Stanley and the Women (8 page)

‘Have
you met him before?’

‘No,
but you get to tell straight away. I don’t wish him any harm but it would be
fun visiting him when he’s ill. That sort of hair-do looks great when they’ve
been tossing and turning for a bit and it comes adrift and you get a bald noddle
with flowing locks down to the shoulder on one side only. Old Nowell’s a
wonder, isn’t she? Christ, it must be getting on for ten years since I saw her
and really she hardly looks a day older. But then egotists always do wear well.
Like queers. Interesting, that. Cheer up, Stan boy, you’ve done all right so
far. He’ll be okay for tonight, I’ll pop in in the morning to see how he’s
getting on and I’ll try and bring a trick-cyclist of some sort along to run the
rule over him.’

‘Thank
you, Cliff, you’re being very good about this.’

‘Only
fairly good at the moment. I had some time to fill in.’

No
puzzle there. As long as I had known him Cliff had been a tremendous hammer of
the ladies, quite a reckless one too — he had found himself within shouting
distance of getting struck off a couple of times. That made him not all that
much different from any other doctor I had ever heard of. It occurred to me
like once or twice before that a day spent mucking about with ugly and decrepit
and sick bodies might make you particularly keen on collecting a young and
pretty one after work. I decided against taking the point up with Cliff there
and then because Bert was bringing our drinks over. When he had done that he
stayed with us, but apparently not so as to say anything, not at first. But
then, when Cliff had told the one about the fellow who was afraid to go to bed
with girls because his mother had told him there were teeth down there, and I
was trying to think of one to tell back, he, Bert suddenly spoke.

‘Do you
mind if I ask you something?’

Drinking
his drink as I was I felt there was not a lot I could say to that, so I said No.

‘Er… do you keep a bottle of vodka in the bed at home?’

‘No,’ I
said again, though it took a bit more out of me the second time round. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t
know really. No offence. I used to keep a half of Scotch in mine sometimes.’

‘Sorry
to be so dense, old chap, but I’m afraid I’ll have to get you to explain the
joke.’

‘I
think we might as well be getting along if you’re ready, Stan,’ said Cliff.

When Nowell
realized we were off she slowly got to her feet and slowly helped Steve to his.
He looked not so much tamed as washed out, emptied, or perhaps like a mental
defective. She walked him to the door as though they were going into church,
then turned and gazed at the two men who in their wisdom were about to take
from her bosom the son she had not quite been trying her hardest to persuade to
stay when she had the chance. After that she made a slight effort to prevent
herself from hurling her arms round him but soon gave up the unequal struggle.
It just so happened that her face was pointing towards Cliff and me at that
stage, which meant I could easily spot the tears that were trickling out of her
nearly closed eyes, and I thought he probably could too, but then he looked not
greatly impressed.

Over
her shoulder I saw Bert go back to being drunk — his neck seemed to turn to
jelly. Of course, he had stopped making his special effort for Cliff.

‘I’ve got hold of a
fellow,’ said Cliff when he rang the next morning. ‘Name of Nash, Alfred Nash.
You might just conceivably have come across it. Well, anyway, he was something
of a celebrity in his younger days. Not so much been heard of him since then,
in fact he hasn’t got a regular job any more and was quite chuffed to be asked
to do something. Everybody seems to think he’s a very good man — I wouldn’t
know exactly. I’ve run into him I suppose half a dozen times in the way of
business.’

‘An
analyst, is he?’ I asked.

‘Of
course he’s not a sodding analyst,’ said Cliff, quite cross until he remembered
it was no use expecting me to know how bad that was or would be. ‘No, he’s a
doctor and a psychiatrist, not a quack in other words. I’d say he was a bit… Well, you’ll be able to see for yourself very soon because I’m off to pick
him up in a few minutes.’

‘Are
you sure you’ll be all right, Stanley?’ asked Susan shortly afterwards. She was
wearing a round woollen hat that gave her a trustful, childish look. ‘Say the
word and I’ll hang on till they get here.’

‘No no,
Sue, you go on in.’ Saturday was of course press day at the
Chronicle
and
they were all undoubtedly expected to turn up, even though according to her
half the reviews and stuff had been sitting in the office since Tuesday.

‘It
would be quite ludicrous for me to try to tell you not to worry about this,’
she said. ‘But there is one part to do with it where you can feel absolutely
safe and secure, and that’s anything involving me in any way. I’ll do whatever
I can and whatever you want me to. I may not always know what that is and
whenever you see I don’t you’re to tell me straight away without thinking. What
I mean is, it doesn’t matter if it seems a lot to ask, or even too trivial to
ask — you tell me and I’ll do it. Now have you got that, darling?’

‘Yeah.
Thank you, love,’ I said, wishing I could find it natural to call her darling
at times like the present, up-and-about times. ‘And thank you for what you’ve
done already. See you this evening.’

She
squeezed my hand — hers was in a woollen glove to go with the hat. I noticed
the faint little dark hairs at the corners of her mouth. The previous evening
after we had seen Steve safely tucked up, she had spent the best part of two
hours pulling me out of a state where I was quite certain I could face nothing
more personal and outgoing than watching television and getting drunk — out of
that and into allowing myself to be made a great fuss of and finally into bed.
I had called her darling then all right.

The
street door slammed and immediately there was total silence in the house. When
looked in on an hour before, Steve had been asleep or, almost as good,
pretending he was. He was going to appear as soon as he felt like it, which
would be soon enough to suit me. I felt very reluctant to be in his company —
oh, I felt plenty of other things too, and disapproved of that one, but there
seemed to be nothing I could do about it and for the moment it was neither here
nor there. All the same I had some time to fill in, not much, but some. I could
go over the closely argued letter I proposed to send to the editor of the
journal of the Classic Car Club on a subject —exhausts — rather outside my
usual area. I might work it up into an article —after all, Susan was not the
only writer in the family. But when I dug it out and looked at it I found that
even to take in what I had been saying was beyond me. So I settled for drinking
a weak Scotch and water instead.

I had
just decided I would not have another till they arrived when they arrived and
put the idea out of my head for the moment. Nash turned out to be about sixty
or a couple of years more, tall, pale, moustached, with a better head of hair
than mine and a posher accent than the Queen’s. He was wearing what he probably
called some well-worn tweeds and what was a rather dirty old polo-neck sweater
in anyone’s language. Cliff took all of two seconds introducing us, I told Nash
it was good of him to come over, he told me he was sorry to hear of Steve’s
troubles, and we were off. My life was getting low on small-talk. For the time
being at least there seemed to be no prospect of a drink — I felt shy of
suggesting it and Cliff had given me nothing in the way of a lead. Well, it was
still early.

I did
some filling-in. Nash listened and wrote things down in a notebook, or rather
on a new 25p memo-pad with lined leaves. He asked about Steve’s early
circumstances and history and wrote down some of what I said about that too.
Then he wanted to know if there had been any recent emotional upsets.

I
hesitated. ‘He broke up with a girl — it could have been the day before
yesterday or a bit longer ago. But … it’s not his style to go off the deep
end about things like that, and anyway it never struck me as being a
particularly serious affair.’

‘But it
was an affair? Forgive me, but on the rare occasions when I peep into the world
of the young I find it about as recognizable as, as medieval Patagonia.’

‘He
keeps things pretty quiet but from the look of his girl, if she wasn’t sleeping
with him she was going against a quite firmly established habit.’

Nash
glanced up sharply from his pad, as if what I had said interested him in some
way he had not expected. ‘I see,’ he said, paused and went briskly on. ‘Ever
been mad yourself? Or gone to a psychiatrist or seen a doctor about your
nerves? M’m, didn’t think you had really. What about your family, brothers and
sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents, any mad people there.’

‘Well,
there’s my mother’s sister. She never stops talking.’

‘What
about?’

‘Oh,
what she’s been doing, where she’s been, in insane detail. You can’t —’

‘No no,
merely in foolish and fatiguing detail. Perfectly normal behaviour in a what,
an elderly female.’

‘But
she —’

‘Is
that the worst you can do, Mr Duke? No uncles who didn’t know what was going on,
or cousins who sat in a chair all day without speaking or moving? No one they
used to say was always rather a funny chap, always a bit … you know.
Ordinary people are usually good judges of that, or they were until some
lunatic went round telling them it was really the sane ones who were mad. Yes,
funny, a bit odd, a bit peculiar, you never quite knew where you were with him,
never really knew what he was thinking, you got on well enough together but you
wouldn’t have been surprised if one day out of the blue he’d said that he’d always
hated you. Shocked and hurt, all that, but not
surprised.
Nobody like
that at all. Oh well. What about your wife, I mean of course your ex-wife, the
boy’s mother, Mrs … Hutchinson. What about her?’

‘Well…’ I looked over at Cliff, who made an encouraging face, dilating his eyes. ‘Well,
I think she is a bit mad.’

This
wild understatement had Cliff blowing out his cheeks. ‘Why do you say that?’
asked Nash. ‘In what way? Mad in what way?’

‘She
can’t seem to … You mentioned something just now about somebody who can’t
make out what’s going on. I don’t think she can do that, not what’s
really
going
on. I mean she knows your name and what day it is, but she sees it all
differently. Nothing’s what it is, it’s always something else. Her sense of other
people’s not good. They can be sweet to her, and they can be foul to her, and
that’s about as much scope as they’ve got. If they can’t be fitted in as one or
the other they don’t exist, no not quite, they’re like Mr Heath or David Bowie,
no more than facts. Of course with her personality and everything she just goes
on like that through her life. Even if everybody got together and dug their
toes in and told her it wasn’t like that it still wouldn’t do any good. No use
telling her to stow it or cheese it or come off it because she really believes
it. That would just be everybody being foul to her at once. I’m sorry, Dr Nash,
I’ve said enough.’

‘Indeed
you have. But the first part was good. M’m. Would you say, would you assent to
the proposition that all women are mad?’

Cliff
did about ten tremendous nods involving the whole top half of his body with
lips pressed tight together and eyes goggling. I said, ‘Yes. No, not all. There
are exceptions, naturally.’

It was
such a gift for Nash to say Naturally back that I had no idea how he avoided
it, but he did, just pushed his mouth forward and went on staring at me in what
seemed to be his way, not offensively, seeing either quite a lot or not much of
anything, it was hard to tell.

‘Yes,’
he said after some of this. ‘We won’t pursue the point. I’ll be having a word
with Mrs Hutchinson. Well. I must say this is a most convenient arrangement,
acquiring copious information before so much as clapping eyes on the patient.
On other occasions I’ve found it to be markedly different, you know. Now, Mr
Duke, I suggest you go and ask your son to come and have a talk with me. Yes, I’m
a doctor if he wants to know, and yes, I’m a psychiatrist. Of course I am.’

I put
this proposition to Steve in various not too different forms as he lay in bed
in what I thought had to be a mightily uncomfortable position looking towards
the ceiling, though his eyes were probably not reaching that far. The room
smelt rather, but not as badly as it might have done if he had been really
grown-up. I opened a window. I also noticed a couple of new shirts still in
their plastic covers and some sets of underclothes out of the chest of drawers
— Susan’s doing. She had understood straight away that he had nothing to wear
but what he stood up in.

After
about ten minutes and nothing special about what I had just said or how I had
said it Steve got quite actively out of bed. He was wearing grubby underpants
and a sort of vest. With the same willing manner he put on his old shirt, his
intensely crumpled trousers and a pair of multicoloured rubber shoes fit for
an Olympic track event. I still didn’t believe it until I had gone downstairs
and into the sitting room with him, introduced him to Nash and seen Nash stare
at him in the way I had noticed, and hung on for a moment before Nash politely
waved me out of the room.