Stanley and the Women (36 page)

‘Yes?’ A
harsh, uninformative voice.

‘May I
speak to Dr Nash, please?’

‘Who are
you?’ A woman, not very young, posh, like Alethea as much as anyone.

‘Duke’s
the name. I was hoping to —’

‘Who
are you?’ Drunk.

‘My son
is one of Dr Nash’s —’

‘Get
off this line and stay off it.’ Like a send-up of a ham actor being
threatening. Also mad. ‘He’s not coming …
got it?
He’s staying right
here, okay? And that is straight from the horse’s mouth, brother. You can tell
your
floosies
that Dr Nash regrets he will be unable to attend the …
ffffunction.’

I went
on standing there by the oriental-style earthenware umbrella jar in Lindsey’s
hall listening to this and feeling a certain amount of a charlie, none the less
quite incapable of coming up with something to say. Then after another word or
two from the drunken upper-crust madwoman there was a sudden complete silence
at the far end, the sort you get when somebody puts his hand over the
mouthpiece. Then Nash came on.

‘Hallo,
Alfred Nash here, who is calling?’

His
composure was so ironclad that for more than an instant I thought I must have dreamt
up the contents of the last half-minute. Of course, being that much older he
must be more used to them, though perhaps … I just beat him to asking again
by telling him who I was, then went on to fill him in about Steve, who I said
had attacked his stepmother. ‘I wish you’d go and see him there, doctor,’ I
said finally. ‘I’m worried about him. The woman is a dangerous psychopath,
sorry, I mean, you know, a hysterical neurotic.’

Only a
touch more sharply he said, ‘What, what woman is that?’

‘Er, Dr
—’

‘Yes
yes, Dr Collings, m’m. M’m. As it happens I can visit your son tomorrow
morning.’

‘I was
going over then myself. Shall I meet you there?’

‘Would
you forgive me a moment?’ More dead silence, for a bit longer this time. When
he emerged again there was a sort of echo of a yell in the background. ‘No, I
think I should advise you to stay away, Mr Duke,’ he said consideringly. ‘I’ll
see you at New Harley Street at twelve, if that’s all right.’

‘I’ll
be there. This is very kind of you.’

‘Well.
The alternative was a workshop on social psychiatry.’

He hung
up with headlong speed, so much so that he chopped off half the last syllable.
I helped myself to another drink and took a refill in to Lindsey, who was
sitting up in bed, though not very far. She looked about two without her
glasses.

‘Cheers,’
she said. ‘Every success.’

‘Thanks.
With what?’

‘Your
new job. Car critic.’

‘Oh
that.’ I had honestly not thought of it above once since telling her on the way
here. ‘I hope I take over in time for the Motor Show. Of course I was going
anyway but only as a bloke, as it were.’

She
could just about have managed without this information, I reckoned, and the
same was true of one or two of the things I went on to tell her, but I was set
on keeping control of the conversation because of a superstitious feeling that
it would be a good-luck sign if Susan stayed unmentioned till we were out of
the flat and, as arranged earlier, in the quite good Greek restaurant a couple
of streets away. As it turned out I won bonus points for a further hold-off up
to when we had ordered. Then I could stand it no longer.

‘You
were saying something about the way she was educated. Susan.’

‘None
other. Yes, she didn’t go to school, or only for a term, then her parents had
to take her away and get her tutored at home. She was terribly homesick and was
subjected to the most frightful bullying.’ Lindsey did a better job on Susan’s
accent than I would have expected, but she was still not as good as Mrs Shillibeer.
‘You hadn’t heard that, I take it.’

‘No.
How did you hear about it? Isn’t that funny, she never said anything to me
about that part of her life and I never thought to ask her.’

‘She
told me is how I heard about it. Well, by the time you came along it must have
dawned on her that those facts are a pretty unprepossessing lot.’

‘What
are you talking about? She couldn’t help them.’

‘Only
if you take them at their face value. You think of what happens at school, at
any school. There are two things everyone gets plenty of, enough and to spare,
especially at first — opposition and competition. Susan hates those. She won’t
have them. Who does she think she is or he think he is, that was her watchword
at Oxford. When the answer would be like the Principal of the college or the
Professor of English Language and Literature, you know, bloody understrappers
of that kidney, with no right to make Susan Daly do what she didn’t want to do
or prevent her from doing what she wanted to do. And then, she was bright as
hell and that tutor must have been damn good, but when the final exams came
along she had a breakdown. Couldn’t sit. Well, you can never know with a thing
like that, but my feeling was at the time, she might not have got a First, you
see, and Kate Oliver who we were both friendly with was going to get one, and
did. She wasn’t speaking to Kate anyway by then because Kate had told a lot of
lies about her to her boyfriend and taken him off her. Maybe. How it looked to
me was he met Kate through her and fancied Kate better. I wouldn’t have said
thank you for him myself. He was reading engineering.’

‘Oh,
yeah. Er, did you ever met her first husband? Book illustrator, wasn’t he?’

‘Mainly.
I never met him but I heard a bit about him. Illustrating books was what he
liked doing best, well you know what I mean. What he liked doing next best was
looking at books that had illustrations by other people and reading books about
them. He liked doing anything like that much better than going to parties that
had writers and artists and people like that at them.’

‘Well,
I must say I can see his … Good God.’

‘What’s
up?’

‘Nothing,
I’ve just remembered something somebody told me about Nowell. Any more on this
fellow?’

‘Apparently,
I’ve forgotten who I had this from but he didn’t go about the business of
illustrating books in an intelligent way. He wanted to do good illustrations in
serious books, proper books. Not trendy illustrations in trendy books that made
a lot of money.’

‘I don’t
believe it,’ I said, not telling nothing but the truth.

‘Suit
yourself, Stanley, it’s only what I heard.’

With
disastrous timing the waiter brought the humous and the taramasalata and the
rest of it at this point, failing miserably to encroach on an intimate moment
or kill a punch line. I put my hand out to my glass and then left it. Easy on
the ouzo tonight, and not just that either.

Lindsey
caught my movement. ‘You’re not drinking. Not by your standards.’

‘No,
sod it. Daren’t. Getting into practice. Motoring correspondent loses licence?
It’s going to change my bleeding life. Turn driving into just another thing I
do, like playing squash or writing letters to the motoring press. Don’t know
how I’ll adjust to it.’

After a
pause she said quietly, ‘Do you want to talk about your son?’

‘No,’ I
said. ‘No, I don’t want to talk about him.’

‘Worse
than Susan, isn’t it?’

I
nodded.

‘I know,
I nearly lost my younger one six years ago. Hit and run. She was … Sorry.’

‘Go
back to those bleeding schooldays of Susan’s,’ I said. ‘And what were they
exactly, those unprepossessing facts?’

‘She
had to be taken away from school — had to be? — because, one, she was homesick.
Translation — she very much wanted to be back in a place where she could do
what she wanted to do all the time. Two, the bullying. Translation — some of
the other little girls got rather cheesed off with the way she kept trying to
do what she wanted to do all the time, including queening it over the rest of
them, and showed her a bit of opposition. I used to wonder how much. Telling
her to pipe down, I dare say. Perhaps getting together and jeering at her and
even pulling her hair. Fiendish things like that.

‘Her
parents came up to Oxford once, at least I saw them once. The old lady was very
straightforward about looking at me as if I was talking Swahili whenever I
opened my mouth, which wasn’t often after the first minute as you might
imagine. And looking at the others for help too. You know, for Christ’s sake don’t
leave me alone with this savage.’

‘Yes,
actually I do know.’

‘But
the old gentleman was the one. Would you believe it, you probably wouldn’t
believe it but he said to me when she’d gone off for a pee or something, he
said, honest he said, “What do you think of my little gel? Rather splendid, isn’t
she?” That’s what he said. I told you you wouldn’t believe it.’

‘Nor I
do. Else he was trying to be funny.’

‘He was
not trying to be funny, Stanley. He was, how shall I put it, he was the
archetype of the ridiculously indulgent father who worships the ground his
little gel walks on and, you know, fancies her quite a bit. Oh yes. Seriously.
I don’t mean of course anything happened, nowhere near, but it was there, there
was something there. Obviously it’s all years ago now.’

‘Look,
love, this is fascinating, and I believe every word of it, but you started off
by saying you thought she was quite capable of er, putting on a show like the
one with the knife, and that’s what I really want to hear about. Is there any
more to come? I mean what you’ve told me so far …’

‘What
about it?’ asked Lindsey when I failed to go on.

‘I was
going to say just, the whole thing sounds no worse than the dossier of any
other deranged bleeding completely wrapped up in herself female, and then I
remembered I always thought she was better than that. I thought she was, you
know, reasonable and listened to what you said to her and you could disagree
with her.’

‘You
could until it started to matter. You gave her a soft ride from what you’ve
told me in the past, and then quite suddenly she finds she’s coming second. And
the lady simply is not cut out for coming second.

‘Now Stanley
dear, I hope you believe I’d never have breathed a word of this if things had
been going on as before. But now they’re all over the shop … I wasn’t going
to tell you, sweetheart, but there was this time a friend of Kate’s gave a
party in her digs, nothing grand, I was there, just drinks before hall, and old
Susan thought she ought to have been invited, well maybe. Anyway, after about
an hour she walked in carrying a bottle of champagne and looking, well, I’d
read about people’s faces looking like masks, but hers really did. Everybody
said Hallo, rather awkward like, and she didn’t say anything, but she hurled
the bottle of champagne clean through the window of this sitting room place
which was on the first floor, and the thing burst like a bloody bomb in the
street, lucky it didn’t hit anyone, and then she just went wild and smashed
every glass and everything she could get her hands on until she was, you have
to say overpowered, it took about four rugger-players to hold her down. Then
she started crying and apologizing, and that went on a long time. Oh, there was
no doubt about who’d come first that evening, not in popularity, no, but in
attention-grabbing she was well in front.

‘Afterwards
she said she didn’t know what had got into her. I thought about it a fair
amount. That bottle of champagne now, a fucking expensive missile if that’s all
you’d ever wanted it for. A half-brick would have done just as well. I reckoned
what she’d done, she’d bought the champagne and was going to come and hand it
over as a gift to the hostess, a gift with a kind of a string to it because it
would put paid to any crap about not being invited. A performance that would
have made a bit of a stir for a short while, nothing like what she did do. She
changed her mind at the last minute, perhaps as late as when she came into the
room and saw all the buggers laughing and chattering and boozing happily away
without her. Acting on the spur of the moment. Like I bet she did with that
knife last night.’ Lindsey had turned quite grim, staring at me through the big
lenses. ‘As for being mad, you should have seen her face that time. She was
unrecognizable, well I recognized her but I wouldn’t have if, what, if I’d
passed her in the street. Off her head. Temporarily. Or temporarily letting it
show.’

From
being well on the way to something like certainty that Susan had been telling
the truth about the knife I was now back to not knowing what I believed or felt
about any of that. Or anything else I could turn my mind to. Trying to think was
like picking through a rubbish-dump looking for nothing in particular.
Eventually I said, ‘If this hadn’t come up I might never have found out about
her,’ only because I had been able to see how to get to the end of the
sentence.

‘Something
else would have, it was bound to. People like that, it’s as if they have to
make something like that happen sooner or later. Their natures need it. Like a
drunk wanting a fight. They’re more bothered about getting one than where it
comes from.’