The Husband's Story (22 page)

Stan did not reply immediately.

‘I'm all right,' he told her.

Helga gave his arm a little squeeze.

‘Then we must arrange to talk to Mr Karlin,' she said. ‘Next Saturday. Six o'clock. How about it?'

Stan thought about Beryl and Marleen, and odd jobs about the house and going round to the newsagent's for the evening paper that Beryl always liked to have.

‘I'd rather a weekday.'

Helga shook her head.

‘Mr Karlin does not get back until Saturday. You are his first appointment. He is returning early specially to see you. It is most important.'

Put like that, Stan did not see what he could do about it.

‘O.K.,' he said.

‘Then let us meet at the New Mexico in Southampton Row. It is very modern. The Sunset Suite would be best. And to be punctual, please. Perhaps I may keep you waiting. If Mr Karlin is late, too, it will not be intended.'

It seemed strange to Stan that Helga never suggested that they should meet twice in the same place.

‘Why go there?' he asked.

Helga removed her hand. She was frowning.

‘For Mr Karlin's sake,' she explained. ‘It will be more convenient for him. He has so many engagements.'

She got up as she said it, and tucked the envelope of photographs under her arm.

‘Now I must leave you,' she said. ‘I have much work to do. It cannot be allowed to wait.'

‘You won't have another drink?'

‘I always have only one drink. More is not good for me.'

Her face was turned up to him as she was speaking and rather to his own surprise he bent forward and kissed her. Helga did not seem in the least surprised.

‘I shall look forward to Saturday,' she said. ‘Then I shall have more time.'

The New Mexico was certainly new. And Mexican. Any aboriginal from Yucatan would at once have felt at home there. Aztec and Mayan symbols were everywhere, and Stan found himself thinking about Beryl's housecoat. Large fibre-glass statues of the Sun God flanked the main elevator concourse, and the décor was all of gold and green stone with some plastic feather decorations ingeniously worked in.

The chain to which the hotel belonged was an international one, but the clientele appeared to be mostly down from the North; Leeds or Huddersfield, probably. To put these foreign tourists at their ease and make them feel at home, the management had opened a Shakespeare Head Inn down in the basement. Because Stan was early he strolled down and inspected it.

Stan wished straight away that it had been the Shakespeare Head that Helga had chosen for their meeting. But when he took the lift up to the Sunset Suite, he saw at once how right she had been. There you stepped straight out of the lift into the tropics. There were palm trees, singing birds in cages, zither music, coconut matting on the floor and a lighting system which allowed for an endless cycle from the clear, pale sunlight of a Central American dawn to full noontide splendour and on to dusk and twilight, finally arriving at night with a sickle moon and a myriad electric stars gleaming down from the ceiling. It stayed like that for about ten minutes of romantic, velvety gloom and then the whole thing started up again. Up in the Sunset Suite, the earth went round the sun punctually once every half-hour.

Helga had been quite right to warn him that she might be late. She was very late. It was six-twenty, and already darkening twilight, Sunset Suite time, when she arrived. But it was not so dark that he could not see that she was apprehensive about something. Stan wondered why. He himself had been sitting at the round bamboo table since five to six, and he had already drunk two of the Trader Vick Specials. In consequence, he felt slightly sick but strangely confident.

‘Anything wrong?' he asked.

Helga did not reply immediately. Instead, she stood there simply looking at him.

‘I will have a drink,' she said at last. ‘I will have a whisky.'

There was just a suggestion of a ‘v' rather than of a ‘w' when she said ‘whisky'. Stan found it irresistible. It showed how Continental she was.

When Helga had been brought her whisky, she sipped it thoughtfully without actually saying anything, simply lifting her glass, taking a tiny gulp and then putting the glass down on the bamboo table-top again.

Quite suddenly she turned towards him.

‘Will you promise me something?' she asked.

At least for the time being, all sensation of sickness had passed. It was only the feeling of confidence that remained.

‘Promise you anything,' he told her.

‘Then do whatever Mr Karlin asks,' she said. ‘For my sake, please do it.'

Her hand was on his arm again, and she was looking up at him with those dark brown appealing eyes of hers. Then she glanced down at her watch.

‘By now Mr Karlin should soon be here,' she said. ‘We will go find him.'

Helga seemed to know her way about the New Mexico. She stopped the lift on the fifth floor and turned right where the sign read ‘550–599'. Up here above the main temple area, the architecture was less strikingly Aztec. The last of the Montezumas would hardly have recognized it. The whole prospect was simply one of bedroom doors, service areas and fire notices. Outside number 561 Helga stopped, and turned towards him.

‘This is where I say good-bye.'

Her voice sounded husky and breathless, almost as if she had been running.

‘Then you're not coming in?'

‘I tell you. This is where I say good-bye.'

Her hand was on his arm again, only this time it was trembling.

‘Remember what I have said. Do what Mr Karlin tells you. Then you will be all right. It will be most profitable.'

Then, without warning, she kissed him.

‘So good-bye it is.'

She had reached out her hand and pressed the push-button beside the door while her lips were still up against his cheek.

‘They are expecting you,' she said.

‘They?' he asked.

But it was no use. Helga had turned her back on him and was walking
away down the corridor.

The door of number 561 opened, and Mr Karlin stood there. In the room behind him the radio was playing.

Mr Karlin looked down the corridor after Helga. She was nearly out of sight by now. Mr Karlin spread out his hands in disappointment.

‘I asked her to stay,' he said, ‘but she couldn't.' Then he stepped to one side. ‘Come in. There's someone here wants to meet you.'

The private suites in the New Mexico were modern and impersonal, like the corridor outside. Just a two-seater couch, an easy chair, an upright armchair, a round table with some glasses on top, a small writing desk, a television set and an indefinite, Impressionistic-looking sort of picture on the main wall. The refrigerator was in the little alcove on the way through to the bathroom.

The easy chair was the one that was occupied. The man who sat there filled it entirely, even overlapping the sides a little. Mr Karlin led Stan up to him.

‘Meet Mr Svenstrom,' he said. ‘Mr Svenstrom, this is Mr Pitts.'

There was, Stan noticed, a note of pride in Mr Karlin's voice as he said it. Stan felt flattered.

But Mr Svenstrom did not get up. All that he did was to point towards the couch.

‘Come and sit down,' he said. ‘We've been waiting for you.'

Stan sat down, and Mr Karlin's hand descended on his shoulder.

‘It's whisky, isn't it?' he asked. ‘You're the one who doesn't like soda, I remember. You're the whisky-and-water man.'

While Mr Karlin had gone off to get the water, Stan found himself left there, staring at Mr Svenstrom. Mr Svenstrom was an unusually neatly-turned-out sort of man. His blue suit was the sort that dummies wear in the windows of multiple tailors' shops. His shirt was white and his tie was striped. He sat cross-legged and Stan could see over the tops of his beautifully polished shoes that his socks were striped, too. What was disconcerting, however, was that Mr Svenstrom was staring back at him. And it was purely a one-way traffic. Mr Svenstrom was wearing dark glasses.

There was a glass of whisky already on the table. It stood beside the ashtray where Mr Karlin had left his cigarette burning. Over on Mr Svenstrom's side there was no glass and no ashtray. It was evident that Mr Svenstrom was not of the self-indulgent kind.

‘Mr Karlin tells me that you are very reliable.'

Stan rubbed the toe of his right foot up against his left ankle. This was not the sort of thing that he had expected the man in dark glasses to say.

‘I do my best,' he told him.

‘And that you have an expensive family.'

Stan did not know quite how to take that last remark. In one sense it was certainly true. Otherwise he wouldn't have needed those advances from Mr Karlin. All the same it was misleading, and there was an implied criticism of Beryl. That was something that Stan wasn't going to take from anyone.

‘They're not so bad,' he said.

Mr Svenstrom did not move. His hands were clasped, and it was by no means obvious that he had even heard.

‘But you like money?' he asked.

‘I do when I've earned it.'

Mr Svenstrom gave just the slightest inclination of his head.

‘And would you like to earn some more?'

It was Mr Karlin who interrupted them. He had come back with a plastic tooth-mug in his hand.

‘Water,' he explained. ‘Nothing else to put it in.'

He poured out something larger than a double whisky and slopped a little of the water on top of it.

‘Sorry to have kept you waiting,' he said.

Then he raised his own glass.

‘Cheers. Cheers and good luck.'

Mr Svenstrom turned to Mr Karlin.

‘I was asking Mr Pitts if he would like to earn some more money,' he said.

Mr Karlin nodded understandingly.

‘And would he?'

Mr Svenstrom shrugged his shoulders.

‘I do not know. I am waiting for his reply.'

Stan was aware that by now they had both swung round and were looking at him. Mr Karlin could not have looked friendlier, or more encouraging; he seemed to be urging him on to say ‘Yes'. And Stan knew why. It was what Mr Karlin had kept hinting at when he had told Stan about the sort of money that top stringers could make. This was the big chance that Mr Karlin had been setting up for him.

Stan cleared his throat.

‘Yes, I would,' he said. ‘I could do with it.' And, with the whisky, his confidence had now returned. ‘I'm not cheap,' he added. ‘Not cheap. But, like you said, reliable.'

Mr Svenstrom sat back in his chair.

‘Nobody wants what is cheap,' he said. ‘This is going to be very expensive. For somebody, it is going to cost a lot.'

Mr Karlin leant over and put his hand on Stan's knee.

‘That's what you want to hear,' he told him. ‘I'm only editorial. Mr Svenstrom's finance.'

Mr Svenstrom ignored Mr Karlin. His dark glasses were turned towards Stan.

‘Are you a talker?' he asked.

‘I… I don't quite follow you.'

‘Can you keep your mouth shut?'

Stan was beginning to feel offended again.

‘I suppose so. When I have to.'

‘When your bread is buttered.'

Mr Svenstrom had so nearly got the saying right that it astonished Stan that it should go wrong at all. With an accent as perfect as Mr Svenstrom's it was hard to believe that the man was from somewhere the other side of the North Sea. If he were to change his name, Stan reflected, and wear suits that were not quite so carefully cut he would have passed for English anywhere; that is, if he put away his dark glasses.

‘We are not a small agency,' Mr Svenstrom continued. ‘We are a big one. Mr Karlin deals in both pictures and stories. Important pictures and important stories. We want to know if you will work for us.'

This was more than Stan had expected. And the thought attracted him. It would put Mr Parker in his place when Stan handed in his letter of resignation. And the letter was going to be a good one, too. Stan could feel the sentences forming inside him like a caption for one of the photographs. ‘Having been offered a post at a higher salary and with better prospects… Desirous as I am of improving my position… in the absence of suitable advancement with the Service… resignation to become effective at earliest possible convenience…' In the morning he would just saunter in, quite casually, and drop the little bombshell into Mr Parker's in-tray, dusting the whole department off his hands as he walked away. But in the meantime he wanted to be certain.

‘You mean give up my job?' he asked

Mr Karlin and Mr Svenstrom exchanged glances.

‘I mean stay where you are,' Mr Svenstrom told him. ‘Stay where you are and work for us.'

‘Part time? In the evenings, that sort of thing?'

Mr Svenstrom was shaking his head slowly from side to side.

‘No,' he said. ‘Full time. All day long. And in the evenings, too.'

Stan started to scrape the toe of his shoe up and down his ankle.

‘I don't get it,' he said.

Mr Svenstrom's hands went up in a tiny gesture of despair. He turned towards Mr Karlin.

‘He is your friend,' he said. ‘You explain.'

As Mr Svenstrom turned his head, the light played a trick on him. For an instant, Stan saw himself reflected in the dark glasses. There he was – or rather, there two of him were – staring back at him out of the centre of Mr Svenstrom's face. He could even see the quiff of hair in front that always rose up again no matter how much he brushed it down. Then Mr Svenstrom leant back, and the dark glasses became simply dark glasses again.

Mr Karlin had edged in closer. He placed his hand on Stan's knee. It was a large hand and it cupped Stan's knee-cap as though it were grasping the bottom knob on a flight of banisters. Only it was more personal than that; as he talked, Mr Karlin kept giving Stan's knee a little squeeze.