‘Oh yes, definite. My government has completed its explorations.’
‘That’s fine — highly satisfactory. Tell me, sir, shall I be working with you direct or with that observer I spoke to recently?’ Pretty crafty, I thought.
‘Observer? What observer?’
‘At the High Commission. That was what you — that was his official designation.’
‘Observer,’ said Mr One, lingering over the syllables. Eventually, ‘Haw,’ he howled at some length, carried away by wonder at his own feat of memory. Like Mandy. ‘He has been subducted.’
So now I knew. The lunch itself would be eatable and drinkable and there would be the fun of telling … Oh well, I had had a minute off.
When I had put the phone back Morgan was there. ‘Stanley, you know that new girl, the one with the cage?’
‘With the what? Is that the same as the one with the rope?’
‘That’s right. Going on like the hammers of hell she’s been, about sexual harassment.’
‘Really? Lucky to get any you’d think, with that comb. The limping porter again, I suppose.’
‘No, it’s the bloody tea-lady. Asks her if she had a good you-know-what last night and says she bets her boyfriend’s got a nice big how’s-your-father. In a nasty way, she says, the girl.’
I groaned. ‘M’m, it’s sexual in a sense, of course it is, and I can see how it might be harassing for her, but it doesn’t quite add up to what the phrase is supposed to mean, does it? Not that there’s the slightest point in telling her so, I realize that. When were you talking to her?’
‘Now, just while you were on the phone.’
‘Oh, yeah, that was the King of Penang wanting four pages. Firm.’
‘Great. Come and have a word with her, would you, Stanley? She’s in a hell of a tizzy.’
I looked round for an escape route and there was Harry Coote brilliantly standing in the doorway. I had not set eyes on him since what he quite likely thought of as the night of the taxi. ‘Got a minute?’ he said.
Well, I would have had a minute and more for Yasser Arafat at that stage rather than a word with a female in a hell of a tizzy, in fact one in almost any foreseeable condition. I told Morgan I would have the word later and he covered up his disappointment like a man, meaning none of it showed.
Since my last visit somebody had replaced Harry’s fish-tank with a piece of sculpture in a dark blue veined material. The subject was probably a horse, or perhaps a cow, but it was impossible to be sure because the artist had died half-way through the job, or perhaps got fed up and left it. There was a new potted plant too with hairy leaves.
Harry sat down at his desk, which was completely bare but for a glass ashtray the size of a dustbin-lid, and took out his cheroots. I noticed that the packet design had a depressing Third-World look to it. ‘Any news?’ he asked.
‘Well, the Penangans are taking those four pages.
‘Really.’ He showed at least as much enthusiasm at hearing this as Morgan had done. ‘How long have you been in the job now?’
‘About eighteen months longer than you’ve been in yours. That’s …’
‘Ever thought of making a change?’
‘Not seriously. Seeing as you ask.’
‘That young fellow, now, what’s he called, your number two, nice young fellow, Morgan something, Morgan, Morgan, Morgan Wyndham, Wyndham, tell me, Stan, in your view, is he, would he be, er, assuming he was interested of course, but do you think he’d be capable of running the show there for a time?’
‘Well there again I haven’t done much in the way of thinking, Harry, to be quite honest. Off the top of my head I reckon that’s about what he’d be, capable. He doesn’t get ideas much. Why?’
‘Well, as I’ve told you before I have my doubts whether advertising manager has ever been the ideal outlet for your particular kind of expertise.’
‘Have you now?’ I asked him when it seemed he had had his last word on the subject. To my mind the conversation needed to get much funnier fast. ‘You wouldn’t be trying to tell me something, Harry, would you?’
‘Yes,’ he said quite briskly. ‘Yes, I would, I am. Unofficially, I’m telling you unofficially that as from the end of the month your services in your present post will no longer be required.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ I said, wondering if the house in Hampstead was burning down as I sat there, and then saw he was looking at me with an awful sort of World War II film admiral’s smile.
‘But your services as motoring correspondent of this newspaper are very much in demand, my dear Stanley. Unofficially, the Board have been dissatisfied with the present arrangement for some time. Then, well, I just happened to run into your ex’s husband, old Bert Hutchinson, I think I told you I see him in the Ladbroke Arms from time to time, and he said, well, he said he’d had a long talk with you recently and he said he’d never come across anybody who knows as much about cars as you do.’ Did he? What had I said? When? ‘And cares about them, he made a big point of that. And that’s … essential,’ said Harry with a lot of sincerity. ‘And I know you’ve always wanted to be a writer.’ How could he know that? What could possibly have made me tell him? Where? ‘So … I went away, and I had a small think, and I dropped a word, and you’ll be hearing … soon. I hope you’re pleased, Stan.’
‘Oh yes.’ I was, or I would be one day. ‘Thank you very much,’ I went on, trying to sound as though I believed he had done it all himself.
‘Forget it, lad. I just passed on a thought, that’s all. Yes, nice to do that little thing on my way out. I’m er, I’m changing jobs myself. Going to edit a new English-language newspaper in South Africa. Quite a, you know, what would you say, a challenge.’
‘You bet.’
‘I thought it was time to make a shift. I thought if I don’t do it now I’m never going to.’
‘That’s the spirit.’
As soon as I had spoken a horrible silence started. I could hardly spring up and be gone so soon after hearing these two fair-sized bits of news, at least I felt I hardly could, but at the same time I could think of nothing to say. Neither could Harry, it seemed, or rather, much worse than that, I saw he could think of something all right, but was far from sure whether he could or should or wanted to say it. The moment had come for him to ask me to marry him. His mouth opened I slid my right foot round till it was alongside the front leg of my chair, heel lifted ready to give me a good take-off on my dash for the door.
‘I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anybody else,’ he began. He had his hands clasped in front of him on the desk. ‘You’ll have noticed I not only have no wife, I also have no lady friend of any sort and as far as you know never have had. That’s right. Some people of course have worked out that that must mean I’m, you know, queer.’ He considerately went straight on at this point to save me having to start pretending I had never been one of those people. ‘Well, I suppose I might be, deep down. All I can say to that is, it would have to be bloody deep down, Jack. No, as regards the direction of my sexual urges, you might call it boringly normal. But when we come to their intensity, then it’s a different picture.’
He ground out his cheroot in slow motion while we both in different ways thought about the picture. ‘Sub,’ he said abruptly. ‘Definitely sub. About once a month to six weeks. Speeds up a bit in the winter, I’ve noticed, funnily enough. Anyway, no problem, I get on the blower, by the time I’m along there she’s ready and waiting, back indoors within the hour. Never let them come to me. Last time that happened she wanted to stay the night and I had a devil of a job shifting her. I’ve been going to the same one for over ten years now. No point in chopping and changing. They’re all built the same.’
While he told me this much Harry had mostly looked away from me but had kept flicking his eyes to my face. Now, with the hard part presumably done, he relaxed a bit, lit another cheroot and gave me more of a proper glance, and when he went on he took his time.
‘I don�
��t suppose it’s ever occurred to you, Stanley, to work out what it costs you to be married, even with the wife working. Well, it wouldn’t, I dare say, your type of bloke. It occurred to me, though, very early in the game. You obviously get considerably more out of it, out of marriage, that is, than I would in all sorts of ways. But for someone like me it’s simply not on.’
He spoke in an impressive, statesmanlike way, thumping the desk with his fist. ‘As a commercial transaction it’s just not on. Your money,’ he said, managing to make it sound really grand, up there on a level with your country and your old mother, ‘draining away twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week on goods and services that are … non-requisite and … non-pleasurable. Like Christmas all the year round. In 1969 men in Great Britain lost control on average of sixty-two per cent of their disposable income on getting married, according to my calculations. And it won’t have gone down since, will it? Not with all this liberation. That’s a laugh, that is.’ He laughed. ‘Liberation from what, pray? But we’d better not start on that. Just remember that wives in developed countries are in effect many times more highly paid for their contribution than any other group, certainly any other unskilled workers. And all this is assuming an average sex life. Whereas in my case …
‘What about companionship?’ I asked, feeling somebody should.
He seemed puzzled. ‘Having another person round the house, you mean?’
‘Well, a bit more than that. To talk to, share things with kind of style.’
‘M’m. I should imagine that would go along with a normal sex drive. Obviously does, in fact. I’m not trying to lay down a general law. The arrangement suits most people. I mean most men. Needless to say it suits most women. Well …’
He looked at his watch and we both stood up. But he had not quite finished. ‘In a way, you know, I don’t really mind if here and there I get suspected of being a faggot. It’s nothing so dreadful these days. Certainly far less objectionable to me than giving someone else my money to spend for the rest of my life. But the result is, of being suspected of it is it’s harder to make friends, men friends that is of course. For instance I’d have liked to get to know you better, Stan, but it wasn’t to be. And then when a man on his own has passed his first youth there’s a lot he doesn’t get invited to. Eh, the world’s made for the marrieds. It’s taken a mortal time for all that to sink in in my case. I intend to do something about it when I get to Cape Town. I can’t do anything about being on my own, at least I won’t, but I can have had a wife in England now rather long dead. Something never discussed. See you before I go.’
All the way back to my office I succeeded in not collapsing with woe at the thought of the friendship that never was. Once or twice during Harry’s recital I had wondered whether his sexual policy might be based on a deep, perhaps unconscious hatred or horror of women, but I concluded now that it was nothing more than hatred and horror of exposing his wallet to the light. In the eyes of most men this was surely a more powerful disincentive to chumming up with him than any inklings of faggotism. He had incidentally not explained what he had against the common practice of other non-marriers, picking girls up at parties and putting them down on the morrow — cheaper, you might have thought, than a Harry-type solution. Ah, but only in theory. You never knew what you might be letting yourself in for in the way of providing a hot bath or a cooked breakfast, lending cab fare with nothing in writing about getting it back, etc. Still, I had to thank him for neither saying what a shame he had always thought it was that Nowell and I had failed to make a go of things nor asking meaningly if things were all right at home. But then perhaps he had never felt much personal commitment to either concern.
Lindsey was looking very trim when she turned up in the pub just after six, even healthier than usual and sort of better defined, as though I were seeing her closer to. Her high-collared metal-buttoned jacket and tan boots gave an outdoorsy effect. From the start she paid close attention to everything I said and quite soon she was paying it to my story of what had happened up to and including Susan’s exit. She, Lindsey, made some faces and a few noises at high or low points but she came out with none of those dispensable prompts I had known females to hand out so as to stay in shot while someone else tried to talk. I carried on for about ten minutes instead of the couple of weeks I could easily have filled. When it was over she went to the bar for more drinks, getting them just in time before the place filled up in a wink like a lift on the underground.
‘Well I never did,’ she said. ‘Do you think she actually went and stabbed herself like that?’
‘No, I … No. A clever, educated woman like Susan, with a responsible job, always in such marvellous control of herself? Surely not. After all I’ve been living with her for four years now. The thing’s too messy, too hasty. Rubbishy. Silly. No. Though I suppose I must have —’
‘She’d have been doing it on the spur of the moment right enough. And when somebody like that loses control they lose it good and proper. Oh, she’s capable of it, believe me.’
‘So you say.’
‘So would others say if you ever got a chance to ask them. Listen, in those four years have you ever met any of her friends from before?’
‘Well, there’s her boss, old Robbie Whatname Jamieson, and his wife, and a fellow called … No, not a lot, not really.’
‘She does that, she cuts off completely and moves on. Do you know, she’s never been near any of the people we used to know at Somerville in the Sixties? What you’ve got to grasp, Stanley, what you’ve got to take in is she’s mad. Off her educated head. It was educated in an interesting way, which I don’t imagine you know about either.’
The fruit-machine started up. Apparently without meaning it or even noticing, someone gave me a boof in the small of the back that neatly sent me off my stool. Someone else came with his pint and stood so close that his bent elbow hid Lindsey’s face. She shifted and looked at me through her glasses, which were very clean and had crimson frames that day.
‘Would you like to come home, Stan?’
‘Oh, I’d love to.’
When we had been at home, in her stately garden flat off Fulham Road, for some little time, she said, ‘You’re not really Jewish at all, are you darling?’
‘No. My grandfather came from East Anglia. Well, I suppose he could have come from Tel Aviv before that but he didn’t. I know I look it a bit.’
‘All right, but what about this then?’
‘Lindsey, where have you been? Oh, of course, I was forgetting. Just let me tell you that over here that’s been done to practically everybody from way back. Even lower-class turds. It’s supposed to help you to pee or something.’
‘Look, I know it’s a dodgy topic, but you are lower-class, aren’t you darling? Just between ourselves, naturally.’
‘I was before I came up in the world, true, but lower-middle-class, not working-class. Very important distinction. My old dad got really wild if you said he was working-class. Worse than calling him a Jew.’
‘You do go on about it a bit, don’t you?’
‘I’d drop it like a shot if people would let me. And you asked. And which bit of the mick working class do you come from, Lucas?’
‘That’s much worse than calling your father a Jew. Micks are Catholics, bog Irish, and I’m right bang in the middle of the middle class — I’ll have you know my father’s a big wheel in the Manpower Services Commission, and everybody there talks with this hick accent except the real nobs who’ve been to school in England. And the family home’s in Lisburn, which is the Godalming of the Six Counties. A very nice place, Northern Ireland. Lovely and quiet. Oh, if you’re a bloody fool and know just where to go you can get your head blown off all right, but it’s quiet everywhere else. No race problem. Peaceful.’
She stopped speaking on the last word. I thought of suggesting that it was rather quaint to say a place had no race problem when it was all Irish there, but then thought not. In a minute or two I was deep into on
e of the nicest silences I could remember for a long time. It was not quite total —not much traffic came down this way, but I heard a couple of taxis, muffled though by the old thick windows and the heavy curtains, scattered footsteps passed, and now and then I caught Lindsey’s breathing, so slow I thought she must be asleep. The things in the rest of my life were still there, only for the time being there was nothing they could do. Very little light came into the room, just enough to make out the dark patch that was her head and the white of her shoulder. Eventually I sighed and shifted. She was awake after all and got me wrong, though not seriously.
‘Do you want a drink?’ she asked without moving.
‘Not yet, thank you. Darling.’
Later on I did have a drink, a Scotch and water actually, and called the number I had been given for Nash. It answered so quickly that someone must have either happened to be dusting the telephone at the time or been sitting waiting for it to ring.
‘Yes?’ A harsh, uninformative voice.
‘May I speak to Dr Nash, please?’
‘Who are you?’ A woman, not very young, posh, like Alethea as much as anyone.
‘Duke’s the name. I was hoping to —’
‘Who are you?’ Drunk.
‘My son is one of Dr Nash’s —’
‘Get off this line and stay off it.’ Like a send-up of a ham actor being threatening. Also mad. ‘He’s not coming … got it? He’s staying right here, okay? And that is straight from the horse’s mouth, brother. You can tell your floosies that Dr Nash regrets he will be unable to attend the … ffffunction.’
I went on standing there by the oriental-style earthenware umbrella jar in Lindsey’s hall listening to this and feeling a certain amount of a charlie, none the less quite incapable of coming up with something to say. Then after another word or two from the drunken upper-crust madwoman there was a sudden complete silence at the far end, the sort you get when somebody puts his hand over the mouthpiece. Then Nash came on.
‘Hallo, Alfred Nash here, who is calling?’
Stanley and the Women Page 25
