Stanley and the Women (34 page)

When
Steve and I eventually reached Gandhi’s pad Gandhi was not in it. But Collings was,
which would save me a walk. Also in attendance were the sister I had seen on my
first visit and since, name of Wheatley, the white-haired moaning loony I had
also seen before, not actually moaning at the moment, and another with no teeth
who was new to me.

Almost
straight away I said to Collings, ‘It looks as if he stabbed my wife. Took a
knife to her. Nothing too serious.

She
followed it up in a flash. ‘Looks as if?’ she repeated. ‘Did he or didn’t he?’

‘He did,’
I said without thinking at all. To believe anything else was ridiculous again. ‘I
just wasn’t there when it happened. But he did it.’

‘Are
you sure.

‘Of
course I’m sure.’ This time it was more that I spoke before I could think. ‘There
she is with a gash in her arm. What are you talking about?’

She was
hardly listening, looking into Steve’s face, looking at his eyes, feeling his
pulse. ‘This boy has been sedated,’ she said.

‘You
bet he has. That was Dr Wainwright’s doing, our GP, when he came to stitch up
my wife. I should have thought it was common sense.

More
no-listening. She sat on the corner of Steve’s bed next to him with her hand on
his shoulder, still looking at him closely, asking him now a string of quite
friendly questions about what he wanted to do and where he wanted to be, soon
agreeing that he should stay as he was for the moment and then get into bed if
he felt like it. I was just starting to think that she might be some good when
she turned towards me and said, ‘What have you been doing to your son?’

I
stopped breathing. The sister sent me a glance of sympathy with a touch of
despair. The white-haired loony did nothing but the toothless one, either
catching the feel of things or driven by a sudden extra bit of delusion, backed
into a corner and crouched there with his arms held out in front of him like a
wrestler’s. When the sister went over and spoke gently to him he dropped his
arms to his sides and started blinking and shaking his head very fast.

After a
while I gave up watching this and said to Collings, ‘Can we go somewhere and
have a talk?’

‘Here
will do, for anything you have to say to me, Stanley.’ Her tone, somewhere in
the anger-resentment bracket, did an unusually good matching job with her
expression. At the same time during what followed she kept switching them both
off and paying attention to Steve, now and then muttering to him too quietly
for me to hear.

‘Well,’
I said, ‘what do you mean, what have I done to him?’

‘It’s
obvious enough I should have thought. He goes through an acute phase, he starts
responding to treatment, he’s gradually pulling out and coming to terms with
himself and getting in touch with his emotions, doing so well that I put him
back with family, which in practice means you, and he promptly turns round and
retreats behind his defences again.’

‘Oh,
that’s what happened, is it? I thought you took him off his drugs and he
promptly tried to join the Arab secret service, climbed a tree to insulate himself
from blokes who were reading his mind with radio waves and went for his
stepmother with a knife.’

While I
was saying this she sent Sister Wheatley out of the room to fetch or do
something or other and then took a bit of notice of me. ‘If he did. It’s just
the sort of tale somebody might dream up if they wanted to get him taken off
their hands and back into hospital.’

‘You
think I,’ I said, and stopped, taking good care not to move my head suddenly in
case it fell off. ‘But if he didn’t…’ I stopped again.

This I
thought she missed altogether for what it was worth. ‘He’s obviously suffered
a major relapse and requires rehospitalization. All those weeks of work gone
for nothing,’ she said, glaring indignantly at me.

‘You’re
a scream, you are, Collings, and no mistake.’ I realized I must have sounded
fairly angry. ‘You decided Steve was ready to spend some of his time at home.
Wrong. You decided he was ready to come off drugs. Wrong again. Two whacking
errors of judgement that might have got somebody killed. And you put it all
down to me. Incidentally till a moment ago you must have thought I was a quite
fit person to be in charge of him, mustn’t you? Another floater.’

‘What’s
the matter with you? Been having trouble with Nowell again?’

‘Oh for
Christ’s sake,’ I said, and the white-haired loony gasped and winced and the
one with no teeth raised his arms as before. ‘You can’t stay ten years old for
ever,’ — the best I could do at short notice.

‘Don’t
you talk like that to me, my lad.’ She stared at me with her eyes half-shut and
her eyebrows lifted in the mysterious expression I had seen in the Crown and
Sceptre that time, only now there was no mystery any more. Sheer rage was there
but also menace, a stated purpose to level the score. ‘One more crack out of
you and I’ll discharge him and then you’ll fucking know all about it. Is that
clear?’

All my
own anger died away. I just felt a dull horror that a doctor, a woman, anybody
could turn a madman loose to avenge a passing slight. No, I felt incredulity
too — surely not, no one would, she was merely furious for the moment. But this
brought no comfort.

The
Sister came back into the room having fetched a file or part of one, presumably
Steve’s part. Collings started checking through it. I said goodbye to Steve in
the hope that he might at least raise his head, but he gave no sign of having
heard, so I went.

While I
was making my way through the boarding-house part of the ground floor I heard
my name called. As more than half expected it was Sister Wheatley. I turned
back.

‘I just
wanted to say, Mr Duke, I’ll keep an eye on Steve for you. Can I have your
telephone number?’ She wrote it efficiently down on a small pad from her top
pocket. ‘If anything, well, untoward happens I’ll let you know. It won’t
because she can’t afford it to, not anything awful, but I thought perhaps you might
like to have something you felt you could rely on. She’s all right really, just
a bit funny sometimes.’

‘That’s
very kind of you, Sister. Thank you,’ I said, and, and thought to myself you
got good and bad in every crowd. You know, like Germans.

Outside there was a lot of
sunshine, more than usual for the time of year, as bright as early evening in
summer. Immediately everyone and everything I had been thinking about up to
that moment fell away and I was stuck with just myself and having no wife. It
stayed with me throughout the drive to the office, the ride in the lift and the
short walk to the private phone, and barely started to shift when Lindsey Lucas
answered her extension, though it moved a bit further off when she agreed to
meet me in the Crown and Sceptre after work. When that was over I spent a
minute or so paying close attention to the wall, which had a great many
unspecified people’s numbers ball-pointed and otherwise written on it. Then I
rang Nash’s New Harley Street place and after an interval got some other male
who told me to ring him, Nash, at home that evening. I said I would, fine, but
the bloke hung about.

‘Is it,
er, very urgent?’

‘I
couldn’t say
very,
no. But I would rather like to see him as soon as
convenient.’

‘Oh.
Have you rung him before at that number? Recently?’

‘No,
never. Why?’

‘I
should, I should leave it till after seven if I were you. To make sure of
getting him, you know.’

‘Oh, I
see,’ I said. I wondered if I had struck Nash’s grandfather, or at least
somebody of that age-group. Then I thought whoever it was had sounded rather as
though he would have liked to warn me about something but had not known how.
Then I put the question aside. In my own office I sat for a time trying to work
up the energy to tackle the whole immense matter of Stentor PA Systems’
half-page. 1 had not got even as far as being able to start to think when my
phone rang and I clutched at it.

‘Stanley
Duke? Good morning, Penangan High Commission calling. I have the Commercial
Attaché for you.’

After a
pause and a click a voice I knew said, ‘Am I having Mr Joke?’

‘Yes,
speaking. Good morning, Mr One, I mean Mr Attaché. What can I do for you?’

‘Mr
Joke, I’m wanting to make some arrangements with you for four pages special
report in your newspaper. It must be soon because our Minister of Trade will
come to London next month for three days. Please telephone my secretary shortly
to arrange lunch.’

‘Is
this definite, Mr Attaché? The last time we discussed the project it was still
at the planning or provisional stage.’ I remembered that it was only simple
sentences that might throw Mr One — anything at all complicated he sailed
through.

‘Oh
yes, definite. My government has completed its explorations.’

‘That’s
fine — highly satisfactory. Tell me, sir, shall I be working with you direct or
with that observer I spoke to recently?’ Pretty crafty, I thought.

‘Observer?
What observer?’

‘At the
High Commission. That was what you — that was his official designation.’

‘Observer,’
said Mr One, lingering over the syllables. Eventually,
‘Haw,’
he howled
at some length, carried away by wonder at his own feat of memory. Like Mandy. ‘He
has been subducted.’

So now
I knew. The lunch itself would be eatable and drinkable and there would be the
fun of telling … Oh well, I had had a minute off.

When I
had put the phone back Morgan was there. ‘Stanley, you know that new girl, the
one with the cage?’

‘With
the what? Is that the same as the one with the rope?’

‘That’s
right. Going on like the hammers of hell she’s been, about sexual harassment.’

‘Really?
Lucky to get any you’d think, with that comb. The limping porter again, I
suppose.’

‘No, it’s
the bloody tea-lady. Asks her if she had a good you-know-what last night and
says she bets her boyfriend’s got a nice big how’s-your-father. In a nasty way,
she says, the girl.’

I
groaned. ‘M’m, it’s sexual in a sense, of course it is, and I can see how it
might be harassing for her, but it doesn’t quite add up to what the phrase is
supposed to mean, does it? Not that there’s the slightest point in telling her
so, I realize that. When were you talking to her?’

‘Now,
just while you were on the phone.’

‘Oh,
yeah, that was the King of Penang wanting four pages. Firm.’

‘Great.
Come and have a word with her, would you, Stanley? She’s in a hell of a tizzy.’

I
looked round for an escape route and there was Harry Coote brilliantly standing
in the doorway. I had not set eyes on him since what he quite likely thought of
as the night of the taxi. ‘Got a minute?’ he said.

Well, I
would have had a minute and more for Yasser Arafat at that stage rather than a
word with a female in a hell of a tizzy, in fact one in almost any foreseeable
condition. I told Morgan I would have the word later and he covered up his
disappointment like a man, meaning none of it showed.

Since my last visit
somebody had replaced Harry’s fish-tank with a piece of sculpture in a dark
blue veined material. The subject was probably a horse, or perhaps a cow, but
it was impossible to be sure because the artist had died half-way through the
job, or perhaps got fed up and left it. There was a new potted plant too with
hairy leaves.

Harry
sat down at his desk, which was completely bare but for a glass ashtray the
size of a dustbin-lid, and took out his cheroots. I noticed that the packet design
had a depressing Third-World look to it. ‘Any news?’ he asked.

‘Well,
the Penangans are taking those four pages.

‘Really.’
He showed at least as much enthusiasm at hearing this as Morgan had done. ‘How
long have you been in the job now?’

‘About
eighteen months longer than you’ve been in yours. That’s …’

‘Ever
thought of making a change?’

‘Not
seriously. Seeing as you ask.’

‘That
young fellow, now, what’s he called, your number two, nice young fellow, Morgan
something, Morgan, Morgan, Morgan
Wyndham,
Wyndham, tell me, Stan, in
your view, is he, would he be, er, assuming he was interested of course, but do
you think he’d be capable of running the show there for a time?’

‘Well
there again I haven’t done much in the way of thinking, Harry, to be quite
honest. Off the top of my head I reckon that’s about what he’d be, capable. He
doesn’t get ideas much. Why?’

‘Well,
as I’ve told you before I have my doubts whether advertising manager has ever
been the ideal outlet for your particular kind of expertise.’

‘Have
you now?’ I asked him when it seemed he had had his last word on the subject.
To my mind the conversation needed to get much funnier fast. ‘You wouldn’t be
trying to tell me something, Harry, would you?’