Stanley and the Women by Kingsley Amis

Author:Kingsley Amis [Amis, Kingsley]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-07-15T18:03:09+00:00

Ebbinghaus House was more of a house than the other place, with two storeys and proper windows. Inside too it was laid out after a different mode. I went into a small ante-room with a linoed floor and a porter’s cubby-hole behind a partition drawn far enough aside for me to see that there was nobody behind it. However, there was somebody in front of it, a young black man standing with his hands clasped together, I thought at first over his privates but actually, as a not very searching second glance showed me, just above them, for the time being at any rate. He was rolling his eyes, though not towards me, and opening and shutting his lips about every second. I decided quite quickly against asking him for directions. The partition and a board on an easel were covered with notices, but they all referred to places like bathrooms or the library or to amusements like chess and boxing. Boxing? Here?

I had just given the notices up when a middle-aged woman in some sort of overall and with a pleasant, capable look about her came bustling towards me out of a passage at the rear. I only got as far as drawing in breath to speak to her, because she shook her head at me and in a flash lay down on her back on the lino with her arms crossed over her chest, like a crusader on a tomb. So I stepped over her and left her and the black fellow to it.

The corridor here had a carpet running down it, one of a pattern my mother would have really liked, and a lot of rooms opening off it. Most of them in fact had their doors open to show quite nicely and brightly decorated insides, rather in the style of a mid-market boarding house in somewhere like Worthing or Hastings. Usually there were people sitting on the beds and chairs or standing, some chatting, some reading, some drinking from paper cups, but all the ones I noticed looked as though they were just filling in time and the rooms were parts of one large waiting room — half of them glanced up and away again as I passed. None seemed in any way mad. After going round a couple of right angles and through a kind of arcade of dispensers of soft drinks, hot drinks, peanuts and bubblegum I came to a doorway beyond which a female sat at a desk with papers and telephones on it.

She leaned over slightly in my direction. ‘Can I help you?’ she asked, meaning what the hell was I doing there and making me wonder whether she had nipped down here from behind the Rorschach House desk.

‘My son is a patient here,’ I said, and gave his name.

‘Wanted to visit him, did you?’

‘If possible. Dr Collings said I could.’

The girl, in her middle twenties with pale hair and a great many moles on her face, consulted a list at her side.

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