'No, I had a full tank when I picked you up, Geoffrey.'
'There you are, Jake.' Geoffrey gave a hesitant smile. 'Right as rain. Nothing to worry about at all.'
'I wasn't worrying for Christ's sake, I was telling you about Services because of that sign.'
'Sign?'
'Yes, Geoffrey: 'sign'. The generic name for flat objects, often rectangular in shape, on which instructions or as in this case information—'
'Do please shut up, Jake,' said Brenda.
Jake held his peace. After about another three minutes' driving they came off the motorway and found to their surprise an authentic old-fashioned family and commercial hotel where it proved possible to dine. All the dishes were firmly in the English tradition: packet soup with added flour, roast chicken so overcooked that each chunk immediately absorbed every drop of saliva in your mouth, though the waterlogged brussel sprouts helped out a bit there, soggy tinned gooseberry flan and coffee tasting of old coffee-pots. Jake wasn't hungry anyway: foreboding had driven out his earlier feelings of looking forward and there was some tension among the party, no doubt as a result of his surely pretty mild brush with Geoffrey in the car, so he didn't say much. The only one who did was Ivor, whose prowess behind the wheel had made them early and who had filled in the spare time with a few large gin and tonics.
'I don't think these psychiatrist chaps are much good,' he said a couple of times in his agreeable full modulated voice. 'Or perhaps the phobia lot are particularly lousy. I'm on my third and none of them have made a blind bit of difference. In fact .... well never mind. Do you know what my latest one tried to tell me the other day? You don't mind me going on about this do you? I don't often get the chance.'
'You go on as long as you like, my dear.'
'Thanks, Brenda. Well—do you know what this bloke tried to tell me?'
'No,' said Geoffrey on brief consideration.
'Well you wouldn't would you Geoffrey? Now you've heard me go on about how I don't like the Tube, the Underground. Right, he took me down there the other week, we went all the way from Warren Street up to Hampstead and I was fine, didn't turn a hair. Next go—off, next day I've got to make the return trip on my own. I went down in the lift and on to the platform and in half a minute I was absolutely terrified. I got myself over it in the end with that deep breathing, but it wasn't funny. So I said all this, and he was 'surprised', because I'd done so well when we went together. And him with a syringe in his pocket with half a gallon of tranquilliser in it, enough to calm down King Kong. And he's 'surprised' it makes a difference. That wasn't it though, the really marvellous thing he told me. Now .... I'm an only child, it was a difficult birth, looks as if my mum and dad decided not to take any chances, I don't blame them. We've been through all that. Anyway, he asked me, when I said I'd been frightened he asked me if there was anything in particular I was frightened of, and I said yes there was, there was nothing on the indicator, no train signalled, and I thought, oh my God it'll never come, I'll be down here forever. And he said, now this is it, he said, me being afraid of nothing arriving in my Underground was all to do with my mum being afraid of something arriving in her Underground. Isn't that marvellous? Especially nothing being the same as something. I tell you, that cheered me up, it really reassured me, I thought, I may be a bit peculiar but at least I'm not as bloody barmy as to come up with that.'
Jake, who had enjoyed the opening of this speech too, laughed a good deal, more than either Geoffrey or Brenda. Soon afterwards Ivor said they still had to find the house and he'd like to get there in the light, so the bill was called for. To Geoffrey's perplexity but without eliciting anything from him in the way of protest, thanks or contribution, Jake paid it; he considered that to save every spare penny for his retirement, every penny, every time would do its bit towards shortening that retirement. They went off. In less than ten minutes, before the sun was quite down, they had pulled up in the large asphalted front yard of a fair-sized redbrick building that must have dated from about the year 1900. Various creepers ran up its walls and there was an ochre-coloured lichen on part of its tiled roof. It was situated near the top of a slight depression that ran down from the main road to Salisbury. Ivor said interestedly that it looked a bit on the big side, to which Brenda demurred; Jake heard later that the place had once been a nursing home and was now hired out for conferences and other enterprises of that kind, many of them no doubt perfectly serious and useful. They went inside.
In another ten minutes the four were reassembled in one of a pair of rooms run together by the disposal of folding doors. Both had the look of meagreness attached to being used rather than lived in: large table to discuss business round, dark-green leather armchairs to hold informal discussions in, reproductions of abstract paintings to do what with? Surely not look at; perhaps to be flattered by, flattered into fancying yourself a cultured person. Ed was on hand to greet them, giving Jake a smile not so much of geniality as of amusement; Rosenberg, little legs atwinkle, must still be pedalling gamely down the M20. The others already arrived were Lionel (stealing), Martha (mother), Winnie (shyness) and three men and a woman Jake had never seen before and whose names he didn't bother with for the moment because he would get to know them so very well the following day. After the introductions he stuck to Ivor, whom he had rather taken to and who seemed to need to talk to somebody.
'We're going to be sixteen altogether and that won't fill this house. It really is big.'
'Is that bad?'
'Not as such, but it means parts of it will be empty so that I can't sort of account for them.'
'I think I can see what you mean. But there's bound to be quite a large staff at a joint like this, and offices and so on.'
'That's true, I hadn't thought of that. Thank you, Jake.'
'Don't pills help? Tranquillisers?'
'Yes, but my bloke's made me give them up. Just gloss over the problem, he says. I take his point in a way, but I'm the one that needs them, not him.'
'Is there anything I can do?'
'It would be good if you could tell me you wouldn't mind if I came up to you and started talking rather fast and saying some pretty silly things.'
Jake had just told Ivor he wouldn't mind when a taxi drew up outside the window near which they were standing. It delivered Ruth (despair), Rosenberg, Kelly (you name it), an unnecessarily tall young woman with a head designed for somebody almost as short as Rosenberg, and not Chris (aggression or something), which was nice. When in due course Kelly came into what called itself the conference-room with the other new arrivals she had
