"Isn't it about time for my turn?" asked Brenda.
"Oh, er .... yes I suppose it is. I sort of lost count of time."
"Carried away. No I don't mean that darling, forget I said it, I was just being frightfully silly. Now on this round I think we might...."
"Hey ! "
"What's the matter?"
"Supposed to be non-genital."
"That's non, isn't it, there?"
"Well yes, but only—"
"Genitals genital and non's non."
"But the spirit of the—"
"Sod the spirit. And even the spirit doesn't say you're not supposed to enjoy it."
"I don't think we ought to—"
"Shut up."
After a little while, Jake began to breathe more deeply, then to flex and unflex his muscles. Forgotten feelings, located in some mysterious region that seemed neither body nor mind, likewise began to possess him. Brenda sighed shakily. He pressed himself against her and at once, try as he would, the more irresistibly for his trying, which was like the efforts of a man with no arms to pick up a pound note off the pavement, the flow reversed itself. In a few more seconds he relaxed.
"Oh well, that's that," he said.
"No it isn't. Only for now. It shows there's something. What do you expect at this stage?"
"What I expect at 'this' stage, and what I shall no doubt get, is about twenty more minutes of an experience I wasn't looking forward to and which has turned out to justify such .... mild forebodings. It isn't you, it's me."
"Don't think you're the only one, mate. It isn't you, it's me cuts both ways, you know. You're not blaming me, that's how you mean it, but you're not taking me into consideration either. What about that?"
"Yes. Yes, you're right."
"If you had—been considering me, you might have wondered what I was doing telephoning Elspeth when all I needed to do to make sure we weren't interrupted was take the receiver off. That's right. Putting off the evil hour. Giving way to mild what names. It wasn't you, it was me. Now you'd better start stroking again, uncongenial as it may be. The doctor said you were to."
"It's not 'uncongenial,' it's just—"
"No, not there. Do my back."
He started doing her back. "You said it was nice before, when I was on your shoulder and arm. Was it? Is this?"
"Oh yes. Not tremendous, but nice."
"Sexy?"
"No," she said as if he had asked her whether she had said yes or no. "Nice all the same. I like all that sort of thing, massages and sauna baths and whatnot. You don't, do you?"
"Never been able to see the point of it."
"I suppose it's just how you're made. I suggest what we do now is go on for however long it is and not mind too much how we get there, talk or recite or sing as long as we put in the time."
"Yes. The idea must be to get us used to touching each other again."
"Start to get us used."
7—Are You Disturbed?
That was on the Monday. On the Tuesday Jake went down to see Rosenberg again, taking his homework with him: the completed questionnaire, the sixth and final draft of his fantasy and the paper discs that recorded the doings of the nocturnal mensurator. These troubled him slightly. Each disc bore a faintly pencilled arc with, at intervals, a thicker line or perhaps a pair of contiguous ordinary lines in a radial position. They were no more than a millimetre or two long and must represent movements of the metal arm on the breaking and making of the electrical circuit. But by this time Jake had forgotten which way the thing was supposed to go when, so he didn't know whether he had had a series of virtually continuous erections, broken only by breathing-spaces in a continuous-performance dreamland orgy, or half a dozen flickers of mild interest per night.
Though he inspected the discs thoroughly, Rosenberg made no comment on this or any other point about them and Jake didn't care to ask him. He took even longer over the questionnaire, nodding as he looked through it with a slow regularity Jake began to find offensive: was he (Jake) such a predictable mess? He had only just begun to find this when the doctor suddenly raised his head and, Curnow-like, stared at him for God knew how long. Could this be a reaction to the breach of discipline in his answer to 'M41' I think children should receive sex education 1 as soon as they can understand 2 before puberty 3 at puberty—'never' scrawled at the bottom? More likely it was his regarding '(M49)' the thought of being watched while engaged in sexual intercourse as not very pleasant nor fairly pleasant nor even a little unpleasant but very unpleasant that had produced the stare, on this view a signal much less of hostility or alarm than of wonder, of a desire to fix in the mind something to tell one's grandchildren.
It was soon clear that the fantasy was altogether on the wrong lines. Rosenberg's chubby little features filled with deep disappointment. Once or twice he screwed up his eyes and frowned as if in actual pain, whether bodily or mental. But in the end he laid aside the neatly typed sheets with a muttered promise to take a more careful look later and asked Jake a lot of questions about his childhood and adolescence, some on new topics like any dreams, wet and non-wet, he remembered from that period and how he had felt about the physical changes he had experienced then, others over already-traversed ground, his parents" relationship and suchlike, in the evident but vain hope of eliciting significant contradiction of previous responses. Together with his detailed account of the non-genital sensate focusing session, interspersed with further questions from Rosenberg which continuing to listen in silence would in most cases have rendered needless, these activities filled tip the hour. Or very nearly: there was time at the end for three momentous directives. One—Jake and Brenda were to go on to practise genital sensate focusing, a term which Rosenberg explained with a wealth of well-known words derived from the classical tongues. Two—Brenda was to accompany Jake on his next visit to the consulting-room. And three—before that could come to pass, the following Thursday afternoon in fact, Jake was to visit the sex laboratory at the McDougall Hospital. By way of reassurance Rosenberg again asked him to say, virtually with his hand on the book, whether he had any objection to exposing his genitals in public and was given the answer no.
The nearer it got to Thursday afternoon the less that answer squared with the truth. In the past he had been very willing indeed to carry out such exposure to selected individual females in private, though not of course just like that, but in the Army, in sports changing-rooms and so on he had been one of the majority who preferred where possible to keep themselves to themselves. At the time he had followed that policy without thinking of it as a policy or as anything at all, but now it looked as if he had better start thinking of it as something. This change of approach was just part of the steady progress towards more sophisticated awareness which had come to fuck up (so it seemed to him) most kinds of human behaviour in the last however many years it was. Preferring to keep himself to himself must be allied to the quirk whereby he regarded the thought of being watched while engaged in sexual intercourse as very unpleasant. And that was going to have to do for the minute.