them as if you were your father talking to you."
"Oh yes?" said Jake, leaning forward eagerly. "What about?"
"Whatever Ed decides. About your father, about sex-you try and remember what he did say. Telling you off. A good deal of that."
"Really. It must call for quite a bit of acting ability."
"You'd be surprised how good some of them are. Lionel was marvellous as his mother, he even managed to look like her. Well you know what I mean."
"Yes of course." He gave himself a mental pat on the back for having detected intimations of queerdom in Lionel.
"Martha was very interesting when she was her mother—you remember her mother's horrible to her, but Martha wasn't horrible at all, when she was being her mother I mean. You know, reasonable and kind and everything. Most odd."
"Mm. It sounds absolutely—"
"Your friend Kelly was really the star turn."
"Was she?"
"As herself as a child. Honestly it was quite frightening. The voice particularly. If you'd shut your eyes you could have sworn it was a child speaking. She was different from the time before. Much madder. Of course she wasn't putting on a show for you today. She asked after you in the lunch-break."
"That was nice." Quite safe, he thought; Brenda wasn't one to save things up, very much the contrary.
"She hasn't been round here since last Saturday has she?"
"Good God no," he said, sounding shocked. "Whatever gave you that idea?" He wasn't acting; his shock had come from the immediate perception that only the luck of the draw had made Brenda ask what she had asked instead of whether Kelly had dropped in on him, say, and from the thought of how he might have reacted if the draw had gone against him. Anybody would think I was having an affair with the bloody girl, he said to himself irritably.
"Just the way she asked after you. I expect that was to get at me."
"Why should she get at you?"
"Because she's after you, or was. Probably moved on to somebody else by now. You're not still falling for that investigative journalist impersonation, are you?"
He frowned in thought. "I don't know. Anyway, if you're right she sounds a rather pathetic character."
"Oh yes she is, some of the time."
"Sorry darling, I'm afraid I don't quite get you."
"I mean she has a pathetic act to go with her bright act and all her other acts. She's never genuine. That's what's wrong with her."
He didn't dispute this aloud and the talk moved on, eventually reaching Geoffrey and causing Jake momentary but keen regret at not having been there to see for himself. Perhaps Brenda had sensed his interest in Kelly, because in subsequent Saturday debriefings she would tend to mention her late and cursorily or not at all. To take it out of him deliberately in such a way didn't quite fit her character as he had come to know it over the years, but then she seemed as the weeks went by to be changing in other ways too, nothing spectacular or even easy to pin down, in fact the nearer he got to doing that the sillier it sounded. She was becoming more friendly and at the same time less intimate; amiable and talkative, never anywhere near chucking crockery about and yet not, or not so much, or not so often, or perhaps indeed not turning her eyes on his in the full deep glance he had known before. He found something comparable in her behaviour during the non-genital sensate focusing sessions on which, after the almost total failure of two successive genital dittos, Rosenberg had ordered them to fall back.
"Is that nice?" she would ask, stroking his chest. "Or at least comparatively nice, I know this isn't your kind of thing much but there must be degrees, quite good and not so good. How is it?"
"Oh, quite good."
"Or would you like it sort of harder, you know, pressing down more?"
"No, that's fine as it is."
"You're meant to be really relaxed to benefit from it. I'm sure it's beneficial anyway, in general, I mean. Anything that reduces stress must be, don't you think?"
"Well, so people keep saying."
"I think it's generally accepted..... Right, my turn, but let's have a kiss first..... Now you do my hip. Let me show you. All the way from here down to here and up again, slowly. Try it..... That's it but not quite so lightly. I find it helps at first to shut your eyes and think of something peaceful, like a garden or a lake. You ought to try that."
This matter-of-factness helped Jake. He still didn't look forward to the focusings but the gloom their prospect had aroused in him was somewhat alleviated. The hard work he put in each time not to seem to be gritting his teeth seemed to have its effect: there were no more complaints of lack of affection. On the two occasions when Brenda went with him to see Rosenberg in Harley Street and was asked what she thought of her marital situation, she answered in summary that it could be better but was coming along not too badly. Even her reproaches for not coming to the Workshop fell away. He began to feel occasional stirrings of hope, though his relief each time Rosenberg didn't order a return to genital sensate focusing was as heartfelt as ever. Funny how it had worked all right with Eve, he thought to himself more than once, or perhaps the difference was simply that then he had been free, responsible to nothing and nobody.
Over the weekend after the end of term the same small thing happened three times: the telephone rang, Brenda went to or across the kitchen to answer it and was hung up on as soon as she spoke. She mentioned burglars; Jake said they'd be wasting their time. He would have forgotten all about this if a not-quite-so-small-thing hadn't happened on the Monday evening while he was watching the nine o'clock news on BBC 1. The telephone rang; cursing mildly he made his way out and answered it.
"Is it possible to speak to Mrs Richardson please?" asked a very hoarse voice with at least two accents in it, one foreign, another perhaps regional, and a couple of speech impediments.
"I'm afraid she's out." Earlier, Brenda had said she was going to a film about gypsies with Alcestis, the sort of thing she had done two or three times recently, if not a spiffing scheme in itself then a bloody sight better one than bringing Alcestis here.
"Can I get her later?"
"She won't be back till eleven at the earliest. I suggest you—" Click. Jake would have forgotten all about this too if, ten minutes later, the doorbell hadn't chimed and it hadn't turned out to be Kelly who had caused it to do so.
"Jesus Christ," he said.
"It's all right, no trouble I promise you, I'm perfectly okay, I can only stay a minute, can I just come into the passage?"
He looked at her. She seemed to have shrunk a good deal since he left her to Ernie, perhaps because of the head-scarf that flattened her hair against her skull and the tightly drawn raincoat, but her manner was much what it had been then. Anyway, what could he do? He stood aside and shut the door after her.
"What do you want? Was it you on the telephone just now?"
"Yes. Brenda hates me. She's probably quite right. Have you told her about me coming to see you in Oxford?"
"Certainly not."
"Good, I didn't think you would have done. I haven't told anybody, not even my parents. What I wanted to ask you was about this week-end Workshop."
"What? What week-end Workshop?"
"Didn't Brenda tell you?"
"No. You'd better..... You can't just stand there, take your things off and come and sit down."
"It's okay, honestly."
"Do as I tell you. Now what's this all about?"