Stanley and the Women (23 page)

‘Hasn’t
anybody got it right?’ asked Susan when we had ordered. ‘Describing madness.’

‘Shakespeare
got it right. Lear, of course. Cerebral atherosclerosis, a senile organic
disease of the brain. Quite common in old age. Periods of mania followed by
amnesia. Rational episodes marked by great fear of what he might have done
while manic and great dread of the onset or renewed onset of mania. That way
madness lies — let me shun that — no more of that. Perhaps even more striking —
Ophelia. A particular form of acute schizophrenia, very thoroughly set up —
young girl of a timid, meek disposition, no mother, no sister, the brother she
depends on not available, lover apparently gone mad, mad enough anyway to kill
her father. Entirely characteristic that a girl with her sort of upbringing
should go round spouting little giggling harmless obscenities when mad. In fact
it’s such a good description that this … subdivision of schizophrenia is
known as the Ophelia Syndrome even to those many psychiatrists who have never
seen or read the play. He was content just to describe it, you see. No theories
or interpretations. Oh, she says and does plenty of things that mean a great
deal to the other characters and to the audience, but she doesn’t know what she’s
saying or doing or who anyone is, because she’s mad.’

Our
starters came then and I thought we might have heard the last of the topic, but
not a bleeding bit of it. I had no great objection to Shakespeare as an author
— it was just that I thought he was rather far back as something to talk about
over lunch. Also I reckoned I had learnt enough about schizophrenia for one
day. Anyhow, in less than a minute and without waiting to be asked Nash was off
again.

‘The
play’s full of interesting remarks about madness, among other things, yes. Polonius.
A rather underrated fellow in my opinion. To define true madness, what is it
but to be nothing else but mad? Not bad. Not bad at all. Not a complete
definition, but an essential part, excluding north-north-west madness. Later
in the same scene, you remember, he has a chat with Hamlet, the fishmonger
conversation, and is made a fool of — the very model of a dialogue between
stupid questioner and clever madman as seen by that, er, that, er, that unusual
person R. D. Laing — you know,
The Divided Self
and all that.

‘But
actually Hamlet’s only
pretending
to be mad, isn’t he? No problem
scoring off the other chap if that’s what you’re up to. Polonius gets halfway
to the point. How pregnant sometimes his replies are, he says, a happiness that
often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be
delivered of — a remarkably twentieth-century view. If he’d paused to think he
might have found it just a bit suspect. But Hamlet in general very cleverly
behaves in a way that lay people who’ve never seen a madman expect a madman to
behave. Ophelia doesn’t go mad till Act IV.’

The two
of them went on having the time of their lives, working their way through
Gothic novels and then Dickens, who either left mad people out altogether or
was no good at them, though evidently terrific on neurosis. There was something
about King Charles’s head.

‘Penangan High Commission,
good afternoon.’

‘Good
afternoon,’ I said, and went on to say who I was. ‘May I speak to the
Commercial Attaché?’

After a
moment I heard the dying-away of a phone bell and after a longer moment a
hollow voice that said, ‘Yes, hallo, yes?’

I said
who I was again, but there followed only a rumble that might or might not have
been human, followed by more silence. ‘Hallo?’

The man
— I assumed it was a man — at the other end breathed out heavily a couple of
times. ‘What … do you want?’ I could not help being impressed by the
quantity of both fear and menace he managed to pack into those four simple
words, with a bit of despair added on.

A
certain amount of despair came over me as I sweated away at explaining what I
wanted, talking about report, supplement, feature, advertisement, publicity in
the hope of grazing the target with one of them. Eventually I just ran out.

Another
rumble. Then, ‘When were you speaking of this before?’ I gave the exact date
and had hardly got it out when he came back, ‘No no, finish, all done,
cancelled, cancelled.’

‘Does
that mean your Minister of Trade has —’

Dialling
tone. I rang the High Commission switchboard again and established quite
easily that, as I suspected, I had been talking not to my pal Mr One but to his
rival or replacement, Mr Two. Mr One had presumably returned to Penang, then.
Not yet, said someone on an extension, he was in consultation with Mr Two but
was not available.

Cheers
most awfully, I thought. Win some, lose some. Well, lose some, certainly. Not
that it really mattered, but it would be nice to have something go right for a
change. I hoped slightly that it had been panic rather than fury that had made
Mr Two bang down the receiver on me.

It was
quite late and I was quite tired. I had had another early morning over at St
Kevin’s, where Steve had turned out to be in more comfortable shape, true to
Nash’s report the previous day that he fancied he had put the hospital on the
right track. Good, but all the same I had found him, Steve, no more responsive
than last Thursday, not really. He lay on rather than in his bed and now and
then sat up on the edge of it while I talked, but that was all. Already, not
nine hours later, I had a pretty poor hold on what I had taken quite a long
time telling him, rambling recollections of holidays, places where we had lived
or stayed, bits of school, that type of thing interspersed with even less
reliable stuff about how nice the hospital seemed and the great strides made in
medical science since the war. At just three moments altogether I thought he
looked at me properly and perhaps recognized me, but they were only moments. In
the room when I arrived, and still there when I left, there had been a small
prematurely white-haired man in his forties looking out of the window and
making the sort of little grunting, moaning, wincing noises that might have
come from a chap watching something like a fist fight in which a friend of his
was rather getting the worst of it.

I had
made no move to see Trish Collings during my visit, in fact on my way back to
the car park I hurried past Rorschach House with my head down. Not much digging
inside it was needed to show me that I was afraid that, if I had happened to
run into her, she would tick me off for having complained about her to Nash, or
for perhaps having done that, which of course was just as bad. Old Don Barley
up to his tricks again.

After
staring at the wall of my office for some few minutes I left the building.
Almost everyone not directly implicated in bringing the paper out had done the
same. Quite a few of them would have made their way, as usual at this time, to
the Crown and Sceptre. Apart from my own staff I had never known more than a
few of them, even by sight, and none was visible now. I carried a large Scotch
over to a stool so placed that I either had to face the wall or turn completely
round each time I put down or picked up my drink. I solved that one by holding
it on my lap.

The
racket was colossal, not just a lot of people talking loud and fast but with a
kind of ferocity to it I had often doubted if you could find outside Fleet
Street. I would stick it while I downed this and another and then go home and
take a bottle in front of the telly. Susan was out, spending the evening with
her mother, though when she debriefed me earlier over the phone she had said
she would not be back late. Still, on the whole things were well placed for
Lindsey to make one of her unscheduled appearances. You could say too well
placed. She had been on my mind quite a bit over the past days — I had been
very touched by her kindly concern when I told her about Steve. Not only that,
though. Anyway, it was not she who pitched up at the bar just when I was
thinking of leaving but Harry Coote, my short, bearded editor. He looked at me
for a moment in the way he had, without smiling or raising his hand or
anything, as though he had found out from somewhere that it was quite funny not
to smile or anything at times when other people usually did. Then he came over.

‘Got
time for one?’

‘Sure,’
I said. ‘Large Scotch and water. No ice.’ It would normally have been a gross
breach of pub protocol to specify the quantity, but that protocol included the
clear provision that it was all right to do so when there was a reasonable
doubt whether a large one would come as a matter of course. And in this case
there was reasonable doubt. But one way or another it was indeed a double that
Harry rather grandly delivered to me before taking up a standing position next
to my stool. He was short enough for his head not to be so very much further
off the ground than mine.

‘How
are things?’ he asked, quite audibly because the uproar seemed to have fallen
off a bit.

‘Fine.’
I could very easily have told him about Mr Two, true, but I kept quiet.

‘I
suppose you haven’t seen anything of old Nowell recently?’

This
was routine, Harry playing himself in with me, or it always had been in the
past. If it turned out to be different this time, if he started being wise or
quietly sympathetic or anything else about Steve, I was off. I said, ‘Yes, as a
matter of fact I ran into her just last week. Had a nice chat with her.’

‘Did
you, now? Oh.’ No, he had heard nothing. ‘Tell me, how was she? How was she
looking?’

‘Great.
She’s unchanged, you know. Absolutely amazing.’

‘Oh
dear,’ said Harry, shaking his head, his eyes gone glassy with wonder.

‘Makes
you think, doesn’t it? She’s all woman is Nowell, if you know what I mean.’

‘I
think so,’ I said. I said to myself that if I hung on long enough he would tell
me he had always thought it was a shame Nowell and I had not managed to make a
go of things, but as it was he told me almost straight away and almost in those
exact words.

After
that he made a great business of lighting one of those rugged cheroots of his,
peering at me every few seconds and generally behaving as though he had in mind
some tremendously important project or request or revelation which he
considered the time was not quite ripe for. This could still have been routine,
though by no means a bit you took no note of. He asked after Susan in an intent
sort of way, and seemed relieved at the news that she was very well, but I
doubted whether hearing so was his whole objective. There was another of the
same when he asked for and got my views on the Government’s financial policies.
After he had given me his I went and bought him a drink, a predictable vodka
and tonic. It occurred to me that having a round of Harry’s to return was
indeed a rare experience.

At my
return he intensified his weighty look, then switched off and said casually, ‘Going
to the Boxes’?’

‘Eh?
What sort of boxes?’

‘Julian
and Paula Box.’ He seemed astonished when I shook my head in ignorance. ‘I
could have sworn I’d seen you there. They’re on a barge. On the river.’

‘Oh,
yeah.’

‘Why
don’t you come along? Drinks party. Completely informal. They’re a very free
and easy couple. Paula doesn’t give a toss.’ The noise had got up again and I
missed the next bit, so he had another shot. ‘I thought we could, er, I thought
we could have a chat on the way, like.’

After
weighing things up I said, ‘All right. Where are we off to?’

‘Got
the car, have you? Oh it’s,’ he hesitated, ‘it’s out by Chelsea.’

‘Chelsea?
Not artists, these mates of yours, are they, or writers?’

‘No,
no,’ he said reassuringly, ‘they’ll all be in accountancy and insurance and
suchlike. No trouble. You’ll enjoy yourself, Stanley. You see.’

Outside
it was blowing half a gale but hardly raining at all, and there was lots of
daylight left. All went well for a time, just one hold-up on the way down to
the Embankment and no trouble after that. We slid along the river at a rate
that left to itself would have got us to Chelsea in about five minutes, so I
held back to give Harry a chance to finish talking about the World Cup and
start recruiting me into MI6 or whatever it was he had in store for me. He was
cutting it pretty fine, I decided, when we reached the corner of Tite Street
and he had still not done with the referee problem.

‘Where
to now?’

‘Well,
I’m afraid I’m not much of a navigator, Stanley. Comes of not running a car,
you know. The best plan is for you to make for Putney Bridge and we’ll think
about it there.’

You
bleeder, I thought wearily. So much for Harry’s famous lack of subtlety. Not
that subtlety of a very high order had been needed to con Muggins into saving
him the taxi fare to Walton-on-Thames or Reading or Oxford or wherever this
perishing barge was going to turn out to be and back, not forgetting the time
and difficulty that finding transport at the far end would have cost him in the
ordinary way, all for the price of a large Scotch and a slice of somebody else’s
hospitality. But no getting away from it, I had wanted to come on my own
account. It was years since I had gone to a party with any intention of picking
up a girl, and a Harry-generation get-together was unlikely to feature many or
any girls, just females, and I was someone’s husband, but you simply never
knew.