"You'll have to go." She had moved some feet away and spoke without looking at him, presumably in an effort to spare him the embarrassment of being associated with her. "I can manage, honestly I can."
It was true he would have to go in the end, but the taxi might not come for another twenty minutes or ever, and for some reason he shrank from the thought of her walking to the station after all. At that point Ernie appeared in the lodge entrance. Jake made straight for him.
"Ernie, I want a word with you."
The porter made a half-revolution as smartly as a guardsman and with Jake closely following retreated into the inner lodge, behind the glass partition. "Sir?"
"The young lady is a little upset. I've ordered her a taxi. I have a lass in two minutes. Would you see she gets off all right?"
"Receiving you laid and clear, Mr Richardson. Send her in here to me and I'll do the necessary, you may be sure—skate's honour, sir!"
Outside again, Jake told Kelly the porter would look after her and then hesitated.
"Thanks. Good-bye," she said, shaking hands. Her eyes were smaller than when she had arrived but not very red. "Sorry again."
"That's all right..... Good-bye."
"See you Saturday," she said as he turned away.
Saturday? Saturday! Dies irae, dies illa solvet saeclum in favilla. And ballocks. Real ballocks. Very serious ballocks indeed.
22—Phallus's End
"Eve, Eve, what is Eve? Well of course when we've looked at the books and got our sums right and done our bigs and wiped our bottoms and at the end of the day, Eve is Eve is Eve is Eve is Eve, and I don't mean the mother of mankind or any such form of words inconsonant with the meaningful and relevant vocabulary of our secular society in these the dosing decades of the second millennium, no sir, no siree, ya bedder believe it, right on, daddio, you cotton-picking bastard, get with it, stay tuned as leading Oxford campus hostess and elegant conversationalist Eve Greenstreet, wife of uncontroversial ithyphallic banker Syd Greenstreet, goes on about what she's sorry but she simply can't avoid describing as her endlessly fascinating self, and why don't you piss off?"
Lancewood screamed quietly, as if half to himself. "No. No. It can't be. It's not in nature."
"I assure you I've reproduced it with toiling fidelity, the most aridly pedantic literalism conceivable. Except of course in point of duration. You'll have some idea if you imagine what you've just heard lasting about three hundred times as long."
"I daren't, I'd go mad."
"I'd had as much as flesh and blood could stand after five minutes," said fake. "My most obvious counter was feigning illness, but that's not as straightforward as it may well sound. Any really serious disorder is ruled out—heart-attack, stroke, apoplexy, all of them alluring, and in the circumstances extremely plausible, but quite apart from how you deal with the doctor you find you can't face the upset, the ambulance and all that. At the other end of the scale, headaches and so on have been worked to death. So you need a dose of something incapacitating but not dangerous, in the "flu mode let's say. The trouble with that is you can't just suddenly start quivering like a jelly and saying you've got to go home—well actually in this case I'm pretty sure I'd have got away with it, but I didn't know that then. I thought then I'd need acting ability, again wrongly, and a reasonable build-up, call it an hour at least from the first passing shiver to deciding to pack it in, plus time for getting the bill, finding a taxi and being loyally seen home. And time was the very thing I couldn't spend any at all of, so I went on the booze.
"Now as you know Damon, I don't enjoy getting drunk and I absolutely hate being drunk, riot understanding what you're saying and feeling as if you're moving about on the sea-bed but still able to breathe. But I didn't think it would come to that when I started off, you see. I was working on the principle of lowering the old critical faculty, blunting the responses and such to the point where she'd merely be boring the arse off me. But I never got there, I can't have done, I mean I can't remember what happened late on or even latish on and I can only reconstruct bits of it, but I must have got utterly smashed and found I still couldn't stand her and threw a pass purely and simply to shut her up, which I'd as soon have thought of doing before she turned up, throw a pass I mean, as fly in the fucking air, as you shall hear. I don't know why I didn't just go home instead because it must have been quite late by then and I don't know where I did the throwing but I do remember it worked, that's to say it shut her up. And also to say it was accepted, or since short of rape it's always the woman who decides, it was encouraged, never mind she hung out a don't-try-anything sign when I invited her and a rotten-sod-for-taking-advantage one this morning. This morning, Christ. Anyway .... encouraged. She couldn't have got it all worked out as a conscious strategy could she? If you want cock talk balls kind of style? No of course she couldn't.
"It wasn't just balls though, as I hope I conveyed to you. One's used to that. This is Oxford, let's face it, as she'd say screwing up her nose to show she was being witty. No, it was her thinking she was the thinking man's rattle that made me want to watch her being eaten alive by crocodiles. You know, don't be so dazzled by how terrifically brilliant it all is with all those frightfully clever little cameo parts and absolutely marvellous imitations and accents, don't be carried away by all that so that you don't see that underneath it's 'bloody good stuff,' wickedly observant and cruelly accurate and actually very concerned about the state of the language and of our society too. Like Mencken only sexy with it. Oh dear oh dear oh dear. And the insensitivity. I've been given to understand in the last few weeks that I'm not as good as I used to think I was at disguising my feelings, especially when they're feelings of contempt, hatred, weariness and malicious hilarity as they are most of the time these days. Well with Eve, for the first hour or so, until my face got tired, I smiled and nodded and twinkled and tried to laugh, and then, but this was well 'after' I'd realised she was going to bat through to the end, then I stopped bothering. Cold. And she didn't notice a thing. Brenda would say of course she'd noticed and that made her nervous so that she couldn't think of any other way of going on. Well I've had my nervous moments but I doubt if I've ever been so frozen with terror that the recourse of shutting my trap has fled my mind. But then Brenda's been...."
Jake paused. After a moment Lancewood got up and put two more logs on the fire, then went out carrying the electric kettle. The room was pleasantly warm and Jake's chair, his every time he came here, more comfortable than any in his own rooms or at Burgess Avenue. Beside it stood a small table bearing a teapot with an embroidered cosy, a Minton cup and saucer and plate, a silver dish with shortbread on it and a glass that had held Malmsey, the only after-dinner wine he really enjoyed. The lights were too low for him to see any of the pictures in detail but he liked them to be there. Outside he could hear rain and wind and nothing else. Physically he was almost himself again, and though it would be different soon enough he felt completely safe, not just secure from harm but in some positive sense he couldn't define. A passage of Horace stole into his mind unbidden, so he booted the bugger out again a bit sharp, and quite right too.
All manner of clocks started striking ten-thirty. Lancewood came back and plugged the kettle in at his side of the fireplace. He was wearing what he called his upper crust old queen's smoking jacket in mulberry-coloured velvet.
"One or two questions occur to me," he said. "For instance, since you seem to have started hating the lady very much almost as soon as she arrived, why didn't you just tell her you found you had a headache and must leave at once?"