After being shown around the kitchen, the “work” rooms, and the dining room, I was taken to see the Center’s founder or leader, the “wise woman,” as she was called, without irony, or with none that I noticed. I had the impression that it would be wise for me, too, to lay off the irony. It was too much of a mature and academic pleasure.

Patricia came to the door of a small, shuttered house ten minutes’ walk from the Center. In her late fifties, she was big, with long, graying hair, in clothes with the texture and odor of cheap oriental carpets. She invited me in and ordered me to sit on a cushion. As I dozed off, she talked loudly on the phone, read her correspondence (“Bastards! Bastards!”), scratched her backside, and, from time to time, looked me over.

When I got up to inspect a picture, she turned. “Sit down, don’t fidget!” she said. “Be still for five minutes!”

I sat down and bit my lip.

I could recall her variety of feminism from the first time around: its mad ugliness, the forced ecstasy of sisterhood, the whole revolutionary puritanism. I didn’t loathe it—it seemed to me to be a strain of eccentric English socialism, like Shavianism—as long as I didn’t have to live under or near it. It did, however, seem better being a young man these days: the women were less aggressive, earned their own money, and didn’t blame anyone with a cock for their nightmares.

I was irritated by what I considered to be this woman’s high-handed approach, and was about to walk out—not that she would have minded—when it occurred to me that for her I was virtually a child as well as only a potential menial. I was neither an Oldbody nor a Newbody. I was a nobody.

I’d always had a penchant for tyrants, at school, at work, and in the theater where, when I was young, they flourished, having come from army backgrounds. I had enjoyed testing myself against them. How many times could they beat you up before they had to come to terms with you? However, now I was shaken by a blast of late-adolescent fury. I’d forgotten how adults talk down to you, when they’re not ignoring you, and how they hate to hear your opinion while giving their own. You’re at one of your parents’ dinner parties and your parents’ friends ask you how your exams are going and you tell them you have failed and you are glad, glad, glad. Your parents tell you not to be rude, and you’ve just been to see If … Your parents want a gin and tonic but you want a machine gun and the revolution, and you want them now.

Despite this, I guessed that Patricia had an intelligence and intensity my former persona would have enjoyed. I liked the fact that the one thing I wouldn’t have said about her, even after only cursory inspection, was that she was serene. Long periods of inner investigation and deep breathing, or whatever therapy she practiced, hadn’t seemed to have cured her of irritability or incipient fury.