His composure was so ironclad that for more than an instant I thought I must have dreamt up the contents of the last half-minute. Of course, being that much older he must be more used to them, though perhaps … I just beat him to asking again by telling him who I was, then went on to fill him in about Steve, who I said had attacked his stepmother. ‘I wish you’d go and see him there, doctor,’ I said finally. ‘I’m worried about him. The woman is a dangerous psychopath, sorry, I mean, you know, a hysterical neurotic.’
Only a touch more sharply he said, ‘What, what woman is that?’
‘Er, Dr —’
‘Yes yes, Dr Collings, m’m. M’m. As it happens I can visit your son tomorrow morning.’
‘I was going over then myself. Shall I meet you there?’
‘Would you forgive me a moment?’ More dead silence, for a bit longer this time. When he emerged again there was a sort of echo of a yell in the background. ‘No, I think I should advise you to stay away, Mr Duke,’ he said consideringly. ‘I’ll see you at New Harley Street at twelve, if that’s all right.’
‘I’ll be there. This is very kind of you.’
‘Well. The alternative was a workshop on social psychiatry.’
He hung up with headlong speed, so much so that he chopped off half the last syllable. I helped myself to another drink and took a refill in to Lindsey, who was sitting up in bed, though not very far. She looked about two without her glasses.
‘Cheers,’ she said. ‘Every success.’
‘Thanks. With what?’
‘Your new job. Car critic.’
‘Oh that.’ I had honestly not thought of it above once since telling her on the way here. ‘I hope I take over in time for the Motor Show. Of course I was going anyway but only as a bloke, as it were.’
She could just about have managed without this information, I reckoned, and the same was true of one or two of the things I went on to tell her, but I was set on keeping control of the conversation because of a superstitious feeling that it would be a good-luck sign if Susan stayed unmentioned till we were out of the flat and, as arranged earlier, in the quite good Greek restaurant a couple of streets away. As it turned out I won bonus points for a further hold-off up to when we had ordered. Then I could stand it no longer.
‘You were saying something about the way she was educated. Susan.’
‘None other. Yes, she didn’t go to school, or only for a term, then her parents had to take her away and get her tutored at home. She was terribly homesick and was subjected to the most frightful bullying.’ Lindsey did a better job on Susan’s accent than I would have expected, but she was still not as good as Mrs Shillibeer. ‘You hadn’t heard that, I take it.’
‘No. How did you hear about it? Isn’t that funny, she never said anything to me about that part of her life and I never thought to ask her.’
‘She told me is how I heard about it. Well, by the time you came along it must have dawned on her that those facts are a pretty unprepossessing lot.’
‘What are you talking about? She couldn’t help them.’
‘Only if you take them at their face value. You think of what happens at school, at any school. There are two things everyone gets plenty of, enough and to spare, especially at first — opposition and competition. Susan hates those. She won’t have them. Who does she think she is or he think he is, that was her watchword at Oxford. When the answer would be like the Principal of the college or the Professor of English Language and Literature, you know, bloody understrappers of that kidney, with no right to make Susan Daly do what she didn’t want to do or prevent her from doing what she wanted to do. And then, she was bright as hell and that tutor must have been damn good, but when the final exams came along she had a breakdown. Couldn’t sit. Well, you can never know with a thing like that, but my feeling was at the time, she might not have got a First, you see, and Kate Oliver who we were both friendly with was going to get one, and did. She wasn’t speaking to Kate anyway by then because Kate had told a lot of lies about her to her boyfriend and taken him off her. Maybe. How it looked to me was he met Kate through her and fancied Kate better. I wouldn’t have said thank you for him myself. He was reading engineering.’
‘Oh, yeah. Er, did you ever met her first husband? Book illustrator, wasn’t he?’
‘Mainly. I never met him but I heard a bit about him. Illustrating books was what he liked doing best, well you know what I mean. What he liked doing next best was looking at books that had illustrations by other people and reading books about them. He liked doing anything like that much better than going to parties that had writers and artists and people like that at them.’
‘Well, I must say I can see his … Good God.’
‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing, I’ve just remembered something somebody told me about Nowell. Any more on this fellow?’
‘Apparently, I’ve forgotten who I had this from but he didn’t go about the business of illustrating books in an intelligent way. He wanted to do good illustrations in serious books, proper books. Not trendy illustrations in trendy books that made a lot of money.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ I said, not telling nothing but the truth.
‘Suit yourself, Stanley, it’s only what I heard.’
With disastrous timing the waiter brought the humous and the taramasalata and the rest of it at this point, failing miserably to encroach on an intimate moment or kill a punch line. I put my hand out to my glass and then left it. Easy on the ouzo tonight, and not just that either.
Lindsey caught my movement. ‘You’re not drinking. Not by your standards.’
‘No, sod it. Daren’t. Getting into practice. Motoring correspondent loses licence? It’s going to change my bleeding life. Turn driving into just another thing I do, like playing squash or writing letters to the motoring press. Don’t know how I’ll adjust to it.’
After a pause she said quietly, ‘Do you want to talk about your son?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I don’t want to talk about him.’
‘Worse than Susan, isn’t it?’
I nodded.
‘I know, I nearly lost my younger one six years ago. Hit and run. She was … Sorry.’
‘Go back to those bleeding schooldays of Susan’s,’ I said. ‘And what were they exactly, those unprepossessing facts?’
‘She had to be taken away from school — had to be? — because, one, she was homesick. Translation — she very much wanted to be back in a place where she could do what she wanted to do all the time. Two, the bullying. Translation — some of the other little girls got rather cheesed off with the way she kept trying to do what she wanted to do all the time, including queening it over the rest of them, and showed her a bit of opposition. I used to wonder how much. Telling her to pipe down, I dare say. Perhaps getting together and jeering at her and even pulling her hair. Fiendish things like that.
‘Her parents came up to Oxford once, at least I saw them once. The old lady was very straightforward about looking at me as if I was talking Swahili whenever I opened my mouth, which wasn’t often after the first minute as you might imagine. And looking at the others for help too. You know, for Christ’s sake don’t leave me alone with this savage.’
‘Yes, actually I do know.’
‘But the old gentleman was the one. Would you believe it, you probably wouldn’t believe it but he said to me when she’d gone off for a pee or something, he said, honest he said, “What do you think of my little gel? Rather splendid, isn’t she?” That’s what he said. I told you you wouldn’t believe it.’
‘Nor I do. Else he was trying to be funny.’
‘He was not trying to be funny, Stanley. He was, how shall I put it, he was the archetype of the ridiculously indulgent father who worships the ground his little gel walks on and, you know, fancies her quite a bit. Oh yes. Seriously. I don’t mean of course anything happened, nowhere near, but it was there, there was something there. Obviously it’s all years ago now.’
/> ‘Look, love, this is fascinating, and I believe every word of it, but you started off by saying you thought she was quite capable of er, putting on a show like the one with the knife, and that’s what I really want to hear about. Is there any more to come? I mean what you’ve told me so far …’
‘What about it?’ asked Lindsey when I failed to go on.
‘I was going to say just, the whole thing sounds no worse than the dossier of any other deranged bleeding completely wrapped up in herself female, and then I remembered I always thought she was better than that. I thought she was, you know, reasonable and listened to what you said to her and you could disagree with her.’
‘You could until it started to matter. You gave her a soft ride from what you’ve told me in the past, and then quite suddenly she finds she’s coming second. And the lady simply is not cut out for coming second.
‘Now Stanley dear, I hope you believe I’d never have breathed a word of this if things had been going on as before. But now they’re all over the shop … I wasn’t going to tell you, sweetheart, but there was this time a friend of Kate’s gave a party in her digs, nothing grand, I was there, just drinks before hall, and old Susan thought she ought to have been invited, well maybe. Anyway, after about an hour she walked in carrying a bottle of champagne and looking, well, I’d read about people’s faces looking like masks, but hers really did. Everybody said Hallo, rather awkward like, and she didn’t say anything, but she hurled the bottle of champagne clean through the window of this sitting room place which was on the first floor, and the thing burst like a bloody bomb in the street, lucky it didn’t hit anyone, and then she just went wild and smashed every glass and everything she could get her hands on until she was, you have to say overpowered, it took about four rugger-players to hold her down. Then she started crying and apologizing, and that went on a long time. Oh, there was no doubt about who’d come first that evening, not in popularity, no, but in attention-grabbing she was well in front.
‘Afterwards she said she didn’t know what had got into her. I thought about it a fair amount. That bottle of champagne now, a fucking expensive missile if that’s all you’d ever wanted it for. A half-brick would have done just as well. I reckoned what she’d done, she’d bought the champagne and was going to come and hand it over as a gift to the hostess, a gift with a kind of a string to it because it would put paid to any crap about not being invited. A performance that would have made a bit of a stir for a short while, nothing like what she did do. She changed her mind at the last minute, perhaps as late as when she came into the room and saw all the buggers laughing and chattering and boozing happily away without her. Acting on the spur of the moment. Like I bet she did with that knife last night.’ Lindsey had turned quite grim, staring at me through the big lenses. ‘As for being mad, you should have seen her face that time. She was unrecognizable, well I recognized her but I wouldn’t have if, what, if I’d passed her in the street. Off her head. Temporarily. Or temporarily letting it show.’
From being well on the way to something like certainty that Susan had been telling the truth about the knife I was now back to not knowing what I believed or felt about any of that. Or anything else I could turn my mind to. Trying to think was like picking through a rubbish-dump looking for nothing in particular. Eventually I said, ‘If this hadn’t come up I might never have found out about her,’ only because I had been able to see how to get to the end of the sentence.
‘Something else would have, it was bound to. People like that, it’s as if they have to make something like that happen sooner or later. Their natures need it. Like a drunk wanting a fight. They’re more bothered about getting one than where it comes from.’
‘Why did she marry me?’
For once Lindsey was stumped for a quick answer, or more likely turned down the one she first thought of. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘you’re successful, but in a different line so you wouldn’t be competing with her, you gave her a lot of rope and what the fuck can I say, Stanley dear, you’re a nice enough fellow and quite an attractive fellow and I should imagine she was as fond of you as she could be of anybody. Still is, I dare say, or could be again.’
With the last few words the waiter brought the moussaka and the stifadou and the rest of the rubbish, which was not much but the worst he could manage in the circumstances. Susan was shut out of the conversation after that but she hung about in my head, not the look of her but the feel of her presence, the kind of thing I got when I came into the house and knew she was there even though there was nothing to see or hear. Oh well, it would be all right when we were back in the flat, I thought to myself, and Lindsey seemed to have the same idea, turning down sweet and coffee and looking at her watch. But then when we were back drinking the coffee she had made she put me right on more than one point. Actually the way she measured me with her eye told me most of it before she opened her mouth.
‘I’m sorry, Stanley, but —’
‘Barry due back, is he?’ I had seen signs of male occupation, though long rather than short term, Suits but no shirts, boots, slippers and plimsolls but only one pair of shoes. ‘Or somebody?’
‘No, nobody. Just, I have these interviews fixed in Glasgow tomorrow and I’m getting the sleeper up there tonight, and I have to put my gear together first. So if you —’
‘Fly up in the morning,’ I said, knowing it was hopeless. ‘I’ll drive you to the airport.’
‘No, sweetheart, I can’t, I’d like to but everything’s arranged.’
‘But as long as I … No of course, I see.’
She refused my offer of a lift to the station in half an hour from now, as it would have been. Whether to put her gear together or not she clearly wanted some time to herself before she took off. Quite understandable. On the way to the front door I realized I had got as far as not being sure what names to give our second child if it was a girl. Ha ha, very funny.
‘Sorry, darling,’ she said. ‘This was all fixed up a couple of weeks ago and you only rang this morning.’
‘I know. It’s all right. See you when you get back.’
‘I don’t like thinking of you going back to that empty house.’
‘I’m not mad about it myself.’
At the Paki supermarket in Hampstead I bought a jar of crunchy peanut butter, a pot of savoury spread, a large jar of pickled onions, a jar of sweet pickle, a small sliced white loaf, a packet of Cheddar, a packet of Brazil nut kernels, a box of liqueur chocolates and a box of chocolate truffles. The other things I needed, butter and whisky, were in stock at home. I unpacked the stuff on the kitchen table, drank some whisky and thought about laundrettes, Chinese takeaways and kindred matters for some minutes. Then I rang Cliff, late as it was, and told him the score. By now I had got it down to about five sentences.
He seemed more shaken than I had expected him to be. After a silence he said, ‘So you’re on your own there.’
‘Yes.’
‘Has she gone for good, do you think?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, we can’t discuss it now,’ he said rather peevishly, and there was another short pause. Then, ‘Come to dinner tomorrow, I mean supper. Just the three of us.’ When I had accepted he said, ‘So I’ll see you in the Admiral Byron about seven, where it’ll just be the two of us. Stan, I’m sorry.’
Nash said, ‘I think we can be reasonably confident that he’ll now be more or less suitably looked after and will be given suitable treatment, at any rate for a time. The effect of that assault … which you described to me… he went into his spaced-out mode, ‘one effect … has been to put the fear of God into Dr Collings. Even she rather balks at the idea of an unmedicated and … presumptively violent patient of hers on the loose. You can discount her threat of discharging your boy. Sheer anger. She spoke out of sheer anger at her … apparent professional failure. As you surmised.’
‘I’m still not happy about leaving my son in her charge,’ I said.
‘Nobody could be happy
at the thought of someone in that position with the ideas that she professes to hold. But while in the intervals of talking modish twaddle, or even démodé twaddle, she administers reasonably appropriate chemotherapy … The boy would find much the same thing in most other places. A different line in twaddle, perhaps.’
‘I see. Dr Nash, I should tell you that there is a possibility that my wife’s wound was self-inflicted.’
He looked as though I had told him that somebody was dead, lowering his eyes, sighing deeply and sitting in silence for a time. Eventually he said, ‘With the aim of bringing about the result I’ve just described to you? To get shot of the lad, was that the idea?’
‘Could be. But I think more likely for my benefit, to draw attention away from him and on to herself.’
He had started doing little rapid nods before I was halfway through. ‘If you come to any conclusion on the matter, however tentative, I hope you’ll let me know. Talk to Dr Wainwright about it.’
‘I will. When she thought I doubted her story she walked out. Left me.’ It came out without much in the way of intention.
This news he took more or less in his stride, as something almost to be expected, but he said seriously enough, ‘You have my profound sympathy in all senses of the word.’
‘Doctor, if we assume my son did attack my wife,’ — now there was a ridiculous phrase if ever there was one — ‘does that make his prospects of recovery a lot worse? I’m afraid that’s not very well put.’
‘I follow you perfectly. No. In effect, in itself no. In the sense that very violent cases may recover and harmless peaceable ones become and remain isolated. But as I said I would welcome information on the point.’
I waited for a bit in the hope that he would offer me sherry for something to say, but he held his peace. I said hesitantly, ‘Could we go back to Dr Collings for a moment? When we talked about her before, I thought you were saying, of course it was difficult in front of my wife, but I thought you were saying that she was getting at me, sorry, that Dr Collings was getting at me out of sheer malice, and I thought you meant that she was simply trying to …’