Free Stanley and the Women by Kingsley Amis

over, he told me he was sorry to hear of Steve’s
troubles, and we were off. My life was getting low on small-talk. For the time
being at least there seemed to be no prospect of a drink — I felt shy of
suggesting it and Cliff had given me nothing in the way of a lead. Well, it was
still early.
    I did
some filling-in. Nash listened and wrote things down in a notebook, or rather
on a new 25p memo-pad with lined leaves. He asked about Steve’s early
circumstances and history and wrote down some of what I said about that too.
Then he wanted to know if there had been any recent emotional upsets.
    I
hesitated. ‘He broke up with a girl — it could have been the day before
yesterday or a bit longer ago. But … it’s not his style to go off the deep
end about things like that, and anyway it never struck me as being a
particularly serious affair.’
    ‘But it
was an affair? Forgive me, but on the rare occasions when I peep into the world
of the young I find it about as recognizable as, as medieval Patagonia.’
    ‘He
keeps things pretty quiet but from the look of his girl, if she wasn’t sleeping
with him she was going against a quite firmly established habit.’
    Nash
glanced up sharply from his pad, as if what I had said interested him in some
way he had not expected. ‘I see,’ he said, paused and went briskly on. ‘Ever
been mad yourself? Or gone to a psychiatrist or seen a doctor about your
nerves? M’m, didn’t think you had really. What about your family, brothers and
sisters, aunts and uncles, grandparents, any mad people there.’
    ‘Well,
there’s my mother’s sister. She never stops talking.’
    ‘What
about?’
    ‘Oh,
what she’s been doing, where she’s been, in insane detail. You can’t —’
    ‘No no,
merely in foolish and fatiguing detail. Perfectly normal behaviour in a what,
an elderly female.’
    ‘But
she —’
    ‘Is
that the worst you can do, Mr Duke? No uncles who didn’t know what was going on,
or cousins who sat in a chair all day without speaking or moving? No one they
used to say was always rather a funny chap, always a bit … you know.
Ordinary people are usually good judges of that, or they were until some
lunatic went round telling them it was really the sane ones who were mad. Yes,
funny, a bit odd, a bit peculiar, you never quite knew where you were with him,
never really knew what he was thinking, you got on well enough together but you
wouldn’t have been surprised if one day out of the blue he’d said that he’d always
hated you. Shocked and hurt, all that, but not surprised. Nobody like
that at all. Oh well. What about your wife, I mean of course your ex-wife, the
boy’s mother, Mrs … Hutchinson. What about her?’
    ‘Well…’ I looked over at Cliff, who made an encouraging face, dilating his eyes. ‘Well,
I think she is a bit mad.’
    This
wild understatement had Cliff blowing out his cheeks. ‘Why do you say that?’
asked Nash. ‘In what way? Mad in what way?’
    ‘She
can’t seem to … You mentioned something just now about somebody who can’t
make out what’s going on. I don’t think she can do that, not what’s really going
on. I mean she knows your name and what day it is, but she sees it all
differently. Nothing’s what it is, it’s always something else. Her sense of other
people’s not good. They can be sweet to her, and they can be foul to her, and
that’s about as much scope as they’ve got. If they can’t be fitted in as one or
the other they don’t exist, no not quite, they’re like Mr Heath or David Bowie,
no more than facts. Of course with her personality and everything she just goes
on like that through her life. Even if everybody got together and dug their
toes in and told her it wasn’t like that it still wouldn’t do any good. No use
telling her to stow it or cheese it or come off it because she really believes
it. That would just be everybody being foul to her at once. I’m sorry, Dr Nash,
I’ve said