‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’
Drinking his drink as I was I felt there was not a lot I could say to that, so I said No.
‘Er… do you keep a bottle of vodka in the bed at home?’
‘No,’ I said again, though it took a bit more out of me the second time round. ‘Why?’
‘I don’t know really. No offence. I used to keep a half of Scotch in mine sometimes.’
‘Sorry to be so dense, old chap, but I’m afraid I’ll have to get you to explain the joke.’
‘I think we might as well be getting along if you’re ready, Stan,’ said Cliff.
When Nowell realized we were off she slowly got to her feet and slowly helped Steve to his. He looked not so much tamed as washed out, emptied, or perhaps like a mental defective. She walked him to the door as though they were going into church, then turned and gazed at the two men who in their wisdom were about to take from her bosom the son she had not quite been trying her hardest to persuade to stay when she had the chance. After that she made a slight effort to prevent herself from hurling her arms round him but soon gave up the unequal struggle. It just so happened that her face was pointing towards Cliff and me at that stage, which meant I could easily spot the tears that were trickling out of her nearly closed eyes, and I thought he probably could too, but then he looked not greatly impressed.
Over her shoulder I saw Bert go back to being drunk — his neck seemed to turn to jelly. Of course, he had stopped making his special effort for Cliff.
‘I’ve got hold of a fellow,’ said Cliff when he rang the next morning. ‘Name of Nash, Alfred Nash. You might just conceivably have come across it. Well, anyway, he was something of a celebrity in his younger days. Not so much been heard of him since then, in fact he hasn’t got a regular job any more and was quite chuffed to be asked to do something. Everybody seems to think he’s a very good man — I wouldn’t know exactly. I’ve run into him I suppose half a dozen times in the way of business.’
‘An analyst, is he?’ I asked.
‘Of course he’s not a sodding analyst,’ said Cliff, quite cross until he remembered it was no use expecting me to know how bad that was or would be. ‘No, he’s a doctor and a psychiatrist, not a quack in other words. I’d say he was a bit… Well, you’ll be able to see for yourself very soon because I’m off to pick him up in a few minutes.’
‘Are you sure you’ll be all right, Stanley?’ asked Susan shortly afterwards. She was wearing a round woollen hat that gave her a trustful, childish look. ‘Say the word and I’ll hang on till they get here.’
‘No no, Sue, you go on in.’ Saturday was of course press day at the Chronicle and they were all undoubtedly expected to turn up, even though according to her half the reviews and stuff had been sitting in the office since Tuesday.
‘It would be quite ludicrous for me to try to tell you not to worry about this,’ she said. ‘But there is one part to do with it where you can feel absolutely safe and secure, and that’s anything involving me in any way. I’ll do whatever I can and whatever you want me to. I may not always know what that is and whenever you see I don’t you’re to tell me straight away without thinking. What I mean is, it doesn’t matter if it seems a lot to ask, or even too trivial to ask — you tell me and I’ll do it. Now have you got that, darling?’
‘Yeah. Thank you, love,’ I said, wishing I could find it natural to call her darling at times like the present, up-and-about times. ‘And thank you for what you’ve done already. See you this evening.’
She squeezed my hand — hers was in a woollen glove to go with the hat. I noticed the faint little dark hairs at the corners of her mouth. The previous evening after we had seen Steve safely tucked up, she had spent the best part of two hours pulling me out of a state where I was quite certain I could face nothing more personal and outgoing than watching television and getting drunk — out of that and into allowing myself to be made a great fuss of and finally into bed. I had called her darling then all right.
The street door slammed and immediately there was total silence in the house. When looked in on an hour before, Steve had been asleep or, almost as good, pretending he was. He was going to appear as soon as he felt like it, which would be soon enough to suit me. I felt very reluctant to be in his company — oh, I felt plenty of other things too, and disapproved of that one, but there seemed to be nothing I could do about it and for the moment it was neither here nor there. All the same I had some time to fill in, not much, but some. I could go over the closely argued letter I proposed to send to the editor of the journal of the Classic Car Club on a subject —exhausts — rather outside my usual area. I might work it up into an article —after all, Susan was not the only writer in the family. But when I dug it out and looked at it I found that even to take in what I had been saying was beyond me. So I settled for drinking a weak Scotch and water instead.
I had just decided I would not have another till they arrived when they arrived and put the idea out of my head for the moment. Nash turned out to be about sixty or a couple of years more, tall, pale, moustached, with a better head of hair than mine and a posher accent than the Queen’s. He was wearing what he probably called some well-worn tweeds and what was a rather dirty old polo-neck sweater in anyone’s language. Cliff took all of two seconds introducing us, I told Nash it was good of him to come over, he told me he was sorry to hear of Steve’s troubles, and we were off. My life was getting low on small-talk. For the time being at least there seemed to be no prospect of a drink — I felt shy of suggesting it and Cliff had given me nothing in the way of a lead. Well, it was still early.
I did some filling-in. Nash listened and wrote things down in a notebook, or rather on a new 25p memo-pad with lined leaves. He asked about Steve’s early circumstances and history and wrote down some of what I said about that too. Then he wanted to know if there had been any recent emotional upsets.
I hesitated. ‘He broke up with a girl — it could have been the day before yesterday or a bit longer ago. But … it’s not his style to go off the deep end about things like that, and anyway it never struck me as being a particularly serious affair.’
‘But it was an affair? Forgive me, but on the rare occasions when I peep into the world of the young I find it about as recognizable as, as medieval Patagonia.’
‘He keeps things pretty quiet but from the look of his girl, if she wasn’t sleeping with him she was going against a quite firmly established habit.’
Nash glanced up sharply from his pad, as if what I had said interested him in some way he had not expected. ‘I see,’ he said, paused and went briskly on. ‘Ever been mad yourself? Or gone to a psychiatrist or seen a doctor about your nerves? M’m, didn’t think you had really. What about your family, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents, any mad people there.’
‘Well, there’s my mother’s sister. She never stops talking.’
‘What about?’
‘Oh, what she’s been doing, where she’s been, in insane detail. You can’t —’
‘No no, merely in foolish and fatiguing detail. Perfectly normal behaviour in a what, an elderly female.’
‘But she —’
‘Is that the worst you can do, Mr Duke? No uncles who didn’t know what was going on, or cousins who sat in a chair all day without speaking or moving? No one they used to say was always rather a funny chap, always a bit … you know. Ordinary people are usually good judges of that, or they were until some lunatic went round telling them it was really the sane ones who were mad. Yes, funny, a bit odd, a bit peculiar, you never quite knew where you were with him, never really knew what he was thinking, you got on well enough together but you wouldn’t have been surprised if one day out of the blue he’d said that he’d always hated you. Shocked and hurt, all that, but not surprised. Nobody like that at all. Oh well. What about your wife, I mean of course your ex-wife, the boy’s mother, Mrs … Hutchinson. What about her?’
‘Well…’ I looked over at Cli
ff, who made an encouraging face, dilating his eyes. ‘Well, I think she is a bit mad.’
This wild understatement had Cliff blowing out his cheeks. ‘Why do you say that?’ asked Nash. ‘In what way? Mad in what way?’
‘She can’t seem to … You mentioned something just now about somebody who can’t make out what’s going on. I don’t think she can do that, not what’s really going on. I mean she knows your name and what day it is, but she sees it all differently. Nothing’s what it is, it’s always something else. Her sense of other people’s not good. They can be sweet to her, and they can be foul to her, and that’s about as much scope as they’ve got. If they can’t be fitted in as one or the other they don’t exist, no not quite, they’re like Mr Heath or David Bowie, no more than facts. Of course with her personality and everything she just goes on like that through her life. Even if everybody got together and dug their toes in and told her it wasn’t like that it still wouldn’t do any good. No use telling her to stow it or cheese it or come off it because she really believes it. That would just be everybody being foul to her at once. I’m sorry, Dr Nash, I’ve said enough.’
‘Indeed you have. But the first part was good. M’m. Would you say, would you assent to the proposition that all women are mad?’
Cliff did about ten tremendous nods involving the whole top half of his body with lips pressed tight together and eyes goggling. I said, ‘Yes. No, not all. There are exceptions, naturally.’
It was such a gift for Nash to say Naturally back that I had no idea how he avoided it, but he did, just pushed his mouth forward and went on staring at me in what seemed to be his way, not offensively, seeing either quite a lot or not much of anything, it was hard to tell.
‘Yes,’ he said after some of this. ‘We won’t pursue the point. I’ll be having a word with Mrs Hutchinson. Well. I must say this is a most convenient arrangement, acquiring copious information before so much as clapping eyes on the patient. On other occasions I’ve found it to be markedly different, you know. Now, Mr Duke, I suggest you go and ask your son to come and have a talk with me. Yes, I’m a doctor if he wants to know, and yes, I’m a psychiatrist. Of course I am.’
I put this proposition to Steve in various not too different forms as he lay in bed in what I thought had to be a mightily uncomfortable position looking towards the ceiling, though his eyes were probably not reaching that far. The room smelt rather, but not as badly as it might have done if he had been really grown-up. I opened a window. I also noticed a couple of new shirts still in their plastic covers and some sets of underclothes out of the chest of drawers — Susan’s doing. She had understood straight away that he had nothing to wear but what he stood up in.
After about ten minutes and nothing special about what I had just said or how I had said it Steve got quite actively out of bed. He was wearing grubby underpants and a sort of vest. With the same willing manner he put on his old shirt, his intensely crumpled trousers and a pair of multicoloured rubber shoes fit for an Olympic track event. I still didn’t believe it until I had gone downstairs and into the sitting room with him, introduced him to Nash and seen Nash stare at him in the way I had noticed, and hung on for a moment before Nash politely waved me out of the room.
Cliff had come out with me. On our way down to the kitchen he nodded to me again, not so dramatically as before but at least as expressively. I got us a gin and tonic each and we sat down at the table. The chairs there were supposed to be particularly good in some way, but to me they were straightforward all-wood jobs with slatted or splatted backs.
‘We’re doing well so far, obviously,’ said Cliff. ‘Him being so amenable. You should see some of them. But it’s not just handy for everyone else, it’s a good sign. I can’t believe he’s really ill. He’ll have been sniffing glue or chewing this, that and the other — you see. Anyway, what did you think of him? Freddie Nash.’
I said, ‘Well, he’s hardly my cup of tea, is he? That voice. And isn’t it rather a performance?’
‘Oh Stan, of course it’s a performance, among other things. Doctors are colossal actors, you know that well enough. Worse than actual actors, because they’ve got more power.
‘What were you going to say about him over the phone earlier? You said you thought he was a bit something but you didn’t say what. A bit what?’
‘Oh, a bit … Well, a bit rigid. Inflexible, kind of style. If that sounds as if he thinks he knows everything then I’ve got it wrong. Just, when he does know something then that’s it. And I’ve heard one or two of the younger people say there are areas he hasn’t kept up with. You’d expect that at his age. But they all agree he’s very good.’
‘Has he got a wife?’
‘Yes, lots. Four at least. He may still be on the fourth, or he may not, or he may be on the fifth by now, I don’t know, but it’s one of those. Why?’
‘Well, I naturally wondered, when he came out with that about all women being mad. Does he believe it himself, would you say?’
‘Oh, I see. Christ, after all those wives he can’t help but, poor old bugger. Only in a manner of speaking, you understand, in the sense you and I believe it — no, sorry, of course you don’t think they’re all mad, do you? Just most of them.’
Cliff laid great stress on it being me who made the exceptions, as an indicator or a reminder that he made none, especially not his own present wife, one of the few women I had met who could give Nowell a hard game. I remembered an evening not long after we first started to get chummy, which had not been all that long before Nowell had sheered off. Last thing that night, while she and I were getting ready for bed, she had launched into a long monologue which I had thought at first was an amazingly, almost frighteningly clear-headed analysis of her own character and conduct, put in the third person so as to be extra clinical and objective, and it had taken a sudden reference to Cliff being spineless to reveal to me that she had been on about Sandra Wainwright all the time. There was very little from my first marriage that had stayed so clear in my mind as those few minutes.
Cliff had gone quiet, probably thinking about Sandra. I said, ‘Yes, I didn’t actually imagine it was Dr Nash’s professional opinion that all females over the age of eighteen were suffering from recognized mental disorders. But then it’s not only an expression, not just a manner of speaking. There’s more to it than simply them being a pest. A lot of them. That’s what I was trying to say just now. The ones like that have got a distorted picture of reality. Not as distorted as thinking they’re Napoleon, but distorted. More distorted than a bloke who thinks the earth is flat, because you can have a decent discussion of football with him. Their thing covers everything.’
‘What? That’s right. Absolutely.’ He looked at his watch, finished his drink and stood up, so perhaps he had not been thinking about Sandra after all. ‘You’ll be okay now,’ he said. ‘He’ll take a bit of time yet. When he’s through he’ll tell you the score so far.’
‘What about his lunch?’
‘He’ll tell you that too. Don’t worry yourself on that account. Fellows like that don’t wait to be asked anything.’
‘Does he drink?’
‘No. You know, wine. He won’t mind you having a couple, but he might mind you falling down in front of him. Use your judgement.’
Cliff added that he felt sure things would turn out all right and that I was to ring him later, I thanked him and he left. I would have kept him if I had had an excuse. Today I might have welcomed even Mrs Shillibeer’s company, but she said her husband made her stay with him all the time at weekends.
There was some of her not-bad soup on the stove, enough for two at a pinch, and in the larder a board of cold meats, a jar of gherkins and some prepared celery and spring onions, and normally just my fancy — not today. I imagined I had anything up to an hour to get through before the next stage was reached. The only thing I could think of to use up some of the time was making myself another gin and tonic, and that used up less than a minute. On a normal Saturday
at past twelve-thirty I’d have been somewhere else, at the golf club, at the squash club, at friends’, always with people. So how was unaccompanied Duke to fill in? Read? Read what?
Suddenly Mandy came into my head, Mandy’s flat with perhaps a Swede in it, perhaps still in it but perhaps by now Mandy as well or instead. The next part was slower. Susan had mentioned the surname. Blackburn. Here was a chance of establishing that there was nothing gruesome or otherwise interesting in Steve’s recent past, and I suppose I also had some dim idea of getting a spot of help, though I could hardly have started to think what sort.
Finding the house phone-book certainly used up some time. When it turned out to be missing from its slot alongside the cook-books I searched the kitchen as usual before running it down in Susan’s study. No helpful crossed lines or wrong numbers turned up, though. Quite soon a young girl’s voice said Hallo with a great deal of alertness and amiability packed into two syllables, English too, very much not the reported Swede, and when I mentioned Mandy I was told she was speaking.
‘It’s Stanley Duke here, Mandy, Steve’s father. I’m afraid he hasn’t been too well. How was he when you saw him last?’ That should fetch anything worth fetching, I thought, and very likely much else.
The silence at the other end was so complete that I wondered if I had been cut off. After a moment I said, ‘Mandy?’ and she said simultaneously, ‘Who is that speaking, please?’
‘Stanley Duke. I’m —’
‘Sorry?’
‘Stanley … Duke. Father of Stephen … Duke. Steve. You know.’ Good God, I wanted to bawl, you were going round with him for four months at least, probably more like six, and it can only be three or four weeks since, etc.
‘Who did you want to speak to?’
‘To you, Mandy. You are Mandy Blackburn, aren’t you? Well then, you remember Steve, surely.’ More silence. ‘Tall, rather thin, fair, with a slightly crinkled nose,’ I struggled on, feeling a perfect idiot, but not knowing how else to go about it. ‘Leans forward when he walks … Likes Mahler … Always cleaning his fingernails.’
Stanley and the Women Page 6