The Husband's Story (28 page)

There was something else, too, that was nice about life the way it was at the moment. Cliff had taken to coming out to Crocketts Green almost every week-end the way he always used to do. And sometimes on weekday evenings as well. That meant that he was midway in between girl-friends, with no one very compelling even yet in sight. Not that he seemed to mind, Beryl kept telling herself. And no wonder. She was the only one he had ever really cared for, she was the only one who brought out the best in him. It was nothing short of heart-breaking the way he still wanted,
needed
, to be with her. Nothing could ever alter that. She kept remembering it all the time. She was remembering it now.

If she hadn't also been remembering Pineland Colony, she would probably have cried.

And then, when life at last seemed to be opening up for both of them, it was Stan who came in for a very nasty shock.

It occurred on one of his Mondays. With his savoury roll and his cup of coffee beside him, he was down there in the basement with the Leviathan file spread open on the blotter, and the desk lamp shining full onto it. By now he'd really got the knack of Mr Karlin's camera
chronometer. Even the six-inch fixed focus no longer bothered him. It was no trouble at all to twist the watch round to the inside of his wrist and press the winder-key. That was all there was to it, and Mr Karlin continued to say that the photographs were some of the best he'd ever seen.

This time, Stan had just taken his overall identification picture – the ABG/3005/Y/474 bit – and was moving on to the page with the reference number B/124/43/B2 when he thought that he heard something. It was faint; very faint. Hardly audible at all, in fact. Just a ripple in the air that reached him from nowhere and passed on leaving nothing behind it.

But Stan was taking no chances. He realized immediately that it was possible that he was being watched. That was why he held up his watch and shook it to make it seem that he suspected that his watch might have stopped. Next he held the watch up close against his ear as though he were listening for the tick.

Then, slowly and deliberately, he unwound the roll of Sellotape and set about repairing the frayed edge of the binder. It was a thoroughly neat, professional-looking job that he was making of it; real bookbinder's stuff. The strips of Sellotape were all exactly parallel and, when he had snipped off the ends with a pair of office scissors, it was hard to believe that the manufacturing stationer had ever intended the binder to be finished in any other style. For a moment, Stan just sat there admiring the result.

Then he heard the sound again; faint and whispering as ever. It came, went away and, just as definitely, returned. Stan kept his head down and went on Sellotaping. The inside of his mouth had gone dry and he could hear his heart-beats. He knew the symptoms only too well. Any moment now the trembling might begin. And that would be fatal. It would give the whole game away if he were discovered sitting there at his desk fairly shaking all over with fear when he was supposed simply to be doing a spot of lunch-hour overtime.

But, by now, there was complete silence once more, the thick blankety silence of all basements. Stan began to tell himself that he must have been mistaken. And, as he did so, there it was, close beside him, the mere shadow of a sound, but present and distinct; and familiar. It was the sound of breathing.

This was when Stan told himself that he would have to act. Even if he weren't the one who was being spied on, it wouldn't do any good to
his reputation within the department if there really happened to be a snooper down there in the Classified and Top Secret bay, and he had just failed to notice him.

He got up.

‘Looking for me?' he asked.

And it was just as well that he had decided to play it that way, all brisk and open and business-like. Because, almost at once, there was the sound of a heel turning on the polished linoleum and then, round the corner of the end cabinet, head thrust forward, appeared the weather-beaten face of Commander Hackett.

And the Commander himself could not have been nicer. He had heard that Stan was doing a bit of tidying-up, he said, and had thought that he might just drop in for a moment to see how he was getting on. Locked doors and security screens meant nothing to Commander Hackett because he had a pass-key for all of them. It was, as a matter of fact, he confessed, the first time he had ever been down to Stan's particular little cubby-hole. And, he added, he couldn't help envying him because it was all so snug and cosy.

There was a rather coarse, nautical side to Commander Hackett, and he gave Stan a wink as he said it. The junior filing clerks (female) were what he had in mind, he gave Stan to understand; Stan could get up to anything inside that little alcove of his and nobody on the floors above would ever be any the wiser.

Altogether he was down there with Stan for upwards of quarter of an hour, gossiping about this and that. And, when he came to go, he seemed surprised to find how late it was. He looked at his watch with real dismay.

Then he turned to Stan.

‘What time d'you make it?' he asked.

‘Ten to two,' Stan told him.

Commander Hackett's eyes were still turned towards him.

‘Nice watch you've got.'

Stan made no attempt to conceal it.

‘Japanese,' he said. ‘Cost a bomb if it was Swiss.'

Commander Hackett nodded.

‘Clever devils, those Nips. That's why you've got to keep an eye on 'em.'

And that was all there was to it. Commander Hackett's face creased itself into the most casual of farewell smiles, and he was gone.

It was a full minute, however, before Stan felt able to move. His heart had stopped pounding, and he was breathing normally again. But the trembling had started up, and his stomach suddenly felt strangely cold and empty. What's more, he was sweating. Back, neck and hands, he was clammy all over. That meant that there was nothing for it but to go along to the lavatory and stand up in one of the cubicles until he felt better.

Ten minutes later he was back at work again. All the same, he was disappointed in himself. Not that there had been anything wrong with his behaviour in front of Commander Hackett. He'd carried that off all right. It was his nerves that had let him down. And, on the way back home in the train that night, he went over the whole business again, silently talking to himself as he did so. Talking to himself, addressing remarks as though to a comparative stranger, had become rather a habit to him lately. Without moving his lips he carried on long, rambling conversations, full of good advice and sound counsel.

‘You've got to get a grip on yourself,' he kept saying. ‘That's what you've got to do. You're not a small-timer any longer, you're in the big league now. You're playing with the blue chips, remember. There's money on the table. It's stacked there, waiting for you. So ask yourself one simple question. Just one. Are you serious? Do you want it, or don't you?'

Playing games like that, pretending that he was someone in a casino, always made Stan feel better, because he was always the superior one in the game, the old hand; the kind the croupiers nodded to. And turning it all into a game made what he was really doing seem somehow so much less frightening.

Cliff had switched over to a Mustang. Not that he had anything against Jaguars. Not against E-types, that is. They could certainly show their heels to most other makes, Italian sports cars included. But they had become too popular. In some circles, even common, in fact. Only last week-end he had taken a girl-friend down to a country club in Surrey, and that had made three of them: three E-types, all black with red upholstery, all with an extra bar for the Continental motoring badges, and all with an off-duty air hostess in a flowered headscarf sitting next to the driver.

Whereas, with a Mustang you were singular. And dominant. There was something about the whole frontal grille that was male and challenging and aggressive. You took on the other traffic rather than just slipped past it. Mustard-colour, too, made a nice change from all-black, and the louvred discs set off the white-wall tyres to perfection. Cliff felt himself spiritually and physically renewed every time he got into the car. Trans-Atlantic it might be, but it undeniably had class.

And class was precisely what Cliff was in need of. That was because he was in process of re-making his life. Not his private life; at least, not for the time being; a new girl, Jeannie, from British Caledonian, was helping there. It was his business life that needed renovation. And Armed Services catering was what he was working to get into.

Admittedly, professional opinion was against it; too much of a closed shop, all his friends told him. But Cliff had gone against professional advice before – and profited. He had also broken other closed trade circles – watches, garden furniture, reproduction antiques; and very remunerative he had found them, too. But nothing like the prospects of Services catering, and Naval catering in particular. Down there at Chatham there was, he felt confident, a whole rich living to be picked up by as little as a-penny-in-the-pound taken off this and that, and added on again somewhere else to that and this. A Mustang was, in the circumstances, exactly the kind of car he needed to show that any tender that he put in was likely to be a bit out of the ordinary.

Kendal Terrace was exactly the sort of neutral background against which the Mustang really did show up; there had, in fact, never been a Mustang parked in Kendal Terrace before. And Beryl, looking out of the window, was pleased to see the way that passers-by – total strangers some of them – paused instinctively to take in the full effect.

Naturally Cliff wanted to take them out for a ride, and naturally Beryl wanted to go. It was Marleen that was the trouble. This time Cliff hadn't told them that he was coming, had simply dropped in without warning. And long after Marleen's bedtime at that. Her goodnight biscuit, her beaker of Ribena and her Enid Blyton had all been finished before Cliff had even got there. And Marleen herself, with wisps of her pretty silvery-gold hair straying over the pillow, was now lying there, her eyes closed, happily exhibition-dancing in her sleep.

What's more, Beryl wouldn't hear of waking her. Not with school tomorrow, she wouldn't. Cliff was secretly not sorry; he had known Marleen from birth and had disliked her all the way. The very last thing he wanted was to have Marleen in the car asking what all the switches were there for.

In the end, it was Stan himself who provided the answer. If Marleen couldn't be left alone he was quite ready to stay behind, he said. As a matter of fact he would, he added, even rather welcome it: being on his own for a bit would give him a chance to get some of his old photographs properly sorted out.

And, standing there on the kerb, waving good-bye to the bright, receding rear lamps of the Mustang, Stan let out a long, grateful sigh of sheer relief. This was one of those moments that he found himself so much in need of nowadays. To be alone, that was the thing. To be able to bask in his own uninterrupted presence, and to have the opportunity of carrying on another of those highly personal two-way conversations with himself. He walked back indoors, past the sunken pool with the little fishing gnome and his companions, and closed the Spanish grille of the front door behind him.

He was sorry that there was no whisky in the house. Ever since he had taken to going round with Mr Karlin he had found that whisky served a very useful purpose. It detached you. There you would be one minute, all humdrum and ordinary. And a couple of whisky-and-waters later you could be up in the clouds with your own private firework display going on all round you. He wouldn't have minded in the least forgetting all about his own photographs and simply sitting down with a glass beside him, planning that wonderful big new studio of his, thinking of the look on Mr Parker's face when he handed in his resignation, even just closing his eyes and trying to remember what Helga's voice sounded like.

As it was, he went through to the kitchen and made himself a cup of Nescafé in one of the new earthenware breakfast beakers that Beryl had bought on special offer at the Supermarket. On the way upstairs, holding the beaker carefully to avoid any drops on the carpet – pottery of that kind apparently didn't have saucers to go with it – he paused at the door of Marleen's room, and stood there looking down at her. She was certainly beautiful and, in her delicate, pale gold way, not really like either of them.
Fairy Child
was what he had called the best-known of his nursery studies of her, and it had appeared in reproduction both in ‘Home Photography' and on the woman's page of a South London local paper.
Ice Princess
, he reckoned, was what he would call the picture if he were to make another study of her now.

For a moment, the thought passed through his mind of opening up
his equipment case and taking a flash portrait of her there and then. But he checked himself. He had used the flash once before in Marleen's bedroom while she had been asleep, and Beryl had been furious. It might have blinded the child, she said. Or set fire to the bedclothes. Either way, it seemed, the risk was disproportionate.

Sipping his Nescafé up there in the quiet of his darkroom and with no double Scotches to brighten things up, Stan's thoughts turned exclusively to money. He checked and re-checked his calculations on the number of Leviathan files and compared it with Mr Karlin's scale of payment. He added up the interest on the money in his number two bank account and hoped that he was right in supposing that, if he didn't say anything about it, the Income Tax would never notice.

He even wondered whether Mr Karlin with his excellent international connections could not perhaps pay some of the money into a foreign account; in Switzerland, for instance, and a numbered one at that. About three thousand pounds in all was what Stan made it. And that was where he told himself it would be wise to stop. Three thousand pounds was enough to get Beryl and Marleen everything they needed.