Read Stanley and the Women for Free Online Page B

Mandy or any other girl that was the
cause of Steve’s behaviour. He had come in for that sort of trouble in the past
and it had affected him differently, not in any kind of violent way, more
prepared to hang on and keep quiet and tend to make the best of it. That went
for how he had handled other kinds of upset. Whatever had happened to him was
completely new.
     
     
    The house was in Hamilton
Terrace, stone and dark brick, hard to get into under  a quarter of a million.
In the garage at the side I noticed one of the first Jaguars, plate
impressively DUW 1, well kept but not ridiculous. I pressed a button and heard
a chime with a cracked note in it. The door was opened by a girl of seven or
eight with straggling dark curly hair and a white dress down to the ground,
like a kid in an old photograph. She also had a very boring face with no Nowell
in it that I could make out.
    ‘I’ve
come to see your mother,’ I said.
    ‘Who
are you?’ Her voice reminded me of Mrs Shillibeer’s.
    ‘Well,
I used to be married to her. She’s —’
    ‘Do you
do commercials?’
    ‘No.’
    Shoving
past her was the thing, but she was holding the door only a little way open and
standing in the gap, and I felt I could hardly trample her underfoot just yet.
While I wondered about this I heard a lavatory-plug being pulled and an inner
door opened, followed by a sharp thud like someone’s knee or head hitting the
door, and after a moment the top half of Bert Hutchinson came in sight. I had
forgotten — I had only seen him about once before — that he was one of the school
that parted their hair just above the ear and trained it over the bald crown, a
policy I thought myself was misguided, but only on the whole. Without noticing
he pushed a colourful picture on the wall askew with his shoulder.
    ‘What
the bloody hell are you doing here?’ he asked me hoarsely and at the second
attempt, and went on before I could answer, ‘Go on, get … get out of it,
you …’
    ‘I
talked to Nowell on the phone and she asked me to come round to give her a hand
with Steve.’
    ‘That’s
right, she did,’ he said, just as hoarsely. He could see straight away that
this made a difference but was far from clear how much. Anyhow, he stayed where
he was and so did the small girl, who had to be his daughter and did look
rather like him in a frightening way.
    ‘Is he
still here?’ I said to keep the conversation going.
    ‘Who?
Oh … yeah … fuck …’ He looked me over, hesitated, then decided to
stretch a point and pulled the door wide open. ‘You …’
    ‘Is
that your Jaguar I see there?’
    Nothing
definite came of that. The hall was stacked with great bulging brown-paper
parcels tied up with hairy string. Some of them had been partly torn open to
show what looked like blankets and bolsters. It was rather dark and smelt of
old flowers or the water they had been in. Not poverty-stricken, though.
    I found
Nowell in a lounge where there would have been plenty of room for a couple of
dozen commercial travellers to hang about for the bar to open. All the
pictures, including a large one let into the wall at the far end, were by the
same artist or squad and showed one or more sailing-ships having a bad time. Nowell
was sitting on a circular couch in the middle being talked to by a white-haired
chap in a jacket put together out of suede, fisherman’s wool, rawhide and
probably canvas. When she saw me she held up her hand with the palm outwards so
as to get me to fight down my impatience till she had finished her listening.
You could have told a hundred yards off that she was listening, hard enough, in
fact, to make any normal person dry up completely in a few seconds. There was
no sign of Steve, like pools of blood or blazing furniture.
    It must
have been a good three years since I had laid eyes on Nowell, either in the
flesh or on the screen. She had not visibly aged, though her thick-and-thin
look seemed to have become more noticeable. I had often