Stanley and the Women (33 page)

He kept
well ahead of me all the way down the stairs and nearly to the front door. ‘Nasty,’
he said as I opened it. ‘Look, er, it might be as well if Susan went and stayed
somewhere for a couple of days while we sort things out with the hospital and
so on. Just to be on the safe side. No need to worry tonight but she ought to
be out of the way tomorrow. So long, Stan. I’ll be in touch.’

I rang
the hospital, but could find nobody who gave any sign of having heard of Steve,
so without a lot of hope of success I left a message at the switchboard. In the
teeth of a whacking reluctance I went back up to the sitting room, though once
there I landed up at the drinks tray without any trouble at all. Susan was
sitting in the same position, her injured arm on the arm of the chair.

‘What
did Cliff say to you?’ she asked in the same tone as before.

‘He
said tomorrow you ought to get out for a bit. Stay with someone.

‘Did he
really.’

‘Can I
get you anything, love? What about a nice cup of tea? Tomato sandwich with the
skins off? Do you good to eat something.’

She
looked at me with her eyes half-closed and her mouth drooping and said in
another voice I had not heard before, low and level, ‘You little bastard. Swine.
Filth.’

I was
so surprised I knocked a bottle of tonic water over with my elbow, and yet I
had been fully expecting it. ‘What have I done?’ I said.

‘You
think I gave myself that cut, don’t you? Three stitches there are in there. I’d
like you to see it.’

‘But I
don’t, I don’t think you gave yourself it.’ I had no idea what I thought.

‘I was
watching you when Cliff told you Steve had said he didn’t know anything about
it and you stood there weighing it up. Weighing it up.’

‘I wasn’t,
there were just some things I couldn’t help —’

‘You
believe what somebody says your deranged, deluded, fucking raving maniac of a
son said instead of what your wife tells you happened. You see what that makes
me, don’t you?’

‘I don’t
believe —’

‘Or
rather what it reveals about what you think of me. You think I’m so neurotic,
so self-centred, so … unprincipled that I’d expose that boy, that poor
madman to being locked up and Christ knows what and I’d put you through it and
suffer all that pain myself just to … just for what? Attention? Is that
what I was after?’ She spoke in the same level tone.

At
least I had the sense to see that this was a question with no good answers.

‘And
you think I’d do that. As well as tell a lie on that scale. That seems to me
about the worst insult one person can give another. And I’m not having it.’ She
stood up. ‘I’m off. And I’m not waiting till the morning as your friend suggests,
I’m leaving straight away. Catch me hanging on here with someone who thinks I’m
like that.’

I stood
up too. ‘You’re not fit to travel, you need rest,’ I said, and got out of her
way as she moved towards the door.

‘I’ll
risk it.’ At the door she stopped and turned round. ‘If anybody wants me they
can get me at my mother’s. Though you’ll be wasting your time if you try me
there yourself. I suppose you think that’s funny. Yet, ass right, the wife’s gorn
orf to er muvver’s,’ she said in a very poor imitation of perhaps a Hackney or
Bow accent as much as anything. ‘Just up your street, you lower-class turd. I
don’t know how I’ve put up with you for so long, with your gross table-manners
and your boozing and your bloody little car and your frightful
mates
and
your whole ghastly south-of-the-river man’s world. You’ve no breeding and so
you’ve no respect for women. They’re there to cook your breakfast and be fucked
and that’s it. So of course nothing they say’s worth taking seriously, and when
one of them says something quite important and serious and a man says something
different then you believe him even though he’s out of his mind. Oh, I wish to
Christ I’d found out about you sooner.’

I
watched her saying this, looking as brainy and nervous as ever but not humorous
any more and nowhere near vulnerable. Her eyes were wide open now, though
blinking pretty fast, and I had seen them more or less like that a thousand
times, but if she had ever before had her lower lip pushed forward as it was at
the moment then I had missed it. She had taken a few steps back into the room
from the doorway and stood there with a brown striped cardigan thrown over her
shoulders and her right hand clasping her left elbow just above the top edge of
the bandage. This set my mind running on whether she had had her arm in the
sleeve or not when … but I pulled guiltily back from that. I was still
dazed and could think of nothing to say. Well, I said ‘Cheers, love’ at the
end.

‘Love,’
she said through her teeth, and made for the door again.

‘Are
you coming back?’

‘I shan’t
be able to take everything with me in one go if that’s what you mean, so yes to
that extent.’

She
said this from outside the room. There was no one I wanted to see and nothing I
wanted to do. Except have another drink, of course. By the time I had seen to
that I was into my second minute of having no wife.

Had she
really stabbed herself? What a perfectly ridiculous sodding question. Who ever
heard of the assistant literary editor of the
Sunday Chronicle
stabbing
herself a bit and saying her barmy stepson had done it to pay her husband out
for thinking the barmy stepson was more important than she was? But perhaps she
had. And of course perhaps she had done it to make the stepson seem barmier
than he was, more violent, so violent he would have to be shut up and her life
could go back to normal. But that would have been calculation in pursuit of
comfort — too squalid to suit a woman like Susan, a woman who might
incidentally let an innocent party in for damage while following her ends but
would never make that damage her aim. If she had done it, she had done it for
ego, as in her own scenario, not for peace and quiet. Wow, I thought to myself
— I had come quite far quite fast too. Could she have done it? Surely not the woman
who had put so much into cheering me up when I needed it, who had only the
other day seen off her own mother and sister on my behalf. But perhaps she had.
Could Nowell have done it? Perhaps. Probably. Yes. But what of that?

At
least one fact needed establishing. When Cliff said Steve had said he knew
nothing about any attack, had I really — what had she said? — had I weighed up
the chances? Not a lot — it had been far more a matter of telling myself in a
completely slow, thick way that that was funny, what Steve said had happened
was different from what Susan said had happened. And when I tried to do some
weighing a moment ago I had not even been able to start. Never mind, at the
time in question had I looked as if that was what I was doing? That depended
not only on how I had behaved but on who had been watching. But what was
absolutely bleeding certain and inescapable was that I could have been weighing
up the chances, which was the same as I could easily have been, which meant I
might even have been going to be foul to her. Good God. Surely not.

I was
going through this for about the fifteenth time when the doorbell rang. Having
got half-way across the room I remembered hearing the phone give its little
end-of-call chink a few minutes earlier and reasoned that a minicab stood
below, so I went back to my chair, not before I had topped up my drink. Almost
at once I heard Susan coming down the stairs and in a moment she appeared in
the doorway. She was carrying the large red suitcase she always took on holiday
and was wearing her round woollen hat and gloves. I got to my feet so as not to
show unwilling, but she just stayed where she was and looked very seriously at
me. If I had had a bit more time I might have gone over to her and confessed to
or admitted anything she liked — as it was I too stayed put. There was no
knowing, then or later, what was going on inside her, from profound sorrow to
wondering whether it would be all right to touch me for the cab fare. Anyway,
the bell rang again and without saying anything or changing her expression she
went out, and soon enough the street door slammed.

Later
on I went and looked at Steve, but he was obviously out for the count, so I
came down again and had another drink or so. About 4 a.m. I woke up in my chair
and went and drank a couple of litres of water and got into bed.

4
    Prognosis

First thing the next
morning I took a cab down to Fleet Street and drove the Apfelsine slowly and
dangerously back to Hampstead. I wished I had a headache or anything else like
that, out where I could see it so to speak, instead of how I felt. Steve was
still half-full of the sedative Cliff had given him and I had a hard time
getting him to get up. When he finally came downstairs he ate nothing, not that
he had done much different on previous mornings as far as I could remember, but
now I was in charge of breakfast I noticed more. I managed a glass of apple
juice and most of half a bowl of posh continental cereal with nuts and raisins
that had been cunningly turned the same dusty white as the cereal itself. On an
ordinary day I would have said that of course I preferred this sort of thing to
any old eggs and bacon or sausage or kipper in the world, but now, again, I
remembered that neither of my wives had been the sort to fancy cooking their
husband’s breakfast, never mind what the second one had had to say on the point
the previous evening. I drank a lot of Lapsang Suchong, which I really did
quite like and which helped the other stuff to stay down.

When
the time came I told Steve so and went and had a pee and collected my gear. He
had not appeared, so I went back to the kitchen and found him in exactly the
same position as I had left him in, sitting near rather than at the table with
his shoulders hunched, hands clasped and head down. I wanted to fetch him a
thump that would lay him full length on the floor, in the first place for not
doing what he was told, but also for being a bleeding pest, being dull, being
off his head, being around the place all the time without a word to say for
himself or even a glance to spare, and taking over my life and mucking it up.
But instead of thumping him I shouted his name. He looked up very quickly and
just for a second I saw him as he always had been before that first evening he
came to the house, but then almost at once his face changed in ways I had no
hope of making out and went back to being something different, more different
than it had been, I thought, with a funny sort of twist to the corner of the
lower lip. I told him we were off, quietly now, and he got up straight away.

As
always it was a relief being in the car because people often said nothing to
each other in cars, and anyway there was the driving to be done. After a few
minutes, though, I started asking Steve what he had been up to the previous day
and he answered after a fashion. He had walked out. He had got on a bus. He had
arrived home. What time? No idea. He had gone to his room. Susan had been in
the sitting room, had she? No idea. What had she said to him? From here on the
answers stopped coming. It looked as if I was never going to know any more
about that afternoon.

I had
one last shot. ‘There must be something you remember,’ I said. ‘Never mind how
trivial.’

He
seemed to reflect for half a minute or so, then nodded slowly. ‘Actually there
is something.’

‘Let’s
have it then.’

‘You’re
not going to like it,’ he mumbled.

‘Don’t
worry, I’ll manage.’

‘Promise
not to be angry.

‘Of
course. I promise.’

‘Well,’
he said, staring in front of him, ‘I remember being born.’ I just managed not
to drive into the side of a bus. ‘What?’ I said. ‘I remember being born.
Everybody’s done their best to make me forget by telling a different story. Mum
says she brought me into the world and you say you’re my father and I don’t
really blame either of you — you probably believe it yourselves by this time.
And everybody else believes it and no wonder. But I’ve had the message so often
on television and in ads and the street names and the names on shops and even
the labels on bottles of sauce and things, so many times I can remember it,
actually being born. Well, I say born, attaining consciousness would be better,
more precise. It was like a great light being switched on.

‘Yeah,
I was put together by these alchemists using the philosopher’s stone.’ He was
smiling cheerfully now. ‘Kept in a vault in Barcelona till needed, then
triggered off by radio beam. And here I am, ready to begin my task.’ At that he
looked guilty and nervous, as though he felt he had let slip something
important. ‘Er, I want to thank you for all your kindness, Mr Duke. Oh, and I
think we should go on calling each other father and son in public. For security
reasons. You understand.’

I
pulled in to the side of the road and stopped behind a van delivering a lot of
eggs. I spent five minutes or so trying to get myself to think that it was all
just part of his madness, nothing to do with rejecting me or his mother, while
thinking under zero pressure that whatever happened or was said in the future I
would always feel I had had some hand, somehow, in bringing about his
condition. Nobody could prove the contrary. Perhaps nobody could prove anything
of importance. Having reached this conclusion I drove on, since I was going to
have to some time.