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Authors: Kingsley Amis

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Some of
this went through my head while I sat drinking Scotch and waiting for Cliff. As
I had found on previous visits with him, the Admiral Byron was frequented by
Scottish labourers, probably building workers, given to shouting unreassuringly
to one another. However, it seemed he had never seen an actual fight in here,
perhaps because of something one of the Scotsmen had gone out of his way to
explain to us, that anybody who looked like starting one was given a right good
hiding and thrown out. The staff changed frequently and only the landlord ever
knew what the place served or where it was kept, apart from the stuff on tap.
Nobody would have called it cosy — it was vast, hangar-like, the result of the
knocking-into-one of several smaller bars or even, to judge by the differences
of structure and style from one end to the other, a couple of separate pubs.
But it had no juke-box or fruit-machine and at the moment, before the Scotsmen,
it was quiet.

Cliff
came bustling in a little later than he had said, complaining as usual, quite
cheerfully as usual, this time mostly about the one-way traffic system and the
hospital staffs’ trade union with a bit about a urologist thrown in. Then quite
soon he looked at me and nodded his head several times and sighed.

‘There’s
a splendid fellow called Sydney Smith,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean, you know, that
fucking old fool.’

‘What
fucking old fool?’

He gave
a growl of disgust. ‘Of course, I keep forgetting you haven’t looked at a book
since you left school and precious few before. There was a posturing old ponce
of a clergyman in Jane Austen’s time, oh Christ, never mind, anyway he was
called Sydney Smith and a lot of people, people like, well I was going to say
Susan, er, think he was a bloody scream. But as I say I don’t mean him. Jesus.
Anyway,
my Sydney Smith wrote the standard work on forensic medicine, which I
suppose I’m going to have …’

‘No, I
can do that,’ I said. ‘Legal medicine. Medicine as regards the law.’

‘Man’s
a genius. Well, in this work there is naturally a chapter on self-inflicted
wounds.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yes,
oh. How a genuine wound inflicted on a person trying to protect himself or
herself against an assailant with a knife is usually on or in the hand,
sometimes the wrist, the inside of the wrist. That’s point one. The
characteristics of a self-inflicted wound are, made in a safe part of the body
unless of course we’re talking about throat-cutting et cetera, so not for
example the inside of the wrist where there are dodgy things like veins but for
example the forearm, the top or outside of the forearm.’ He made gestures in
case I had never bothered to find out what a forearm was. ‘Where Susan, er, was
wounded.

‘Next
thing, the cut will not penetrate what we medical johnnies call the true skin,
that’s your corium, a quarter of an inch or so deep in places like that. As
with Susan’s wound. Then, the cut follows the curvature of the body if that
part is curved, like the forearm. You can see how that wouldn’t happen with a
real stab. I’d have liked to take a better look but it’s a pound to a pinch of
shit that Susan’s wound did that. And the last thing but perhaps the most
telling, I’ve never quite understood why, but they all seem to have a dry run
or two first, little tentative nicks alongside the main wound, even the
cut-throat brigade — I’ve seen it. Anyway, there were a couple of those on
Susan’s arm. And there we are. I’d take my chance with a jury on it.

‘Bloody
silly of her, wouldn’t you say, apart from anything else? You’d think an
intelligent girl like that would realize it was on the cards there’d be some
sort of give-away. She must have got the idea one moment and done it the next,
on impulse. Mad as a hatter, like the lot of them. Must have seemed like a
heaven-sent opportunity when poor old Steve came wandering in. What a
marvellous bloody irony, eh, that it took that to get Collings and her gang to
start looking after him properly at Key’s. I talked to some Paki there.’

‘Yeah.
Nash went over.’

When
Cliff saw I had nothing more to offer about Nash he said, ‘Disasters are just
crappy things that happen, you know, Stan. It’s a waste of time to try to
explain them or make sense of them.’

‘Which
one are you talking about?’

‘Steve,
of course. I’m afraid I don’t regard the other one, her walking out that is, as
all that much of a disaster.’ When I made no reply to that he said, ‘Another
irony, if we’re collecting the buggers, is that she attains her object and
successfully got Steve out of her hair and now she’s not around to enjoy it.
What?’

‘Oh, I
don’t think that was her object. I think she was scene-stealing.’ It was clear
that he understood me immediately. ‘At least that was what I thought at the
time. I’m not so sure that I’m so sure now. It’s hard to feel it makes much
difference. I’ll tell Nash about her arm and the rest of it.’

‘I’ll
tell him, I want a word with him anyway. Let’s have it again now.

She
walked out on you because she thought you thought she’d stabbed herself and
said Steve did it, right?’

‘Next
time, take more care. She walked out
after saying
she knew I thought
that. After saying a great deal more besides. She was … mad with rage that
I’d seen through or I might have seen through an extremely dodgy operation she
may already have been regretting — as unwise, naturally, not bad form or
anything silly like that. If seen through, eh? it would show her up as some
kind of monster. At the same time she was calculating that anything short of
mad rage would be as bad as a half-hearted denial — but there of course she was
going by what her own reaction would have been and didn’t realize that a
wholehearted denial would have cut much more ice with me, or you or any other
man. But then again she was mad with rage. I must have annoyed her quite a bit
in the past and she’d bottled it up and it all came out at once. She was
frightened too — you showed you suspected her. What was that for, by the way?’

‘For
just that, to frighten her, frighten her off. I didn’t know what she might have
got up to next. I meant to signal to her but not to you, but I was so bloody
cross myself that I muffed it, clearly. Terrible how they drag us down to their
level, isn’t it? Crikey, you do know her well, Stan. Pity you didn’t before,
but then you never do, one doesn’t I mean. Did you work all that out in just
those couple of minutes just now?’

‘No, I
was on it all the time I was going round telling myself that of course the
whole thing was perfectly genuine. Men’s minds are funny things too, you know.
Oh, the rest of it was, the walking-out was an escalation of the bawling-out.
Plus it would have been a wee bit awkward for her to stay in the same house
after some of the things she’d said.’

‘She’ll
come walking back in again, won’t she?’ said Cliff a moment or two later.

‘No.
Live with a man who thinks or knows she did a thing like that?’

‘She’ll
pretend you don’t think or know it. So will you. It never happened. Easy as
winking.’

‘Some
of what she said …’

‘That’s
your problem. She was upset, wasn’t she, after being attacked with a knife? Who
wouldn’t be?’

‘She
won’t be back.’

I went
and got more drinks. The place was filling up, though mostly down the far end
in the part that looked like an old-fashioned railway waiting room. When I gave
my order the little slut with her hair green and half an inch long all over cut
me off by saying ‘Sorry?’ almost as soon as I opened my mouth. When I was a kid
you hung on a bit if you missed the first few words and hoped to pick up the
drift later. Anyway, I had more luck with my second go and at least she knew
where the Famous Grouse was.

Cliff
was looking thoughtful. ‘According to some bloke on the telly the other night,’
he said, ‘twenty-five per cent of violent crime in England and Wales is
husbands assaulting wives. Amazing figure that, don’t you think? You’d expect
it to be more like eighty per cent. Just goes to show what an easy-going lot
English husbands are, only one in four of them bashing his wife. No, it doesn’t
mean that, does it? But it’s funny about wife-battering. Nobody ever even asks
what the wife had been doing or saying. She’s never anything but an ordinary
God-fearing woman who happens to have a battering husband. Same as race
prejudice. Here are a lot of fellows who belong to a race minding their own
business and being as good as gold and not letting butter melt in their mouths,
and bugger me if a gang of prejudiced chaps don’t rush up and start
discriminating against them. Frightfully unfair.’

‘The
root of all the trouble,’ I said, ‘is we want to fuck them, the pretty ones,
women I mean. Just try and imagine it happening to you, everyone wanting to
fuck you wherever you go. And of course being ready to pay for you if your
father’s stopped doing that. You’d have to be pretty tough to stand up to it,
wouldn’t you? In fact women only want one thing, for men to want to fuck them.
If they do, it means they can fuck them up. Am I drunk? What I was trying to
say, if you want to fuck a woman she can fuck you up. And if you don’t want to
she fucks you up anyway for not wanting to.’

‘I read
somewhere about a Hollywood film star,’ said Cliff. ‘I forget which one, years
ago anyway, she was getting on a bit, used to go to a lot of parties, it might
have been Madeleine Carroll, one night she went to one and nobody made a pass
at her, so she went home and took an overdose. That was coming out into the
open a bit, I agree.’

‘Actually
they used to feel they needed something in the way of provocation,’ I said, ‘but
now they seem to feel they can get on with the job of fucking you up any time
they feel like it. That’s what Women’s Lib is for.’

‘It’s
getting worse,’ said Cliff, ‘now they’re competing on equal terms in so many
places and find they still finish behind men. They can’t even produce a few
decent fucking
jugglers.
Like the race thing again.’

‘They
say people go on getting married to the same person time after time,’ I said. ‘Well
men certainly do. There isn’t another other sex.

‘It’s
no use saying anything to a woman,’ said Cliff ultimately, and drained his
glass.

I
waited, but there was no follow-up. ‘When what?’

‘What?’

‘It’s
no use saying anything to a woman when what? Or unless what?’

‘When
nothing. Ever.’

We had
a couple more drinks and were quite merry by the time we got to the Wainwrights’
house in Holland Park, and were quite unmerry again two minutes later. Sandra
was cross about something. I could not have said what was different from usual
in her manner or tone or expression or anywhere else, not really, not in
detail, and yet I could tell. I could have told at a hundred metres. Of course
I could. Any man could. Any man was meant to. I had sometimes wondered if they
thought we thought they were really trying to keep their feelings to themselves
at times like these, but if you knew
that
you could destroy the world.

I got
half a minute of it to myself at the start because Cliff had broken off for a
pee in the hall cloakroom. Sandra embraced me with all the warmth of a recent
rape victim.

‘Cliff
tells me Susan’s walked out on you,’ she said. ‘That must be upsetting for you.’

‘Yes it
is rather.’ I wondered how she would talk and look if she were telling me
instead that Susan was to be congratulated and whatever upset I got from this
or anything else would do me a power of good.

‘I
suppose it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other,’ she said, meaning such
was the impudent travesty I was preparing to palm off on the public. ‘It
usually seems to be.’

‘Probably.’

‘I
expect you want a drink.’ To go with the fourteen I clearly had inside me.

‘Well…’

Cliff
came in. While Sandra asked him if the pub had been fun and he told her it had
been, thanks, I watched him notice, wonder what he had done, think of
something, think surely not for Christ’s sake, and resign himself. He widened
his eyes at me but said nothing. I said nothing. In fact all three of us said
nothing, pretty near literally, until Sandra went out to the kitchen. When he
was sure she was clear he opened his mouth to start, but the phone rang first.

He went
across the room and answered it. ‘Yes,’ he said, and held the handset out to me
with a completely blank and completely informative face.

‘Oh
Stanley, thank God you’re there,’ said Susan’s voice, strained but calm. ‘I was
going to give up if you weren’t. Can you ever forgive me?’

‘What
for?’ I said.

‘Well,
those terrible things I said to you.

‘Oh,
those.’

While
she hurried on about having been so desperately frightened and upset and one
thing and another I turned towards Cliff, who did the brief lift of the chin
South London people use to mean Told you so or Here we go again or Wouldn’t you
bleeding know. People elsewhere too, I dare say. Perhaps all over the world.

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