Contents
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Kingsley Amis
Dedication
Title Page
ONE: Onset
TWO: Progress
THREE: Relapse
FOUR: Prognosis
The History of Vintage
Copyright
Lucky Jim
That Uncertain Feeling
I Like It Here
Take a Girl Like You
One Fat Englishman
The Anti-Death League
I Want It Now
The Green Man
Girl, 20
The Riverside Villas Murder
Ending Up
The Crime of the Century
The Alteration
Jake’s Thing
Collected Short Stories
Russian Hide-and-Seek
The Old Devils
Difficulties with Girls
The Folks that Live on the Hill
The Russian Girl
Mr Barrett’s Secret and Other Stories
You Can’t Do Both
The Biographer’s Moustache
Just when Stanley Duke thinks it safe to sink into middle age, his son goes insane. As if that wasn’t terrible enough, Stanley finds himself beset on all sides by women – neurotic, cantankerous, half-baked or just plain capricious. As one by one they gnaw away at his composure, Stanley wonders whether insanity is not something with which all women are intimately acquainted.
Kingsley Amis was born in south London in 1922 and was educated at the City of London School and St John’s College, Oxford. After the publication of Lucky Jim in 1954, Kingsley Amis wrote over twenty novels, including The Alteration, winner of the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, The Old Devils, winner of the Booker Prize in 1986, and The Biographer’s Moustache, which was to be his last book. He also wrote on politics, education, language, films, television, restaurants and drink. Kingsley Amis was awarded the CBE in 1981 and received a knighthood in 1990.
He died in October 1995.
To Hilly
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Epub ISBN: 9781446414606
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Published by Vintage Classics 2004
8 10 9
Copyright © Kingsley Amis 1984
First published in Great Britain in 1984 by Hutchinson
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099461043
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IT HAD BEEN one of Susan’s most successful evenings. After weeks of hot sun in the late June and July, the weather had turned cool and some of the people, especially the women, must have been quite glad of the candles round the dinner table. The room, which she had recently had redecorated, looked bright and cheerful. There was a comfortable, friendly atmosphere with everybody contributing something to the conversation. The first course, cold avocado soup with a sprinkling of red pepper on top, had been made by Mrs Shillibeer, the daily woman, under Susan’s supervision, and it went down extremely well. So did the cold cooked salmon with cucumber, fresh mayonnaise and a sauce made out of chopped olives also by Mrs Shillibeer. They drank a rather good white Burgundy with that, four bottles between the eight persons there, and a small glass each of a sweet Rhône wine with the raspberries and cream. By the time Susan took them upstairs for coffee they were in excellent form.
The sitting room on the first floor had a low ceiling and a rather awkward shape, but she had done her best to turn it into an attractive place with carefully chosen lamps and bright rugs and cushions. The pictures were all personal in some way too, done by artists known to her or the gifts of friends. A long row of gramophone records, mostly orchestral, instrumental and chamber works, stood in a specially built wooden case, part of which housed the rather old-fashioned hi-fi. But naturally it was books that predominated – no science, no history, a bit of biography and some essays alongside a lot of plays, poetry, novels and short stories. Her own two books of collected pieces were among the essays somewhere, not in any particular place.
Quite a few of the books had come her way as review copies in the literary department of the Sunday Chronicle. Others she sold off in regular batches, an established perk that went some way towards making up her salary as assistant literary editor of the paper. Not far, though, especially considering how much of the literary editor’s work she had to do besides her own. He was there that evening, old Robbie Leishman Jamieson, in fact she had very much set it up as his evening, with an American novelist also present and a new writer of science fiction or something of the kind, and their wives. Old Robbie was the centre of attraction on the pale-grey velvet settee with a shot of his favourite malt whisky in a cut-glass tumbler and Susan encouraging him to tell all his best Evelyn Waugh stories, especially the one about Noel Coward and the Papal Nuncio, which had to be explained to the American novelist’s wife.
People used to say about Susan at this stage of her life that things were going not too badly for her after some rather rough times earlier on. Back at the beginning there had been a husband nobody seemed to know a great deal about, an unsuccessful painter or book-illustrator she married to spite her family, according to her, and started divorcing as soon as she found the family had been right about him all the time. Her main attachment after that had been to a considerably more successful left-wing playwright she lived with for six years but could not marry because he already had a wife, and as well as being left-wing was a Roman Catholic, not one of the sort that went in for divorce. That part lasted till the end of ’78, when the fellow’s wife developed a serious illness and he went back to her. On 12 February 1980 Susan began her second and present marriage and later that year moved into the substantial Victorian redbrick house up near the pond in Hampstead, once the property of a minor poet and antiquarian of those days.
She had passed her thirty-eighth birthday a fortnight before the party for Robbie Jamieson. At first glance she could have been quite that, a rather tall woman who walked and stood a bit off centre with her hands on her elbows very often, frowning, blinking rather above the normal rate and always pushing her upper lip down over her teeth and pressing the lower lip against it in a doubtful kind of way. In one of her grey cardigans or unsensational dark summer dresses she could have been mistaken for a librarian or even a secretary in a local-authority office, but only for a second and before she realized someone else was there. Close to and in conversation she showed up as younger, better shaped for a start and also much more definite in her appearance, with large clear brown eyes and a very distinctly outlined mouth, and glossy black hair that had a little grey in it but no more than was enough to show how black and how genuinely black the rest was. She looked clever, nervous, humorous, something like devoted or loyal when she gave a person her full attention, and gullible, and beautiful. It was true she lacked the withdrawn expression to be seen in most women considered beautiful, but there ought to have been a word for her combination of features, which was among other things completely distinctive, meaning less good versions of it somehow never seemed to show up, and the obvious word always had a lot to be said for it, quite enough in this case. Anyway, that was the conclusion I came to every time I thought about the matter. In fact I told her she had been looking beautiful that evening, when the guests had gone and I was helping her take the coffee things and the glasses out to the kitchen.
‘That’s good,’ she said, kissing me. ‘Even in my present state, you mean.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.
‘What? Even attired in one of my old school nighties and without so much as having passed a comb through my hair.’
‘I didn’t say a word. Did I say anything at all?’
‘You didn’t have to, old boy. When I appeared as hostess you radiated courteous disapproval. Fairly courteous disapproval. For three seconds or so.’
‘I very much doubt whether I radiated anything. You guessed I’d be feeling it, which isn’t the same at all.’
‘Well, you were, weren’t you, so it’s not so different. Not that I’m complaining, I promise you.’
I said, ‘I don’t think it’s egotistical or funny or like a Jew or like a gangster of me to fancy the idea of my wife getting herself up in a bit of style. Which would indeed include a much more expensive dress than the one you’re wearing. Nicer, too. Also something in the way of earrings or –’
‘Of course it isn’t funny, darling, it’s sweet of you, but you know how hopeless I am, I’d still only pour soup over it. Here.’ She pulled part of her skirt into the light. ‘Actually this is probably mayonnaise. Bugger.’
I managed not to press the point. In spite of what she had said just now Susan always kept her hair neatly trimmed and shaped, but with everything else I could think of her careless attitude to her appearance did seem pretty firm. It connected up somehow with her ideas about art and her position as a writer, an obviously important part of her life she had never wanted me to inquire into. I thought in one way it was rather a shame, not getting the most out of a complexion and colouring as good as hers, but I have always been a great believer in letting people decide things like that for themselves, and there was not much I could have done about this one in any case. So when she asked me in various ways if I thought the evening had been a success I not only said the right things but said them enthusiastically. I went on record as being quite sure the meal had been remarkably popular, old Robbie had had the time of his life, the Americans had gone down well enough with the others and had also been suitably entertained, and more in the same strain, not that she was in much real doubt in her own mind, of course. By this time we had finished in the kitchen and were back in the sitting room.
‘Shall we have just one more last quick drink?’ I said.
‘Why not?’ said Susan, screwing up her face.
I poured her a small brandy and myself a smallish Scotch and water. As I did so I realized I had put down a couple already that night.
‘Good old Stanley,’ she said in a very slightly dreamy way. ‘Without whom none of it would have been possible.’
‘What do you mean? You organized the whole thing.’
‘That’s exactly what I do mean.’
‘It’s true I was responsible for the wines, and there I feel I can claim some credit. The Beaumes-de-Venise in particular. Never been known to fail. Actually I think even old Robbie approved, don’t you?’
‘Darling, what I’m trying to say is, you let me have the entire evening exactly the way I wanted it even though it wasn’t really your sort of evening. Just like you let me have my life the way I want it, as far as you can. Even though, well, parts of it aren’t quite your sort of life, I suppose.’
We looked at each other and she smiled and half-shut her eyes in the way she sometimes did.
‘You don’t hear me complain,’ I said. ‘Shall I come and sit over there?’
‘Let’s go up.’
The words were not even out of her mouth when the buzzer from the street door went, a short burst but long enough.
‘Shit,’ said Susan with an annoyance I shared.
When I took the phone arrangement off the wall there was nobody at the other end, though not quite silence, more like a very loud seashell. I said Hallo several times and there was still nothing.
‘Probably a drunk going home from a pub,’ Susan said.
‘Not this late I shouldn’t think. Nobody left anything, did they? I’d better go and see.’
The outside door was at the far end of a short glassed-in passage over a dip in the ground. I opened it and looked around and saw nothing at all even when I stepped out, only street lighting and a few parked cars, in fact I was just about on the point of going back in when I heard somebody say something, a mumbled couple of words in a man’s voice. I said Hallo again, still without getting any answer. Then after more silence the same person spoke again, tentatively.
‘Dad?’
‘Steve!’
There was no one else it could have been, though even now I had not really recognized the voice. I already knew that something was wrong, before I could think of any possible reasons. At the same time I felt the slight muzziness slip away from my head. I walked up the street a few yards and found my son alongside the next-door garage, or just stepping out from that corner. Nineteen he was that year, a tall lad, taller than me, also fairer, and of course less bald. He seemed to be wearing his usual assemblage of dark jacket and trousers and light-coloured open-necked shirt. I thought he was avoiding my eye, but it was hard to tell in the patchy light. Usually we hugged each other on greeting but not this time.
‘Well, fancy seeing –’
‘Okay if I come in for a bit?’
‘Of course it’s okay. It’s great to see you, Steve-oh. What can I offer you? Drink? Bed? Food? Anything within reason.’
I turned away towards the house but he stayed where he was. ‘Got some people in, have you?’
‘No. We did have, but they’ve gone. There’s just Susan and me. We were –’
‘Have you got those colour photographs I took that year in Spain?’
‘Hey, you’re supposed to be in Spain now, aren’t you, you and, er, you and Mandy? Why aren’t you there? Didn’t you go, or what?’
‘Oh, yeah. See, I wanted to get my head together.’
‘What?’ That last bit bothered me for a moment, until I put it down as another of the vague phrases he and his mates picked up out of nowhere, rode to death for a few weeks or months and suddenly forgot. ‘But did you go? When did you get back?’
‘Just now.’
‘You mean today.’
‘Just now. Victoria. I walked.’
‘Not all the way here from Victoria, surely to God? It must be about . . .’
About six miles, I reckoned later, a couple of them noticeably uphill. Steve had no estimate or anything else to offer. He stood there on the pavement like somebody at the start of a long wait, not facing me quite head-on. His manner was not so much cold or off-hand as completely devoid of the friendly concentration on whoever he was talking to that he had always shown as long as I could remember. Suddenly I felt an absolute fool, a washout as a parent, nosey, pernickety, dull, only wanting to ask tiresome questions about taxis and buses, phoning, luggage and things like that. My head was full of some tougher questions about my son’s state of mind, but they were going to have to keep likewise.
‘Shall we go inside?’ I said it very casually, as though the last thing on earth I wanted was to put pressure on anyone – I had no idea why.
‘All right.’
We met Susan in the hall. ‘I was just . . . Oh hallo Steve, it was you then, how super, darling,’ she said. ‘We thought you were meant to be away.’ She seemed to notice nothing out of the ordinary, I was glad to see, not even when she went to hug him and he held back for a moment at first. She went on, ‘Dad and I were just having a last drink upstairs. You did get to Spain in the end, did you? Where was it, not that bloody place all the Brits go, what’s it called, not Torremolinos? Well, that’s a comfort, anyway. They tell me it’s all frightfully cheap over there now.’
More of that kind of thing got us to our seats upstairs and Steve answered up, not in his old way but enough like it to make me begin to tell myself he was only tired, or had been feeling embarrassed about something he would let out to us as soon as he felt relaxed enough, not that he had ever been particularly easy either to tire or to embarrass. Then Susan turned to him in a way that could have meant nothing to anybody but that she was going to move nearer home, and I saw him shut himself in.
She said, ‘Tell me, Steve, is Mandy still reading The French Lieutenant’s Woman? I remember you saying she was never without it. Quite a read for anybody, of course.’ She sounded and looked like a very expensive nurse, being very good with him, so good you would hardly have noticed. I suppose there was quite a lot for her to be good with him about, his accent, for instance, which was considerably worse than mine. I was very much aware of it when after a long uncomfortable silence he started to speak.
‘Mandy and I don’t have an amazing amount to say to each other, know what I mean? I mean we do talk all right, but we don’t seem to communicate. So I thought, well, we’re not getting anywhere, it doesn’t really mean anything, it didn’t really happen, so I thought I’d better try and get my head together, you know, try and get things sorted out, so I could decide what I was going to do. I mean you’ve got to do it for yourself, like sort out what you . . .’
He took some time over saying this because he put more silences in. There was a sort of comic contrast between the importance Susan and I had been attaching to his account of himself before it came and what he had actually said, but I thought that as regards things like originality and clearness and compared with almost anything else from one of his generation his statement was not too bad. What had made it hard to listen to or sit through was nothing in the words themselves, not even in the way he delivered them, which was lackadaisical enough but no more so than would have been natural for somebody rather bored at having to explain himself or merely ready for bed after a long walk. No, he just left out completely all the small movements of face and body and inarticulate sounds that you get from people talking, all the familiar signs of an interest in being understood. I would never have thought that a negative change could be so noticeable, and certainly not that having noticed it I was going to take something like half a minute making up my mind exactly what it was. I did notice that he frowned once as he was speaking, but very briefly and not at anything in particular that I could see. Otherwise he was completely without expression, even when he said what he did about getting his head together and I had been so sure he would remember he had said it before, outside in the street, and would let me have some signal that he knew I was thinking it was funny or awful of him to say it again. That was the worst part.
Susan said, quite rightly, ‘Do I gather you’re not seeing Mandy at the moment?’
‘Well, you know, not much going for it.’
‘Is she staying behind in Spain for a bit?’
‘Decide what I’m going to do.’
There was another silence. I was very relieved when he got up, sprang to his feet in fact with no sign at all of being tired any more, but then in another second he had gone back to his lifeless, wrapped-up style. He muttered something about a drink of water.
‘Of course,’ I said, looking across to where we kept the tray with the bottles of Malvern and Perrier, but it had gone downstairs with the rest of the stuff. ‘Sorry, there doesn’t – ’
‘It’s okay, I’ll get it.’
‘What’s the matter with him?’ asked Susan when he had gone out.
‘He’s exhausted. He walked all the way from Victoria, or so he said.’
As though we had both been dying for the chance we had moved instantly into what sounded like accusation on one side and excuse on the other. We kept it up while Susan went on about why no bus or taxi – I came back with queues at the station, why no phone-call – all his generation were like that, and why no luggage – well, nothing much to say there. Neither of us turned anywhere near fervent but it was odd just the same, especially since she had taken a lot of trouble over Steve and they seemed to like each other. Perhaps not so odd on second thoughts, merely a result of being a stepmother and a father and not one hundred per cent cool. I stepped out of the pattern when she mentioned his passport.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I can’t believe he’s got it on him. Nor any cash either.’
‘Well, you could . . .’ She stopped. ‘So he can’t have come from Spain. Where has he been?’
‘I don’t know. I think I’ll go and get a beer.’
‘I don’t blame you,’ she said, meaning for wanting to keep an eye on Steve.
When I got to the foot of the stairs it was like being in a Channel steamer with the drumming and shuddering of the water-system in the walls and all about. In the kitchen the sound of the water itself as it hit the sink was more noticeable. There were pools of it, not very large or deep ones, on the floor and on the various work-surfaces near by. As I came in Steve was adding to them with what was bouncing off the glass in his hand. This he seemed keen to rinse as thoroughly as possible. Feeling ridiculously self-conscious I went past him not too quickly to the refrigerator and took out and opened a can of Carlsberg lager. He knew I was there, of course, but he took no notice of me, or perhaps he did, because he turned off the tap and turned it on again just long enough to fill the glass, which he drained and refilled the same way, all at top speed as though he had taken a bet, and without any signs of pleasure or of anything else. Obviously I had no way of knowing how many glasses he had drunk before I arrived.
By the time he was starting the fourth round of the process I had got a glass for myself, poured my beer and thrown the can away, so that from then on I was hanging about. I tried to force myself to stroll out of the room. Perhaps I ought to say something. I was sure I remembered reading somewhere that children could actually welcome discipline.
‘Come and have a spot of Scotch,’ I said, and tried to infiltrate lightness into the way I said it. ‘All that water can’t be the best –’
He looked at me for the first time. It was a glare that lasted less than a second. ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ he shouted, so loudly that I jumped. After a weird moment of hesitation he hurled the half-full glass on to the floor and rushed out. Finally I heard the faint slam of the door of his old bedroom at the top of the house.
Susan found me brushing the pieces of glass into the dustpan. I tried to make what had happened sound more ordinary than it had been, but without getting anywhere much. She listened carefully and said in a reasonable tone that no one in fact wanted or needed so much water. I agreed with her.
‘He’s not normally given to throwing glasses on the floor, is he?’ she asked. ‘No, that’s just it.’ He had always been a quiet, easy-going sort of fellow, rather apt to walk out of situations when he felt cross or frustrated, but less so lately than as a boy, and never inclined to violence in any form.
‘He doesn’t seem to be . . . Something’s upset him.’
‘Something certainly has,’ said Susan, nodding her head several times. She clearly thought there was more in the phrase than I had reckoned with. ‘I bet you I know where that young man has just come from, and it’s a long way from Spain. Unless of course she happens to have been there, which would explain a good deal, I suggest.’
The person referred to was my former wife and Steve’s mother, Nowell by name, now married to somebody called Hutchinson. She had left me for him in 1974 and since then, or rather since the end of the legal hassle, we had not met more than a couple of times. Steve hardly ever mentioned her and I had stopped asking him about her. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t think he sees her much these days.’
‘What about the time he appeared out of the blue after that cricket match and didn’t speak the whole evening? And it turned out she was stoned in the Shepherd’s Bush flat the entire time he was there. You remember.’
If other things had been different I would have enjoyed as usual her tone of voice for talking about Nowell, not a bit hostile, better than objective, sort of interested, putting the expression in like someone reading aloud in the family circle. ‘Yes, but that was years ago.’ I wondered if she would still be able to go on like that having met Nowell even for five minutes.
‘And the school outing.’ Susan glanced at me and went on in her usual way, though quieter. ‘Tell me what you think is wrong.’
‘I don’t know what I think is wrong. He could have had a row with Mandy. They haven’t been going together very long, but . . .’
‘Three months? I expect that’s quite a long time in their world, don’t you?’
‘Yeah.’
Having turned off lights and locked windows we got to our bedroom on the second floor. Steve’s room was up a curving flight of stairs at the far end of this floor, and for a moment I tried to remember if the bed in it would be made up before telling myself that there were plenty of blankets within reach and that anyway he was not five years old any longer. I shut our door behind us. Susan came over and put her arms round me.
After a couple of minutes she said, ‘You’re upset too, aren’t you? In a different way.’
‘I suppose I am. I didn’t think I was.’
‘Have one of my sleepers. Quick and no hangover.’
The next morning things had settled back into proportion. The main event of last night had of course been the dashing and enjoyable dinner party. Steve would probably have slept off whatever had been bothering him and might be talked into staying on for a couple of days. He had always got up late and it came as no surprise that he was still out of sight when I cleared off my Blue Danube coffee and boiled egg in the kitchen and checked my stuff before leaving for the office. Susan appeared in a white terry robe just as I was on my way to the door. She had never been a great early riser either and had her hair hanging down loose round her face. There were faint brownish blotches on the fine skin near her eyes.
‘I’m off this morning,’ she said.
‘I thought as much.’
‘You haven’t forgotten mummy’s coming to lunch?’
‘I had. Or else you forgot to tell me.’
‘Perhaps I did. Anyway, can you come? Please? I know it’s a nuisance but she does like to see you.’
Susan did it just right, appealing to me without putting the pressure on, making her mother out to be fond of her own way but in an amount I could probably put up with or not far off. In fact I was a long way from clear whether the old girl did like to see me in quite the usual sense of the words, but I was as ready as I ever was to see her any time, that is any time bar a Friday lunchtime, my preferred procedure being to take a sandwich at work midday and then beat the weekend rush-hour. Susan knew that perfectly well, and I was just going to remind her of it when I realized she had not tried to use my perhaps difficult son as an extra reason why I ought to be around. I thought that was excellent.
‘All right then,’ I said, ‘I may be a bit late but if I am I’m still slated to attend.’
‘Oh Stanley, you are gorgeous.’
She came round the table and began kissing me in a very friendly way. In a moment I tried to put my hand in under the terry robe, but she prevented me.
‘Later,’ she said. ‘I’m not awake yet.’
Susan knew I worried about being on time at work. The weather that morning was damp and blowy and I got a sufficient sample of it just walking the few yards to my garage door. Inside and soon afterwards outside was the Apfelsine FK 3. I could really have managed my surface travel perfectly well with taxis and the occasional hire, but I could hardly have justified keeping the Apfelsine if I had done that, and I was set on keeping it until something replaced it in its class. It was what used to be called a status symbol. I always thought it was much easier to understand than most symbols. I parked it at the other end in my personal space in the office park without turning a hair.
It happened by chance to be motorcars that I discussed in the way of business a couple of hours later. This was in a wine bar just off Fleet Street called La Botella that when I first went to it had been a sort of local for men from the nearby newspaper offices and law places, but for some years now had attracted drinkers mostly of no particular description. Spirits were sold there as well as wine.
As well as operating a stuffy rule about men wearing ties, the management at La Botella was hard on women, forcing them to sit down in the long narrow room at the side of the premises and then making it next to impossible for them to order drinks once they had done that. Lone women who were new to the place or had screwed their plans were always being stood or advanced drinks in the side room by decent chaps. When the man I was talking to there that morning had been called to the telephone, much to his disgust, and half a minute later Lindsey Lucas pitched up in search of a seat and a gin and tonic, I could hardly have turned her down even if we had been total strangers.
I had known her much longer than I had known Susan, though the two were exact contemporaries and old friends without ever having been close. In fact I had an affair with Lindsey after my first wife left me and had given her one or two a bit casually a couple of extra times between then and taking up with Susan. In those days a husband of Lindsey’s had come and gone, perhaps still did. She was reddish-fair and well formed, medium-sized, with a good skin, very well-chosen glasses and a banked-down manner like a newscaster’s. With this went a hard flat Northern Ireland accent which I liked as a noise without feeling it suited her especially well. For the past three years she had had a column on the women’s page of one of the down-market dailies.
‘You saw your ex was on the box the other night,’ she said with very little delay. To someone else she might have sounded accusing but I could tell it was only those tight vowels.
‘Yes I did see, I mean I saw she was going to be but I didn’t see the play. Was it good? Was she good? Did you see it?’
‘I did, the first half. One of those drama-documentaries about life in our hospitals today. She was the maverick matron who didn’t really think they ought to be torturing the patients to death just yet. But get that – matron. Oh, it was called senior nursing officer or some such jargon but she was a matron. Fiery and vital and everything but a matron. Looking not too bad it must be said. What is she now, forty-four?’
‘Just over. She’s the same as me.’
‘Looking quite good. A wee bit miscast in the role, maybe.’
Lindsey took a quick look at me from behind her glasses to see if I had fully appreciated this touch, then another, slower one. She knew well enough that chatting to an ex-husband about the wife who ran away from him was not altogether the straightforward business you might think it would be, even when there was no nonsense whatever about any lingering fondness, as in this case. He might thoroughly enjoy hearing of her misfortunes and love being reminded how terrible she was to have around, but the very next bit might throw doubt on his good sense or taste in ever having got involved with her in the first place. So Lindsey took her time.
‘It wasn’t a very big part,’ she said, ‘but I think I’m right in saying it was her first for . . . quite a while. And before it I can’t remember anything since she was whoever it was in that version of The Letter, you know, the woman who shoots her boyfriend and then says he was trying to rape her when really he was trying to ditch her. We, uh, we thought she was just right for that, but it didn’t go down very well, I believe. In fact that career of hers in television, which I remember you telling me she was so set on . . .’
So set on, I muttered under my breath and through my teeth, that you could almost say she left me to have a better crack at it – ‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘I may have missed some things, but it doesn’t seem to have come to very much. What about that husband of hers? – what’s he called, Hutchinson is it?’
‘Bert Hutchinson. What about him? Horrible bleeder. Wears suede shirts. And drinks like a fish, I hear.’
‘Oh? Well, she should be used to that, Stanley. Perhaps she likes her husbands to put it away. Not that I blame them.’
‘No rudeness, please. He drinks like a fish, I just drink, right? Basic distinction. Anyway, he never turned out to produce or direct anything at all as far as I know. There was meant to be going to be a pricy series about Mr Gladstone, with Nowell as I imagine it would be Mrs Gladstone, but then it fell a victim to some axe or quota or whatever.’
‘Oh my God,’ said Lindsey, undoubtedly thinking of Nowell as Mrs Gladstone, though I had no real idea of why that should be so bad. ‘I don’t suppose you see much of her, do you?’
‘No point. It was bad enough being married to her.’
‘Have you seen their child?’
‘No. I’d forgotten it existed until now.’
‘You should. I can’t imagine why Nowell ever agreed to have it. It’s a girl. Naturally.’
‘I don’t know why you say that. Get invited there, do you?’
‘Oh, somebody took me along. Are you doing anything for lunch? I don’t think this fellow of mine’s coming.’
‘I wish I wasn’t but I am. In fact it’s starting to get tight already.’
‘Come on, it’s only –’
‘I know, but I’ve got to get home.’
‘To Hampstead? Do you go home to lunch every day now?’
‘No, not every day,’ I said, wishing I was queer and need never explain anything to anybody. ‘Today, though. My mother-in-law’s coming to lunch.’
I was scowling at Lindsey so fiercely that she just grunted and took a good swallow of her drink, but she was not the sort to leave off when she wanted to go on. I caught sight of my bloke on his way back from the phone, and she saw at once that some interruption was a few seconds away. With an extra dose of the accent, or so I thought, she said, ‘You certainly do marry some extraordinary people, Stanley,’ obviously reckoning on any real comeback being ruled out. But the bloke, instead of keeping on his way towards us, veered aside in the direction of a pee, so there was no rush after all for the moment.
‘Now I realize you haven’t got much time for her,’ I said, ‘Susan that is, but I have. You don’t think I know what I’m getting, do you? Well, I think I do, by and large. I like most of it, and the bits I don’t like so well I can put up with quite easily, because there’s nothing that says I’ve got to agree with her idea of what she’s doing. So she’ll pretend she’s helping someone or being nice to them, and she really is too, but she’s also showing off her genius and drawing attention to herself, which is what a lot of people do, and I’ll go along with it. And that works out perfectly well, because she’s not a thought-reader, you see. As I say, it’s only a small part of the time. We’ve been married two and a half years now, and going together nearly four, so I reckon so far I’m probably going to be all right.’
‘I hope so,’ said Lindsey with a smile that looked okay, but making it sound as though she was rather hoping against hope. ‘No, I’m not so much down on the old thing as perhaps you imagine. But according to me she’s slightly mad, you know.’
I was far from sure how that sounded. ‘What does that mean?’ I said.
‘Well I . . . she can’t really believe that anything or anybody exists unless they concern her personally.’
‘My God, all I can say is it’s a good job we haven’t got you in charge of committals to the nut-hatch or we’d all be in there.’
‘Yeah, we all do most things but some of us do some of them more than others do. Of course I haven’t seen her for years. She’s probably grown up by now.’
‘What’s that bleeder doing in there?’ I asked her, looking at my watch. ‘Ah, how’s . . . how’s Barry?’ I was pleased with myself for having come up with her husband’s name just when required, but what I tried to get across to her was more that naturally in an ideal world there would most likely not be people called Barry. It seemed from her reply that this particular one was still around, at any rate not yet dead or required to keep his distance by court order. My bloke returned at last, closely followed by Lindsey’s apologizing for his lateness. I settled things with mine in about five seconds, got her latest phone number off her, and left. By now I was medium late, so I grabbed a passing taxi.
My mother-in-law’s lime-green Saab, with a fresh scrape on the rear door, was parked across the road from the pottery shop. In the quite recent past I had watched her have two minor accidents in it at walking pace, one with a stationary furniture van, the other with a simple brick wall, both in excellent conditions of visibility and road surface. At higher speeds she obviously took more care, or else was under some sort of special protection. I could let Susan see nearly all of what I felt about her mother’s driving.
In the hall of my house Mrs Shillibeer was rubbing the stain off the floorboards in an area by the fireplace. At the first sound of this name I had imagined a chain-smoking old witch in a flowered overall and one of those turban affairs I had seen on the women who came to clean my parents’ house in South London. In other words I had not expected a tall fat girl in her twenties whose usual get-up was a tee-shirt, jeans and pink brocade slippers. Under one of these at the moment there was a pad of wire wool with which she was doing her stain-removal in an upright position. In theory the person at work could have been someone different because her face was hidden by the paperback book she was reading called The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm. Then when she heard the street door latch behind me she lowered the book far enough to see over the top of it.
‘Hallo,’ she said in a loud affected voice. ‘Lady Daly,’ she went on in the same voice and paused for quite a long time, ‘hazz . . . arrived-uh.’ She was given to making announcements of this sort. I could never tell whether she was being cheeky to me or so to speak joining up with me against whoever the announcement was about.
Lady Daly was naturally my mother-in-law. Her husband, fallen down dead before I ever came along, had been a Conservative MP for a safe Hertfordshire seat, given a knighthood for never having done anything. When I opened the sitting-room door she tried to shove back into its place on the shelves the book she had taken out and turn round and face me innocently at the same time, like Ingrid Bergman interrupted in a bit of amateur spying. They were not my books anyway.
‘Morning, Stanley,’ she got in quickly.
‘Morning, lady. How are you today? Can I get you something? What about a spot of sherry?’
‘Oh no. No. No thank you.’ She gave me a peck on the cheek, as near as someone without an actual beak could. ‘But you have . . . have one.’
‘I don’t see why not,’ I said, and started to make myself a small Scotch on the rocks. There were rocks on hand in the plastic pineapple instead of to be fetched from the kitchen because Susan had got Mrs Shillibeer to interrupt her other duties to put them there. Where was Susan? One of the troubles with getting on all right with people like your mother-in-law, or looking as if you did, or trying to, was that people like your wife took to leaving you alone with them to have a nice chat.
My mother-in-law managed to stop watching my operations at the drinks tray. ‘Filthy traffic,’ she said as one committed road-user to another.
‘Wicked. Of course there’s the weekend coming up.’
She turned on me indignantly. ‘But it’s barely Friday afternoon.’
‘I know, but you know how it is.’
‘I wonder some of them bother to go in to work at all. Well, a great many don’t, as we see. They’re unemployed.’
‘Yes, I know.’ I raised my glass. ‘Cheers, lady.’
Mum was what I had called my first mother-in-law but this one had other ideas. I thought they were on the wrong lines. Lady Daly had to be a dodgy thing to be called in the first place and the nickname or whatever it was reminded you of that dodginess. Also I very much doubted whether she had ever done what I once had out of curiosity and looked up the word in The Concise Oxford Dictionary. Apparently to use it in the vocative and the singular, which was what I had just been up to, could only be either poetical or vulgar, nothing in between. I thought that was very interesting.
‘I gather you have Steve staying with you,’ she said after a pause, quite chuffed at getting over all the various difficulties raised by bringing out this name.
So nothing really awful had happened in between. ‘Yes, he dropped in to stay for a couple of days. So it seems. Just turned up on the doorstep. As they do at that age.’
‘Such a nice boy. Still working at his writing, is he?’
‘Yes, I think so, yes. Plugging away.’ It would hardly have been fair to say that Steve had ever plugged away at anything. What kept him going usually was pound-note jobs with gardeners and handymen and dribs and drabs from me.
‘Tell me, Stanley, it’s dreadfully stupid of me, but I seem never to have taken in just what it is that he writes. Is it verse or prose? Essays? Plays, perhaps?’
‘No, it’s not plays.’
‘How would you describe it?’
‘Well . . .’
I tried to remember anything at all about the few badly typed pages that, in response to many requests and with a touching mixture of defiance and shyness, Steve had planked down next to me on the couch one Sunday afternoon the previous winter. But it was the same now as then, really. I had not been able to come up with a single word, not just of appreciation, but even referring to one thing or another about the material. But surely I had managed to tell whether it was in verse or prose? Hopeless.
‘Of course, he hasn’t shown me a great deal of it.’ I looked across and met the old girl’s eye and wished she could find a way of coming a little less far to meet me – sometimes you would give anything for a spot of boredom. ‘I don’t know about you but I’m a complete wash-out when I come up against any of this modern stuff.’
‘Oh, I do absolutely agree. But what would you have –’
Susan came in then. ‘Sorry,’ she said in a half-whisper. I was relieved to see her, as I often was, and it was easy enough to see that her mother felt something similar, say like after spending an unpredictable length of time with a small half-tamed wild animal. When Susan kissed me she gave the top part of my arm the special little squeeze that meant she was thanking me or apologizing or hoping to cheer me up. I imagined she was doing a minor bit of all three that time. She took the dry sherry I poured for her and went and stood with her mother near the china-cupboard. Seen as a pair like this they could look more alike than I cared for, and today was one of the days, with them both wearing darkish skirts and lighter-coloured tops. Lady D would have been in her middle or late sixties but she had kept her figure, and one way or another her hair was almost as dark as Susan’s. But then again her eyes were much lighter and she looked less clever, more nervous and not humorous at all.
I drank some of my Scotch and said, ‘Any sign of the young master?’
‘Oh,’ said Susan, ‘he –’
She stopped suddenly because the door was thrown open, also suddenly, so that it banged into one of her embroidered stools, though not very hard. Even so, the effect was quite noticeable, especially when nobody came in or could be seen from inside the room. The three of us stood still and said nothing, not in the least like people wondering what the hell was going on. Then Steve strolled round the corner, very casual, I thought, preoccupied but normal enough, scruffy enough too, having probably spent the night in his clothes.
‘Hallo, dad,’ he said quietly. ‘Hallo Susan. Hallo . . . lady.’
‘Good morning, Steve,’ said my mother-in-law rather like a fellow playing in Shakespeare.
‘Er . . .’ he said, and stopped. I could hear him breathing deeply through his mouth. ‘Can I borrow a book?’
‘Help yourself, my dear,’ said Susan, spreading a hand. ‘Fiction there . . . poetry there . . . politics, psychology, what you will . . . Art and so on down there.’
Steve, who had not followed this closely, turned his head towards the bookshelves. The other three of us moved into the window-bow so as not to seem to be watching him looking. We talked about something like the Labour Party or what we might do for Christmas. After a minute or two he moved away from the books and apparently started examining a painting on the end wall. It was mostly blue, but some parts of it were white. As far as I knew he had never taken any particular interest in pictures and this one had hung there all through his dozens of visits to the house. He went on examining it. Susan had no idea – if she had been playing the adverb game ‘normally’ would have been the one she was doing. Her mother handled it differently, putting all her effort into not running for her life. I sympathized with her at the same time as wondering what exactly it was we three had to be so on edge about. Before I had solved it there was a tearing sound and I saw that Steve was in fact tearing the cover off a book. I shouted out to him. Having got rid of the cover he tried to tear the pages across but they were too tough and he put the remains of the book down on a cushion on the back of a chair. By the time I went over there he had gone. The book was Herzog, by Saul Bellow.
‘I’m sorry, love,’ I said to Susan. ‘I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing. He must be off his head. I’ll get you another.’
‘It’s all right, darling,’ she said, ‘I’d finished with it, it was just hanging about on the shelves. Lunch in ten minutes,’ she called after me on my way to the door, sounding as normal as anybody could have managed.
With my mind on the water-drinking event I checked the kitchen, then briefly the upstairs in general before catching up with my son in the small bathroom, or rather lavatory with washbasin, next to his bedroom. As before, there was plenty of water about – on the mirror behind the basin, into which he was staring, on his face and hair and clothes and on the floor. He had evidently not touched the clean towel on the metal rack beside him.
‘What’s the matter with you?’ I said, trying to sound angry instead of worried. ‘What do you mean by tearing up a book like that?’
He just stood there with his hands by his sides and said nothing.
‘These things cost money, you know.’
‘I’ll pay for it,’ he said wearily.
‘Like hell you will.’ Now I was really angry. He was always offering to pay for other people’s things he had used up or broken or lost, going on every time as though it was very sweet of him to be so patient with all these smallminded idiots, and then somehow not having the cash on him until I forked out. ‘Anyhow it’s a waste, and it might have been a special copy, and it might not be able to be replaced, and what did you want to go and do it for in the first place? Are you crazy or something?’
By way of reply he turned on the cold tap and started to slosh handfuls of water on to his face in a tremendous, ridiculous hurry, throwing more of it down his shirt and trousers and round his feet. He did this in complete silence.
I waited till I had stopped feeling angry and said, ‘Have you been to see your mother?’ I tried to make it sound interesting, as though his mother had been a film.