Stanley and the Women

by Kingsley Amis

  I watched her saying this, looking as brainy and nervous as ever but not humorous any more and nowhere near vulnerable. Her eyes were wide open now, though blinking pretty fast, and I had seen them more or less like that a thousand times, but if she had ever before had her lower lip pushed forward as it was at the moment then I had missed it. She had taken a few steps back into the room from the doorway and stood there with a brown striped cardigan thrown over her shoulders and her right hand clasping her left elbow just above the top edge of the bandage. This set my mind running on whether she had had her arm in the sleeve or not when … but I pulled guiltily back from that. I was still dazed and could think of nothing to say. Well, I said ‘Cheers, love’ at the end.

  ‘Love,’ she said through her teeth, and made for the door again.

  ‘Are you coming back?’

  ‘I shan’t be able to take everything with me in one go if that’s what you mean, so yes to that extent.’

  She said this from outside the room. There was no one I wanted to see and nothing I wanted to do. Except have another drink, of course. By the time I had seen to that I was into my second minute of having no wife.

  Had she really stabbed herself? What a perfectly ridiculous sodding question. Who ever heard of the assistant literary editor of the Sunday Chronicle stabbing herself a bit and saying her barmy stepson had done it to pay her husband out for thinking the barmy stepson was more important than she was? But perhaps she had. And of course perhaps she had done it to make the stepson seem barmier than he was, more violent, so violent he would have to be shut up and her life could go back to normal. But that would have been calculation in pursuit of comfort — too squalid to suit a woman like Susan, a woman who might incidentally let an innocent party in for damage while following her ends but would never make that damage her aim. If she had done it, she had done it for ego, as in her own scenario, not for peace and quiet. Wow, I thought to myself — I had come quite far quite fast too. Could she have done it? Surely not the woman who had put so much into cheering me up when I needed it, who had only the other day seen off her own mother and sister on my behalf. But perhaps she had. Could Nowell have done it? Perhaps. Probably. Yes. But what of that?

  At least one fact needed establishing. When Cliff said Steve had said he knew nothing about any attack, had I really — what had she said? — had I weighed up the chances? Not a lot — it had been far more a matter of telling myself in a completely slow, thick way that that was funny, what Steve said had happened was different from what Susan said had happened. And when I tried to do some weighing a moment ago I had not even been able to start. Never mind, at the time in question had I looked as if that was what I was doing? That depended not only on how I had behaved but on who had been watching. But what was absolutely bleeding certain and inescapable was that I could have been weighing up the chances, which was the same as I could easily have been, which meant I might even have been going to be foul to her. Good God. Surely not.

  I was going through this for about the fifteenth time when the doorbell rang. Having got half-way across the room I remembered hearing the phone give its little end-of-call chink a few minutes earlier and reasoned that a minicab stood below, so I went back to my chair, not before I had topped up my drink. Almost at once I heard Susan coming down the stairs and in a moment she appeared in the doorway. She was carrying the large red suitcase she always took on holiday and was wearing her round woollen hat and gloves. I got to my feet so as not to show unwilling, but she just stayed where she was and looked very seriously at me. If I had had a bit more time I might have gone over to her and confessed to or admitted anything she liked — as it was I too stayed put. There was no knowing, then or later, what was going on inside her, from profound sorrow to wondering whether it would be all right to touch me for the cab fare. Anyway, the bell rang again and without saying anything or changing her expression she went out, and soon enough the street door slammed.

  Later on I went and looked at Steve, but he was obviously out for the count, so I came down again and had another drink or so. About 4 a.m. I woke up in my chair and went and drank a couple of litres of water and got into bed.

  4 Prognosis

  First thing the next morning I took a cab down to Fleet Street and drove the Apfelsine slowly and dangerously back to Hampstead. I wished I had a headache or anything else like that, out where I could see it so to speak, instead of how I felt. Steve was still half-full of the sedative Cliff had given him and I had a hard time getting him to get up. When he finally came downstairs he ate nothing, not that he had done much different on previous mornings as far as I could remember, but now I was in charge of breakfast I noticed more. I managed a glass of apple juice and most of half a bowl of posh continental cereal with nuts and raisins that had been cunningly turned the same dusty white as the cereal itself. On an ordinary day I would have said that of course I preferred this sort of thing to any old eggs and bacon or sausage or kipper in the world, but now, again, I remembered that neither of my wives had been the sort to fancy cooking their husband’s breakfast, never mind what the second one had had to say on the point the previous evening. I drank a lot of Lapsang Suchong, which I really did quite like and which helped the other stuff to stay down.

  When the time came I told Steve so and went and had a pee and collected my gear. He had not appeared, so I went back to the kitchen and found him in exactly the same position as I had left him in, sitting near rather than at the table with his shoulders hunched, hands clasped and head down. I wanted to fetch him a thump that would lay him full length on the floor, in the first place for not doing what he was told, but also for being a bleeding pest, being dull, being off his head, being around the place all the time without a word to say for himself or even a glance to spare, and taking over my life and mucking it up. But instead of thumping him I shouted his name. He looked up very quickly and just for a second I saw him as he always had been before that first evening he came to the house, but then almost at once his face changed in ways I had no hope of making out and went back to being something different, more different than it had been, I thought, with a funny sort of twist to the corner of the lower lip. I told him we were off, quietly now, and he got up straight away.

  As always it was a relief being in the car because people often said nothing to each other in cars, and anyway there was the driving to be done. After a few minutes, though, I started asking Steve what he had been up to the previous day and he answered after a fashion. He had walked out. He had got on a bus. He had arrived home. What time? No idea. He had gone to his room. Susan had been in the sitting room, had she? No idea. What had she said to him? From here on the answers stopped coming. It looked as if I was never going to know any more about that afternoon.

  I had one last shot. ‘There must be something you remember,’ I said. ‘Never mind how trivial.’

  He seemed to reflect for half a minute or so, then nodded slowly. ‘Actually there is something.’

  ‘Let’s have it then.’

  ‘You’re not going to like it,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll manage.’

  ‘Promise not to be angry.

  ‘Of course. I promise.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, staring in front of him, ‘I remember being born.’ I just managed not to drive into the side of a bus. ‘What?’ I said. ‘I remember being born. Everybody’s done their best to make me forget by telling a different story. Mum says she brought me into the world and you say you’re my father and I don’t really blame either of you — you probably believe it yourselves by this time. And everybody else believes it and no wonder. But I’ve had the message so often on television and in ads and the street names and the names on shops and even the labels on bottles of sauce and things, so many times I can remember it, actually being born. Well, I say born, attaining consciousness would be better, more precise. It was like a great light being switched on.

  ‘Yeah, I was put together by these alchemists using the p
hilosopher’s stone.’ He was smiling cheerfully now. ‘Kept in a vault in Barcelona till needed, then triggered off by radio beam. And here I am, ready to begin my task.’ At that he looked guilty and nervous, as though he felt he had let slip something important. ‘Er, I want to thank you for all your kindness, Mr Duke. Oh, and I think we should go on calling each other father and son in public. For security reasons. You understand.’

  I pulled in to the side of the road and stopped behind a van delivering a lot of eggs. I spent five minutes or so trying to get myself to think that it was all just part of his madness, nothing to do with rejecting me or his mother, while thinking under zero pressure that whatever happened or was said in the future I would always feel I had had some hand, somehow, in bringing about his condition. Nobody could prove the contrary. Perhaps nobody could prove anything of importance. Having reached this conclusion I drove on, since I was going to have to some time.

  When Steve and I eventually reached Gandhi’s pad Gandhi was not in it. But Collings was, which would save me a walk. Also in attendance were the sister I had seen on my first visit and since, name of Wheatley, the white-haired moaning loony I had also seen before, not actually moaning at the moment, and another with no teeth who was new to me.

  Almost straight away I said to Collings, ‘It looks as if he stabbed my wife. Took a knife to her. Nothing too serious.

  She followed it up in a flash. ‘Looks as if?’ she repeated. ‘Did he or didn’t he?’

  ‘He did,’ I said without thinking at all. To believe anything else was ridiculous again. ‘I just wasn’t there when it happened. But he did it.’

  ‘Are you sure.

  ‘Of course I’m sure.’ This time it was more that I spoke before I could think. ‘There she is with a gash in her arm. What are you talking about?’

  She was hardly listening, looking into Steve’s face, looking at his eyes, feeling his pulse. ‘This boy has been sedated,’ she said.

  ‘You bet he has. That was Dr Wainwright’s doing, our GP, when he came to stitch up my wife. I should have thought it was common sense.

  More no-listening. She sat on the corner of Steve’s bed next to him with her hand on his shoulder, still looking at him closely, asking him now a string of quite friendly questions about what he wanted to do and where he wanted to be, soon agreeing that he should stay as he was for the moment and then get into bed if he felt like it. I was just starting to think that she might be some good when she turned towards me and said, ‘What have you been doing to your son?’

  I stopped breathing. The sister sent me a glance of sympathy with a touch of despair. The white-haired loony did nothing but the toothless one, either catching the feel of things or driven by a sudden extra bit of delusion, backed into a corner and crouched there with his arms held out in front of him like a wrestler’s. When the sister went over and spoke gently to him he dropped his arms to his sides and started blinking and shaking his head very fast.

  After a while I gave up watching this and said to Collings, ‘Can we go somewhere and have a talk?’

  ‘Here will do, for anything you have to say to me, Stanley.’ Her tone, somewhere in the anger-resentment bracket, did an unusually good matching job with her expression. At the same time during what followed she kept switching them both off and paying attention to Steve, now and then muttering to him too quietly for me to hear.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘what do you mean, what have I done to him?’

  ‘It’s obvious enough I should have thought. He goes through an acute phase, he starts responding to treatment, he’s gradually pulling out and coming to terms with himself and getting in touch with his emotions, doing so well that I put him back with family, which in practice means you, and he promptly turns round and retreats behind his defences again.’

  ‘Oh, that’s what happened, is it? I thought you took him off his drugs and he promptly tried to join the Arab secret service, climbed a tree to insulate himself from blokes who were reading his mind with radio waves and went for his stepmother with a knife.’

  While I was saying this she sent Sister Wheatley out of the room to fetch or do something or other and then took a bit of notice of me. ‘If he did. It’s just the sort of tale somebody might dream up if they wanted to get him taken off their hands and back into hospital.’

  ‘You think I,’ I said, and stopped, taking good care not to move my head suddenly in case it fell off. ‘But if he didn’t…’ I stopped again.

  This I thought she missed altogether for what it was worth. ‘He’s obviously suffered a major relapse and requires rehospitalization. All those weeks of work gone for nothing,’ she said, glaring indignantly at me.

  ‘You’re a scream, you are, Collings, and no mistake.’ I realized I must have sounded fairly angry. ‘You decided Steve was ready to spend some of his time at home. Wrong. You decided he was ready to come off drugs. Wrong again. Two whacking errors of judgement that might have got somebody killed. And you put it all down to me. Incidentally till a moment ago you must have thought I was a quite fit person to be in charge of him, mustn’t you? Another floater.’

  ‘What’s the matter with you? Been having trouble with Nowell again?’

  ‘Oh for Christ’s sake,’ I said, and the white-haired loony gasped and winced and the one with no teeth raised his arms as before. ‘You can’t stay ten years old for ever,’ — the best I could do at short notice.

  ‘Don’t you talk like that to me, my lad.’ She stared at me with her eyes half-shut and her eyebrows lifted in the mysterious expression I had seen in the Crown and Sceptre that time, only now there was no mystery any more. Sheer rage was there but also menace, a stated purpose to level the score. ‘One more crack out of you and I’ll discharge him and then you’ll fucking know all about it. Is that clear?’

  All my own anger died away. I just felt a dull horror that a doctor, a woman, anybody could turn a madman loose to avenge a passing slight. No, I felt incredulity too — surely not, no one would, she was merely furious for the moment. But this brought no comfort.

  The Sister came back into the room having fetched a file or part of one, presumably Steve’s part. Collings started checking through it. I said goodbye to Steve in the hope that he might at least raise his head, but he gave no sign of having heard, so I went.

  While I was making my way through the boarding-house part of the ground floor I heard my name called. As more than half expected it was Sister Wheatley. I turned back.

  ‘I just wanted to say, Mr Duke, I’ll keep an eye on Steve for you. Can I have your telephone number?’ She wrote it efficiently down on a small pad from her top pocket. ‘If anything, well, untoward happens I’ll let you know. It won’t because she can’t afford it to, not anything awful, but I thought perhaps you might like to have something you felt you could rely on. She’s all right really, just a bit funny sometimes.’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, Sister. Thank you,’ I said, and, and thought to myself you got good and bad in every crowd. You know, like Germans.

  Outside there was a lot of sunshine, more than usual for the time of year, as bright as early evening in summer. Immediately everyone and everything I had been thinking about up to that moment fell away and I was stuck with just myself and having no wife. It stayed with me throughout the drive to the office, the ride in the lift and the short walk to the private phone, and barely started to shift when Lindsey Lucas answered her extension, though it moved a bit further off when she agreed to meet me in the Crown and Sceptre after work. When that was over I spent a minute or so paying close attention to the wall, which had a great many unspecified people’s numbers ball-pointed and otherwise written on it. Then I rang Nash’s New Harley Street place and after an interval got some other male who told me to ring him, Nash, at home that evening. I said I would, fine, but the bloke hung about.

  ‘Is it, er, very urgent?’

  ‘I couldn’t say very, no. But I would rather like to see him as soon as convenient.’

&
nbsp; ‘Oh. Have you rung him before at that number? Recently?’

  ‘No, never. Why?’

  ‘I should, I should leave it till after seven if I were you. To make sure of getting him, you know.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ I said. I wondered if I had struck Nash’s grandfather, or at least somebody of that age-group. Then I thought whoever it was had sounded rather as though he would have liked to warn me about something but had not known how. Then I put the question aside. In my own office I sat for a time trying to work up the energy to tackle the whole immense matter of Stentor PA Systems’ half-page. 1 had not got even as far as being able to start to think when my phone rang and I clutched at it.

  ‘Stanley Duke? Good morning, Penangan High Commission calling. I have the Commercial Attaché for you.’

  After a pause and a click a voice I knew said, ‘Am I having Mr Joke?’

  ‘Yes, speaking. Good morning, Mr One, I mean Mr Attaché. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Mr Joke, I’m wanting to make some arrangements with you for four pages special report in your newspaper. It must be soon because our Minister of Trade will come to London next month for three days. Please telephone my secretary shortly to arrange lunch.’

  ‘Is this definite, Mr Attaché? The last time we discussed the project it was still at the planning or provisional stage.’ I remembered that it was only simple sentences that might throw Mr One — anything at all complicated he sailed through.