Stanley and the Women

by Kingsley Amis

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Along here.’

  I was parked a dozen yards off, near side to the pavement. She opened the door as wide as it would go, looked at Bert for about a second, took his glasses off his nose and handed them to me, laid out the cushions on the nearest bit of ground, which was damp but not watery, unrolled the roll of stuff, a length of carpet as I now saw, and placed it next to the cushions. Having done that she got in at the other side and, bracing her shoulder against the doorpost, shoved at Bert with her slippered feet until he fell off the seat and out of the car. Then she rolled him on to the bit of carpet and started dragging him along the pavement towards his front gate, a job made easier for her by the suitcase-handle let into the front edge of the strip. I locked the Apfelsine and collected up the cushions, one of which she took off me in the hall and put under his head before turning him on his side. She held out her hand to me for his glasses, which she stowed on a nearby oak chest beside pieces of outdoor clothing like gloves and a child’s mack. The last thing was a blanket from the top shelf of the coat-cupboard thrown over him. The whole operation had taken two minutes at the outside.

  ‘You must love him very much,’ I said.

  ‘Fuck off, darling.’ Nowell stared at me. ‘Do you know, I don’t think you’d better have that drink after all.’ She looked down at Bert and then at me again. ‘They say however many times you get married it’s always to basically the same person, don’t they? Watch out, Stan.’

  I drove home in exactly the style of a very very good driver who had had two small glasses of wine with his dinner and was taking no chances but of course not dawdling. And I was lucky. Well, it was still not half-past ten. Quite a few points needed chewing over, though not before the morning. One, probably not the most important, was whether Bert always or even sometimes got himself given the cushion-and-carpet treatment when he was only acting pissed. Another came from what Nowell had said. Had she only been talking about drink?

  3 Relapse

  Steve was worse when I saw him next. He talked, but not to me or to anybody else who was there. I could not make out half of what he said and the rest made no sense. His mouth was very dry, with the drugs presumably, and there was a crud or something of what looked like half-dried-up saliva sticking to his teeth. He obviously had no idea of where he was or what was going on, and the way he moved his eyes, which had dilated pupils, made me think he was seeing things that were not there. Still, he seemed calm.

  On the next couple of visits his hallucinations, if that was what they had been, seemed to have blown over, but nothing or very little was getting through to him. That was what I thought, anyway, and Susan agreed the day she went with me. So it came as quite a surprise when Trish Collings rang up that evening and said she was transferring him to the St Kevin’s day clinic, which meant he would be spending his nights at home, and would I please come and fetch him at 5.30 tomorrow. His condition had significantly improved, she said.

  I held down any desire to cheer, no longer knowing what I thought of Collings. ‘Since this morning?’ I asked.

  ‘The improvement has become obvious since this morning, but it’s been taking shape for some time now.’ As before, she sounded extra west-of-Winchester over the phone, bursting with cricket and cream teas. ‘Anyway, you’ll be able to judge for yourself very soon.

  When I got to her terrible office she started explaining about how it was up to me to arrange for Steve to be brought to and fro. I interrupted her.

  ‘Aren’t we going to wait for Mrs Hutchinson?’

  ‘I didn’t ask her to attend. This is between you and me, Stanley.’

  ‘Oh, so when it comes to getting something done I’m not such a disaster.’

  ‘Will you please try to contain your aggression towards your ex-wife at least while you’re here.’

  She spoke quite stroppily. I apologized, and she went on to caution me against assuming that Steve was now completely and permanently cured, and put it on record that she was not a magician. After that she talked about what a bad thing it would be if I or anybody else, but particularly I, showed any resentment towards him for any upset or inconvenience he might unintentionally cause. She also warned me against thinking that quite run-of-the-mill possible bits of behaviour on his part, like smashing crockery or staring into space for a couple of hours at a time, were really abnormal violence or withdrawal respectively. If anyone, me for instance, got it across to him that that view was being taken, then he would become more alienated.

  ‘May I ask a question, doctor?’

  This set her off on one of her merriest guffaws. When she was able to she said, ‘My, we are being formal today.’

  ‘Well, I thought so. Anyway, just, if he’s done so well in hospital, and there are likely to be these difficulties at home, wouldn’t the logical thing be to keep him here?’

  Her mouth slid sideways. ‘That’s a bad question if it means you’re thinking of the disruption likely to be caused in your routine and your wife’s.’

  ‘Of course I’m thinking of it,’ I said, glad that as I felt just then I was indoors and sitting down. ‘That’s natural. But in another sense I’m also thinking of my son. Parents often do think of their children in ways like that.’

  ‘I’ll accept that,’ she said, doing so with suspicious willingness. ‘Perhaps you have been taking a balanced view of the situation. Yes, in some circumstances continuing hospitalization would be the answer, but here we have to consider the long term. What we’re all trying to do, you’ll agree, is get Steve to be able to stand on his own two feet, and the first step towards doing that is to allow him out of the artificial hospital environment and into the community, as far as possible at the moment, when he’s ready to spend his evenings and nights with family, and I think he is ready for that.’

  ‘I see. Can we look forward to a steady improvement?’

  ‘Hopefully yes. But in these situations there’s always the possibility of relapse. That’s why I stressed the importance of responsible handling.’

  ‘I see,’ I said again. ‘One more thing if I may. I’ve got a wife at home and I’m no unarmed-combat expert myself. How likely is he to get violent?’

  ‘Now here again that sort of thing can’t be ruled out, but any purposeful violence is much mote to be associated with psychopathiform disorders. Steve may well appear threatening and alarming without engaging in any violent behaviour at all.’

  ‘Well, that’s something, I suppose.’

  She told me a bit more about what to expect, none of it markedly confidence-building, and at the end of it said in a voice that was quite gentle by her standards, ‘I expect you’re looking forward to having him home.’

  My God, I thought to myself, if anybody ever looked off their bleeding rocker then this was it, never mind what Nash and his lot might say. She was sitting hunched up at her table clutching a fag in her right hand, opening and closing her left hand, smiling unsteadily at me with the left side of her mouth and blinking her left eye. Her head jerked a couple of times. The nearest thing would have been out of an award-winning Mexican movie made in black and white on purpose and called Las something. If she bothered at all she probably read my expression as embarrassed paternal feeling. At any rate she got up after a minute, nodded at me and went noisily out of the room. When she came back she had Steve with her.

  ‘Hallo, dad,’ he said, and shook my hand. He was looking me in the eye and smiling. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Hallo, son, I’m fine.’

  ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Oh yes, absolutely.’

  I was very nearly sure that I would sooner have had him as I had last seen him than as he was now. He, his normal self, would never have shaken hands with me like that without a private signal that of course the whole thing was a joke, an act, an imitation, anyway not what it seemed to any idiots who might have been watching. And he had met me eye to eye right enough, but if he had not just called me Dad I would have sa
id without recognizing me, certainly without the least touch of the humorous warmth I had always had from him on meeting and whenever we were at all specially aware of each other for a second. Again I wondered whether I would have instantly recognized him out of context, and fancied the proportions of his face had altered in some small but unmissable way.

  ‘Isn’t it nice to seen him looking so well, Stanley?’ said Collings.

  ‘Yes, it certainly is. Well, Trish, if there’s nothing more for the moment we may as well be getting along.’

  ‘No no, you’re free to go,’ she said, and choked back another peal of merriment, unless I imagined it. ‘I’ll just walk you to the entrance.’

  It seemed a long hike to the hall of Rorschach House. The lengths of material underfoot, which on my last visit I had thought must be for something temporary, were still there, only more crumpled and stained than before. I was dying to be rid of Collings and at the same time dreading being alone with Steve. Her farewell when it came was fully up to standard for embarrassment, with a terrible roguish bit about it being au revoir not goodbye for him and her.

  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 Alethe
a 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.