Stanley and the Women (26 page)

He had
not said the last bit very quietly, and he had started to slur his words too.
When he went on he kept the volume down but he still talked in a mumbling kind
of way. ‘If you don’t like ‘em, you don’t want to fuck ‘em. And who could like
her after they got to know her, after they’d seen her in action? The milkman
worships her, but he’s new and he hasn’t not brought the bloody cream yet. The
accountant, well, he’s not new, I suppose, just an idiot. She’s a … she’s a
fucky
nuck
case, that’s what she is. Ought to be put away. For her own
protection.’

‘Well
then, there we are. If you don’t want to fuck your wife you have the option of
telling her it’s because she’s such a horrible bloody creature, which actually
I wouldn’t dare to do, I’d be too afraid of a knife in my guts. Seriously. She
could justify anything she did. Unendurable provocation. How do we know it was
unendurable? Use your eyes, she couldn’t endure it, could she?’

I
watched him while he struggled to get his mind round his next, clinching point,
ready to help out if needed, but he made it on his own. ‘Or,’ he said
triumphantly, ‘Or you can be pissed all the time so the matter doesn’t arise,
ha ha ha. By well-established convention. And for real too, I should imagine.
Variation by Hutchinson — be pissed some of the time and act pissed the rest of
the time. I must be pretty bloody good at the latter by now because she’s never
noticed the difference. As far as I can remember, that is.’

‘Things
must have been all right at the beginning,’ I said. ‘When you first went round
with her.’

‘Till
we’d been married a couple of years. By which time she’d finally got the
message that I didn’t really like parties full of TV and film people. She
couldn’t believe it at first.’

‘Was
that when you stopped wearing suede shirts?’

‘Eh?
Sorry, Stanley, I don’t get you.’

‘Never
mind.’

‘I
heard about your boy. I’d offer to help but … but no.’ He gave another
sigh, one that went into a huge single hiccup. ‘If you’re going to drive me
home, Stan, and my honest guess is you’ve more or less got to, you’d better do
it before I pass out.’

I tried
to, but he was too quick for me. Much too heavy, too. It was a judgement on me
for the Harry stunt, on Bert as well perhaps. I hauled at his arm for a time,
then gave up and went and rang the front-door bell, which clunked as before. Nowell
answered it quite soon, wearing a dress which looked to me as though it was
made out of a well-known brand of dietary biscuit. I realized I was very drunk myself,
nowhere near fit to be in charge of a motor vehicle on any grounds bar
necessity.

‘Stanley!’
she said, all welcoming smiles. ‘How nice to see you. Come and have a drink.
Bert’s gone to a —’I’ve got him in the car,’ I said.

Before
I could think of a winning way to describe the problem she turned round and
went back across the hall. She had started to catch on as soon as I spoke,
without showing a wink of surprise or even curiosity about how her husband came
to be out with a fellow he always said was a shit. After half a minute or so
she reappeared carrying a fat bunch of cushions under one arm and a roll of
some thickish material under the other. She seemed definitely shorter than
before, and when she passed me on the step I saw she was wearing bedroom
slippers, little green affairs with turned-up toes. Her manner had a sort of
professional steadiness about it. I followed her into the street with my brain
not working too well. The wind was still blowing pointlessly away.

‘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 said 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.