Stanley and the Women

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘No,’ said Steve in an agitated way, shaking his head violently. ‘No.’

  ‘Of course you have. Or you’ve been sniffing glue or taking horrible speed. I’ve got enough troubles of my own without listening to your nonsense hour after hour.’ So Chris Rabinowitz had not come up with the offer or prospect he had been supposed to. Without looking at me Nowell went on, ‘Get him out of here, Stanley, please, and leave me in peace. I’ve had about all I can take.’

  Before I could say anything he shouted, ‘You poor fools! You’re in terrible danger!’ He looked wildly round the room as though he needed a place to take cover.

  I tried to get him to look at me. ‘What danger, Steve? What from?’

  ‘You have to trust me, dad.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘You’ve got to put your whole trust in me, completely. Swear you’ll trust me whatever happens.’

  ‘Of course I trust you, lad, we all do, but what do you mean, whatever happens? What’s going to happen? Who —’

  ‘No, swear — you have to swear. Mum, you swear first — come and stand over here by me.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Steve,’ said Nowell, but she said it without any conviction at all. And incidentally she looked like the way she had looked one time years before, I remembered, when she had wanted a holiday in Morocco and I had said Majorca was far enough.

  Steve was shouting again. ‘Will you listen! It’s going to happen any minute now!’

  I said, ‘What is? For Christ’s sake, what’s supposed to happen?’

  ‘I can’t explain, you have to trust me.

  Silence fell, but from the way Steve looked it was not going to last long. He was trembling in a jerky way and wincing as though he was cold, and his expression and even the set of his shoulders showed total bewilderment, though the word was not strong enough for a feeling that in this case was obviously as painful as extreme fear. At that point I knew what I had known on his first appearance the previous night, or rather I was forced to admit it to myself. On the other hand I was stumped for what to do. It seemed Nowell was not. She put her arm round his shoulders and talked to him with a loving sort of indignation, taking his part against the world.

  ‘You’ve had about enough, you poor little thing, haven’t you? It really is too bad. You’ve been under the most terrible pressure. I’m not surprised you’re upset. Anybody would be. It must have been absolutely awful,’ she said, and more in the same strain.

  In a minute or so she had him sitting on the couch and not trembling in the same way. I knew and cared nothing about why she was doing it or what she was saying to herself about it. Bert had no way of understanding what was happening but that bothered him not in the least. His offspring was more up with things, staring while resting her cheek on her shoulder like a kid watching a couple of sweet little baa-lambs. I went over and asked for a phone.

  He decided not to trust himself to speak, which I thought showed sound judgement. Kicking over on the carpet his fortunately empty glass he made a last-straw face and noise and pointed at the ceiling as earlier, then flew into a temper and shook his head a lot and pointed at the floor. I found what I was looking for in the next room, which set me wondering rather where Bert thought he was for the moment.

  ‘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 we
ight 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.’

  ‘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.