Stanley and the Women (31 page)

‘He
could be up there all day,’ I said. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘I don’t
think there’s anything we can do.’ Susan had pushed her hair up and under a red
mackintosh hat with a fairish brim. It made her look French or Italian, anyway
not English and absolutely not like her mother. ‘I can’t imagine what would
make him come down while he still wants to stay there.’

‘We can’t
just leave him there to get wetter and wetter.’

‘It
looks as if we’ll have to, darling. We’re not helping him by standing about
here getting wet ourselves. I’m not being callous about it but he’ll come down
in his own good time. When he’s had enough.’

‘Oh sure,
but when’s that going to be? He’s mad, love. He’s probably got voices telling
him to stay there for forty days and forty nights.’

‘Maybe,
maybe not. Didn’t one of those doctors say something about attention-seeking?
Anyway, it’s their job to sort it out.’

‘But
surely to God …’

‘I
think we ought to try leaving him to himself. Taking no notice.’

‘Hey,
dad!’ called Steve, so unexpectedly that I jumped. ‘I couldn’t do anything
else. I didn’t want to come up here but I had to, where I can’t be looked into.
I kept giving things away in the house, even when I was asleep.’ He was
shivering and making hissing noises between the words. His voice came out odd
but distinct in the damp air. ‘I didn’t mean to but I just couldn’t help it. I
haven’t got to be awake to be tapped because the storage circuits are always
active, but there’s got to be conduction too and that means metal or stone at
ground level. I can always be looked into if there’s that and I don’t even know
when it’s happening. The street’s nearly as bad even with the location tuning.
But up here I’ve got all this insulation with vegetable matter and the gap’s
too wide to jump at normal power. I just hope they don’t realize what’s keeping
them out. With stepped-up power I wouldn’t even be safe up here.’

His
cheeks were shiny with rain and probably tears as well and his mouth was turned
down at the corners. I could not imagine a better example of a person full of
fear and misery. I called to him, ‘Please come down, son, I beg you. Just for
your dad. Please.’

He
shook his head and turned away, his face crumpling.

‘I’m
going to ring Nowell,’ I said to Susan.

She
stared at me for a couple of seconds and then said in what I thought was a
cheerful voice, ‘I hope you’re joking, Stanley.’

‘No I
am not joking. I told you about the way she calmed him down when he got violent
at her place that time, and talked him into going into hospital over the phone.
Well, let’s see if she can work the trick again.’

‘Surely
you know how I feel about her.’ No, there was nothing cheerful here.

‘I
fancy I’ve a pretty fair idea, though you’ve never actually said. I understand
all that, and in the ordinary way of course I wouldn’t dream of letting her get
within a mile of you, but this isn’t an ordinary situation. Your feelings are
very important to me, make no mistake, love, but just at the moment Steve’s
feelings are more important. And his state. Now you must be able to understand
that.’

‘Yes, I
understand,’ she said, and turned round and went back into the house.

For a
moment I felt a pang of a kind of fear I had not even thought about for nearly
ten years. Then it was gone. I called to Steve that I would be back and left
him there.

I got
through to Nowell straight away. When I did I realized I had been half or a
quarter hoping she would be unreachable. As soon as she understood what was
required of her she started thick-and-thinning away like nobody’s business and
after doing enough of it to last me, or herself, said she would come at once.

‘Great.
Don’t —’ I said, and stopped.

‘Don’t
what, darling?’

‘I was
going to say don’t break your neck, then I remembered you don’t drive.’

She
sounded a bit puzzled when she signed off, as well she might. I had been going
to ask her not to queen it too hard over Susan, but then it had flashed on me
that it was very much the wrong time for being foul to her.

Exactly
as I put the phone down the doorbell rang, as if she had found a way of
literally coming at once. But of course it was Mrs Shillibeer’s early morning.
She was wearing a pale blue plastic mack with a hood and resembled an enormous
child.

‘Hallo,’
she said in her geriatric-minder voice. ‘Horrible weather.’ She mouthed the
words so that if I was too deaf to hear them I stood a fair chance of
lip-reading them.

‘Oh,
yes, it is,’ I said with a slight quaver.

‘Mrs
Duke upstairs?’ she went on, actually pointing.

‘I
shouldn’t be at all surprised.’

I could
hear very little sting in the last one, but it was the best I could do at that
moment, and probably just as well. I went out and told Steve his mother would
be here soon and saw him nod. Then I went to the bathroom and finished shaving,
and then to the bedroom to finish dressing. Susan was there. The whine of the
vacuum-cleaner came from somewhere under our feet.

‘Has
she arrived yet?’

‘No,’ I
said. ‘I’ll come and tell you when she has.’

‘I don’t
want to set eyes on her.’

‘Oh,
fair enough. I shan’t be bringing her up here.’

‘How
long will she be around, do you think?’

‘Not
long, I’d say. If nothing happens in the first few minutes then that’s it, probably.
Anyway, she won’t want to hang about.’

‘I’ve
got things to do in here, clearing out drawers and so on, so I shan’t be
wasting my time.’

It was
sporting of her to throw that in. All the same I would have settled for a smile
or two. Not that she was cold or I had done any better myself. The two of us
had been relaxed but not intimate, like people who had worked in the same
office for years without ever having met outside it.

I was
in the kitchen trying to eat a yoghurt when Mrs Shillibeer barged into the
room. Her forehead looked amazingly huge compared with her chin.

‘There’s
a man in one of the trees out there,’ she gabbled, no geriatrics now.

‘Yes,’
I said, ‘I know.’ My mind was a total blank. I had not stopped thinking about
Steve or him being in the tree for more than five seconds at a time, but
somehow it had never occurred to me that this female was going to have to have
something said to her on the subject.

‘What’s
he doing? Who is he?’

‘He’s
my son.’ This slipped out a second before I got to ideas about branch-lopping,
man from the Council and so on.

‘The
one who’s staying here? The one you … What’s he doing up a tree?’

‘I
suppose he just felt like it,’ I found I was saying. Perhaps I really had gone
senile.

‘Felt
like it?’ she asked indignantly. ‘In this weather?
What’s the matter with him? On drugs, is he?’

Here
was my out, but I was too thick to recognize it. ‘Nothing like that,’ I said
with conviction, realizing as I said it that this was not even true in any
literal way.

‘What
is it then? People don’t go sitting in the middle of a tree in the pouring rain
like that, not if they’re … normal. What is the matter with him?’

I
coughed. ‘He’s … upset. Confused. Unhappy.’ Nobody hearing the words could
have believed they were honestly spoken.

‘That
hospital’s not just for anxiety and depression,’ she said, suddenly gone all
calm and wide-eyed. Susan and I had worked out that that was the best story to
cover any unforeseen puzzling or perhaps alarming bit that might have emerged.
But it was no use this morning. Mrs Shillibeer had guessed the truth, near
enough anyway. ‘He’s barmy. I’m not having that.’

She
started to fling out of the room but then froze and, while I watched in
fascination, retraced her steps to where I sat at the table, moving with
ridiculous caution like somebody imitating a burglar. First looking over each
shoulder in turn she bent forward in my direction and gave me a slow wink.

‘I’ll
tell you this much,’ she said in a throaty undertone about as far as possible
from her usual mode. ‘It’s a relief, that’s what it is. I’ve been dying to get
away from this job almost since I first started here, that’s almost two years
now, not that long after you moved in. The money’s good quite frankly and my
husband would never have let me walk out of here just because I didn’t fancy
coming. But now I’ve got a reason, see. He knows I’ve got this thing about
loonies. So I’m off the hook at last. Whoopee.’

‘Why
don’t you like working here? Not because of me, I hope?’

‘Ooh
no, not you, Stanley, you’re a darling, you are. No, it’s that stuck-up cat you
married. What did you want to go and do that for, a nice guy like you? Have you
ever noticed the way she talks to me?’ Actually I had, but I kept quiet. ‘No
reason why you should. Oh Mrs Shillibeer, would you very kindly, very sweetly
chop up these shallots, not too fine, you know the way I like them, and tell me
when you’ve done them.’ It was —of course — an unkind imitation but not quite
an unrecognizable one. ‘Never once talks to me like a human being. It’s not
much to ask. And that mother. And that sister. You want to watch the mother.
That’s the way Susan’ll end up. Well, she’s most of the way there already, I
reckon.’

Mrs Shillibeer
seemed again ready to be off. I said, ‘Are you going up there now to tell her
some of that?’

‘Christ
no, what do you take me for? I’m much too scared of her. I’d sooner cross my
husband. And that’s saying something. Good luck, Stanley love. I’m afraid you’re
going to need it. Oh, and I hope your son gets better soon. They can do a lot
these days, you know.’

She
went out in the same sort of style as she had come in, getting into trim for
the action. Instantly the doorbell rang. It was Nowell. Who else?

‘Darling
Stanley.’ A warm hug came my way, one full notch below sexiness but no more and
accompanied by the usual good smell. ‘Am I going to be asked in?’

‘Of
course. I …’

‘Is he
all right? Will he be all right for the next two minutes?’

‘Yes.’
I took her into the kitchen, which was all she seemed to want. Much against my
expectation she showed no interest in her surroundings. ‘Would you like some
coffee?’

‘No
thanks,’ she said, not sitting down. ‘Stanley, I want to say this. I know you
think I’ve behaved pretty badly over Steve and his troubles, not doing my fair
share and all that. Of course you think so. And in a way you’re right. The
thing is, I’ve got troubles of my own. Or rather Joanne has. You’ve seen her,
so perhaps you’ve some idea of how difficult she can be. Difficult, that’s
hardly the word. It’s a full-time job just keeping an eye on her. Not long ago
I had to take her to Portugal for a week because she wanted some sunshine. It
may be all my fault in the first place but there’s no point in arguing about
that now. As you can imagine, I don’t get any help from Bert.’ The mention of
this name had a knowing look packaged up with it. ‘There it is. She’s got me
and Steve’s got you. Simple as that. I’ll lend you a hand when I can but mostly
I can’t. There we are.’

Again,
it was not the moment to query any of this or boggle at the idea of a human
being who could make Nowell have to do things, so I was sweet to her instead.
Before I had quite finished somebody came tearing down the stairs and went out
by the front door. Nowell ignored this completely. I told her to hang on a
moment and went up to the bedroom.

Susan
was sitting on the bed with about five hundred waist-belts on the counterpane.
I was a bit flummoxed on how to open the conversation but she led off straight
away.

‘Mrs Shillibeer
has gone. Walked out.’

The way
she spoke these half-dozen words sounded incredibly and horrendously like what
I had heard in the kitchen five minutes before. I was reminded in a more
disagreeable way than usual that snobbily or not I was quite tickled by being
married to someone who talked like that. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I heard her.’

‘She
said you told her Steve was mad and mad people frighten her. She had a mad
brother. What the bloody hell possessed you to tell her?’

‘I didn’t
mean to. It just sort of … She guessed. I wasn’t ready for her.’

‘You
knew she was here, you let her in. A clever man like you.’

‘I’m
sorry, I got flustered. We can discuss it later. Nowell has arrived.’

‘I can’t
understand why you didn’t call the hospital. They must have people who are used
to dealing with this sort of thing.’

‘Perhaps
I should have, I don’t know. I will if this doesn’t work. Anyway, she’s here
now.’

‘Well… good luck,’ said Susan with a smile that came and went.

Whether
by good luck or not, it worked. Nowell took her previous line about what a
rough time he must have been having and in less than five minutes Steve was
down, soaked to the skin, pale, shivering, wretched, but on terra firma. Nowell
hugged him, but he seemed unresponsive and had nothing to say for himself.
Having called off his performance, though, he was keen enough to get back
indoors, and without fuss set about obeying instructions to go up and take off
his wet things.