Still, nothing lasts for ever, and by now most of the problems were just about solved. He’d accomplished the move to Helen’s, had handled the terminal quarrels with his wife, and the rest was safely in the hands of the solicitors. There was nothing more to do. And so now here he was, his marriage at an end, his Sabbatical in the bag, and ahead of him month after month of undisturbed tranquillity: long peaceful days of uninterrupted work in Helen’s charming sitting-room, which had more or less become his study—followed by blissful evenings in her company, playing records, love-making, or working together on his thesis. The circumstances couldn’t be more ideal, or more conducive to inspired and creative work.
*
And so what was going wrong? What was getting in the way now?
Because something was. Each morning, as soon as Helen was gone and he had the flat to himself, he would start the day by making this therapeutic cup of strong black coffee; and then he would sit, slowly sipping it, waiting, with decreasing hope, for some tiny spark of enthusiasm to penetrate his leaden mind and set him going again.
Sometimes, when there was a bit of Helen’s typing still to check over, it wasn’t so bad. It gave him an excuse, of a sort, for once more postponing the moment of creation. Greedily, he went over it line by line, taking a horrid pleasure in anything she’d done the least bit wrong. Altering her work, even if only by a comma, gave him the feeling that he was doing something.
This morning, thank goodness, was one of these not-so-bad mornings. There’d been the Ledbetter interview for her to finish, and also some tables about the incidence of depression in different age-groups. These she’d been copying for him out of a massive tome which ought to have been returned to the library days ago: and with a small lift of the spirit—because here was yet another little job which demanded of him no spark of creativity; in fact quite the reverse, because creativity in copying out statistics can lead to the worst kind of trouble—he set himself to check the accuracy of her copy.
Nothing wrong at all. Everything checked out exactly, in every detail, and Martin felt a guilty twinge of disappointment. He could feel his mind, temporarily alerted by the possibility of spotting an error committed by someone else, growing dull once more.
Half past ten. Time for his next cup of coffee. By the time he’d drunk this, looked out of the window at the streaks of February rain, and tapped the barometer to reassure himself that it was going to continue, and give him an excuse for staying indoors all day—by this time, it was after eleven. Soon, it would be before twelve instead; and shortly after that, lunch-time would be in sight, and the worst would be over. In the afternoons, for some reason, he usually felt better—so much better, sometimes, that he would even force himself out for a short walk to clear his head. Occasionally, it actually worked, and his head was cleared. When this happened, he would find himself stepping out quite briskly on the homeward journey, and with any luck would be sitting at his desk and actually getting something written before the brief spurt of energy began to die. It was a sort of race against time: to walk just far enough to get the mental vigour flowing, but not so far that it was all gone again by the time he reached home.
It was a hit-and-miss business at best; and more and more these days he found himself reluctant to expose himself to these dreary perambulations with so uncertain a prospect of reward. It wasn’t even as if there was anywhere pleasant to walk. Helen’s flat, pretty and elegant enough inside, was nevertheless situated in a peculiarly dreary neighbourhood of tall converted houses and ill-kept front-gardens. There was no park or recreation-ground for miles: from this point of view he’d been much better off at home—at 16, Hadley Gardens, that is to say—and so now, when Martin took himself out at all it was as a prisoner in the exercise-yard, grim and joyless, the sole purpose being to prevent himself sinking into irreversible apathy, physical and mental.
*
While he ate his lunch—a double-decker cheese and bacon sandwich—Martin kept a close watch on the square of grey slanting rain framed by the window, fearful lest it should begin to lighten, or the cosy patter of raindrops ease against the glass. Provided it kept on like this, as the barometer had promised it would, then there would be no question of the bloody walk. He might have a little sleep instead, and really get down to work after tea. Yes, that would be the best plan. After tea was always a good time, with Helen home, pottering companionably in the kitchen and tiptoeing in every now and then to see if he wanted anything.
A little flurry of rain against the window sounded like a tiny burst of applause: his decision seemed to be meeting approval even from the elements. Settling himself on the sofa, with his feet up, he closed his eyes.
And then the telephone rang.
CHAPTER IV
HE TOOK FOR granted it would be Helen. This was her hour—the school dinner-hour—for ringing him up to say she’d be home late. It was very unsettling, and it seemed to happen constantly: some wretched teacher being away with flu, or having to go to the dentist, the osteopath, the oculist—it sounded more like a nursing-home than a school, Martin would sometimes comment sourly. Or maybe the driver of the coach to and from the playing-fields hadn’t turned up; or the headmistress was entertaining an important visitor; whatever it was, however unconnected with her actual duties, it always somehow seemed to involve Helen; to involve her, furthermore, in some task so inane that it was impossible to conceive why they wanted it done at all, let alone why they needed a First Class history graduate to accomplish it. Waiting behind for some child’s father to turn up and take her to ballet class: sitting with someone else’s form while they did their French homework: attending an emergency staff meeting to decide what to do about girls who came to school in slit skirts. Such trivia! Such drivelling, pettifogging nonsense! Sometimes Martin was furious on Helen’s behalf, that they should so exploit her and misuse her talents; and sometimes, more disturbingly, he was ashamed of her for allowing it.
Anyway, what with one thing and another, Martin was relieved rather than disappointed when the voice down the phone turned out not to be Helen’s at all. It was a male voice, vaguely familiar, and though he couldn’t at first place it, he recognised immediately that it was the voice of somebody annoying. Somebody who had annoyed him before, who would continue annoying him in the future, and was certainly about to annoy him now.
“Lockwood here. Who’s speaking?” he snapped, his voice already sharp with anticipatory irritation.
“Oh. Yes. It’s me,” came the idiotic reply; and immediately Martin recalled the idiotic face that belonged with it: round, cherubic, and adorned with a cheery, optimistic smile almost impossible to wipe off.
Walter. That’s who it was. Walter Cummings, the pink, grotesquely contented Psychology student who’d been allotted to Martin as Research Assistant for this project of his. “Just to assist with the donkey-work,” Martin’s supervisor had told him, a little apologetically, “I’m afraid he’s not really qualified yet to work on his own initiative.”
Or to work at all, if it came to that. The donkey would in many ways have been preferable. Donkeys at least can’t ring up in the middle of one’s afternoon siesta to bray at length about their reasons for not doing whatever it is they are supposed to be doing.
“So you’ve decided to let me down over the Timberley interview,” Martin barked, before Walter had managed to get any further than, “You see, the thing is, Mr Lockwood …” “That’s what it is, isn’t it? Don’t waste time explaining, let me guess. You’re ratting-out again, as always. Because of the weather, no doubt,” he added witheringly. “You’re planning to upset our whole schedule because you don’t like going out in the rain! You’re scared of getting wet! You make me sick, you students, you’re so feeble you don’t know you’re born …!”
Not in the least offended, Walter laughed the tolerant little laugh that he kept for his fuddy-duddy elders when they seemed to be getting themselves worked-up. If Martin could have smashed his idiot face in, here and now, by p
utting his fist through the phone, he would have done so.
“Oh, no, Mr Lockwood, you’ve got me wrong, you positively have. It’s not the rain—well, not in any direct sense, if you see what I mean. It’s like this, Mr Lockwood: what’s happened, the little old bus won’t seem to start this afternoon. It’s the electrics again, I think, the wet’s got into the electrics somehow. I mean, weather like this, it hasn’t let up all day, has it, and the little old bus, she can’t take it. It’s not like she had a garage over her head, is it, she spends her nights on the streets does my little old bus, not like your swanky young …”
Martin gripped the receiver till his knuckles whitened. It was the ghastly, unshakable bonhomie of the little monster that maddened him most. Idle, irresponsible and incapable students were, of course, no novelty to Martin; but never before had he had to deal with one so sublimely unaware of his own worthlessness. Hidden away under Walter’s plump, self-satisfied exterior lurked a plump, self-satisfied ego of terrifying dimensions; an ego so bloated with inner security as to be quite beyond the reach of ordinary reproofs and put-downs. Even two years in the Psychology Department had made no dent in it: Freud and Jung and all the other purveyors of guilt and self-doubt had simply bounced off it, like so many tennis-balls.
“Well, toodle-ooo, Mr Lockwood,” Walter concluded, quite unabashed; and as a crowning insult managed to hang up on Martin just before Martin had succeeded in slamming the phone down with such force as to set the little reptile’s eardrums ringing. If only they’d still been there. And if reptiles do in fact have eardrums? Oh, what the hell! Damn, damn, damn!
So what to do now? Martin’s first impulse was to get Walter’s Director of Studies on the phone, and urge him to have the lad horse-whipped, or sent down, or something: but of course he could see for himself how useless it would be, in this present day and age. Nothing would happen to Walter, while on him, Martin, the whole thing would rebound with hideous force. Before the week was out, he’d find himself saddled with a reputation for being authoritarian, upper class, right wing, non-egalitarian and all that sort of thing. And then where would his career prospects be?
Besides, even if, by some miracle, Walter’s Director of Studies did pay any attention to the complaint, it still wouldn’t solve the immediate problem. Satisfying though it might be to learn that Master Cummings was to be hanged at dawn and his head nailed up above the supermarket check-out, it still wouldn’t get this Timberley woman interviewed as arranged, at three o’clock this afternoon.
He’d have to do it himself. That was the grim conclusion towards which everything pointed. There went his afternoon nap. There went his cosy tea with Helen, chatting about this and that. There, too, in all probability, went his evening session of work. His nerves would be in shreds after all this frustration and annoyance, on top of the effort of being compassionate and caring towards this damn Timberley woman. That was the trouble with depression. It might be a good subject to write about, but it was liable to land you with the most bloody awful interviewees. It could be like getting speech out of a hibernating tortoise.
Inwardly fuming, Martin flicked open the street-map and studied the route. Seven miles at least, right through the centre of town. Allowing for getting lost, and for traffic blocks, and for all the other obstacles that Fate so loves to scatter in the path of those who are already behind schedule, he ought to be starting just about right now.
Scribbling a note for Helen, warning her that he might be late—what a relief it was that she wasn’t the sort of woman to make a fuss about it, as Beatrice would have done!—he collected his Timberley file, his notebook and his briefcase, and set out into the rain.
*
It was still raining quite heavily when he drew up outside the small, prim terrace house in which this Mrs Timberley lived with her depression. He had already made some notes on the bare facts of her case—that she was fifty-four years old, married, and that the depression had grown upon her gradually over a number of years. He also had notes on the various drugs and treatments that had been tried out on her during this period, none of them apparently, having halted by the smallest degree the relentless progress of her malady from “mild” to “moderate” to “severe”. Over the years, she had had spells in hospitals, spells out of hospital, spells attending psychiatric out-patients. At the moment, she was out of hospital and “under Domicilliary Care”, though who was doing the caring was not, from the notes, at all clear.
As he swooped across the wet pavement, shoulders hunched against the downpour, Martin experienced a small lifting of the spirit, akin to that of the hunter who has successfully cornered his prey, though it still has to be dispatched. At least he’d arrived at the damn place; the worst, in a way, was already over. With a faint feeling of accomplishment, he pressed the bell, and listened to the sweet chimes from within playing their quaint background music to this Mrs Timberley’s dark night of the soul.
CHAPTER V
“YES, SIR, PLEASED to meet you, Sir, won’t you come in, Sir?” enthused the rosy-faced old man who opened the door to Martin. “Come along in out of the wet. Terrible, innit, this weather we been having? Still, mustn’t grumble,” he amended, as he helped Martin divest himself of his raincoat in the narrow passage. “Spring’s around the corner, only a month away now, innit? That’s what I been saying to my Magsy”—here he dropped his voice, and gestured significantly up the dark little stairway—“Perk up, me dear, I been saying, keep your pecker up, gel, Spring’s only just around the corner! That’s right, innit? Just around the corner ….”
So narrow was the passage-way, and so dark now that the front door was closed, that getting Martin’s wet raincoat hung on a peg was quite a business, a sort of ill-choreographed little ballet, with the two men sidling around and across each other, trying to get out of one another’s way; and all the while, Mr Timberley—for this, presumably, was the elderly husband—kept up his flow of effusive and slightly servile welcome. “So good of you to come, Sir, so kind! My Magsy, she’ll be that pleased to see you! My goodness, you should ’a’ seen her, she’s been that excited all morning, there’s been no holding her! And now, Sir, if you’ll just step up this way …?”
The upstairs room into which Martin was ushered was small and dark, and very hot. A two-bar electric fire glared and hummed among the shadows, and there must have been some kind of central heating on as well, so completely had the wintry outside temperature been cancelled out and obliterated. The windows, small and meanly-proportioned in the first place, were so cluttered up with lace curtains, net curtains, and heavily-draped velvet curtains that only dim vestiges of the damp grey daylight were able to penetrate the room, and at first Martin found it quite difficult to locate his subject.
“… that excited all morning, there’s been no holding her!” Mr Timberley had informed him fondly; and Martin peered around the small room, stuffed with furniture and dusty ornaments, trying to accustom his eyes to the dimness.
Then he saw her. Lolling like a great cushion in a high-backed easy-chair, she had made no move to greet him; but she wasn’t asleep, either. He found himself staring into a grey, swollen face from which a pair of tiny, unblinking eyes stared back malevolently. Or seemed to do so. It was impossible, really, to guess whether this unnerving fixity of gaze betokened active hostility, or merely an indifference to his presence so total as to be quite scarey; a relic of the primeval void before Creation was begun, and darkness was upon the face of the earth.
“Mild”, “Moderate”, or “Severe”? Tilting his record card towards the cracks of light from the window, Martin checked the category.
“Severe”. Yes. They could say that again. He gritted his teeth, preparing for the ordeal. Ugh!
Still, here he was. It had taken nearly an hour to get here, and even if all the answers turned out to be mumblings and “don’t knows”, it would still count as an interview for his series. Well, sort of. He damn well intended to count it, anyway: social researchers thirty inter
views behind schedule can’t be choosers.
With the effort of a removal-man shifting a piano, he summoned up his bedside manner, and turned, all teeth and smiles, to his subject.
“Well, good afternoon, Mrs Timberley!” he began, in that bright, slightly over-loud voice which always seems so appropriate in addressing people a lot less fortunate than oneself: “How are you today? Feeling a bit better, eh? That’s fine, that’s just fine! Now, I wonder if you’d mind …?”
Still the eyes stared into his, expressionlessly—unless maybe it was with hatred, who could tell?—and Martin found his technique floundering. But he was into it now, there was no turning back, especially with the doting, anxious husband hovering over him, tense with hope, waiting for something to happen, like a child at the Zoo. Martin pulled himself together. Averting his eyes, and fastening them on the comforting familiarity of his notebook, he proceeded with his formula:
The Parasite Person Page 4