Stanley and the Women

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Stanley’s very keen on writing,’ said Nowell seriously. ‘His second wife’s a writer, you know. She doesn’t write a lot but she does write. And he sometimes writes himself, articles for the magazines about cars.

  To my surprise Collings seemed interested in this information and made quite a lengthy note. When she had finished doing that she pushed back her chair, which matched the table and had only one leg, and lit a cigarette. ‘Of course with changing social conditions the elitist role of education is passing too.’

  ‘Oh, yeah,’ I said.

  ‘Nowadays there’s much more emphasis on the social function, training the kids to relate to each other and preparing them to take their places in the adult world.’

  ‘At my school we got that thrown in, just by being there. We didn’t attend classes in it.’

  ‘No, and we can see the results, can’t we?’

  I thought about it. ‘Can we?’ She probably meant sexism and censorship and things like that.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s at all important to help kids learn to express themselves and develop their identities?’

  ‘Of course I do. I mean no, not really, and anyway I don’t see how you teach that, and that’s not what you go to school for. Any more than you join the police force to learn about community relations or whatever. You may pick up some of that on the side but the business of the police is to see to it that people obey the law.’

  Nowell had been watching me in a furtive kind of way that somehow made it no more difficult for me or anybody else present to see that that was what she was doing. Other bits of her expression showed how she was slightly thunderstruck to see that her ex-husband was even more stupid or brutal or out of date than she remembered, or perhaps had been able to take in before. She took no interest in politics, but she had been to too many parties in Islington and Camden Town not to know that the idea of the police seeing to it that people obeyed the law, or doing anything really, was a very bad one. So she produced a hissing inwards whistle and gazed wide-eyed at Collings, who managed to convey that she too was shaken by my last remark before saying, ‘Don’t you find it rather revealing that you see fit to equate the educational process with the British police of the 1980s?’

  ‘I don’t myself. I can’t see how I would, but I dare say you do. Except I didn’t equate them, if the word means what I think it does. I was merely making a comparison on one point, not …’

  I nattered on a little longer, but I had lost them again. Nowell did one of her controlled yawns, looked at her watch, bounced a hand over her hair-do. Collings pulled her chair back in to the table and put her cigarette part-way out in the saucer, getting it across that the enjoyable frivolous intermission was over and the serious work about to recommence. I wished Susan were there. She would have seen to it somehow that the story Collings went off with was a few kilometres nearer the truth. If that mattered.

  So to Steve and sex. He emerged even to Collings as hopelessly normal, standard, average. She rather surprised me by apparently finding nothing macabre in his slight but visible shyness with girls, not so much as a castration complex. Anyway, she gamely wrote bits down. Nowell came up with a few mote of her own-brand facts, but all they did was fill out the picture of Steve spending his early years with his mother in constant attendance and his father at the office, out getting drunk and never remembering his birthday.

  At no particular juncture that I could spot, Collings said that that was enough for today, put the top on her pen and gathered up her papers. Nowell glanced over at me. For once in our lives, it seemed to me we were both thinking the same thing, that some kind of round-up so far or tentative communiqué would be welcome. I knew enough about Collings to be reasonably certain that it would never occur to her to wonder whether Nowell and I might perhaps be thinking along those lines, so I spoke up.

  Sure enough, Collings was evidently thrown into some confusion by the idea, but she made a quick recovery. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘on the understanding that we’re still at a preliminary stage and this is only speculation …’ For the first time she was addressing Nowell and me more or less equally. ‘What Steve needs,’ she said slowly, sounding quite thoughtful, ‘is to be accepted as he is, and not as other people might wish him to be. That’s something that goes very deep in everybody, the need to be oneself. It takes precedence over almost all other drives. So … when it’s frustrated, the effect can be devastating. Steve is suffering from years of being treated and responded to, reacted to, as if he were someone else, someone quite different, someone created by other people. What we’re seeing now is his protest against that kind of treatment.’

  By the end of that lot she had gone all the way back to talking entirely in my direction. ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said, ‘it’s me, I’m the other people you’re talking about, I’m the one who’s to blame for the state he’s in.’

  ‘Please don’t think that, Stanley,’ said Collings, and Nowell put her head on one side and half-closed her eyes in a way that showed that she was against me thinking that as well.

  ‘Why not, if it’s true?’

  ‘Thinking in terms of blame won’t do any good. It won’t help you to help Steve, which is what this is all about, after all.’

  ‘I ought to have seen it coming, oughtn’t I? All the time I was sending him to a private school and getting a tutor in and bothering him about his homework I was actually setting him up for …’

  ‘You did it all for the best, darling,’ said Nowell.

  ‘Oh, super.’

  ‘I can tell you very seriously and professionally, and without any qualification that you’re not to blame,’ said Collings. ‘Instrumental, perhaps. That’s rather a different thing.’ After a moment’s hesitation she went on, ‘I must say it would be a pity if you let concern with your own moral position get in the way of more important things,’ and Nowell looked at the floor because she was afraid she took the same view.

  ‘I’m with you there,’ I said, and meant it. The trouble was that just then I could see no way of putting the idea of blame out of my mind whatever anybody told me. Without thinking I said, ‘Not everyone whose father puts pressure on him to pass exams ends up with schizophrenia.’

  ‘Of course there are other factors. Oh and by the way, I thought I’d already made it clear that Dr Nash’s diagnosis is quite mistaken, I’m sorry to say. If we must use these reductive terms, what Steve’s suffering from is something we call a schizophreniform disorder, which may sound similar to you but I assure you is quite different.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Nowell did a little forward semi-circle with her head and said in a semi-whisper, ‘Do you think I could possibly see him for a moment? Please?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Collings shortly. ‘He’s in Ebbinghaus House, which you’ll see on your left as you make for the main entrance.’

  ‘Aren’t you coming, Dr Collings?’ I asked.

  ‘No, it’s a rule of mine.’ Again she hesitated. ‘You may find some of his behaviour a bit unexpected. You know, unusual.’

  ‘Un… usual?’ repeated Nowell over a great surge of music on the inaudible soundtrack. ‘And what exactly is that supposed to mean?’

  For the first time a tiny rift could be seen in the idyllic relationship between those two. Collings said with her laid-on patience, ‘Certain physical reactions that are often observed in cases of this kind but people in your position are unlikely to have come across. That’s all.’

  ‘What sort of physical reactions?’ asked Nowell, taking a pace to one side to head Collings off if she tried to run out of the room.

  ‘Eye movements, changes of expression and so on. Nothing gross.’

  Nowell seemed satisfied with that. Collings indicated that she had gathered enough information to keep her happy for the time being. In the middle of doing so she threw me out completely by giving me a really powerful sexy look, one that almost qualified as a leer. At least that was what I took it to be, though given her skimpy control over he
r face it might almost equally well have stood for impersonal sympathy or moral disapproval. Not that that mattered much either.

  A minute later Nowell and I emerged from Rorschach House, whose name was indeed over its door, into watery sunshine. I was again struck by how neat the whole scene was, too neat perhaps, obsessively so, the kind of loonies’ garden this lot preferred to head-high grasses, holes dug in the ground and constant bonfires. Inmates strolled on the shaven lawns or walked up and down the weedless gravel paths. Well, I assumed they were inmates, but in these days of any old dress they could easily have been a convention’s worth of forensic psychiatrists out for a breath of fresh air after a lecture. Somebody who looked straightforward was approaching, a tall thin woman with a froth of white hair, a tic, a frown and a mouth that moved vigorously, also, as I saw when she was nearer, a copy of the Journal of Behavioural Psychology under her arm, which I felt must have meant something, though I was not clear what. I was hungry and I was nearly sure I could have done with a drink, even at whatever time it was, not yet eleven.

  ‘What an extraordinary woman,’ said Nowell as we walked, referring I assumed to Collings. ‘What did you think of her? Did you fancy her at all?’

  ‘Good God no, and even if I did I wouldn’t dream of laying a finger on a dodgy little bag like that.’

  ‘You must be getting old, Stanley. You used not to be so particular. As regards dodginess, that is.’

  There was a good deal I could have said on this subject, especially to Nowell, but I gave a peaceable grunt instead.

  ‘I thought it was a bit thick, the way she went on about you being to blame for what’s happened to poor little Steve. I hope you didn’t take that too seriously.’

  ‘Actually she went on rather a lot about me not being what you’d call to blame, didn’t she?’

  ‘Oh yes, but that was only what she said afterwards, you could tell she was really trying to blame you. I think that’s really mean, it’s bad enough to have your son have a breakdown without being told that it’s your fault on top of it. Bloody disgusting.’

  I moved my eyes to take in her face. Its thick-and-thin look was very much on view at the moment, plus a touch of generous indignation. There had been a time — I could remember it distinctly — when I would have at once asked her why, if that was her view of the matter, she had told Collings those lies about my having neglected Steve in his childhood, and would have been amazed when, instead of answering the question, she asked me why I had suddenly started being foul to her, what was the matter with me and the rest of the list. That certainly made me feel old.

  ‘Well, whatever you may think of her,’ she said, ‘the bag fancies you.’

  ‘Surely not.’

  ‘Oh yes, darling, I’m never wrong about that kind of thing. So no wonder she gave you a bad time — hell hath no fury, no? Now I’m sorry, Stanley, but I’m afraid I’ve suddenly realized that after that grilling in that frightful room the thought of picking my way through a bunch of madmen to see Steve doing unusual physical reactions is just too much for me. I’m not like you, tough as old boots, I simply can’t face it. Is that awful of me? I’d be afraid of upsetting him. I wonder, could you angelically give him my love and tell him I’ll be over to see him in a day or two? And let me know how he is, yes?’

  I said I would, and found myself going on to say, ‘I should think probably one visitor at a time is as much as he can cope with at the moment.’

  Nowell gave me a radiant smile, full of affection and gratitude, and kissed me warmly on the cheek. ‘You are a nice man, Stanley,’ she said, holding me at arm’s length a moment and gazing at me. Then she was off with a spring in her step. I had been sweet to her when I could just as well — rather more easily, in fact — have been foul to her.

  I remembered Cliff Wainwright saying once that women were like the Russians — if you did exactly what they wanted all the time you were being realistic and constructive and promoting the cause of peace, and if you ever stood up to them you were resorting to cold-war tactics and pursuing imperialistic designs and interfering in their internal affairs. And by the way of course peace was more peaceful, but if you went on promoting its cause long enough you ended up Finlandized at best. Calling this to mind now somehow helped me to see that Nowell’s line on Steve’s childhood came out of no sort of hostility, just self-protection, forestalment of the possible and well-founded charge that it was she who had done most of the neglecting. I had forgotten that her whole character was based on a gigantic sense of insecurity, not that remembering that had ever done me the slightest good.

  Ebbinghaus House was more of a house than the other place, with two storeys and proper windows. Inside too it was laid out after a different mode. I went into a small ante-room with a linoed floor and a porter’s cubby-hole behind a partition drawn far enough aside for me to see that there was nobody behind it. However, there was somebody in front of it, a young black man standing with his hands clasped together, I thought at first over his privates but actually, as a not very searching second glance showed me, just above them, for the time being at any rate. He was rolling his eyes, though not towards me, and opening and shutting his lips about every second. I decided quite quickly against asking him for directions. The partition and a board on an easel were covered with notices, but they all referred to places like bathrooms or the library or to amusements like chess and boxing. Boxing? Here?

  I had just given the notices up when a middle-aged woman in some sort of overall and with a pleasant, capable look about her came bustling towards me out of a passage at the rear. I only got as far as drawing in breath to speak to her, because she shook her head at me and in a flash lay down on her back on the lino with her arms crossed over her chest, like a crusader on a tomb. So I stepped over her and left her and the black fellow to it.

  The corridor here had a carpet running down it, one of a pattern my mother would have really liked, and a lot of rooms opening off it. Most of them in fact had their doors open to show quite nicely and brightly decorated insides, rather in the style of a mid-market boarding house in somewhere like Worthing or Hastings. Usually there were people sitting on the beds and chairs or standing, some chatting, some reading, some drinking from paper cups, but all the ones I noticed looked as though they were just filling in time and the rooms were parts of one large waiting room — half of them glanced up and away again as I passed. None seemed in any way mad. After going round a couple of right angles and through a kind of arcade of dispensers of soft drinks, hot drinks, peanuts and bubblegum I came to a doorway beyond which a female sat at a desk with papers and telephones on it.

  She leaned over slightly in my direction. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, meaning what the hell was I doing there and making me wonder whether she had nipped down here from behind the Rorschach House desk.

  ‘My son is a patient here,’ I said, and gave his name.

  ‘Wanted to visit him, did you?’

  ‘If possible. Dr Collings said I could.’

  The girl, in her middle twenties with pale hair and a great many moles on her face, consulted a list at her side. ‘Stephen Duke, was it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  ‘He’s in one of the rooms upstairs.’ This too seemed to mean something more or other than what it said.

  ‘How do I get there?’

  ‘By the stairs.’ Before I was actually forced to ask another question she went on, ‘Along on your left.’

  I thanked her and she silently went back to whatever she had been doing before. The conversation had made me feel old again, also this time out of touch, high and dry, a survivor from a bygone era.

  The stairs were indeed along on my left, a single steep flight ending at a closed door. Here a worryingly incompetent hand-lettered notice asked me to ring and wait. When I rang I heard a pair of feet running away from just inside the door to some remoter part. After about a minute, in other words a longish time, the door opened a few inches and stayed there while a high-p
itched voice spoke in a very foreign language, angrily I thought. In the end the door opened properly and a male Asian stood there, Indian or Pakistani, small, middle-aged and without any expression at all. I explained my errand and whether or not he understood he let me in. I just had time to notice that this floor looked quite different from the one below, more like what I had seen of Rorschach House, when he showed me into a small room containing four beds. Three of them were empty and made up and the fourth had Steve in it.

  Steve was apparently asleep. He was rather pale in a sort of transparent way. When I said his name his head made a sudden twisting movement and his eyes opened, though if he recognized me he gave no sign. He began to sit up while his head and neck went on jerking sharply backwards and to one side in a way that must have been most uncomfortable, if not painful. His eyes focused on me again for a few seconds, but then they rolled up and sideways in the same direction as his head, which soon followed, along with the shoulder on that side. I said his name again, louder, and he said something back, or perhaps just made a noise, a distressed noise. When he had been taken by another, more marked spasm I went back into the passage I hurried back into the passage and called for a doctor.

  The Asian put his head out of the next room but one to Steve’s. ‘Yes?’ he said, not sharply, not kindly or in a concerned way either.

  ‘Would you come here, please? Something’s wrong.

  He frowned and put his head back in for a moment before emerging and moving towards me carrying a millboard with papers clipped to it and followed by a Caucasian girl of about thirty in a uniform with something that looked like an officer’s badges on the shoulders. When the three of us got to Steve his tongue was sticking out quite a long way. The Asian nodded his head as if satisfied.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ I asked.

  ‘He is suffering from schizophreniform disorder.’

  ‘Yes, but does that cover these … whatever they’re called … colossal twitches? Are they all part of the disorder?’