Stanley and the Women (37 page)

‘Why
did she marry me?’

For
once Lindsey was stumped for a quick answer, or more likely turned down the one
she first thought of. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re successful, but in a different
line so you wouldn’t be competing with her, you gave her a lot of rope and what
the fuck can I say, Stanley dear, you’re a nice enough fellow and quite an
attractive fellow and I should imagine she was as fond of you as she could be
of anybody. Still is, I dare say, or could be again.’

With
the last few words the waiter brought the moussaka and the stifadou and the
rest of the rubbish, which was not much but the worst he could manage in the
circumstances. Susan was shut out of the conversation after that but she hung
about in my head, not the look of her but the feel of her presence, the kind of
thing I got when I came into the house and knew she was there even though there
was nothing to see or hear. Oh well, it would be all right when we were back in
the flat, I thought to myself, and Lindsey seemed to have the same idea,
turning down sweet and coffee and looking at her watch. But then when we were
back drinking the coffee she had made she put me right on more than one point.
Actually the way she measured me with her eye told me most of it before she
opened her mouth.

‘I’m
sorry, Stanley, but —’

‘Barry
due back, is he?’ I had seen signs of male occupation, though long rather than
short term, Suits but no shirts, boots, slippers and plimsolls but only one
pair of shoes. ‘Or somebody?’

‘No,
nobody. Just, I have these interviews fixed in Glasgow tomorrow and I’m getting
the sleeper up there tonight, and I have to put my gear together first. So if
you —’

‘Fly up
in the morning,’ I said, knowing it was hopeless. ‘I’ll drive you to the
airport.’

‘No,
sweetheart, I can’t, I’d like to but everything’s arranged.’

‘But as
long as I … No of course, I see.’

She
refused my offer of a lift to the station in half an hour from now, as it would
have been. Whether to put her gear together or not she clearly wanted some time
to herself before she took off. Quite understandable. On the way to the front
door I realized I had got as far as not being sure what names to give our
second child if it was a girl. Ha ha, very funny.

‘Sorry,
darling,’ she said. ‘This was all fixed up a couple of weeks ago and you only
rang this morning.’

‘I
know. It’s all right. See you when you get back.’

‘I don’t
like thinking of you going back to that empty house.’

‘I’m
not mad about it myself.’

At the
Paki supermarket in Hampstead I bought a jar of crunchy peanut butter, a pot of
savoury spread, a large jar of pickled onions, a jar of sweet pickle, a small
sliced white loaf, a packet of Cheddar, a packet of Brazil nut kernels, a box
of liqueur chocolates and a box of chocolate truffles. The other things I
needed, butter and whisky, were in stock at home. I unpacked the stuff on the
kitchen table, drank some whisky and thought about laundrettes, Chinese
takeaways and kindred matters for some minutes. Then I rang Cliff, late as it
was, and told him the score. By now I had got it down to about five sentences.

He
seemed more shaken than I had expected him to be. After a silence he said, ‘So
you’re on your own there.’

‘Yes.’

‘Has
she gone for good, do you think?’

‘I don’t
know.’

‘Well,
we can’t discuss it now,’ he said rather peevishly, and there was another short
pause. Then, ‘Come to dinner tomorrow, I mean supper. Just the three of us.’
When I had accepted he said, ‘So I’ll see you in the Admiral Byron about seven,
where it’ll just be the two of us. Stan, I’m sorry.’

Nash said, ‘I think we can
be reasonably confident that he’ll now be more or less suitably looked after
and will be given suitable treatment, at any rate for a time. The effect of
that assault … which you described to me… he went into his spaced-out
mode, ‘one effect … has been to put the fear of God into Dr Collings. Even
she rather balks at the idea of an unmedicated and … presumptively violent
patient of hers on the loose. You can discount her threat of discharging your
boy. Sheer anger. She spoke out of sheer anger at her … apparent
professional failure. As you surmised.’

‘I’m
still not happy about leaving my son in her charge,’ I said.

‘Nobody
could be
happy
at the thought of someone in that position with the ideas
that she professes to hold. But while in the intervals of talking modish
twaddle, or even démodé twaddle, she administers reasonably appropriate
chemotherapy … The boy would find much the same thing in most other places.
A different line in twaddle, perhaps.’

‘I see.
Dr Nash, I should tell you that there is a possibility that my wife’s wound was
self-inflicted.’

He
looked as though I had told him that somebody was dead, lowering his eyes,
sighing deeply and sitting in silence for a time. Eventually he said, ‘With the
aim of bringing about the result I’ve just described to you? To get shot of the
lad, was that the idea?’

‘Could
be. But I think more likely for my benefit, to draw attention away from him and
on to herself.’

He had
started doing little rapid nods before I was halfway through. ‘If you come to
any conclusion on the matter, however tentative, I hope you’ll let me know.
Talk to Dr Wainwright about it.’

‘I
will. When she thought I doubted her story she walked out. Left me.’ It came
out without much in the way of intention.

This
news he took more or less in his stride, as something almost to be expected,
but he said seriously enough, ‘You have my profound sympathy in all senses of
the word.’

‘Doctor,
if we assume my son did attack my wife,’ — now there was a ridiculous phrase if
ever there was one — ‘does that make his prospects of recovery a lot worse? I’m
afraid that’s not very well put.’

‘I
follow you perfectly. No. In effect, in itself no. In the sense that very
violent cases may recover and harmless peaceable ones become and remain isolated.
But as I said I would welcome information on the point.’

I
waited for a bit in the hope that he would offer me sherry for something to
say, but he held his peace. I said hesitantly, ‘Could we go back to Dr Collings
for a moment? When we talked about her before, I thought you were saying, of
course it was difficult in front of my wife, but I thought you were saying that
she was getting at me, sorry, that Dr Collings was getting at me out of sheer
malice, and I
thought
you meant that she was simply trying to …’

‘Fuck
you up because you were a man,’ said Nash, disconcerting me to some extent. ‘Yes,
Mr Duke, that was what I meant. As you say, I was a little inhibited by your
wife’s presence.

‘But
surely, Dr Nash, that’s not enough of a motive on its own to make somebody, you
know, in a professional matter like that, with these very important things at
stake …’

‘Not
enough of a motive?’ His voice had gone high. ‘Fucking up a man? Not enough of
a motive? What are you talking about? Good God, you’ve had wives, haven’t you?
And not impossibly had some acquaintance with other women as well? You can’t be
new to feeling the edge of the most powerful weapon in their armoury. You must
have suffered before from the effect of their having noticed, at least the brighter
ones among them having noticed, that men are different, men quite often wonder
whether they’re doing the right thing and worry about it, men have been known
to blame themselves for behaving badly, men not only feel they’ve made mistakes
but on occasion will actually admit having done so, and say they’re sorry, and
ask to be forgiven, and promise not to do it again, and mean it. Think of that!
Mean it. All beyond female comprehension. Which incidentally is why they’re not
novelists and must never be priests. Not enough of a motive? They don’t have
motives as you and I understand them. They have the means and the opportunity,
that is enough.’

At the
start of this he had stared at me in what looked like stark fear, wondering
whether I might not be an android or have been taken over by an alien entity.
After that he calmed down, though not completely by any means, and now went
back most of the way to the stark-fear mode when he said, ‘For God’s sake tell
me you know what I’m talking about.’

‘Oh, of
course I do. But the way I see it, they have motives of a sort. It’s the sort
that’s frightening. I think Collings let Steve out of hospital and took him off
drugs to punish me for ticking her off for —’

‘Oh,
there’ll have been some trigger, no doubt,’ he said, making a sideways
neck-chop motion. ‘In sufferers from rabies a touch on the arm or showing a
bright light is sufficient to provoke a violent suffocative paroxysm. No doubt
you did annoy or displease the woman in some way. What of it?’

‘Well,
I think that makes her unfit to be in charge of —’

‘Forget
it, my dear fellow. If things went that far, can you imagine yourself telling a
tribunal that in your opinion a certain qualified doctor and psychiatrist is
unfit to be in charge of a certain case because in your opinion she has been
swayed by personal motives? A tribunal that included at least one woman? Take
your time.’

‘I don’t
need any. No.’

‘So be
it. Let’s leave Dr Collings, Mr Duke. I’ll, I’ll see to her, or keep her in
order. My turn to go back. On our first meeting, at your house, do you remember
my asking you if you thought all women were mad?’

‘Very
clearly,’ I said. ‘And I told you I thought a lot of them were. Well, what’s
happened in the meantime hasn’t exactly forced me to change my mind.’

‘I find
that very natural. Would you say, would you go as far as to say that the real
mad people are not the ones in mental hospitals, like your son, but …
women, certain women?’

‘It’s
tempting. Or rather —’

‘It is
tempting. Half of it, anyway.’ Yes, he was calm, and yet not relaxed, holding
himself down or in, mentally biding his time to leap out at you. ‘It seems you
hold to your view on certain selected women. M’m. That’s young Wainwright’s
view, of course, or on the way to it. He thinks they’re all mad, or says he
does. Of course one must bear in mind that in the ordinary way a general
practitioner has very little contact with insane people. Neurotic people, on
the other hand…’

‘For
God’s sake, Dr Nash, does somebody have to be frothing at the mouth or going
for you with an axe or chattering about reincarnated Old Testament prophets
before you’ll pass them as mad? Can’t they be mad part-time, a bit mad? Like
you can have a grumbling appendix without actually …’

Nash
was not listening. His chest slowly filled with air. This was going to be the
big one. ‘Would … that … they …
were
… mmmmad,’ he
grated out in five loud sliced-off screeches, displaying his off-white teeth
and looking far from sane himself. ‘If only … they
were
… off their
heads.
Then we could treat-’em, lock-’em-up, bung-’em-in-a-straitjacket,
cut-’em-off-from-society. But they’re not. They’re not.’

He
sprang up, came round his desk and advanced on me. I wondered briefly if he
took me for a transvestite, a male impersonator, but he was only on the first
leg of a series of pacings to and fro. ‘Mad people,’ he went on in a tone not
much less strung-up than before, ‘can’t run their lives, they’re incapable of
dealing with reality. How many women are like that? Mad people are hopelessly
muddled with their thoughts, their feelings, their behaviour, their talk at
variance with one another and all over the place. Does that sound like a
description of a woman? Mad people are confused, adrift, troubled, even
frightened. What woman is? — really is, I mean.

‘No,’
he said, starting another crescendo. ‘No. They’re not mad. They’re all too
monstrously, sickeningly,
terrifyingly
sane. That’s the
whole
trouble.
That’s the whole trouble,’ he repeated in his normal voice,
blinking and moving his head about like a fellow coming round after a blackout.
‘Well, Mr Duke, I hope your marital difficulties sort themselves out. Because
after all one has to
be
married. That’s where they’ve … Now I know
you’re a busy man and I too have things to do. We will be in touch.’

At the
door he said, ‘Your boy has a good chance.’

I was as busy as I could
manage to be for the rest of the day. I kept trying to throw off the thought of
Steve, then when trying to think about Susan instead kept breaking down. I
switched to trying to work out why I had the feeling that he would never be
back. Perhaps it came from something Nash had said that morning. But he had
said very little on the matter and nothing new. Perhaps there had been
something in his manner, something more unhopeful than his words. Perhaps, more
likely, it went back to the previous morning and the tiny glimpse I had had of
Steve as he used to be, an instant and complete reminder of the person I had
already started to forget. No doubt what could happen once for a second could
in theory happen again for longer, and I did my best to believe it without
getting very far. In the end I had no real idea at all why that Steve seemed
gone for good and the one I saw every day, the miserable, quaking, humourless
nitwit who was also my son, looked like being a fixture. As for him, it would
be better if he were dead, provided that could be arranged without him having
to die.