"How do you mean?"
"Realising how you'd come by all your views and that you've got no thoughts of your own. It took courage to face that."
"Oh well, there we are." Geoffrey had been frowning but now his features relaxed and he smiled cheerfully. "I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about. Just not my day."
"How's Allie?" asked Jake to cover his renewed wonderment. "Allie?"
"Yes. How is she?"
"She's all right. Why?"
"Nothing, pure interest."
"She's never been better as long as I've known her. Why shouldn't she be?"
"No reason. If you'll excuse me I must just have a word with Brenda," said Jake, who at that stage would have welcomed a word with Ernie, Mrs Sharp, anybody at all. But he didn't get his word because Ed declared it was time to be getting on, nor was the least disagreement voiced. After the teathings had been collected and removed, he said,
"All right, Jake, strip."
An expected or, as in this case, not really unexpected piece of nastiness is not thereby rendered less nasty; so at least it seemed to Jake at the time. Another point that struck him with almost equal force at about the same moment was that a piece of nastiness that has been preceded over a period by several other roughly comparable pieces of nastiness is not thereby rendered less nasty either. He said he wouldn't (do as he was told) and was disconcerted to hear how petulant and fatuous it seemed to sound.
"Wasn't I just telling you about yourself suffering from sexual guilt and shame?" This of course was Rosenberg, his little nose lifted in triumph.
"It isn't that, it's just embarrassment. For a .... with a female with sex in mind, that's a different matter."
"Why so? You may have forgotten, but you once gave me an assurance that you had no objection to exposing your genitals in public."
Imprecations suggested themselves in such profusion and variety that Jake was silent quite long enough for Ed to say in his calmest tone.
"Cut the bullshit. Jake, I said take off your clothes. So take off your fucking clothes."
He caught Brenda's eye, which stated with the utmost clarity of diction available to eyes that it would be measurably better for him if he complied with the facilitator's request. Everyone else was clearly expecting it too. So in the end he complied, marvelling a certain amount that he had had the unconscious predictive power or something to make that a clean-underclothes day. Well there he was, grey-and-white chest-hair, elliptic areolas round the nipples, some broken veins on the chest, a perceptible if less than gross pot-belly, pimple-scars on the thighs, yellow toenails and all, not forgetting those parts that had once so interested him and from time to time others. For a moment it didn't feel too bad, and then it felt too bad.
Acting on End's orders, the nine other participants came up to him successively and stroked or squeezed various parts of him though avoiding the genital area oh I say how frightfully decent; in practice his shoulders and upper arms got most attention. While they were doing that they were supposed to tell him things like he was all right. Kelly looked and sounded sorry for him, Chris, whom he had been looking forward to least, told him that he was all right and then that he was definitely all right, and Brenda seemed pleased with him, but he didn't take much notice of any of them because he was concentrating so hard on stopping himself from trembling all over. That was a help in a way. When they had all finished and he got dressed what struck him was how much less better he felt now he had got dressed than he had expected. He had some difficulty in giving his full attention to Brenda when, complying with End's request to conduct a self-draining (so you could have two of the same sort of thing in the salad), talked for twenty-five minutes about how unattractive and stupid and incompetent and ignorant and unattractive and useless and silly and unattractive she felt all the time. But he got the main drift.
17—Exposing Ed
When the Workshop broke up at half-past six Brenda asked Geoffrey if he would like to come with her and Jake for a cup of tea and a drink. He understood her fully and at once and thanked her but said he had to be off to his own home to change and take Alcestis to a theatre. However he showed no disposition to be off in a hurry, hanging about in the room they had spent so long in and near the front door (at a spot from which another room was to be seen with only a wicker-covered carboy and a ping-pong table in it) and asking the other two if they didn't think that one or another part of the proceedings had been particularly good and saying he thought it had been. This minor delay made them the last to leave, just behind Rosenberg and Ed, who were exchanging farewells in the "porch". On their conclusion Rosenberg startled Jake by wheeling 'away' the child's bicycle that had been parked there, mounting it at the kerb and riding off on it—startled him till he saw that of course a child's bicycle and a Rosenberg's bicycle would be indistinguishable for practical purposes. And any bicycle would be quite effective in today's traffic and was much cheaper than a car, especially one modified for a two-foot-high driver.
Geoffrey promised to be in touch soon and went, walking with his characteristic head-down gait-because he doesn't want to see anything, thought Jake. He said to Brenda.
"I'd give a few bob to know what he's changing into."
"What? A suit, I imagine. Why?"
"He's got half a suit on already. For the theatre I should think he'd go for, er .... a safari jacket with a frilled shirt and velvet bow-tie, jeans, tartan socks...."
"What are you talking about?"
"Well you must admit he does dress extraordinarily."
"Honestly, just because he doesn't dress like anybody else...."
"You don't overstate the case. No, it's more than that. It's one of his character-trait-substitutes like pretending to hate nurses and like Dvorák. No .... it's not that either, if that was what he was after it would be much easier and less ridiculous if he just always wore white or bright red or had a collection of outlandish ties, say. Ah, you were right after all, not dress like 'anybody' else. Perverseness! An instinct, a compulsion to get things wrong. That's why...." Jake's voice trailed off, he understood now about Geoffrey's magpies, Lake Vancouver and Florence Nightingale throwing herself under the King's horse at the Grand National, results of an endless series of drawn battles between memory and the will to err, but as he felt at the moment he couldn't face explaining all that from the start. He went on fast instead, "That's why he's such a pest to talk to, always on the look-out for chances of getting at cross-purposes with you. In fact there was the most amazing—"
"Why are you so against him?"
"Darling I'm not 'against' him, I'm just interested in him. You never know, we might even be able to help him." (It was true enough that Jake didn't consider himself to be more against Geoffrey than any reasonable man ought to be and was indeed interested in him, but the mention of helping him was pretty pure hypocrisy.) "You saw I was talking to him in that tea-break? Well, I congratulated him on sort of seeing through himself—that's what he said he'd done if you remember, there was nothing in him, he said. Anyway, he said he couldn't make out what I was driving at. That really staggered me, because I thought, when he said that all his views and everything were just to make him seem interesting, which struck me as absolutely dead right, perhaps it was sheer chance he got it right, he didn't really mean it, all he was doing was saying another thing that was supposed to make him seem interesting."