Stanley and the Women (7 page)

‘May I
speak to Dr Wainwright? It’s Stanley Duke.’

‘I’m
sorry, Mr Duke, I’m afraid — one moment.’

After a
short pause Cliff Wainwright’s mellow voice suddenly spoke. He came from one
station up the Clapham Junction line from me but he had done a thorough job on
his accent, only letting out an unreconstructed SW16 vowel about every other visit.
‘You’re in luck, Stan,’ he said. ‘I was literally going out of the door. What
can I do for you?’

‘It’s
about my son, young Steve. I’m afraid he’s very sick. I’m afraid he’s mad.’

‘Really?
I shouldn’t have thought that was on the cards. What’s he been up to?’

I did
some explaining.

‘Oh,
yes, well, m’m, slightly hopped up is about what it sounds like to me. Unless
he’s having fun, of course. No. Ever done anything like it before? You sure?
Ah. And I assume he’s not pissed. I’d better have a look at him, hadn’t I? At
home, are you?’

I did
some more explaining.

‘Fine,
no problem, with any luck I should be along in about fifteen minutes. Don’t
worry, my old Stan. If he turns violent just hit him with an iron bar.’

The
phone was a pre-war one, or a replica. I went on sitting in front of it after I
had hung the receiver back on its hook. The room had probably got itself called
the study, or even the den, with a roll-top desk like in the films, a
word-processor, a row of theatrical directories and an incredible number of
photographs of Nowell — in what looked like Shakespeare, in something to do
with Dracula, talking to Princess Margaret, talking to Sean Connery, as a tart,
as a nun, on a TV quiz-show, on a TV chat-show. The ones I recognized had an
out-of-date look. Bert was in two or three of them but there were none of her
with Steve at any age.

Words
like mania and schizophrenia and paranoia ran through my mind. I tried to
remember what I had heard and read about madness and the treatment of it over
the years but it was all a mess. I just had the same settled impression as ever
that the fellows in the trade had a very poor idea of what they were up to. Now
I came to think of it I did recall looking at a classy paperback where a
psychiatrist had said that the only actual help they could give you when you
went off your head was to keep you comfortable and safe and stop you doing
things like killing yourself until you got better of your own accord if you
were lucky or for the rest of your life if you were not. Cheers. But he had
been making out a case, exaggerating, paying off scores or trying to write a
bestseller. Of course he had. The business was bound to look pretty ropy from
outside, all wild theories and rich people going to the shrink every week for
twenty years and mental hospitals with no roofs, and never mind the successes,
the new drugs and therapies, the thousands of patients quietly though perhaps
slowly improving. That was certain to be going on. Things were just the same
with medical science, you only heard about the scandals and the mistakes and
not about the marvellous cures. Well no, it was not the same exactly but there
were similarities. And that psychiatrist’s book had been published quite a long
time ago.

I
decided to ring home while I was about it just to say what was going on, but
there was no reply — Susan must have slipped out for something. Till then I had
not realized how much I had wanted to hear the sound of her voice. Immediately
after that Steve shouted something next door and there was a violent noise that
was really two noises at once, a crash end a kind of giant pop, and then more
shouting and some shrieking. I guessed what had happened and I was roughly
right. When I dashed in I saw a lot of glass on the rug in front of the television
set and a large hole in its insides surrounded by odds and ends of electronics,
also the remains of a puff of smoke. A big grey stone ashtray was lying among
the glass. Steve still looked bewildered but not in such a detached way, more
as though he was worried at not understanding what the excitement was about.
All the other three were yelling, Nowell at him, Bert more or less in general
and the small girl at everybody, and that was the worst of the three. I shouted
in her direction, not too loudly but I probably looked a bit alarming. Anyhow,
she shut up and so did the other two, only a moment though, in Nowell’s case at
least.

‘Get
him out of here,’ she ordered me in ringing tones.

I tried
to ignore her and tell Steve he was all right. It was not very constructive, I
dare say, but it was all I could think of.

‘Get
him out of here,’ said Nowell, bravely sticking to her guns. ‘He’s raving mad,
the boy’s raving mad.’

I said,
‘Never mind about that. Now just quieten down, will you? Come on, cool it. The
doc’s on his way.’

At this
stage Bert tried to shove himself in. ‘You heard, you … Out, ha, bastard.’

‘Look,
old chap,’ I said, ‘I don’t want to find I’ve got to put a bit of weight on
you, do I? And I’m very nearly doing it already, you know,’ which was really
not much at all but it soothed our Bert’s feelings in no time.

Nowell
had taken a few steps nearer the smashed set and quite likely it looked worse
from there. She certainly seemed more furious on her way back.

‘It’s
ruined.’ She was starting to shout again. ‘Completely ruined!’

‘That’s
right,’ I said, and did what I should have done straight away and pulled the
plug out of the wall.

‘I’m
not putting up with that kind of behaviour in my house. If he’s not out of here
in one minute flat I’ll call the police and ask them to remove him. I won’t
have it, do you hear me?’

All of
a sudden I remembered exactly what it had been like being married to her, a
large piece of it anyway — her saying something quite short and uncomplicated
that gave me a couple of hundred things to say back, all of them urgent and
necessary and with a bearing and all completely hopeless, all pointless. I
remembered too how it had felt to start saying them regardless, rather dashing
and plucky, like knocking back the drink that you know will put you over the
top. The present set were at least as urgent and the rest of it as any, mostly
to do with Steve and her being his mother, but with a few here and there about
the police and how they might react to the idea of evicting a son from a parental
home, plus how serious was she about that, etc. This time I refrained from
starting, not actually out of concern for Steve but because I could see clearly
what I would only have got as far as dimly suspecting in the old days, that she
wanted me to start. And that was because she could be sure of dominating a
scene with me whereas she could not with Steve as he was or might be at the
moment. After all these years. But that never made any odds.

Some of
this I worked out later. I answered her quite quickly. ‘Cliff Wainwright’ll be
here any minute. I’ll take Steve then.’

‘You
take him now. You can wait outside. It’s not raining.’ She was certainly
putting on a wonderful demonstration of somebody having to stand up for what
they thought was right.

‘Sorry
about the telly,’ said Steve briskly. ‘Only thing to do.’ There was nothing
brisk about his looks. He was breathing unsteadily and his mouth was trembling.

The
cracked chime sounded from the front of the house. ‘That one’s yours, Bert,’ I
told him. ‘Soon as you like.’ With almost no interval he picked up a visual
okay from Nowell and went off, followed by little girlie looking over her
shoulder and pouting till she was through the door. I put my hand on Steve’s
arm but he shook it off and turned his face away. ‘Nowell, do see what you can
do,’ I said. ‘You were so marvellous with him before.’

I
watched her hesitate. Meanwhile I wondered whether perhaps she was taking her
current line because Steve had scared her, before deciding that all that scared
her was the prospect of everybody not looking at her for five seconds. That was
just as she plumped for being distracted rather than marvellous and began
blinking a lot and making small sudden movements. By the time Cliff appeared,
looking more ridiculously handsome and like a Harley Street doctor than ever,
she was well into it, also starting to talk about thank God he was here and so
forth. But it cut no ice with him — of course he was used to all that, and not
only from her. In some way that was too smooth for me to catch he had her on
one side in a flash and after a nod to me was strolling over towards Steve and
giving him the kind of casual but wide-awake look-over I knew from visits to
his consulting room. Steve backed off a pace or two.

‘This
doesn’t concern you in any way, Dr Wainwright,’ he said. ‘You’re not wanted
here.’

‘Oh, I
don’t know,’ said Cliff, and glanced at the shattered television. ‘Was that
you?’

I
fancied Steve looked uncertain. ‘Yeah.’

‘Really.’

After
nearly a minute Steve said, ‘Like I said, I had to,’ firmly this time.

‘Had
to? Bad as that?’

‘Yes, I
… There’s something been done to it.’

‘What
sort of thing?’

‘Something
been done to it. Fixed. You’re going to say it’s crazy, but I know it was
recording us. It’s happened before, see.’

‘What,
you mean as it might be on a video-tape.’ Cliff went over and peered for a
moment into the guts of the ruined set. When he came back he tried to walk
Steve to a seat but Steve declined to go along. ‘I doubt it, you know. In fact
it’s impossible. A VTR’s quite a bulky affair, you couldn’t possible fit one
into a box that size.’

‘Sophisticated
development. Just a microchip.’

‘Oh,
one of
those,’
said Cliff, sounding very tired indeed. ‘Too small to
see. I know.’ He looked up because Bert had come back into the room,
unbelievably carrying what looked like a glass of water. I caught on when Cliff
took the glass, produced a pill from nowhere in particular and held the two out
towards Steve. ‘Here.’

‘Look,
doc. I don’t need any pill. Thanks.’

‘Maybe
not. Up to you. It’s a tranquillizer and I gather you’re a bit tensed up by
this and that. No lasting effect. It won’t —’

‘What’s
your name,
doctor?
Your real name.’ Steve sounded unfriendly all right
but in other ways he seemed just adrift, half out of touch with what was going
on. I was pretty sure he had not connected me with Cliff’s arrival, which would
have made it seem quite like the result of some conspiracy.

‘Oh,
get out of it, lad,’ said Cliff. ‘My name’s never been anything but Wainwright.
Now you just —’

‘Not
Isaac, is it? Or Moses?’

Cliff
gave me a quick glance which I read as him wanting me to see what I could do.
Anyway I said, ‘Go on, Steve, knock it back and we can get off home.’

‘You
keep your nose out of this,’ he said without looking at me.

‘Its
only effect will be to make you feel better,’ said Cliff, going on rather
awkwardly holding out the pill and the glass.

‘Stuff
it.’

So
everything was in position for Nowell to move towards him slowly, hesitantly,
with her arms hanging down at her sides in a way they never did, and stand in
front of her son just looking at him, not saying anything, her eyebrows raised
a tiny bit more than usual and her eyelids possibly lower and a very slight
smile of hope and trust on her lips, which you could just see were apart at the
middle but together at the corners. All things considered she was lucky I had
somehow not remembered to bring my flame-thrower with me, I thought to myself, then
forgot it when he suddenly took the pill off Cliff and washed it down with a
gulp of water.

‘Well
done,’ said Cliff to them both. ‘We should start getting the benefit of that
pretty soon. There is just one more thing, Steve, and then you can relax. Who’s
behind this business? You know, monkeying with the … The Jews, is it?’

‘I’m
not saying.’

‘Right,
fair enough, you go and rest for a bit.’

Nowell,
with her arm in a protective position round Steve, took him off to the couch
where she had been sitting with Chris Rabinowitz an unbelievably short time
previously.

Cliff
said to me, ‘Well, you don’t need me to tell you he’s disturbed. But there are
several possible reasons for it. In my experience the likeliest is a shot of
something like LSD. He ever gone in for that?’

‘Not as
far as I know. Nor even smoked pot. I don’t think he’d have felt he had to tell
me he hadn’t if he had. No, I just don’t think this lot use it.’

‘Well,
whatever’s the matter there’s plenty can be done. But in the meantime you and
Susan had better stand by for a large dose of boredom and inconvenience, I’m
afraid.’

‘I reckon
we can face that.’

‘Ah,
you don’t really know yet what you’re …

He
stopped speaking at the approach of Bert, who said quite distinctly, ‘Can I get
you a drink? Gin? Scotch?’

Cliff
asked if he could have a gin and tonic. I hesitated and then said I would like
one too. When Bert had gone I said, ‘That bugger was pissed five minutes ago.

‘Oh, he
still is, he’s just making a special effort for me. It’s amazing what people
will do for doctors, you know. Even today. Barring nobs, of course.’