Stanley and the Women (32 page)

I
walked Nowell to the door. Her behaviour had impressed me rather. As well as
hiding all curiosity about the house and its contents she had not once
mentioned Susan’s name or raised the subject without actually referring to it,
something she was very good at, and at no stage had shown any triumph or
complacency at getting Steve to quit his perch, just pleasure and relief. True,
she had more or less blamed me personally for his wetness, coldness and lack of
topcoat, but I could think of quite a few people who would have taken that
tack.

At the
threshold I said, ‘Thank you for coming so quickly. That was a damn good show
just now.’

‘Think
nothing of it. Just a knack I have.’ Then she gave me a look that signalled the
advent of something in bold. ‘You’re a good chap, Stanley,’ she said very
earnestly. ‘No wonder Steve’s devoted to you.’

‘Oh.’

Here it
came. ‘I miss you, you know. Do you believe me?’

‘Why
not? I miss you. Every day.’

The
warmth in my voice took her by surprise, and me too a bit. For an insane moment
I could see her seriously wondering why I had said that, how much I meant it,
what it might indicate for the future — then it passed, and the Eternal Woman
once more looked out of Nowell’s eyes. She threw her head back, kissed me
lightly on the cheek and tripped away to a waiting taxicab whose driver was
doggedly picking his nose.

I was
glad I had said what I had. I had indeed meant it, though it was not a complete
statement of the case, perhaps not even accurate as far as it went. But if you
could miss somebody, feel somebody’s absence, without ever wanting to be with
them again, then yes, I missed Nowell every day. More to the point, I had been
sweet to her in spades, which was not going to come in unhandy when Steve
climbed on to the roof of Buckingham Palace or hijacked a jet.

I got
him into a hot bath now and went to the bedroom and said, ‘All over. She talked
him down and she’s gone.’

‘I
know.’ Susan had moved on to long thin strips of different-coloured material
the purpose of which was very difficult to guess. ‘At least I gathered he was
down. Is he all right?’

‘Well,
he’s better where he is than where he was. I don’t know what more you could
say.’

She was
still on her limited-friendliness tone, the nearest thing to a female
freeze-out I had ever had from her. But when the time came to take Steve off we
held on to each other for a fair time, with her seeming not to want to let go
as if I were off to the States or somewhere. At the end she gave me a smile, a
real one this time. So that was all right.

When I
had escorted Steve to Dr Gandhi’s manor I went in search of Collings and found
her in her room. She was looking really rough that morning, with her hair got
up to remind you of carefully prepared paper. I told her about Steve and the
tree and she said it was part of the pattern.

‘Look,
it may be part of your pattern, Dr Collings,’ I said as quietly as I could, ‘but
it’s not part of mine or my wife’s. We’re not used to handling this kind of
thing.’

‘I
understand that.’

‘Terrific,
but could you do something about it? We’re getting near the end of our
resources.’

‘Of
course it’s a period of great tension and distress for you both. It would be
far from unusual in this situation for your marriage to suffer severe strain,’
she said, ready with more technical data if they were needed.

‘I dare
say it would. I wasn’t actually thinking of that side of it. What I was driving
at, my wife and I don’t know how to deal with someone like Steve. We’ve managed
so far but any moment he might do something we couldn’t cope with. Would you
please take him back in as a full-time patient where there are trained people
to look after him. In his interests.’

‘It’s
in his interests to stay as he is, believe me, Stanley. Do you want him to be a
hospital case for the rest of his life?’ She went on to describe a few of what
she called hospital cases in some detail, and if she wanted my honest agreement
that the general run of them would have been as well or better off dead she
could have had it for the asking. There was more than a touch of overkill here
and I wondered where we were due next. At the end of her cases she said, ‘I
hope you’ll agree it’s worth a lot of sacrifice to make any of that less likely
to happen to Steve.’

‘Oh,
absolutely,’ I said, letting myself off a question about how much sacrifice and
how much less likely, and another one about how likely in the first place.

‘He
must be helped to live in the world, to make a successful transition to family
and community.’ On she went about that while I grew more and more uneasy. As
she spoke she looked more steadily at me than ever before. This part was so
boring that when the punch came I almost missed it. ‘These current difficulties
are all part of the process of adjustment to the withdrawal of chemotherapy. A
progressive —

‘Chemotherapy?
That’s drugs, isn’t it? You mean you’ve taken him off drugs?’

‘Drugs
are a crutch, an artificial support. He’s got to learn to do without them if he’s
ever going to live any sort of normal life.’

‘But he’s
mad.
You should have seen him when he was up that tree. Not just the
loony stuff he was saying but the way he looked and everything. He wasn’t in a
difficulty or adjusting, he was raving bonkers, poor fellow. He was in a
state.
Anyone could have seen.’

‘It’s
very difficult and painful for him and that’s why he needs all the
understanding and encouragement you can give him.’

‘Please
take him back. For a bit. He’s not ready.’

‘You
must let me be the judge of that.’

After a
bit more along the same lines I came away, trying not to feel scared about what
might be in store. Just after starting back I remembered the flick-knife, still
in my pocket. I had not exactly forgotten it but so far kept finding I was
short of a good place to dump it. Now I soon had one —the river off Blackfriars
Bridge. When it was gone I felt a glow of relief, which was not very logical
but well worth having on a day like today.

That afternoon, while I
was on my way back from an advertising agency somewhere off Oxford Street, an
accident up ahead kept me sitting in a traffic block for forty minutes. On my
desk in the office I found a note from Morgan telling me to ring home — urgent.

‘How
long ago was this?’ I asked, dialling.

‘Oh,
getting on for an hour. It was your wife.’ He hesitated, then said, ‘She
sounded a bit upset.’

After
half a dozen rings a man’s voice spoke at the far end.

‘This
is Stanley Duke,’ I told him.

‘Stan, it’s
Cliff. I’m afraid there’s been a bit of a dust-up here, old son. All under
control now, but you’d better get along as soon as you can. I’ll stay till you
come.

‘Anybody
hurt?’

‘Nothing
that can’t be taken care of.’

When I
got home by taxi and let myself in I found a trail of blood, drops of it the
size of a 10p piece, running into the kitchen. ‘Up here, Stanley,’ said Cliff’s
voice.

Susan
was in her usual chair in the sitting-room. She was pale and had a fair-sized
bandage on her left forearm. There was more blood on the carpet and furniture,
not a great amount but quite enough. I hurried over and we hugged each other.
She said she was all right. I asked what had happened. Cliff answered. ‘Steve
came at her with a knife,’ he said.

‘Oh,
God. Where is he? Where is he now?’

‘In his
room. With a shot in him that’ll make him not want to go anywhere for quite a
while.’

‘How
bad is the arm?’

‘Well,
it’s nasty, but it’s not, it’s not bad. In the fleshy part, no major
blood-vessel punctured, I’ve put three stitches in, under a local anaesthetic
of course.’ He spoke in a dead sort of way, almost as though these details
bored him. ‘There’ll be a certain amount of pain when it wears off and for a
couple of days afterwards. I’ll leave some pills for that. And I’ll look in
tomorrow.’

When he
had said that I quite expected him to leave, but he stayed where he was,
standing by the empty fireplace. I had pulled a stool up to Susan’s chair. ‘Tell
me what happened, love,’ I said. ‘If you can bear to.’

‘Oh, I
can bear to. I think the worst part was the fright at the beginning,’ she said,
a little quietly for her but well under control. ‘You did take him to the
hospital, darling, did you?’

‘Yeah. Right
to the ward.’

‘I didn’t
even know he was in the house. The door just burst open and he came rushing in
with this knife shouting that I was a bloody bitch who’d driven his mother and
father apart and wouldn’t let him see his mother. Like that bit of hostility
last week, you remember, only this time he meant business, and I just had time
to get to my feet before he … struck at me.’ She started to lift her left
arm to show how, but winced and used the other one instead. ‘I tried to catch
his wrist but I didn’t manage it properly, and he cut me.’ I squeezed her hand.
‘And I thought I was done for, but then he stopped, I don’t really know why,
perhaps it was the sight of blood, anyway he dropped the knife and gave the
most awful sort of groan or moan, an absolutely harrowing noise, and then he
simply ran off and I heard his bedroom door slam, and it was over.’

She had
not actually started to cry but she was not far off it. I thought she was being
pretty good. ‘Thank God for that, anyway,’ I said. ‘What knife was it?’

‘There,’
she said, and there it was on one of the low tables almost in front of me,
though I saw it now for the first time — a kitchen knife from downstairs with,
as I knew, a sharp point and edge, now with dried or drying blood on it, some
of which had leaked on to the sheet of newspaper underneath. ‘Well … I went
down to the kitchen and tried to get you, and couldn’t, and then I got Cliff,
and he sweetly said he’d come straight away, and I sort of hung about near the
front door, ready to run, until he arrived, and there we are.’

‘I know
it’s a bit early but I’m going to have a drink,’ I said after a moment. When I
looked at Susan she shook her head. ‘Cliff?’

‘No
thanks, I’ve got to get back.’ But he still made no move.

‘So
then you turned up,’ I said from the drinks tray.

‘Yes, I
turned up,’ said Cliff. As soon as he started to speak I knew that he was not
at all bored, just choosing his words carefully, and also that there was
something that had not been mentioned, something to do with him — actually I
had known it almost since coming into the room. ‘I put in the local,’ he went
on, ‘and that was going to take a few minutes to work, so I went up to have a
look at Steve. There he was, lying on his bed, not asleep, but quite relaxed I
thought, you could almost say torpid, but after what Susan had told me I was
taking no. chances. I gave him Valium intravenously, which is pretty
quick-acting. He didn’t object.’

‘Didn’t
he say anything at all,’ I asked, ‘why he’d done it or anything?’

‘Oh, he
said something. I asked him why, why he’d attacked his stepmother, and he said
he didn’t know what I was talking about. He’d let himself in and come straight
up, thinking he was alone in the place, he said.’ Cliff snapped the catches of
his bag. I fancied his hands were shaking. ‘He said he hadn’t done it.’

A
horrible pause followed. What felt like a hundred thoughts went through my head
in two or three seconds, bits of remarks about Steve from Nash, from Collings,
from Nowell, cloudy memories of Steve himself when younger, sharper ones of
Susan the other day, this morning, and behind it all something I could neither
face nor define. At last, very late, I said, ‘Amnesia, presumably.’

‘Does
rather suggest that, doesn’t it? Yes, it’s quite common in these cases.’ He
sighed, scratching his head elaborately and sending a thin shower of dandruff
on to the shoulders of his incredibly dark green suit. ‘Well, that’s it. I
shouldn’t say much about this to anyone, but then I don’t suppose either of you
will want to. Except of course to the people at the hospital, Stan, when you
take Steve in in the morning. It’s quite likely they’ll want him back in
full-time, I suppose. Yeah, and better let them know where he is now.’

‘What
did you say, you suppose they might want him back in full-time?’ Susan asked. ‘But
surely, I mean after a thing like this they must, mustn’t they? Or has he got
to murder somebody first?’

‘If you’re
talking about legal committal, I can assure you it wouldn’t be at all easy. Not
really worth a shot, in fact.’

Cliff
had still not sounded his normal self and Susan had spoken so faintly I could
hardly hear her, almost without expression too, a new voice for her as far as I
was concerned. Shock, that would be. Fatigue. I felt dazed, like with a very
bad hangover, wanting to start using my mind on what had been said and what
seemed to have happened but unable to get there.

Now
Cliff handed over pills and gave instructions about them and other things and I
tried to listen. When he started to leave I went with him.