Jake's Thing Page 3

  "I'm sorry," he said. "I'll try to do better next time." Of course he meant do and nothing more: how could anyone change his attitude to a pair like the Mabbotts? But next time was going to have to include next time they came up in conversation as well as in person, and that meant fewer of those jocular little sallies about them which had so often cheered up his half of the breakfast or lunch table. A few moments earlier he had thought of telling Brenda that in fact the idea of those two having noticed anything in the least objectionable was a load of rubbish and that she was cross with him for what she knew he felt about them, not for how he had behaved to them, but that too he decided against.

  She had moved to the fireplace, he now saw, and was carefully picking up the pieces of china. "How did it go with the doctor, darling? I should have asked you before."

  "That's all right. Oh, he .... asked me the sort of questions one might have expected and said he couldn't do anything and fixed up an appointment for me with some fellow who might be able to do something."

  "When? I mean when's the appointment?"

  "Tuesday. Right after Easter."

  "Good," said Brenda, going back to the tea tray. "Anybody interesting at the club?"

  The dub was a long way from St James's in more than the geographical sense and existed for the benefit of unprosperous middle-aged and elderly men of professional standing. In order to survive it had recently had to sell half of itself, of its premises that is, to a man who had constructed a massage parlour there. "Just the usual crowd," said Jake, accurately enough.

  "I see. Ooh, the Thomsons have asked us round for drinks one evening next week," she said, mentioning one of the comparatively few couples in Orris Park who didn't go on about their cars or their children the whole time. "I've put it in the diary."

  "Well done."

  "You know, we ought to give a party some time. We can't go on just taking other people's hospitality."

  "I quite agree, but it's so bloody expensive. Everybody drinks Scotch or vodka these days."

  "They can't do much about it if you just offer them wine."

  "I suppose not."

  "I was thinking." Brenda stood with the tray held in front of her stomach. "I thought we might give that new Greek place a try."

  "Tonight?"

  "I just thought...."

  "I don't really like Greek food. I always think Greek food is bad Turkish food and Turkish food isn't up to much."

  "What about Sandro's? We haven't been there for ages."

  "They charge the earth and they never seem to change their menu. Isn't there anything in the house?"

  "Only the rest of that chicken."

  "Sounds fine. You could fix up a salad, couldn't you?"

  "I suppose so..... Then we could go to a film."

  "There's nothing very marvellous on, I looked at the 'Standard' yesterday. Oh, apart from that thing about Moloch turning up in the crypt of a San Francisco church and having children fed to him alive, 'The Immolation,' that's it, I wouldn't mind seeing that."

  "Well I would."

  "You are funny, I keep telling you it's all pretend. Look love, I vote we pull up the drawbridge tonight. I know it's selfish of me but I don't honestly feel quite up to stirring out and that probably means I shouldn't, don't you think? Let's be absolute devils and have the heating on and huddle round the telly."

  So when the time came, Brenda went and sliced the chicken and made a salad and a dressing and got out the rather swarthy Brie that needed eating up and put it all on trays and brought them into the sitting-room. The TV was a colour set, small but all right for two. On it she and Jake watched episode 4 of 'Henry Esmond,' the News, including film of a minor air disaster in which a good half of those involved hadn't even been hurt, International Snooker, with a commentary that laid great stress on the desire of each player to score more points than the other and so win the match, World Outlook, which consisted largely of an interviewer in a spotted bow-tie being very rude to a politician about some aspect of nuclear energy and the politician not giving a shit, and Rendezvous with Terror: 'The Brass Golem.' Or rather Jake watched that far; Brenda gave up at the first soccer result and opened her Simon Raven paperback. At the start of the collegno violin passage advertising the approach of the rendezvous just alluded to, she got up from the sofa which she had herself covered with crimson velvet.

  "You off, darling?" asked Jake. "These things are always innocuous ballocks, you know. About as frightening as Donald Duck."

  "No, I'll be off anyway. Still the spare room?"

  "I think while we're still sleeping badly."

  "Mm. Ooh, I'm sorry I didn't thank you properly for the chocolates."

  "The..... Oh yes. Oh, I thought you did."

  "If the scales aren't too bad in the morning I might treat myself to one tomorrow night. Well...."

  "Good night, love."

  She bent and kissed him on the cheek and was gone. Jake washed down his Mogadon with some of his second glass of what was supposed to be claret. He was sorry now that he hadn't done what impulse and habit had suggested and told Brenda about the abortive wine-switch. Done properly the tale would have amused her, its confessional aspect given her pleasure, the row over the Mabbotts been prevented or disposed of, not merely broken off. But to have done it properly would have meant taking trouble, not much, true, but more than he had on the whole felt like taking at the time. Well there it is, he thought.

  Despite everything the background bass clarinet could do, and it did indeed get a lot done in quantity, terror as expected failed altogether to turn up at the prearranged spot. Summoned by an ancient curse but otherwise unaccounted for, the metalloid protagonist ran his course in twenty minutes less commercials. His most mysterious endowment was the least remarked: that of always coming upon his quarry alone, out of sight and hearing of everyone else, in a blind alley, in a virtually endless tunnel, in a room with only one door and no usable window, etc. He ground to a halt finally through gross overheating of the lubricants in the Turkish bath where Providence, in the form of total chance, had led his last intended victim to take refuge. Very neat.

  As he went round the room turning everything off, Jake reconstructed the brief script conference at which the creative producer had outlined the story to his colleagues. "Right," he snarled, stabbing at the air with an invisible cigar to point the turns in his argument, "got this guy made of like brass, see, buried somewheres for a coin's age, okay, comes like an earthquake or explosion or whatever, right, anyways he done get gotten dug up, see, this old like parchment says any motherfucker digs me up gets to done get gotten fucked up good, okay, he fucks up three—four guys around, right, chases the last guy into somewhere fucking hot, see, now the brass guy done gotten oil like instead of blood, okay, so 'he' gets to done get gotten fucked up, right, Zeke and Zack get on it right away, see, they don't get to done get gotten done it by tomorrow, they lose their asses, okay, and any number of cunts all over the world who know a bloody sight better will watch the bloody thing. Right."

  Upstairs, Jake unhurriedly cleaned his teeth and peed, feeling a comfortable drowsiness at the edge of his mind. Light showed under Brenda's door: she liked to read for a time before settling off, which he didn't. He went into the spare room and undressed. There were pictures in here no less than everywhere else, most of them non-modern black-and-white unoriginals; in almost every case he could have said whether or not a given one belonged to the house but he would never have missed any of them. He put on his pyjamas, turned off the light and was about to get into bed, then changed his mind and went to the window.

  Looking out, he remembered with no great vividness doing the same thing one night some shortish time after Brenda and he had come to live here. Then as now there had been plenty to see, mainly by the street-lamp that stood no more than twenty yards off: houses, trees, bushes, parked cars, the bird-table in the garden diagonally opposite. Then, too, some of the windows must have been illuminated and it was quite possible that, as n
ow, the only sounds had been faint voices and distant footsteps. After some effort he remembered further his feelings of curiosity, almost of expectation, as if he might find himself seeing a link between that moment and things that had happened earlier in his life. He remembered, or thought he did; there was no question of his re-experiencing those feelings, nor of his wishing he could. What was before him left him cold, and he didn't mind.

  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."

  "No," said Jake, suppressing a different and longer answer.

  "Good. First question then. What is your full name?"

  "Jaques [Jakes] Cecil Richardson." Jake spelt out the Jaques. And I reckon I got seventy-five per cent
on that, he thought, in mind of a comic monologue a decade or two old.

  "Jaques. Now that's an uncommon name for an Englishman."

  "Yes. 'My' ancestor came over from Paris in 1848.

  "18481 You must have made a close study of your family history."

  "Oh, I wouldn't say that. After all, 1848 was 1848."

  "Just so, but the date would seem to have lodged in your memory."

  "Well, they did have a spot of bother there in that year, if you—"

  "Ah, when did they not the horrible men? Do you know, Dr Richardson, I think those French fellows must have caused 'nearly' as much trouble in the world as we Irish?" Rosenberg gave a deep-toned laugh, showing numerous very small white teeth. "Oh dear. Your age."

  "Fifty-nine."

  "Sixty," said Rosenberg as he wrote.

  "Well, it is actually fifty-nine, not that there's a lot of difference, I agree."

  "We always enter the age next birthday. We find it makes for simplicity."

  "Oh I see."

  "Your profession."

  "I teach at a university."

  "Any particular one?"

  "Yes. Oxford. I'm Reader in Early Mediterranean History there and a Fellow of Comyns College. And by the way I have got a doctorate but I don't normally use the title."

  "So it's 'Mr' Richardson. Now your trouble is that your libido (lib-eedo) has declined."

  "My what?" asked Jake, though he had understood all right. "Your libido, your sexual drive."

  "I'm sorry, I'd be inclined to pronounce it lib-eedo, on the basis that we're talking English, not Italian or Spanish, but I suppose it'll make for simplicity if I go along with you. So yes, my lib-eedo has declined."

  "Are you married?"

  "Yes."

  "How much does your wife weigh?"