In due course Jake found himself standing near the window and facing Martha, the one with the mother. Her eyes were fixed on him in an unbroken stare. He stared back for quite a long time on the view that this must be what was required but in the end got fed up with it and shifted his gaze. Ed appeared at that very juncture and caught the tiny movement.
"No no no," he said, and again he might have been feeling impatient or sympathetic or anything else. "Hold it at eye to eye until I give you the word to break."
It went on for a period that could have contained without substantial cuts the whole of an evening's viewing from Batman to Closedown, or strictly speaking that was how it seemed to Jake. Strange things happened to his vision: at one stage Martha's face went two-dimensional, became a rough disc floating against a background of dark clouds or water, at another it receded a whole mile but grew in size proportionately so that the space it occupied was unchanged. His mind could do nothing but announce its distress to itself: silent recitation of Catullus or poems from the Anthology was about as useful an idea as thinking about sex. When, hardly looked for any longer, the word came to break it suggested at short notice a breaking wave of relief, but as waves do this one quite soon receded. He felt shaken up, uncoupled from the outside world. If Ed had wanted to do that thoroughly but without resorting to shock tactics he had succeeded to the full.
He had also, perhaps without meaning to, stated a major theme of the Workshop's activities, namely that every single one of them without any exception whatsoever lasted for very much longer than you would ever have thought possible. The next stage was a first-rate case in point. It was called free scanning, which meant in practice that you and your yoke-fellow inspected each other's faces with a thoroughness that would have made it possible to count the pores on them if required. Martha's was the face of a woman of forty or so, neither pretty nor ugly. Subjecting it to this kind of scrutiny meant that conventional details of general shape of nose or mouth went unregarded; if Jake were to pass Martha in the street the next day he would have been less not more likely to recognise her as a result of this experience.
The face business was not of course the end of it: Martha took and examined each of Jake's hands in turn, and he hers. Then she walked very slowly round him like an exalted tailor. He looked out of the window on to a patch of knee-high grass with things like discarded clothes—horses and oil-stoves showing here and there and said quietly,
"What does your mother—"
"No talking," said Ed, "there'll be plenty of time for talking in a little while."
There was, though the bit about the little while turned out to be relative. At last Ed clapped his hands above his head and called on Chris to make the rounds.
"Make the rounds?" It came out high-pitched and querulous. "Yeah, you know. Start with Winnie and end with Jake and Brenda."
Chris was the one who didn't like the human race, young, pale and (happily) on the small side. He went and stood in front of Winnie, swaying backwards and forwards slightly in apparent thought. Then he got off the mark, telling her she was a bloody bitch and Christ he'd be shy if he was her and much more of the same. It was a full six minutes by Jake's watch before Chris moved on. At that rate it would be close to an hour before the rounds were finally made, and at 'that' rate, not allowing for intervals, it would be close to ten hours before everybody had had or done his (or her) turn, but long before then one participant at least would have suffered irreversible brain-damage from rage and boredom. Chris's tirades were repetitive in the extreme, but of course it was the tune that mattered, not the words. By the time Chris had moved on again Jake had spotted a periodic element in that tune, a repeated decline from the expression of apparent fury to a mere ill-natured jeering. But was it jeering? More significant, was it fury? Would Ed know?
Jake's interest perked up when Chris turned his attention to Geoffrey, on the basis that even the unobservant couldn't fail to observe a few things about him that would be just right for a truculent harangue, if only his witty clothing, but there was nothing worth attention apart from an all-too-short passage of Joycean word-play about assholes towards the end. Geoffrey appeared dumbfounded at most of it, but then he would have found your visiting card a pretty tough nut to crack. Kelly was next and Jake's interest perked back up for a different reason—what reason? Oh, just interest. She stood perfectly still with her arms folded and stared Chris in the face throughout his speech to her. The folded arms brought her bosom into prominence. It was good all right. There was something about her, perhaps starting with the clothes, that separated her from others of her age, made her the opposite of Miss Calvert, helped him to see that she was attractive. He went on looking at her after Chris had shifted to Lionel, had his eye caught and looked away. When he looked again, sidelong this time, she was giving Ivor one of the cautious bits of appraisal he had earlier noticed her sending him and Brenda. Kelly wanted to know what Ivor felt about what was taking place between Chris and Lionel. Ah.
Chris finished with Lionel and started on Ruth, who was the oldest person there and was sobbing within seconds. Jake wanted to stop it and went on wanting more and more. So did Brenda, he could see. Kelly he thought did, but wasn't sure. Nobody else showed the smallest sign. Rosenberg didn't look up from the journal he was reading; Ed was peering and squeezing his chin. Suddenly he looked at his watch and said in his usual tone.
"All right, cut it, Chris. Go to Jake."
Chris did as he was told at once. He said nothing for much longer than he had said nothing to any of his previous victims, his small features working their way through a limited range of expressions of loathing.
"Who do you think you are, you old bastard?" he inquired finally. "Who gave you the bloody right to be so fucking superior? You think I'm dirt, don't 'you?' Bloody dirt. Don't you? Come on, don't you?"
Jake thought it was rather clever of Chris, considering Chris, to have worked that out but kept the view to himself. "I haven't any particular—"
"Not talk-back, Jake," said Ed.
Without turning round Chris made a shushing gesture that told of ingratitude or preoccupation. "Eh haven't ennair pahtierkyawlah ballocks. You know what you are, don't you? You want to know what you are, what you really are? You're just one big lump of shit." After that he descended to personal abuse. So far from waning in vigour as before his displeasure mounted. Then he fell abruptly silent. When he went on it was a tone he hadn't used before, one unmistakably (to Jake) indicating real anger and so reducing all his earlier behaviour to some kind of charade. "If you don't take that look off your face right away," he said slowly and quietly, "I'm going to..."
It helped Jake that he had once been quite a good tennis player and was still pretty nimble for his age, also that he had noticed Chris glance over towards Ed for an instant; anyway, when the punch came he was almost ready for it, just managed to deflect it past his ear. Ed was there in no time and gave Chris a tremendous slap across the face so that he cried out and nearly fell. That was about when Jake saw what a good thing it was that Chris was undersized. He felt a sudden sharp twinge of total lack of pity for him.
"Bad boy," said the facilitator blandly. "Around here we don't play it that way, okay?"
"You didn't see the look on his face." Chris was close to tears. "He was looking at me as if he thought I was a lump of shit—you should have seen him, honestly."
"Well, you called him one." (The feat of memory, for Chris had used quite a number of other expressions, impressed Jake. He realised he hadn't seen Ed take a single note.) "Maybe he does think you're a lump of shit. Maybe you 'are' a lump of shit. Now get yourself together and go to Brenda."