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 Dvorák, 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.
One evening he had been extolling Dvorák in the musical context when a woman had asked him, to all appearance quite innocently, if he didn't think that the something sharp minor melody in the middle of the something movement of the, er, the New World Symphony was as fine in its way as the famous tune played by the something in the first section and that only the .... the syncopations and the something elses in it, which made it hard for the uninitiated to sing, had stopped it being as famous. He had said quickly (and Jake could imagine with what stiffness) that in such matters he always followed the popular view and the subject had dropped. But afterwards he had started thinking and had realised that, although the existence of the New World Symphony and Dvorák's authorship of it were as firmly settled in his mind as the establishment of the prin
ciple of evolution by (steady) Darwin, he knew nothing about it, of how it might differ from its composer's old-world symphonies if any, of how the least part of it went, or how many decades had gone by since he had last heard it, assuming he ever had. How then had work and musician come to hold their curious importance to him? For the first time since God knew when the lovely Ann Dvorák had returned to his mind and it was in that moment (he must have read a book or two of a sort at some point) that he understood how he had acquired what he had thitherto thought of as his opinions. All these disappeared as such instantly and reverted to what they had always been : things he said so as to seem to be someone.
"But I wasn't anyone and I'm not anyone," said Geoffrey. "I don't just mean I'm not important, though I'm certainly not that. I'm completely cut off. Oh I don't mean in a personal sort of way—I've got a wife whom I adore and we get on very well and I have some very nice friends." He looked affectionately at Brenda and Jake. "But they're all like just sort of comforts, marvellous to have around but I don't want to know anything more about them than I do already. They don't interest me. Nothing ever has—I've never wanted to know anything at all. That's why I couldn't remember what I read in the encyclopedia: I had no reason to and I wasn't concerned with knowing for the sake of knowing. It was different with my governess and exams and so on. But now I've got nothing to think about and I realise it, nothing except myself and that's very dull. There's nothing in me. I'm contemplating my own navel—I remember reading that or being told it, I suppose everybody has to remember some things or we—couldn't read at all or even speak or function in any way—and my navel's a pretty boring subject."
That seemed to be all for now. From the familiar lively manner of his in which he had talked of his dealings with nurses and Dvorák, a manner quite reconcilable with a keen curiosity about himself and the workings of his own mind, Geoffrey had in the last minute or so fallen with some abruptness into a hollow, lugubrious mode of speaking that matched the content of what he said. This—the tune, not the words—recaptured the attention of his audience which, apart from Jake, Brenda and Kelly, and in a different way Ed and Rosenberg, had stopped listening at about the Bradlaugh stage. Even Chris might well have noticed the change. There was a pause, during which facilitator and psychologist conferred inaudibly; then Geoffrey was thanked for his efforts rather as if he had just failed an audition by a small but distinct margin. Poor old bugger, Jake thought to himself, at least you're a cut above Miss Calvert and that lot. To them, the failure of things like knowledge to win their interest constituted a grave if not fatal defect in the thing itself.
Martha's one-to-one followed. She was herself and you were her mother and there were slanging-matches which she always won. Jake did his best when it came round to him but he was a bit distracted by wondering, and also beginning to nourish a man's-hand-size-cloud-type suspicion of, what the good Ed might have in store for him. He also wondered, not so hard but still quite a bit, what would be required of the person whose turn must intervene between Martha's and his—Kelly.
Time, plenty of it, came to the rescue here: Kelly was to engage in self-expression. In Jake's vocabulary this was a vague term applied to activities like swearing and children's art but in the present context it evidently meant something more specific. The girl at once left her chair, sat down on one of the more affluent patches of carpet and clasped her knees.
"All right, Kelly." The note of coaxing in End's voice was intensified. "Your assignment is to give us yourself. You gave us a whole lot last time but now you're going to try to give us all of it, the piece, Kelly. Whenever you're ready."
After half a minute of inert silence she uttered the first of a great number of loud howling noises. If this was self-expression it was hard to name the part of the self being expressed, its fear, its rage, its grief, its pain, its hatred or its disappointment or some other thing. Jake had never heard the cries of a maniac, far less those of a damned soul, but he thought there might be some common ground in both cases. The girl thrashed about on the floor, arching her backbone to a degree a trained gymnast might have envied and thrusting her trunk forwards and down between her parted thighs. The movements of her head were so rapid that it was hard to catch anything interpretable in her face, though there was a moment at which he saw clearly what he had seen only once before in his life, when the small child of a colleague had fallen in a Summertown garden and cut its knee: a tear spurting from a human eye. Next to him Brenda shivered or shuddered and reached out and took his hand.
At last the howls were reduced to moans and then to long gasping breaths; Kelly wiped her cheeks with her fingers and Ed helped her to her feet and told her that maybe that wasn't quite all of it but it was damn near and congratulations. Jake was bracing himself for the fray when Mr Shyster, fetched as it now seemed by means of a bell push beside the disfigured fireplace, came in with more refreshments. This time there were cups of tea at the everything-must-go price of 10p and biscuits Jake didn't bother with. He saw that Geoffrey was unattended and crossed over to him.
"I thought that took some doing, what you did."
"Took some..... Oh. Oh, it wasn't all that difficult. Did you think it went down all right?"
"Who with?"
"End's in a funny mood, he didn't seem at all impressed, not even with the last bit, and that really was rather difficult. I was really trying then."
"To express emotion, you mean."
"But then he said hardly anything to Lionel either. It's probably just his mood. He's only human like the rest of us, after all."
"Geoffrey, there's just one thing that—"
"Yes."
"Er, well I was just going to say there was one thing that sort of puzzled me a bit in what you said—which was all absolutely fascinating, I don't mean that. It was about .... you not going to school because of your father's ideas, which I quite...."
"No no, my father was 'against' my going to school, any sort of school. It would have been contrary to his principles for me to be taught scripture and go to chapel. I thought I'd explained all that."
"Oh I think I understood. But what I was going to ask you, I took you to mean you wished your father had let you go to school, because if you had, you'd have been able to get your hero-worshipping done while you were still there. Surely if you had, you'd have seen through the whole thing that much sooner and realised that much sooner, which is quite a long time, that you only got your opinions and all that from imitating the way your hero-worship chaps went on. Which wouldn't have been at all a good thing, would it, because you'd have seen you were whatever you said, nobody in particular, years, decades before you did in fact. In reality. As it happened."
"Jake—everything you advance as an argument is quite true," said Geoffrey weightily. "But with respect you seem to be missing the point. It was 'because' I didn't go to school that 'I failed' to meet all those people. If 'I had' gone to school I'd have met them 'sooner.'"
"And realised you were imitating them sooner, that was my whole—"
"No no, if you go over it in your mind you'll see I'm right."
What Jake did see was that he had fallen into his old error, still quite common with him even when dealing with pupils, of supposing that because somebody used things like verbs and conjunctions he (or she) could follow what others said. Changing tack he said, and meant it, "Amazing how you managed to get that much insight into yourself and not be afraid to follow it up."
"How do you mean?"
"Realising how you'd come by all your views and that you've got no thoughts of your own. It took courage to face that."
"Oh well, there we are." Geoffrey had been frowning but now his features relaxed and he smiled cheerfully. "I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about. Just not my day."
"How's Allie?" asked Jake to cover his renewed wonderment. "Allie?"
"Yes. How is she?"
"She's all right. Why?"
"Nothing, pure interest."
"She's ne
ver been better as long as I've known her. Why shouldn't she be?"
"No reason. If you'll excuse me I must just have a word with Brenda," said Jake, who at that stage would have welcomed a word with Ernie, Mrs Sharp, anybody at all. But he didn't get his word because Ed declared it was time to be getting on, nor was the least disagreement voiced. After the teathings had been collected and removed, he said,
"All right, Jake, strip."
An expected or, as in this case, not really unexpected piece of nastiness is not thereby rendered less nasty; so at least it seemed to Jake at the time. Another point that struck him with almost equal force at about the same moment was that a piece of nastiness that has been preceded over a period by several other roughly comparable pieces of nastiness is not thereby rendered less nasty either. He said he wouldn't (do as he was told) and was disconcerted to hear how petulant and fatuous it seemed to sound.
"Wasn't I just telling you about yourself suffering from sexual guilt and shame?" This of course was Rosenberg, his little nose lifted in triumph.
"It isn't that, it's just embarrassment. For a .... with a female with sex in mind, that's a different matter."
Jake's Thing Page 17
