Stanley and the Women (3 page)

Susan
knew I worried about being on time at work. The weather that morning was damp
and blowy and I got a sufficient sample of it just walking the few yards to my
garage door. Inside and soon afterwards outside was the Apfelsine FK 3. I could
really have managed my surface travel perfectly well with taxis and the
occasional hire, but I could hardly have justified keeping the Apfelsine if I
had done that, and I was set on keeping it until something replaced it in its
class. It was what used to be called a status symbol. I always thought it was
much easier to understand than most symbols. I parked it at the other end in my
personal space in the office park without turning a hair.

It
happened by chance to be motorcars that I discussed in the way of business a
couple of hours later. This was in a wine bar just off Fleet Street called La Botella
that when I first went to it had been a sort of local for men from the nearby
newspaper offices and law places, but for some years now had attracted drinkers
mostly of no particular description. Spirits were sold there as well as wine.

As well
as operating a stuffy rule about men wearing ties, the management at La Botella
was hard on women, forcing them to sit down in the long narrow room at the side
of the premises and then making it next to impossible for them to order drinks
once they had done that. Lone women who were new to the place or had screwed
their plans were always being stood or advanced drinks in the side room by
decent chaps. When the man I was talking to there that morning had been called
to the telephone, much to his disgust, and half a minute later Lindsey Lucas
pitched up in search of a seat and a gin and tonic, I could hardly have turned
her down even if we had been total strangers.

I had
known her much longer than I had known Susan, though the two were exact
contemporaries and old friends without ever having been close. In fact I had an
affair with Lindsey after my first wife left me and had given her one or two a
bit casually a couple of extra times between then and taking up with Susan. In
those days a husband of Lindsey’s had come and gone, perhaps still did. She was
reddish-fair and well formed, medium-sized, with a good skin, very well-chosen
glasses and a banked-down manner like a newscaster’s. With this went a hard
flat Northern Ireland accent which I liked as a noise without feeling it suited
her especially well. For the past three years she had had a column on the women’s
page of one of the down-market dailies.

‘You
saw your ex was on the box the other night,’ she said with very little delay.
To someone else she might have sounded accusing but I could tell it was only
those tight vowels.

‘Yes I
did see, I mean I saw she was going to be but I didn’t see the play. Was it
good? Was she good? Did you see it?’

‘I did,
the first half. One of those drama-documentaries about life in our hospitals
today. She was the maverick matron who didn’t really think they ought to be
torturing the patients to death just yet. But get that — matron. Oh, it was
called senior nursing officer or some such jargon but she was a matron. Fiery
and vital and everything but a matron. Looking not too bad it must be said.
What is she now, forty-four?’

‘Just
over. She’s the same as me.’

‘Looking
quite good. A wee bit miscast in the role, maybe.’

Lindsey
took a quick look at me from behind her glasses to see if I had fully
appreciated this touch, then another, slower one. She knew well enough that
chatting to an ex-husband about the wife who ran away from him was not
altogether the straightforward business you might think it would be, even when
there was no nonsense whatever about any lingering fondness, as in this case.
He might thoroughly enjoy hearing of her misfortunes and love being reminded
how terrible she was to have around, but the very next bit might throw doubt on
his good sense or taste in ever having got involved with her in the first
place. So Lindsey took her time.

‘It
wasn’t a very big part,’ she said, ‘but I
think
I’m right in saying it
was her first for … quite a while. And before it I can’t remember anything
since she was whoever it was in that version of
The Letter,
you know,
the woman who shoots her boyfriend and then says he was trying to rape her when
really he was trying to ditch her. We, uh, we thought she was just right for
that, but it didn’t go down very well, I believe. In fact that career of hers
in television, which I remember you telling me she was so set on …

So set
on, I muttered under my breath and through my teeth, that you could almost say
she left me to have a better crack at it — ‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘I may
have missed some things, but it doesn’t seem to have come to very much. What
about that husband of hers? — what’s he called, Hutchinson is it?’

‘Bert
Hutchinson. What about him? Horrible bleeder. Wears suede shirts. And drinks
like a fish, I hear.’

‘Oh?
Well, she should be used to that, Stanley. Perhaps she likes her husbands to
put it away. Not that I blame them.’

‘No
rudeness, please. He drinks like a fish, I just drink, right? Basic
distinction. Anyway, he never turned out to produce or direct anything at all
as far as I know. There was meant to be going to be a pricy series about Mr
Gladstone, with Nowell as I imagine it would be Mrs Gladstone, but then it fell
a victim to some axe or quota or whatever.’

‘Oh my
God,’ said Lindsey, undoubtedly thinking of Nowell as Mrs Gladstone, though I
had no real idea of why that should be so bad. ‘I don’t suppose you see much of
her, do you?’

‘No
point. It was bad enough being married to her.’

‘Have
you seen their child?’

‘No. I’d
forgotten it existed until now.

‘You
should. I can’t imagine why Nowell ever agreed to have it. It’s a girl. Naturally.’

‘I don’t
know why you say that. Get invited there, do you?’

‘Oh,
somebody took me along. Are you doing anything for lunch? I don’t think this
fellow of mine’s coming.’

‘I wish
I wasn’t, but I am. In fact it’s starting to get tight already.’

‘Come
on, it’s only —’

‘I
know, but I’ve got to get home.’

‘To
Hampstead? Do you go home to lunch every day now?’

‘No,
not every day,’ I said, wishing I was queer and need never explain anything to
anybody. ‘Today, though. My mother-in-law’s coming to lunch .’

I was
scowling at Lindsey so fiercely that she just grunted and took a good swallow of
her drink, but she was not the sort to leave off when she wanted to go on. I
caught sight of my bloke on his way back from the phone, and she saw at once
that some interruption was a few seconds away. With an extra dose of the
accent, or so I thought, she said, ‘You certainly do marry some extraordinary
people, Stanley,’ obviously reckoning on any real comeback being ruled out.
But the bloke, instead of keeping on his way towards us, veered aside in the
direction of a pee, so there was no rush after all for the moment.

‘Now I
realize you haven’t got much time for her,’ I said, ‘Susan that is, but I have.
You don’t think I know what I’m getting, do you? Well, I think I do, by and
large. I like most of it, and the bits I don’t like so well I can put up with
quite easily, because there’s nothing that says I’ve got to agree with her idea
of what she’s doing. So she’ll pretend she’s helping someone or being nice to
them, and she really is too, but she’s also showing off her genius and drawing
attention to herself, which is what a lot of people do, and I’ll go along with
it. And that works out perfectly well, because she’s not a thought-reader, you
see. As I say, it’s only a small part of the time. We’ve been married two and a
half years now, and going together nearly four, so I reckon so far I’m probably
going to be all right.’

‘I hope
so,’ said Lindsey with a smile that looked okay, but making it sound as though
she was rather hoping against hope. ‘No, I’m not so much down on the old thing
as perhaps you imagine. But according to me she’s slightly mad, you know.’

I was
far from sure how that sounded. ‘What does that mean?’ I said.

‘Well… she can’t really believe that anything or anybody exists unless they
concern her personally.’

‘My
God, all I can say is it’s a good job we haven’t got you in charge of
committals to the nut-hatch or we’d all be in there.’

‘Yeah,
we all do most things but some of us do some of them more than others do. Of
course I haven’t seen her for years. She’s probably grown up by now.’

‘What’s
that bleeder
doing
in there?’ I asked her, looking at my watch. ‘Ah, how’s
… how’s Barry?’ I was pleased with myself for having come up with her
husband’s name just when required, but what I tried to get across to her was
more that naturally in an ideal world there would most likely not be people
called Barry. It seemed from her reply that this particular one was still
around, at any rate not yet dead or required to keep his distance by court
order. My bloke returned at last, closely followed by Lindsey’s apologizing for
his lateness. I settled things with mine in about five seconds, got her latest
phone number off her, and left. By now I was medium late, so I grabbed a
passing taxi.

My mother-in-law’s
lime-green Saab, with a fresh scrape on the rear door, was parked across the
road from the pottery shop. In the quite recent past I had watched her have two
minor accidents in it at walking pace, one with a stationary furniture van, the
other with a simple brick wall, both in excellent conditions of visibility and
road surface. At higher speeds she obviously took more care, or else was under
some sort of special protection. I could let Susan see nearly all of what I
felt about her mother’s driving.

In the
hall of my house Mrs Shillibeer was rubbing the stain off the floorboards in an
area by the fireplace. At the first sound of this name I had imagined a
chain-smoking old witch in a flowered overall and one of those turban affairs I
had seen on the women who came to clean my parents’ house in South London. In
other words I had not expected a tall fat girl in her twenties whose usual
get-up was a tee-shirt, jeans and pink brocade slippers. Under one of these at
the moment there was a pad of wire wool with which she was doing her
stain-removal in an upright position. In theory the person at work could have
been someone different because her face was hidden by the paperback book she
was reading called
The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.
Then when she heard
the street door latch behind me she lowered the book far enough to see over the
top of it.

‘Hallo,’
she said in a loud affected voice. ‘Lady Daly,’ she went on in the same voice
and paused for quite a long time, ‘hazz … arrived-uh.’ She was given to
making announcements of this sort. I could never tell whether she was being
cheeky to me or so to speak joining up with me against whoever the announcement
was about.

Lady
Daly was naturally my mother-in-law. Her husband, fallen down dead before I
ever came along, had been a Conservative MP for a safe Hertfordshire seat,
given a knighthood for never having done anything. When I opened the
sitting-room door she tried to shove back into its place on the shelves the
book she had taken out and turn round and face me innocently at the same time,
like Ingrid Bergman interrupted in a bit of amateur spying. They were not my
books anyway.

‘Morning,
Stanley,’ she got in quickly.

‘Morning,
lady. How are you today? Can I get you something? What about a spot of sherry?’

‘Oh no.
No. No thank you.’ She gave me a peck on the cheek, as near as someone without
an actual beak could. ‘But you have … have one.’

‘I don’t
see why not,’ I said, and started to make myself a small Scotch on the rocks.
There were rocks on hand in the plastic pineapple instead of to be fetched from
the kitchen because Susan had got Mrs Shillibeer to interrupt her other duties
to put them there. Where was Susan? One of the troubles with getting on all
right with people like your mother-in-law, or looking as if you did, or trying
to, was that people like your wife took to leaving you alone with them to have
a nice chat.

My
mother-in-law managed to stop watching my operations at the drinks tray. ‘Filthy
traffic,’ she said as one committed road-user to another.

‘Wicked.
Of course there’s the weekend coming up.’

She
turned on me indignantly. ‘But it’s barely Friday afternoon.’

‘I
know, but you know how it is.’

‘I
wonder some of them bother to go in to work at all. Well, a great many don’t,
as we see. They’re
unemployed.’

‘Yes, I
know.’ I raised my glass. ‘Cheers, lady.’

Mum was
what I had called my first mother-in-law but this one had other ideas. I
thought they were on the wrong lines. Lady Daly had to be a dodgy thing to be
called in the first place and the nickname or whatever it was reminded you of
that dodginess. Also I very much doubted whether she had ever done what I once
had out of curiosity and looked up the word in
The Concise Oxford
Dictionary.
Apparently to use it in the vocative and the singular, which
was what I had just been up to, could only be either poetical or vulgar,
nothing in between. I thought that was very interesting.