"—come back and finish it later if I'm disturbing you."
"Yes do. No don't." It would be anything from two to a hundred and two minutes later. "No, finish it now you've—"
"-easily come back after I've—"
"No. No. Finish it 'now,' Mrs Sharp."
"Well .... if that's what you really want, Mr Richardson."
The buffeting resumed and went on for a minute or so, then stopped. Moving only his eyes, and them not much, Jake sat and waited for another half-minute. At the end of that time he executed a playful lunge, a feint. Instantly the buffeting resumed. He rocked triumphantly in his chair. "Gotcha!" he hissed. "Now try and tell me it's all imagination."
But the funny part came when the polishing was well and truly over and he could go on where he had left off, or rather more or less where he had begun. As if acting on orders committed to memory and carried out many times in rehearsal he went to the top drawer of his desk, took out an unused long envelope, turned to the picture of Carter-face that he liked most of best, put the envelope so that it covered the less endearing part of her and went on from there.
Later he said out loud, "And that's only the beginning. No. It's a start."
6—Focusing Session
"What does it mean?" asked Brenda.
"Well, sensate ought to mean endowed with sense or senses, as dentate if it occurs must mean endowed with teeth, but I don't see how any sort of focusing can be endowed with any sort of sense. I think they wanted an adjective from sense and noticed or someone told them sensuous and sensual were used up and they noticed or someone told them a lot of words ended in -ate. Makes it sound scientific too. Like nitrate. And focusing, well. Homing in on? No? Concentrating? Something like that."
"I see. But what does it mean?"
"Christ, love, I don't know. Getting you, getting one interested in the other person physically, something like that I should think. Anyway, we know what we're supposed to do."
"Yes. Darling, you're not to be cross but I must ring Elspeth before we start. She said she'd ring me today or tomorrow and 'I know' it'll be while we're doing our focusing if I don't get in first. You know."
"Check." As just disclosed, Elspeth was of the Alcestis-Mrs Sharp sorority though, living as she did on the far side of London at Roehampton, less to be feared. "You take as long as you have to. I'll be in the study."
Jake finished putting the lunch plates in the rack on the metal draining board and went where he had said. The study had been made out of what had been not much more than a spacious box-room and the kneehole desk, the celebrated red leather armchair and a pair of Queen Anne bookcases left little space for anything else, but even he could see that the turquoise carpet was a pretty shade and went well with the wallpaper and Madras cotton curtains.
With the intention not so much of getting in the mood as of keeping up the good work he glanced at a couple of papers that lay on the desk, had been lying there in perfect security since the previous Thursday, even though it was now Monday and Mrs Sharp had by standing arrangement attended the house on the Friday and that very morning. For both times Brenda had been at home and, as in many a (or many another) case of hyper normal powers, Mrs Sharp's were severely curtailed or even curbed altogether by the presence of a third party. Jake picked up one of the papers.
'M27' (he read) I find the thought of sexual intercourse with a willing female somewhat under the age of consent, say 14-15 yrs
1 very pleasant
2 fairly pleasant
3 a little unpleasant
4 very unpleasant
In so far as he could make himself address his mind to the problem, he found he thought all four. The age thing didn't come into it: the attractiveness of any willing female past puberty depended for him on her attractiveness, though as far as he knew he had in practice confined himself to those of 16 yrs and over. What counted was the immediacy or lack of it. Some time or other in Hawaii or somewhere, very pleasant; on his next trip to Italy, fairly pleasant; by the end of next month in Orris Park, a little unpleasant; here and now, very unpleasant. Even that wasn't quite right because of the difference between the thought of sexual intercourse and the thought of the thought of it. If he could snap his fingers and boof, there he was in mid-job, very pleasant; if she were really actually in fact standing a yard away on the precise point of starting to show how willing she was, very unpleasant. Not unpleasant, either, just as much as his old man needed to set it trying to haul itself up into his abdomen. But he couldn't write all this down, especially since the question was obviously nothing to do with any of it. Like the good examinee he had always been (best classical scholarship of his year at Charterhouse, First in Mods, best First of his year in Greats) he asked himself what was expected here, what was being looked for. A means of sorting out the child-molesters from the gerontophiles, why yes, and no doubt of making the finer distinction between the inhibited who welcomed any accepted restriction and the robust sturdy husky hardy hearty etc. He ticked 2 and picked up the other paper.
A fantastically beautiful girl with an unbelievable figure wearing a skin-tight dress cut as low as it possibly could be is looking at me with eyes blazing with uncontrollable passion (he read). With lazy languorous movements she peels off the dress and reveals herself as completely stark naked and utterly nude. Her breasts are so enormous that there is hardly room for them on her thorax. They are rising and falling with irresistible desire as with her shapely hips swaying lazily she glides over and stands insolently before me with her hands on her curving hips and her colossal breasts jutting 100 words out at me. I tear off all my clothes and she gives a tremendous gasp of astonishment and admiration and awe. She lies down on a bed which is there.
There was more, but he was still 73 words short of the 600 minimum set by Rosenberg and had already been compelled to introduce two additional girls, the first with immense breasts, the second with gigantic ones, for the sake of variety. He felt that this must violate some important canon of the genre but could find no other alternative to direct repetition. It was not that he had been idle; this was the fourth draft. The first, which had said all he really wanted to say on the matter, had consisted only of nouns, verbs, prepositions, pronouns and articles and been 113 words long; gamma minus at best. Well, he had to find those 73 somewhere before setting off for Harley Street the next morning. What about a black girl? With Brobdingnagian breasts? No no, with gleaming ebony skin. Mm..... The trouble was that being white himself he tended to think about white girls when he thought about girls at all.
Brenda tapped softly at the open door. "All right?"
"Right."
He followed her across the small landing, where a Bengal rug lay, and into their bedroom. Here, in a drill they had been through many times together, they lifted off, folded and laid down on an ottoman the patchwork quilt she had expertly made. Again by tradition, lapsed in this case, she slipped off to the bathroom and he quickly undressed and got into bed. He felt calm and yet uneasy, quite resolved to carry out orders but unable not to wish that something harmless in itself would prevent what was in prospect. After a minute he turned over so that he would have his back to Brenda when she reappeared. She had treated with exemplary seriousness Rosenberg's letter about her need to lose weight, had joined the local group of Guzzlers Anonymous at the first opportunity and had already taken off six ounces, but that wasn't going to be enough to make her feel all right about being seen naked, which she had avoided for the past year or more, he supposed.