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… 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 a
nd 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.