Stanley and the Women, Page 3

  My mother-in-law managed to stop watching my operations at the drinks tray. ‘Filthy traffic,’ she said as one committed road-user to another.

  ‘Wicked. Of course there’s the weekend coming up.’

  She turned on me indignantly. ‘But it’s barely Friday afternoon.’

  ‘I know, but you know how it is.’

  ‘I wonder some of them bother to go in to work at all. Well, a great many don’t, as we see. They’re unemployed.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ I raised my glass. ‘Cheers, lady.’

  Mum was what I had called my first mother-in-law but this one had other ideas. I thought they were on the wrong lines. Lady Daly had to be a dodgy thing to be called in the first place and the nickname or whatever it was reminded you of that dodginess. Also I very much doubted whether she had ever done what I once had out of curiosity and looked up the word in The Concise Oxford Dictionary. Apparently to use it in the vocative and the singular, which was what I had just been up to, could only be either poetical or vulgar, nothing in between. I thought that was very interesting.

  ‘I gather you have Steve staying with you,’ she said after a pause, quite chuffed at getting over all the various difficulties raised by bringing out this name.

  So nothing really awful had happened in between. ‘Yes, he dropped in to stay for a couple of days. So it seems. Just turned up on the doorstep. As they do at that age.

  ‘Such a nice boy. Still working at his writing, is he?’

  ‘Yes, I think so, yes. Plugging away.’ It would hardly have been fair to say that Steve had ever plugged away at anything. What kept him going usually was pound-note jobs with gardeners and handymen and dribs and drabs from me.

  ‘Tell me, Stanley, it’s dreadfully stupid of me, but I seem never to have taken in just what it is that he writes. Is it verse or prose? Essays? Plays, perhaps?’

  ‘No, it’s not plays.’

  ‘How would you describe it?’

  ‘Well…’

  I tried to remember anything at all about the few badly typed pages that, in response to many requests and with a touching mixture of defiance and shyness, Steve had planked down next to me on the couch one Sunday afternoon the previous winter. But it was the same now as then, really. I had not been able to come up with a single word, not just of appreciation, but even referring to one thing or another about the material. But surely I had managed to tell whether it was in verse or prose? Hopeless.

  ‘Of course, he hasn’t shown me a great deal of it.’ I looked across and met the old girl’s eye and wished she could find a way of coming a little less far to meet me — sometimes you would give anything for a spot of boredom. ‘I don’t know about you but I’m a complete wash-out when I come up against any of this modern stuff.’

  ‘Oh, I do absolutely agree. But what would you have —Susan came in then. ‘Sorry,’ she said in a half-whisper. I was relieved to see her, as I often was, and it was easy enough to see that her mother felt something similar, say like after spending an unpredictable length of time with a small half-tamed wild animal. When Susan kissed me she gave the top part of my arm the special little squeeze that meant she was thanking me or apologizing or hoping to cheer me up. I imagined she was doing a minor bit of all three that time. She took the dry sherry I poured for her and went and stood with her mother near the china-cupboard. Seen as a pair like this they could look more alike than I cared for, and today was one of the days, with them both wearing darkish skirts and lighter-coloured tops. Lady D would have been in her middle or late sixties but she had kept her figure, and one way or another her hair was almost as dark as Susan’s. But then again her eyes were much lighter and she looked less clever, more nervous and not humorous at all.

  I drank some of my Scotch and said, ‘Any sign of the young master?’

  ‘Oh,’ said Susan, ‘he —’

  She stopped suddenly because the door was thrown open, also suddenly, so that it banged into one of her embroidered stools, though not very hard. Even so, the effect was quite noticeable, especially when nobody came in or could be seen from inside the room. The three of us stood still and said nothing, not in the least like people wondering what the hell was going on. Then Steve strolled round the corner, very casual, I thought, preoccupied but normal enough, scruffy enough too, having probably spent the night in his clothes.

  ‘Hallo, dad,’ he said quietly. ‘Hallo Susan. Hallo … lady.’

  ‘Good morning, Steve,’ said my mother-in-law rather like a fellow playing in Shakespeare.

  ‘Er…’ he said, and stopped. I could hear him breathing deeply through his mouth. ‘Can I borrow a book?’

  ‘Help yourself, my dear,’ said Susan, spreading a hand. ‘Fiction there … poetry there … politics, psychology, what you will … Art and so on down there.’

  Steve, who had not followed this closely, turned his head towards the bookshelves. The other three of us moved into the window-bow so as not to seem to be watching him looking. We talked about something like the Labour Party or what we might do for Christmas. After a minute or two he moved away from the books and apparently started examining a painting on the end wall. It was mostly blue, but some parts of it were white. As far as I knew he had never taken any particular interest in pictures and this one had hung there all through his dozens of visits to the house. He went on examining it. Susan had no idea — if she had been playing the adverb game ‘normally’ would have been the one she was doing. Her mother handled it differently, putting all her effort into not running for her life. I sympathized with her at the same time as wondering what exactly it was we three had to be so on edge about. Before I had solved it there was a tearing sound and I saw that Steve was in fact tearing the cover off a book. I shouted out to him. Having got rid of the cover he tried to tear the pages across but they were too tough and he put the remains of the book down on a cushion on the back of a chair. By the time I went over there he had gone. The book was Herzog, by Saul Bellow.

  ‘I’m sorry, love,’ I said to Susan. ‘I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing. He must be off his head. I’ll get you another.’

  ‘It’s all right, darling,’ she said, ‘I’d finished with it, it was just hanging about on the shelves. Lunch in ten minutes,’ she called after me on my way to the door, sounding as normal as anybody could have managed.

  With my mind on the water-drinking event I checked the kitchen, then briefly the upstairs in general before catching up with my son in the small bathroom, or rather lavatory with washbasin, next to his bedroom. As before, there was plenty of water about — on the mirror behind the basin, into which he was staring, on his face and hair and clothes and on the floor. He had evidently not touched the clean towel on the metal rack beside him.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I said, trying to sound angry instead of worried. ‘What do you mean by tearing up a book like that?’

  He just stood there with his hands by his sides and said nothing.

  ‘These things cost money, you know.’

  ‘I’ll pay for it,’ he said wearily.

  ‘Like hell you will.’ Now I was really angry. He was always offering to pay for other people’s things he had used up or broken or lost, going on every time as though it was very sweet of him to be so patient with all these small-minded idiots, and then somehow not having the cash on him until I forked out. ‘Anyhow it’s a waste, and it might have been a special copy, and it might not be able to be replaced, and what did you want to go and do it for in the first place? Are you crazy or something?’

  By way of reply he turned on the cold tap and started to slosh handfuls of water on to his face in a tremendous, ridiculous hurry, throwing more of it down his shirt and trousers and round his feet. He did this in complete silence.

  I waited till I had stopped feeling angry and said, ‘Have you been to see your mother?’ I tried to make it sound interesting, as though his mother had been a film.

  At once he dramatically turned off the water and sna
tched up the towel, and started drying himself, but you could soon tell he had nothing to say this time either.

  ‘If something’s upsetting you I wish you’d tell me about it,’ I said. ‘Or if I’ve done anything you don’t like. I know it sounds dull but I want to help you.’

  It sounded dull all right. Perhaps that was what Steve was trying to get across by the way he finished drying his face and neck, peered into the mirror, turning his head to and fro to catch the light, and then started drying his face and neck again. Or perhaps he had really not heard. I tried to think how to go on. At no particular point he said suddenly and in a trembling voice, but just the same like someone continuing a conversation,

  ‘I was hot, that’s all. Haven’t you ever been hot? What’s so peculiar about trying to get cool? All got to be the same, have we? All like you. Anybody who isn’t is mad, according to you. Why don’t you come out and say it?’ He was still looking in the mirror, though not catching my eye in it. ‘You want to get bloody Dr Wainwright over and certify me, don’t you? Go on, admit it.’

  He turned round and stood in front of me, stood about, in fact, not showing the least interest in what I might say back to him. But I began telling him he was wrong and of course I had never even thought of getting him certified, and I would have gone on to appeal to him to forget the whole thing and come and have some lunch, only he pushed past me not all that rudely and went off to his room, still holding the towel. The door slammed.

  Susan was waiting for me just inside our bedroom. I shut the door behind us and we hugged each other, with her giving a little half-joky shiver. I told her about the water and the accusation and she listened attentively, arms crossed and lips pressing together. When I had finished she said, ‘I waited till he was in the bath and I sneaked into his room and looked in his coat and the chest of drawers and places, everywhere. No passport, no traveller’s-cheque stuff, no ticket stubs, nothing. So …’ She jerked her shoulders.

  ‘So he hadn’t come from Spain, or not straight from there. No knowing where he was or how long he’s been, well, whatever he is now.

  ‘Before he had his bath he didn’t appear at all so I went up to see how he was getting on, and he was just lying in bed, not asleep, just lying there. Then about half an hour ago I was nearly blasted off my chair in the study by Mahler on the record-player. Not just loud, you know, but absurdly loud. Grotesquely loud. And then of course when I asked him to turn it down he turned it off.’ She shook her head a few times.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It must be his sex life. At least it’s all I can think of.’

  ‘Oh, I brilliantly rang her flat, having brilliantly but I forget why put its number in my book, but somebody I thought sounded Swedish said no, Miss Blackburn was not there.’

  ‘Didn’t they say anything else?’ Asking that question was rather dishonest of me, because actually I only wanted to hear some more of what Susan must have thought was a Swedish accent. It reminded me strongly of the Italian accent she had put on the previous evening to tell a story about Toscanini.

  ‘No, in fact I never made out whether Mandy wasn’t there just then or on a permanent basis.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I think all we can do is leave him to himself until he snaps out of it. Sorry about that book, by the way. I couldn’t get him to say why he’d done it.’

  ‘Never mind. But actually I would rather like another copy if possible.’

  ‘No problem, I’ll send one of the girls out for it this afternoon. You go on down now and I’ll give it a couple of minutes.’

  When I went into the kitchen Lady D swung round on me with an expression that showed clear as a bell that she expected a full report on the case of the buggered-up book. I had used most of that couple of minutes to pour and swallow a stiff Scotch. I wished now I had brought another one with me, that or a brass knuckleduster. Hoping her idea might go away if I said nothing, I took my place at the table opposite Susan, who rolled her eyes slightly.

  Fat chance. ‘And what did Steve have to say about destroying that book?’ asked her mother, getting a totally different effect this time from leaning on poor old Steve’s name.

  ‘Well, he made it pretty clear that something had just come over him, he couldn’t say what. But he was obviously very embarrassed about the whole thing and wished it hadn’t happened.’ True in parts, I thought.

  Lady D gave a kind of one-syllable laugh that in the standard way left it open whether she was coming clean about not believing a word or thought she was keeping it to herself. Mrs Shillibeer helped things along by standing at the cooker doing a marvellous imitation of somebody not listening to what somebody else was saying because of being so completely wrapped up in heating and stirring a saucepan of soup. Susan said,

  ‘Stanley thinks he’s had an upset in his love life and I must say I’m inclined to agree.’

  ‘And that licenses him to rend apart other people’s books?’

  I frowned. ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. No, I … wouldn’t say that. In fact I can’t agree at all. Explains it, perhaps.’

  ‘Let’s just hope he’ll sort of unwind,’ said Susan.

  ‘After shedding the gigantic burden of responsibility he habitually carries about on his poor shoulders,’ said Lady D with tremendous faces and head-movements as she spoke. Previous to that she had sent me the latest of a series of looks which the chances were she thought I never saw or possibly failed to understand, burning looks, looks that showed she was wondering what sort of bloke it could be that had a son who did diabolical things like tearing covers off books. I stopped trying to think what to say when I noticed that Mrs Shillibeer had pointed her face at me, opened her mouth and started blinking non-stop to show she had a message for me.

  ‘Oh, Mr Duke,’ she said, or rather called.

  Instead of screaming I said, ‘Yes, Mrs Shillibeer?’

  ‘Oh, Mr Duke, would you like me to take Steve up something on a tray?’ Her voice climbed the better part of an octave on the last word.

  I looked at Susan. ‘I don’t think so, thanks. Best to leave him. He’ll come down and get himself something if he feels like it.’

  ‘Of that there is no room whatsoever for doubt,’ said the old girl.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t agree more, lady,’ I said.

  Mrs Shillibeer doled out the soup and the three of us had lunch. While we were having it I thought to myself that someone else, someone apart from Steve, was behaving unusually, and that was my mother-in-law. It had been clear to me for some time that she reckoned Susan had not taken much of a step up in the world by becoming one of the Dukes, but up to just now she, Lady D, had managed to keep that sort of feeling more or less to herself. But then of course there had not been anything much in the way of reason or excuse or provocation before.

  ‘Are you going in this afternoon?’ I asked Susan at one stage, meaning to work.

  ‘I wasn’t, why?’

  ‘Well, good, I’ve got to and I just thought there ought to be someone here.’

  ‘But that’ll leave Susan alone in the house,’ said her mother in amazement. She had a chain on the ends of her glasses and round her neck so that in between times they sat on her chest and when she was wearing them, like now, the chain hung down in a loop behind and waggled about in a quaint way every time she moved her head, and she had never thought of that.

  ‘Except for Steve, yes,’ I said.

  ‘It’s all right, mummy,’ said Susan.

  We never found out what her mother thought of the idea in so many words because just then there was the noise of an assault platoon coming down the stairs and a few seconds later the crash of the street door.

  ‘Would that be Steve?’ asked Lady D, doing another variation by putting on no emphasis at all.

  ‘I think it must be,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps when he comes back he’ll be in a more gracious mood.’

  Soon afterwards I went out and picked up a taxi on its way back from dropping somebody at one of the Jewboys’
houses in the Bishop’s Avenue.

  The phone on my desk rang and a man’s voice grunted once or twice and said, ‘Is that, er, is … is, er …

  If whoever it was had really forgotten my name he would have had to do it very recently, since asking the switchboard for me. Another day I might have played him along. ‘Stanley Duke here,’ I said.

  ‘Ah. Duke … you’re a shit. A shit. Ha. Don’t ring off, don’t ring off, somebody here who wants a word with you, you …’

  The words died away in mutterings. Those few seconds had been enough to remind me first of a big fat body, a round dark-red face, a scrubby beard and glasses, and then of a name, Bert Hutchinson, and immediately after that I guessed some of what had happened and felt scared. I was glad I was alone in the office just then.

  ‘Stanley,’ said a faint, suffering voice.

  ‘Yes, Nowell. What’s the —’

  ‘Stanley, it’s Nowell. Could you possibly come round? I can’t deal with him at all. I don’t know what’s the matter with him, I think he must be mad.’

  ‘What’s he been —’

  ‘Stanley, you’ve simply got to come round, I can’t stand it, it’s absolutely terrifying. He’s been saying the most horrible things to me.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. That in itself was no atrocity from my point of view. ‘What’s he doing at the moment?’

  ‘He’s upstairs,’ my ex-wife admitted. ‘But he’s in the most awful state. You must come, Stanley. You don’t know what it’s like, honestly.’

  There was a vague kind of bawling in the background during the last part of this, which I thought was probably Bert suggesting some other remarks she could make. I asked her what she expected me to do and generally made difficulties, but I knew I had to go. For one thing, there was nothing to stop me. I checked that they were still where they had been, not in Shepherd’s Bush any more but nearer the centre and perhaps classier in Maida Vale. Then I hung up and to show my independence or something rang the High Commission of one of the South-East Asian countries and failed to raise the Commercial Attaché, which was nothing out of the way. Finally I got moving — in the Apfelsine, naturally.