Stanley and the Women (5 page)

Instead
of screaming I said, ‘Yes, Mrs Shillibeer?’

‘Oh, Mr
Duke, would you like me to take Steve up something on a tray?’ Her voice
climbed the better part of an octave on the last word.

I
looked at Susan. ‘I don’t think so, thanks. Best to leave him. He’ll come down
and get himself something if he feels like it.’

‘Of
that there is no room whatsoever for doubt,’ said the old girl.

‘Oh, I
couldn’t agree more, lady,’ I said.

Mrs Shillibeer
doled out the soup and the three of us had lunch. While we were having it I thought
to myself that someone else, someone apart from Steve, was behaving unusually,
and that was my mother-in-law. It had been clear to me for some time that she
reckoned Susan had not taken much of a step up in the world by becoming one of
the Dukes, but up to just now she, Lady D, had managed to keep that sort of
feeling more or less to herself. But then of course there had not been anything
much in the way of reason or excuse or provocation before.

‘Are
you going in this afternoon?’ I asked Susan at one stage, meaning to work.

‘I wasn’t,
why?’

‘Well,
good, I’ve got to and I just thought there ought to be someone here.’

‘But
that’ll leave Susan alone in the house,’ said her mother in amazement. She had
a chain on the ends of her glasses and round her neck so that in between times
they sat on her chest and when she was wearing them, like now, the chain hung
down in a loop behind and waggled about in a quaint way every time she moved
her head, and she had never thought of that.

‘Except
for Steve, yes,’ I said.

‘It’s
all right, mummy,’ said Susan.

We
never found out what her mother thought of the idea in so many words because
just then there was the noise of an assault platoon coming down the stairs and
a few seconds later the crash of the street door.

‘Would that
be Steve?’ asked Lady D, doing another variation by putting on no emphasis at
all.

‘I
think it must be,’ I said.

‘Perhaps
when he comes back he’ll be in a more gracious mood.’

Soon
afterwards I went out and picked up a taxi on its way back from dropping
somebody at one of the Jewboys’ houses in the Bishop’s Avenue.

The phone on my desk rang
and a man’s voice grunted once or twice and said, ‘Is that, er, is … is, er
…

If
whoever it was had really forgotten my name he would have had to do it very
recently, since asking the switchboard for me. Another day I might have played
him along. ‘Stanley Duke here,’ I said.

‘Ah.
Duke … you’re a shit. A
shit.
Ha. Don’t ring off, don’t ring off,
somebody here who wants a word with you, you …’

The words
died away in mutterings. Those few seconds had been enough to remind me first
of a big fat body, a round dark-red face, a scrubby beard and glasses, and then
of a name, Bert Hutchinson, and immediately after that I guessed some of what
had happened and felt scared. I was glad I was alone in the office just then.

‘Stanley,’
said a faint, suffering voice.

‘Yes, Nowell.
What’s the —’

‘Stanley,
it’s Nowell. Could you possibly come round? I can’t deal with him at all. I don’t
know what’s the matter with him, I think he must be mad.’

‘What’s
he been —’

‘Stanley,
you’ve simply
got
to come round, I can’t stand it, it’s absolutely
terrifying. He’s been saying the most horrible things to me.

‘Oh,’ I
said. That in itself was no atrocity from my point of view. ‘What’s he doing at
the moment?’

‘He’s
upstairs,’ my ex-wife admitted. ‘But he’s in the most awful state. You must
come, Stanley. You don’t know what it’s like, honestly.’

There
was a vague kind of bawling in the background during the last part of this,
which I thought was probably Bert suggesting some other remarks she could make.
I asked her what she expected me to do and generally made difficulties, but I
knew I had to go. For one thing, there was nothing to stop me. I checked that
they were still where they had been, not in Shepherd’s Bush any more but nearer
the centre and perhaps classier in Maida Vale. Then I hung up and to show my
independence or something rang the High Commission of one of the South-East
Asian countries and failed to raise the Commercial Attaché, which was nothing
out of the way. Finally I got moving — in the Apfelsine, naturally.

The
traffic was a bit hard and I used up some endurance just getting out of the car
park. At the lights at the bottom of Fetter Lane I was behind an enormous tourist
bus from Frankfurt. The guide spotted me and pointed me out to his passengers
as a typical Fleet Street editor. They all seemed to be about sixteen. I tried
to give them their money’s worth by looking energetic and ruthless, also
thoroughly up-to-date in my approach. Or perhaps it was just the car. Talking
of which, as I pulled away and again by the Law Courts the clutch was
definitely on the heavy side, still, after everything I had done to it. I would
have to get somebody in who knew a bit about the subject. Not my field,
clutches. When it came to gearboxes, now, I reckoned I could hold my own, even
with the paper’s motoring correspondent, not that that was saying much. In
fact, a good half of my published works, articles as well as letters, had to do
with gearboxes one way and another, trade press only of course. So far, at
least. But if …

No, I
must not let myself get out of thinking about what was on the way up. First,
though, I was going to go back to that short phone conversation with Nowell.
Had she really not named Steve, not laid it on the line that that was who she
was talking about? Very likely. It was the sort of thing distracted females did
in films — it just went to show how distracted they were. It was also the sort
of thing some females did in real life distracted or not, and that went to
show, really show, how wrapped up in themselves they were. In a small way. They
knew who they were talking about and that was it. Not that they knew who they
were talking about and you could bleeding well catch up as best you might — no,
just they knew who they were talking about. Another time I might have pretended
I thought she was talking about Prince Charles, but not today.

I had
never felt I had had too much to do with either marrying Nowell or not being
married to her. After going round with her for about six months I had suddenly
noticed that I was already well on with a trip that ended in marriage and had
no places to get off. Not that I had wanted to. Then after thirteen years and
at no particular point that I could see she had gone and set up with this Bert
Hutchinson. Between then and now I had done a great deal of thinking about him
and how he compared with me, but it had not taken me all that long to decide
that about the one difference between us there could be no argument about had
to do with him being showbiz and me not being. In talking to people like
Lindsey Lucas I would admittedly say that Nowell had gone off with Bert to be
got better parts in television by him, but the fact that it had not happened
told against that idea — she was too shrewd to be so wrong about what somebody
could do for her. No, it was just that Bert fitted in with her by presumably
liking to spend as much time as possible with showbiz people and I never had. I
could stand spending quite a lot of time with them and looking after myself the
rest of the time, only from Nowell’s point of view that was unsatisfactory in
at least two ways. No prizes for seeing a connection here with her not having
been able to run the whole of her and my life whereas perhaps Bert let her run
the whole of theirs and even liked it, but that you obviously could argue
about.

I had
got to that point, and also to the Marylebone flyover, when it suddenly came to
me that it was not trouble with or about Mandy or any other girl that was the
cause of Steve’s behaviour. He had come in for that sort of trouble in the past
and it had affected him differently, not in any kind of violent way, more
prepared to hang on and keep quiet and tend to make the best of it. That went
for how he had handled other kinds of upset. Whatever had happened to him was
completely new.

The house was in Hamilton
Terrace, stone and dark brick, hard to get into under  a quarter of a million.
In the garage at the side I noticed one of the first Jaguars, plate
impressively DUW 1, well kept but not ridiculous. I pressed a button and heard
a chime with a cracked note in it. The door was opened by a girl of seven or
eight with straggling dark curly hair and a white dress down to the ground,
like a kid in an old photograph. She also had a very boring face with no Nowell
in it that I could make out.

‘I’ve
come to see your mother,’ I said.

‘Who
are you?’ Her voice reminded me of Mrs Shillibeer’s.

‘Well,
I used to be married to her. She’s —’

‘Do you
do commercials?’

‘No.’

Shoving
past her was the thing, but she was holding the door only a little way open and
standing in the gap, and I felt I could hardly trample her underfoot just yet.
While I wondered about this I heard a lavatory-plug being pulled and an inner
door opened, followed by a sharp thud like someone’s knee or head hitting the
door, and after a moment the top half of Bert Hutchinson came in sight. I had
forgotten — I had only seen him about once before — that he was one of the school
that parted their hair just above the ear and trained it over the bald crown, a
policy I thought myself was misguided, but only on the whole. Without noticing
he pushed a colourful picture on the wall askew with his shoulder.

‘What
the bloody hell are you doing here?’ he asked me hoarsely and at the second
attempt, and went on before I could answer, ‘Go on, get … get out of it,
you …’

‘I
talked to Nowell on the phone and she asked me to come round to give her a hand
with Steve.’

‘That’s
right, she did,’ he said, just as hoarsely. He could see straight away that
this made a difference but was far from clear how much. Anyhow, he stayed where
he was and so did the small girl, who had to be his daughter and did look
rather like him in a frightening way.

‘Is he
still here?’ I said to keep the conversation going.

‘Who?
Oh … yeah … fuck …’ He looked me over, hesitated, then decided to
stretch a point and pulled the door wide open. ‘You …’

‘Is
that your Jaguar I see there?’

Nothing
definite came of that. The hall was stacked with great bulging brown-paper
parcels tied up with hairy string. Some of them had been partly torn open to
show what looked like blankets and bolsters. It was rather dark and smelt of
old flowers or the water they had been in. Not poverty-stricken, though.

I found
Nowell in a lounge where there would have been plenty of room for a couple of
dozen commercial travellers to hang about for the bar to open. All the
pictures, including a large one let into the wall at the far end, were by the
same artist or squad and showed one or more sailing-ships having a bad time. Nowell
was sitting on a circular couch in the middle being talked to by a white-haired
chap in a jacket put together out of suede, fisherman’s wool, rawhide and
probably canvas. When she saw me she held up her hand with the palm outwards so
as to get me to fight down my impatience till she had finished her listening.
You could have told a hundred yards off that she was listening, hard enough, in
fact, to make any normal person dry up completely in a few seconds. There was
no sign of Steve, like pools of blood or blazing furniture.

It must
have been a good three years since I had laid eyes on Nowell, either in the
flesh or on the screen. She had not visibly aged, though her thick-and-thin
look seemed to have become more noticeable. I had often tried to analyse it in
the old days, but could still get no further than being nearly sure it
consisted physically of a slight permanent rounding of the eyes and raising of
the eyebrows plus the top teeth being a bit sticky-out in the English mode. In
those old days it, the look, had been one of her great attractions as far as I
was concerned, along with things like her breasts. I had not known then that
the thick and thin in question was not what she would be at my side through but
what she was prepared to battle through to get her own way. On the other hand
there was nothing deceptive about her breasts, not then anyhow. Not much about
them could be made out today through the top part of her faded dungarees. They
and the polka-dotted handkerchief on her head gave the idea that she might be
just going to get down to stripping the paint off a door or even hanging out
the washing, whereas in fact she would have been easily as likely to be going
up in a balloon. There was all that to be said and more, but sitting in the
same room with her I found it impossible to be simply glad I was not married to
her any more and not to flinch a bit at the thought. Stopping being married to
someone is an incredibly violent thing to happen to you, not easy to take in
completely, ever.

Funny
old Nowell. Nowell? It was amazing, but in all those years I had never realized
that of course that was wrong. Nowell was to do with Christmas — there was a
carol about the first one. Noel was her name but she or her mother had just not
been able to spell it. There were cases like Jaclyn and Margaux and Siouxie
where no one seriously imagined that was right, but this was different. Nowell
was like Jayne and Dianna and Anette where somebody had been plain bleeding
ignorant.