Stanley and the Women (35 page)

‘Yes,’
he said quite briskly. ‘Yes, I would, I am. Unofficially, I’m telling you
unofficially that as from the end of the month your services in your present
post will no longer be required.’

‘Oh,
yeah,’ I said, wondering if the house in Hampstead was burning down as I sat
there, and then saw he was looking at me with an awful sort of World War II
film admiral’s smile.

‘But
your services as motoring correspondent of this newspaper are very much in
demand, my dear Stanley. Unofficially, the Board have been dissatisfied with
the present arrangement for some time. Then, well, I just happened to run into
your ex’s husband, old Bert Hutchinson, I think I told you I see him in the
Ladbroke Arms from time to time, and he said, well, he said he’d had a long
talk with you recently and he said he’d never come across anybody who knows as
much about cars as you do.’ Did he? What had I said? When? ‘And
cares
about
them, he made a big point of that. And that’s … essential,’ said Harry with
a lot of sincerity. ‘And I know you’ve always wanted to be a writer.’ How could
he know that? What could possibly have made me tell him? Where? ‘So … I
went away, and I had a small think, and I dropped a word, and you’ll be hearing
… soon. I hope you’re pleased, Stan.’

‘Oh
yes.’ I was, or I would be one day. ‘Thank you very much,’ I went on, trying to
sound as though I believed he had done it all himself.

‘Forget
it, lad. I just passed on a thought, that’s all. Yes, nice to do that little
thing on my way out. I’m er, I’m changing jobs myself. Going to edit a new
English-language newspaper in South Africa. Quite a, you know, what would you
say, a challenge.’

‘You
bet.’

‘I
thought it was time to make a shift. I thought if I don’t do it now I’m never
going to.’

‘That’s
the spirit.’

As soon
as I had spoken a horrible silence started. I could hardly spring up and be
gone so soon after hearing these two fair-sized bits of news, at least I felt I
hardly could, but at the same time I could think of nothing to say. Neither
could Harry, it seemed, or rather, much worse than that, I saw he could think
of something all right, but was far from sure whether he could or should or
wanted to say it. The moment had come for him to ask me to marry him. His mouth
opened I slid my right foot round till it was alongside the front leg of my
chair, heel lifted ready to give me a good take-off on my dash for the door.

‘I’m
going to tell you something I’ve never told anybody else,’ he began. He had his
hands clasped in front of him on the desk. ‘You’ll have noticed I not only have
no wife, I also have no lady friend of any sort and as far as you know never
have had. That’s right. Some people of course have worked out that that must
mean I’m, you know, queer.’ He considerately went straight on at this point to
save me having to start pretending I had never been one of those people. ‘Well,
I suppose I might be, deep down. All I can say to that is, it would have to be
bloody deep down, Jack. No, as regards the
direction
of my sexual urges,
you might call it boringly normal. But when we come to their
intensity,
then
it’s a different picture.’

He
ground out his cheroot in slow motion while we both in different ways thought
about the picture. ‘Sub,’ he said abruptly. ‘Definitely sub. About once a month
to six weeks. Speeds up a bit in the winter, I’ve noticed, funnily enough.
Anyway, no problem, I get on the blower, by the time I’m along there she’s
ready and waiting, back indoors within the hour. Never let them come to me.
Last time that happened she wanted to
stay the night
and I had a devil
of a job shifting her. I’ve been going to the same one for over ten years now.
No point in chopping and changing. They’re all built the same.’

While
he told me this much Harry had mostly looked away from me but had kept flicking
his eyes to my face. Now, with the hard part presumably done, he relaxed a bit,
lit another cheroot and gave me more of a proper glance, and when he went on he
took his time.

‘I don’t
suppose it’s ever occurred to you, Stanley, to work out what it costs you to be
married, even with the wife working. Well, it wouldn’t, I dare say, your type
of bloke. It occurred to me, though, very early in the game. You obviously get
considerably more out of it, out of marriage, that is, than I would in all
sorts of ways. But for someone like me it’s simply not on.’

He
spoke in an impressive, statesmanlike way, thumping the desk with his fist. ‘As
a commercial transaction it’s just
not on.
Your money,’ he said,
managing to make it sound really grand, up there on a level with your country
and your old mother, ‘draining away twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week
on goods and services that are …
non-requisite
and …
non-pleasurable.
Like Christmas all the year round. In 1969 men in Great Britain lost
control on average of sixty-two per cent of their disposable income on getting
married, according to my calculations. And it won’t have gone down since, will
it? Not with all this liberation. That’s a laugh, that is.’ He laughed. ‘Liberation
from what, pray? But we’d better not start on that. Just remember that wives in
developed countries are in effect many times more highly paid for their
contribution than any other group, certainly any other unskilled workers. And
all this is assuming an average sex life. Whereas in my case …

‘What
about companionship?’ I asked, feeling somebody should.

He
seemed puzzled. ‘Having another person round the house, you mean?’

‘Well,
a bit more than that. To talk to, share things with kind of style.’

‘M’m. I
should imagine that would go along with a normal sex drive. Obviously does, in
fact. I’m not trying to lay down a general law. The arrangement suits most
people. I mean most men. Needless to say it suits most women. Well …’

He
looked at his watch and we both stood up. But he had not quite finished. ‘In a
way, you know, I don’t really mind if here and there I get suspected of being a
faggot. It’s nothing so dreadful these days. Certainly far less objectionable
to me than giving someone else my money to spend for the rest of my life. But
the result is, of being suspected of it is it’s harder to make friends, men
friends that is of course. For instance I’d have liked to get to know you
better, Stan, but it wasn’t to be. And then when a man on his own has passed
his first youth there’s a lot he doesn’t get invited to. Eh, the world’s made
for the marrieds. It’s taken a mortal time for all that to sink in in my case.
I intend to do something about it when I get to Cape Town. I can’t do anything
about being on my own, at least I won’t, but I can have had a wife in England
now rather long dead. Something never discussed. See you before I go.’

All the
way back to my office I succeeded in not collapsing with woe at the thought of
the friendship that never was. Once or twice during Harry’s recital I had
wondered whether his sexual policy might be based on a deep, perhaps
unconscious hatred or horror of women, but I concluded now that it was nothing
more than hatred and horror of exposing his wallet to the light. In the eyes of
most men this was surely a more powerful disincentive to chumming up with him
than any inklings of faggotism. He had incidentally not explained what he had
against the common practice of other non-marriers, picking girls up at parties
and putting them down on the morrow — cheaper, you might have thought, than a
Harry-type solution. Ah, but only in theory. You never knew what you might be
letting yourself in for in the way of providing a hot bath or a cooked
breakfast, lending cab fare with nothing in writing about getting it back, etc.
Still, I had to thank him for neither saying what a shame he had always thought
it was that Nowell and I had failed to make a go of things nor asking meaningly
if things were all right at home. But then perhaps he had never felt much
personal commitment to either concern.

Lindsey was looking very
trim when she turned up in the pub just after six, even healthier than usual
and sort of better defined, as though I were seeing her closer to. Her
high-collared metal-buttoned jacket and tan boots gave an outdoorsy effect.
From the start she paid close attention to everything I said and quite soon
she was paying it to my story of what had happened up to and including Susan’s
exit. She, Lindsey, made some faces and a few noises at high or low points but
she came out with none of those dispensable prompts I had known females to hand
out so as to stay in shot while someone else tried to talk. I carried on for
about ten minutes instead of the couple of weeks I could easily have filled.
When it was over she went to the bar for more drinks, getting them just in time
before the place filled up in a wink like a lift on the underground.

‘Well I
never did,’ she said. ‘Do you think she actually went and stabbed herself like
that?’

‘No, I
… No. A clever, educated woman like Susan, with a responsible job, always
in such marvellous control of herself? Surely not. After all I’ve been living
with her for four years now. The thing’s too messy, too hasty. Rubbishy. Silly.
No. Though I suppose I must have —’

‘She’d
have been doing it on the spur of the moment right enough. And when somebody
like that loses control they lose it good and proper. Oh, she’s capable of it,
believe me.’

‘So you
say.’

‘So
would others say if you ever got a chance to ask them. Listen, in those four
years have you ever met any of her friends from before?’

‘Well,
there’s her boss, old Robbie Whatname Jamieson, and his wife, and a fellow
called … No, not a lot, not really.’

‘She
does that, she cuts off completely and moves on. Do you know, she’s never been
near any of the people we used to know at Somerville in the Sixties? What you’ve
got to grasp, Stanley, what you’ve got to take in is she’s mad. Off her
educated head. It was educated in an interesting way, which I don’t imagine you
know about either.’

The
fruit-machine started up. Apparently without meaning it or even noticing,
someone gave me a boof in the small of the back that neatly sent me off my
stool. Someone else came with his pint and stood so close that his bent elbow
hid Lindsey’s face. She shifted and looked at me through her glasses, which
were very clean and had crimson frames that day.

‘Would
you like to come home, Stan?’

‘Oh, I’d
love to.’

When we
had been at home, in her stately garden flat off Fulham Road, for some little
time, she said, ‘You’re not really Jewish at all, are you darling?’

‘No. My
grandfather came from East Anglia. Well, I suppose he could have come from Tel
Aviv before that but he didn’t. I know I look it a bit.’

‘All
right, but what about this then?’

‘Lindsey,
where have you been? Oh, of course, I was forgetting. Just let me tell you that
over
here
that’s been done to practically everybody from way back. Even
lower-class turds. It’s supposed to help you to pee or something.’

‘Look,
I know it’s a dodgy topic, but you are lower-class, aren’t you darling? Just
between ourselves, naturally.’

‘I was
before I came up in the world, true, but lower-middle-class, not working-class.
Very important distinction. My old dad got really wild if you said he was
working-class. Worse than calling him a Jew.’

‘You do
go on about it a bit, don’t you?’

‘I’d
drop it like a shot if people would let me. And you asked. And which bit of the
mick working class do you come from, Lucas?’

‘That’s
much worse than calling your father a Jew. Micks are Catholics, bog Irish, and
I’m right bang in the middle of the middle class — I’ll have you know my father’s
a big wheel in the Manpower Services Commission, and everybody there talks with
this hick accent except the real nobs who’ve been to school in England.
And
the
family home’s in Lisburn, which is the Godalming of the Six Counties. A very
nice place, Northern Ireland. Lovely and quiet. Oh, if you’re a bloody fool and
know just where to go you can get your head blown off all right, but it’s quiet
everywhere else. No race problem. Peaceful.’

She
stopped speaking on the last word. I thought of suggesting that it was rather
quaint to say a place had no race problem when it was all Irish there, but then
thought not. In a minute or two I was deep into one of the nicest silences I
could remember for a long time. It was not quite total —not much traffic came
down this way, but I heard a couple of taxis, muffled though by the old thick
windows and the heavy curtains, scattered footsteps passed, and now and then I
caught Lindsey’s breathing, so slow I thought she must be asleep. The things in
the rest of my life were still there, only for the time being there was nothing
they could do. Very little light came into the room, just enough to make out
the dark patch that was her head and the white of her shoulder. Eventually I
sighed and shifted. She was awake after all and got me wrong, though not
seriously.

‘Do you
want a drink?’ she asked without moving.

‘Not
yet, thank you. Darling.’

Later
on I did have a drink, a Scotch and water actually, and called the number I had
been given for Nash. It answered so quickly that someone must have either
happened to be dusting the telephone at the time or been sitting waiting for it
to ring.