Stanley and the Women (19 page)

While I
was speaking, Nowell had been looking from me to Collings and back and giving
little quiet puffing and grunting laughs. Now she said, ‘Oh Stanley, you are
being rather a bore, darling. You do go on, don’t you? And there’s no need to,
you know. Okay, now it’s come up you feel bad about having neglected Steve a
bit. Forget it! Nobody blames you. It’s normal, as Trish told you. It’s all
over. Past history, old boy. Now could we possibly all manage to be sensible
and get on with the job, yes?’

Having
been brought up not to interrupt I kept quiet, against my inclination, until
the end of that. When I started, my voice sounded like something off very
early radio, or disc, or cylinder. ‘In this context I have nothing to feel bad
about. It was you, not I, who neglected Steve. One instance. The evening I —’

‘Stanley,
please.’ Collings had got to her feet, and I had to admit, very unwillingly
again, that the old rough tones had some authority in them. ‘Can I prevail on
you not to conduct your private quarrels in this office?’

I said
slowly and quietly, and as I guessed afterwards sounding this time incredibly
sinister, ‘That’s not what I was up to, Dr Collings, whatever it may have
sounded like to you. I was trying to get the facts straight, not very cleverly
it seems, but surely … Now presumably you hold some theory or whatever you
prefer to call it about the state people like Steve get into being something to
do with the way their parents treated them when they were small. Fair enough.
But a theory can only give the right answer in a particular case if the facts
of that case are properly established. It will give the wrong answer or no
answer at all if the information supplied is incorrect for any reason. So in
the case of Steve, if the received information says that I —’

‘Oh for
Christ’s sake,’ cried Nowell after a leave-this-to-me look at Collings that
went on for less than a second, ‘Steve isn’t a
case,
he’s your son! He’s
a human being, not a bloody motor car! You and your information supplied and
theories and answers, I don’t know how you can … Etc.

There
had never been any hope at all for my side, from how far back you bleeding
trembled to think, but in peace no less than in war hopeless efforts must be
made. This one had been such a blow-over for the opposition that Nowell had
had no need to send in the second wave by asking me why I was being so foul to
her, nor Collings to hit me with science. Even so I continued to resist
sporadically as the story swept, or rather slouched, on. For instance what kind
of school experience had Steve had?

How did
Collings mean? Had he been a success at school? No, he had not — he had left
with a single ‘0’ level, in biology.

‘Were
you disappointed with that result?’

‘Well I
wasn’t, Trish dear, I tell you frankly,’ said Nowell. ‘But then I don’t happen to
think exams are important. I think what matters is what a person’s like. I know
Stanley doesn’t agree with me.’

‘No,’ I
said, still quietly. ‘I think both are important. Sorry, of course that’s not
agreeing with you. No, exams get you jobs, that’s the point.’

‘I must
say I haven’t noticed them getting youngsters much in the way of jobs in the
last couple of years,’ said Nowell in a concerned, caring voice.

Collings
cut in before I could answer that, which was probably just as well. ‘So you
were disappointed with the result, Stanley. Did you let Steve see your
disappointment?’

‘You
bet I let him see it. It was his second try. I wanted him to have another go,
but they —’

‘And
had you put pressure on him beforehand to do well? Not only for that exam but
for earlier ones too?’

‘Yes I
had. Of course I had. Short of tortures and death-threats, I’d better say. Plus
rewards for success. If any.’

‘It
used to worry the poor little thing to death,’ said Nowell.

‘And
when Steve didn’t do well, you made it clear you were disappointed in him, you
thought he’d let you down.’

‘I was
disappointed with the result. I don’t think I gave him a bad time, I didn’t say
anything, but I didn’t go round pretending I hadn’t noticed either. Perhaps I
was a bit disappointed, in him, but you get that. There were other ways he was
so much more than I’d ever expected.’

‘But
surely you must have realized he wasn’t academically orientated?’

‘I
could see he wasn’t Einstein, but I still wanted him to do his best. Like
English ‘0’ level. He sometimes talked of being a writer. You’d think he’d have
had the interest.’

‘Stanley’s
very keen on writing,’ said Nowell seriously. ‘His second wife’s a writer, you
know. She doesn’t write a lot but she does write. And he sometimes writes
himself, articles for the magazines about cars.

To my
surprise Collings seemed interested in this information and made quite a
lengthy note. When she had finished doing that she pushed back her chair, which
matched the table and had only one leg, and lit a cigarette. ‘Of course with
changing social conditions the elitist role of education is passing too.’

‘Oh,
yeah,’ I said.

‘Nowadays
there’s much more emphasis on the social function, training the kids to relate
to each other and preparing them to take their places in the adult world.’

‘At my
school we got that thrown in, just by being there. We didn’t attend classes in
it.’

‘No,
and we can see the results, can’t we?’

I
thought about it. ‘Can we?’ She probably meant sexism and censorship and things
like that.

‘Don’t
you think it’s at all important to help kids learn to express themselves and
develop their identities?’

‘Of
course I do. I mean no, not really, and anyway I don’t see how you teach that,
and that’s not what you go to school for. Any more than you join the police force
to learn about community relations or whatever. You may pick up some of that on
the side but the business of the police is to see to it that people obey the
law.’

Nowell
had been watching me in a furtive kind of way that somehow made it no more
difficult for me or anybody else present to see that that was what she was
doing. Other bits of her expression showed how she was slightly thunderstruck
to see that her ex-husband was even more stupid or brutal or out of date than
she remembered, or perhaps had been able to take in before. She took no
interest in politics, but she had been to too many parties in Islington and
Camden Town not to know that the idea of the police seeing to it that people
obeyed the law, or doing anything really, was a very bad one. So she produced a
hissing inwards whistle and gazed wide-eyed at Collings, who managed to convey
that she too was shaken by my last remark before saying, ‘Don’t you find it
rather revealing that you see fit to equate the educational process with the
British police of the 1980s?’

‘I don’t
myself. I can’t see how I would, but I dare say you do. Except I didn’t equate
them, if the word means what I think it does. I was merely making a comparison
on one point, not …’

I
nattered on a little longer, but I had lost them again. Nowell did one of her
controlled yawns, looked at her watch, bounced a hand over her hair-do. Collings
pulled her chair back in to the table and put her cigarette part-way out in the
saucer, getting it across that the enjoyable frivolous intermission was over
and the serious work about to recommence. I wished Susan were there. She would
have seen to it somehow that the story Collings went off with was a few
kilometres nearer the truth. If that mattered.

So to
Steve and sex. He emerged even to Collings as hopelessly normal, standard,
average. She rather surprised me by apparently finding nothing macabre in his
slight but visible shyness with girls, not so much as a castration complex.
Anyway, she gamely wrote bits down. Nowell came up with a few mote of her
own-brand facts, but all they did was fill out the picture of Steve spending
his early years with his mother in constant attendance and his father at the
office, out getting drunk and never remembering his birthday.

At no
particular juncture that I could spot, Collings said that that was enough for
today, put the top on her pen and gathered up her papers. Nowell glanced over
at me. For once in our lives, it seemed to me we were both thinking the same
thing, that some kind of round-up so far or tentative communiqué would be
welcome. I knew enough about Collings to be reasonably certain that it would
never occur to her to wonder whether Nowell and I might perhaps be thinking
along those lines, so I spoke up.

Sure
enough, Collings was evidently thrown into some confusion by the idea, but she
made a quick recovery. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘on the understanding that we’re still
at a preliminary stage and this is only speculation …’ For the first time
she was addressing Nowell and me more or less equally. ‘What Steve needs,’ she
said slowly, sounding quite thoughtful, ‘is to be accepted as he is, and not as
other people might wish him to be. That’s something that goes very deep in
everybody, the need to be oneself. It takes precedence over almost all other
drives. So … when it’s frustrated, the effect can be devastating. Steve is
suffering from years of being treated and responded to, reacted to, as if he
were someone else, someone quite different, someone created by other people.
What we’re seeing now is his protest against that kind of treatment.’

By the
end of that lot she had gone all the way back to talking entirely in my
direction. ‘Don’t tell me,’ I said, ‘it’s me, I’m the other people you’re
talking about, I’m the one who’s to blame for the state he’s in.’

‘Please
don’t think that, Stanley,’ said Collings, and Nowell put her head on one side
and half-closed her eyes in a way that showed that she was against me thinking
that as well.

‘Why
not, if it’s true?’

‘Thinking
in terms of blame won’t do any good. It won’t help you to help Steve, which is
what this is all about, after all.’

‘I
ought to have seen it coming, oughtn’t I? All the time I was sending him to a
private school and getting a tutor in and bothering him about his homework I
was actually setting him up for …’

‘You
did it all for the best, darling,’ said Nowell.

‘Oh,
super.’

‘I can
tell you very seriously and professionally, and without any qualification that
you’re not to blame,’ said Collings. ‘Instrumental, perhaps. That’s rather a
different thing.’ After a moment’s hesitation she went on, ‘I must say it would
be a pity if you let concern with your own moral position get in the way of
more important things,’ and Nowell looked at the floor because she was afraid
she took the same view.

‘I’m
with you there,’ I said, and meant it. The trouble was that just then I could
see no way of putting the idea of blame out of my mind whatever anybody told
me. Without thinking I said, ‘Not everyone whose father puts pressure on him to
pass exams ends up with schizophrenia.’

‘Of
course there are other factors. Oh and by the way, I thought I’d already made
it clear that Dr Nash’s diagnosis is quite mistaken, I’m sorry to say. If we
must use these reductive terms, what Steve’s suffering from is something we
call a schizophreniform disorder, which may sound similar to you but I assure
you is quite different.’

‘Oh.’

Nowell
did a little forward semi-circle with her head and said in a semi-whisper, ‘Do
you think I could possibly see him for a moment? Please?’

‘Yes,’
said Collings shortly. ‘He’s in Ebbinghaus House, which you’ll see on your left
as you make for the main entrance.’

‘Aren’t
you coming, Dr Collings?’ I asked.

‘No, it’s
a rule of mine.’ Again she hesitated. ‘You may find some of his behaviour a bit
unexpected. You know, unusual.’

‘Un… usual?’ repeated Nowell over a great surge of music on the inaudible
soundtrack. ‘And what exactly is that supposed to mean?’

For the
first time a tiny rift could be seen in the idyllic relationship between those
two. Collings said with her laid-on patience, ‘Certain physical reactions that
are often observed in cases of this kind but people in your position are
unlikely to have come across. That’s all.’

‘What
sort of physical reactions?’ asked Nowell, taking a pace to one side to head Collings
off if she tried to run out of the room.

‘Eye
movements, changes of expression and so on. Nothing gross.’

Nowell
seemed satisfied with that. Collings indicated that she had gathered enough
information to keep her happy for the time being. In the middle of doing so she
threw me out completely by giving me a really powerful sexy look, one that
almost qualified as a leer. At least that was what I took it to be, though
given her skimpy control over her face it might almost equally well have stood
for impersonal sympathy or moral disapproval. Not that that mattered much
either.

A minute later Nowell and
I emerged from Rorschach House, whose name was indeed over its door, into
watery sunshine. I was again struck by how neat the whole scene was, too neat
perhaps, obsessively so, the kind of loonies’ garden this lot preferred to
head-high grasses, holes dug in the ground and constant bonfires. Inmates
strolled on the shaven lawns or walked up and down the weedless gravel paths. Well,
I assumed they were inmates, but in these days of any old dress they could
easily have been a convention’s worth of forensic psychiatrists out for a
breath of fresh air after a lecture. Somebody who looked straightforward was
approaching, a tall thin woman with a froth of white hair, a tic, a frown and a
mouth that moved vigorously, also, as I saw when she was nearer, a copy of the
Journal
of Behavioural Psychology
under her arm, which I felt must have meant
something, though I was not clear what. I was hungry and I was nearly sure I
could have done with a drink, even at whatever time it was, not yet eleven.