‘Fuck you up because you were a man,’ said Nash, disconcerting me to some extent. ‘Yes, Mr Duke, that was what I meant. As you say, I was a little inhibited by your wife’s presence.
‘But surely, Dr Nash, that’s not enough of a motive on its own to make somebody, you know, in a professional matter like that, with these very important things at stake …’
‘Not enough of a motive?’ His voice had gone high. ‘Fucking up a man? Not enough of a motive? What are you talking about? Good God, you’ve had wives, haven’t you? And not impossibly had some acquaintance with other women as well? You can’t be new to feeling the edge of the most powerful weapon in their armoury. You must have suffered before from the effect of their having noticed, at least the brighter ones among them having noticed, that men are different, men quite often wonder whether they’re doing the right thing and worry about it, men have been known to blame themselves for behaving badly, men not only feel they’ve made mistakes but on occasion will actually admit having done so, and say they’re sorry, and ask to be forgiven, and promise not to do it again, and mean it. Think of that! Mean it. All beyond female comprehension. Which incidentally is why they’re not novelists and must never be priests. Not enough of a motive? They don’t have motives as you and I understand them. They have the means and the opportunity, that is enough.’
At the start of this he had stared at me in what looked like stark fear, wondering whether I might not be an android or have been taken over by an alien entity. After that he calmed down, though not completely by any means, and now went back most of the way to the stark-fear mode when he said, ‘For God’s sake tell me you know what I’m talking about.’
‘Oh, of course I do. But the way I see it, they have motives of a sort. It’s the sort that’s frightening. I think Collings let Steve out of hospital and took him off drugs to punish me for ticking her off for —’
‘Oh, there’ll have been some trigger, no doubt,’ he said, making a sideways neck-chop motion. ‘In sufferers from rabies a touch on the arm or showing a bright light is sufficient to provoke a violent suffocative paroxysm. No doubt you did annoy or displease the woman in some way. What of it?’
‘Well, I think that makes her unfit to be in charge of —’
‘Forget it, my dear fellow. If things went that far, can you imagine yourself telling a tribunal that in your opinion a certain qualified doctor and psychiatrist is unfit to be in charge of a certain case because in your opinion she has been swayed by personal motives? A tribunal that included at least one woman? Take your time.’
‘I don’t need any. No.’
‘So be it. Let’s leave Dr Collings, Mr Duke. I’ll, I’ll see to her, or keep her in order. My turn to go back. On our first meeting, at your house, do you remember my asking you if you thought all women were mad?’
‘Very clearly,’ I said. ‘And I told you I thought a lot of them were. Well, what’s happened in the meantime hasn’t exactly forced me to change my mind.’
‘I find that very natural. Would you say, would you go as far as to say that the real mad people are not the ones in mental hospitals, like your son, but … women, certain women?’
‘It’s tempting. Or rather —’
‘It is tempting. Half of it, anyway.’ Yes, he was calm, and yet not relaxed, holding himself down or in, mentally biding his time to leap out at you. ‘It seems you hold to your view on certain selected women. M’m. That’s young Wainwright’s view, of course, or on the way to it. He thinks they’re all mad, or says he does. Of course one must bear in mind that in the ordinary way a general practitioner has very little contact with insane people. Neurotic people, on the other hand…’
‘For God’s sake, Dr Nash, does somebody have to be frothing at the mouth or going for you with an axe or chattering about reincarnated Old Testament prophets before you’ll pass them as mad? Can’t they be mad part-time, a bit mad? Like you can have a grumbling appendix without actually …’
Nash was not listening. His chest slowly filled with air. This was going to be the big one. ‘Would … that … they … were … mmmmad,’ he grated out in five loud sliced-off screeches, displaying his off-white teeth and looking far from sane himself. ‘If only … they were … off their heads. Then we could treat-’em, lock-’em-up, bung-’em-in-a-straitjacket, cut-’em-off-from-society. But they’re not. They’re not.’
He sprang up, came round his desk and advanced on me. I wondered briefly if he took me for a transvestite, a male impersonator, but he was only on the first leg of a series of pacings to and fro. ‘Mad people,’ he went on in a tone not much less strung-up than before, ‘can’t run their lives, they’re incapable of dealing with reality. How many women are like that? Mad people are hopelessly muddled with their thoughts, their feelings, their behaviour, their talk at variance with one another and all over the place. Does that sound like a description of a woman? Mad people are confused, adrift, troubled, even frightened. What woman is? — really is, I mean.
‘No,’ he said, starting another crescendo. ‘No. They’re not mad. They’re all too monstrously, sickeningly, terrifyingly sane. That’s the whole trouble. That’s the whole trouble,’ he repeated in his normal voice, blinking and moving his head about like a fellow coming round after a blackout. ‘Well, Mr Duke, I hope your marital difficulties sort themselves out. Because after all one has to be married. That’s where they’ve … Now I know you’re a busy man and I too have things to do. We will be in touch.’
At the door he said, ‘Your boy has a good chance.’
I was as busy as I could manage to be for the rest of the day. I kept trying to throw off the thought of Steve, then when trying to think about Susan instead kept breaking down. I switched to trying to work out why I had the feeling that he would never be back. Perhaps it came from something Nash had said that morning. But he had said very little on the matter and nothing new. Perhaps there had been something in his manner, something more unhopeful than his words. Perhaps, more likely, it went back to the previous morning and the tiny glimpse I had had of Steve as he used to be, an instant and complete reminder of the person I had already started to forget. No doubt what could happen once for a second could in theory happen again for longer, and I did my best to believe it without getting very far. In the end I had no real idea at all why that Steve seemed gone for good and the one I saw every day, the miserable, quaking, humourless nitwit who was also my son, looked like being a fixture. As for him, it would be better if he were dead, provided that could be arranged without him having to die.
Some of this went through my head while I sat drinking Scotch and waiting for Cliff. As I had found on previous visits with him, the Admiral Byron was frequented by Scottish labourers, probably building workers, given to shouting unreassuringly to one another. However, it seemed he had never seen an actual fight in here, perhaps because of something one of the Scotsmen had gone out of his way to explain to us, that anybody who looked like starting one was given a right good hiding and thrown out. The staff changed frequently and only the landlord ever knew what the place served or where it was kept, apart from the stuff on tap. Nobody would have called it cosy — it was vast, hangar-like, the result of the knocking-into-one of several smaller bars or even, to judge by the differences of structure and style from one end to the other, a couple of separate pubs. But it had no juke-box or fruit-machine and at the moment, before the Scotsmen, it was quiet.
Cliff came bustling in a little later than he had said, complaining as usual, quite cheerfully as usual, this time mostly about the one-way traffic system and the hospital staffs’ trade union with a bit about a urologist thrown in. Then quite soon he looked at me and nodded his head several times and sighed.
‘There’s a splendid fellow called Sydney Smith,’ he said. ‘I don’t mean, you know, that fucking old fool.’
‘What fucking old fool?’
He gave a growl of disgust. ‘Of course, I keep forgetting you haven’t looked at a book since you left
school and precious few before. There was a posturing old ponce of a clergyman in Jane Austen’s time, oh Christ, never mind, anyway he was called Sydney Smith and a lot of people, people like, well I was going to say Susan, er, think he was a bloody scream. But as I say I don’t mean him. Jesus. Anyway, my Sydney Smith wrote the standard work on forensic medicine, which I suppose I’m going to have …’
‘No, I can do that,’ I said. ‘Legal medicine. Medicine as regards the law.’
‘Man’s a genius. Well, in this work there is naturally a chapter on self-inflicted wounds.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yes, oh. How a genuine wound inflicted on a person trying to protect himself or herself against an assailant with a knife is usually on or in the hand, sometimes the wrist, the inside of the wrist. That’s point one. The characteristics of a self-inflicted wound are, made in a safe part of the body unless of course we’re talking about throat-cutting et cetera, so not for example the inside of the wrist where there are dodgy things like veins but for example the forearm, the top or outside of the forearm.’ He made gestures in case I had never bothered to find out what a forearm was. ‘Where Susan, er, was wounded.
‘Next thing, the cut will not penetrate what we medical johnnies call the true skin, that’s your corium, a quarter of an inch or so deep in places like that. As with Susan’s wound. Then, the cut follows the curvature of the body if that part is curved, like the forearm. You can see how that wouldn’t happen with a real stab. I’d have liked to take a better look but it’s a pound to a pinch of shit that Susan’s wound did that. And the last thing but perhaps the most telling, I’ve never quite understood why, but they all seem to have a dry run or two first, little tentative nicks alongside the main wound, even the cut-throat brigade — I’ve seen it. Anyway, there were a couple of those on Susan’s arm. And there we are. I’d take my chance with a jury on it.
‘Bloody silly of her, wouldn’t you say, apart from anything else? You’d think an intelligent girl like that would realize it was on the cards there’d be some sort of give-away. She must have got the idea one moment and done it the next, on impulse. Mad as a hatter, like the lot of them. Must have seemed like a heaven-sent opportunity when poor old Steve came wandering in. What a marvellous bloody irony, eh, that it took that to get Collings and her gang to start looking after him properly at Key’s. I talked to some Paki there.’
‘Yeah. Nash went over.’
When Cliff saw I had nothing more to offer about Nash he said, ‘Disasters are just crappy things that happen, you know, Stan. It’s a waste of time to try to explain them or make sense of them.’
‘Which one are you talking about?’
‘Steve, of course. I’m afraid I don’t regard the other one, her walking out that is, as all that much of a disaster.’ When I made no reply to that he said, ‘Another irony, if we’re collecting the buggers, is that she attains her object and successfully got Steve out of her hair and now she’s not around to enjoy it. What?’
‘Oh, I don’t think that was her object. I think she was scene-stealing.’ It was clear that he understood me immediately. ‘At least that was what I thought at the time. I’m not so sure that I’m so sure now. It’s hard to feel it makes much difference. I’ll tell Nash about her arm and the rest of it.’
‘I’ll tell him, I want a word with him anyway. Let’s have it again now.
She walked out on you because she thought you thought she’d stabbed herself and said Steve did it, right?’
‘Next time, take more care. She walked out after saying she knew I thought that. After saying a great deal more besides. She was … mad with rage that I’d seen through or I might have seen through an extremely dodgy operation she may already have been regretting — as unwise, naturally, not bad form or anything silly like that. If seen through, eh? it would show her up as some kind of monster. At the same time she was calculating that anything short of mad rage would be as bad as a half-hearted denial — but there of course she was going by what her own reaction would have been and didn’t realize that a wholehearted denial would have cut much more ice with me, or you or any other man. But then again she was mad with rage. I must have annoyed her quite a bit in the past and she’d bottled it up and it all came out at once. She was frightened too — you showed you suspected her. What was that for, by the way?’
‘For just that, to frighten her, frighten her off. I didn’t know what she might have got up to next. I meant to signal to her but not to you, but I was so bloody cross myself that I muffed it, clearly. Terrible how they drag us down to their level, isn’t it? Crikey, you do know her well, Stan. Pity you didn’t before, but then you never do, one doesn’t I mean. Did you work all that out in just those couple of minutes just now?’
‘No, I was on it all the time I was going round telling myself that of course the whole thing was perfectly genuine. Men’s minds are funny things too, you know. Oh, the rest of it was, the walking-out was an escalation of the bawling-out. Plus it would have been a wee bit awkward for her to stay in the same house after some of the things she’d said.’
‘She’ll come walking back in again, won’t she?’ said Cliff a moment or two later.
‘No. Live with a man who thinks or knows she did a thing like that?’
‘She’ll pretend you don’t think or know it. So will you. It never happened. Easy as winking.’
‘Some of what she said …’
‘That’s your problem. She was upset, wasn’t she, after being attacked with a knife? Who wouldn’t be?’
‘She won’t be back.’
I went and got more drinks. The place was filling up, though mostly down the far end in the part that looked like an old-fashioned railway waiting room. When I gave my order the little slut with her hair green and half an inch long all over cut me off by saying ‘Sorry?’ almost as soon as I opened my mouth. When I was a kid you hung on a bit if you missed the first few words and hoped to pick up the drift later. Anyway, I had more luck with my second go and at least she knew where the Famous Grouse was.
Cliff was looking thoughtful. ‘According to some bloke on the telly the other night,’ he said, ‘twenty-five per cent of violent crime in England and Wales is husbands assaulting wives. Amazing figure that, don’t you think? You’d expect it to be more like eighty per cent. Just goes to show what an easy-going lot English husbands are, only one in four of them bashing his wife. No, it doesn’t mean that, does it? But it’s funny about wife-battering. Nobody ever even asks what the wife had been doing or saying. She’s never anything but an ordinary God-fearing woman who happens to have a battering husband. Same as race prejudice. Here are a lot of fellows who belong to a race minding their own business and being as good as gold and not letting butter melt in their mouths, and bugger me if a gang of prejudiced chaps don’t rush up and start discriminating against them. Frightfully unfair.’
‘The root of all the trouble,’ I said, ‘is we want to fuck them, the pretty ones, women I mean. Just try and imagine it happening to you, everyone wanting to fuck you wherever you go. And of course being ready to pay for you if your father’s stopped doing that. You’d have to be pretty tough to stand up to it, wouldn’t you? In fact women only want one thing, for men to want to fuck them. If they do, it means they can fuck them up. Am I drunk? What I was trying to say, if you want to fuck a woman she can fuck you up. And if you don’t want to she fucks you up anyway for not wanting to.’
‘I read somewhere about a Hollywood film star,’ said Cliff. ‘I forget which one, years ago anyway, she was getting on a bit, used to go to a lot of parties, it might have been Madeleine Carroll, one night she went to one and nobody made a pass at her, so she went home and took an overdose. That was coming out into the open a bit, I agree.’
‘Actually they used to feel they needed something in the way of provocation,’ I said, ‘but now they seem to feel they can get on with the job of fucking you up any time they feel like it. That’s what Women’s Lib is for.’
&n
bsp; ‘It’s getting worse,’ said Cliff, ‘now they’re competing on equal terms in so many places and find they still finish behind men. They can’t even produce a few decent fucking jugglers. Like the race thing again.’
‘They say people go on getting married to the same person time after time,’ I said. ‘Well men certainly do. There isn’t another other sex.
‘It’s no use saying anything to a woman,’ said Cliff ultimately, and drained his glass.
I waited, but there was no follow-up. ‘When what?’
‘What?’
‘It’s no use saying anything to a woman when what? Or unless what?’
‘When nothing. Ever.’
We had a couple more drinks and were quite merry by the time we got to the Wainwrights’ house in Holland Park, and were quite unmerry again two minutes later. Sandra was cross about something. I could not have said what was different from usual in her manner or tone or expression or anywhere else, not really, not in detail, and yet I could tell. I could have told at a hundred metres. Of course I could. Any man could. Any man was meant to. I had sometimes wondered if they thought we thought they were really trying to keep their feelings to themselves at times like these, but if you knew that you could destroy the world.
I got half a minute of it to myself at the start because Cliff had broken off for a pee in the hall cloakroom. Sandra embraced me with all the warmth of a recent rape victim.
‘Cliff tells me Susan’s walked out on you,’ she said. ‘That must be upsetting for you.’
‘Yes it is rather.’ I wondered how she would talk and look if she were telling me instead that Susan was to be congratulated and whatever upset I got from this or anything else would do me a power of good.
‘I suppose it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other,’ she said, meaning such was the impudent travesty I was preparing to palm off on the public. ‘It usually seems to be.’