Stanley and the Women

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘There you are,’ said Steve.

  After a moment I said, ‘How do you mean?’ because he seemed to think I knew. I wished Nash would join in.

  ‘Joshua,’ said Steve.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Oh come on — Joshua.’ For the first time he showed some impatience. ‘He’s only just … You saw him with your own eyes.

  ‘I saw a man. What … which Joshua are you talking about?’

  ‘More than one, is there? That one’s the one that took out Jericho with ultra-sound and saw off the Canaanites.’

  He mispronounced this name and I took a second to disentangle it. ‘How do you know about Joshua?’ I asked. It was nowhere near the most urgent question I had for him, but even now I could not imagine anything that would drive him to the Old Testament.

  ‘There are methods of obtaining the relevant information,’ he said, dropping back into his master-spy act for a moment, but soon coming up lively and self-confident. ‘Anyway, you saw him, didn’t you, what, twenty yards away? Less than a minute ago?’

  ‘You’re telling me that that was Joshua out of the Bible out there in the street just now, are you?’

  Evidently I was almost there but not quite. ‘Well, in a kind of way. You know, that was him born again. They’re all that in the key section.’

  I had no excuse now for complaining that Steve’s new view of the world was short of imagination or scope. When I looked at Nash, hoping for a sign that that sort of thing was to be expected, would soon pass, perhaps even had a nice touch of technical interest to it, there was nothing but a long, serious stare. Before I could speak to him Steve cut in.

  ‘You still don’t believe me, do you?’

  ‘I don’t see what made you think that was what he was. I don’t see how you could tell. I mean you must admit he looked like just an ordinary bloke.’

  ‘What do you expect him to look like, a geezer in white with a long white beard? It’s nothing to do with what he looks like, it’s who he is.’

  ‘Yeah, but what is it about him that tips you the wink who he is? You can’t have —’Look, I just know, got it? I know.’

  ‘But…’ I had seen at the start it was no use arguing but I only stopped now because I could think of nothing to say.

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s not the type of thing you can explain.’

  He turned to Nash to appeal for support on the point that there were types of things like that. I said to Nash, ‘I think what you suggested, I think we’d better do that.’ Nash nodded silently. He still looked grim.

  ‘No, I’m not going there,’ said Steve as soon as he understood the proposal. He showed no anger or fear but he would not have it. ‘I wouldn’t be safe in a place like that,’ he kept saying. Nash explained that if necessary he could have him put inside willy-nilly. Steve told him he was bluffing, and after a bit I stopped being clear what I thought. I said a lot of things I immediately forgot. A couple of times I felt so hungry I thought I was going to die, then the next moment not at all. Time passed as though it was never going to do anything else. I was sinking into a drowse of apathy and despair when something reminded me of something and I plunged downstairs to the phone. I forgot what I said there too, just like a drunk person, but no matter. ‘Your mother wants to speak to you,’ I said to Steve when I got back.

  He went straight away. I explained to Nash, who merely grunted. He obviously thought it was no time for a chat, turning over his notes with a great rustle of pages and hissing through his teeth, and I tried to hold off but soon I was saying firmly, ‘He’s very sick, isn’t he?’

  ‘Well, we’re not quite clear, are we, on exactly when, er matters took their present course,’ he said a bit at a time, ‘but his illness does seem to have progressed as fast as any I’ve known, of its type. From your account, and Wainwright’s, a remarkable rate of development. And to be so specific, comparatively specific, at this early stage, about his delusion that is — most unusual, if not …’ His voice died away, and it did seem just briefly that for once in his life he was not sure, or had let it be seen he was not. Then he charged on, ‘But very sick in any sense of unusual resistance to being made better, no. At least there’s no sign of that at the moment. We’re only at the beginning, you know.’

  ‘What causes it, doctor, this sort of illness?’

  Nash shook his head, either not knowing or knowing but not saying. ‘What … triggers it off is often some sort of shock to the emotions. Which means I think that it’s always that but sometimes the psychiatrist can’t find it or is uncertain about it. In this case the Fawzia episode looks rather a long time ago and the Mandy episode looks rather slight, but one never knows. It isn’t all-important to find the shock.’

  ‘He seems less frightened than he was.’

  ‘These things come and go. Large changes of mood from no visible cause are characteristic.’

  I thought of that when Steve reappeared, so soon I thought at first my luck had run out and Nowell had failed or not tried to do what she had promised. But I soon saw that was wrong. He had stopped being animated and he looked different, physically exhausted, like somebody who had been up all night. I was sure Nash noticed it too.

  ‘All right, I’ll go there.’ Steve said that without much expression, but he sounded quite convincingly fed up when he went on to say, ‘So I changed my mind. Does it matter why?’ The question was for me personally, though I had not been conscious of even asking myself anything on those lines. ‘You’re getting rid of me, aren’t you? That’s what you want. Father.’

  Those last few words of Steve’s turned out to be very easy to remember. They stayed around while I watched him silently — except for eating noises —get through a couple of bowls of soup and some ham and some bread in the kitchen, and incidentally while Nash sat on in the sitting room and wrote a lot of stuff for the hospital and ate Brie and cream crackers and drank a glass of red wine, just what he had ordered actually, though without specifying the rather pricey Burgundy that, feeling a bit of a coward, I had opened for him. There was a distraction when a young man dressed like a dustman, or so I thought, came to the front door and turned out to be the municipal psychiatric social worker summoned earlier by Nash to take Steve off. He, the social worker, wasted no time, but made two phone calls, handed me a piece of card that had an address and phone number written on it with amazing legibility, made it clear in the same movement that I would not be needed on the expedition and started a move to the door.

  ‘Cheers, dad,’ said Steve, not at all hostile now and so a lot more effectively reproachful than he could ever have been on purpose.

  ‘Cheers, son.’ Hugs were out, so I said a few things about him being well looked after and me coming to see him soon, and more deep stuff like that.

  When the two had gone, Nash said, ‘He should indeed be well looked after at St Kevin’s,’ surprising me slightly — I had put him down as a man who saved his attention for the job. ‘There really is a saint called that, you know. Irishman, of course. How he got his name on a hospital near Blackheath I can’t imagine. Anyway, it’s a cheerful sort of place, not one of your Victorian dungeons. Amusing lot, the Victorians, but when it came to institutional interiors they just gave up. I know somebody there called Dr Abercrombie who’s a very good man. I couldn’t get hold of him just now, but, er, he’s a very good man.’

  After that Nash made a whole operation of taking a last look at his notes and bundling them up and into his pocket. He seemed to me to be trying and failing to come up with a hopeful but true remark that also meant something.

  ‘Bit of luck, getting hold of that chap this time of the week,’ I said.

  Nash thought not, on the whole. ‘Saturday afternoon’s time and a half. Monday morning’s when you won’t find them. All day Monday, in fact.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I said. I could not have accounted for it, but this information depressed me. ‘Could you have put him in, put my son in if he’d gone on refusing to budge?’

 
‘Oh yes. Yes. But it’s not easy with a patient who isn’t grossly mad, mad on inspection so to speak, there he goes waving a great knife, that kind of behaviour. Not at all easy. All these vile rights of the individual, you know — it’s becoming more and more difficult to get anything done.’

  He gave me his card, engraved to the nines needless to say, with an address in Eaton Square as well as one in New Harley Street. ‘Mr Duke,’ he went on, staring at me, ‘I do want to impress upon you that I’m most inordinately interested in my subject. So much so that even after all these years I still catch myself wondering how supposedly intelligent people can absorb themselves in these various secondary pursuits. Mathematics. Literature, even. This means in practice that I’m prepared, I’m very willing to talk about your son’s case with you at any remotely reasonable time by telephone, in person by arrangement. Such a discussion couldn’t fail to touch on points of significance, do you see. Just try to bear that in mind, would you?’

  As soon as I was alone I started thinking about what Steve had said when he agreed to go into hospital, or rather just remembering, because I failed to get any actual thinking done on the subject. I stood about in the sitting room, then in the kitchen, where I tried to think about food instead and got nowhere there either. Obviously it was time I settled down to what I always did when I wanted to relax, to unwind, to take my mind off things, to potter through a couple of hours without having to think. Only I was short of anything like that, it seemed, except small stuff like a beer and a read of the paper. How had I managed before and after Nowell left me? It had been different then, I was not very clear how — something to do with being away a lot, changing jobs, having the builders in, and other rubbish I had forgotten after eight years.

  On past form on a Saturday Susan would not be back for a fair while, but sometimes she was early, and when she was going to be she usually rang to say, but not always. I was feeling powerfully like ringing her, but was uneasy about making her feel she ought to be home when she could still not leave work. All the same I had moved to within reach of the phone when it rang and made me jump.

  ‘Stanley? Is that you, Stanley?’

  It was like something out of a dream, not what that usually means, something marvellous, too good to be true, dreamy in fact, but something very hard to take, not at all vague, most precise, hard to take in too because the thing is wrong in a special way, like black and white at the same time. Anyway, for a moment I really thought Susan was talking to me with Nowell’s voice. Then I realized that of course it must all just be Nowell.

  ‘Yes, Nowell, as a matter of fact I was —’It’s Nowell here, darling. Did it work?’

  ‘What? Oh yes. Like a charm. Thanks very —’

  ‘You might have taken the trouble to let me know.’

  ‘I was going to, honestly, but I haven’t had a chance — he’s only this absolute second gone out of the door. We couldn’t get hold of the chap.’ Already without the least sense of strain I had slipped back into Nowell’s world, a place where, among other features, the truth or untruth of a statement rated rather low when you came to decide whether to state it or not. Not that you actually bothered to go into that side of it.

  ‘What? What chap?’

  ‘Oh, the … the chap at the hospital,’ I answered more or less at random. ‘Still, it’s all done now, thank God. I don’t know what line you took but you were pretty good, obviously.’

  ‘Well…’ she said, and in a way I wished I could have been there to see her saying it, ‘you know. Look, Stanley, tell me, where have they taken him, how is he, what are they going to do to him? It’s all happened so quickly.’

  ‘I don’t know any more about it than I did when I spoke to you an hour ago, except they’ve taken him to —’Darling, we must have a proper discussion, it’s too absurd. After all, we are both responsible for the poor little thing.’

  ‘Yes of course, but for the moment there’s really not a lot to discuss. He’s gone into hospital — that’s done, as I say. If you want to talk about his, well, his illness then Dr Nash is the fellow for that. He’ll be getting in touch with you anyway. He’s the one with all the —’

  ‘That’s not what I mean. We ought to discuss it. You and I. Surely you can see it’s an extremely serious matter, and it’s a thing we know more about than anybody else, I’m not talking about doctors, and if you want my opinion it’s our duty, and surely it’s a reasonable thing for me to ask in my position.’

  ‘Oh absolutely, but wouldn’t it still be sensible to wait till you have seen Nash and heard what he thinks are sort of the most important points?’

  In Nowell’s book a discussion was not a matter of views being put forward and argued over, let alone a method of working out what it was best to do about some problem. At the same time it was a cut above your straight chinwag, anyway morally. A discussion had such a serious subject that you could go on as long as you liked about any bit of it you fancied, because you were only trying to get at the truth, not showing off or holding the floor or any of those. The chosen bit could be as far-fetched as you liked too, because these days nobody could be sure what might or might not throw light on this or that. The seriousness also made it all right to be things you were usually supposed not to be in conversation, starting with rude and embarrassing.

  For these and other reasons I felt I could really do without a discussion with Nowell about Steve. What I had just said was nothing more than an attempt to hold her off — I had felt like going quite a way further but, as she had reminded me with her last few words, she had been the one who had talked Steve round when my lot could not, twice in twenty-four hours too, and there was plenty of time to go yet.

  Until she got to that last phrase about her position, her voice and the looks and movements I could so easily imagine going with it had been chummy, almost cosy, with a definite hint of only-yesterday going on —not her usual style with me. She went back to it when she said, ‘After all, this isn’t some sort of scientific experiment, darling. It’s to do with our son. My son. I don’t mind admitting I’m awfully ignorant about all sorts of things, but I do know a lot about him.’

  ‘You certainly do,’ I said admiringly, also thoughtfully. ‘You can read him like a book. Always could. What was that place in Brittany you took him to a couple of times?’

  ‘What? When was this?’

  Her tone had completely changed in that second, but I was too slow to take it in. ‘Oh, years ago, he can’t have been more than eight or —’What did he say to you?’

  ‘Well, he’d obviously loved having you to himself. I was tied up here with all the —’

  ‘Perhaps you hadn’t noticed, Stanley, but the poor boy was in the most frightful state. Confused … terrified …’

  ‘Eh?’ For the moment I was baffled. ‘Look, Nowell, I don’t mean just now, I’m talking about then, when you and he came back to Maida Vale and I asked him if he’d had a nice holiday and he was full of the way you’d —’

  ‘For Christ’s sake, any reasonable man would have been pleased to be helped out of a problem he couldn’t cope with himself. I must say I had thought I was doing you a good turn.’

  ‘You were, and I’m very grateful — I didn’t —’

  ‘I can see you may be upset but you’ve no need to take it out on me. There’s no point in trying to deal with you in your present mood. Thank you for your information. Good afternoon to you.

  Most of the things old Nowell said and did were funny really. The difficulty had always been in laughing at them, especially when they were coming your way. The dignified-restraint component in her final offering illustrated the point well. At this distance I was unsure how I had taken that type of thing when we were first married — as rather dignified and restrained, probably, though also hasty, perhaps, or confused. I had gone straight from something like that to what I felt now, a desire to chop her off at the ankles, without so much as an embarrassed smirk in the middle.

  At the moment any sor
t of smirk could only have been at my own expense, with first place going to my brilliant attempt to lead her away from the topic of the dreaded discussion. I had forgotten until too late that she was sensitive about Steve’s younger days, when she had boarded him out with friends more than she should have, got in unsuitable girls to look after him, and so on. I had only been fool enough to bring these things up once, just before she left me or perhaps just after, but I always might again, she never knew. And then of course when I was baffled near the end of our conversation I knew I had started speaking quicker than before, and a bit louder, and with a certain amount of force or emphasis, and from her point of view I might easily have gone on to set about being foul to her any second, and she could hardly have been expected to take a chance on that. For Nowell, if one patch was dodgy the whole area was dodgy, even if the other fellow seemed to be sticking to the far end of the field. This little way of hers often tended to limit conversation to the here and now.

  But when she had gone there I was on my own again. I turned on the radio, a Danish job called a StereoBoy, something I rather wished I had noticed before I bought it, and went not very searchingly over the bands. Most of the stations were evidently playing the same yobbos’ war-chant, but even the others were somehow impossible, too far on with what they were doing to be caught up with. I had just started on a second run-through when I heard Susan’s key in the door.

  I went round the corner into the hall and there she was, coming down the passage with her briefcase and stubby umbrella and shaking out her woollen hat. Her eyes looked extra large.

  ‘Oh, I am glad to see you, love,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see anybody.’

  We stood with our arms round each other. ‘There’s nothing awful, is there?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Well. They’ve taken him off to hospital. And he’s mad, the doc says.

  ‘Tell me all about it.’

  We went into the kitchen, where a woman with a North-country accent was talking seriously about senile dementia. Susan turned her off, or rather, not knowing how to do that, shifted off the frequency, which was good enough for me just then.