The Parasite Person (9 page)

W
ITH EYES THAT
would barely open, Martin looked at his watch. He hated waking up and finding that Helen had already left for work. He couldn’t blame her, obviously, since it was already a quarter to ten, and he didn’t blame her. He just hated it, that’s all.

He had had an awful night, and he was feeling awful now. It had been five o’clock before he’d finally got rid of that wretched girl, and even then he’d had to pay the minicab himself, as well as ringing it up and everything. She wouldn’t even do that for herself.

Lying in bed now, his head thick with sleep and his usual morning lethargy heavy upon him, he began trying to piece together something of last night’s extraordinary events: what had been said, and by whom, and whose fault it all was. This last was something Martin always needed to know before he could get properly to grips with anything.

Partly (he had to admit) it was his fault. He should have been more on his guard. He might have known, from her irritating and totally useless interview, that this Ruth Ledbetter was going to be a pain in the neck if she could possibly work out some way of being so. She was the type. He’d met them before, these interview subjects who seemed to imagine that just because they’d bared their souls to you in answer to your questions, this somehow entitled them to plague the life out of you afterwards, as if you were their bloody therapist. Transference, that’s what it was, he reflected, and experienced a flicker of self-satisfaction until he recollected that if transference was what they were after, then they should be paying £15.00 an hour for it, the going rate; not
demanding minicabs, and cups of tea, not to mention a share of the whisky to which boredom drove him as the night wore on.

How had she tracked him down, anyway? Who could have given her his address? One of those damnfool busybodies at the Clinic, no doubt, their claws into everybody’s business, and paid never to let well alone.

What, exactly,
had
she come for?—apart, of course, from making a bloody nuisance of herself, which, for one of her temperament, was doubtless a worth-while project in itself. As best he could with his furred morning brain, Martin tried to gather up his tattered recollections of last night’s ordeal.

“Look, Prof, if the answer’s No, say so,” had been her opening words: or at least these were the words that first clearly penetrated his consciousness. He had complied with alacrity, saying “No!” loudly and clearly, and without getting bogged down in
time-consuming
queries as to what the hell she was talking about. Keep it simple, he’d thought. Whatever it is, say No to it, and then there can’t be any more fuss.

How wrong he’d been. Far from bringing her discourse to an end, the simple little monosyllable had had the effect of triggering off a positive fury of communication. She’d gone on for hours, the incessant patter of sound sometimes loud and staccato against his eardrums, sometimes faint and far away, like distant bagpipes, according as he dozed, and woke, and dozed again in the hard kitchen chair.

Of what she’d actually said, he remembered almost nothing, partly because of falling asleep such a lot, and partly because of being too annoyed to listen properly even when he was awake. Annoyed not only with Ruth for landing herself on him at this unearthly hour, but with Helen, too, for allowing it. What the hell did she think she was doing, allowing her lover to spend half the night closeted in the kitchen with a brazen little hussy like this? And providing them with tea and biscuits too, for God’s sake! Why couldn’t she be jealous and possessive, like other women? Then maybe he, Martin, would have had a decent night’s sleep, and wouldn’t be feeling so absolutely frightful this morning.

Ten o’clock. Glumly, and with frightful effort, Martin dragged
himself out of bed, and huddling into his dressing-gown padded out to the kitchen.

Last night’s debris had been cleared away, and the breakfast table was neatly and invitingly laid for one. In a tiny glass jar beside his plate, Helen had placed two golden crocuses, the first of the season. She was saying it with flowers, saying something to the effect that even far away in her classroom, she was still loving him.

Or was still keeping an eye on him. That’s more what it felt like, somehow. Saying it with flowers has always been a chancey business, the message sent often becoming sadly scrambled by the time it reaches the recipient. Martin felt trapped, and somehow put-upon by this all-embracing care and concern that never seemed to let up, day or night.

Impatiently, he pushed the flowers aside to make room for the coffee-pot, and then slowly, resentfully, and not very efficiently he set about making his own breakfast. This morning, perversely, he decided to have a boiled egg
with his toast, a thing he rarely did: and a great nuisance it proved to be, what with finding the right pan, and timing it, and everything. It was a sort of retaliation for the flowers: just
look
at all the bothersome tasks you’re leaving me to do all by myself.

*

The ringing of the telephone almost pitched him out of his chair. The shock was awful, he was filled with a nameless dread, which after a very few moments he was able to identify all too easily as the usual and familiar dread lest somebody was going to expect him to do something.

He just couldn’t face it, not at this hour in the morning. He sat with his head in his hands waiting for it to stop.

*

That damn Ledbetter girl! Under the impact of the din, a flicker of memory was surfacing from his subconscious … something she’d said …? asked him about …? catching him at a moment when he was too exhausted to argue …? Yes, that was it. Something about phoning him. Phoning him this morning for his decision.

What
decision? How people do keep on at you! Crouched at the table, shoulders hunched, head down, like a man under machine-gun
fire, Martin tried to make his mind a blank; and then, when this didn’t work, he fell to counting the rings as they blared through the flat.

Surely it must stop
some
time? Has there ever been a case of a telephone that goes on ringing
for
ever
?
In the
Guinness
Book
of
Records
would it be …?

And at last, of course, it
did
stop. Quite shaken, Martin raised his head, and wearily tried to resume his breakfast. By now his appetite was quite gone. The coffee was cold, the egg was hard, and a tight knot of rage, almost indistinguishable from heart-burn, was
forming
in his gullet. Why did people have to do this to him? Why couldn’t they leave him alone?

At the sight of the little golden flowers, still beaming their innocent message at him as if nothing had happened, he almost choked.

It was all Helen’s fault, somehow. He couldn’t explain it or analyse it, but it was.

*

Work was impossible. Even leafing through his amended notes for Section II. The Aetiology of Depression in Middle Life, made him feel quite ill. There wasn’t an idea anywhere that hadn’t been cribbed from someone else, not a paragraph which wasn’t heavy with platitudes and padding.

Endogenous Depression. Reactive Depression. Menopausal
Depression
. Early signs and symptoms. There wasn’t a single thing here which wasn’t common knowledge, elementary textbook stuff. How long could he keep up the delusion that these worn-out commonplaces were going to lead somehow to some brilliant new synthesis, some novel and startling hypothesis which would
revolutionis
e the whole academic approach to the subject, and open up avenues of treatment yet undreamed?

“The typical onset is insidious,” he had written, as if no one had ever noticed this before. “His early symptoms are commonly attributed by the patient to adverse factors in his environment. Guilt and self-blame may already be evident at this stage, blah blah blah, commonly projected on to those close to him, blah blah
blah, resulting in progressive withdrawal from supportive relationships, blah blah blah …”

*

It was almost a relief when the front door bell sliced through this tired re-hash of entrenched platitudes. Deeply though Martin loathed all the kinds of people it could possibly be—meter-readers, neighbours, insurance salesmen, window-cleaners and the like—nevertheless,
any
distraction was better than none. Hating whoever it was would at least be a change from hating everything else.

A scowl on his face, and a faint, pleasurable stirring of adrenalin in his veins, Martin strode towards the door. There might even be an opportunity to be rude to somebody. You never knew.

*

Ruth Ledbetter sidled in like an experienced stray cat, giving him no chance to shut the door on her. Once inside, as stray cats will, she made straight for the electric fire with its two bars on.

“What a bloody waste,” she remarked, bending down the better to warm her small, ungloved hands, mottled with cold. “
Two
bars! You a bloody millionaire, or something?”

“I’ll turn them off if you like,” Martin threatened, irritated by the blatant advantage she was taking of the condemned luxury; and almost instantly he realised what a mistake it was to have been thus side-tracked. He should have concentrated all his energies on telling her to
go:
to get out, to scram, to piss off. It was too late now. This sort of thing has to be said in the heat of the moment, across a still un-breached threshold, and with your hand still in the position of power on the doorhandle. You can’t do it once the visitor has established a bridge-head within your territory, has already
penetrated
as far as the sitting-room, and is stepping, cat-like, around the perimeter of the carpet, examining every picture, every bit of decoration, with a sort of wondering contempt.

“Christ! It’s a sort of tomb, isn’t it?” was her first remark, “A sort of Do-it-Yourself mortuary.”

Thunderstruck, Martin took two steps backwards and,
half-expecting
to find the room indeed changed, looked wildly about him.

It was a pretty room, he’d always thought so; even elegant, for
Helen had excellent taste, though little money to spend. The white-painted bookshelves were sparkling, the carpet
newly-vacuumed
, and vases of autumn leaves and berries, still beautiful, stood here and there about the room, the muted colours reflected softly in polished wood and gleaming brass.

“Dead things!” Ruth pointed. “She keeps dead things to look at in the evenings! She tears them from the live trees and hedges, and brings them back here so she can watch them die! She a
necrophiliac
or something, your girlfriend?”

Martin was completely thrown. He could think of no words with which to reply to these bizarre and outrageous accusations. The sheer insolence of it left him speechless.

And yet, under his very proper sense of outrage, he was aware that he was feeling better than he had for months. The heavy mornings’ dullness that had plagued him for so long was suddenly quite gone. He felt a sort of glee, a secret inner gloating impossible to describe.

Something was happening at last.

“N
O SEX
,”
SAID
Ruth, sipping her coffee delicately through neat, pointed lips, like a small bird. “I hate sex. If you try to make me have sex, then it’s all off, I won’t help you at all.”

Why couldn’t she say “make love”? “Have sex” was such an ugly, harsh phrase, especially from so young a girl. Not that it mattered. Nothing was further from his mind at this particular juncture, and, as politely as he could, he told her so, adding: “I’ve got my own girl-friend, you know, here, living with me, and I love her very much.”

“You do?” Ruth looked at him reflectively, with something of the air of a doctor who, having diagnosed a mortal disease, is uncertain just how much of the truth to reveal to the patient. “Then how come you’re in a depression? A
clinical
depression,” she amended, showing off, with childlike vanity, her familiarity with technical terms. “Listen!” She picked up a page of manuscript from his desk as if at random—though Martin felt quite sure that she’d been prying about among his papers while he’d been making the coffee—“Just listen to this!” and she proceeded to read his own words back at him, mimicking what she imagined to be the pompous tones of an authority on the subject:

She skimmed through the paragraph:

“So who wants to read your autobiography, Prof? I thought this was meant to be a
thesis
?”

“It
is
a thesis!—” Martin was beginning indignantly, but she interrupted him:

“Autobiography,” she insisted. “A walking case-history!” She sniggered, and tossed the page back among the others. “The case-history of a certain M 40 B, Social Psychology lecturer. Victim of Life Events Nos 2, 5, 6 and 7. To wit: Broken Marriage, Change of Domicile, Acquisition of New Life Partner, Failure to Achieve Promotion at work. Adding up to a total of 470 points on the Life-Stress Scale. Friends: nil. Occupation: bloody nothing. No wonder he’s depressed. Right?”

Martin shrugged. He wasn’t going to let her see that her snap diagnosis had struck home. If it
was
a snap diagnosis? Some way or another, she seemed to have discovered one hell of a lot about him.

“You exaggerate,” he said lightly. “Naturally, I’m aware that I have certain depressive tendencies, most academics have, but—”

“Not tendencies. A full-blown clinical depression,” she insisted. “Endogenous.” She loved using these polysyllables, you could tell. And she was using them correctly, damn her.

Abruptly, Martin changed the subject.

“You said you had a proposition to make to me,” he suggested, taking her coffee cup rather pointedly away from her. She was irritating him almost past endurance by scooping out the sugary dregs with a teaspoon and then licking at them with her quick darting tongue. “Did you want some more?” He held the cup well away from her, enquiringly, and when she shook her head he put it down safely out of her reach. “Now, tell me, Ruth, exactly what it was you had in mind?”

“I told you last night,” she said sulkily; and then, when he waited for her to continue, she added nastily: “That’s another
symptom of depression, you know; never listening to a word anybody says.”

It was, too. He couldn’t fault her on her textbook knowledge.

“It can also be a symptom of boredom,” he pointed out drily. “And of prolonged sleep-deprivation. It’s a syndrome you may encounter quite often if you make a habit of waking people up in the small-hours and forcing them to sit up all night while you tell the story of your life. It
was
the story of your life you were telling, I take it?”

Well, of course it was. They were all the same, these neurotic types. And now, just like the rest of them, she was sulking. Not looking at him. Not speaking. Fidgeting in the big chair. Was it for this that he’d shaken the dust of his student seminars off his feet for a whole year? So touchy, some of these girls, it made you wonder how they’d ever picked their way through their pampered lives even thus far.

At last, she spoke.

“You’re looking at my legs,” she accused, pulling her short navy skirt as far over her knees as it would go; and now, of course, he did look at them, for the first time. Skinny they were, white as peeled mushrooms under her laddered tights. Not attractive at all. He felt boredom, like the beginning of an illness, stirring restlessly in his vitals, and knew that he must act quickly before it got him.

“Look, Ruth, I’m sorry if I don’t remember too well just what it was we were talking about last night, but it was bloody late, you know. If you want people to listen to you, you should pick a time convenient to them as well as to yourself.”

It felt rather good, having a young person to patronise again. Perhaps he was missing his students more than he realised.

“However,” he continued, pleased by his little homily, “it so happens that this
is
a time convenient to me, and so I’ll be happy to give you a few minutes—” he glanced importantly at his watch, just as if the time it indicated made a blind bit of difference. “But do please get on with it, my dear. I haven’t got all day.”

He had, of course, but that was beside the point. The incipient boredom was beginning to gnaw, like an ulcer, inside him.

“Jumpy, aren’t you?” she remarked, and stretching out her thin
legs across the hearthrug, she leaned back in the chair and contemplated him, a small smile beginning to twitch at the corners of her lips. “It’s a pity you couldn’t be bothered to listen to me last night, Mr Lockwood, because the proposition I put up to you then was quite something. It could have been all yours, Daddy-O. Like, you know, real neat.

“It’s too late now, so that’s Curtains for Proposition A. Which leaves us Proposition B. Right? Right, Mr Lockwood?”

“Why—er—yes.” Martin was somehow taken by surprise, he’d thought the sentence was going on for ages yet. “Yes. I suppose so. Yes. I mean ‘Right’,” he amended, as if giving the correct
password
. “‘Right’.”

“Right,” she echoed, on a curious note of relief, as if the first small step of some complex and hazardous project had after all gone according to plan. “Right, Mr Lockwood. Proposition B, then. A business proposition, plain and simple. Would you like me to do your interviews for you? Take them over, the whole lot, and finish them? I could. I’m experienced. And I happen to know you’ve got behind with them.”

How
did she happen to know? Who had told her? First his address, here at Helen’s: and now this. He began to feel hunted down, closed in upon, by persons unknown.

He wasn’t going to let her see his discomfiture.

“As a matter of fact, Ruth, you happen to be perfectly right,” he said, with assumed nonchalance. “Though how you came to have access to confidential information of this nature, I really
cannot
…”

“Oh, Walter told me,” she said easily; and then, misinterpreting Martin’s startled look, she kindly explained: “You know. Walter Cummings. The guy who works for you. A big, fat goofy chap, as thick as two boards.”

Martin had been about to express outrage at this casual
exchange
of confidential information among his subordinates, but now he thought better of it. He liked her description of Walter. A perceptive girl. Maybe she
would
make a good interviewer?

He thought about it, and the more he thought about it the more delectable seemed the prospect of getting help—competent, professional
help, not Walter’s reluctant and intermittent
fumblings
—with his frightful arrears of interviews. And not merely help; unless he had misunderstood her, she was proposing to take over the job completely, to do the whole lot of them herself, just like that. The very idea of it set his heart pounding with sheer, incredulous relief. To get the bloody things
done
, without having to bloody
do
them! It was like a dream come true.

If only it
did
come true? If only there wasn’t some snag
somewhere
?

He looked at his prospective assistant thoughtfully: at the pale, sharp features, the bright, calculating eyes.

The hell with it! Of course she was calculating, and so, for that matter, was he: why else would he be looking her up and down like this, weighing up the advantages and possible disadvantages of employing her? Everyone calculates, applies the What’s-in-it-for-me test to any new project. They’d be fools not to, and the last thing he wanted was another fool on the job.

Yes, he decided, she’d do. She had brains, she had
determination
, and above all she had the cheek of the devil, which,
particularly
in the case of depth-interviewing, is a qualification in itself.

“What are your qualifications?” he asked. He didn’t want her to think it was a walkover, getting this job, though of course it was: at 80p an hour, how could it be otherwise? Nor did he want her to think he would take just anybody, though of course he would, that’s how he’d got Walter. But you don’t get that sort of bad luck twice in a lifetime, surely?

“Qualifications? Oh, well, of course I haven’t got a degree or any of that crap,” she answered him, as if this was a recommendation in itself. Which of course it was, in a way: a graduate would kick up no end of tedious fuss about the pay scale. “Walter said it didn’t matter,” she continued. “He says he hasn’t got one, either.”

Walter this. Walter that. Martin felt uneasy.

“A friend of yours, is he?” he asked cautiously. He was wary of this sort of thing. He didn’t want the two of them getting together on the job, comparing notes, ganging up on him. It could easily happen.

Her reply was reassuring.

“What, a creep like that?” she exclaimed. “You’ve got to be joking!” and once again Martin’s heart warmed towards such perspicacity in one so young. “No,” she hastened to explain, “I only met him the once, and why I chatted him up, it was so’s he could fill me in about the job. You know; what it was like, kind of thing. What
you
were like. To work for, I mean.” She paused. “He said you were okay,” she concluded, tolerantly, “except when you were in one of your moods.”

In one of my moods! Martin almost choked with fury.

“What Mr Cummings is pleased to describe as ‘one of my moods’,” he explained coldly, “refer without exception to those numerous occasions when he has let me down without warning and for reasons so trivial as to be nothing short of downright insolence. Now I hope, Ruth, that if we
do
decide to take you on, you’ll put your back into the work, make a decent job of it. I can’t afford to have
another
assistant mucking me about, missing appointments, upsetting my schedules. I hope that’s understood? If you do a job for me, you’ll do it well and thoroughly? Right?”

“Oh yes. I’ll do it well and thoroughly, all right,” she assured him; and for a moment it seemed to Martin that she was making the words sound like some kind of a threat: but of course that was ridiculous. “So don’t worry about that, Mr Lockwood. There’s just one more thing, though—”

He was waiting for this. For some minutes now Martin had been turning over in his mind how to break it to her about the 80p an hour. Not that this was the way the Grants people put the case to aspiring employees: £3.00 per interview was the figure they quoted, with little congratulatory squeals for the lucky applicant about to lay his hands on such loot. But 80p an hour was what it actually came to, by the time you’d telephoned your subject to fix an appointment, had found your way to his address at No. 144 on some God-forsaken Council Estate, with all the doorways labelled 1–11, and then waited around until he came back from the doctor’s, the dry-cleaners, the betting-shop; and then, on top of all that, actually
getting
the interview, typing it out when you got home, pages of it, sometimes, half of it illegible and having to be filled in out of your own head….

How to present all this enticingly, that was the problem. Martin decided on the detached, breezy approach. If all else failed, he could top-up the meagre pittance from his own pocket: it would be uneconomic, but worth it, in the way that champagne is
uneconomic
but worth it, or a weekend in a five-star hotel.

“About money,” he began, “I have to warn you, Ruth, that the rates we can afford to pay—that the Grants Committee can afford to pay, that is, it’s not really anything to do with me—”

She interrupted him.

“Who said anything about paying? I don’t want any pay. I’ll get you your interviews for nothing.”

In a way, it was wonderful. In a way, it solved everything, particularly the problem of how the Grants people would view the prospect of allotting him a second assistant. “But you’ve got Walter Cummings already,” they’d say, looking it up in their filing system under C. And if he suggested scrapping Walter and replacing him by this obviously more efficient young woman, their eyes would widen reproachfully. “But don’t you realise, Mr Lockwood, that Walter comes from a
Broken
Home
!” they’d say, in hushed voices, as if he’d switched on an electric razor in church: and if (as had once happened) he allowed himself to retort that he wasn’t surprised, Walter was enough to break any home, they’d gasp in horror, as if he were Grippen himself, and he would practically hear his prospects of promotion clanging yet another notch or two downwards.

So Ruth Ledbetter’s unprecedented quixotry was in one way a godsend. In another, it was slightly unnerving.

If she wasn’t in it for the money, then what
was
she in it for?

“I’m just interested,” she explained smugly. “Any objections?”

Lots: but Martin couldn’t think how to put them into words. What they added up to was a profound and all-embracing mistrust of people who act from motives other than those of self-interest. Such people weren’t playing fair, it always seemed to Martin, and dealing with them was like playing chess according to a revised set of rules known only to your opponent: defeat is certain. Unselfish people are frightening, he felt, in the same way that lunatics are frightening; you never know what they may do next.