Stanley and the Women

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Quite enough, thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m going up top. I’ve got to get some air or I’ll die.’

  ‘I’ll join you. I’ll just get a freshener first.’

  Closely following an elderly woman with an enormous backside under some ribbed grey material, I climbed to the deck. It was not quite dark, with hundreds of lights showing on both banks and a few more round me and on the other barges. Out here on the water it seemed very quiet, or it might have done but for the long hallooing retches that came from somebody up at the far end. Half a dozen other figures leant or slumped at various points. I found a secluded spot and had soon taken in all the air I could handle. Having done so I felt just slightly worse. The back of my neck prickled and my mouth kept filling with saliva. There were only three things I could do — leave, lie down or be sick. The first was the one to go for, but I would have to try at least to find Harry first.

  Outside the opening that led to the stairway I came across a man of about fifty kicking the corded step below it and biffing at the sides with the heels of his hands. He had obviously given the business some thought. ‘I think it’s going to rain again,’ I said as I approached.

  He looked round and nodded cheerfully while going on bashing away and incidentally blocking my path. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if you weren’t right, lad,’ he said in an unreconstructed Northern accent. He had a broad pink face and sandy eyebrows and wore a towelling jacket with military pockets and drill trousers. ‘Just working off my feelings, like,’ he went on, then evidently made up his mind that I deserved some further explanation, because he stopped what he was doing and turned towards me, panting slightly. He was rather drunker than I had thought at first.

  ‘The wife’s been being a little bit provoking,’ he said in a half-whisper, smiling and screwing up his nose. ‘You know, feminine. Now whenever that happens I don’t say a word, I come straight outside wherever I may be and I do what I just been doing for two minutes, and then I go back in full of the joy of spring. When I got married I told myself I could be happy or I could be right, and I’ve been happy now for twenty-two years. Ee, sorry, lad, here I go gassing away and holding you up.’ He stood aside, looking at his watch. ‘Another … forty seconds should see it through.’

  I had been away no more than ten minutes, probably less, but the scene down below had changed quite a lot in the time. I thought to begin with that everybody was being sick, then I saw that only quite a small number were or had been, but they were naturally getting all the attention. One fellow had — I turned my eyes away. A woman was — no. Even now there was no general move towards the stairs. The bleeding idiots had stood their ground hoping the whole thing would pass off until it was too late to move a step. If I had been Julian Box I would have been very angry with them, but if he was he was getting no chance to show it, because his wife was giving him a going-over for not stopping them or not holding the boat steady or something like that.

  Harry was nowhere to be seen, not in the main room anyway. Literally gritting my teeth and trying to think of rose-gardens I tried the revolting areas round the toilets and shouted his name through the door of each one with no result. In the first bedroom a man was lying with his grizzled head hanging over the edge. The second bedroom was empty — no, there was a pair of legs sticking out from the far side of the bed. They were Harry’s. He had helpfully squeezed his head in under to be sick there. Somehow I got him moving. I tried not to look at his beard. When we were nearly at the stairs Bert came up.

  ‘Can you give me a lift, Stan?’

  ‘All right. Lend a hand here.’

  There was a hold-up at the gangway, and when he got ashore Harry failed to perk up at once in the usual way of seasick people on landing. He stayed propped up against the Apfelsine while Bert and I moved aside for a pee. The three of us climbed aboard. Bert insisted on going in the back, which called for a semi-climb over the tipped passenger seat, no doddle for a bloke his size even cold sober, Harry got in beside me unaided though unsteady, and we were off.

  Bert swore now and then. Harry said once or twice he was feeling better. I kept quiet until I spotted a vacant taxi halted at a traffic-light on our left.

  ‘Get him,’ I said to Harry, pulling up and pointing. ‘Bert wants a taxi. Quick about it.’

  He only just made it but he made it, and came back almost simpering. ‘Okay.’

  I said, ‘I’m afraid it’s not okay here, Harry. He’s passed out, I can’t shift him. Not a hope. Look, you take that taxi, go on. I’ll see to him, don’t worry.’

  ‘But you can easily —’

  ‘No, it’s all right, I’ll deal with him. Off you go now, I’ll manage.’

  There was nothing he could do, especially when I put the window up. The wheels started to turn.

  ‘He’s taking it,’ said Bert’s voice behind me. ‘Not much choice, really. Five quid up his shirt from here. That was brilliant, Stan. Real touch of class.’

  ‘It was your idea.’

  ‘I’m talking about the execution. Fantastic. Bloody noble, you were. Anything for a pal.’ When he was settled in the passenger seat he gestured towards the instrument panel and said, ‘Don’t let’s do this now. Motors another time, right? Hey, I bet you thought that bugger was seasick, didn’t you? Well, he may have been but he’d drunk too much too.’

  ‘Do what? In that minute? We weren’t there more than —’

  ‘That’s the point. When you go hurling it down it only takes half what it does spread out. When I started talking to him, not so long before you turned up, he was working his way through a bloody trayload of gin and tonics. Just started on the last one as you came along. And the rate he was going there’d been other trays before. It was free, you see. Like what, red rag to a bull? One of those. In the boozer we tell him when it’s his shout. It’s a joke, except we don’t think so, and he doesn’t think so. How do you stand him?’

  ‘I haven’t got to stand him,’ I said. ‘Good editor, though. Gets the readers.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ said Bert in disgust, then shut up for a bit, then suddenly said, ‘Five past eight. Fixed up for dinner, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There’s a place I go to sometimes in Soho. Little Italian joint. That sound all right to you?’

  ‘Fine. But aren’t you rather pissed, Bert?’

  ‘Not by my standards, old son. Anyway, they know me there.’

  They certainly seemed to from the reception they gave him, which reminded me of Nash’s at his place, only this one was of course a class or two down the social scale. What was similar was the way Bert basked in it. Pissed or not, he soon saw me noticing.

  ‘Friendly bunch, eh? I come here quite a lot, actually. In fact I’m quite famous here. I’m not famous in any famous places but I am here.’ He drained his wineglass and filled it again. ‘Because of the people I’m usually with. I do a lot of TV commercials. More interesting work than you might think. Reasonably well paid, too.’

  ‘So I gather,’ I said. This explained several things, including the general impression he gave of prosperity and non-failure. I realized I had known almost nothing about him except that he got drunk and had a first Jaguar.

  ‘You might even have seen the odd one. Er, Prosit lager?’

  ‘What, those two fellows in the helicopter? Marvellous. You did that?’

  He looked modestly into his minestrone, which he was coping with rather better than I had expected. ‘That’s me, yeah. That’s one of mine. I do all those. So I’m quite famous in that line, you see, in the business, but you don’t get known to the general public there. I don’t mind that myself, as I say the money’s good, but … And then … If …’ He put his spoon down. ‘Stanley, I’ve got to talk about her. Say I can. Say it’s all right. Please.’

  ‘I’ve seen it coming for hours, mate. Go ahead and enjoy yourself.’

  ‘Because you’re the only man on earth who’ll understand.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that, but I see what
you mean. Anyway.’

  ‘Yeah anyway, but where had I got to?’

  ‘Wait a minute. Oh yes, you don’t mind not being famous everywhere, but presumably she does.’

  ‘Yeah, she does. She wouldn’t like me being famous everywhere either but she’d get something out of that, or she thinks she would, or you can’t prove she wouldn’t, any more than you can prove anything else about her. She reckons if I was a famous director of feature films she’d meet a lot of other famous directors and get parts in their films and that would be some compensation for being married to the likes of fucking me. I said once directors would be much more likely to give her parts if they hadn’t met her.’

  ‘You said that? Out loud? To her?’

  ‘I told her. I was cross with her about something. I didn’t get the chance of telling her anything else for a couple of weeks after that, but she turned up. It was partly she likes to spend a lot, you see. Christ, you know. She got it wrong about the career, didn’t she, but the cash held up all right.’

  ‘You mean she married you to get parts in films?’

  ‘That’s right. Like she married you because you were earning a lot for your age. Sorry, Stan. Sounds crude, doesn’t it? I suppose it would if I meant she’d planned it and really knew what she was doing. But it’s only men who plan things like that. You could fill her with what’s that truth drug stuff, that’s right, scopolamine, you could dose her up to the gills with fucking scopolamine and she’d still deny it. Another thing she knows without knowing she knows is that she’s a not very good actress who isn’t very beautiful and she’ll be forty-six by the end of the year, so where’s she going to go? She’s much too neurotic to set up on her own. No, I’m stuck with her. By Christ, you’re a long time alive, Stanley.’

  ‘Why don’t you get out yourself?’

  ‘You must be joking. Get out? I couldn’t face it, not again, not now. I did it before, perhaps nobody told you but I had to get unmarried too, and it bloody near killed me then. And soon enough I’m going to be fifty-three. But there’s a snag attached to what you might call the zero option, which now I come to think of it is a bloody marvellous name.’ He laughed, then sighed. ‘What? Snag, there’s a snag. And I don’t mind telling you what it is. It’s not much fun … living with somebody … you don’t like much.’

  Over a rather good scaloppina of veal and interrupting himself with swigs of Valpolicella Bert told me some of his grounds for not liking his wife much. All of it, or nearly all of it, was familiar territory. Not that that made it any less interesting — on the contrary, it was wonderful to recognize variably sized almost-forgotten offences against common sense, good manners, fair play, truth, all those, with just the names and circumstances changed.

  One short section was new. Bert described, believably enough, the way she hated you to be there, within range, in the room when she did some footling manual task like safety-pinning something to something else or tearing a stamp off a sheet and sticking it on an envelope. You were watching her, she said, waiting for her to be slow or clumsy or to get it wrong. Needless to say you were doing nothing of the kind, you had not got as far as taking in what she was up to, but as always you might have been watching and waiting, you could have been, there was no way of proving you were not. It gave me a ridiculous pang to think that I had never noticed her doing that, not as one more tiny absurd awful thing about her but just as a thing about her. I had thought I knew her better than anybody else ever could.

  When Bert called for coffee, grappa and cigars it became clear to me, in so far as anything now could, that he was one of that number who could go on when most others had fallen by the wayside, in other words got drunk but had the power of drinking more, perhaps much more, without collapsing, at least for the moment. Also without losing hold of the conversation. He had repeated or partly repeated a couple of his stories, but he was still better than some people I knew cold sober. At the time I had reckoned that his funeral address on motoring could only have come from somebody well on with his last half-hour before blacking out. Not so, evidently. When the grappa arrived he went halfway back to that style for a moment, holding up his glass and staring at it like an actor.

  ‘The great refuge,’ he said as though he had just thought of it himself. ‘The great comfort. And the great protection.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  He scowled at me. ‘It’s a protection in a way that probably hasn’t occurred to you, sonny, as well as the obvious. Now. She thinks I’m pissed all the time, right? You probably think the same, why shouldn’t you? But I’m not. Obviously. A piss-artist couldn’t do my job. Of course I am sometimes pissed, like now, like tonight, partly though not wholly in consequence of a little discussion of a carved walnut armchair, probably early Georgian. Hence also my presence on that fucking barge. But mainly, usually, normally not.’

  ‘You were pretty far gone that afternoon I came to your place, remember?’

  ‘Oh, bloody good,’ he said, laughing. ‘I take that as a real tribute. By the way I’m sorry I bad-mouthed you over the phone and so on. My line on you with her is that you’re a shit, you see. There’s no such thing as a safe line on anything with her, as you may have noticed, but I just thought that would be the least unsafe.’

  ‘You mean you weren’t pissed at all that time?’

  ‘What? Oh, no no. Couple of beers at lunchtime. I was hamming it up.’

  ‘You hammed it up like mad when I arrived and she wasn’t even in sight.’

  ‘Ah, but that’s the rule. The rule is, I’ve got to have a rule, I’m always pissed there, if not for real then I act it. Too confusing otherwise, too bloody risky too. I work from an office just across the road from here. That’s good because she thinks I’m getting arseholes drunk round the clubs. I don’t know where she thinks all the money comes from. But that’s not interesting, is it? Not so long as it keeps coming.’

  ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘Of acting pissed? I’ll tell you,’ he said in a much quieter voice. ‘When you’re young, you’re ready to fuck anything on two legs. That’s almost enough on its own. But as time goes by, you get choosy. You know, if they chat to you about Harold Pinter while you’re on the job or they throw their food about and swear at the waiters or you find out they used to work for the Gestapo or the KGB or one of those, well, you notice, it puts you off a bit. And by the time you’re fifty, Stan, you’re even more demanding. You expect them to be a bit pleasant occasionally, right? To listen now and then, m’m? To be good company, eh? A lot of unreasonable things like that.’

  He had not said the last bit very quietly, and he had started to slur his words too. When he went on he kept the volume down but he still talked in a mumbling kind of way. ‘If you don’t like ‘em, you don’t want to fuck ‘em. And who could like her after they got to know her, after they’d seen her in action? The milkman worships her, but he’s new and he hasn’t not brought the bloody cream yet. The accountant, well, he’s not new, I suppose, just an idiot. She’s a … she’s a fucky nuck case, that’s what she is. Ought to be put away. For her own protection.’

  ‘Well then, there we are. If you don’t want to fuck your wife you have the option of telling her it’s because she’s such a horrible bloody creature, which actually I wouldn’t dare to do, I’d be too afraid of a knife in my guts. Seriously. She could justify anything she did. Unendurable provocation. How do we know it was unendurable? Use your eyes, she couldn’t endure it, could she?’

  I watched him while he struggled to get his mind round his next, clinching point, ready to help out if needed, but he made it on his own. ‘Or,’ he said triumphantly, ‘Or you can be pissed all the time so the matter doesn’t arise, ha ha ha. By well-established convention. And for real too, I should imagine. Variation by Hutchinson — be pissed some of the time and act pissed the rest of the time. I must be pretty bloody good at the latter by now because she’s never noticed the difference. As far as I can remember, that is.’


  ‘Things must have been all right at the beginning,’ I said. ‘When you first went round with her.’

  ‘Till we’d been married a couple of years. By which time she’d finally got the message that I didn’t really like parties full of TV and film people. She couldn’t believe it at first.’

  ‘Was that when you stopped wearing suede shirts?’

  ‘Eh? Sorry, Stanley, I don’t get you.’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘I heard about your boy. I’d offer to help but … but no.’ He gave another sigh, one that went into a huge single hiccup. ‘If you’re going to drive me home, Stan, and my honest guess is you’ve more or less got to, you’d better do it before I pass out.’

  I tried to, but he was too quick for me. Much too heavy, too. It was a judgement on me for the Harry stunt, on Bert as well perhaps. I hauled at his arm for a time, then gave up and went and rang the front-door bell, which clunked as before. Nowell answered it quite soon, wearing a dress which looked to me as though it was made out of a well-known brand of dietary biscuit. I realized I was very drunk myself, nowhere near fit to be in charge of a motor vehicle on any grounds bar necessity.

  ‘Stanley!’ she said, all welcoming smiles. ‘How nice to see you. Come and have a drink. Bert’s gone to a —’I’ve got him in the car,’ I said.

  Before I could think of a winning way to describe the problem she turned round and went back across the hall. She had started to catch on as soon as I spoke, without showing a wink of surprise or even curiosity about how her husband came to be out with a fellow he always said was a shit. After half a minute or so she reappeared carrying a fat bunch of cushions under one arm and a roll of some thickish material under the other. She seemed definitely shorter than before, and when she passed me on the step I saw she was wearing bedroom slippers, little green affairs with turned-up toes. Her manner had a sort of professional steadiness about it. I followed her into the street with my brain not working too well. The wind was still blowing pointlessly away.