As he went upstairs he sang under his breath a ditty learned in those Army days of his:
'Get older this ...'
'Get older that ...'
'When there isn't a girl about Yer feel so lonely,'
'When there isn't a girl about Yer on yer only .... Get older this (bash! bash!)'
'Get older that (boom! boom!) ...'
It certainly didn't take him back. Locking himself in with a load of new-bought wankery, on the other hand, did, as predicted, but the distance was far smaller in the second case. He settled down comfortably in his handsome brass-studded red leather armchair, a present from Brenda on his fiftieth birthday, and opened 'Kensington.'
After looking through it at colour-supplement speed he put it aside. It was full of chaps and parts of chaps, or rather of course it was full of girls but with chaps very much in the picture. 'Zoom' and its contemporaries had occasionally included the odd chap dressed as a policeman or rustic, only he had been dressed, and the point of him had been the mistaken though innocuous one of something like comic relief, and you could usually get rid of him or most of him by folding the page. No amount of ingenuity of that order would have got rid of the chaps here.
The journal he had picked up in the shop almost at random turned out to be called 'Agora, and the breast he had spied on its cover turned out to be part of a drawing, more precisely part of a drawing-within-a-drawing that a chap in the outer drawing was drawing. He was the only visible chap throughout 'Agora,' but there were dozens of his sex in the letterpress of which, apart from small or smallish advertisements and some more non-erotic drawings, it entirely consisted. The range was from she ran her dainty fingers up and down my, by way of the other night my girl friend took hold of my, to can anything be done to straighten out my. Some of it wasn't supposed to be true and some of it was.
Lastly and with renewed expectation he came to 'Mezzanine.' It was about the size of the Liverpool telephone directory but was printed on much nicer paper. As part of the fun-delaying ritual that was itself part of the fun, he began at the beginning. Car. Cigarette. Soft drink. Hard drink. Mezzanine Platform—this was some more on the lines of said she'd never seen anything like my. Cigarette. Car. Article on speedboats. Article on Loire wines. He was over halfway through this, finding it sound enough if rather jocosely written, when he so to speak remembered where he was. Guiltily he flipped over the page and came upon a small photograph and a large photograph, both a bit misty on purpose, of a very pretty girl who at the same time looked like President Carter, in the sense that her face looked like his face, and who had almost no clothes on without giving much away. Over the next page, three more photographs, arty angles, unlikely poses. Over the next page, well this is it folks. Wham. And (there being two such) bam. And thank you most awfully main.
Jake stared, though without amazement. Tit—was not what this magazine was. In one sense he was on very familiar territory, even if the familiarity was slightly dated; in another he'd never been there before. His mind searched slowly. It was all a matter of how you looked at it, in two senses again if not more. In itself it was a bit..... And for some reason you found you had to consider it in itself, even though most of the rest of her was there, including her face. In itself it had an exotic appearance, like the inside of a giraffe's ear or a tropical fruit not much prized even by the locals. He turned on and found more of the same, on again and found more art, again and came to an article on hairpieces. Men's. To put on their heads.
In the days of 'Zoom'—when, that is, 'Zoom'-style had been as far as you could easily, safely and not expensively go—he had believed that to come across, by some stupendous accident, one of his favourite 'Zoom' girls, Anne Austin, June Palmer or Rosa herself, in a pose such as he had just seen would have constituted the summit of human (or at least male) felicity. Well, then no doubt it would have done. That had been 'then.'
He turned on yet again through various commemorations of the unfree good things in life until he came to the expected series of photographs with the girl on the cover as model. There was quite a lot of stuff alongside about her personal habits, including a clear statement in large letters and between quotation marks of what she regarded as the best thing in 'her' life. Jake found this slightly offensive; her holding such a view was at least unobjectionable but he would have preferred to reach that conclusion about her under his own steam. In some of the accompanying pictorial pornographic material her hand was quite where it hadn't been quite on its cover and her mouth was open and her eyes shut. Right. Now that should have been just what the doctor ordered. Why wasn't it? What made it, to a very small degree but unmistakably, off-putting? Before he could get his censor out of bed the thought popped up in his mind that she was no lady. By Gad sir, he said to himself, country's going to the dogs, time and place for everything, but without squashing that thought, which even attained the clarification that while what this girl was up to or at any rate was trying to be mistaken for being up to lay well within the scope of a lady, being so photographed didn't. But, he reminded himself, the girls he imagined to himself got up to things that were much more, more—come on, out with it: more degrading than this. Yes, but that was him. And those girls did what they did because, however perversely, they enjoyed it, not because they were getting paid. He had imagined better than he knew when he credited this one with a sound business head. All rationalisation and self-deception, he said to himself; you wouldn't have thought of any of that 'then.' Ah, but supposing it had been 'then' that you....
Jake did a mental about-turn. He had decided that the only picture of business-head that he really liked was one of her shopping (fully-clothed) in a vegetable-market and was about to junk the whole project when he remembered with a start what the flesh-and-blood doctor had ordered. Fifteen minutes had he said? Oh Christ. Well, knock off five for time already put in. He set himself to pore grimly over business-head and Carter-face in alternate bouts of two minutes each, fighting off as best he could the distractions of the possibly—Roman ring worn by the one, the pleasantness of the rural scene in which the other wallowed, the uncertainly identifiable ornament or utensil in the shadows behind the one, and so forth. After a while, this way or that he was getting interested. Then the dead silence was broken by a tremendous rattling of the lock on the door.
That fairly hurtled him back not far off fifty years. He went into a kind of throe and made wild self-defensive motions. "What is it?" he asked. He had to ask most of it twice or more.
No answer, further rattling, but the door itself did seem to be holding for the moment.
"What do you want? Mrs Sharp?" This was louder and steadier. "I told you I didn't want to be—"
"—thought your knob looked as if it could do with a polish." No no, 'of course' she didn't say that, couldn't have done; she must have been talking about th' door-knob or y' door-knob, but it had sort of come through to him different.
"Oh I see. I mean it probably does, still surely there's no need for you to start on it—"