Stanley and the Women (11 page)

‘You’re
telling me that that was Joshua out of the Bible out there in the street just
now, are you?’

Evidently
I was almost there but not quite. ‘Well, in a kind of way. You know, that was
him born again. They’re all that in the key section.’

I had
no excuse now for complaining that Steve’s new view of the world was short of
imagination or scope. When I looked at Nash, hoping for a sign that that sort
of thing was to be expected, would soon pass, perhaps even had a nice touch of
technical interest to it, there was nothing but a long, serious stare. Before I
could speak to him Steve cut in.

‘You
still don’t believe me, do you?’

‘I don’t
see what made you think that was what he was. I don’t see how you could tell. I
mean you must admit he looked like just an ordinary bloke.’

‘What
do you expect him to look like, a geezer in white with a long white beard? It’s
nothing to do with what he looks like, it’s who he is.’

‘Yeah,
but what is it about him that tips you the wink who he is? You can’t have —’Look,
I just know, got it? I know.’

‘But…’ I had seen at the start it was no use arguing but I only stopped now
because I could think of nothing to say.

‘I’m sorry,
it’s not the type of thing you can explain.’

He
turned to Nash to appeal for support on the point that there were types of
things like that. I said to Nash, ‘I think what you suggested, I think we’d
better do that.’ Nash nodded silently. He still looked grim.

‘No, I’m
not going there,’ said Steve as soon as he understood the proposal. He showed
no anger or fear but he would not have it. ‘I wouldn’t be safe in a place like
that,’ he kept saying. Nash explained that if necessary he could have him put
inside willy-nilly. Steve told him he was bluffing, and after a bit I stopped
being clear what I thought. I said a lot of things I immediately forgot. A
couple of times I felt so hungry I thought I was going to die, then the next
moment not at all. Time passed as though it was never going to do anything
else. I was sinking into a drowse of apathy and despair when something reminded
me of something and I plunged downstairs to the phone. I forgot what I said
there too, just like a drunk person, but no matter. ‘Your mother wants to speak
to you,’ I said to Steve when I got back.

He went
straight away. I explained to Nash, who merely grunted. He obviously thought it
was no time for a chat, turning over his notes with a great rustle of pages and
hissing through his teeth, and I tried to hold off but soon I was saying
firmly, ‘He’s very sick, isn’t he?’

‘Well,
we’re not quite clear, are we, on exactly when, er matters took their present
course,’ he said a bit at a time, ‘but his illness does seem to have progressed
as fast as any I’ve known, of its type. From your account, and Wainwright’s, a
remarkable rate of development. And to be so specific, comparatively specific,
at this early stage, about his delusion that is — most unusual, if not …’
His voice died away, and it did seem just briefly that for once in his life he
was not sure, or had let it be seen he was not. Then he charged on, ‘But very
sick in any sense of unusual resistance to being made better, no. At least
there’s no sign of that at the moment. We’re only at the beginning, you know.’

‘What
causes it, doctor, this sort of illness?’

Nash
shook his head, either not knowing or knowing but not saying. ‘What …
triggers it off is often some sort of shock to the emotions. Which means I
think that it’s always that but sometimes the psychiatrist can’t find it or is
uncertain about it. In this case the Fawzia episode looks rather a long time
ago and the Mandy episode looks rather slight, but one never knows. It isn’t
all-important to find the shock.’

‘He
seems less frightened than he was.’

‘These
things come and go. Large changes of mood from no visible cause are
characteristic.’

I
thought of that when Steve reappeared, so soon I thought at first my luck had
run out and Nowell had failed or not tried to do what she had promised. But I
soon saw that was wrong. He had stopped being animated and he looked different,
physically exhausted, like somebody who had been up all night. I was sure Nash
noticed it too.

‘All
right, I’ll go there.’ Steve said that without much expression, but he sounded
quite convincingly fed up when he went on to say, ‘So I changed my mind. Does
it matter why?’ The question was for me personally, though I had not been
conscious of even asking myself anything on those lines. ‘You’re getting rid of
me, aren’t you? That’s what you want. Father.’

Those last few words of
Steve’s turned out to be very easy to remember. They stayed around while I
watched him silently — except for eating noises —get through a couple of bowls
of soup and some ham and some bread in the kitchen, and incidentally while Nash
sat on in the sitting room and wrote a lot of stuff for the hospital and ate
Brie and cream crackers and drank a glass of red wine, just what he had ordered
actually, though without specifying the rather pricey Burgundy that, feeling a
bit of a coward, I had opened for him. There was a distraction when a young man
dressed like a dustman, or so I thought, came to the front door and turned out
to be the municipal psychiatric social worker summoned earlier by Nash to take
Steve off. He, the social worker, wasted no time, but made two phone calls,
handed me a piece of card that had an address and phone number written on it
with amazing legibility, made it clear in the same movement that I would not be
needed on the expedition and started a move to the door.

‘Cheers,
dad,’ said Steve, not at all hostile now and so a lot more effectively
reproachful than he could ever have been on purpose.

‘Cheers,
son.’ Hugs were out, so I said a few things about him being well looked after
and me coming to see him soon, and more deep stuff like that.

When
the two had gone, Nash said, ‘He should indeed be well looked after at St Kevin’s,’
surprising me slightly — I had put him down as a man who saved his attention
for the job. ‘There really is a saint called that, you know. Irishman, of
course. How he got his name on a hospital near Blackheath I can’t imagine.
Anyway, it’s a cheerful sort of place, not one of your Victorian dungeons.
Amusing lot, the Victorians, but when it came to institutional interiors they
just gave up. I know somebody there called Dr Abercrombie who’s a very good
man. I couldn’t get hold of him just now, but, er, he’s a very good man.’

After
that Nash made a whole operation of taking a last look at his notes and bundling
them up and into his pocket. He seemed to me to be trying and failing to come
up with a hopeful but true remark that also meant something.

‘Bit of
luck, getting hold of that chap this time of the week,’ I said.

Nash
thought not, on the whole. ‘Saturday afternoon’s time and a half. Monday
morning’s when you won’t find them. All day Monday, in fact.’

‘Oh
yeah,’ I said. I could not have accounted for it, but this information
depressed me. ‘Could you have put him in, put my son in if he’d gone on refusing
to budge?’

‘Oh
yes. Yes. But it’s not easy with a patient who isn’t grossly mad, mad on
inspection so to speak, there he goes waving a great knife, that kind of
behaviour. Not at all easy. All these vile rights of the individual, you know —
it’s becoming more and more difficult to get anything done.’

He gave
me his card, engraved to the nines needless to say, with an address in Eaton
Square as well as one in New Harley Street. ‘Mr Duke,’ he went on, staring at
me, ‘I do want to impress upon you that I’m most inordinately interested in my
subject. So much so that even after all these years I still catch myself
wondering how supposedly intelligent people can absorb themselves in these
various secondary pursuits. Mathematics. Literature, even. This means in
practice that I’m prepared, I’m very willing to talk about your son’s case with
you at any remotely reasonable time by telephone, in person by arrangement.
Such a discussion couldn’t fail to touch on points of significance, do you see.
Just try to bear that in mind, would you?’

As soon
as I was alone I started thinking about what Steve had said when he agreed to
go into hospital, or rather just remembering, because I failed to get any
actual thinking done on the subject. I stood about in the sitting room, then in
the kitchen, where I tried to think about food instead and got nowhere there
either. Obviously it was time I settled down to what I always did when I wanted
to relax, to unwind, to take my mind off things, to potter through a couple of
hours without having to think. Only I was short of anything like that, it
seemed, except small stuff like a beer and a read of the paper. How had I
managed before and after Nowell left me? It had been different then, I was not
very clear how — something to do with being away a lot, changing jobs, having
the builders in, and other rubbish I had forgotten after eight years.

On past
form on a Saturday Susan would not be back for a fair while, but sometimes she
was early, and when she was going to be she usually rang to say, but not
always. I was feeling powerfully like ringing her, but was uneasy about making
her feel she ought to be home when she could still not leave work. All the same
I had moved to within reach of the phone when it rang and made me jump.

‘Stanley?
Is that you, Stanley?’

It was
like something out of a dream, not what that usually means, something
marvellous, too good to be true, dreamy in fact, but something very hard to
take, not at all vague, most precise, hard to take in too because the thing is
wrong in a special way, like black and white at the same time. Anyway, for a
moment I really thought Susan was talking to me with Nowell’s voice. Then I
realized that of course it must all just be Nowell.

‘Yes, Nowell,
as a matter of fact I was —’It’s Nowell here, darling. Did it work?’

‘What?
Oh yes. Like a charm. Thanks very —’

‘You
might have taken the trouble to let me know.’

‘I was
going to, honestly, but I haven’t had a chance — he’s only this absolute second
gone out of the door. We couldn’t get hold of the chap.’ Already without the
least sense of strain I had slipped back into Nowell’s world, a place where,
among other features, the truth or untruth of a statement rated rather low when
you came to decide whether to state it or not. Not that you actually bothered
to go into that side of it.

‘What?
What chap?’

‘Oh,
the … the chap at the hospital,’ I answered more or less at random. ‘Still,
it’s all done now, thank God. I don’t know what line you took but you were
pretty good, obviously.’

‘Well…’ she said, and in a way I wished I could have been there to see her saying
it, ‘you know. Look, Stanley, tell me, where have they taken him, how is he,
what are they going to do to him? It’s all happened so quickly.’

‘I don’t
know any more about it than I did when I spoke to you an hour ago, except they’ve
taken him to —’Darling, we must have a proper discussion, it’s too absurd.
After all, we are both responsible for the poor little thing.’

‘Yes of
course, but for the moment there’s really not a lot to discuss. He’s gone into
hospital — that’s done, as I say. If you want to talk about his, well, his
illness then Dr Nash is the fellow for that. He’ll be getting in touch with you
anyway. He’s the one with all the —’

‘That’s
not what I mean. We ought to
discuss
it. You and I. Surely you can see
it’s an extremely serious matter, and it’s a thing we know more about than
anybody else, I’m not talking about doctors, and if you want my opinion it’s
our
duty,
and surely it’s a reasonable thing for me to ask in my position.’

‘Oh
absolutely, but wouldn’t it still be sensible to wait till you have seen Nash
and heard what he thinks are sort of the most important points?’

In Nowell’s
book a discussion was not a matter of views being put forward and argued over,
let alone a method of working out what it was best to do about some problem. At
the same time it was a cut above your straight chinwag, anyway morally. A
discussion had such a serious subject that you could go on as long as you liked
about any bit of it you fancied, because you were only trying to get at the
truth, not showing off or holding the floor or any of those. The chosen bit
could be as far-fetched as you liked too, because these days nobody could be
sure what might or might not throw light on this or that. The seriousness also
made it all right to be things you were usually supposed not to be in
conversation, starting with rude and embarrassing.

For
these and other reasons I felt I could really do without a discussion with Nowell
about Steve. What I had just said was nothing more than an attempt to hold her
off — I had felt like going quite a way further but, as she had reminded me
with her last few words, she had been the one who had talked Steve round when
my lot could not, twice in twenty-four hours too, and there was plenty of time
to go yet.

Until
she got to that last phrase about her position, her voice and the looks and
movements I could so easily imagine going with it had been chummy, almost cosy,
with a definite hint of only-yesterday going on —not her usual style with me.
She went back to it when she said, ‘After all, this isn’t some sort of
scientific experiment, darling. It’s to do with our son. My son. I don’t mind
admitting I’m awfully ignorant about all sorts of things, but I do know a lot
about him.’