Stanley and the Women

by Kingsley Amis

  Susan was sitting on the bed with about five hundred waist-belts on the counterpane. I was a bit flummoxed on how to open the conversation but she led off straight away.

  ‘Mrs Shillibeer has gone. Walked out.’

  The way she spoke these half-dozen words sounded incredibly and horrendously like what I had heard in the kitchen five minutes before. I was reminded in a more disagreeable way than usual that snobbily or not I was quite tickled by being married to someone who talked like that. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I heard her.’

  ‘She said you told her Steve was mad and mad people frighten her. She had a mad brother. What the bloody hell possessed you to tell her?’

  ‘I didn’t mean to. It just sort of … She guessed. I wasn’t ready for her.’

  ‘You knew she was here, you let her in. A clever man like you.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I got flustered. We can discuss it later. Nowell has arrived.’

  ‘I can’t understand why you didn’t call the hospital. They must have people who are used to dealing with this sort of thing.’

  ‘Perhaps I should have, I don’t know. I will if this doesn’t work. Anyway, she’s here now.’

  ‘Well… good luck,’ said Susan with a smile that came and went.

  Whether by good luck or not, it worked. Nowell took her previous line about what a rough time he must have been having and in less than five minutes Steve was down, soaked to the skin, pale, shivering, wretched, but on terra firma. Nowell hugged him, but he seemed unresponsive and had nothing to say for himself. Having called off his performance, though, he was keen enough to get back indoors, and without fuss set about obeying instructions to go up and take off his wet things.

  I walked Nowell to the door. Her behaviour had impressed me rather. As well as hiding all curiosity about the house and its contents she had not once mentioned Susan’s name or raised the subject without actually referring to it, something she was very good at, and at no stage had shown any triumph or complacency at getting Steve to quit his perch, just pleasure and relief. True, she had more or less blamed me personally for his wetness, coldness and lack of topcoat, but I could think of quite a few people who would have taken that tack.

  At the threshold I said, ‘Thank you for coming so quickly. That was a damn good show just now.’

  ‘Think nothing of it. Just a knack I have.’ Then she gave me a look that signalled the advent of something in bold. ‘You’re a good chap, Stanley,’ she said very earnestly. ‘No wonder Steve’s devoted to you.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Here it came. ‘I miss you, you know. Do you believe me?’

  ‘Why not? I miss you. Every day.’

  The warmth in my voice took her by surprise, and me too a bit. For an insane moment I could see her seriously wondering why I had said that, how much I meant it, what it might indicate for the future — then it passed, and the Eternal Woman once more looked out of Nowell’s eyes. She threw her head back, kissed me lightly on the cheek and tripped away to a waiting taxicab whose driver was doggedly picking his nose.

  I was glad I had said what I had. I had indeed meant it, though it was not a complete statement of the case, perhaps not even accurate as far as it went. But if you could miss somebody, feel somebody’s absence, without ever wanting to be with them again, then yes, I missed Nowell every day. More to the point, I had been sweet to her in spades, which was not going to come in unhandy when Steve climbed on to the roof of Buckingham Palace or hijacked a jet.

  I got him into a hot bath now and went to the bedroom and said, ‘All over. She talked him down and she’s gone.’

  ‘I know.’ Susan had moved on to long thin strips of different-coloured material the purpose of which was very difficult to guess. ‘At least I gathered he was down. Is he all right?’

  ‘Well, he’s better where he is than where he was. I don’t know what more you could say.’

  She was still on her limited-friendliness tone, the nearest thing to a female freeze-out I had ever had from her. But when the time came to take Steve off we held on to each other for a fair time, with her seeming not to want to let go as if I were off to the States or somewhere. At the end she gave me a smile, a real one this time. So that was all right.

  When I had escorted Steve to Dr Gandhi’s manor I went in search of Collings and found her in her room. She was looking really rough that morning, with her hair got up to remind you of carefully prepared paper. I told her about Steve and the tree and she said it was part of the pattern.

  ‘Look, it may be part of your pattern, Dr Collings,’ I said as quietly as I could, ‘but it’s not part of mine or my wife’s. We’re not used to handling this kind of thing.’

  ‘I understand that.’

  ‘Terrific, but could you do something about it? We’re getting near the end of our resources.’

  ‘Of course it’s a period of great tension and distress for you both. It would be far from unusual in this situation for your marriage to suffer severe strain,’ she said, ready with more technical data if they were needed.

  ‘I dare say it would. I wasn’t actually thinking of that side of it. What I was driving at, my wife and I don’t know how to deal with someone like Steve. We’ve managed so far but any moment he might do something we couldn’t cope with. Would you please take him back in as a full-time patient where there are trained people to look after him. In his interests.’

  ‘It’s in his interests to stay as he is, believe me, Stanley. Do you want him to be a hospital case for the rest of his life?’ She went on to describe a few of what she called hospital cases in some detail, and if she wanted my honest agreement that the general run of them would have been as well or better off dead she could have had it for the asking. There was more than a touch of overkill here and I wondered where we were due next. At the end of her cases she said, ‘I hope you’ll agree it’s worth a lot of sacrifice to make any of that less likely to happen to Steve.’

  ‘Oh, absolutely,’ I said, letting myself off a question about how much sacrifice and how much less likely, and another one about how likely in the first place.

  ‘He must be helped to live in the world, to make a successful transition to family and community.’ On she went about that while I grew more and more uneasy. As she spoke she looked more steadily at me than ever before. This part was so boring that when the punch came I almost missed it. ‘These current difficulties are all part of the process of adjustment to the withdrawal of chemotherapy. A progressive —

  ‘Chemotherapy? That’s drugs, isn’t it? You mean you’ve taken him off drugs?’

  ‘Drugs are a crutch, an artificial support. He’s got to learn to do without them if he’s ever going to live any sort of normal life.’

  ‘But he’s mad. You should have seen him when he was up that tree. Not just the loony stuff he was saying but the way he looked and everything. He wasn’t in a difficulty or adjusting, he was raving bonkers, poor fellow. He was in a state. Anyone could have seen.’

  ‘It’s very difficult and painful for him and that’s why he needs all the understanding and encouragement you can give him.’

  ‘Please take him back. For a bit. He’s not ready.’

  ‘You must let me be the judge of that.’

  After a bit more along the same lines I came away, trying not to feel scared about what might be in store. Just after starting back I remembered the flick-knife, still in my pocket. I had not exactly forgotten it but so far kept finding I was short of a good place to dump it. Now I soon had one —the river off Blackfriars Bridge. When it was gone I felt a glow of relief, which was not very logical but well worth having on a day like today.

  That afternoon, while I was on my way back from an advertising agency somewhere off Oxford Street, an accident up ahead kept me sitting in a traffic block for forty minutes. On my desk in the office I found a note from Morgan telling me to ring home — urgent.

  ‘How long ago was this?’ I asked, dialling.

  ‘Oh, getting on for a
n hour. It was your wife.’ He hesitated, then said, ‘She sounded a bit upset.’

  After half a dozen rings a man’s voice spoke at the far end.

  ‘This is Stanley Duke,’ I told him.

  ‘Stan, it’s Cliff. I’m afraid there’s been a bit of a dust-up here, old son. All under control now, but you’d better get along as soon as you can. I’ll stay till you come.

  ‘Anybody hurt?’

  ‘Nothing that can’t be taken care of.’

  When I got home by taxi and let myself in I found a trail of blood, drops of it the size of a 10p piece, running into the kitchen. ‘Up here, Stanley,’ said Cliff’s voice.

  Susan was in her usual chair in the sitting-room. She was pale and had a fair-sized bandage on her left forearm. There was more blood on the carpet and furniture, not a great amount but quite enough. I hurried over and we hugged each other. She said she was all right. I asked what had happened. Cliff answered. ‘Steve came at her with a knife,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, God. Where is he? Where is he now?’

  ‘In his room. With a shot in him that’ll make him not want to go anywhere for quite a while.’

  ‘How bad is the arm?’

  ‘Well, it’s nasty, but it’s not, it’s not bad. In the fleshy part, no major blood-vessel punctured, I’ve put three stitches in, under a local anaesthetic of course.’ He spoke in a dead sort of way, almost as though these details bored him. ‘There’ll be a certain amount of pain when it wears off and for a couple of days afterwards. I’ll leave some pills for that. And I’ll look in tomorrow.’

  When he had said that I quite expected him to leave, but he stayed where he was, standing by the empty fireplace. I had pulled a stool up to Susan’s chair. ‘Tell me what happened, love,’ I said. ‘If you can bear to.’

  ‘Oh, I can bear to. I think the worst part was the fright at the beginning,’ she said, a little quietly for her but well under control. ‘You did take him to the hospital, darling, did you?’

  ‘Yeah. Right to the ward.’

  ‘I didn’t even know he was in the house. The door just burst open and he came rushing in with this knife shouting that I was a bloody bitch who’d driven his mother and father apart and wouldn’t let him see his mother. Like that bit of hostility last week, you remember, only this time he meant business, and I just had time to get to my feet before he … struck at me.’ She started to lift her left arm to show how, but winced and used the other one instead. ‘I tried to catch his wrist but I didn’t manage it properly, and he cut me.’ I squeezed her hand. ‘And I thought I was done for, but then he stopped, I don’t really know why, perhaps it was the sight of blood, anyway he dropped the knife and gave the most awful sort of groan or moan, an absolutely harrowing noise, and then he simply ran off and I heard his bedroom door slam, and it was over.’

  She had not actually started to cry but she was not far off it. I thought she was being pretty good. ‘Thank God for that, anyway,’ I said. ‘What knife was it?’

  ‘There,’ she said, and there it was on one of the low tables almost in front of me, though I saw it now for the first time — a kitchen knife from downstairs with, as I knew, a sharp point and edge, now with dried or drying blood on it, some of which had leaked on to the sheet of newspaper underneath. ‘Well … I went down to the kitchen and tried to get you, and couldn’t, and then I got Cliff, and he sweetly said he’d come straight away, and I sort of hung about near the front door, ready to run, until he arrived, and there we are.’

  ‘I know it’s a bit early but I’m going to have a drink,’ I said after a moment. When I looked at Susan she shook her head. ‘Cliff?’

  ‘No thanks, I’ve got to get back.’ But he still made no move.

  ‘So then you turned up,’ I said from the drinks tray.

  ‘Yes, I turned up,’ said Cliff. As soon as he started to speak I knew that he was not at all bored, just choosing his words carefully, and also that there was something that had not been mentioned, something to do with him — actually I had known it almost since coming into the room. ‘I put in the local,’ he went on, ‘and that was going to take a few minutes to work, so I went up to have a look at Steve. There he was, lying on his bed, not asleep, but quite relaxed I thought, you could almost say torpid, but after what Susan had told me I was taking no. chances. I gave him Valium intravenously, which is pretty quick-acting. He didn’t object.’

  ‘Didn’t he say anything at all,’ I asked, ‘why he’d done it or anything?’

  ‘Oh, he said something. I asked him why, why he’d attacked his stepmother, and he said he didn’t know what I was talking about. He’d let himself in and come straight up, thinking he was alone in the place, he said.’ Cliff snapped the catches of his bag. I fancied his hands were shaking. ‘He said he hadn’t done it.’

  A horrible pause followed. What felt like a hundred thoughts went through my head in two or three seconds, bits of remarks about Steve from Nash, from Collings, from Nowell, cloudy memories of Steve himself when younger, sharper ones of Susan the other day, this morning, and behind it all something I could neither face nor define. At last, very late, I said, ‘Amnesia, presumably.’

  ‘Does rather suggest that, doesn’t it? Yes, it’s quite common in these cases.’ He sighed, scratching his head elaborately and sending a thin shower of dandruff on to the shoulders of his incredibly dark green suit. ‘Well, that’s it. I shouldn’t say much about this to anyone, but then I don’t suppose either of you will want to. Except of course to the people at the hospital, Stan, when you take Steve in in the morning. It’s quite likely they’ll want him back in full-time, I suppose. Yeah, and better let them know where he is now.’

  ‘What did you say, you suppose they might want him back in full-time?’ Susan asked. ‘But surely, I mean after a thing like this they must, mustn’t they? Or has he got to murder somebody first?’

  ‘If you’re talking about legal committal, I can assure you it wouldn’t be at all easy. Not really worth a shot, in fact.’

  Cliff had still not sounded his normal self and Susan had spoken so faintly I could hardly hear her, almost without expression too, a new voice for her as far as I was concerned. Shock, that would be. Fatigue. I felt dazed, like with a very bad hangover, wanting to start using my mind on what had been said and what seemed to have happened but unable to get there.

  Now Cliff handed over pills and gave instructions about them and other things and I tried to listen. When he started to leave I went with him.

  He kept well ahead of me all the way down the stairs and nearly to the front door. ‘Nasty,’ he said as I opened it. ‘Look, er, it might be as well if Susan went and stayed somewhere for a couple of days while we sort things out with the hospital and so on. Just to be on the safe side. No need to worry tonight but she ought to be out of the way tomorrow. So long, Stan. I’ll be in touch.’

  I rang the hospital, but could find nobody who gave any sign of having heard of Steve, so without a lot of hope of success I left a message at the switchboard. In the teeth of a whacking reluctance I went back up to the sitting room, though once there I landed up at the drinks tray without any trouble at all. Susan was sitting in the same position, her injured arm on the arm of the chair.

  ‘What did Cliff say to you?’ she asked in the same tone as before.

  ‘He said tomorrow you ought to get out for a bit. Stay with someone.

  ‘Did he really.’

  ‘Can I get you anything, love? What about a nice cup of tea? Tomato sandwich with the skins off? Do you good to eat something.’

  She looked at me with her eyes half-closed and her mouth drooping and said in another voice I had not heard before, low and level, ‘You little bastard. Swine. Filth.’

  I was so surprised I knocked a bottle of tonic water over with my elbow, and yet I had been fully expecting it. ‘What have I done?’ I said.

  ‘You think I gave myself that cut, don’t you? Three stitches there are in there. I’d like you to see it.’
>
  ‘But I don’t, I don’t think you gave yourself it.’ I had no idea what I thought.

  ‘I was watching you when Cliff told you Steve had said he didn’t know anything about it and you stood there weighing it up. Weighing it up.’

  ‘I wasn’t, there were just some things I couldn’t help —’

  ‘You believe what somebody says your deranged, deluded, fucking raving maniac of a son said instead of what your wife tells you happened. You see what that makes me, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t believe —’

  ‘Or rather what it reveals about what you think of me. You think I’m so neurotic, so self-centred, so … unprincipled that I’d expose that boy, that poor madman to being locked up and Christ knows what and I’d put you through it and suffer all that pain myself just to … just for what? Attention? Is that what I was after?’ She spoke in the same level tone.

  At least I had the sense to see that this was a question with no good answers.

  ‘And you think I’d do that. As well as tell a lie on that scale. That seems to me about the worst insult one person can give another. And I’m not having it.’ She stood up. ‘I’m off. And I’m not waiting till the morning as your friend suggests, I’m leaving straight away. Catch me hanging on here with someone who thinks I’m like that.’

  I stood up too. ‘You’re not fit to travel, you need rest,’ I said, and got out of her way as she moved towards the door.

  ‘I’ll risk it.’ At the door she stopped and turned round. ‘If anybody wants me they can get me at my mother’s. Though you’ll be wasting your time if you try me there yourself. I suppose you think that’s funny. Yet, ass right, the wife’s gorn orf to er muvver’s,’ she said in a very poor imitation of perhaps a Hackney or Bow accent as much as anything. ‘Just up your street, you lower-class turd. I don’t know how I’ve put up with you for so long, with your gross table-manners and your boozing and your bloody little car and your frightful mates and your whole ghastly south-of-the-river man’s world. You’ve no breeding and so you’ve no respect for women. They’re there to cook your breakfast and be fucked and that’s it. So of course nothing they say’s worth taking seriously, and when one of them says something quite important and serious and a man says something different then you believe him even though he’s out of his mind. Oh, I wish to Christ I’d found out about you sooner.’