The Husband's Story (50 page)

‘And were they close friends, the two of them?'

Beryl smiled. She was determined not to give herself away; if Mr Cheevers wanted to talk about Cliff she would discuss him as she might have done a stranger.

‘Yes. Funny when you come to think of it, isn't it?' she replied. ‘They weren't a bit like each other, you know. Not a bit they weren't.'

‘But they got on well together?'

Beryl smiled again.

‘Oh, yes. They always did. Cliff used to tease him a bit, but Stan never minded. Not really, he didn't. Not so that it mattered.'

It was Mr Cheevers who deliberately let the conversation flag. His long experience in interviews told him that, at any moment now, he would be approaching the danger point. When he did speak, he was deliberately casual; scarcely interested, it seemed.

‘And if he was Stan's friend' – Mr Cheevers, too, had slipped into the habit of calling him ‘Stan' – ‘I expect you and Marleen must be missing him. He used to be around quite a lot, wasn't he?'

Beryl did not reply immediately. She was removing a piece of cotton from her dress.

‘On and off like,' she told him.

With that, she got up and Mr Cheevers knew that the only thing left to him was to close his notebook. He thanked her, and went out into the narrow entrance hall to pick up his driving gloves.

As soon as he had opened the front door, however, he could see what sort of night it still was. The rain was sheeting down, and the pool with the old bearded gnome fishing in it was overflowing again just as it had been on the night when Stan had brought home all those presents. Mr Cheevers spread his handkerchief across his head and ran for it.

A minute or two later, the front-door bell rang. It was Mr Cheevers again. He looked wetter than ever.

‘Sorry to have to bother you,' he said. ‘But my car won't start. Mind if I use your telephone?'

Half an hour later, Mr Cheevers was still there. Apparently, there was no garage in Crocketts Green that was prepared to come out on such a night, and the hire-car service was not even answering.

‘I'll phone Daimler Hire,' he told her. ‘I'll get them to come down and pick me up.'

It was Beryl who stopped him.

‘Why not stay here for the night?' she asked. ‘We can put you up like. There's Stan's room. You can have that.'

Mr Cheevers drew in his breath. It would be the first time that he had ever been upstairs in Kendal Terrace. At the thought of the wealth
of background material that it would provide, a thrill of sheer, professional pride ran through him.

‘If you're sure it's not too much trouble…' he began.

But Beryl stopped him.

‘You stay down here,' she said. ‘I'll just go and get things ready.'

Left to himself, Mr Cheevers ran over the evening's notes. There were nearly six pages of them. Pruned down and properly sub-edited they would make up another very useful paragraph or two. He was by now, he reckoned, at least three-quarters through the whole manuscript, and he was even working out possible publication dates when Beryl called out to him to come up.

Once actually inside Stan's bedroom, it was all more true to life – true, that is, to the life that he had imagined for Stan – than seemed possible. The very smallness of the room had a pathos all of its own, and the size of the miniature washbasin only seemed to accentuate it. The bed, too, was a narrow one. All in all, it was hard to believe that Stan's bedroom belonged to the same house as the front lounge with the built-in china cabinet and the television set or the dining alcove and the free-standing kitchen cabinets. Mr Cheevers felt that at last he was beginning to understand how it was that anyone as ordinary as Stan might have felt driven to break out.

A pair of striped flannelette pyjamas had been laid out on the eiderdown.

‘You'd better wear those,' said Beryl, who was standing behind him. ‘Stan wouldn't mind. Not the way things are, he wouldn't.'

She paused.

‘And you may be needing this,' she said. ‘Better have it anyhow, just in case.'

It was the blue-and-white sports robe that Stan had bought at the Colony's Trading Post for use when he was sitting beside the swimming pool.

‘Well, I think that's everything,' she said. ‘Good night. Sleep well.'

Mr Cheevers undressed slowly, looking round the room as he did so and treasuring every moment. ‘Like the wallpapered cell of a lay monk,' the words came to him. ‘Spartan, plain, austere…'

He was still repeating the words as he put on the sports robe, and began to make his way along the passage to the bathroom. He did not get far, however. The door of Marleen's room was flung open and she
stood there facing him. For a moment neither spoke. Then he saw that under her flimsy pink nightie her little bosom had begun to heave.

‘No you don't, Cheevie,' she said. ‘Not your scene. No way. Not now. Not ever.'

With that she flew at him and tried to rip the soft blue-and-white towelling off his shoulders.

After ‘the little scene', as Beryl always in her own mind referred to Marleen's attack upon Mr Cheevers, she was careful to keep the two of them as much apart as possible. They had, of course, to sit down together with her in the warmth and comfort of the front lounge and share the same folding-table in the alcove of the dinerette. But she no longer left them alone in each other's company.

Not that, in all probability, anything would have happened if they had been. That was because Beryl had already had it out with Marleen. She had slowly and patiently explained how important it was that the book should be published, and how necessary therefore Mr Cheevers was to both of them.

‘If you think I want the two of us to starve just because your Dad's done something silly then you'd better have another think coming,' she had finished up. ‘There's a lot of money in books if you know how to write them like Mr Cheevers does.'

With Beryl herself so much preoccupied with Mr Cheevers, it was only natural that by now Marleen should have become the family's chief link with Stan; and it was to Marleen rather than Beryl that Stan mostly wrote nowadays. It was probably just as well, too. Previously, Beryl had kept on getting upset by the unpleasant reminders on cheap, brownish notepaper; even the sight of the equally cheap envelope had been enough to bring on one of her headaches.

In the result, it was Marleen who was best placed to observe the change in Stan's condition; all for the better, too, it seemed. And it was the Library that had done it. In any prison, the post of Librarian is, next to that of the Governor himself, about the most cherished position in the place. And Stan was certainly the man to fill it.

The transformation of having someone under forty, and still with a zest for good filing, was really quite startling. In the six months or so during which he had been there, a renaissance had taken place: loose pages were pasted in again, broken spines repaired and traces of chocolate and chewing-gum scraped off covers. The Library became, after the Chapel, the show-piece of the whole prison. Journalists,
Howard Leaguers, foreign visitors, well-intentioned Peers and documentary film producers were all taken there, and Stan was introduced to the whole lot of them. Never in his entire life had he felt so important or so deeply appreciated. And it was apparent in his appearance. Despite the awful, ill-fitting prison clothes, a change had come over him. He had acquired a new dignity, and an air of calm and self-possession; it was the air of a man who after long deliberation had finally arrived at a big decision.

Even so, Marleen was entirely unprepared for it. As Beryl herself was. And this time it was to Beryl that the inferior-looking prison envelope was addressed. The enclosed letter made no mention of Marleen.

The tone, moreover, was so quiet, so reasonable, that it might have been that of any husband and any wife conferring together about their domestic future. It began by reminding Beryl that, though he had already served nearly two years of his time, there was still a solid block of over ten years ahead of him, even allowing for a maximum reduction for good conduct: by then, he would be nearly fifty and Beryl herself would be forty-six. That being so, he felt it only fair to remind her that she should start thinking about getting a divorce just as soon as she could. He'd checked up how to go about it and apparently it was all quite simple and straightforward: more of a formality than anything else, really. He'd fully understand, he said, if she wanted one, and if she wanted to get married again he wouldn't mind about that, either. All that he was thinking about, he assured her, was her happiness and Marleen's.

It was the extreme neatness of Stan's handwriting that upset Beryl. If the whole thing had been scrawled, tear-stained and crumpled, she might have been able to understand, even to forgive. But this tidy, formal little document, never! The left-hand margin was as straight and upright as though he had used a T-square; and, at the bottom right-hand corner, Stan had drawn a short, diagonal line and had inserted the letters ‘PTO' in the resultant triangle.

As it happened, the letter came on the same day as one of Mr Cheevers's evening calls, and naturally she turned to him for advice. Mr Cheevers, it turned out, was all in favour of the idea: he made that clear from the outset. The whole thing, indeed, seemed part of a prearranged pattern: if he had designed it himself, he could not have improved on it. News of the divorce would make a useful little
paragraph to help keep the story alive; and for the book itself, no ending could have been more perfect. The more he thought about it, the more enthusiastic he became and, to make sure that there were no unforeseen hitches, no slip-ups, he offered Beryl the services of the
Sunday Sun
legal department.

‘Place yourself in their hands, and you need be put to no further trouble in the matter.' He paused, searching round in his mind for one parting sentence of consolation. ‘Of course,' he added, ‘I fully realize what a deep shock all this must have been to you. If there is any way…'

But Beryl was not listening. She had gone over to the mantelpiece and was tapping something.

‘That's funny like,' she told him. ‘It isn't working. I must have forgotten to fill the glass up or something.'

It may even have been part of a prearranged plan – though Mr Cheevers was not to see it like that at the time – that Mr Cheevers's old mother should have passed away on the very day on which Beryl's speeded-up divorce came through. Whatever it was, the outcome was inevitable. ‘Two lonely hearts' was how Mr Cheevers put it to her; and Beryl found herself agreeing with him.

In the result, Beryl's new address, as Mrs Cyril Cheevers, was No. 10 The Pallisades, Wimbledon Common. Admittedly, it was not quite so central as she might have wished, nor so fashionable. It wasn't by any means the sort of apartment block she would have been living in if she had married Cliff. But it was modern and, even though she had been there rather less than three years, she had largely forgotten about Kendal Terrace by now. It might have been another woman of the same name who had once happened to live there.

For a start, there was none of that everlasting money-worry that had nagged at her during all those endless, wearing years with Stan. This showed itself in all sorts of different ways. Nowadays, for instance, on those occasions when her sugar-hunger suddenly became unbearable, she no longer had to slip into the nearest confectioners' to buy a walnut-cream-milk-flake, pretending that she was buying it for Marleen: instead, there was always a box of Dinner Mints or assorted chocolates standing by all ready on the occasional table in the living-room.

And it was the same with her clothes. There was no need now to go to a back street suburban dressmaker, with a copy of last month's
Vogue
under her arm, and a length of material bought in the January sales. These days Beryl was exclusively a High Street shopper. Her dresses came from the smarter of the Wimbledon boutiques, Estelle's or Maryon's or Jeannette's; and very smart some of them were, too.

The greatest difference in Beryl's appearance, however, had come about because of her hair. With no Monsieur Louis, late of the Ritz, to guide her, she had allowed herself to be talked into utter recklessness. In the end chair in one of the new open-style salons she had, on impulse, agreed that she would have her hair cut short.

Not that the operation had passed entirely without incident. Twice at the thought of what was happening she had broken down completely and, with two of the junior assistants called in to help, had needed to be comforted. Then, after it was all over and she saw her hair,
her
hair, lying there discarded on the side-table with the white streak showing up pathetically amid the mass, she collapsed again. This time it required Osborne biscuits and Nescafé to restore her.

Indeed, it was not until her hairdresser suggested that, professionally mounted as an ornamental hair-piece, what had just been cut off could be worn again whenever she wanted to, or all the time if she felt like it, that she became calm once more.

Her one great consolation was an inner, private one. It was all part of today's preparation for tomorrow. Everyone told her that short hair made her look much younger; and this was now all that mattered. She was now thirty-six, getting on for thirty-seven; and, for the future to be perfect, she could not afford to look one day older than thirty-one, or thirty-two at the outside.

The only trouble was that there was one room too few in the new apartment. Beryl had done all she could, of course: she had made the best of things. The end bedroom, Marleen's room as they had called it when they moved there, had been completely redecorated. In place of the pale, satin-finish wallpaper and the Regency curtains, there were plain white walls with a stencil design of rabbits and windmills and baby elephants, and the dado of funny ducks all carrying shopping baskets; even the glazed chintz curtains carried scenes from Disneyland.