Stanley and the Women

by Kingsley Amis

  No answer. I had no clear idea why, but I went straight on to do a bit of wondering, for the tenth time, about Harry’s sex life. He appeared to have none at all — his name had never been remotely linked with any man’s, woman’s or child’s, though he was seen around with plenty of people. He never went near the subject in conversation — so for instance when his long-ago alleged chumminess with Nowell arose, as it did from time to time, I was at least spared any hint that they might have had it away together, which comparatively few men in that situation would or could have kept themselves from suggesting. He gave nothing away in his clothes or mannerisms or speech. And so on. The consensus was that the bed he kept his distance from had a little boy in it. Of course, it still could have been a big boy, even though Harry must have been getting into his middle fifties by now. After all, you never knew, did you? Not with them.

  I forgot about Harry straight away when I got back to my office. No secretary. Morgan made a nothing-to-do-with-me face and at the same time I saw there was a woman standing by my desk. Her back was half turned and for a moment I thought it was Nowell. Then I realized I had been misled just by the hair, which had the right rough texture and shortish cut, though it was rather too dark, and by the vaguely foundry-style rig-out in slate-coloured denim, and it was true that Nowell had been fresh in my mind. I soon saw that this woman was hardly like her at all really, younger, longer in the leg, thinner, with a thin face and a nervous or restless manner. For the second time in a few days I guessed something was wrong without being able to say what.

  ‘Mr Duke?’ She had a deep, harsh voice with one or other regional accent.

  ‘Yes. What do you want?’

  ‘There’s no need to be unfriendly, surely.’

  ‘So you say.’ I felt somehow I had had enough laughs for one morning. ‘Now, please tell me who you are and what you want.’

  Morgan had been following this, and called, ‘She said she had an appointment, Stan. There was nothing in your book, but I couldn’t, er …’ He left it there. He was a very capable deputy advertising manager.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, and nodded to the woman to go on.

  She ducked her head and said with souped-up humility, ‘My name is Trish Collings, and I’m a friend of your son’s, and I was —’

  ‘What’s up? Is he all right?’

  She stared at me. ‘Well … that’s rather what I’ve come to ask you, Mr Duke. I thought you might have some news of him.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. Morgan’s phone rang and he answered it. ‘Now,’ I went on, ‘how did you make your way here, to this room?’

  ‘Does that matter?’

  ‘Certainly. You’re not supposed to be allowed up without personal permission. Standard procedure.’

  ‘That’s what I figured, so I got straight in the lift and asked around. It didn’t take me long. Anyway, how is Steve?’

  ‘How long have you known him?’

  Up to this point she had seemed not to be giving me her full attention. She had kept glancing at, or towards, the photographs and other cuttings that were pinned to the cork runner on the wall by the desk, most of them scattered with handwritten comments. They would have been very largely unintelligible or at best uninteresting to anyone outside a narrow local circle, and even I could have spared a few of them. Now she tore herself away from all that and faced me more squarely. ‘I don’t see that matters much either,’ she said, and I put her down as probably West of England.

  ‘What are you doing here? Why didn’t you ring me up?’

  ‘Look, Mr Duke, all I want to know is how Steve is. That’s not classified information, is it?’

  ‘Of course not. He’s … all right. A bit under the weather but nothing serious,’ I said without thinking. ‘Why? What have you heard about him?’

  ‘Oh, is there something to hear?’

  Across the room Morgan put his phone back. I went over to him and said, ‘Look, Taff, could you lose yourself for a few minutes?’ I was hazy about why I wanted him to do that — I had no theories to speak of about Trish Collings, if that was her name, except that she was not what she said she was, but even so embarrassment of some sort could safely be predicted. If in due course she came at me with a razor I could call for help from the dozens of people within hearing, run away, etc. Still no secretary, a temporary who was going the right way about making herself even more so than had been agreed in the first place.

  Morgan had done quite a good job for him on hiding his astonishment at my request. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Er … sure.’ By the way his eyes flickered I could tell he was starting to wonder too.

  ‘Have you tried him?’

  He cottoned on to that instantly — no trouble with anything like that. ‘Not reachable, but somewhere in the building, so we’re getting warm. I left a message.’

  ‘Great. Well …’

  The sudden quiet reminded him that he had undertaken to leave. ‘Er … see you later,’ he said, and went out at a near-run.

  I started on the female again. ‘Now. Who are you?’

  ‘Mr Duke, why all this fuss about a simple inquiry after somebody’s welfare? What’s the matter?’

  She spoke, as she had done from the start, in a reasonable tone, in fact with slightly overdone reasonableness. By now we had had quite enough time to finish looking each other over. The female was not all that much younger than Nowell after all, with good features except for that thin mouth, which had something wrong about its shape or perhaps the way she moved it in speaking. I thought there had been sexy bits in her expression part of the time, to show she might be interested in me and inquire whether I might be interested in her, but it was hard to be sure of that because she moved her mouth about even when she was keeping quiet, and also kept shifting her eyes to and fro. Her face was never still. That meant I had no chance of telling whether she was attractive either. What she was mostly looking at was a not very large man with a rather small moustache, probably with a suspicious, hostile look as well and certainly with the nearest he could manage to a deep-frozen eunuch’s one.

  ‘State and authenticate your identity in the next ten seconds,’ I said, quite enjoying this part, ‘or I’ll call Security and have you buzzed out.’

  ‘What are you so afraid of?’

  ‘Plenty of things, thanks, and one of them’s that you might be off your head whoever you are.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said as though she had won a bet with herself.

  ‘Ah? Two seconds.’ I moved towards the phone. ‘Sorry about the script.’

  ‘All right, you can call off the panic, I’ve got what I wanted,’ she said, still a good deal more mildly than the way I had gone on from the start. ‘My name is Trish Collings, and I’m helping to look after Steve at St Kevin’s.’

  ‘He is all right, is he?’

  ‘No cause for alarm.’

  ‘Nurse, are you? Or doctor or what?’

  ‘I am a doctor, yes. So —’

  ‘I thought a Dr Abercrombie was supposed to be in charge of his case.’

  ‘Dr Abercrombie suffered a small heart attack a few days ago. He’ll be off work for at least a month.’

  ‘So are you in charge of Steve?’

  ‘I don’t like that phrase, it has the wrong implications, but yes, I am a senior psychiatrist.’

  ‘Really. What identification have you?’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.’ She unzipped what looked like a man’s black imitation-leather sponge bag and turned through it.

  ‘I’d just like to be on the safe side if it’s all the same to you,’ I said, I had meant to sound indignant and rather grand, but it came out apologetic. As I spoke I realized I felt it too, and could not quite see why, except there we were and Dr Collings was a woman.

  After a moment she passed me a letter addressed to the person she claimed to be, even down to the Trish. It was from the librarian of the British Psychiatric Association, which somehow worsened things slightly for my side. By this time I was fighting ha
rd not to say I was sorry, also wondering whether my uneasy feelings at the sight of her were all accounted for now.

  ‘You didn’t give me much of a chance, did you?’ I said as I handed her back the letter. ‘What am I supposed to think when a strange female barges in …

  I had lost her — something in or about the letter had caught her attention. She peered short-sightedly at it while I remembered that the book it referred to had been called The Parenthood of Madness and started feeling uneasy again. Then, taking her time, she folded up the single sheet and pushed it back into her sponge bag. ‘Sorry?’ she said.

  ‘Nothing, I was just —’

  ‘I know, I shouldn’t have done it really, but it sometimes helps to catch people off their guard.’

  ‘I see, yeah. Has it helped this time?’

  At this piece of repartee she shook her head in a way I thought was more preoccupied than negative — I noticed that whichever it was none of her hair moved. At the same time she gave a smile of a sort, turned down at the corners, not very wonderful to look at, really, but with something awkward or shy about it that I could not object to. She sent me one or two of her short glances but said nothing.

  I said, ‘How’s Steve?’

  ‘Ah,’ she said again, but went on straight away, ‘He’s all right, he’s fine, he’s just got some problems which we’re beginning to get a sense of, we need to know more about him, his early history, all that, I hope you’ll be able to help us in those areas.’ Where had I heard that sing-song before? ‘Which means I’m going to have to ask you to give me some of your time.’ Time — toime — West of England it was, the very thing for Long John Silver, of course, but extraordinarily ageing for any young or youngish woman, almost as bad as a southern Irish brogue. ‘I thought the atmosphere here would be more relaxed than in hospital.’

  ‘Did you really? Far from ideal, I should have thought.’

  As I spoke a phone rang from what sounded inches away, closely followed by another, and a small young man and a bigger older man went by some yards apart with pieces of paper in their hands, shouting back and forth. Further off a voice yelled, calling, swearing, yawning.

  Dr Collings seemed to take my point. ‘Or would there be somewhere you’d feel more relaxed?’

  ‘There would, quite a few places.’ Places like one of the little rooms at the top of the Bar and Press Club would be private all right but for that very reason not relaxing, not for me, not with this female. ‘Er, but I doubt if you’d think they were suitable.’

  She frowned. ‘Oh? What sort of places are they?’ It was obviously nothing to do with the frown itself, but I suddenly realized that her breasts were a size or two bigger than the rest of her. Usually, in fact I dare say every time up to now, seeing a thing like that had me paying the woman concerned much more attention automatically, which in this case meant straight away and without thinking. But the breasts of Dr Collings had no such effect, merely adding up to one more out-of-place piece of her. Still, they were breasts.

  ‘What?’ I answered.

  ‘Where are you thinking of?’

  ‘I thought we might go to a pub,’ I found I had said. ‘If that’s all right.’

  ‘Sure, why wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘They’re usually pretty quiet for a while yet.’

  ‘Fine, fine.’

  ‘There’s quite a nice one, well, anyway, just the other side of Fleet Street called the Crown and Sceptre. Not a hundred yards away. Almost opposite.’

  ‘All right. Let’s go.’

  ‘Well… I was wondering if you’d mind going on and I’ll join you in a few minutes. There’s just a few things I’d like to get squared away here first, if it’s all tight with you.’

  ‘Can’t they wait?’

  ‘Well yes, in a sense of course they can, but, er, unless you’ve got a particular urgent bit for me I’d very much like to, er … After all, you did —’

  ‘Mr Duke,’ she said in her controlled way, ‘which is more important to you, your son or these matters you seem to be so interested in? Whatever they are.’

  One day quite soon a woman was going to say something very much like that to me, something hardly at all more noteworthy than that, and I would collapse and die without recovering consciousness. I put out a hand, not too fast, and gripped the edge of the desk. ‘My son, of course,’ I said, ‘when it comes to it. If it has come to it you’d better tell me now, hadn’t you?’

  I thought that was quite good, but before it was half over I lost her again. She walked out of the office at average speed without looking at me. I could think of nothing to do but assume I would find her in the designated pub in due course. Morgan reappeared so immediately that he must have been hanging about in sight of the doorway.

  After a quick glance over his shoulder he said, ‘Who was that?’

  It was undoubtedly a fair question, but for some reason I found it an impossible one to answer in any satisfactory way. ‘She’s … a friend of my son’s.’

  He waited till he was sure there was no mote to come before saying ‘Oh yes’ in a voice that dripped with disbelief and suspicion. The Welsh accent came in handy for that. There did seem to be rather a lot of accents around that morning, but then I hardly ever came across anybody without one, apart from me, of course.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and gave him a dozen or more boring things to do and make other people do. When I had finished I rang the Thurifer agency again and got the fellow I was after. His story was that not he but someone at Thurifer had gone off his head and I was to stop worrying. So I stopped worrying and rang Cliff Wainwright, who answered at once and in person and sounding quite angry. He calmed down somewhat when he discovered who it was, but went back to being fed up when I asked him about Trish Collings.

  ‘A bit off, you know, this, Stanley, quite frankly. Surely you realize it’s most improper for me to go sounding off about all and bloody sundry. And I don’t possess a card-index system on the whole of the medical profession and areas adjacent as you appear to think. However, by some freak of chance it does so happen I’ve heard of the bag. Well above average was what was said. Thoroughly in touch, very good with the patients. That can be dodgy, of course. Well, what patients like isn’t necessarily good for them. They’re keen on not being cut open. For instance. Anyway, there she is.’

  ‘Do you have any other children?’ asked Collings.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Surely Steve must have told you that, if you’ve talked to him at all, as you say you have.’

  ‘Not even by your second wife?’

  ‘No, not even by her. Why?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Eh? Oh, er … Nowell said she couldn’t face going through all that again.’

  ‘That’s not what she said to me. Yes, I spent nearly an hour with her before coming along to see you. She was very helpful.’

  ‘Really? In my experience nothing’s what Nowell says to anybody, whether it’s you or me or the postman. I mean whatever she said’s got nothing to do with what happened. Ever.’

  ‘How long is it since she left you?’

  ‘Eight years. Nearly nine. I’m not bitter, it’s just I know her. At least I am, bitter, to some extent, I can’t ever see myself not being, but it’s much more I know her, that I say things like that about her. It’s true anyway. She can’t… You’ll see what I mean when you’ve seen a bit more of her. Well, you might, I suppose.’

  ‘In fact she did face going through it again.’

  ‘That’s right. She wouldn’t have not done it just because she’d told me she couldn’t or wouldn’t. If you remind her that she’s said something it doesn’t suit her down to the ground at that moment to have said, she says she didn’t say it, even if you’re fool enough to produce a boatload of other people who heard her say it. Simplifies life no end. She makes the past up as she goes along. You know, like communists. Why are we talking about this, anyway?’

  ‘You still haven’t told me why there are no children of
your second marriage.’

  ‘No, I haven’t, have I? I can’t think what it can have to do with anything, but you’re the doctor. So. Susan was nearly thirty-six when she married me and that’s oldish to start having children, I should have thought. She hadn’t had any by her previous husband, and presumably she wanted to go on not having any — well, that was what I presumed. She said she reckoned she wasn’t cut out for motherhood, which I took as a sign that she probably wasn’t.’

  ‘Was that all she ever said on the matter?’

  ‘Just about. I didn’t try to get any more out of her. It sounded quite reasonable to me. After all, it’s not as if she was the Queen.’

  ‘Did you try to get her to change her mind?’

  ‘Certainly nor.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Well, I had no particular, special desire for any more kids. Lots of men would have felt the same, perhaps most of them. No child of Susan’s and mine could have been any kind of company for Steve. And I didn’t think it was my place to talk her into a thing like that. The woman should decide, and Susan was absolutely definite about it.’

  ‘Is that your usual line, would you say, leaving the basic decisions to your female partner?’

  ‘No, I said in a thing like that, that concerns her more than me.

  ‘You mean you think the role of the mother is much more important in the raising of children than that of the father.’