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non-stop to
show she had a message for me.
    ‘Oh, Mr
Duke,’ she said, or rather called.
    Instead
of screaming I said, ‘Yes, Mrs Shillibeer?’
    ‘Oh, Mr
Duke, would you like me to take Steve up something on a tray?’ Her voice
climbed the better part of an octave on the last word.
    I
looked at Susan. ‘I don’t think so, thanks. Best to leave him. He’ll come down
and get himself something if he feels like it.’
    ‘Of
that there is no room whatsoever for doubt,’ said the old girl.
    ‘Oh, I
couldn’t agree more, lady,’ I said.
    Mrs Shillibeer
doled out the soup and the three of us had lunch. While we were having it I thought
to myself that someone else, someone apart from Steve, was behaving unusually,
and that was my mother-in-law. It had been clear to me for some time that she
reckoned Susan had not taken much of a step up in the world by becoming one of
the Dukes, but up to just now she, Lady D, had managed to keep that sort of
feeling more or less to herself. But then of course there had not been anything
much in the way of reason or excuse or provocation before.
    ‘Are
you going in this afternoon?’ I asked Susan at one stage, meaning to work.
    ‘I wasn’t,
why?’
    ‘Well,
good, I’ve got to and I just thought there ought to be someone here.’
    ‘But
that’ll leave Susan alone in the house,’ said her mother in amazement. She had
a chain on the ends of her glasses and round her neck so that in between times
they sat on her chest and when she was wearing them, like now, the chain hung
down in a loop behind and waggled about in a quaint way every time she moved
her head, and she had never thought of that.
    ‘Except
for Steve, yes,’ I said.
    ‘It’s
all right, mummy,’ said Susan.
    We
never found out what her mother thought of the idea in so many words because
just then there was the noise of an assault platoon coming down the stairs and
a few seconds later the crash of the street door.
    ‘Would that
be Steve?’ asked Lady D, doing another variation by putting on no emphasis at
all.
    ‘I
think it must be,’ I said.
    ‘Perhaps
when he comes back he’ll be in a more gracious mood.’
    Soon
afterwards I went out and picked up a taxi on its way back from dropping
somebody at one of the Jewboys’ houses in the Bishop’s Avenue.
     
     
    The phone on my desk rang
and a man’s voice grunted once or twice and said, ‘Is that, er, is … is, er
…
    If
whoever it was had really forgotten my name he would have had to do it very
recently, since asking the switchboard for me. Another day I might have played
him along. ‘Stanley Duke here,’ I said.
    ‘Ah.
Duke … you’re a shit. A shit. Ha. Don’t ring off, don’t ring off,
somebody here who wants a word with you, you …’
    The words
died away in mutterings. Those few seconds had been enough to remind me first
of a big fat body, a round dark-red face, a scrubby beard and glasses, and then
of a name, Bert Hutchinson, and immediately after that I guessed some of what
had happened and felt scared. I was glad I was alone in the office just then.
    ‘Stanley,’
said a faint, suffering voice.
    ‘Yes, Nowell.
What’s the —’
    ‘Stanley,
it’s Nowell. Could you possibly come round? I can’t deal with him at all. I don’t
know what’s the matter with him, I think he must be mad.’
    ‘What’s
he been —’
    ‘Stanley,
you’ve simply got to come round, I can’t stand it, it’s absolutely
terrifying. He’s been saying the most horrible things to me.
    ‘Oh,’ I
said. That in itself was no atrocity from my point of view. ‘What’s he doing at
the moment?’
    ‘He’s
upstairs,’ my ex-wife admitted. ‘But he’s in the most awful state. You must
come, Stanley. You don’t know what it’s like, honestly.’
    There
was a vague kind of bawling in the background during the last part of this,
which I thought was probably Bert suggesting some other remarks she could make.
I asked her what she expected me to do and generally