Stanley and the Women (16 page)

‘Christ,
you don’t have to know someone for twenty years to reach a conclusion on that.
Yes, she is very intelligent, exceptionally intelligent, as anybody who’s ever
talked to her for five minutes is well aware. Including her husband.’

Collings
gave one of her hearty laughs and laid her hand heavily on my shoulder. Somehow
I managed not to fling it off or bite it. ‘Oh, he says the same, but you know
what men are, he could be biased, couldn’t he? But Lindsey, you mustn’t mind me
going on like this, I’m curious, but I’ve heard people in the office who do
know Susan say they’ve found her a bit, well, not stand-offish exactly, but
very very reserved. What would your comment be on that? Stanley won’t mind me
saying what I’ve said.’

That
did make Lindsey look at me, but there was no need for signals now. She had
gone rather red, which suited her looks no end. Glaring through her glasses,
she said, ‘Stanley may or may not mind what you’ve said, but I can assure you
that I do. And my comment would be, Fuck off, whoever you are. What’s the
matter with you? Why don’t you listen? I told you she was an old friend of
mine. What do you think I am? Be in touch, Stanley. Go carefully.’

She
gave me a quick kiss and a squeeze of the hand that reminded me of Susan, and
hurried away without another glance. Collings, who had kept up quite a good
detached sort of air while Lindsey had been telling her her fortune, twisted
her mouth at me as though it had been Lindsey who had behaved oddly or badly. I
sat down and for a moment just gazed.

‘What
the bleeding hell were you playing at?’

‘I’m
sorry if I’ve upset you.’

‘Me
being upset’s not the point. What did you think you were doing? I mean that
literally. What did you actually think you were doing? For God’s sake.’

‘Gathering
information,’ she said in her patiently reasonable voice.

‘Yeah,
and a great roaring success you made of it, I’ll give you that. You extracted
the precious secret that Susan’s intelligent and you’re where you started on
whether she’s reserved or not. Terrific. All that at the price of a few lies
and a spot of trouble-making.’

‘There
was information there right enough if you knew what to look for.’

‘Oh I
get it, you could tell what she meant when she thought she was meaning the
opposite or not meaning anything at all. You’re a marvel, you are.’

‘I have
upset you. Please try to —’Well I would be upset, wouldn’t I?’ I stopped for a
moment and then went on more gently. ‘Look. You’re not just a woman I happen to
have taken to the pub, you’re the doctor who’s looking after my son or however
you want to put it, and he seems to be very sick. So what do I think when I see
you behaving in such a daft and irresponsible and
pointless
way? What am
I supposed to think?’

For the
first time she met my eyes steadily for something over a couple of seconds. Her
own were narrowed while at the same time her eyebrows were lifted. At least
that was what it looked like, though admittedly when I tried it later in front
of the mirror I got nowhere with making my own face do both those things at
once. She also seemed to have drawn in her nostrils. I could not have said what
that expression expressed but it was nothing encouraging, that was for sure. I
thought for a moment she was going to cry and got ready to start apologizing
for everything I could think of, but the moment passed and her face went back
to its constant movement. When she began to speak it was in a flat voice
without much inflection.

‘Now
listen to me, Stanley. First of all you’ll have to take it from me that my
experiment just now wasn’t pointless. As regards the rest of it, you’ll have to
agree that no actual harm was done. That little Irish girl went off quite
charged up with having stood on her dignity, and nobody said anything to hurt
your feelings that I heard. But the important thing is for you to reshape your
image of psychiatry and psychiatrists, which you’ve got from people like Alfred
Nash. Oh, a brilliant man undoubtedly, made a fine contribution, only trouble
is he’s still stuck in Sydney in the 1950s, and the world’s moved on since
then. Everything’s got much more flexible, there aren’t the old rigid
categories any more. The way Nash sees the human race, there are mad people and
sane people …’

‘Dr Collings,’
I said, ‘if I could just —’

‘Do
call me Trish. The medical title is so compartmenting.’

‘M’m,
but if you don’t mind I think I’ll stick to Dr Collings, but you can go on
calling me Stanley if you want. Anyway. We’ve talked about me and my first wife
and my present wife and Lindsey Lucas and me again and now Dr Nash. Could we
talk about Steve? I dare say you haven’t finished examining him or whatever you
want to call it yet, but you must have some thoughts about him. I wish you’d
give me an idea of what they are, if that’s all right.’

‘Sure.’
She gave me a smile I had to hold on to myself not to look away from. ‘Let’s
have another drink, though. My round. The same again?’

She was
good in pubs, I thought to myself, promptly naming her preference when I asked
her earlier and correctly taking that single off Lindsey to put in her
half-drunk gin and tonic. It seemed not to go with the rest of her. Whatever
that was like. I groaned quietly. Just when I could have done with a spot of
mind-battering the fruit-machine was vacant and silent but for an amplified hum
and the general noise-level seemed to be down. There was nothing to stop me
from worrying about whether I really had tried to freeze Steve out when he was
small. What was it about the idea that was familiar? — not the accusation
itself but the type. Familiar from long ago, not the more recent past. Of
course! Nowell. It had been a favourite trick of hers to denounce you for doing
something or being something that had simply never crossed your mind, so that
when it came to answering the charge you had nothing to show, no register of
dates and places that showed you doing or being conspicuously the opposite,
just a load of denials and undocumented general stuff, no alibi, in fact. But
then people without alibis were often guilty.

I had
got that far when Collings came back with the drinks. She plunged into business
straight off, talking in a much less jittery, uncomfortable way than before.

‘Nash’s
diagnosis of Steve was schizophrenia,’ she said, lighting a Silk Cut. ‘I just
can’t accept anything as prefabricated as that. What’s at stake here is far
from simple. On the information available so far, I think we’re dealing with a
problem in living, something involving not just him but also the people close
to him, especially his parents. You’ve got to remember first that all kids of
that generation have got a lot to cope with, a lot to try and make sense of —
unemployment, of course, but also the nuclear holocaust, racial tension, urban
pollution, alienation, you name it. They’re very vulnerable and they feel
powerless, it’s a big, dangerous world over which they have no control. Someone
like that senses that he’s at risk. Then there comes a crisis in his emotional
life, like breaking up with his girlfriend, and he’s defenceless. So, what does
he do? He creates a defence. He doesn’t have anywhere to hide, so he makes a
place to hide, a place we call madness, or mental illness, or delusions, or
hallucinations.’

She
paused for a swig, also probably for effect. I felt drunk or something, but
asked her, ‘Do you mean he’s just putting on all that stuff about Joshua and
the other fellows in the Bible?’

‘Not
consciously. He believes every word of it, for the time being.’

‘But
that’s … I’m afraid I still don’t quite see what he’s defending himself
against or hiding from.’

‘Well,
there are various ways of putting it. Escaping from reality, or his own inner
feelings, or inner needs might be more accurate. He’s trying to keep other
people at a distance emotionally, so he puts up a wall, a wall consisting of
what the likes of Nash call delusions. In cases like this that’s often due to
an appalling fear of being hurt. Now at this stage one can’t be sure, but I
rather think that with Steve it’s more that he’s afraid of hurting other
people. He’s a very nice boy, that I do know.’ Here she sounded quite defiant,
as if she thought I was obviously not going to let her get away with that, and
putting me strongly in mind of my mother-in-law. ‘Our job is to persuade him
to lower his defences. He won’t do that unless we can help him to get in touch
with his own feelings, including especially his own anger.’

‘Get in
touch with his own anger,’ I said. ‘I see. What sort of chance would you say
there is of that?’

‘It’s
too early to say. You’re anxious about this, I know, Stanley, but believe me it’s
most important not to jump to conclusions. This is very tricky and difficult
ground. We’re dealing with a scared, confused, insecure boy who has to be
helped to find out who he really is.’

A
frightful feeling that had been growing on me ever since we came into the pub
suddenly got much worse, so bad I could no longer pretend it was not there or
was really something else. It was roughly that Collings’s general style and
level of thinking would have done perfectly well for a psychiatrist in an
American TV movie but might have looked a bit thin in a Sunday magazine
article. And this could simply not be anything like a correct description. I
was drunk, stupid too at the best of times, unable to take in ideas of any
difficulty. But I had been perfectly sober when I arrived, and Steve talking
about Joshua because he was afraid of hurting other people was not a difficult
idea. It was not an idea at all.

I told
myself it had to be, had to make sense somehow, somewhere. The resemblance to
TV must be a mistake, an illusion based on my ignorance, which had made me miss
all sorts of subtle points and misunderstand phrases and expressions that were
nearly or even exactly the same as bits of drivel but actually conveyed a
precise scientific meaning to those in the know, and getting in touch with your
own anger and finding out who you really were, etc., were technical terms
referring to definite, observable processes. Or Collings’s approach was so new
that they had not yet worked out a what, a terminology for it. Or she was
hopeless at talking about what she did but shit-hot in action. Or something
else that made it all right, because something must. Whatever she might say and
however she might behave, the bint was a
doctor.

Anyway,
there was no alternative to going on trying to listen. I went on doing that for
forty minutes or so, the stage at which we shunted from presumable technical
talk to further inquiries into my early relations with Steve. That part went
quite well as far as I was concerned, because I had had time to do some
remembering and get my confidence back. I could see now that for some reason,
like to fit a theory, Collings was trying to make out that father and son had
got on badly or in a distant sort of way. I told her different and thought she
seemed to notice. At the end we fixed that I should come and see her at the
hospital in a couple of days, Nowell too perhaps.

Back in the office I went
straight to something the improvers had unaccountably overlooked, a boxed-in
part where you could make phone-calls in private. It was the Sundays’ day off
and I got Susan at home. Just having her at the other end listening put a lot
of things right. She agreed to keep a careful look-out for twitching females
with cider-apple accents.

I
hesitated a moment over the next, but quite soon had Nash on the line
reassuring me it was all right to call. I passed the news about Dr Abercrombie.

‘Oh,’
he said quietly. ‘A small one, you say.’

‘That’s
what I was told. By somebody calling herself Dr Trish Collings, who seems to
have taken over from him. She’s taken over my son, anyway.’

‘Oh.’
Quite a different noise, and followed by silence.

‘Do I
gather you know her?’

‘I know
of her.’ A great sigh sounded in my ear. ‘You do realize, Mr Duke, that medical
etiquette is unmistakable and strict on the point that no practitioner may say
anything derogatory about another, or more accurately anything at all beyond
the barest facts. So I won’t. Say anything at all. For now.’

‘I see.’

‘She’ll
probably ask you a lot of questions about yourself. Oh really. M’m. Well, it
can’t do any harm to answer them. I suppose she didn’t say anything about those
tests I asked to have done on your boy. No. Of course everything takes time
these days. Er, now I come to think of it there’s another fellow in that
hospital I have some acquaintance with, at least there was two or three years
ago. More like five. Fellow name of Stone. He’s … different from the …
from Dr Collings. I’ll get after him and tell you what I find out. Cheer up, Mr
Duke. The boy’s quite safe in there.’

My
third call broke the run of abnormal luck. Lindsey was out, not back yet. Where
from? Sorry. I looked at my watch and thought. From what I knew of her she
would look into her office if she could before going to lunch. As I rushed off
to look into mine I wondered why it had suddenly got so urgent to see Lindsey
in the flesh, too urgent for any rubbish like message-leaving. Oh yes, she must
not be allowed to go on thinking or suspecting that Collings and I were having
an affair a moment longer than necessary, and stopping her had to be done face
to face.