Stanley and the Women (27 page)

The car
park was in weak sunshine. ‘Well, how did they treat you back there?’ I asked,
and when I got no answer, ‘All right, were they?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What
was the food like? Okay, was it?’

‘Yeah.’

He had
spoken so lifelessly that I was filled with a sudden panicky suspicion — he had
indeed not recognized me, he still had not the slightest idea of what was
happening, he had simply had it drummed into him to address as dad the man who
turned up and to go wherever he was taken.

No,
that could not be, that was daft, he was simply nervous, confused, frightened,
shy of committing himself or saying more than he had to. He would talk all
right when he had settled down and felt safe.

There
was not much sign of that for the first couple of days. On arrival he said
Hallo to Susan quite nicely and shook hands with her, a bizarre sight if I ever
saw one, but after that he only spoke without being spoken to when he wanted
the coffee jar, an extra blanket, a light for his cigarette, the time of day.
He ate little, read nothing, watched television, took long showers, left the
television on, left the shower on, left the lights on. I could find nothing
abnormal about any of this, nothing unusual, and yet it was different. The most
different part came first thing in the morning — so far from having trouble
getting him up I found him fully dressed sitting looking shell-shocked on the
edge of his bed or on the broad sill of the big window on the landing. But he
certainly seemed calm.

About
the third evening early on he said to me quite normally, ‘Just popping out to
get some Marlboros.’ Susan was there too.

It was
the first unnecessary thing he had said for a long time. Partly because in a
very unimportant way I was fed up with having to give him lights every ten
minutes and partly to provoke some sort of reaction I said, not at all crossly,
‘You might as well buy yourself a few boxes of matches while you’re about it.’

I got
my reaction all right, also notice that he had some sort of grasp of the state
of affairs. He glared at me with astonishing hostility, showed his teeth in a
way I had never seen before and said in a sort of choked-up or choked-off
voice, ‘Don’t you fucking dare talk to me like that, you bastard. Who the
bloody hell do you think you are, giving me your fucking orders?’

Knowing
at once there was no point in it I still said, ‘I wasn’t giving any orders, I
was merely making a suggestion.’

‘Like
fuck you were. You were trying to make me into part of your bloody little
police state, weren’t you? You’re just a pissy little dictator. You don’t care
about anybody but yourself and other people can go and jump in the fucking
lake.’

‘That’s
not true.’ Susan sounded pretty cross herself. ‘Your father sweats his guts out
for you. Look at the way he —’

He
turned on her so savagely that I got to my feet. ‘You keep out of this, you
fucking bitch,’ he said with shocking sincerity. ‘You’ve done enough, pushing
my mother out and now you won’t let me go near her, you bloody…’

‘She’s
not there,’ I shouted. ‘I can’t get hold of her. She’s not around.’ I had
phoned three or four times on my own account and only got an answer once, from
a foreign voice that said helpfully that Mrs Hutchinson had gone to London. Not
that Steve had so much as mentioned her until this moment since the evening I
first fetched him. But it was no use going into any of that.

With a
growl of hatred and disgust he took a step towards me and jerked his fist in
the air, but then shoved past me and hurried out. Susan and I stood without
moving until the front door slammed, on which we clung to each other.

‘That’s
not his way,’ I said, trying to remember something of Collings’s about helping
him to get in touch with his own anger. Was that what I had done?

‘No,
well he’s not himself. He’s all in a muddle, poor little thing. He probably
feels bloody awful from all these drugs and things and when you’re like that
you lash out at whoever’s nearest. Come on, darling, let’s have a drink.’

After
ten minutes or so we heard the door slam again and after another moment a burst
of working-class music from the television. When I went in last thing I found a
semi-circle of used matches round Steve’s chair, one of which had burnt the
carpet slightly. It seemed not much to be bucked up by.

The next day Susan’s
mother came to lunch. So did Alethea, Susan’s elder sister by half a dozen
years. Alethea had been married to a doctor, a chest man at a London teaching
hospital who had run off with one of the cleaning women there. I still thought
that was a pretty peculiar thing to have done, though not as peculiar as before
I met Alethea. She had gone white early, wore her hair in a short bob and, with
her tallish, stooped figure, looked a bit like a country parson in an old
number of
Punch,
dressed differently, though. When I turned up, rather
late on purpose, she greeted me quite heartily and made a great thing of
insisting on a full double kiss in the continental mode.

‘Stanley
dear, how marvellous to see you, it’s been absolutely ages.’

‘Lovely
to see you, Alethea,’ I said, only just managing not to burst out laughing in
her face. Although we had met a good dozen times over the years I had never
learnt to be altogether ready for the way she talked, which sounded to me like
a fellow trying to get you to hate and despise the upper classes by
ridiculously overdoing their accent. My mother-in-law looked quite startled at
the way I came rushing over to embrace her. Susan was out of the room.

‘And
how are things going in Fleet Street?’ asked Alethea. ‘Have you had any good
scoops lately?’

‘I’m
not on that side of it,’ I said, ‘but nobody gets much in the way of scoops
these days because —’

‘They’re
pulling down the whole of that lovely William IV terrace just round the corner
from where I am,’ Alethea told me. ‘You remember, on the north side of the
square?’

Her
mother answered, not that I had any objection. ‘Oh darling, they can’t,’ she
said, with a quick glance my way to check that I was not grinning with
satisfaction at this news.
‘Not
the one where Sickert lived?’

‘I’m
afraid they can, darling. I’ve a number of friends locally, as you know, and I
hear on the best authority that it’s all coming
down
and a block of
flats and a supermarket are going
up.
Damn-all chance of stopping it.’

‘People
like that will do
anything,’
said my mother-in-law.

‘Terrible,’
I said. ‘Terrible.’

‘Of
course you’re all right round here, aren’t you, Stanley?’ said my
sister-in-law. ‘All these rich socialists with their Georgian mansions, nobody’s
going to lay a finger on
them,
oh dear no, don’t make me laugh.’

Good
advice, that last bit, I thought, successfully remembering what it was like. ‘Yes,
they have been quite reasonable, actually,’ I said. ‘There’s a place in Flask
Walk called —’

‘They’re
stopping the season-ticket arrangement for those concerts of the Friends of the
Baroque,’ said Alethea to the old girl and me more or less jointly. ‘Something
I don’t really understand about the laws about charities. Apparently there is
or was some loophole that some little bureaucrat has cleverly managed to close.’

‘A
magnificent achievement. Obviously a man destined for the highest office.’

Lady D
had let me off that one, but I went and poured myself a Scotch anyway. While I
was doing it Susan came in and we had a quick exchange —all well, no news,
lunch in ten minutes. I took the sherry round. We had an item on the duty on
wine and another on the Royal Shakespeare Company. Then there was something
about the Saab wanting its boot repaired and I pricked up my ears, but before
we could be told about the latest slow-motion bump good old Alethea cut in. She
made sure there were only the four of us in the room and said into a minimal
pause,

‘I
rather gather … poor Steve … has been a little … under the weather
lately.’

‘He’s
better than he was,’ said Susan. ‘As I told you, they let him —’Is it …
some sort of breakdown?’

‘Evidently
they don’t use that word,’ I said, ‘but yes, that’s what it seems to boil down
to.’

‘Poor
you, how frightfully worrying for you both.’

‘Has he
been behaving violently again?’ asked Lady D.

Alethea
twisted round on her. ‘Behaving violently? How do you mean, darling? What sort
of thing?’ Now was the time I could have done with hearing about the terrace or
the tickets, but it was obviously too late for anything like that.

‘Well,
when I was here three weeks ago he flew into a rage about nothing in particular
that I could see, grabbed a book of Susan’s off the shelves and tore it to
pieces, and then rushed out of this house and round to his mother’s, where he
proceeded to smash the television set to fragments.’

I said,
‘A very distinguished psychiatrist —’

‘But
that’s nothing very terrible or extraordinary,’ said Alethea, really
disappointed.

‘I
quite agree, darling, exactly my own view of the thing,’ said Lady D, causing
me to blink slightly. ‘But then of course these days everything has to be …
Stanley,’ she went on, and lifted her head up in a confidential way, so as to
let the world know we were all on the same side, ‘is that boy really to be
regarded as ill, would you say?’

‘Well,
he’s not physically ill, lady,’ I said. ‘As regards mental illness I have to
leave it to the —’

‘Mental
illness?’ said Alethea. ‘What sort of thing?’

‘I don’t
think Stanley wants to go into any of that,’ said Susan.

‘Just
in the family, darling.’

‘No,
darling.’

‘What
does Steve do with himself here?’ My mother-in-law swung her glass out of the
path of the sherry bottle. ‘How does he get through the day?’

‘He
gets through the day at the hospital. As regards the evenings here he just sits
in front of the television. No trouble to anybody.’

‘And no
good to himself, it appears. I suppose he’d die rather than go for a walk. Does
he never help Susan in the house?’

‘Well,
there’s nothing really for him to do, darling,’ said Susan. ‘I have two people
coming in and I’m not going to put him on to papering the best bedroom just for
the hell of it.’

‘So he
never so much as washes up a teacup,’ said the old girl, sending her elder
daughter a glance of wonderfully covered-up horror and getting back one of the
same sort.

‘There’s
a machine for that, as you know.’ Susan was beginning to fidget.

‘Which
requires to be loaded, I believe.’

‘Darling,
Steve’s in a very strange state, he’s not just another idle teenager with a fit
of the mopes. He needs to feel sympathized with and that nobody’s trying to get
at him.’

‘And it
would be
getting at
him to induce him to perform some portion of his
share of household tasks. I see.’

‘Surely
there are simply dozens of things he could do in the garden,’ said Alethea.

‘Please,
both of you,’ said Susan, getting up. By now she
was quite agitated. ‘We’re going through a very nasty time in this house at the
moment and we don’t need lecturing on how to run it. Really we don’t. So could
we please drop the subject.’

‘I’m
sorry,’ said Lady D in one of the plenty of ways of saying that without doing
any apologizing. ‘I was only thinking of Steve and what a shame it would be if
he were actually encouraged in his… .’ She took a long time over that one. ‘Slackness,’
she said eventually. ‘But of course I quite realize that it’s much too late to
talk along such lines,’ she said with her voice beginning to die away, ‘and
that these rather unhappy strains in his character probably go back to his
early training and the unfortunate influence of his mother,’ she said with the
last word coming through strongly enough and a glance at me that left no real
doubt in my mind that the mother she was thinking of was rather bald and had a
little moustache and drove an Apfelsine.

‘Shall
we go down to lunch?’ said Susan. When the other two had finally cleared off
she said to me, ‘I don’t know what happened, darling, honestly. That’s about as
bad as I’ve known her. Alethea being there comes into it somehow, I’ve noticed
it before. But … part of it was to do with concern about Steve, I would
like you to believe that.’

Yeah, I
said to myself. And some more of it was to do with making out that what was
wrong with Steve was nothing more than a severe case of being lower class. Not
all of it, no.

When I got back from the
hospital with Steve the following evening I could see Susan had news for me. I
waited till he had settled in front of the TV with his usual coffee and slice
of bread and honey, then followed her up to our bedroom. What she had was
something to show me rather than tell me, a square-cornered length of metal or
heavy plastic about four inches by an inch by half an inch with a roughened
surface. It looked like the handle of something, which was what it actually
turned out to be when I pressed a stud at one end and a stout pointed blade
shot out of the other.