"Why so? You may have forgotten, but you once gave me an assurance that you had no objection to exposing your genitals in public."
Imprecations suggested themselves in such profusion and variety that Jake was silent quite long enough for Ed to say in his calmest tone.
"Cut the bullshit. Jake, I said take off your clothes. So take off your fucking clothes."
He caught Brenda's eye, which stated with the utmost clarity of diction available to eyes that it would be measurably better for him if he complied with the facilitator's request. Everyone else was clearly expecting it too. So in the end he complied, marvelling a certain amount that he had had the unconscious predictive power or something to make that a clean-underclothes day. Well there he was, grey-and-white chest-hair, elliptic areolas round the nipples, some broken veins on the chest, a perceptible if less than gross pot-belly, pimple-scars on the thighs, yellow toenails and all, not forgetting those parts that had once so interested him and from time to time others. For a moment it didn't feel too bad, and then it felt too bad.
Acting on End's orders, the nine other participants came up to him successively and stroked or squeezed various parts of him though avoiding the genital area oh I say how frightfully decent; in practice his shoulders and upper arms got most attention. While they were doing that they were supposed to tell him things like he was all right. Kelly looked and sounded sorry for him, Chris, whom he had been looking forward to least, told him that he was all right and then that he was definitely all right, and Brenda seemed pleased with him, but he didn't take much notice of any of them because he was concentrating so hard on stopping himself from trembling all over. That was a help in a way. When they had all finished and he got dressed what struck him was how much less better he felt now he had got dressed than he had expected. He had some difficulty in giving his full attention to Brenda when, complying with End's request to conduct a self-draining (so you could have two of the same sort of thing in the salad), talked for twenty-five minutes about how unattractive and stupid and incompetent and ignorant and unattractive and useless and silly and unattractive she felt all the time. But he got the main drift.
17—Exposing Ed
When the Workshop broke up at half-past six Brenda asked Geoffrey if he would like to come with her and Jake for a cup of tea and a drink. He understood her fully and at once and thanked her but said he had to be off to his own home to change and take Alcestis to a theatre. However he showed no disposition to be off in a hurry, hanging about in the room they had spent so long in and near the front door (at a spot from which another room was to be seen with only a wicker-covered carboy and a ping-pong table in it) and asking the other two if they didn't think that one or another part of the proceedings had been particularly good and saying he thought it had been. This minor delay made them the last to leave, just behind Rosenberg and Ed, who were exchanging farewells in the "porch". On their conclusion Rosenberg startled Jake by wheeling 'away' the child's bicycle that had been parked there, mounting it at the kerb and riding off on it—startled him till he saw that of course a child's bicycle and a Rosenberg's bicycle would be indistinguishable for practical purposes. And any bicycle would be quite effective in today's traffic and was much cheaper than a car, especially one modified for a two-foot-high driver.
Geoffrey promised to be in touch soon and went, walking with his characteristic head-down gait-because he doesn't want to see anything, thought Jake. He said to Brenda.
"I'd give a few bob to know what he's changing into."
"What? A suit, I imagine. Why?"
"He's got half a suit on already. For the theatre I should think he'd go for, er .... a safari jacket with a frilled shirt and velvet bow-tie, jeans, tartan socks...."
"What are you talking about?"
"Well you must admit he does dress extraordinarily."
"Honestly, just because he doesn't dress like anybody else...."
"You don't overstate the case. No, it's more than that. It's one of his character-trait-substitutes like pretending to hate nurses and like Dvorák. No .... it's not that either, if that was what he was after it would be much easier and less ridiculous if he just always wore white or bright red or had a collection of outlandish ties, say. Ah, you were right after all, not dress like 'anybody' else. Perverseness! An instinct, a compulsion to get things wrong. That's why...." Jake's voice trailed off, he understood now about Geoffrey's magpies, Lake Vancouver and Florence Nightingale throwing herself under the King's horse at the Grand National, results of an endless series of drawn battles between memory and the will to err, but as he felt at the moment he couldn't face explaining all that from the start. He went on fast instead, "That's why he's such a pest to talk to, always on the look-out for chances of getting at cross-purposes with you. In fact there was the most amazing—"
"Why are you so against him?"
"Darling I'm not 'against' him, I'm just interested in him. You never know, we might even be able to help him." (It was true enough that Jake didn't consider himself to be more against Geoffrey than any reasonable man ought to be and was indeed interested in him, but the mention of helping him was pretty pure hypocrisy.) "You saw I was talking to him in that tea-break? Well, I congratulated him on sort of seeing through himself—that's what he said he'd done if you remember, there was nothing in him, he said. Anyway, he said he couldn't make out what I was driving at. That really staggered me, because I thought, when he said that all his views and everything were just to make him seem interesting, which struck me as absolutely dead right, perhaps it was sheer chance he got it right, he didn't really mean it, all he was doing was saying another thing that was supposed to make him seem interesting."
"Bit of a coincidence, wouldn't that be, or have I got it wrong? I expect I have. I just thought he was terrifically brave."
"Perhaps he was. I told him I thought so, which can't do any harm, I suppose, though he didn't seem to take it in much."
They were nearly home now, hurrying through the rain that had begun to fall. Two carloads of Asians dawdled past. Brenda said hesitantly.
"What did you think of the other stuff, the other people?"
"Oh I really don't know, don't ask me yet. I'm what Ed would do doubt call too close to it."
"All right. But you were good. Can't have been much fun."
"Thank you darling."
As soon as they were indoors Brenda slipped out to the kitchen and put the kettle on; Jake followed.
"You can't have tea at this time," he told her, "it's a quarter to seven."
"Oh can't I, you just watch me. It's either that or gin and it had better not be gin. Not for a bit anyway."
"What I could really do with is a cigarette."
She gave him a glance of sympathy but said nothing. After a moment he picked up her discarded coat and headscarf and put them with his own hat and coat in the hall cupboard, which had a floral china doorknob on it. An aeroplane went slowly by, or rather not slowly at all but staying in earshot for about three-quarters of an hour. With greater intensity than ever before he wished he still had his "libido", because if he had he and Brenda would be on their way upstairs now to make love. Of course they would; nothing like the Workshop had ever come their way before but of course they would. The thing about you and your wife making love was that it made things all right, not often for ever but always for a time and always for longer than the actual love-making. In that it was unique: adultery could make life more interesting but it couldn't make things all right in a month of Sundays. And as for booze you must be joking—as well expect a fairly humane beating—up to do the job.
He went back into the kitchen where Brenda was spooning the Jackson's Earl Grey, one of their few indulgences, into the teapot, which was floral too.
"Look at me not making buttered toast," she said.
"I do so, and I admire."
"Twelve pounds I've lost in just three weeks. The Guzzlers say that's as fast as it's safe to go."
"I'm sure the
y're right."
The doorbell chimed. Jake always wished it wouldn't do that but would ring or be a buzzer instead; the trouble was it counted as being outside the house, which was his province, and he couldn't be bothered so it went on chiming. Anyway, when he opened the door he found Kelly was there, though she wasn't for long; she furled her umbrella and stepped across the threshold so promptly and confidently that he at once assumed that Brenda had invited her during one of the breaks at Mr Shyster's and for some odd reason neglected to mention it. Standing now by the cheval glass the girl nodded and smiled inquiringly at him.
"We're in the kitchen," he said; "Brenda's just making a cup of tea."
"Oh marvellous. Is it this way?"
Brenda had entered upon the very act of tea making. The look she gave reversed Jake's understanding as fast as it had formed: the appearance of Kelly was a surprise to her, and not a particularly welcome one either. If the second half of this was noted it wasn't reacted to; Kelly walked over to the sink and stood her umbrella up in it to drain, talking eagerly the while.
"It's so kind of you both to let me just barge in on you like this, I hope you don't mind too much. You may be wondering how I found you, well I simply followed you from that frightful house. At a respectful distance, so I wasn't quite sure which gate you went in at but I got it on the second try. It's the most awful cheek on my part but I did so want to have a chat with you both."
"What about?" asked Brenda in a colourless tone.
Kelly seemed to find this an unexpected question. "That ghastly session and the incredible things that happened and that criminal man Ed." When neither Richardson responded immediately she hurried on, "Of course if you're busy or anything I quite understand, I'll take myself off in a flash, you've really only to say the word."
Something like sixty-three and a half per cent of this last bit was directed at Jake, who didn't say the word. What he did say (and when taken up later on the point by Brenda said truthfully that when he said it disinclination to chuck someone, anyone out with no decent excuse in sight came first among whatever motives he might have had) was, "No no, we're not doing anything special, stay and have a cup of tea with us."
"Oh thank you, you are nice. You see, the reason I've come to you two like this is there's really nobody else I can talk to. The others are all very sweet people, even poor little Chris, his bark's worse than his bite, but they're not what you'd call intellectual giants, well, Ivor's no fool and Martha's quite sensible except about her mother, but you can't sort of 'talk' to them, so up till now I've had to work on my own."
"Work at what?" asked Brenda as before.
"It may sound silly to you both but I want to expose Ed. Oh not so much Ed personally but the whole Workshop bit. So I, what do you call it, I infiltrated this one. Jolly easy it was too. I just went to my GP, who's a silly little man and I spun him a yarn about not being able to keep a job or settle to anything and having rows with my parents, and he passed me on to that even sillier little man Rosenberg who passed me on to Ed, and there I was, simple as that. I've been going to these get-togethers for six weeks now. Oh I say what a beautiful room, it must have taken you absolute years to get it like this, Brenda, I do congratulate you."
The room in question was naturally the sitting room into which, Jake carrying the tea tray, the three had now moved. General praises were followed by plenty of particular ones lavished on glass paperweight, trailing plant, some sort of candlestick, some sort of miniature and like lumber. It all went down well enough with Brenda, though it fell some way short of winning her over. Jake put up with it as long as he could before moving back towards a matter that had started to interest him, not a lot, but more than any bleeding paperweight or miniature was going to.
"This business of exposing the Workshop," he said in a slender interval between such articles. "You mean publicly? In court, for instance?"
Brenda, as she was apt to. whenever he tried to take a conversation back to an earlier point, gave a look attributing to him either slowness on the uptake or pedantry; for her, things must run on, not back, unless of course Alcestis had a "story" to finish. But Kelly turned eager again at once and he was touched with surprise and gratitude as the variegated awfulness and fatuity of the day sank for the moment out of sight.
"Well yes," she said. "Well, I don't know, I haven't found out enough yet, but how it began, a friend of mine at work went to another Workshop round Sloane Square, and it was absolutely appalling she told me, people beaten up and, you know, group sex and everything, so she stopped going. Then I heard from someone else about Ed, don't repeat this either of you because it may not be true, but this person said that after one of End's sessions a chap had gone straight home and killed himself with sleeping pills. So I thought somebody had better look into it, so I joined as I said and, well, you've both just seen for yourselves."
"Seen what?" asked Brenda.
"Well, him, Ed, encouraging Chris to be aggressive when what he needs is a damn good smack-bottom and being told not to be so boring, and poor Ruth, you're not going to tell me being made to do all that crying does any good, 'made' to do it, four times over, and Lionel, after this afternoon the only thing he can be is more confused than when he started. And Ivor ought to stick to proper treatment and not..... And making Jake strip,"—straight to Brenda in a relaxed informal interested conversational tone—"just to humiliate him. He did the same thing to Chris two weeks ago after he'd ticked Ed off without being told to. I noticed you talking to him when we stopped for lunch, Jake—how did you hit off with him?"
"He said it was obvious I was hostile."
"Exactly. Getting back at you. But he doesn't really need that, even, something to set him off. It's just power, hurting and embarrassing and generally abusing everybody and all in the name of therapy and no one to stand in your way."
Jake offered more tea and was accepted. "I think in fairness I ought to remind you of what Rosenberg said to me when I resisted. About .... shame and guilt. You could say there was a connection."
"In this business everything's connected with everything else. I forgot why it was supposed to be good for Chris to strip but I could soon run up an explanation, couldn't you, either of you?"
"Another thing it might interest you to know is that during our chat in the lunch-break he told me his plan for Ruth. What she needs is a shake-up, you see, so when the time comes she'll be put in the hot seat and told what a bloody bore she is. A great help to be told that when you're old and lonely and frightened."
"The swine. Anyway, thanks for telling me. One more bit of information."
"He can be very plausible, though. He had me thinking it might be a good idea, and the same with Chris and Ivor."
"Exactly."
They looked at each other in silence for a moment, Jake on the corner of the velvet-covered sofa and Kelly sitting animatedly forward on what had used to be called a pouf or pouffe but obviously couldn't be these days; she reminded him for an instant of someone he had recently met, he had no idea who. Brenda had been standing by a carved plant-table near the window; now, announcing by her move that she would join the conversation for a strictly limited period and purpose, she perched on the arm of the chair in which she normally watched TV or read. Her voice was rather livelier than before when she said,
"Er ..."—leaving an empty space where Kelly's name would have fitted—"do you mind if I ask you a question?"
"No, Brenda, of course not."
"You say you, what was it, you infiltrated the Workshop so as to show it up, so that means you faked being somebody who needed therapy, psychotherapy."
"Yes, I went to quite a lot of trouble actually, but I indent have bothered, it was as easy as pie, as I said."
"So when Ed asked you to do whatever it was and you cried and writhed about and so on, you were faking that too."
"Oh absolutely."
"But you really were crying. real tears, I saw them. And you still look slightly weepy, as if you've been cryin
g."
"Do I? Oh yes, they were real tears all right, but I was faking them at the same time. What I mean is, it was a performance that included crying. I can cry at will, always have been able to. My dad says I get it from him, he's in the theatre, he says it's all a matter of being self-centred enough. I studied acting for a year until I realised I couldn't stand the people."
"I see," said Brenda. "How can we help you?"
"Well really just knowing I've got the two of you on my side is a big help in itself. And you can both keep your ears open for anything you may hear, from Rosenberg and so on, and if I can't make it one Saturday I'll need someone to watch Ed for me. That sort of thing."
"And when you've got enough information you'll decide whether you're going to sue him or not."
"I might sue him or I might write about him in a newspaper."
"What would you sue him for?"
"Well, I'm no legal expert, I'd have to find out about that but I'd have thought one could get him for fraud. After all he is a fraud isn't he?"
Brenda said nothing to that. Jake hesitated before he came in.
"An intellectual fraud certainly. All this stuff about getting away from logic and reason which he isn't even consistent about. And 'of course' when a crowd of people tell you on instruction that you're nice you're not going to feel in the least less shy when you meet a crowd of other people you've never seen before. And whatever any of them may have got off their chests will all be back on their chests by now. 'And' he makes a hundred and fifty quid a time out of us and God knows how many other lots he runs. But he hasn't got a contract with me, he hasn't even said he might be able to help me. So I don't really see quite how we...."
"Neither of you know the first thing about it so I think it's be better if you shut up and give him a chance." Brenda spoke in a livelier style than ever. "You say you've been six times and today was our first, it seems to me perfectly ridiculous to expect any results for several months, Dr Rosenberg said we shouldn't. And there are always rumours about these sorts of things which I don't think should be passed on. And I don't care what rot anybody talks if they make me feel better and I dare say you won't believe me or think it matters but I felt really better after saying my piece even if it didn't last very long."
Jake's Thing Page 18
