can't help each other emotionally but I can help you practically, so why not?'
'Well, Allie, that is most kind of you, I do appreciate it very much.'
'Rubbish, man, nothing to it. So long. No, I can see myself out.'
And in a moment the front door banged. Curious thing, human nature, Jake thought to himself as he started on his cold meat and salad. You get someone like that, by no means the most attractive of women, in fact pretty plain and full of irritating mannerisms, to all appearance entirely self-centred, and then she comes in at the end, so to speak, to show that underneath it all as so often there's more than a spark of decency-and of shrewdness too. Yes, that was certainly a legitimate view. On the other hand it might be tentatively argued that old Smudger was still just as much of a raving monster as she had ever been, or rather substantially more of one with her 'shrewdness' seeing him as a threat to her charter to talk balls all the time and her 'decency' trying to make him feel bad with a coals-of-fire job. He was delighted at this confirmation that she knew he hated her like hell and hoped devoutly that shopping for him would cause her great inconvenience. What about a couple of hundredweight of cement for a birdbath or something in the garden? It had begun to look as if finding somewhere to stay, somewhere really satisfactory and also cheap, would be no easy matter. He poured out the last of the wine and took it in front of the television set.
28—Physical after All
Later that year, in the November, Jake became troubled with excessive shitting. He would have to go seven or eight times a day and between those times his innards were never quiet, popping, chuckling and fizzing their heads off and emitting moans of poignant grief that attracted the concern or the interest of his classes and pupils. A preliminary exploration of his bum by Dr Curnow proved inconclusive; he must pay another visit in the third week. So one afternoon he duly made his way through rainy gusts to the bus stop and, preceded on board by two pairs of coffee- coloured children, the first in the charge of a white woman, the second of a black man, was soon being carried towards Harley Street.
Not much had happened to him in the intervening months. He had cancelled his holiday in Sicily in favour of a trip to Crete with Lancewood and his chum. There he had accused the hotel staff corporately of having stolen his money, traveler's cheques and passport a sufficient time before their discovery under his mattress, where it could only be that he had stowed them out of some freak of caution put beyond recapture by retsina and Mogadon. Brenda was settled in the Burgess Avenue house with Geoffrey, Jake in a perfectly bearable couple of rooms in Kentish Town, nearer the centre on the 127 route. He often wondered how much he missed her but never for long at a time. Wynn-Williams fell down dead. Two days before he (Jake) moved he had had a very brief visit from Kelly, first in what Brenda had called her investigative-journalist persona and on being told to go away straight into the apologising self-accusing waif he had had two previous doses of. Then bugger pity, he had said to himself, lest you let a fiend in at your door. But he was always going to feel he had let her down, or rather not always, what crap, just to the end of his days, not nearly as long. He finished his article about Syracuse and sent it in.
The bus passed between the tiled facade of Mornington Crescent station and the roughly triangular paved area with the statue of Cobden near its apex, pitted and grimy and lacking its right hand, Richard Cobden the corn- law reformer and worker for peace and disarmament, too famous for his Christian name and dates to be needed in the inscription. Almost at the foot of the plinth what looked like the aboveground part of a public lavatory, black railings draped with black chicken wire, bore a notice saying London Electricity Board—Danger Keep Out and gave a limited view of a stairway with ferns growing out of it and its walls. Two bollards painted in rings of black and white were to be seen not far off, their function hard even to guess at. Weeds flourished in the crevices between the paving stones, a number of which had evidently been ripped out; others, several of them smashed, stood in an irregular pile. Elsewhere there was a heap of waterlogged and collapsed cardboard boxes and some large black plastic sheets spread about by the wind. Each corner of the space was decorated with an arrangement of shallow concrete hexagons filled with earth in which grew speckled evergreen bushes and limp conifer saplings about the height of a man, those at the extreme ends crushed by traffic and the greenery run into the soil along with aftershave cartons, sweet-wrappers, dog-food labels and soft-drink tins. Turning south, the bus stopped at its stop across the road from Greater London House, through the windows of which fluorescent lighting glared or flickered all day. It stood on ground filched from an earlier generation of dwellers in the Crescent who had woken one morning to see and hear their garden being eradicated.
Fifteen minutes later Jake was walking down Harley Street, buffeted by damp squalls as he went. He noticed a man and a woman in Western dress before he got to Curnow's place and was admitted. Thanks perhaps to the default of a bashaw or begum the receptionist showed him in straight away.
'Sit down, would you please?' The doctor made it sound as if this procedure would quite likely be painful and was certainly unusual but would turn out to serve his patient's interests better than any alternative soon come by. 'And how have things been?'
'Oh, not too bad. A slight improvement on the whole.'
'You've kept to your diet?'
'Pretty well. I've laid off the fruit and the spices but I have backslid a couple of times with the wine.'
'You must cut it out altogether. You've passed no blood or
mucus or anything of that character or nature?'
'No, nothing of that category or description.'
'Any pain? Good. Now if you'll just take down your trousers and pants and lie on the couch.'
Curnow pushed a light up Jake's bum and had a look round there while Jake made hooting noises to relieve his fairly marked discomfort. When Curnow came down again it felt as if he had brought far, far more than his light with him but this proved not to be the case. Soon Jake was back in his chair and very glad of it too.
'Well, there are some unformed stools up there but nothing abnormal. Keep on with the Lomotil and the diet and it should clear up. But remember: no wine,' said Curnow doggedly, adding with extreme reluctance, 'for the time being. If you must drink stick to spirits.' He paused, following up a memory perhaps set off by a glimpse of Jake's genitals a few minutes before. 'Ah-your libido. I sent you to Dr Rosenberg, didn't I? What was the result?'
'Nothing whatever. No, that's not quite true. My .... libido declined further during the 'therapy' and has gone on doing so since.'
'I gather from that that you have ceased the therapy. Why?'
'Things like it being offensive and nonsensical.'
'I could recommend you elsewhere. There are others in the field.'
'If any of them could help me I shouldn't need to go to them.'
The doctor said impressively, 'Let me suggest an altogether different approach. When I measured the
