"Screw biologically. We've made one sort of start, but there's another sort we haven't made," said Brenda with an emphasis he had never heard her use before, or else had forgotten, "and this really is you. You've got to find out whether you feel any affection for me or whether you're the sort of man who can only feel affection for women he wants to go to bed with or wouldn't mind going to bed with or thinks of in a sort of bed what-name, context. If you're not that sort, if you do feel some affection for me even though you don't want to go to bed with me you'd better start working on it and trying to show it. And remember I can tell."
"What about your affection for me?" he asked after a silence.
"It's there but it's keeping itself to itself. It tends to watch its step a bit after the knocks it's taken."
"When did it last take a knock?" This was playing for time while he tried to recover a memory.
"Ooh, about two hours ago, when I kissed you and tried to start talking to you and you came back with any complaints and put your arm around me as if I was an old sow you were having to keep warm till the vet arrived."
"I didn't mean it like that."
"I don't say you 'meant' it like anything. I just might as well have been an old sow."
"I suppose you think this is a good time to bring all this up."
"Yes I do. Check. An excellent time. After you've taken the first step towards getting your, well, your confidence back and before you sell yourself the idea that that's all you have to do. I mean before you absolutely stop wondering what went wrong. Dr Rosenberg seemed to think they go together, you know, screwing and being affectionate, as far as I could make out what he meant, and so do a lot of other people."
"Yes of course." Jake had remembered. "You believed me when I said you looked beautiful in the sitting-room just before we came out."
"I believed something. Something nice. What made you say it?"
"Just remembering how things used to be, sort of suddenly."
She dropped her gaze to her plate, which was now quite empty, and pushed her hand out towards him between the dish warmer and the soy sauce. He took the hand and squeezed it, telling himself it was amazing how after all these years one went on forgetting the old truth that women meant things differently from men. They (women) spoke as they felt, which meant that you (a man) would be devastated forever if you took them literally. (The compensation, in fact bonus on aggregate, was that they thought you operated in the same way, so that they forgave and forgot the devastating things you said to them. He had once, in the course of one of their rows about her relations, called Brenda an illiterate provincial, which had gone down at least as badly as expected at the time but had never since been thrown in his face, thank God; just think what he would have done about and with an accusation of remotely comparable nearness to the bone. And felt about it too.) So what she had said last Tuesday to Rosenberg and him, what he had lain awake going over in his mind in the medium-sized hours the following day, what had then seemed to him to write or at any rate rough-draft finis to their marriage—all that that had boiled down to was saying in bold sans-serif Great Primer italics that she was seriously fed up with him and he had bloody well better stop feeling sorry for himself and take a bit of notice of her for a change. And she had been and was absolutely right. So there they were.
"I think all this might sort itself out in the end with a bit of luck," he said.
"So do I, darling."
"Good. .... We must have earned at least a beta-double-plus from Dr Rosenberg for this evening's work."
"If not beta-alpha query."
"If he could see us now he'd be nodding his little head in approbation."
"Rubbing his tiny hands with satisfaction."
"Showing all his miniature teeth in a benevolent smile."
"Dancing on the tips of his microscopic toes."
"Shaking his filter-passing buttocks."
"I quite like him really."
Jake lifted the corner of his lip and sighed. "What's this do he's got lined up for us next week-end?"
"The Workshop?"
"Oh 'Christ,' I'd forgotten it was called that, I must have censored it out of my memory."
"What's wrong with it?"
"Wrong with it? If there's one word that sums up everything that's gone wrong since the War, it's Workshop. After Youth, that is."
"Darling, you are a silly old oxford don, it is only a word."
"Only a word?—sorry. No, this whole thing is all about language."
"Whole thing? What whole thing?"
"Well, the .... you know, bloody Rosenberg and his jargon, and beyond that, the way nobody can be bothered to..... Anyway, what is this fucking Workshop? I may say that if it's a 'fucking' Workshop you can all count me out. I'm buggered if I'm going to start taking part in exhibeeshes in my condition, or even trying to."
"It's nothing like that, it's a sort of group where everyone has a different sort of problem and says what it is and the others talk back to them. It's meant to help you unburden yourself and gain insight. But Dr Rosenberg explained it to us. Weren't you listening?"
"I suppose unburdening yourself might be a good thing in some cases. No, I was too bored."
"You must try and make it a success, you know, and take it seriously."
"I promise you I'll try, but at this distance it does give off a distinct smack of piss."
15—At Mr Shyster's
The following day week, Saturday, at a quarter to ten of an overcast but so far not actually wet morning, Jake and Brenda made their way on foot to a house in Maclean Terrace some five hundred yards from their own. The events of the intervening eight days may be briefly summarised. There had been two further sessions of genital sensate focusing, the first slightly, the second considerably less successful than the initial one; the consultation with Rosenberg had thrown further light on Jake's sexual behaviour and attitudes but made visible thereby nothing in particular, or so it seemed to the patient; Brenda had told Jake, this time over tandoori chicken and bindhi gosht at the Crown of India in Highgate, that if he wanted to show affection for her he must try harder and then had discussed their holiday plans for September; Eve Greenstreet had cancelled her dinner with Jake because it looked as if her mother had started dying; and Mrs Sharp had tried to break down Jake's study door in order to admit a woodworm authority while he (Jake) was deeply engaged with business-head and Carter-face. Oh, and Brenda had had lunch and been to a film about peasants with Alcestis.
The house that was to house the Workshop was a little older and, to judge by its front, a little larger than the Richardsons". That front had also had nothing done to it but in a bigger way: parts of the stucco facing had fallen off and there was a quite interesting-looking crack running down from the corner of an upstairs window. The front garden had no flowers or shrubs in it but quite enough in the way of empty beer-tins, fag-packets and cardboard food-containers thrown over the low hedge by tidy-minded passers-by and not removed by the inmates. What were the latter going to be like? Jake, who would have had to confess unwillingly to suffering slight twinges of curiosity and expectation as well as uneasiness at what might be in store for him, felt the uneasiness start to mount and become better defined. He noted successively the broken window-pane mended with a square of linoleum, the lidless dustbin in which a thick slightly shiny off-white vest with shoulder-straps and a bottle that held Cyprus sherry caught the eye, the bucket half full of what you hoped was just dirty water and the comfortable-looking two-legged armchair in the passage that led to the rear. Agoraphobic stockbrokers, dentists afflicted with castration anxiety, anally-fixated publicity consultants he had been prepared for; mixed-up berks from building sites or off those lorry things that pulped your rubbish were quite a different prospect. Nor was he one whit reassured by the child's bicycle propped against the side of what was doubtless known as the porch.