STANLEY AND
THE WOMEN
KINGSLEY AMIS
1 Onset
It had been one of Susan’s most successful evenings. After weeks of hot sun in 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-fl. 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 red-brick 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 wash-out 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 t
o 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.