‘Yes, he’s disturbed. He goes to a day clinic at a psychiatric hospital. They say he’s improving.’
‘I thought it was that pretty well straight away. At first I thought glue-sniffing or one of those, but then I thought no no. You get to recognize it. You know, if those fellows down the road were any good, they’d have got on to it and just turfed him out before he could start making a nuisance of himself. They’ll never learn, I’m afraid.’ He paused and hung out another sign. ‘That knife of his, now. You’d seen it before, hadn’t you?’
‘Yes, but I didn’t know he was taking it around with him. I or rather my wife had just come across it in his drawer.’
‘And you left it there? What a silly way to behave, even for someone who didn’t know that weapons of that sort are illegal. I mean as I say, I’m quite satisfied in my own mind that this afternoon that knife never left his pocket, but nobody with any gumption would bet on a thing like that in advance, surely to God.’
‘I see that now, but the hospital people were on at me not to let him feel —’
‘Misprize common sense at your peril is my motto. Well, it’s not my place to go on about this, especially when I’m drinking your excellent whisky. Which I must now very reluctantly tear myself away from.’ He got to his feet, drained his glass and gave me a look. ‘Bury that nail-file good and deep, eh?’
I followed him to the front door. He put on his uniform cap, making himself look quite grimly official, and seemed to be thinking something out. Finally he said,
‘You know, Mr Duke, from a personal point of view, speaking just for myself you understand, the Major Fuads of this world have got one thing to be said not for them at all, just about them. They do seem to have got the women problem sorted out nice and neat. Whether you like it or not. Well, here I go. Thank you for your hospitality. Say good night to Mrs Duke for me if you would. And good night to you, sir.
He hesitated for a moment, then turned away. While I strolled back upstairs to get my drink that last mention of Major Fuad got it across to me who he had reminded me of. I winced and groaned to myself and felt bad, all in vain — it was Nowell, no question, not just the tune being more important than the words and the no nonsense about forbearance towards a helpless victim, but also the sort of substitutional effect, saying A and meaning X, or rather talking about A but really talking about X, and not caring who knew it — especially that. At the same time I realized I had started to wonder whether I ought to ring her and tell her about the dust-up at the embassy. Not now, that was for sure — perhaps in the morning, from the office.
‘What a horrible bugger, that policeman,’ said Susan when I joined her in the kitchen.
‘Is he, was he? What was wrong with him?’
‘Oh, the ghastly bloody complacent way he could see through everyone and know exactly what happened out of his vast experience.’
She was being pretty definite about it, but I held on a bit longer. ‘Well, with a bloke like that, I should imagine experience would be quite a reliable guide.’
‘And the way he sneered at me for being your second wife. Fucking cheek. Who the hell cares what he thinks?’
I had been looking fairly closely at the Superintendent at that stage in the conversation, and I had seen nothing but a passing embarrassment. Still, it was probably not an interesting enough point to be worth a mention, so I made a semi-agreeing noise instead.
‘Incidentally,’ she said with a look that failed miserably to convince me that what she was going to say would be incidental, ‘it wasn’t such a good idea to let him have his knife back, was it?’
‘No, it wasn’t. Your friend the Superintendent said the same sort of thing. I just didn’t think of him going and doing a thing like that. Good job he didn’t actually do anything.’
‘According to that cop.’
‘Well, yes.’
She came over and put her cheek against mine. ‘Bit frightening, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah. And awful. Let’s have another drink.’
The next morning Steve was nowhere to be found. His bed had been slept in, in fact I had seen him sleeping in it when I looked in last thing. He had evidently made himself a cup of coffee. We reckoned or hoped he had gone out to buy cigarettes, though five to eight seemed a bit early for that, and there was rain about and he had not taken the mack I had lent him, but none of that counted for much. If buying cigarettes was all he was up to he would be back by 8.20 at the latest. 8.20 came and went. I could think of nothing to do but get on with shaving and dressing.
Half a dozen decent-sized trees stood in a line in the bit of garden at the side of the house, elms that had somehow escaped disease. As I shaved, the mirror in front of me reflected a view through the window of the upper parts of two of these elms. I was working my way round my moustache when I caught a movement in one of the two. As soon as I went over and looked I saw Steve standing on a branch next to the trunk about thirty feet from the ground. He was holding on to and also leaning on another branch in a position that was probably quite comfortable for the moment. I tapped on the window and after an eerie interval he turned his head and caught my eye. The light was poor but good enough to show me that he was very pale. I collected Susan and we rushed out and round.
It was not actually raining all that hard just then, but there was a lot more to come in the sky and a gusty wind was blowing. In just his shirt and jacket and trousers Steve was going to be wet through before very long and thoroughly chilled, unless he already was after however long he had been up there. Some rooks or crows were flying about near the tree-tops and cawing a good deal, perhaps because of him. He watched us approaching as though it was barely worth his while. When I asked him what he was doing he took no notice, in fact he looked away and seemed to stare into the next garden or the one further, where there might have been something interesting going on for all I knew. His hair clung to his head with the wet.
I decided it would be impossible to climb the tree to a height where I could hope to get through by talking to him face to face, and pointless to go up to any lower level. So I stayed where I was and said all the things you would say in the situation, or as many as I could think of, and no doubt some more than once. Susan went in and fetched the mack he had left behind, and then I did do a climb and managed to loop the thing over the branch he was standing on. He ignored it. A little after that he pulled himself forward and I thought for a moment he was coming down, but he was going up, up to the next tier, so to speak. I stepped back for a better view, remembering rather late in the day that he had been given to this sport as a young boy and had once, on holiday in Wales, climbed some horrible height like seventy feet to get to a bird’s nest, not to take the eggs, just look at them. Now I saw him find a fork and another bit that between them made a kind of seat where he had no need to hang on to anything.
‘He could be up there all day,’ I said. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘I don’t think there’s anything we can do.’ Susan had pushed her hair up and under a red mackintosh hat with a fairish brim. It made her look French or Italian, anyway not English and absolutely not like her mother. ‘I can’t imagine what would make him come down while he still wants to stay there.’
‘We can’t just leave him there to get wetter and wetter.’
‘It looks as if we’ll have to, darling. We’re not helping him by standing about here getting wet ourselves. I’m not being callous about it but he’ll come down in his own good time. When he’s had enough.’
‘Oh sure, but when’s that going to be? He’s mad, love. He’s probably got voices telling him to stay there for forty days and forty nights.’
‘Maybe, maybe not. Didn’t one of those doctors say something about attention-seeking? Anyway, it’s their job to sort it out.’
‘But surely to God …’
‘I think we ought to try leaving him to himself. Taking no notice.’
‘Hey, dad!’ called Steve, so unexpectedly that I jumped. ‘I couldn’t do anythin
g else. I didn’t want to come up here but I had to, where I can’t be looked into. I kept giving things away in the house, even when I was asleep.’ He was shivering and making hissing noises between the words. His voice came out odd but distinct in the damp air. ‘I didn’t mean to but I just couldn’t help it. I haven’t got to be awake to be tapped because the storage circuits are always active, but there’s got to be conduction too and that means metal or stone at ground level. I can always be looked into if there’s that and I don’t even know when it’s happening. The street’s nearly as bad even with the location tuning. But up here I’ve got all this insulation with vegetable matter and the gap’s too wide to jump at normal power. I just hope they don’t realize what’s keeping them out. With stepped-up power I wouldn’t even be safe up here.’
His cheeks were shiny with rain and probably tears as well and his mouth was turned down at the corners. I could not imagine a better example of a person full of fear and misery. I called to him, ‘Please come down, son, I beg you. Just for your dad. Please.’
He shook his head and turned away, his face crumpling.
‘I’m going to ring Nowell,’ I said to Susan.
She stared at me for a couple of seconds and then said in what I thought was a cheerful voice, ‘I hope you’re joking, Stanley.’
‘No I am not joking. I told you about the way she calmed him down when he got violent at her place that time, and talked him into going into hospital over the phone. Well, let’s see if she can work the trick again.’
‘Surely you know how I feel about her.’ No, there was nothing cheerful here.
‘I fancy I’ve a pretty fair idea, though you’ve never actually said. I understand all that, and in the ordinary way of course I wouldn’t dream of letting her get within a mile of you, but this isn’t an ordinary situation. Your feelings are very important to me, make no mistake, love, but just at the moment Steve’s feelings are more important. And his state. Now you must be able to understand that.’
‘Yes, I understand,’ she said, and turned round and went back into the house.
For a moment I felt a pang of a kind of fear I had not even thought about for nearly ten years. Then it was gone. I called to Steve that I would be back and left him there.
I got through to Nowell straight away. When I did I realized I had been half or a quarter hoping she would be unreachable. As soon as she understood what was required of her she started thick-and-thinning away like nobody’s business and after doing enough of it to last me, or herself, said she would come at once.
‘Great. Don’t —’ I said, and stopped.
‘Don’t what, darling?’
‘I was going to say don’t break your neck, then I remembered you don’t drive.’
She sounded a bit puzzled when she signed off, as well she might. I had been going to ask her not to queen it too hard over Susan, but then it had flashed on me that it was very much the wrong time for being foul to her.
Exactly as I put the phone down the doorbell rang, as if she had found a way of literally coming at once. But of course it was Mrs Shillibeer’s early morning. She was wearing a pale blue plastic mack with a hood and resembled an enormous child.
‘Hallo,’ she said in her geriatric-minder voice. ‘Horrible weather.’ She mouthed the words so that if I was too deaf to hear them I stood a fair chance of lip-reading them.
‘Oh, yes, it is,’ I said with a slight quaver.
‘Mrs Duke upstairs?’ she went on, actually pointing.
‘I shouldn’t be at all surprised.’
I could hear very little sting in the last one, but it was the best I could do at that moment, and probably just as well. I went out and told Steve his mother would be here soon and saw him nod. Then I went to the bathroom and finished shaving, and then to the bedroom to finish dressing. Susan was there. The whine of the vacuum-cleaner came from somewhere under our feet.
‘Has she arrived yet?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ll come and tell you when she has.’
‘I don’t want to set eyes on her.’
‘Oh, fair enough. I shan’t be bringing her up here.’
‘How long will she be around, do you think?’
‘Not long, I’d say. If nothing happens in the first few minutes then that’s it, probably. Anyway, she won’t want to hang about.’
‘I’ve got things to do in here, clearing out drawers and so on, so I shan’t be wasting my time.’
It was sporting of her to throw that in. All the same I would have settled for a smile or two. Not that she was cold or I had done any better myself. The two of us had been relaxed but not intimate, like people who had worked in the same office for years without ever having met outside it.
I was in the kitchen trying to eat a yoghurt when Mrs Shillibeer barged into the room. Her forehead looked amazingly huge compared with her chin.
‘There’s a man in one of the trees out there,’ she gabbled, no geriatrics now.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I know.’ My mind was a total blank. I had not stopped thinking about Steve or him being in the tree for more than five seconds at a time, but somehow it had never occurred to me that this female was going to have to have something said to her on the subject.
‘What’s he doing? Who is he?’
‘He’s my son.’ This slipped out a second before I got to ideas about branch-lopping, man from the Council and so on.
‘The one who’s staying here? The one you … What’s he doing up a tree?’
‘I suppose he just felt like it,’ I found I was saying. Perhaps I really had gone senile.
‘Felt like it?’ she asked indignantly. ‘In this weather? What’s the matter with him? On drugs, is he?’
Here was my out, but I was too thick to recognize it. ‘Nothing like that,’ I said with conviction, realizing as I said it that this was not even true in any literal way.
‘What is it then? People don’t go sitting in the middle of a tree in the pouring rain like that, not if they’re … normal. What is the matter with him?’
I coughed. ‘He’s … upset. Confused. Unhappy.’ Nobody hearing the words could have believed they were honestly spoken.
‘That hospital’s not just for anxiety and depression,’ she said, suddenly gone all calm and wide-eyed. Susan and I had worked out that that was the best story to cover any unforeseen puzzling or perhaps alarming bit that might have emerged. But it was no use this morning. Mrs Shillibeer had guessed the truth, near enough anyway. ‘He’s barmy. I’m not having that.’
She started to fling out of the room but then froze and, while I watched in fascination, retraced her steps to where I sat at the table, moving with ridiculous caution like somebody imitating a burglar. First looking over each shoulder in turn she bent forward in my direction and gave me a slow wink.
‘I’ll tell you this much,’ she said in a throaty undertone about as far as possible from her usual mode. ‘It’s a relief, that’s what it is. I’ve been dying to get away from this job almost since I first started here, that’s almost two years now, not that long after you moved in. The money’s good quite frankly and my husband would never have let me walk out of here just because I didn’t fancy coming. But now I’ve got a reason, see. He knows I’ve got this thing about loonies. So I’m off the hook at last. Whoopee.’
‘Why don’t you like working here? Not because of me, I hope?’
‘Ooh no, not you, Stanley, you’re a darling, you are. No, it’s that stuck-up cat you married. What did you want to go and do that for, a nice guy like you? Have you ever noticed the way she talks to me?’ Actually I had, but I kept quiet. ‘No reason why you should. Oh Mrs Shillibeer, would you very kindly, very sweetly chop up these shallots, not too fine, you know the way I like them, and tell me when you’ve done them.’ It was —of course — an unkind imitation but not quite an unrecognizable one. ‘Never once talks to me like a human being. It’s not much to ask. And that mother. And that sister. You want to watch the mother. That�
�s the way Susan’ll end up. Well, she’s most of the way there already, I reckon.’
Mrs Shillibeer seemed again ready to be off. I said, ‘Are you going up there now to tell her some of that?’
‘Christ no, what do you take me for? I’m much too scared of her. I’d sooner cross my husband. And that’s saying something. Good luck, Stanley love. I’m afraid you’re going to need it. Oh, and I hope your son gets better soon. They can do a lot these days, you know.’
She went out in the same sort of style as she had come in, getting into trim for the action. Instantly the doorbell rang. It was Nowell. Who else?
‘Darling Stanley.’ A warm hug came my way, one full notch below sexiness but no more and accompanied by the usual good smell. ‘Am I going to be asked in?’
‘Of course. I …’
‘Is he all right? Will he be all right for the next two minutes?’
‘Yes.’ I took her into the kitchen, which was all she seemed to want. Much against my expectation she showed no interest in her surroundings. ‘Would you like some coffee?’
‘No thanks,’ she said, not sitting down. ‘Stanley, I want to say this. I know you think I’ve behaved pretty badly over Steve and his troubles, not doing my fair share and all that. Of course you think so. And in a way you’re right. The thing is, I’ve got troubles of my own. Or rather Joanne has. You’ve seen her, so perhaps you’ve some idea of how difficult she can be. Difficult, that’s hardly the word. It’s a full-time job just keeping an eye on her. Not long ago I had to take her to Portugal for a week because she wanted some sunshine. It may be all my fault in the first place but there’s no point in arguing about that now. As you can imagine, I don’t get any help from Bert.’ The mention of this name had a knowing look packaged up with it. ‘There it is. She’s got me and Steve’s got you. Simple as that. I’ll lend you a hand when I can but mostly I can’t. There we are.’
Again, it was not the moment to query any of this or boggle at the idea of a human being who could make Nowell have to do things, so I was sweet to her instead. Before I had quite finished somebody came tearing down the stairs and went out by the front door. Nowell ignored this completely. I told her to hang on a moment and went up to the bedroom.
Stanley and the Women Page 22