Stanley and the Women (12 page)

‘You
certainly do,’ I said admiringly, also thoughtfully. ‘You can read him like a
book. Always could. What was that place in Brittany you took him to a couple of
times?’

‘What?
When was this?’

Her
tone had completely changed in that second, but I was too slow to take it in. ‘Oh,
years ago, he can’t have been more than eight or —’What did he say to you?’

‘Well,
he’d obviously loved having you to himself. I was tied up here with all the —’

‘Perhaps
you hadn’t noticed, Stanley, but the poor boy was in the most frightful state.
Confused … terrified …’

‘Eh?’
For the moment I was baffled. ‘Look, Nowell, I don’t mean just now, I’m talking
about then, when you and he came back to Maida Vale and I asked him if he’d had
a nice holiday and he was full of the way you’d —’

‘For
Christ’s sake, any
reasonable
man would have been
pleased
to be
helped out of a problem he couldn’t cope with himself. I must say I had thought
I was doing you a good turn.’

‘You
were, and I’m very grateful — I didn’t —’

‘I can
see you may be upset but you’ve no need to take it out on me. There’s no point
in trying to deal with you in your present mood. Thank you for your
information. Good afternoon to you.

Most of
the things old Nowell said and did were funny really. The difficulty had always
been in laughing at them, especially when they were coming your way. The
dignified-restraint component in her final offering illustrated the point well.
At this distance I was unsure how I had taken that type of thing when we were
first married — as rather dignified and restrained, probably, though also
hasty, perhaps, or confused. I had gone straight from something like that to
what I felt now, a desire to chop her off at the ankles, without so much as an
embarrassed smirk in the middle.

At the
moment any sort of smirk could only have been at my own expense, with first
place going to my brilliant attempt to lead her away from the topic of the
dreaded discussion. I had forgotten until too late that she was sensitive about
Steve’s younger days, when she had boarded him out with friends more than she
should have, got in unsuitable girls to look after him, and so on. I had only
been fool enough to bring these things up once, just before she left me or
perhaps just after, but I always might again, she never knew. And then of
course when I was baffled near the end of our conversation I knew I had started
speaking quicker than before, and a bit louder, and with a certain amount of
force or emphasis, and from her point of view I might easily have gone on to set
about being foul to her any second, and she could hardly have been expected to
take a chance on that. For Nowell, if one patch was dodgy the whole area was
dodgy, even if the other fellow seemed to be sticking to the far end of the
field. This little way of hers often tended to limit conversation to the here
and now.

But
when she had gone there I was on my own again. I turned on the radio, a Danish
job called a StereoBoy, something I rather wished I had noticed before I bought
it, and went not very searchingly over the bands. Most of the stations were
evidently playing the same yobbos’ war-chant, but even the others were somehow
impossible, too far on with what they were doing to be caught up with. I had
just started on a second run-through when I heard Susan’s key in the door.

I went
round the corner into the hall and there she was, coming down the passage with
her briefcase and stubby umbrella and shaking out her woollen hat. Her eyes
looked extra large.

‘Oh, I
am glad to see you, love,’ I said. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been so glad to see
anybody.’

We
stood with our arms round each other. ‘There’s nothing awful, is there?’ she
asked.

‘No.
Well. They’ve taken him off to hospital. And he’s mad, the doc says.

‘Tell
me all about it.’

We went
into the kitchen, where a woman with a North-country accent was talking
seriously about senile dementia. Susan turned her off, or rather, not knowing
how to do that, shifted off the frequency, which was good enough for me just
then.

I said,
‘You’re back early, then. Do you mind if I have a drink?’

‘Of
course not. You sit down. I tried to ring, but the switchboard had blown up or
something. Whisky and water?’

‘Yeah,
lovely.’

When I
came to the bit about Nowell and her getting Steve to agree to be taken off, I
kept a careful eye on Susan. I took no decision to — I just found I had started
to. In nearly four years, longer if you went back to our first meeting, I had
never known her say or do anything that showed how she felt about Nowell. I
realized this was a pretty big statement to make on any woman’s feelings about
any other woman, not just her husband’s ex-wife, if by anything you meant
anything.
She had obviously found some third way of getting across to me her total
hatred, contempt and horror. Her words to me on the subject that Friday night,
reminding me that Steve  had seemed upset once or twice after visiting his
mother, had come over with about the punch of a traffic report. This time round
it was the same story — nothing that could show on the tapes, audio or visual,
and great waves of umbrage. Fair enough. Still, I thought there was no point in
piling it on by going into Nowell’s phone-call to me, which had really not
added anything, so I ended up with Steve going off in that docile way.

When
she could see there was no more to come, Susan said, ‘Good. What a relief,’ and
got up and started to put the kettle on. She had not once interrupted me or
even shifted about much.

‘Yes,
it is,’ I said. ‘It seems a bit sudden, though, that’s all. Doesn’t it?’

‘Shoving
him in on sight, so to speak. Very sudden. But by what standards? If he’d had
a ruptured appendix or whatever it is, not sudden in the least.’

‘It can’t
be as urgent as a physical thing.’

‘Maybe
not — I wouldn’t know. I’m just saying, what you mind isn’t Steve going into
hospital suddenly, without warning — you mind Nash suddenly deciding he should
go in. The way you see it, he should have thought about it longer, a serious
step like that, gone away and come back again. That’s because you don’t know
any more than I do about psychological things, mental things. They seem like
just a branch of ordinary things, don’t they? Literature’s rather the same, to
a lot of people. Anyway, I see no reason why Nash should be less right today
than he would be on Monday. I can’t remember whether I’ve ever told you, but I
had a barmy cousin once, so I’ve been through part of this before. Would you
like some tea?’

‘No
thanks,’ I said. ‘No, yes, I will. Thanks.’

‘What
have you had to eat?’

‘Not a
lot.’

Susan
washed out the teapot at the sink and carefully dried the inside, a thing of
hers. Then she said, ‘Those points Nash made about the drugs and the tests and
so on, it’s much easier to do them in hospital, you agreed with all that, I
thought.’

‘Yeah.
Yes. Didn’t you?’

‘Oh
yes. And that Joshua business put the lid on it, you said yourself. So I don’t
quite see …’ Standing behind me, she put her hand gently on my shoulder and
went on in a gentle voice, ‘What’s really bothering you, darling?’

I put
my hand over hers. ‘Well, it was what he said when he told Nash and me he was
prepared to go in — I ought to be pleased because I was getting rid of him and
that was the only thing I cared about, according to him.’

‘Is
that all? I don’t suppose he meant it very seriously, do you? And even if he —’

‘It’s
not that so much, I’d just hate to think he was right and I wasn’t actually
interested in what’d be best for him, only in getting him off my back.’

‘Without
you realizing it. Give it a rest, Stanley, you’re much too self-aware for any
of that kind of crap. Also much too bright not to be able to see that what’s
best for somebody can quite easily be what’s best and most convenient for
somebody else as well, you for instance. But too bloody sentimental and silly
to take it in, to believe yourself. And what’s wrong with getting him off your
back in the state he’s in at the moment? And there’s my back to be considered
too, you know.’ There had been no gentleness in her voice for a bit, but I
could hear some of it when she said, ‘And too silly to ring me up.’

She
leant down and kissed me. With me sitting at the table as I was we were only
able to hug each other in a rather badly-organized way, but it seemed not to
matter much. There was plenty I wanted to say to her, all good, all nice
things, only I could not sort them out or get them to sound right in my head,
so I made pleased, friendly noises and stroked her neck. In a minute she
straightened up and went to make the tea.

Later I
rang the hospital number the fellow had given me, and after what I thought was
an uncommonly short space of time an Asian voice said Yes, Mr Duke had been
admitted that afternoon. But I could find out nothing else whatever, not even
whether somebody might tell Mr Duke that his father had called.

2
   Progress

When I rang the hospital
the next day the response was much as before. Another Asian voice, or quite
likely the same one, said Mr Duke was comfortable but, it turned out, was not
to be visited — not must on no account be or taking everything into account had
better not be, just was not to be. After a repeat on the Monday morning I
decided unenthusiastically to try and get hold of one of the doctors, but to
put it off until after eleven, when there would be no excuse for such people
not being on duty.

People
like advertising managers of daily newspapers needed to get off the mark a bit
earlier. I arrived in my office to find my deputy and our joint secretary
already in position, which was right. Everything they told and showed me was
very dull except the news, passed on a strip of flimsy that Thurifer Chemicals
were cancelling their half-page.

‘That
leaves them five light,’ said my deputy, a capable but non-drinking Welshman
called Morgan Wyndham who liked being what he called realistic. ‘Five out of
eight.’

‘I
know,’ I said. ‘He can’t do that.’

‘He won’t
be there yet,’ Morgan told me when I started to dial the agency.

I
ignored him. After the last digit there was a click or two and then a colossal
silence, as though I had been put through to the house of the dead. Another try
ended the same way.

Morgan
looked over from his own phone. ‘Was he there?’

‘Probably
not, but I didn’t get that far.’ Next time I did a switch in the hope of
flushing out the bugs, and got the ringing tone in fine style.

‘Penangan
High Commission, good morning,’ said a girl’s voice.

‘Is the
Commercial Attaché there, please?’ I knew that sounded none too clever, but the
thing was that like all his pals, apparently, the chap had three names, just
one syllable each and, to look at on his official card, perfectly pronounceable
as small chunks of near-English. But when I had tried them over the phone a few
weeks before, this girl or her colleague, though as English as your hat, had
not known what I meant, or so she had said and gone on saying. Eventually she
had produced three amazing noises that according to her I must have meant, and
I must have, because the right chap at once came on the line. And thereupon
became the Commercial bleeding Attaché for ever in my book.

‘Just a
moment, sir,’ the operator was saying politely. I thought she sounded
marvellous. ‘Er … did you want to speak to Mr One Three Five or Mr Two Four
Six?’

Of
course that was not what she said, but it was no further from it than half the
other ways I could have put it. Her question put me in a bit of a quandary. ‘What’s
the difference?’ I asked eventually.

‘Well… Mr One’s the old Attaché, and Mr Two came last week.’

‘Oh,
yeah. Right, give me Mr One, if you would.’ This sounded like, or rather
probably was, the right chap, and also incidentally a chap destined to go
jetting back to Penang at any moment, but there was not a lot I could do with
that thought except bear it in mind.

I gave
my name and that of the paper, and after a moment a high-pitched voice that
made you think of sweet and sour pork said, ‘Hallo, yes?’

‘It’s
Stanley Duke, Mr Attaché,’ I said for good measure. ‘You remember we discussed
a possible special report in my paper. I wonder if you’d had a chance to think
about it.’

‘Ah —
Mr Joke. Oh
yes.’
He sounded pretty well overcome with joy. ‘Now
everything is being arranged. I’m communicating with my government and they’re
being very interested. Extremely interested. Particularly the Minister of Trade
will be coming to Europe next month and will be spending three days in London.
He’s being very intelligent and very well educated and has visited Australia.
Now I think with your good assistance he’ll be understanding the commercial
advantages of my proposal.’