4—Thunderball
The next Tuesday morning when Jake set off down Burgess Avenue it was raining, but not very hard. Even if it had been very hard he would have more or less had to set off just the same. Four or five years ago there had been a taxi-rank at the end of the High Street by St Winifred's Hospital and a telephone-call fetched one to the front door within a few minutes in any weather. The sign and the shelter were still there but they served only to trap the occasional stranger into a fruitless wait. Minicabs either didn't come or had drivers you had to pilot street by street to places like Piccadilly Circus. And there was the expense. And the Underground was only worth while for long journeys, over the river or out to Chelsea: Jake had established that 47 Burgess Avenue NW16 was about as equidistant as anywhere could be from the stations at Golders Green, East Finchley, Highgate and Hampstead. He had several times read, though not recently, of plans to extend one or other branch of the Northern Line to a contemplated Kenwood Station in the 1980s.
Every 6-7 mins was how often 127s were supposed to turn up at the stop by the Orris Park Woolworths, so to be given the choice of two after only 10-11 was rather grand and certainly welcome in the increasing rain and squirts of cold wind. Jake got on to the second bus, one of the newish sort distinguished by a separate entrance and exit. The doors closed after him with a swish of compressed air that resembled to what was almost a worrying degree the sound of the off-licence bugger and his overalled customer saying Cheers to each other. The conductor too was one of the newish sort, which in this case meant that he chucked you off if you hadn't got the exact money. But Jake made a great point of not being caught out by things like that.
Whenever he could he liked to sit at the back on the offside, where there was a niche just wide enough for an umbrella between the emergency door and the arm of the seat, but someone from Asia was there that morning so he took the corresponding position upstairs. Among the people he had a good or fair view of, there was none he remembered having seen before. They were divided, as well they might have been, into those older than him, round about his age and younger than him. In different ways all three groups got him down a bit. Only one child seemed to be about the place but it was making a lot of noise, talking whenever it felt like it and at any volume it fancied. Far from admonishing or stifling it, its mother joined in, talked back to it. Like a fool he had forgotten to bring anything to read.
Although there was no shortage of his fellow human beings on the pavements and in and out of shops, other places and spaces were altogether free of them, so recurrently that his mind was crossed by thoughts of a selective public holiday or lightning semi-general strike. A railway bridge revealed two or three acres of empty tracks and sidings; large pieces of machinery and piles of bricks stood unattended on a rather smaller stretch of mud; no one was in sight among the strange apparatuses in what might have been a playground for young Martians; a house that had stayed half-demolished since about 1970 over-looked a straightforward bombsite of World War II; nearer the centre, the stone face of a university building was spattered with rust-stains from scaffolding on which Jake had never seen anybody at work. Even Granville Court, Collin wood Court and the others, angular but lofty structures of turd-coloured brick resting on squat stilts, seemed to be deserted. Even or especially.
Warren Street was at hand; he climbed warily down the stairs, holding on with all his strength when a deeper cavity than usual in the road-surface lifted him heel and toe into the air. He got off by Kevin's Kebab, crossed over and fought his way westward against a soaking wind that blew now with fatuous indignation. 878 Harley Street. Proinsias Rosenberg MD, MA (Dip. Psych). The door opened in his face and an Englishman came out and stepped past him and was away. A small woman in a white housecoat showed Jake into a room where folk from many lands and of nearly as many creeds sat in chintz-covered armchairs reading 'Punch' and 'Private Eye'. But it was no more than ten minutes before she came back, took him along a corridor to another room and shut him in.
Jake found himself closeted with a person he took to be a boy of about seventeen, most likely a servant of some kind, in a stooped position doing something to an electric fire. "I'm looking for Dr Rosenberg," he said.
It was never to cut the least ice with him that the other did not in fact reply, "Ah now me tharlun man, de thop a de mornun thoo yiz"—he might fully as well have done by the effect. ("Good morning" was what he did say.)
"Dr Rosenberg?" said Jake again, a little flustered. He saw now that the youth was a couple of years older than he had supposed at first, short-haired and clean-shaven, wearing a sort of dark tunic-suit with a high collar that gave something between a military and a clerical air.
"Rosenberg it is. How do you do, Dr Richardson." Jake got a hearty handshake and a brown-eyed gaze of what looked like keen personal admiration but in the circumstances could hardly have been the genuine article. "Do come and sit down. I hope this room'll be warm enough—such a wretchedly cold spring we've been having so far, isn't it?"
When he failed to add what Jake was in a way expecting and would certainly have accepted, that his master or father if not grandfather would be down in a minute, things eased quite quickly. "I'm sorry, I'm afraid I...."
"You're not the first by a very long chalk indeed, Dr Richardson, I can assure you of that." He who must after all be conceded to be Dr Rosenberg didn't really talk like an O'Casey peasant, his articulation was too precise for that, but he did talk like a real Irishman with a largely unreconstructed accent, even at this stage seemed no more than twenty-one or -two and had shown himself, between finishing with the fire and sitting down behind his desk, to be about two foot high. He said in an oddly flat tone, "I understand very well how strange it must be to hear my style of talk coming out of a man with a name straight from Germany."
"Or Austria." Which would be rather more to the point, thought Jake, and thought too that he had conveyed that meaning in his inflection.
"Or Austria." The doctor spoke as one allowing a genuine if rather unimmediate alternative. Jake went back to being flustered. No sooner had he managed to bring himself to have this tiny Emerald Isler palmed off on him instead of the bottled-at-the-place-of-origin Freudian anybody just hearing the name would have expected than he was being asked to believe in a student of the mind who didn't know where Freud had come from. He said quickly, "Dublin man, are you?"
"Correct, Dr Richardson," said Dr Rosenberg, in 'his' inflection awarding his new patient a mark or two for knowing that many Irishmen were Dubliners and virtually all Dubliners Irishmen. "Perhaps it might be of interest," he went on, though not as if he had any very high hopes of this, "if I were to explain that an ancestor of mine was a German consular official who liked the look of the old place, married a local girl, and no doubt you'll be able to fill in the rest of the story for yourself. I charge seventeen pounds fifty a session—is that acceptable?"
"Yes," said Jake. Christ, he thought.
"Good. Now Dr Curnow has sent me a report on you." The psychologist's manner had changed and he opened a file with an alacrity that would have been quite uncharacteristic of his colleague. "There's just one point I'd like to have clearly understood before we get down to business. You do realise that in our work together I shall be asking you a number of questions."
"Yes."
"And you have no objection."