Stanley and the Women

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘I quite agree, darling, exactly my own view of the thing,’ said Lady D, causing me to blink slightly. ‘But then of course these days everything has to be … Stanley,’ she went on, and lifted her head up in a confidential way, so as to let the world know we were all on the same side, ‘is that boy really to be regarded as ill, would you say?’

  ‘Well, he’s not physically ill, lady,’ I said. ‘As regards mental illness I have to leave it to the —’

  ‘Mental illness?’ said Alethea. ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘I don’t think Stanley wants to go into any of that,’ said Susan.

  ‘Just in the family, darling.’

  ‘No, darling.’

  ‘What does Steve do with himself here?’ My mother-in-law swung her glass out of the path of the sherry bottle. ‘How does he get through the day?’

  ‘He gets through the day at the hospital. As regards the evenings here he just sits in front of the television. No trouble to anybody.’

  ‘And no good to himself, it appears. I suppose he’d die rather than go for a walk. Does he never help Susan in the house?’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing really for him to do, darling,’ said Susan. ‘I have two people coming in and I’m not going to put him on to papering the best bedroom just for the hell of it.’

  ‘So he never so much as washes up a teacup,’ said the old girl, sending her elder daughter a glance of wonderfully covered-up horror and getting back one of the same sort.

  ‘There’s a machine for that, as you know.’ Susan was beginning to fidget.

  ‘Which requires to be loaded, I believe.’

  ‘Darling, Steve’s in a very strange state, he’s not just another idle teenager with a fit of the mopes. He needs to feel sympathized with and that nobody’s trying to get at him.’

  ‘And it would be getting at him to induce him to perform some portion of his share of household tasks. I see.’

  ‘Surely there are simply dozens of things he could do in the garden,’ said Alethea.

  ‘Please, both of you,’ said Susan, getting up. By now she was quite agitated. ‘We’re going through a very nasty time in this house at the moment and we don’t need lecturing on how to run it. Really we don’t. So could we please drop the subject.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Lady D in one of the plenty of ways of saying that without doing any apologizing. ‘I was only thinking of Steve and what a shame it would be if he were actually encouraged in his… .’ She took a long time over that one. ‘Slackness,’ she said eventually. ‘But of course I quite realize that it’s much too late to talk along such lines,’ she said with her voice beginning to die away, ‘and that these rather unhappy strains in his character probably go back to his early training and the unfortunate influence of his mother,’ she said with the last word coming through strongly enough and a glance at me that left no real doubt in my mind that the mother she was thinking of was rather bald and had a little moustache and drove an Apfelsine.

  ‘Shall we go down to lunch?’ said Susan. When the other two had finally cleared off she said to me, ‘I don’t know what happened, darling, honestly. That’s about as bad as I’ve known her. Alethea being there comes into it somehow, I’ve noticed it before. But … part of it was to do with concern about Steve, I would like you to believe that.’

  Yeah, I said to myself. And some more of it was to do with making out that what was wrong with Steve was nothing more than a severe case of being lower class. Not all of it, no.

  When I got back from the hospital with Steve the following evening I could see Susan had news for me. I waited till he had settled in front of the TV with his usual coffee and slice of bread and honey, then followed her up to our bedroom. What she had was something to show me rather than tell me, a square-cornered length of metal or heavy plastic about four inches by an inch by half an inch with a roughened surface. It looked like the handle of something, which was what it actually turned out to be when I pressed a stud at one end and a stout pointed blade shot out of the other.

  ‘In his chest of drawers,’ said Susan. ‘Not even covered up. It wasn’t there yesterday. I look every morning.’

  ‘Quite right. But when did he get it? Unless he was keeping it somewhere else before. And even then … Must have been at the other end, out near the hospital. I just drop him there, you see, I don’t bodyguard him all the way to the ward. It’s quite a walk to the shops. Not impossible, though, I suppose. Anyway here it is, eh?’

  ‘Must have cost a bit if he got it new.’

  ‘I gave him fifty the other day. I can’t have him coming to me every time he wants a packet of fags, can I?’

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I clicked the knife back into its hilt. ‘I honestly don’t know. Well, we can confront him with it.’

  ‘No need for that, we can just ask him what it’s for. Can’t we?’

  ‘That’s confronting him with it. Or we can throw it away. That’s confronting him with it as soon as he finds it isn’t there instead of now.’

  ‘Well, what about confronting him with it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said trying to think whether concealed possession of a flick knife would count as normal or abnormal in Collings’s book. ‘We can predict his reaction from what happened the other day. Rage, curses, accusations of spying, and so on.’

  ‘Which can be faced.’

  ‘Oh, sure. But … It’s a pity about the spying. I support you on it, I mean if you’d asked me whether you should look through his things I’d have said go ahead. But if you look at it it is very much the sort of response that … Well, that Dr Collings said would alienate him.’

  ‘So you’re in favour of putting it back.’

  ‘I can’t see what’s to be gained from not. We know it’s there now, and he doesn’t know we know. And it’s not as if it’s the only knife in the house. Those non-stainless French kitchen jobs of yours, you could tackle a bleeding elephant with one of them. I suppose we could lock them up. You’re not really with me over this, are you, Sue?’

  ‘I just think if you said very casually and calmly that I’d happened to come across it when I was —’

  ‘Then he’d fly into a rage and accuse us both of spying. Don’t forget he’s Nowell’s son too. Can you imagine how she’d behave if you casually and calmly told her you’d happened to come across something in her handbag? Of course, she is a… er, we all know what she is. I’ll check this with Collings in the morning.’

  Collings said putting the knife back was right — Stephen had probably only got hold of it in the first place so as to feel secure. In case I went for him with a hammer, I said to myself but not to her. Further reports would be welcome. His action on being encouraged to take a shower, which was to take a shower so thorough that he used up all the hot water and made me late for work, had its annoying side but hardly seemed worth reporting.

  At the start of the second week he took to going to his room earlier than before, at ten o’clock, nine o’clock, straight after arriving home. That time, feeling a perfect idiot, I sneaked up about eight to spy out the land. The light was on in the room. One or two slight sounds told me nothing except that he was not in bed. Reading? Conceivably but not much more. Looking at dirty pictures? Quite possibly. Staring into space? Quite likely. I left it and Susan and I forgot about him for the whole evening, until we heard him coming down for his late-night snack and our conversation, which had been bounding along before, soon petered out.

  Five days after the knife incident Susan again had something waiting for me when I got home. In the bedroom she handed me some sheets of cheap lined paper covered with Steve’s familiar and terrible handwriting. ‘It was on the little round table in his room,’ she said. I thought she looked tired, rather pale anyway. ‘He must have meant us to find it there.’

  ‘What is it, a letter?’

  ‘You’d better read it.’

  I sat on the edge of the bed and she settled herself next t
o and partly behind me in one of those kneeling or squatting female positions with her arm on my shoulder. Although terrible enough, full of unnecessary loops, leaning, falling over and straightening itself up again, the writing could mostly be read, and the spelling mistakes were plentiful, but the intended words could mostly be rescued. Put right as far as it could be put right, Steve’s message went like this:

  BE IT KNOWN TO ALL THE PEOPLES OF PLANET EARTH —

  Light years ago in the secret heart of the galaxy an Element created itself. For centuries it had no name, then ancient Atlantean physicists discovered it with scanners and named it POTENTIUM. But when Atlantis perished neath the waves the secret of POTENTIUM perished also.

  More centuries flew by on the wings of time, until Lemurian mystics got to know about it in dreams and visions sent by MITHRAS, but when they went and told their king he was displeased and had them slain. So alas the secret was lost once more.

  Then as NOSTRADAMUS had predicted the Alchemists brought POTENTIUM back into existence, but no man knew what it would do.

  Then one day the great AVERROES was experimenting on some POTENTIUM by bombarding it with Photon Particles and this mutated it into an isotope that could live in the human brain. REJOICE!

  HENCEFORTH MAN WAS ARMED AGAINST EVIL.

  POTENTIUM IS THE SOURCE OF THE SPIRIT THAT FIGHTS FOR GOOD.

  The element that had no name,

  Through the centuries it came,

  Through all the smoke and flame,

  POTENTIUM God’s gift to man,

  By his great plan,

  The war against evil began,

  Against those who live for greed,

  To smash their vile creed,

  And make them all bleed,

  POTENTIUM gives the power,

  To strike at the right hour,

  EVIL

  LIVE

  VILE

  Atomic Number 108

  Symbol Pt

  Atomic Weight 303

  Valency Number 99

  Rainbow Metal

  THIS IS A DEMOCRATIC DOCUMENT OF GREAT IMPORTANCE

  CREATED FOR THE PRESERVATION OF PEACE

  AND THE DESTRUCTION OF THE

  WICKED

  HAIL POTENTIUM THE POWER OF THE LORD

  Underneath the text there was a drawing of a person with a beard stretching out an arm towards some buildings that seemed to be falling down among small figures probably intended to be human beings. It, the drawing, was done in ballpoint and I thought showed very little talent.

  I had just had time to take this in when Susan gave a sort of shrieking gasp right in my ear and I looked up rather quickly to see Steve standing by the door, which I could have sworn had been shut, and glaring at us. He might have been there for a couple of minutes. When he saw us see him he came towards us in a determined way. I jumped up.

  ‘What are you doing with that?’ he said, or rather snarled.

  ‘Reading it. That’s what you meant us to do, isn’t it?’

  ‘Fucking snooping!’

  ‘You left it lying about,’ I said, and tried and failed to get the energy together to go on about people having to go into his room to make the bed, etc.

  The next moment, probably just by chance, his manner changed. All menace left it. He looked alert and preoccupied at the same time, like somebody trying to remember something or to hear a distant sound. He soon gave this up and focused on me with his mouth hanging open. Slowly he closed it and pressed the lips together until his expression was one of smothered amusement, also shyness and a modest kind of pride, reminding me of how he had looked at me the first time I saw him walk. Then he broke out into laughter, completely amused and amiable, no awful side to it at all in itself. The trouble was I could see nothing much that was funny in what was actually happening or what was there in front of us. I tried to make out he was laughing at me and Susan for being serious or stupid or worried or frightened, or at himself for being angry just now, or anything like that, but it was no good. Nash had talked about schizophrenics being too mad to know what was funny. I stood there longing for a drink till Steve jerked his head back and scampered out of the room.

  Susan had come up and taken my hand and now she put her arms round me and squeezed. ‘Stanley, I’m scared,’ she whispered.

  ‘Not much of a treat, was it?’

  ‘No, I mean I’m still scared. All that … mad stuff about Atlantis and alchemists and smashing the evil ones, it’s like … I don’t know.’

  ‘Bleeding ridiculous.’

  ‘Darling, it’s not just ridiculous. That boy, he’s very seriously disturbed.’

  ‘We knew that,’ I said. ‘I’ll discuss the matter when I’ve got a glass in my hand and not before.’ When I had, and we were in the sitting room with the door firmly shut, I said, ‘Sue, love, listen to me, now. This thing is just an old piece of sci-fi, that’s all it is. Tripe, in fact. I thought it had gone out. Plus the sort of stuff you get through the post from the green-ink brigade — you know, the pyramids one minute and lasers the next. The thing’s not worth taking seriously, really.’

  ‘He believes it,’ said Susan. ‘He thinks it’s true.’

  ‘Oh, come on. Believes it? It’s like a kid scribbling. Doodling.’

  ‘There’s violence there. To smash their vile creed and make them all bleed. I suppose that’s more doodling.’

  ‘I’d say maybe he was trying to get a rhyme, but then I wouldn’t know about a thing like that.’

  ‘The destruction of the wicked doesn’t sound very funny to me.’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t going to threaten to let their dog out and knock over their pint in the pub, was he?’

  This was the moment where she should have looked up at me and smiled and said she was sorry to have gone on like that, and I would have said of course I saw why and more in the same strain while saying to myself, in this case, that although Steve’s document might not be worth getting steamed up about it was a long way from reassuring in itself. But instead of that she went on sitting there on the grey velvet settee in one of her grey cardigans and dark skirts, pressing her lips together, her head down in a way that showed off the blackness and glossiness of her hair. I felt I was a long way from knowing what she was thinking, not that I would have gone round claiming I regularly did know.

  Partly to break the tension I said, ‘I’d better give Nowell a ring.’

  Susan looked up then and no mistake. ‘Why? What for?’

  ‘I’d like to tell her about this just now and, well, the general situation. I should have got hold of her earlier.’

  ‘What for? What can she do?’

  ‘Nothing, love. I don’t want her to do anything, I just want her to be informed. She probably doesn’t even know he’s here.’

  ‘I dare say she doesn’t,’ said Susan sharply. ‘She never takes the slightest interest in him.’

  ‘Look, I’m not calling her in as a consultant, all I’m after is putting her in the picture so if he does act up, like walking in there out of the blue as he’s quite liable to do, she can’t complain she was kept in the dark. Okay?’

  ‘Yes.’ Susan sighed and blinked apologetically. ‘You know, it’s hard going on being reasonable all the time when you’re feeling a bit shaken up.

  ‘Oh, absolutely. Listen, Sue, I’m sorry all this is happening, and it’s sort of none of your doing.’

  ‘It’s none of yours, either. Forget it, darling.’

  ‘No, you know what I mean. I don’t really feel I can leave him alone in the house much for the moment, but you can go out. You must go out on your own a bit more.’

  ‘I don’t like going out without you.’

  ‘Then we must have a few more people in.’

  ‘Don’t worry, there’s always plenty to do here. And you’re here, aren’t you?’

  ‘It’s not much of a life for you.’

  ‘Yes it is. We’ll make sure he doesn’t get into the bedroom again, darling.’

 
When I tried the Hutchinson number it answered immediately. I remembered feeling very slightly baffled when there was no answer before — what if I had been somebody who might have had work for Nowell? But no point in going into that now because it was Bert at the other end.

  ‘Stan here. Hold on a minute. How did you get away with it the other day, going out on a blind with your favourite shit?’

  ‘No problem,’ said Bert with his mouth close to the phone. ‘I told her she had to be joking at first, then I couldn’t remember anything about it, could I? Well, it wasn’t all no problem, because it still didn’t look good. But she was over the moon that morning because Chris Rabinowitz wanted to talk to her about an idea he’d had. She can be quite agreeable when everybody’s doing what she wants at once. Remember? Anyway. Was I all right that time? When I look back, it starts getting a bit vague over the veal.’

  ‘You were fine. Not that I was in much of a state to judge.’

  ‘Not offensive? … Good. Hang on, I’ll get her. Ah, you … shit,’ he said, his voice getting louder and further away at the same time, fuzzier too. ‘You bloody man. Ha … darling,’ he continued with a quite impressive off-mike acoustic. ‘Darling, it’s that, er… .

  Nowell came on the line full of simple wonder and pleasure at hearing the sound of my voice, but changed it to sincere puzzlement when I seemed to think she might want to be told what Steve had recently been up to, where he was, etc. When I actually started to tell her she switched again and stopped listening. How she got that across on a non-visual circuit without saying anything or making any other kind of noise I had very little idea, but the fact made me realize I must have seriously underestimated her acting ability in the past. Then something I said about the flick-knife business evidently broke through, and she came over all motherly — to me, not Steve.

  ‘I’m very glad you’ve told me about this, Stanley. You did quite right. Of course it’s an upsetting, disturbing thing, suddenly coming across a knife hidden away like that.’