"You see the really awful part about last night wasn't anything that happened during it. I'll have to go back a bit. Without ever really thinking about it I'd been working on the assumption that the only reason women were tolerated was because the world was run by men, normal men who by definition didn't see them as they really were because they were looking at them through, er, a kind of distorting—"
"Horn-rimmed spectacles."
"Sod you. Yes. Once I even played with the fantasy that the point of women being in season all the time with only brief interruptions, and even those aren't treated as interruptions among primitive peoples I read somewhere, anyway if they were like dogs or rather bitches with intervals of several months during which they aroused no sexual feelings at all then most of "em wouldn't make it, they'd get their bloody heads kicked off before they could come on heat. Well that was all very well, quite harmless, the sort of thing a lot of men say on the understanding that they don't really mean it, "not really, especially men who are ones for the ladies.
"Now we come to last night, the awful part about it. The reason I could be so wrong about her wasn't so much that I'd been looking at her through horn-rimmed spectacles as that I hadn't been listening to her at all, not a word she ever said, she just didn't interest me. And I could have sworn she did, I could have sworn I'd identified her as what did I say, lively and clever and plainspoken and so on. But I'd really-only-wanted-one-thing. She told me so this morning and that's when I saw it. I don't even like them much. Women. I despise them intellectually—as the Governing Body now knows. Christ, that reminds me, I must write to the Master."
"What about?"
"What about? Me blowing my top at the College Meeting, that's what about."
"Oh, that. You did cause a bit of a stir at the time but these things soon blow over as you know, or rather as you would know if you'd always attended as regularly as I have. Behaviour that would be taken as evidence of madness or brain damage or the utmost malignity outside is just something that helps to make life interesting when we do it. Comes from being in college. Rather like the Army. For instance Wynn-Williams and the Jehovah's Witnesses, were you there or did you ever hear about it? I'll tell you another time. Go on about not liking women."
"Yes. Well, last night was a sort of illustration of it. I think in a nasty way I quite enjoyed it, at least until I got pissed, watching that female make an exhibition of herself. The thing is, it's not them, it's me. I don't see them as they are any more than I did before. I haven't got those spectacles any more but that doesn't mean my sight's improved. Is it possible to be objective in a case like this? What I feel is imagine me thinking I liked them all those years when I didn't really care for them one bit. Rather sad. Makes you wonder, too. I mean can it be only me? Eve used to screw around a lot at the time I knew her, so there must have been plenty of other blokes who failed to notice she was intolerable company. And blokes who screw girls who screw around a lot are usually blokes who screw around a lot, like me or rather me as I was. More support for the idea that womanisers don't like women. Whereas in fact, in fact they are nice, aren't they Damon? You ought to know, you've never fancied them for an instant and you like them."
"As you say, but Jake love, you're depressing yourself, it's not as bad as you think, you're still suffering from the various tolls that have been taken of you."
"I'd better go to bed."
"Not in your present mood. I understand now why your final contribution this afternoon was so emphatic. A lot of what you said was true but only as far as it went. There's one thing you ought to try to remember. Men have their own ways, just as efficient ways, of being evasive and overbearing and dull and thoroughly unsatisfactory. Perhaps I see some of them a little more clearly than you do. That ought to make me more tolerant when a girl tells me she thinks Hamlet was a woman. I don't say it does but it ought to. What about Brenda? She's the only one who matters."
"She says I only want one thing too. Of course I don't know how far she...." Jake spread his hands.
"Oh dear. That is rather untoward, I do see."
"I'm supposed to be working out what I feel about her. I don't dislike her, which is a start of a kind. I like having her about the place. I like chatting to her, but I don't find myself wanting to tell her things—I remember in the old days whenever I read or heard or thought of anything funny or striking or whatever it might be, my first thought was always, I must tell Brenda about that. Not any more. I suppose I ought to tell her just the same—my "therapist" works on the principle that the way of getting to want to do something you don't want to do is to keep doing it. Which seems to me to be a handy route from not .... pause .... wanting to do it to not wanting, wanting not, to do it. But I am paying him to know best. Brenda wants affection, physical affection. She also needs it and ought to have it. My chap is always on at me to go through the motions of it on the principle I've described. I'm a bit scared of being shifted from not-pause-wanting to do that to not wanting to do it. Do you know what I think I am, Damon. A male chauvinist pig. Until the other day I'd never have dreamt of saying that about anybody, least of all myself. Just goes to show, doesn't it? I think if you don't mind I will bugger off, before I depress myself into a decline. But thank you."
It was of Kelly, not Eve or Brenda, that Jake was thinking as he trotted through the rain to his rooms. How did she fit in? He didn't think he felt any affection for her, which might have had something to do with what she had said about things like his dick—easy to forgive, not so easy to forget—but he couldn't be sure while his main feeling for her was still pity. She certainly aroused his interest, genuine interest as opposed to the testosterone—fed substitute that had graced his sometime dealings with Eve, but again that interest might well attach to her as a phenomenon rather than as a person. Oh well. On arrival he shut his outer door in case Mrs Sharp should be on her way into college to hear from his very lips whether he wanted his study curtains washed, and took the plastic phallus out of the drawer where it had lain for the past fifteen days, out of sight all the time and out of mind too except when he had been in London or on his way there. With a paper-knife, a razor-blade and his bare hands he eventually reduced it to fragments too small for it to be made recognisable again by anyone but a three-dimensional-jigsaw-puzzle grandmaster, should such a person exist. As he worked Jake muttered to himself.
Ah now me poor owld bogger, sure it's athackun your own masculinithy yiz are. Ochone, ochone, yiz do be performun an acth of sexual self-thesthroction, do yiz know. Guilth and shame have been rakun havoc wid yiz so dey have, acushla machree. Jasus, Mary and Joseph, de resolth of inorthinathly sthricth thoileth-thrainun thoo be sure, wid maybe a spoth of sothomy ath your poblic school trown in. And bethath and be-fockungorrah, loife's a soighth aisier dis way if yiz ron tings roighth."
23—Extreme Bourgeois Puritan Conventionality
As well as Kelly's visit to Oxford, that day had seen ball lightning in Glasgow. Later in the month the weather improved, with long spells of sunshine that reminded Jake of one of his summer terms as an undergraduate before the war, he couldn't remember which. At the beginning of June, while Brenda stayed with her Northumberland cousins, he spent a couple of nights with Lancewood and his friend John at their cottage near Dry Sandford, sitting out on the lawn with them till an advanced hour. It didn't last: the rain came back, accompanied by cold and thunder, in nice time to damage Eights Week and plague examinees scurrying to and from the schools. The last day of term, the last of that academic year, was one of the worst.
Even so, the Oxford end of Jake's life over those weeks had been normal, even satisfactory to the limited degree possible: he hadn't trampled Miss Calvert to death. the little bastard from Teddy Hall had taken to cutting (no doubt it was called boycotting) his lectures and it looked as if Thwaites, the Bradfordian, was going to get his First in Part I, as against which the Cardiff man had been offered the job and had accepted. The London end, beyond question the larger one, had in the meanti
me not done too well. Jake kept up his visits to Rosenberg who displayed, whether or not he really felt, great interest in the Eve episode; it was possible that his mill had been getting a little hard up for grist. Naturally he tended to concentrate on his patient's fragmentary recollections of the act of sex he had performed, trying to elicit more of them from him.
"Let's go over the whole thing again at a snail's pace," he would say.
"I honestly don't think I can do it more slowly than last time."
"Ah, you can try. Now you commenced manual manipulation of her breasts."
"Yes, I thought pedal manipulation was ruled out one way or another," Jake ventured to reply on one such occasion. "For instance etymologically."
"I'm sorry, I'm afraid I don't quite follow."
"Never mind. Yes, manual manipulation of her breasts was just what I did commence."
"And what were your feelings as you did so?" Rosenberg would pursue.
"I've told you. That it was odd, that it was bizarre."
"You mean you found it disgusting."
"No, again as I've told you, all I found it and everything else I can remember was odd or bizarre."
"You suffered feelings of shame."
"No, and not of guilt either. Not even whatever you called it, personally orientated guilt about my wife. I wasn't thinking of her at the time."
Another recurrent theme had to do with Jake's fantasies, in the sense not of his private daydreamings but of his commissions of these to paper for Rosenberg's inspection. Each fresh attempt brought the same response, the same as the very first, the one about the fantastically beautiful girl with the unbelievable figure. The holder of that MA (Dip. Psych) shook his small head, drew in his breath and sighed, cleared his throat repeatedly and in general behaved much as Jake would have done if confronted by an essay attributing the origin of Mediterranean civilisations to colonists from outer space. There was the same effect of not knowing where to start.
"I'm a doctor," was a favourite opening of Rosenberg's. "I'm 'your' doctor, Mr Richardson. I'm not going to be shocked, you know, by anything you think or say or write."
"No, I believe that."
"If you do—I beg your pardon, seeing that you do, why don't you come clean? Or rather"—it was well worth watching, the deliberation with which he steeled himself the first time he leaped the yawning semantic chasm in front of him—"come 'dirty!?'"
"Well, that's the dirtiest I could do. You must admit I've made progress, cutting out all the soft and warm stuff and being heavy on the Anglo-Saxon."
"True, true, but it's all too normal, too straight. I've never worked with anybody who hadn't some slight deviation, often more than one-voyeurism, fetishism, a very wide field there, sado-masochism, even more so...."
"I'm sorry to disappoint you, I must be a very straight man."
"In some ways indeed you are, to the point of extreme bourgeois puritan conventionality partly resulting from your having attended a single-sex school."
"Oh come off it, man." Jake never quite got over his incredulity at this accusation.
Twice at least Rosenberg tried to support his view by referring to the goings-on at the McDougall. "Several of the photographs that were shown to you there you found offensive. In particular one featuring the female sex organ."
"Yes, I remember. I said it was ugly and so it was, to me, and I bet a lot of other men would say the same and to find it an ugly sight in a photograph isn't the same as finding the whole idea disgusting which I know is what you're working towards."
That usually stopped that one, though Jake's eccentric and psychologically sinister dislike of undressing in mixed company was sometimes taken into consideration. Like all Rosenberg's others, this line of inquiry was continuously and abundantly boring but at least, by the relaxed standards of the matter in hand, it had some observable relevance. The same could not be said of an occasion when Rosenberg produced a machine either called something like a GPI or designed to do something called something like GPI. It was somewhat smaller than the nocturnal mensurator (itself long since returned to him and never mentioned since) and was supposedly designed to measure nervous tension. The thing worked by in the first place measuring something else, sweat, perhaps, or changes in skin temperature; Jake, who didn't listen to Rosenberg whenever it seemed legitimate, wasn't listening. Pads connected by wires to the machine were fastened on his thumb and middle finger, a switch clicked and a different sort of dick, as from a small loudspeaker, followed. It proved to be the first of a series of such dicks, one every five or six seconds. Rosenberg took him on an imaginary stroll round Orris Park and the clicks stayed the same, sat him in his study and the rate increased slightly, put him in the bedroom with an undraped Brenda and the machine behaved like a Geiger counter in a plutonium shop. They didn't try that again.
Actually that happened on the first Tuesday of the summer vacation. The dating was fixed in Jake's mind because something much more extraordinary happened then too: there was a moment of mild interest, nothing to do with the "therapy" of course. He had mentioned the end of the Oxford term as he sat down on arrival.
"Ah yes," said Rosenberg, "to be sure. That means you'll be having several months at your disposal which you'll be able to devote exclusively to research because of your freedom from teaching responsibilities."
He spoke with marked reluctance, indeed with sullenness, as if he had been offered too good a price for reciting those couple of dozen words to be able to turn down the job but wasn't going to throw anything in the way of pretending to care. Jake came back with something like Yes and the psychologist's manner changed completely, became just that, in fact, as he set the ball rolling with a fervid inquiry after his patient's early morning erections.
He must have got an answer but Jake knew nothing of it. His mind had sped back to their very first encounter when Rosenberg had used the same grudging tone in talking of his ancestry, then forward again a week and a bit to their convivial chat in the Lord Nelson. There had been an air of resentment, almost of hatred, about the way he had planked down that couple of miserable facts about his friend (friend? friend?) the editor of 'Mezzanine' and how long he might or might not go on editing it—yes, in that way worse for Rosenberg in the pub, because pubs were places where you were supposed to have real convivial chats, not like consulting-rooms or hospitals where you ran the show and need only waste a few seconds on tittle-tattle before getting on with 'what really mattered'.
"No, no erotic dreams," he said to Rosenberg. Another one was what he was saying to himself, another fucking displaced egotist. As the ordinary sort cared only for maintaining or advancing their own position, judging always in terms of what was useful, never of what was interesting, so this sort put a cause or subject in place of self, identified with it to a degree seldom envisaged by those fond of that term and made everything an example of something, some theory, generalisation, set of facts already in their keeping. He had run across plenty of them in his time at Oxford, as he had half-remembered while he ordered his drink in the Lord Nelson: atheistical religionists who talked, not all that much better than Eve had done, about the hidden powers of the mind, philosophasters, globalequality persons—all or any of whom Rosenberg had reminded him of on the same occasion. That was today and yesterday; the day before yesterday had been far less daft, with Marxists of various sorts predominant or thought to be: as an undergraduate he had had pointed out to him a not very old man at Exeter to whom all evils flowed from what he still called Bolshevism.
Some of this occurred to Jake on his way home after the consultation. It was then too that he reconsidered Rosenberg's fitness for his job. He had tentatively decided, that time when the Workshop was assembling, that a psychologist could afford not to know a great deal outside his subject and still do well enough within it. What about a psychologist who didn't care in the least for the world outside it, even resented its existence? There were fields of study in which indifference or antipathy to all other matters coul
d be no handicap, those fields in which the presence of an observer had a negligible effect on what was observed—astronomy, for instance. Jake felt that psychology must be a different case, so much so that he now doubted his earlier view. Any student of the mind would surely be a good deal hampered by lack of all acquaintance with some of its more noteworthy products—art, for instance. But he didn't bother to pursue the thought because whatever conclusion about Rosenberg he might arrive at he was stuck with him.
And that was because of Brenda. It would be unfair to say that she had faith in Rosenberg; to her, he was simply the expert whose instructions must be followed regardless. No, a little more, in that to query any of those instructions was seen as captious at best, as showing less than a burning desire for sexual betterment. Other things were similarly seen, most of all Jake's persistent refusal to accompany Brenda to the Workshop after the first try. Ed had it in for him, he said; there was no knowing what the man might get up to next, given the chance. He also said he was uncertain, unhappy, unconvinced, things like that about the procedures followed, pale versions of his real feeling that if Rosenberg was a bit suspect Ed was a ravening charlatan. (Didn't Rosenberg's readiness to send his patients to work with Ed make Rosenberg worse than a bit suspect? Not quite necessarily: he might find he gained fresh insight that way, might be standing by to intervene should the facilitator require one of the participants to be disembowelled by way of smartening him up. He—Rosenberg—got a mark for not having put any pressure on Jake to resume attendance.)
Another thing Jake didn't tell Brenda was as much as the bare fact of Kelly's call on him in Oxford. His silence was variously motivated. Admitting in effect that she had been right and he wrong about the girl would have gone against the grain, though he minded that sort of thing less than most men. It would have distressed him too to recount the incident in full, and although some people might have consented to be fobbed off with a fifty-word synopsis, Brenda was certainly not one of them. There was also the good rough rule that said that telling one female anything at all about your dealings with another was to be avoided whenever possible. And there was a fourth reason which eluded him at the time. Anyway, keeping quiet was another discouragement from changing his 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.
Jake's Thing Page 23
