The Complete Short Stories: The 1960s

He put his arms round her, cuddling her. In a minute he was kissing her, her grief and his greed all mixed together in a bowl of tears.

‘Leave me alone,’ she said. ‘Who are you? Why did you come and tell me this?’

‘I thought I’d made that clear, Penelope. Ni told me to come and tell you. He’s bored to death and he’s quitting – going to start life anew, a-nude.’

Though she had been crying, she had not really believed till now. Something Stoneward said seemed to have penetrated and made her accept the situation as he presented it.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she said, which is what all women say when they first begin to believe.

Stoneward neither contradicted nor accepted her statement. He just crouched by her, naked under his clothes.

‘Whatever am I going to do?’ Penelope asked aloud at last, speaking not to him but to herself.

‘I love you,’ he said simply. ‘I always have. Every word your husband has told me about you has been music to my ears. I’ve treasured the smallest fact about you, Penelope. I know your vital measurements, the size of stocking you take, the make of soap you use, which breakfast cereal you prefer, the names of your favourite movie and phoney stars, how long you like to sleep nights. Unless you have secrets from Ni, I know everything about you, for you as a Normal are only the sum of these pretty facts. Come with me to my flat, I’ll take care of you – worshipping from afar all the time, have no fear! My research days for my magnum opus are over!’

She looked at him doubtfully.

‘You know what,’ she said. ‘I think that right now I want to get away out of here. I can’t think here at all. Will you kindly wait five minutes while I just go pack a bag, Mr Stoneward? Then I’ll be with you.’

‘Your eyes have spent their days drifting among the starry nights,’ he said dreamily.

Penelope laughed, got up a little jerkily and left the room. Paul Stoneward buried his face in the warm patch she had created in the chair, drumming his fists on the chair arm. People were all the same, all the same, even this golden girl, just a puppet … all pulp puppets. He nursed his terrible secret: once people ceased to have any power over you, they were absolutely in your power. He could almost have cried about it.

He rose, walked quietly into the hall and dialled Civilian Sanctions again. When he had given Beynon his orders, he returned to the living room to await Penelope. She appeared after a quarter of an hour, entirely composed, clutching a tan suitcase a little too tightly. Stoneward took her arm and led her out of the house, mincing exaggeratedly by her soft side.

As they walked down the drive, he looked back over his shoulder. Brick house with pink and pistachio trim, lawn with pink roses florabounding all over the place in each corner, mail box on its white post at the foot of the driveway down the slope. Stoneward laughed. This popsie was really leaving home.

‘Coffee?’ she said suspiciously. ‘What’s that?’

‘When you’ve done pacing up and down, it’s an old time euphoric with taste additives,’ Stoneward said, setting the cups down and widening his nostrils over the steam. It was exhilarating to have the three dimensional shape of her in his room.

He had rolled Nigel Hamilton Alexander, snores and all, under his bed, and stuffed a sponge into his mouth. He had chased round, half-serious, half-laughing, straightening out the room after he had let her in. Penelope hardly noticed him; she walked up and down the room like a little caged – well, a little caged cutie. You could see the exercise doing her ankles good; they looked fine. Not so her soul. Penelope was still in a state of shock. No resilience, these Normals – except physically, of course, in the case of present company.

Present company drank down her java like a good girl and heeled over onto the rug. Stoneward, who had been watching like a lynx, caught her as she fell, thought several thoughts, licked his lips, but straightened up and let her sleep.

Business first. Congress should have of his best.

Hustling into the bedroom, legs moving like dapper nutcrackers, head cool as a safe, he pulled several stage properties out of a drawer and flung them onto the bed, ruffling the covers as he did so. Then he seized the mortal remains of N-Compass Co’s chief and rattled them roughly back to life.

‘Penelope … stop … lemme get to the … ugh …’ Alexander muttered, chewing his way through a king-size mist.

‘Don’t give me that crud about Penelope after what you’ve been doing to Jean,’ Stoneward said nastily. ‘Look at the mess the pair of you have made of my bedroom, you dirty old romp. Get up and get out.’

Heavily, Alexander pulled himself to the bedside and sat on it. His dull eye, moving like a whale in heavy seas, finally lighted on a female garment by the pillows.

‘Jean left you that pair with her love,’ Stoneward said. ‘Said to tell you she had another pair some place. Now come on, snap out of it, Nigel.’

The older man buried his head in his hands. After some minutes of silent battle, he launched himself to his feet, exclaiming, ‘I got to get back home and sort all this out with Penelope.’

‘Home! Penelope!’ Stoneward echoed. ‘Don’t be immoral, old sport. You can’t have it both ways. The past has ceased to exist for you. You were a Normal, now you’re not. Normals don’t behave like you have; your card will have to be stamped “Neurotic” now!’

‘You’re just confusing me, mister,’ Alexander said stubbornly. ‘I got to get home.’

‘That’s what I’m telling you, Alexander the Grunt. You’ve got no home. You’ve stepped outside the bounds of normal behaviour and so your Normal life has ceased to exist. Face up to it like a man.’

‘I got to get home. That’s all I know.’

‘Don’t you love me any more, Ni?’ Stoneward asked, peeping at his watch. ‘We used to be such buddies in the old days. Remember the Farellis, the Vestersons, the vacations in Florida? Remember the pistachio shoots off Key West?’

‘Ah, shut up, you give me bellyache,’ Alexander said, ‘not that I wish to be insulting and I’d like to make it clear I regret it if I have committed a nuisance on your premises.’

‘Spoken like a man!’ Stoneward cried delightedly. ‘That’s what I call breeding, pal. It’s all you have left, believe me.’

‘Just help me get a taxi, will you?’

They went down onto the street, quiet, well-manicured street full of ditto people. A cab pulled up for them. Paul Stoneward bundled in after his victim, who did not protest beyond a grunt. He glanced at his watch again; but his timing had always been faultless and he could have patted himself with approval.

‘2011, Springfield,’ Alexander said to the driver.

The drive took them fifteen minutes. The cabby pulled up uncertainly by a big advertisement hoarding. Stoneward dragged his companion onto the sidewalk, crammed money into the driver’s hand and said, ‘Beat it, bud.’

He stood there, hands on hips, posing for his own pleasure and whistling the opening theme of Borodin’s Second Symphony, while Alexander moved unhappily back and forth, a bull bereft of its favourite china shop. Before them loomed a big hoarding boosting Fawdree’s Fadeless Fabrics.

‘It’s gone! My house – my home has gone!’

‘Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Stoneward said.

Crying as if in physical pain, Alexander ran behind the hoarding. Nothing there – just a flat lot with a little dust still hanging above it (The Civic Demolition boys must have worked their disintegrators with real zest!) Alexander burst into howls of anguish.

‘You’re having a wail of a time, Alec Sander,’ Stoneward said, taking the other by the arm. ‘Now why don’t you listen to me, your uncle P.? You’re at last – although a solid forty-five – getting a glimmer of what life is about. You’re learning man! Life is not a substantial thing; you can’t guarantee any one minute of it, past, present or future; you can’t salt it away in moth-balls. You thought it was secure, safe, snug, something as solid and predictable as the foot in your boot, didn’t you? You were wrong by at least one hundred and eighty degrees. Life is a dream, a dew. Fickle, coy and hard to please, prone to moth. Nothing is left to you now, man, but dreams. You never had a dream in your life. Now you have actively to start dreaming. Now – at last!’

‘Penelope,’ Alexander said. He pronounced the single word, then he took out his silk handkerchief and blew one forlorn and faded chord on his nose. The breeze turned over a page of his hair and he said, ‘Penelope, you don’t understand … Penelope, I can’t live without her mister. We … shared everything. I can’t explain. We shared … had secrets.’

‘You had secrets?’ Stoneward whispered, leaning forward. ‘Now you’re really giving, man. Let me inside the catwalks of your psycho-

logy, if you’ll pardon the dirty word, and I’ll see if I can help at all.’

‘There was one secret,’ the middle-aged man said, weeping without restraint now as he talked, ‘one secret that was very dear to us. I suppose everyone must have something. You have such a sharp way of being sympathetic, Paul, I can’t be sure if you’ll understand. Remember how I was trying to dodge away from Johnny J. Flower in the bar, whenever it was? This morning. I like him. I like Johnny. It wasn’t that I didn’t like him; and he likes me – you could see that. I wanted it to stay that way. I want him to like me. I don’t to know if you’ll understand … You see, I didn’t want Johnny to find out what a bore I am. I always dodge him if I can. People bore me – except you, Paul, you’re my only friend. I don’t mind being bored; it’s, well, kind of comfortable – you know you’re safe when you’re bored. But I know I am boring, too, and that’s the secret Penelope and me had … I never wanted Johnny to find out. She knew I knew I was a bore and she – well, she just understood, that’s all. I’ll never find anyone like her again and now she’s gone. Gone, man.’

Paul Stoneward did not even laugh. He had seen right down into the depths which had hitherto been closed to him, and he was frightened. Without another word, he turned away, walking off with hunched shoulders past the hoarding, down the road, leaving Alexander crying on an empty lot.

By the time he got home, his high spirits had returned. He rang Beynon again.

‘Your hair looks heliotrope on this screen, Commissioner,’ he said, ‘or did you dye it? Either way, I like it how you have it.’ And he launched into a long and unwisecracking account of what he had done and was going to do on the Alexander case.

Beynon sighed heavily when the screen finally dimmed, and turned to me. He looked not unlike Alexander, heavy, solid, without dreams.

‘Well, Kelly, do you feel the same as I do?’ he asked. Commissioner Beynon always lead with a query.