know, by anything you think or say or write.'
'No, I believe that.'
'If you do—I beg your pardon, seeing that you do, why don't you come clean? Or rather'—it was well worth watching, the deliberation with which he steeled himself the first time he leaped the yawning semantic chasm in front of him—'come 'dirty!?''
'Well, that's the dirtiest I could do. You must admit I've made progress, cutting out all the soft and warm
