I said, ‘You’re back early, then. Do you mind if I have a drink?’
‘Of course not. You sit down. I tried to ring, but the switchboard had blown up or something. Whisky and water?’
‘Yeah, lovely.’
When I came to the bit about Nowell and her getting Steve to agree to be taken off, I kept a careful eye on Susan. I took no decision to — I just found I had started to. In nearly four years, longer if you went back to our first meeting, I had never known her say or do anything that showed how she felt about Nowell. I realized this was a pretty big statement to make on any woman’s feelings about any other woman, not just her husband’s ex-wife, if by anything you meant anything. She had obviously found some third way of getting across to me her total hatred, contempt and horror. Her words to me on the subject that Friday night, reminding me that Steve had seemed upset once or twice after visiting his mother, had come over with about the punch of a traffic report. This time round it was the same story — nothing that could show on the tapes, audio or visual, and great waves of umbrage. Fair enough. Still, I thought there was no point in piling it on by going into Nowell’s phone-call to me, which had really not added anything, so I ended up with Steve going off in that docile way.
When she could see there was no more to come, Susan said, ‘Good. What a relief,’ and got up and started to put the kettle on. She had not once interrupted me or even shifted about much.
‘Yes, it is,’ I said. ‘It seems a bit sudden, though, that’s all. Doesn’t it?’
‘Shoving him in on sight, so to speak. Very sudden. But by what standards? If he’d had a ruptured appendix or whatever it is, not sudden in the least.’
‘It can’t be as urgent as a physical thing.’
‘Maybe not — I wouldn’t know. I’m just saying, what you mind isn’t Steve going into hospital suddenly, without warning — you mind Nash suddenly deciding he should go in. The way you see it, he should have thought about it longer, a serious step like that, gone away and come back again. That’s because you don’t know any more than I do about psychological things, mental things. They seem like just a branch of ordinary things, don’t they? Literature’s rather the same, to a lot of people. Anyway, I see no reason why Nash should be less right today than he would be on Monday. I can’t remember whether I’ve ever told you, but I had a barmy cousin once, so I’ve been through part of this before. Would you like some tea?’
‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘No, yes, I will. Thanks.’
‘What have you had to eat?’
‘Not a lot.’
Susan washed out the teapot at the sink and carefully dried the inside, a thing of hers. Then she said, ‘Those points Nash made about the drugs and the tests and so on, it’s much easier to do them in hospital, you agreed with all that, I thought.’
‘Yeah. Yes. Didn’t you?’
‘Oh yes. And that Joshua business put the lid on it, you said yourself. So I don’t quite see …’ Standing behind me, she put her hand gently on my shoulder and went on in a gentle voice, ‘What’s really bothering you, darling?’
I put my hand over hers. ‘Well, it was what he said when he told Nash and me he was prepared to go in — I ought to be pleased because I was getting rid of him and that was the only thing I cared about, according to him.’
‘Is that all? I don’t suppose he meant it very seriously, do you? And even if he —’
‘It’s not that so much, I’d just hate to think he was right and I wasn’t actually interested in what’d be best for him, only in getting him off my back.’
‘Without you realizing it. Give it a rest, Stanley, you’re much too self-aware for any of that kind of crap. Also much too bright not to be able to see that what’s best for somebody can quite easily be what’s best and most convenient for somebody else as well, you for instance. But too bloody sentimental and silly to take it in, to believe yourself. And what’s wrong with getting him off your back in the state he’s in at the moment? And there’s my back to be considered too, you know.’ There had been no gentleness in her voice for a bit, but I could hear some of it when she said, ‘And too silly to ring me up.’
She leant down and kissed me. With me sitting at the table as I was we were only able to hug each other in a rather badly-organized way, but it seemed not to matter much. There was plenty I wanted to say to her, all good, all nice things, only I could not sort them out or get them to sound right in my head, so I made pleased, friendly noises and stroked her neck. In a minute she straightened up and went to make the tea.
Later I rang the hospital number the fellow had given me, and after what I thought was an uncommonly short space of time an Asian voice said Yes, Mr Duke had been admitted that afternoon. But I could find out nothing else whatever, not even whether somebody might tell Mr Duke that his father had called.
2 Progress
When I rang the hospital the next day the response was much as before. Another Asian voice, or quite likely the same one, said Mr Duke was comfortable but, it turned out, was not to be visited — not must on no account be or taking everything into account had better not be, just was not to be. After a repeat on the Monday morning I decided unenthusiastically to try and get hold of one of the doctors, but to put it off until after eleven, when there would be no excuse for such people not being on duty.
People like advertising managers of daily newspapers needed to get off the mark a bit earlier. I arrived in my office to find my deputy and our joint secretary already in position, which was right. Everything they told and showed me was very dull except the news, passed on a strip of flimsy that Thurifer Chemicals were cancelling their half-page.
‘That leaves them five light,’ said my deputy, a capable but non-drinking Welshman called Morgan Wyndham who liked being what he called realistic. ‘Five out of eight.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘He can’t do that.’
‘He won’t be there yet,’ Morgan told me when I started to dial the agency.
I ignored him. After the last digit there was a click or two and then a colossal silence, as though I had been put through to the house of the dead. Another try ended the same way.
Morgan looked over from his own phone. ‘Was he there?’
‘Probably not, but I didn’t get that far.’ Next time I did a switch in the hope of flushing out the bugs, and got the ringing tone in fine style.
‘Penangan High Commission, good morning,’ said a girl’s voice.
‘Is the Commercial Attaché there, please?’ I knew that sounded none too clever, but the thing was that like all his pals, apparently, the chap had three names, just one syllable each and, to look at on his official card, perfectly pronounceable as small chunks of near-English. But when I had tried them over the phone a few weeks before, this girl or her colleague, though as English as your hat, had not known what I meant, or so she had said and gone on saying. Eventually she had produced three amazing noises that according to her I must have meant, and I must have, because the right chap at once came on the line. And thereupon became the Commercial bleeding Attaché for ever in my book.
‘Just a moment, sir,’ the operator was saying politely. I thought she sounded marvellous. ‘Er … did you want to speak to Mr One Three Five or Mr Two Four Six?’
Of course that was not what she said, but it was no further from it than half the other ways I could have put it. Her question put me in a bit of a quandary. ‘What’s the difference?’ I asked eventually.
‘Well… Mr One’s the old Attaché, and Mr Two came last week.’
‘Oh, yeah. Right, give me Mr One, if you would.’ This sounded like, or rather probably was, the right chap, and also incidentally a chap destined to go jetting back to Penang at any moment, but there was not a lot I could do with that thought except bear it in mind.
I gave my name and that of the paper, and after a moment a high-pitched voice that made you think of sweet and sour pork said, ‘Hallo, yes?’
‘It’s Stanley Duke, Mr Attaché,’ I sa
id for good measure. ‘You remember we discussed a possible special report in my paper. I wonder if you’d had a chance to think about it.’
‘Ah — Mr Joke. Oh yes.’ He sounded pretty well overcome with joy. ‘Now everything is being arranged. I’m communicating with my government and they’re being very interested. Extremely interested. Particularly the Minister of Trade will be coming to Europe next month and will be spending three days in London. He’s being very intelligent and very well educated and has visited Australia. Now I think with your good assistance he’ll be understanding the commercial advantages of my proposal.’
Mr One tended to speak of his fellow-countrymen as worthy but limited, needing a Western nudge of some sort to fall in with his proposals, of which the latest known to me was the buying of space in the paper to tell its readers, or a couple of dozen of them, about his country’s achievements. Actually that particular proposal had come from me in the first place, but I found I could face having the credit hogged.
‘You and I,’ he tinkled on, ‘will be making some arrangements beforehand. We mustn’t trouble the Minister with details. Please come to lunch here. I think you like our food.’
‘Oh, delicious.’ I liked their ginseng stuff too, though delicious was probably not the word for it. ‘I’ll look forward to that. Well, I mustn’t keep you, Mr Attaché.’ Then a thought struck me. ‘By the way, I gather you have an assistant these days.’
It had not been a good thought. ‘Assistant?’ said Mr One in a voice like a blast off the Eiger. ‘What assistant?’
‘I don’t know, the switchboard seemed to think —’
‘Oh no. No no. I’m not having an assistant, Mr Joke.’
‘Sorry, I just —’
‘He’s being an observer, you understand. We’re calling him an observer, you see. Please telephone my secretary shortly to arrange lunch. And please give my regards to your charming wife.’
No light on the replacement question, then, but the stuff about the advertising space was good news as far as it went. Lunch with Mr One, assuming he managed not to vaporize first, would be no huge treat, still, worth it for the experience and for telling Susan afterwards. She had got a mention just now because she had given a small party for the Penangan Cultural Attaché, and he had invited us to a do at his High Commission, and among those present had been Mr One, in on whom I had homed as soon as I had heard what he was, and then Penangans were the sort of people who took a lot of trouble over things like wives.
I glanced up and saw a short bearded man watching me from the doorway, or what might have been the doorway if the walls of my office had come up high enough to contain a door instead of only reaching about as far as the top of this fellow’s head. That was as far as the walls of nearly everyone’s office had come up since the inside of the whole building was remodelled at some stage in the Seventies. Perhaps he had not been actually watching me, only looking at me, but I felt a bit watched that day.
When I reckoned I had noticed him he said, ‘Got a minute?’
‘Sure,’ I said, standing up behind my desk. You always had a minimum of that much for the Editor, whoever he might be. This one’s name was Harry Coote and he had not been in the job long, anyway not as long as I had been in mine, which was what counted, and what made me feel a little uneasy too from time to time. Harry struck me as one of those men who very much preferred their own ideas to other people’s on all sorts of issues, including ones like who should and especially who should not be advertising manager of the paper they edited. Of course nobody took a blind bit of notice of what editors thought about that unless the paper was putting on readers, but then rather to my surprise the paper was putting on readers, and doing it at a time when its rivals were giving all their readers cars to try and coax them to go on being their readers a bit longer. And I liked my job — I thought I was good at it slightly more than I liked it, but still.
On my way out I dropped the Thurifer note in front of Morgan. I followed Harry along to his office, which had walls that went all the way to the ceiling, also enough hardware to launch a smallish satellite, also a long tank for tropical fish with no fish in it, no other creatures either, no greenery, no water even, just sand, stones and empty shells, and a light still going that probably no one knew how to put out. In its active days the tank had tipped you off that a great man worked here, along the lines of a flint-glass sherry decanter or an antelope-hoof snuffbox further back.
‘How are things?’ asked Harry. That just meant he was not yet ready to come to the point, if any.
‘Fine,’ I said, pretending to hesitate before turning down one of the dusty, gnarled cheroots he showed me. ‘You remember that business about the Penangan report we talked about.’ I ran through part of my phone conversation. When the subject had been mentioned before Harry had shown guarded approval. To print four or any number of pages of guff about a distant and irrelevant hell-hole would do nothing, or nothing good, for circulation but it would raise the tone, lift the paper a millimetre up market. More than once I had noticed him saying he thought it was time to improve the paper’s image, give it a touch of quality, etc. Perhaps he really hated to have it putting on readers. Anyway, it might be interesting to see his reaction to the nearer approach of the Penangan report.
It was interesting, but not encouraging. ‘Yes, well, that’s what you get,’ he said firmly and vaguely. He wanted to register doubt or disapproval without knowing how. ‘Of course, it’s nothing to do with me.’ There he was telling the strict truth, only it lacked conviction.
‘Well, we’ll see how it goes.’ Not easy to quarrel with that either.
‘You’re, er, you’re going to meet this Minister of Trade bloke, are you?’
‘I thought I would, yeah. When he comes over.’
‘If he does.’
‘That’s right, if he does.’
Harry’s mouth buckled behind the beard with the exertion of dragging air through his cheroot. You could tell they were a cruel smoke just from the look of them. For some reason I thought of what he had been known to do, perhaps invariably did do, when he had you up to dinner at his bachelor joint in Tufnell Park — give you an admittedly not too bad Chinese takeaway meal and make you eat it with chopsticks, real ones though, mind you, bought or stolen on some all-expenses trip to Peking. I had never been asked along myself, but had had the facts on the first-hand authority of the Features Editor, who had heard from somebody else, somebody not even in Fleet Street, that at one of these blow-outs Harry had given them tea to wash it down with, pointing out that actually with any national food you were supposed to drink the national drink, the wine of the country, which in this case any fool could see was not wine. There had been times when 1 found the tea story a bit hard to believe, but at the sight of Harry now, looking quite upset at the way his cheroot would not draw to suit him, I could manage it all right.
After a short silence he said, ‘I’ve been thinking about you, Stanley.’
I could think of one or two rude answers to that but no polite ones, so I just looked expectant.
‘You really, you really enjoy doing what you do, do you?’
‘Yes,’ I said, sounding terrifically certain and relaxed at the same time.
‘And you think you ought to be doing it, do you?’
‘Without any question whatever. How do you mean?’
‘Well, you know, I was just wondering whether you felt you had the proper scope for your talents in the present job.’
‘What? What talents?’
He gave a slight laugh. ‘Get stuffed, Stanley,’ he said, or rather must have meant to say, but what he in fact said was something far nearer ‘Gat steffed, Stunley.’ That was because he came from up North, so much so that if he ever got tired of editing he could have walked into a job as a chat-show host on any of the TV channels. ‘I know more about you than you give me credit for,’ he was going on. ‘I’m not such a fool as I look, you know.’ It seemed a good idea to let that one go too. ‘Fo
r instance, er … Oh yes. Tell me, do you ever see anything of old Nowell these days?’
I had always thought that one of the most appealing things about Harry was his complete openness, if you could use the word to cover being incapable of successful deceit. So I knew straight away and for sure that he had heard not a word about my recent contacts with Nowell — whom many years previously and for a very short time he was supposed to have been in the same digs as — and was just being pushy and nosy in his usual way. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Practically nothing. Why?’
‘Oh… I always thought it was a pity you two couldn’t manage to make a go of it.’
Always? Until he joined the paper, Harry would not have known of my existence much. ‘Well, there we are.’ I looked at my watch.
‘I see Whatsisname, Bert, in the Ladbroke Arms occasionally.’
‘Oh, yeah.’
‘I suppose you haven’t got much time for him.’
‘Not a lot, no. Well …’
‘Oh, he’s not so bad when you get to know him.’
I glared suddenly at the fish-tank as though I had noticed something starting to come to life there. Another short pause followed, long enough all the same for it to dawn on even our Harry that the time had not yet come to fill me in on all those good points of Bert’s that I had been missing up to now. A knock sounded at the door and the Political Editor put his bald head round it. Harry told him to come on in, sounding quite relieved. ‘Well, if you don’t mind, Stan,’ he said, smiling, ‘I seem to have this conference.’
‘No, I don’t mind, Harry. I really don’t mind a bit.’
‘Right, see you. Oh, and, er,’ he turned his smile off, ‘I hope everything’s going fine at home.’
He conveyed to me that I was not to not manage to make a go of my second marriage if I knew what was good for me, using so much wattage that something of the sort got across to the Political Editor, a man I knew only from his photograph in the paper, who looked at him and then at me and had started to look back at him about the time I left them together. Outside I just missed butting under the chin, luckily on the whole, a seven-foot female in a knee-length cardigan also bound for the conference. Harry was quite capable, I thought to myself, of believing that what he had been up to back there was showing sympathetic interest in me, kindly concern about someone who was not his responsibility in any strict way but about whom he nevertheless felt a certain this, that and the other. At least he would have said he had been doing that if challenged, gone on saying it to the death too if necessary. But what had he really been up to?