"But I wasn't anyone and I'm not anyone," said Geoffrey. "I don't just mean I'm not important, though I'm certainly not that. I'm completely cut off. Oh I don't mean in a personal sort of way—I've got a wife whom I adore and we get on very well and I have some very nice friends." He looked affectionately at Brenda and Jake. "But they're all like just sort of comforts, marvellous to have around but I don't want to know anything more about them than I do already. They don't interest me. Nothing ever has—I've never wanted to know anything at all. That's why I couldn't remember what I read in the encyclopedia: I had no reason to and I wasn't concerned with knowing for the sake of knowing. It was different with my governess and exams and so on. But now I've got nothing to think about and I realise it, nothing except myself and that's very dull. There's nothing in me. I'm contemplating my own navel—I remember reading that or being told it, I suppose everybody has to remember some things or we—couldn't read at all or even speak or function in any way—and my navel's a pretty boring subject."
That seemed to be all for now. From the familiar lively manner of his in which he had talked of his dealings with nurses and Dvorák, a manner quite reconcilable with a keen curiosity about himself and the workings of his own mind, Geoffrey had in the last minute or so fallen with some abruptness into a hollow, lugubrious mode of speaking that matched the content of what he said. This—the tune, not the words—recaptured the attention of his audience which, apart from Jake, Brenda and Kelly, and in a different way Ed and Rosenberg, had stopped listening at about the Bradlaugh stage. Even Chris might well have noticed the change. There was a pause, during which facilitator and psychologist conferred inaudibly; then Geoffrey was thanked for his efforts rather as if he had just failed an audition by a small but distinct margin. Poor old bugger, Jake thought to himself, at least you're a cut above Miss Calvert and that lot. To them, the failure of things like knowledge to win their interest constituted a grave if not fatal defect in the thing itself.
Martha's one-to-one followed. She was herself and you were her mother and there were slanging-matches which she always won. Jake did his best when it came round to him but he was a bit distracted by wondering, and also beginning to nourish a man's-hand-size-cloud-type suspicion of, what the good Ed might have in store for him. He also wondered, not so hard but still quite a bit, what would be required of the person whose turn must intervene between Martha's and his—Kelly.
Time, plenty of it, came to the rescue here: Kelly was to engage in self-expression. In Jake's vocabulary this was a vague term applied to activities like swearing and children's art but in the present context it evidently meant something more specific. The girl at once left her chair, sat down on one of the more affluent patches of carpet and clasped her knees.
"All right, Kelly." The note of coaxing in End's voice was intensified. "Your assignment is to give us yourself. You gave us a whole lot last time but now you're going to try to give us all of it, the piece, Kelly. Whenever you're ready."
After half a minute of inert silence she uttered the first of a great number of loud howling noises. If this was self-expression it was hard to name the part of the self being expressed, its fear, its rage, its grief, its pain, its hatred or its disappointment or some other thing. Jake had never heard the cries of a maniac, far less those of a damned soul, but he thought there might be some common ground in both cases. The girl thrashed about on the floor, arching her backbone to a degree a trained gymnast might have envied and thrusting her trunk forwards and down between her parted thighs. The movements of her head were so rapid that it was hard to catch anything interpretable in her face, though there was a moment at which he saw clearly what he had seen only once before in his life, when the small child of a colleague had fallen in a Summertown garden and cut its knee: a tear spurting from a human eye. Next to him Brenda shivered or shuddered and reached out and took his hand.
At last the howls were reduced to moans and then to long gasping breaths; Kelly wiped her cheeks with her fingers and Ed helped her to her feet and told her that maybe that wasn't quite all of it but it was damn near and congratulations. Jake was bracing himself for the fray when Mr Shyster, fetched as it now seemed by means of a bell push beside the disfigured fireplace, came in with more refreshments. This time there were cups of tea at the everything-must-go price of 10p and biscuits Jake didn't bother with. He saw that Geoffrey was unattended and crossed over to him.
"I thought that took some doing, what you did."
"Took some..... Oh. Oh, it wasn't all that difficult. Did you think it went down all right?"
"Who with?"
"End's in a funny mood, he didn't seem at all impressed, not even with the last bit, and that really was rather difficult. I was really trying then."
"To express emotion, you mean."
"But then he said hardly anything to Lionel either. It's probably just his mood. He's only human like the rest of us, after all."
"Geoffrey, there's just one thing that—"
"Yes."
"Er, well I was just going to say there was one thing that sort of puzzled me a bit in what you said—which was all absolutely fascinating, I don't mean that. It was about .... you not going to school because of your father's ideas, which I quite...."
"No no, my father was 'against' my going to school, any sort of school. It would have been contrary to his principles for me to be taught scripture and go to chapel. I thought I'd explained all that."
"Oh I think I understood. But what I was going to ask you, I took you to mean you wished your father had let you go to school, because if you had, you'd have been able to get your hero-worshipping done while you were still there. Surely if you had, you'd have seen through the whole thing that much sooner and realised that much sooner, which is quite a long time, that you only got your opinions and all that from imitating the way your hero-worship chaps went on. Which wouldn't have been at all a good thing, would it, because you'd have seen you were whatever you said, nobody in particular, years, decades before you did in fact. In reality. As it happened."
"Jake—everything you advance as an argument is quite true," said Geoffrey weightily. "But with respect you seem to be missing the point. It was 'because' I didn't go to school that 'I failed' to meet all those people. If 'I had' gone to school I'd have met them 'sooner.'"
"And realised you were imitating them sooner, that was my whole—"
"No no, if you go over it in your mind you'll see I'm right."
What Jake did see was that he had fallen into his old error, still quite common with him even when dealing with pupils, of supposing that because somebody used things like verbs and conjunctions he (or she) could follow what others said. Changing tack he said, and meant it, "Amazing how you managed to get that much insight into yourself and not be afraid to follow it up."