The Parasite Person (4 page)

How dare she! For
him,
she had nothing but complaints and tears and ugly, whining recriminations; and now here she was screaming with merry laughter in the company of this interfering, mischief-making bitch!

Bitch! Both of them, bitches!

And what’s more, he could guess who it was they were bitching about.
Him.

“M
ARTIN
,
DARLING
,
LISTEN
. This Ledbetter girl—the bit where she denies ever having been depressed. I’m just wondering—if you’d maybe probed a bit more at that point …? I mean, we do know, don’t we, that she
did
have treatment for depression, it’s in her record….”

Helen, from her seat at the typewriter, had swivelled round to face him, pushing her soft blonde hair back from her forehead in a familiar self-deprecating gesture: a gesture that seemed to say that the criticism she was voicing was merely a blonde, fluffy sort of criticism, unworthy of an important man’s attention. When in fact it was nothing of the sort, but right on the ball.

“I don’t know—perhaps I’m just being stupid?” she continued, knowing that she was not. “Perhaps I missed some of the
preliminary
data …?”

She hadn’t missed a thing, naturally. Martin, slumped at the breakfast table, still in his dressing-gown, still eating, felt at a hideous disadvantage. It was barely ten past eight, and here she was, fully dressed, lipstick in place, and all agog to finish the typing of this interview before she left for work. Her eagerness to be a help to him at this hour in the morning was terrifying, it absolutely made his stomach churn, but of course he couldn’t say so because it was so marvellous of her to be doing it at all, fitting it in somehow before going off to her rather gruelling teaching job, at which she had to arrive on the dot of nine.

Reluctantly, Martin gulped down the dregs of his coffee and raised his bleary eyes. He just couldn’t think at this hour of the day, the evenings were his time for thinking. Intelligent
questions while he was still spreading marmalade on his last piece of toast simply made him feel ill. Why couldn’t she be rushing round the flat looking for handbags and things, like other women?

“I don’t mean,” Helen continued, pushing her hair back yet again, and beginning to talk faster and faster, as if gathering speed for the running jump she was going to have to take over his morning lethargy. “I don’t mean that there’s
necessarily
any
discrepancy
. After all, a girl like that—a slightly unbalanced girl—might easily find herself denying, even in her own mind, that …”

Martin’s early morning brain buzzed like a telephone that hasn’t even been dialled yet. He could grasp just enough of what she was saying to feel sure that she was right, but beyond this his mind was a blank.

He decided to allow himself a little flare-up of petulance. Why not? After all, they’d been living together for over a month now, surely it didn’t have to go
on
being so bloody idyllic? Not
all
the time?

“Just type what’s there,” he admonished her, repressively. “There’s no need at this stage to start looking for discrepancies. Certainly not for the typist to start looking for them.”

He was sorry the moment he’d said it; the quick dip and swing of her hair as she bent once more to her work told him he’d hurt her. He hadn’t meant to, really he hadn’t; but she shouldn’t go on at him so.

To compensate for his momentary unkindness it was now necessary to go across and lean over her shoulder, to praise her—indeed over-praise her—for the excellence of her work, and to tell her how beautiful she’d been looking, sitting here at the typewriter so sweet and serious, and all for him.

She melted at once, of course, and he kissed her, smudging her lipstick so that it had to be done all over again. He knew how she gloried in this sort of thing: there can’t be many history mistresses who have to re-do their lipstick
twice
before going in to their first lesson of the morning.

*

Twenty minutes later she was gone, and at the sound of the outer door closing behind her, such a wave of relief washed over him as stopped him in his tracks, absolutely appalled.

It was the awful familiarity of the feeling that frightened him most. This was precisely and exactly the way he’d always felt about doors slamming behind his wife. Any door, anywhere, ever. In her case, of course, it had been right and proper to feel like this; reassuring, in a way, a sign that the marriage was collapsing in just the way a marriage should collapse. Almost with nostalgia, he recalled those slamming doors of his former life, ushering in, as they did, stretches of wonderful peace and silence while Beatrice sobbed in the bedroom, sulked in the kitchen, or even merely refused to speak to him, passing him on the stairs with averted, swollen eyes. Whatever the form of her withdrawal, it was always an improvement on what had gone before, and brought with it a sense of release and freedom. No doubt the relief on these occasions was only the proverbial relief experienced by those who cease to bang their heads against brick walls, but all the same it was a welcome respite, and very understandable. What was
not
so
understandable
was how this very same relief could be experienced by one who no longer has a brick wall to bang his head against; who is, on the contrary, living a life as near to paradisal as mortal man can hope for. How could it be that the emotions engendered by a sour and hostile estranged wife could be thus transposed, in their entirety, on to the image of an adored and adoring mistress? How could such a thing be possible?

It couldn’t, obviously. There must be some other explanation; and. to Martin, with all his psychological training and know-how, the explanation was as obvious as it was reassuring.

What was happening, quite simply, was that his nervous system had, over the years with Beatrice, become conditioned to react like this to the sound of a slamming door, so that now, like any Pavlov dog, he was incapable of reacting in any other way.

Yes, that was it. A simple stimulus-response phenomenon, nothing to do with Helen herself or how much he loved her.

All was explained. His boundless and unqualified love for Helen was still intact. With a clear conscience, he could now permit
himself to relax into this wonderful sense of solitude, of lightness, of restored well-being, knowing that it was spurious, a mere hangover from the unhappy past. He could make himself a fresh cup of coffee, too, exactly the way he liked it, instead of in that blasted percolator. Strong and black, and with lots of sugar, it would perhaps stir his torpid faculties just sufficiently to enable him to go to his desk and settle down to a morning’s work on that God-awful thesis.

This was another somewhat disturbing thing that was
happening
to him—or, rather, wasn’t happening. His thesis, which was to have been the turning-point in his career, simply wasn’t
progressing
at all, or hardly. Already, the deadline was barely nine months away, and he’d scarcely completed even the introductory section; while his ideas for the succeeding chapters were still just as unformed—to be honest, just as derivative—as they’d been when he’d first prepared his synopsis. He had hoped—had, indeed, confidently assumed—that once he really got down to it his head would start humming with new and revolutionary ideas, just as it had done in his student days: that some novel and startling hypothesis would spring effortlessly into his mind, complete with inspired notions as to where and how to look for corroborative evidence. And once this had happened, he would then be able to forge ahead, recklessly outstripping that boring old synopsis, breaking new ground, confounding his critics, and blazoning his name in gold across the whole history of his subject.

But it wasn’t happening. He’d been at it, on and off, for more than a year now, and not one single new or exciting idea had come to him. Every thought that entered his head had already been thought of by a dozen others; every avenue of research seemed to be blocked solid by hundreds of people who’d got there before him.

Inspiration was dead. His brain hummed not with new and exciting ideas but with an ever-deepening boredom and sense of defeat.

What had happened to him? What was going wrong?

The answer, at first, had seemed easy. It was the pressure of his routine work at the Polytechnic that was holding him back. Twelve hours’ lecturing a week had been pushed on to him that year,
despite his protests; and what with the preparation for these, and the seminars, and the tutorials, he seemed to have no time left for his own work at all. Also, as part and parcel of all this, there was the relentless persecution by his students, for ever handing in their assignments and expecting him to read them, or else not handing them in and expecting him to listen to their hard-luck stories of how this, that, and the other had prevented them finishing on time, and how none of it was their fault.

As if he cared. The fewer assignments the better, as far as he was concerned, and whether the omissions were due to laziness,
stupidity
, or their grandmother being dead, he couldn’t care less, why bother
him
about it?

The whole thing was so pointless, anyway. There wasn’t a thing he could teach them that they couldn’t just as well look up in some book. What was the library for? It had cost half a million pounds, or something, to put up, and was supposed to be the pride and glory of the place: but would the students use it? They would not, not so long as they had the option of pestering him instead without moving out of their chairs. That’s what he was paid for, being pestered by them, and the little beasts knew it. A Pestership, that’s how it should have been listed, this job of his….

Anyway, with all this stacked against him, and the best hours of his day devoured by administrative trivia, it had seemed plausible enough, at the time, to attribute his creative block to pressure of routine work.

*

But then, a few months ago, all these long-standing obstacles had been suddenly and almost miraculously removed by the granting of his long-awaited Sabbatical—a whole year, on full pay, during which no teaching duties at all were to be required of him. Instead he was expected to concentrate full-time on what he had always longed to concentrate on—his writing and his research.

Hooray! A lucky break for Martin Lockwood at last!

But Martin’s rejoicings were short-lived. No sooner had the distractions and obstacles imposed by his job been wholly
removed
, than a whole new lot of obstacles and distractions came swarming in, as if on cue, to take their place: it was as if there were a
sort of Parkinson’s Law of interruptions, from which no man can escape. What happened to Martin was that it was at just this juncture that his affair with Helen began building up to crisis point, and his marriage, long moribund, began to collapse
completely
. From then on, he didn’t seem to have a minute to himself. Courting Helen, quarrelling with Beatrice: it was all incredibly time-consuming; and then, on top of all this, the actual mechanics of breaking up the marriage and moving in with Helen seemed to fall entirely on him. Neither of the ladies in the case would stir a finger to help him, Helen out of diffidence, Beatrice out of spite, but the net effect was the same in either case: namely, that it was left to him to cope single-handed with bloody everything, from making room for his belongings in Helen’s flat to finding a solicitor for Beatrice, who was soggily doing absolutely nothing on her own behalf: just crying down the telephone, for which he was still paying, to all her awful friends.

Still, nothing lasts for ever, and by now most of the problems were just about solved. He’d accomplished the move to Helen’s, had handled the terminal quarrels with his wife, and the rest was safely in the hands of the solicitors. There was nothing more to do. And so now here he was, his marriage at an end, his Sabbatical in the bag, and ahead of him month after month of undisturbed tranquillity: long peaceful days of uninterrupted work in Helen’s charming sitting-room, which had more or less become his study—followed by blissful evenings in her company, playing records, love-making, or working together on his thesis. The circumstances couldn’t be more ideal, or more conducive to inspired and creative work.

*

And so what was going wrong? What was getting in the way
now
?

Because
something
was. Each morning, as soon as Helen was gone and he had the flat to himself, he would start the day by making this therapeutic cup of strong black coffee; and then he would sit, slowly sipping it, waiting, with decreasing hope, for some tiny spark of enthusiasm to penetrate his leaden mind and set him going again.

Sometimes, when there was a bit of Helen’s typing still to check
over, it wasn’t so bad. It gave him an excuse, of a sort, for once more postponing the moment of creation. Greedily, he went over it line by line, taking a horrid pleasure in anything she’d done the least bit wrong. Altering her work, even if only by a comma, gave him the feeling that he was doing
something.

This morning, thank goodness, was one of these not-so-bad mornings. There’d been the Ledbetter interview for her to finish, and also some tables about the incidence of depression in different age-groups. These she’d been copying for him out of a massive tome which ought to have been returned to the library days ago: and with a small lift of the spirit—because here was yet another little job which demanded of him no spark of creativity; in fact quite the reverse, because creativity in copying out statistics can lead to the worst kind of trouble—he set himself to check the accuracy of her copy.

Nothing wrong at all. Everything checked out exactly, in every detail, and Martin felt a guilty twinge of disappointment. He could feel his mind, temporarily alerted by the possibility of spotting an error committed by someone else, growing dull once more.

Half past ten. Time for his next cup of coffee. By the time he’d drunk this, looked out of the window at the streaks of February rain, and tapped the barometer to reassure himself that it was going to continue, and give him an excuse for staying indoors all day—by this time, it was after eleven. Soon, it would be before twelve instead; and shortly after that, lunch-time would be in sight, and the worst would be over. In the afternoons, for some reason, he usually felt better—so much better, sometimes, that he would even force himself out for a short walk to clear his head. Occasionally, it actually worked, and his head
was
cleared. When this happened, he would find himself stepping out quite briskly on the homeward journey, and with any luck would be sitting at his desk and actually getting something written before the brief spurt of energy began to die. It was a sort of race against time: to walk just far enough to get the mental vigour flowing, but not so far that it was all gone again by the time he reached home.