mind and starting to go to the Workshop again: one little extra apology for having invaded him, accidentally or accidentally-on-purpose within Brenda's hearing, and that would be shit. Well, he wasn't exactly palpitating with hunger for Kelly's company but he did want to know how she was getting on, for which his only source was Brenda-Rosenberg had gone all professional ethical on him when approached. Since he couldn't hurry things up by admitting his interest he had to sit through Brenda's weekly bulletins with the best grace he could muster, and recent experience made him see to it that his best was pretty bloody good.
'Well, we started with scanning pairs and free scanning as before,' she said on the first Saturday evening, 'and then we did parents and children.'
'What's that?'
'First you're your father and then you're your mother and then you're yourself as a child.'
'How do you mean?'
'You act it. You pick somebody of your own sex and talk to
them as if you were your father talking to you.'
'Oh yes?' said Jake, leaning forward eagerly. 'What about?'
'Whatever Ed decides. About your father, about sex-you try and remember what he did say. Telling you off. A good deal of that.'
'Really. It must call for quite a bit of acting ability.'
'You'd be surprised how good some of them are. Lionel was marvellous as his mother, he even managed to look like her. Well you know what I mean.'
'Yes of course.' He gave himself a mental pat on the back for having detected intimations of queerdom in Lionel.
'Martha was very interesting when she was her mother—you remember her mother's horrible to her, but Martha wasn't horrible at all, when she was being her mother I mean. You know, reasonable and kind and everything. Most odd.'
'Mm. It sounds absolutely—'
'Your friend Kelly was really the star turn.'
'Was she?'
'As herself as a child. Honestly it was quite frightening. The voice particularly. If you'd shut your eyes you could have sworn it was a child speaking. She was different from the time before. Much madder. Of course she wasn't putting on a show for you today. She asked after you in the lunch-break.'
'That was nice.' Quite safe, he thought; Brenda wasn't one to save things up, very much the contrary.
'She hasn't been round here since last Saturday has she?'
'Good God no,' he said, sounding shocked. 'Whatever gave you that idea?' He wasn't acting; his shock had come from the immediate perception that only the luck of the draw had made Brenda ask what she had asked instead of whether Kelly had dropped in on him, say, and from the thought of how he might have reacted if the draw had gone against him. Anybody would think I was having an affair with the bloody girl, he said to himself irritably.
'Just the way she asked after you. I expect that was to get at me.'
'Why should she get at you?'
'Because she's after you, or was. Probably moved on to somebody else by now. You're not still falling for that investigative journalist impersonation, are you?'
He frowned in thought. 'I don't know. Anyway, if you're right she sounds a rather pathetic character.'
'Oh yes she is, some of the time.'
'Sorry darling, I'm afraid I don't quite get you.'
'I mean she has a pathetic act to go with her bright act and all her other acts. She's never genuine. That's what's wrong with her.'
He didn't dispute this aloud and the talk moved on, eventually reaching Geoffrey and causing Jake momentary but keen regret at not having been there to see for himself. Perhaps Brenda had sensed his interest in Kelly, because in subsequent Saturday debriefings she would tend to mention her late and cursorily or not at all. To take it out of him deliberately in such a way didn't quite fit her character as he had come to know it over the years, but then she seemed as the weeks went by to be changing in other ways too, nothing spectacular or even easy to pin down, in fact the nearer he got to doing that the sillier it sounded. She was becoming more friendly and at the same time less intimate; amiable and talkative, never anywhere near chucking crockery about and yet not, or not so much, or not so often, or perhaps indeed not turning her eyes on his in the full deep glance he had known before. He found something comparable in her behaviour during the non-genital sensate focusing sessions on which, after the almost total failure of two successive genital dittos, Rosenberg had ordered them to fall back.
'Is that nice?' she would ask, stroking his chest. 'Or at least comparatively nice, I know this isn't your kind of thing much but there must be degrees, quite good and not so good. How is it?'
'Oh, quite good.'
'Or would you like it sort of harder, you know, pressing down more?'
'No, that's fine as it is.'
'You're meant to be really relaxed to benefit from it. I'm sure it's beneficial anyway, in general, I mean. Anything that reduces stress must be, don't you think?'
'Well, so people keep saying.'
