"I wonder if you'd kindly explain about this thunderball thing you've been constantly referring to. I don't believe I—"
"Well, you know, 'Thunderball.' Film, didn't I say? Sean Connery. James Bond. Ian Fleming. Barbara something, was it?"
"Ah to be sure, James Bond," said Dr Rosenberg without producing much conviction in Jake. "Do you want to tell me what happened later?"
"I will. We lay around for a bit, not very long, and then she said brightly she was hungry and what about dinner, and I said we could eat at home, and she said if I didn't mind what she felt like was a long lazy rather greedy evening somewhere with a lot of pasta and a lot of vino, and so that's what we did, and it was quite good fun really, and we said good night in the restaurant. She was marvellous, she did it very well. The only thing she couldn't do was make me think she didn't know. Of course she couldn't. They always know things like that, not that much acumen was called for in this case. Yes. She knew I knew she knew I knew she knew."
Rosenberg seemed to think this last part was important; at any rate he went in for a good deal of writing while Jake's memory fastened against his will on the hours he had lain awake that night and on how he had spent most of the next day: unable to read, unable to attend to radio or television, eating almost nothing, staring into space, hardly thinking, trying not so much to accept what had happened to him as just to take it in. To distract his mind from this he glanced round the small and by now slightly overheated room with artificial interest. He saw a couch of a height inconvenient for anyone much under eight foot (to use it himself the doctor would pretty well need a rope ladder), a green filing-cabinet, no books beyond diaries and directories and, on a fluted wooden pedestal, a life-sized human head in some shiny yellowish material with the surface of the skull divided into numbered sections. That distracted his mind like mad.
"Right," said Rosenberg at last, "I think I have that clear. And you've had no intercourse at all since then. Have you masturbated?"
It took Jake a little while to get the final participle because the Irishman had stressed it on its third syllable, but he did get it. "Er .... yes. Well, a couple of times."
"Do you have early-morning erections?"
This time Jake responded at once, with a desire to tell the bugger to mind his own business. Then he saw that that sort of wouldn't do and said, "Yes. Usually anyway."
"Do you have fantasies?"
"Sexual fantasies. A bit. Not much."
"Have you over these last weeks used written or pictorial pornography or visited a sex movie?"
"No to the lot. I haven't read any pornography for years and I've never been to a, a sex movie."
"I see. Going back now to before your illness, how was your libido in those days?"
"Well, not what it was when I was a youngster, obviously, but my wife and I were having a—performing sexual intercourse at least once a week and more at special times like holidays, and I worked out that in "74 I had two affairs, one of them only a couple of, er, occasions but the other lasting several months on and off."
"And longer ago, how active were you sexually in your forties and thirties?"
"Just put it this way, in my time I've been to bed with well over a hundred women."
Rosenberg had made some notes of the answers to all his questions until this last one, at which to Jake's distinct annoyance he merely nodded. More questions followed and more notes were taken. Parents, characters of, probable sex-life of, attitude to; knowledge of sex, how acquired; masturbation, frequency of (high); homosexual activities (none); first sexual experience, to what degree a success (bloody marvellous, thanks very much); then, at a less leisurely pace, subsequent sexual experience, marriages, divorces, causes of, present wife, relationship with, sexual and non-sexual. As far as he knew Jake kept nothing back here, but he had the feeling that a series of negatives was all that was established; still, necessary work, no doubt. At last the scientist of mental phenomena looked at his watch and said,
"Ah now, just one or two final points. What is your height, Mr Richardson?"
"Five foot eleven."
"And your weight?"
"Twelve stone six"—noted by Jake only the previous week to be exactly right for his height and age, according to whatever chart it had been.
Rosenberg gave a small frown. "Is that all?"
"Yes, that's all."
"Mm. Well I think all the same you'd do well to lose a few pounds. Try to get down to twelve stone. Cut down on starchy foods and take more exercise. And of course, how much do you drink?"
"Sometimes a glass of beer with lunch, sometimes a glass of sherry before dinner, three or four glasses of wine with dinner rising to a whole bottle on special occasions, say once every three or four weeks." This was the exact truth.
Rosenberg frowned more deeply. "No more than that? No spirits?"
"I haven't drunk any spirits for over thirty years. I found they didn't agree with me."
"Try not to go beyond three glasses of wine in future."
"All right."
"Would you care to make a note of those points? There'll be more to come."
"Okay." Jake scribbled on the back of his chequebook in his shameful handwriting. "Starch. Exercise. Wine."
"Good. Now Mr Richardson, there is a certain programme of tasks you have to work through with me. We call it inceptive regrouping. Is this time next week convenient? Very well. Between now and then I want you to do the following. Buy some pictorial pornographic material and study it on at least three occasions for a minimum of fifteen minutes at a time. See that this leads to masturbation at least once, preferably twice. Write out a sexual fantasy in not less than six hundred and not more than a thousand words. Oh, and fill this in—there we are—making sure you give only one answer to each question. I'm not going too fast for you, I hope? Good. I also want you to have a non-genital sensate focussing session with your wife. You understand what I mean by non-genital?"
"Yes, I understand that."
"In a non-genital sensate focusing session the couple lie down together in the nude and touch and stroke and massage the non genital areas of each other's bodies in turns of two or three minutes at a time for a period of up to half an hour. They don't perform sexual intercourse. That's exceedingly important: sexual intercourse is strictly forbidden at this stage. You'll find it all set out here." He handed over a second sheet of sleek paper. "Now we come to the use of the nocturnal mensurator. If you'd just step over here, Mr Richardson."
Dr Rosenberg turned and took from a narrow table behind him an object Jake had not noticed before, a heavy wooden box outwardly of much the sort women keep sewing or embroidery in. When the lid was raised it could be seen that a black composition panel covered most of the inside. On the panel were a brass turntable with a short thick spindle, an arm on the gramophone principle with a stub of pencil in place of the needle, a two-point socket, two electric switches and two lengths of double flex with various attachments at each end.
"If you'll pay attention," said the doctor, "you'll find this is quite straightforward. Mains here." He put the plug at one end of the fatter length of flex into a socket in the side of the box and the plug at the other end into a socket in the wall behind him. "Mains on." He snapped one of the switches. "This in here." He put the much smaller plug at one end of the thinner length of flex into the socket on the panel and showed that attached to the other end was a broken hoop of light plastic an inch and a half or so across and apparently stiffened with wire. Then, neatly enough but with rather more force than might have been expected, he tore off a corner of paper, pushed a ballpoint pen through it and fastened it by way of the hole just made to the spindle. "You'll be wanting to run up nice neat little discs like gramophone records for your own use but this'll show the general idea. Now we lower the pencil on to the paper so, press the other switch so, and the turntable is now revolving, too slowly for you to see, but you can take it from me it is. Now: this fellow here"—he held up the plastic loop—"is what they call a circuit breaker. At the moment the wires in it are touching and so the circuit is closed. Now watch the pencil when I pull the wires apart and break the circuit." The pencil together with its arm moved an undramatic but definite tenth of an inch inwards, towards the centre of rotation. "Close." The pencil moved back. "Break. Close. And so on. So: when you go to bed you fasten the ring round the root of your penis, you go to sleep, the turntable revolves maybe half an inch, you get an erection, which pushes the wires apart and breaks the circuit and bingo! the pencil moves and stays in the same position until the erection passes. And so on. And in the morning, there we have a complete record of your nocturnal erections. Ingenious, don't you think?"