"Very. What use is it?"
"It's of use, or I wouldn't be asking you to go through all this riddle-me-ree, now would I? Every night, please, until further notice. Bring the discs with you when you come next week. Oh, and be sure to keep a note of the times you go to bed and wake up. Erections when you're awake don't count. And don't forget to turn off 'both' switches when you get out of bed."
While he talked the doctor had been swiftly dismantling the nocturnal mensurator. He shut the lid and put the box into a Harrods plastic carrier, explaining with a smile that Jake wouldn't be wanting to have people in the Tube or wherever ask to see his tape recorder. On request, Jake supplied his address and telephone number, taking a visiting card in exchange.
"Proinsias. Is that a German name?"
"Irish. It's pronounced Francis. The correct Gaelic spelling. I take it you've no objection to exposing your genitals in public?"
"I hadn't really—"
"It's only semi-public. All qualified personnel. We have a first-rate sex laboratory at the McDougall Hospital in Colliers Wood. I venture to say it's the finest in the world at this time. Professor Trefusis runs a splendid team. We'll be running the rule over you.,
"Will you?"
"I will, I'll be there too. It'll take a few days to fix it up—I'll let you know. And I'll write to your wife."
"Just one question, doctor, if I may. Can I take it that there is a connection between my illness, convalescence and so on and my loss of, er, lib-eedo?"
"We don't generally find it helpful to talk in those terms."
"Perhaps you'd talk in them this once just to please me. Connection?"
"Physical pain and fatigue do not in general inhibit libido."
"Thank you."
5—Business-Head and Carter-Face
It was almost with eagerness that Jake embarked on his programme of inceptive regrouping. A kind of savour attached to the official, by-order-in-council doing of things often thought inappropriate, even unseemly, in those past their first youth. To the idea of doing them, at least. But first there was the Brenda side of the question to be settled. How much, if anything, was she to be told of the bits that didn't directly involve her? With the nocturnal mensurator his mind was made up for him by the impossibility of concealing it about his person on arrival back home, nor could he think of a plausible false description of it. And what after all did it matter? No accountability could be apportioned anywhere for how his tool behaved, or failed to behave, while he slept.
Its conduct in waking hours was a horse of another colour. Any woman, even the most severely rational in intention, a category that excluded Brenda, must feel slighted to some degree when the one she regarded as her own property was turned to a different sexual use, not by any means least in cases where her successful rival existed only on paper, so to speak, or in the mind. And he felt sure that all the talk he could devise about the entire point of it being the restoration of their sex-life, however well argued, however carefully listened to, would only end up with her asking him to promise to try not to enjoy it. Besides. sneaking off on the quiet with some pictorial pornographic material would be like old times.
The next morning looked like giving him as good a chance as he was likely to get; Brenda had gone off early with Alcestis to probe a new kickshaw-mart in New King's Road, an operation any male could have polished off in three hours at the most, bus there and back, but was going to last those two, travelling in the Mabbotts" Peugeot though they were, most of the day with lunch thrown in, no doubt at one of those places where they really worked on you to get you to have a glass of wine with your food. (Alcestis: he had whimpered and gone all shaky for a while at the thought—unentertained the previous day—of what would have happened without fail if she'd been at no. 47 when he got back from Rosenberg: him—Jake—flat on his back on the bamboo settee ballock-naked with the plastic whatsit round his john thomas and the other end of the flex plugged into the plugged-in nocturnal bloody mensurator in one minute flat.)
Once a keen buyer of tit-magazines, he realised as he left the house that he hadn't even glanced at one for what felt like about three years but was probably a bit more. He did know, though, that the old order, of Venus Films Ltd and Visart Dept 100, of 'Kamera, Pagan, Zoom, QT' and 'Solo' no. 3 (featuring Rosa Domaille) sold alongside science fiction in the little shop in Newport Court, had yielded place to the open and widespread sale of large glossy journals that went further and also elsewhere, in the sense that they included supposedly serious or at least nonruttish short stories and articles on probably cars and clothes. However widespread, their sale could hardly be universal; better make for the Blake Street end of Orris Park, by tradition the cheaper and nastier end. At first glance this wasn't apparent: the buildings were no grimier, the proportion of derelict shops with corrugated iron in the window-frames no higher, the amount and variety of litter underfoot no greater. Then he saw the hand-done poster on the door of the Duke of Marlborough—Pub Live Family Entertainment with Bridie on drums, The Cowboy Himself, Mick on Duovox—and reflected that not all distinctions had been effaced.
The shop was on a corner next to a place with a lot of corroded refrigerators and rusty gas and electric cookers on the pavement outside it. Jake pretended to peer at one of these while he spied out the land. Confectionery counter-kids" toys and things—greeting card stand—the stuff. In he went and started trying not to read what it said on the cards and looking the stuff over. Not easy: it was arranged in an overlapping row so that only the one at the end was fully visible. In Newport Court, under the head mistressy yet motherly eye of the white coated lady in charge, limited browsing had been the rule, half-a-crown's worth of purchase per five or six minutes. Here there were no other customers to give guidance, though some was provided by the look of the bloke behind the confectionery, just the kind of squat bald forty-year-old to jump at the chance of asking Jake menacingly if he could help him. So one fell swoop would have to do it. 'Mezzanine'—hadn't they seized a couple of issues of that in Australia recently? The rest of the lettering wasn't encouraging: The Gay Lib Game, Through the Insurance Maze, Exclusive-Britain's Secret Police Network. The picture was different. It showed a girl with the kind of angular good looks that suggested a sound business head and the kind of clothes, though in some disarray, that real girls wore. In one hand she held a tipped cigarette, but what counted for much more, especially on the cover, was where the other wasn't quite. One, thought Jake. Further along he caught sight of the fragment 'sington' and took it to be part of 'Kensington,' the name of a periodical recently described by its proprietor (in what connection Jake had forgotten) as entirely educational in character. Two. Directly to the side he caught a glimpse of half an outsize bare breast and decided that had better be three and the lot before the bald bugger asked him if he wasn't tiring his eyes with all that reading.