Stanley and the Women (25 page)

‘The
wife’s been being a little bit provoking,’ he said in a half-whisper, smiling
and screwing up his nose. ‘You know, feminine. Now whenever that happens I don’t
say a word, I come straight outside wherever I may be and I do what I just been
doing for two minutes, and then I go back in full of the joy of spring. When I
got married I told myself I could be happy or I could be right, and I’ve been
happy now for twenty-two years. Ee, sorry, lad, here I go gassing away and
holding you up.’ He stood aside, looking at his watch. ‘Another … forty
seconds should see it through.’

I had
been away no more than ten minutes, probably less, but the scene down below had
changed quite a lot in the time. I thought to begin with that everybody was
being sick, then I saw that only quite a small number were or had been, but
they were naturally getting all the attention. One fellow had — I turned my
eyes away. A woman was — no. Even now there was no general move towards the
stairs. The bleeding idiots had stood their ground hoping the whole thing would
pass off until it was too late to move a step. If I had been Julian Box I would
have been very angry with them, but if he was he was getting no chance to show
it, because his wife was giving him a going-over for not stopping them or not
holding the boat steady or something like that.

Harry
was nowhere to be seen, not in the main room anyway. Literally gritting my
teeth and trying to think of rose-gardens I tried the revolting areas round the
toilets and shouted his name through the door of each one with no result. In
the first bedroom a man was lying with his grizzled head hanging over the edge.
The second bedroom was empty — no, there was a pair of legs sticking out from
the far side of the bed. They were Harry’s. He had helpfully squeezed his head
in under to be sick there. Somehow I got him moving. I tried not to look at his
beard. When we were nearly at the stairs Bert came up.

‘Can
you give me a lift, Stan?’

‘All
right. Lend a hand here.’

There
was a hold-up at the gangway, and when he got ashore Harry failed to perk up at
once in the usual way of seasick people on landing. He stayed propped up
against the Apfelsine while Bert and I moved aside for a pee. The three of us
climbed aboard. Bert insisted on going in the back, which called for a
semi-climb over the tipped passenger seat, no doddle for a bloke his size even
cold sober, Harry got in beside me unaided though unsteady, and we were off.

Bert
swore now and then. Harry said once or twice he was feeling better. I kept
quiet until I spotted a vacant taxi halted at a traffic-light on our left.

‘Get
him,’ I said to Harry, pulling up and pointing. ‘Bert wants a taxi. Quick about
it.’

He only
just made it but he made it, and came back almost simpering. ‘Okay.’

I said,
‘I’m afraid it’s not okay here, Harry. He’s passed out, I can’t shift him. Not
a hope. Look,
you
take that taxi, go on. I’ll see to him, don’t worry.’

‘But
you can easily —’

‘No, it’s
all right, I’ll deal with him. Off you go now, I’ll manage.’

There
was nothing he could do, especially when I put the window up. The wheels
started to turn.

‘He’s
taking it,’ said Bert’s voice behind me. ‘Not much choice, really. Five quid up
his shirt from here. That was brilliant, Stan. Real touch of class.’

‘It was
your idea.’

‘I’m
talking about the execution. Fantastic. Bloody noble, you were. Anything for a
pal.’ When he was settled in the passenger seat he gestured towards the
instrument panel and said, ‘Don’t let’s do this now. Motors another time,
right? Hey, I bet you thought that bugger was seasick, didn’t you? Well, he may
have been but he’d drunk too much too.’

‘Do
what? In that minute? We weren’t there more than —’

‘That’s
the point. When you go hurling it down it only takes half what it does spread out.
When I started talking to him, not so long before you turned up, he was working
his way through a bloody trayload of gin and tonics. Just started on the last
one as you came along.
And
the rate he was going there’d been other
trays before. It was free, you see. Like what, red rag to a bull? One of those.
In the boozer we tell him when it’s his shout. It’s a joke, except we don’t
think so, and he doesn’t think so. How do you stand him?’

‘I
haven’t got to stand him,’ I said. ‘Good editor, though. Gets the readers.’

‘Oh
shit,’ said Bert in disgust, then shut up for a bit, then suddenly said, ‘Five
past eight. Fixed up for dinner, are you?’

‘No.’

‘There’s
a place I go to sometimes in Soho. Little Italian joint. That sound all right
to you?’

‘Fine.
But aren’t you rather pissed, Bert?’

‘Not by
my standards, old son. Anyway, they know me there.’

They
certainly seemed to from the reception they gave him, which reminded me of Nash’s
at his place, only this one was of course a class or two down the social scale.
What was similar was the way Bert basked in it. Pissed or not, he soon saw me
noticing.

‘Friendly
bunch, eh? I come here quite a lot, actually. In fact I’m quite famous here. I’m
not famous in any famous places but I am here.’ He drained his wineglass and
filled it again. ‘Because of the people I’m usually with. I do a lot of TV
commercials. More interesting work than you might think. Reasonably well paid,
too.’

‘So I
gather,’ I said. This explained several things, including the general
impression he gave of prosperity and non-failure. I realized I had known almost
nothing about him except that he got drunk and had a first Jaguar.

‘You
might even have seen the odd one. Er, Prosit lager?’

‘What,
those two fellows in the helicopter? Marvellous. You did that?’

He
looked modestly into his minestrone, which he was coping with rather better
than I had expected. ‘That’s me, yeah. That’s one of mine. I do all those. So I’m
quite famous in that line, you see, in the business, but you don’t get known to
the general public there. I don’t mind that myself, as I say the money’s good,
but … And then … If …’ He put his spoon down. ‘Stanley, I’ve got to
talk about her. Say I can. Say it’s all right. Please.’

‘I’ve
seen it coming for hours, mate. Go ahead and enjoy yourself.’

‘Because
you’re the only man on earth who’ll understand.’

‘I
wouldn’t be too sure of that, but I see what you mean. Anyway.’

‘Yeah
anyway, but where had I got to?’

‘Wait a
minute. Oh yes, you don’t mind not being famous everywhere, but presumably she
does.’

‘Yeah,
she does. She wouldn’t like me being famous everywhere either but she’d get
something out of that, or she thinks she would, or you can’t prove she wouldn’t,
any more than you can prove anything else about her. She reckons if I was a
famous director of feature films she’d meet a lot of other famous directors and
get parts in their films and that would be some compensation for being married
to the likes of fucking me. I said once directors would be much more likely to
give her parts if they hadn’t met her.’

‘You
said that? Out loud? To her?’

‘I told
her. I was cross with her about something. I didn’t get the chance of telling
her anything else for a couple of weeks after that, but she turned up. It was
partly she likes to spend a lot, you see. Christ, you know. She got it wrong
about the career, didn’t she, but the cash held up all right.’

‘You
mean she married you to get parts in films?’

‘That’s
right. Like she married you because you were earning a lot for your age. Sorry,
Stan. Sounds crude, doesn’t it? I suppose it would if I meant she’d planned it
and really knew what she was doing. But it’s only men who plan things like
that. You could fill her with what’s that truth drug stuff, that’s right,
scopolamine, you could dose her up to the gills with fucking scopolamine and
she’d still deny it. Another thing she knows without knowing she knows is that
she’s a not very good actress who isn’t very beautiful and she’ll be forty-six
by the end of the year, so where’s she going to go? She’s much too neurotic to
set up on her own. No, I’m stuck with her. By Christ, you’re a long time alive,
Stanley.’

‘Why
don’t you get out yourself?’

‘You
must be joking. Get out? I couldn’t face it, not again, not now. I did it
before, perhaps nobody told you but I had to get unmarried too, and it bloody
near killed me then. And soon enough I’m going to be fifty-three. But there’s a
snag attached to what you might call the zero option, which now I come to think
of it is a bloody marvellous name.’ He laughed, then sighed. ‘What? Snag, there’s
a snag. And I don’t mind telling you what it is. It’s not much fun … living
with somebody … you don’t like much.’

Over a
rather good scaloppina of veal and interrupting himself with swigs of Valpolicella
Bert told me some of his grounds for not liking his wife much. All of it, or
nearly all of it, was familiar territory. Not that that made it any less
interesting — on the contrary, it was wonderful to recognize variably sized
almost-forgotten offences against common sense, good manners, fair play, truth,
all those, with just the names and circumstances changed.

One
short section was new. Bert described, believably enough, the way she hated you
to be there, within range, in the room when she did some footling manual task
like safety-pinning something to something else or tearing a stamp off a sheet
and sticking it on an envelope. You were watching her, she said, waiting for
her to be slow or clumsy or to get it wrong. Needless to say you were doing
nothing of the kind, you had not got as far as taking in what she was up to,
but as always you might have been watching and waiting, you could have been,
there was no way of proving you were not. It gave me a ridiculous pang to think
that I had never noticed her doing that, not as one more tiny absurd awful
thing about her but just as a thing about her. I had thought I knew her better
than anybody else ever could.

When
Bert called for coffee, grappa and cigars it became clear to me, in so far as
anything now could, that he was one of that number who could go on when most
others had fallen by the wayside, in other words got drunk but had the power of
drinking more, perhaps much more, without collapsing, at least for the moment. Also
without losing hold of the conversation. He had repeated or partly repeated a
couple of his stories, but he was still better than some people I knew cold
sober. At the time I had reckoned that his funeral address on motoring could
only have come from somebody well on with his last half-hour before blacking
out. Not so, evidently. When the grappa arrived he went halfway back to that
style for a moment, holding up his glass and staring at it like an actor.

‘The
great refuge,’ he said as though he had just thought of it himself. ‘The great
comfort. And the great protection.’

‘I’ll
drink to that.’

He
scowled at me. ‘It’s a protection in a way that probably hasn’t occurred to
you, sonny, as well as the obvious. Now. She thinks I’m pissed all the time,
right? You probably think the same, why shouldn’t you? But I’m not. Obviously.
A piss-artist couldn’t do my job. Of course I am
sometimes
pissed, like
now, like tonight, partly though not wholly in consequence of a little
discussion of a carved walnut armchair, probably early Georgian. Hence also my
presence on that fucking barge. But mainly, usually, normally not.’

‘You
were pretty far gone that afternoon I came to your place, remember?’

‘Oh, bloody
good,’ he said, laughing. ‘I take that as a real tribute. By the way I’m sorry
I bad-mouthed you over the phone and so on. My line on you with her is that you’re
a shit, you see. There’s no such thing as a safe line on anything with her, as
you may have noticed, but I just thought that would be the least unsafe.’

‘You
mean you weren’t pissed at all that time?’

‘What?
Oh, no no. Couple of beers at lunchtime. I was hamming it up.’

‘You
hammed it up like mad when I arrived and she wasn’t even in sight.’

‘Ah,
but that’s the rule. The rule is, I’ve got to have a rule, I’m always pissed
there, if not for real then I act it. Too confusing otherwise, too bloody risky
too. I work from an office just across the road from here. That’s good because
she thinks I’m getting arseholes drunk round the clubs. I don’t know where she
thinks all the money comes from. But that’s not interesting, is it? Not so long
as it keeps coming.’

‘What’s
the point?’

‘Of
acting pissed? I’ll tell you,’ he said in a much quieter voice. ‘When you’re
young, you’re ready to fuck anything on two legs. That’s almost enough on its
own. But as time goes by, you get choosy. You know, if they chat to you about
Harold Pinter while you’re on the job or they throw their food about and swear
at the waiters or you find out they used to work for the Gestapo or the KGB or
one of those, well, you notice, it puts you off a bit. And by the time you’re
fifty, Stan, you’re even more demanding. You expect them to be a bit pleasant
occasionally,
right?
To listen now and then,
m’m?
To be good
company,
eh?
A lot of unreasonable things like that.’