The Husband's Story (11 page)

That was why, when he suggested that she should stay the night, Estelle quite readily agreed. And it was at moments such as this that Cliff's natural, easy charm always came to the fore. As a host, he was perfect. He simply invited Estelle to go through to the bathroom first, and told her that she would find a new toothbrush in the cupboard over the basin. Just that. Estelle had always liked men who were nonchalant.

When she emerged, she was wearing Cliff's St Tropez wrap that she had found conveniently hanging up behind the door. And Cliff himself was down to his string vest and college underpants. His restrained pinstripe suit, his pink shirt and his bold and rather striking tie were draped neatly over the chair by the window, with his brown suede shoes on the floor beside them.

Cliff put his arm tenderly about her, and they started to go through to the bedroom together. They had got only as far as the end of the couch, however, when the front-door buzzer sounded. The note startled him. Telling Estelle to stay where she was, he padded barefoot
into the hall. It was definitely on the late side for visitors. There was no safety-chain on the door, and he was careful to lean his shoulder up against it as he turned the knob.

But it was only lonely Zena. And after the frustrations of the airport, the endless cups of coffee before the flight cancellation was finally confirmed, she was dangerously close to breaking-point. At the sight of Cliff, all stripped-down and masculine-looking, she uttered a happy little cry and sprang at him. The door flew open, and there he was clasped in the cherry-red uniform of Charter Airflights.

It was over Cliff's shoulders that Zena saw Estelle. And the sight of those long, white legs under the St Tropez bath-wrap was too much for her. She was still carrying her overnight air-bag with the name of her employers printed on it. And it was heavy because it contained a carton of duty-free whisky that she had intended as a present for Cliff. Slipping the bag off her shoulder, she shortened her grip on the strap and hit out at him. Cliff, all but defenceless in his string vest and college underpants, backed away. Then he saw that Zena was making for Estelle, and he tried to stop her. That was when the cherry-red uniform got torn. The occasional table went over. And Zena was swinging out again. This time it was at Estelle. But by now Estelle was prepared. She had picked up one of Cliff's brown suede shoes, and was defending herself.

Looking back on the whole episode, what Cliff resented most was Zena's and Estelle's attitude towards him. When the fight was over, they had gone through to the bathroom together, and had stayed there rather a long time. While Cliff was putting the occasional table back on its feet again and picking up the cigarette ends from the ashtray that had gone over with it, he could hear taps being turned on and off, and the basin cupboard being opened and shut again. Because Estelle would hardly be using her new toothbrush now, he imagined that it was aspirins or sticking-plaster that they were after. Then the bathroom door opened and they walked straight past him. The last that he saw of either of them was as they went down the corridor towards the lift. They had their arms round each other by then, and Estelle was carrying Zena's air-bag for her.

That was how it was that Cliff was free to see so much more of Stan and Beryl. With Estelle and Zena both gone, and with no one else on call at the moment, the flat seemed strangely desolate and empty. By
comparison, Kendal Terrace was a haven. There was real warmth there. He might have been one of the family the way Beryl greeted him. And, low in spirits as he was, more than once on the way down in the car he had reflected on how things might have been.

By rights, it should have been Stan who was dropping in on him and Beryl.

It was in the second mail delivery, the one that usually reached Contracts Filing at the same time as the tea trolley, that the buff, internal office envelope addressed to Mr Stanley Pitts arrived. It was marked ‘Private and Personal'. And, the moment it came, Stan pounced on it.

He had been sure that he would hear something during the day. It made him feel all bright and cheerful inside. And it had showed. During breakfast Beryl had even accused him of holding out on her, saying that he must know more than he was telling. Otherwise he wouldn't be like that, she had added: not at breakfast, he wouldn't. And the same happy, expectant feeling had persisted all the way up in the train.

Now that the letter had really come, however, he found that he couldn't bear the strain of it all. It meant too much to him. He just stood where he was, with the buff envelope in his hand looking down at it. Then, because he didn't want to attract attention to himself, didn't want any of the juniors in the department to wonder what he was doing, he picked up the letter-opener and slit open the envelope with a flourish as though it didn't matter.

He was still standing as he unfolded the paper and began to read, and he did not sit down again immediately. He wasn't even looking at the letter any more. He was staring straight ahead of him; not really seeing anything, either. Eyes simply fixed in space, oblivious of everything. And he was quite still, except that now his hands were trembling.

When he did at last sit down it was because he suddenly felt sick. A strange sensation of not being there, of not being anywhere, had come over him, and he wondered if he were going to faint.

Because his fingers were still twitching, he found it difficult to fit the letter back into its envelope. But all that he wanted was to get it out of his sight. What it said was his secret and, for the time being, that was how he wanted to keep it. Opening his jacket, he pushed the envelope deep down into his inside breast pocket, along with his wallet and his season-ticket and his comb. He could hear the scraping, grasshoppery
sound as the teeth of the comb came up against the flap of the envelope.

But it was no use. In his mind's eye, he could still see the hard, black typing on the inferior, brownish paper. ‘…
regret having to inform you that your application has been unsuccessful… post has accordingly been otherwise filled'.
And just so that there could be no mistake about it, no careless blunder up in Personnel, there was the reference number,
P||372,
that he knew by heart, plainly set out in the same hard, black typing. He could have done a drawing of the whole letter from memory.

The palms of his hands had moisted up and become sticky, and he went down the corridor to the staff lavatory. As he passed the temporary girl from the typing pool, the one he knew rather liked him, he heard her ask if he was all right. But he didn't even answer. Then, when he looked at his reflection in the big plate-glass mirror over the washbasins, he saw why she had spoken; all the colour had gone out of him.

After his second cup of water, drunk out of a limp, cardboard container, he felt better. Not so sick, but still shaky. Then he went over to the window, and leant up against the wall beside the roller-towel machine. Despite that drink of water, the whole inside of his mouth felt dry again.

He was thinking of what he would say to Beryl when he got home that night.

Because Stan still wasn't feeling well, Mr Miller sent him home early. A quiet evening in front of the telly followed by a good night's rest and he'd be a different man in the morning, Mr Miller told him.

It was four o'clock when Stan left Frobisher House. Going out at that time gave him an unreal, strangely guilty feeling and, as he passed the security check, he was careful to speed up a bit, stepping out as though he were going somewhere important. But, now that he was out there on the pavement, he didn't know what to do with himself.

Then he remembered that he hadn't eaten any lunch. He had felt too ill for lunch. Besides, up there in the canteen he would have met too many people.

There was a Wimpy Bar at the corner, and he went in and ordered a cup of coffee and a hamburger. The coffee was all right. But he couldn't manage the hamburger. He didn't feel strong enough. Long before it had gone cold, he had pushed it away from him right up to the far end of the table-top as though someone else had made the
order and then forgotten about it.

Stan wasn't thinking about food at all. He was thinking about Marleen's dance contest, and the rates that were due next month, and the overdue electric light bill that he hadn't yet paid, and the new pair of shoes that he needed for himself, and the cost of Beryl's weekly hair-do, and the overdraft repayments, and the price of colour film, and his own turn-down by Personnel and Establishment.

With a start, he realized how late it was getting. Leaving the office at four was one thing; idling about in Wimpy Bars was quite another. If he had hurried, really hurried, he could have been at Cannon Street in time to catch the two-minutes-past-five or even, with luck, the four-forty. As it was, he was in danger of losing his usual train. And by the time he reached the station the barrier on Platform 4, his platform, was already closing.

The sight of the gate as it was pulled across in front of him produced an odd sensation. He realized that, instead of feeling angry and frustrated, he was grateful. Positively grateful. The plain truth was slowly beginning to dawn on him. He wasn't merely reluctant to go home, wasn't simply trying to put off telling Beryl.

He was afraid.

Until the moment of Stan's return, it had been undeniably one of the better days in Beryl's life.

Marleen's cold, which had looked like developing into a real, old-fashioned streamer, had cleared up overnight as if by magic, and Beryl didn't even have to press a spare hankie into the little hand when she said goodbye to her at the school gate. Beryl herself was happy, too, because she was so sure that Stan was happy. She had felt it all day. Ever since breakfast time, in fact. That was when, for the first time, she had been certain, really certain, that Stan would, at last after all that waiting, have something definite to tell her when he got home.

In consequence, she had been in high spirits. A strangely young feeling had come over her, a sense of lightness. And every time she saw herself reflected in the shop windows in the High Street the whole effect pleased her. Last season's camel-hair coat still looked almost new, and her patent leather handbag sparkled. That was because she had given it a thorough going-over with Min-Cream after she had finished polishing her dressing-table. But what she liked best about those reflections of herself, what was so reassuring, was that no one catching a glimpse of her could have imagined for a single moment that she was the sort of woman who ever had to turn her hand to housework. People would never have believed that less than an hour ago, rubber gloves and all, she'd been down on her knees wiping over Marley tiles like a skivvy because the plastic handle had come clean off her Dainty Maid Handymop.

It was entirely for Stan's sake that she had gone into the Supermarket and bought him a deep-frozen Cornish chicken pie. Chicken pie, provided it was one of the deep-frozen kind, was one of Stan's favourites. And clearly he deserved a bit of a treat. It had been cruel - yes, downright cruel – of the Civil Service to keep him in suspense like that. Fortunately for him, he wasn't the highly-strung type. Even so, it must have been a strain on him, too, she reckoned. For some time now he hadn't been looking what she'd call well; not really well, that is. He was in need of a tonic, something to brace him up a bit. Just thinking about it made her
feel strangely loving towards him. Almost maternal.

And during her afternoon rest, her regular shut-away-from-the-outside-world siesta, the same mood of lovingness persisted. She felt warm and blissful. There wasn't so much as a trace of one of her silly old headaches, and she really believed that she had found the right hand-cream at last. When she had peeled off her rubber gloves before going out shopping, she'd noticed it straight away. And it was the same now that she was holding the Mars Bar. Her fingers round the packet looked soft and white and delicate. Not a bit like a housewife's. More like a young bride's, she thought. Next to her hair which, as Beryl always said whenever the subject came up, was the best thing about her, she had always been very proud of her long, slender hands.

The copy of
Woman's Own
was open on the bed beside her; and on the pillow, the pocket radio, turned down so as not to be disturbing, was quietly saying something to her. But Beryl was neither listening nor reading. She was thinking. Annoying and irritating in little ways as Stan was, she ought to try to be nicer to him, she kept telling herself. Her role as a wife was to build him up, give him self-confidence, make him feel important.

And it was all going to be so much easier on his new salary level. For a start, it meant that she would be able to take him in hand and do something about his clothes. Just because he was stock size, standard small gentleman's that is, he didn't have to go around reminding everybody about it. Even his best suit, the brown one, was somehow too ordinary. Something in dark grey flannel with a chalk stripe and rather wide lapels was what she had in mind for him; and definitely striped shirts, instead of plain ones. And a blue-and-white polka dot tie; big dots, not small ones, of course.

On nice days nothing but nice things seem to happen; it was little Marleen who had once said that, when she had still been quite tiny. And it was true. By six-thirty, everything was ready. The table in the dinerette alcove had been re-laid after tea, the Cornish chicken pie was in the oven with the switch set low, Marleen had finished in the bathroom and Beryl was in her Mexican housecoat with the Sun-God buttons.

Even on ordinary days it was one of the moments that Beryl liked best. There was a sense of leisure, of luxury almost, in just being able to sit there quietly in the lounge for a few minutes. Idly, more to pass the time than anything else, she re-read the article in
Woman's Own
on attic conversions. Not that she was thinking of doing anything about it; not just for the moment, that is. Not until they had settled up with Mr Winters. But some time next year, perhaps. One huge, enormous room stretching the whole length of the house was how she saw it, with divan-style furnishing and a lot of big, lumpy cushions; and a squat, glass-topped table; and low-key lighting; and bare boards, naturally, with a rug or two set at strange, odd angles to complete the effect.