The Husband's Story (29 page)

That is, coming on top of his Civil Service pay, of course.

In a leafy, Surrey side-lane, the mustard-coloured Mustang was now parked. The lights had been turned off and the driving-seat and the front passenger-seat were both empty. In the back – Mustangs are fast rather than roomy – two figures were huddled close together.

It was the one with the elaborate hair-do who was speaking. And there was a little catch in her voice as she said the words.

‘No, not now,' she was saying. ‘It wouldn't be right. Not with Stan staying behind to look after Marleen, it wouldn't. Besides, I don't feel like it. Not out here in the road, I don't. Somebody might come.' She paused long enough to run her fingers along the back of Cliff's hand. ‘Some other time, perhaps. But not tonight. So just don't go on about it.' Her head was on his shoulder and she slid down lower into the seat beside him. ‘Why not come down to the Isle of Wight with us?' she added, breathlessly. ‘Stan's bound to be out photographing once we get there. And Marleen'll be playing table tennis or something. Then we can be together like.'

Cliff was bending over her and his lips were close to hers. Beryl, however, had not quite finished.

‘But not every night,' she said firmly. ‘Just once. Only just once.'

Oddly enough, it was Beryl and not Stan who began to be haunted by suspicions of infidelity.

It came to her in a flash, and she knew instantly that the facts were too stark and too compelling for her to be able to ignore them. There were those frequent, mysterious late nights of his; and the unexpected gifts, like that of the perpetual drinking duck; and his new carefree attitude towards money. Some other woman, she realized, must have taught him how to begin spending it. It all added up: it was part of one big, sinister pattern.

In consequence, she began taking stock of him, casting sideways glances at meal-times, wondering what on earth it could be that this other woman, whoever she was, could possibly see in him. It must be something to do with his manner, she supposed, because that was precisely where the greatest change had occurred. He was so much more self-assured nowadays. More positive. More easy-going. Yet, at the same time, more withdrawn, more secretive. And slowly the alarming truth began to dawn upon her. This wasn't one of those trivial everyday affairs between a man in his late thirties and some little common chit of a typist. This had the authentic hallmark of something far more serious.

And now it was not only every Tuesday evening that Stan was out, but most Saturday mornings as well. Practically desertion, she called it. Beryl had already decided that, if things hadn't changed by the time she got back from their holidays, she would consult a solicitor. And it wouldn't be legal separation either that she was after. This would be the real thing. Divorce; divorce, with alimony; divorce with alimony and with Cliff thrown in as well, she wouldn't wonder.

In the meantime, it was the Saturday mornings that annoyed her most. Stan had always been such an excellent shopper – quick, thorough and willing. He never seemed to mind how long he queued up to pay for things at the Supermarket, or how much he carried home afterwards.

That was why it was nothing less than infuriating nowadays the way he would set off on Saturdays, all smug and superior, to catch his
usual train, saying in an indifferent, off-hand manner that he was just putting in a little bit of extra overtime.

Naturally, she didn't believe him. That was why she began going through his pockets to see if she could find anything incriminating. Not that the search yielded very much; receipts from Kodak mostly, an odd voucher for an office raffle, a paper clip or two and a screwed-up toffee paper; that sort of thing.

Nor need she have bothered. Stan's Saturday mornings were not a part of any permanent pattern in his life; just a passing and impulsive phase. At the very moment when Beryl was searching, Stan was in a first-floor front room in Earls Court. And the girl – a young and rather pretty one – was showing herself every bit as understanding as her calling demanded.

‘I'm sorry if I did anything wrong,' Stan told her. ‘Perhaps I did go a bit too far.'

‘Oh, I don't know,' she replied. ‘It's what you came for, wasn't it?'

‘Not really. Not right at the end, I mean. It's just that I didn't seem able to stop.'

She smiled back at him.

‘That's what they all say. But don't tell the policeman. He mightn't believe you. Anyhow, better luck next time.'

And, so far, Stan had certainly been having it. He had pulled away from the kerb satisfactorily, he had braked at the pedestrian crossing giving due notice of his intention, and now he was edging gingerly into the outside lane before making a right-hand turn. The instructor no longer even seemed unduly worried about him. He merely sat there, relaxed and reconciled, wondering how he could get a bit more spirit into his pupil.

‘You're only doing eighteen miles an hour,' he had kept reminding him when the motorists behind had started to object. ‘Step on it a bit, sir, keep moving.' Indeed, so long as he had been on the staff of the motoring school, he had never known a learner so polite, so unimpulsive. Running into the back of the milk float last week had, he felt sure, been no more than a minor misadventure, the sort of thing that might happen to anyone. Star quality, he was sure, was what he had sitting beside him if only he could really get him going.

Stan himself was determined that his driving should be nothing less than perfect. To begin with, there would be the full course of twelve lessons; next, he would pass triumphantly through the driving test;
and then, a whole month's more Saturday morning practice motoring with someone from the school as a back-seat passenger. By the time he took Beryl and Marleen out with him for the first time he was determined that he should be an experienced motorist with quite a few hundred on the clock; even something of a veteran driver, in fact.

And there was more to do than that. It all had to come as a surprise to Beryl. That much was essential. And more than a surprise, it had to be kept entirely secret. Taking driving lessons was precisely the kind of thing that Mr Karlin had warned him against. It was the kind of indiscretion that might hint at a sudden improvement in living standards. And that, Mr Karlin kept stressing, amounted practically to a signed confession.

In consequence it was under an assumed name on his driving licence that Stan sat himself down every time behind the wheel of the motoring school's Morris 1100. What's more, it had taken a bit of organizing to arrange about the false licence. Here Stan had been extra careful. For a start, he hadn't wanted to risk giving the accommodation address of the newsagent's in Putney from which he had opened his second banking account. And he certainly hadn't wanted to give the same name. His number two account had been opened in the name of a Mr Arthur E. Edwards of Wimbledon, whereas his driving licence was for someone called P. F. Richardson, living at another accommodation address in Notting Hill.

It was the spy-stories that Stan kept reading nowadays that had first given him the idea of using the various aliases; and it was his relationship with Mr Karlin that had first given him the idea of reading spystories. Even there, however, he had been cautious. They were paperbacks mostly that he bought, or cheap, pulp-trade American crime magazines. For him to be found with a whole library of such literature would, he knew, be nothing less than incriminating. He therefore made a point of throwing them away as soon as he had finished reading them; and, even then, never in the same place, never to establish any kind of pattern, simply thrusting them into station waste-baskets, dropping them into Corporation litter-bins, leaving them about on the upstairs seats of buses.

It was his own workroom back in Kendal Terrace that still worried him. If Security ever did begin to get suspicious that was the first place they would start looking. And with the watch and false driving licence
and the extra cheque book staring up at them from one of the drawers it would be all up straight away. He had thought of dislodging one of the floor boards and constructing a hiding-place beneath or going up into the loft and hollowing out a space above the rafters. But he dismissed both ideas. The spy-stories and the crime magazines were full of descriptions of searches by MI6 where even the upholstery had been slashed open.

In the end, he decided on one of the safe deposit boxes in the bank at Wimbledon. That made things practically fool-proof. In the first place, there was nothing to connect Stanley Pitts of Kendal Terrace with the bank in Wimbledon. And secondly, if the safe deposit box ever should come to be opened, the trail would lead back only as far as the newsagent's in Putney. And the masterstroke of the plan was that he had already posted the key of the safe deposit addressed to himself at the self-same newsagent's. For as little as sixpence a week it could rest there safely. And once a month or so, just to keep up the pretence, he could take it out, go along to the Post Office, buy one of their ready-stamped envelopes and mail it back again. ‘Snake-eating-its-own-tail' was what such an arrangement was called in Secret Service circles; and, according to ‘True Spy Stories', there was always a lot of it going on.

That isn't to say that even now Stan's mind was ever completely at ease. It isn't possible to live two different lives both at the same time without experiencing a certain sense of strain. But the anxiety, the jumpiness, were made up for by quite a different feeling; and it wasn't simply a matter of the money. It went deeper than that. Self-congratulation was at the core of it. Stan was conscious of being aloof and superior to everybody.

Inside himself he was smiling.

‘I've pulled it off, that's what I've done,' he kept repeating. ‘I've got ‘em all guessing. This isn't just feeding
false
information – all that's been done before. This is
real
information. They can check it. It's real. But it's the wrong kind. It's out-of-date. It's useless. And they don't know it. That's the big joke. It's useless. They've been taken for a ride, they have. And I'm the one who's been taking them. If people knew about me, I'd be famous. I'm Unknown Public Hero Number One, I am.'

In the meantime, the most important thing in his life was, Stan recognized, to go on being unknown. That was why he had to be so
careful about his driving lessons, and about his eventual possession of a car.

It was the use – not necessarily the ownership – of a car that he was working up to; and this was all-important. Because if anyone should ever get to hear that he was by way of being a motorist he wanted it to be clearly understood right from the start that it was not an extravagance but an economy.

Accordingly, whenever he saw the chance, he kept raising the matter of domestic railway fares, bringing the conversation round to it in the most casual and disarming manner. That very day, over lunch in the canteen, he managed to establish the point most neatly. A Mr Holds-worthy from Sickness and Claims had mentioned that he and his wife were off on a charter flight to Morocco. Stan let him ramble on about seeing foreign places before you were too old before he interrupted him.

‘D'you know,' he said as though the thought had only just occurred to him, ‘that, mile for mile, it's cheaper nowadays to fly than it is to go by rail?'

Mr Holdsworthy demurred, just as Stan had expected him to do. And he was ready for it.

‘Well, I can tell you one thing,' was how he finally wound up as two o'clock came round and the lunch-break was nearly over. ‘I'm thinking of hiring a Mini this year. Quite big enough really. There's only the three of us. And think of what you save. No taxi to the station. No porters to tip. No hanging about waiting for trains. Just slam the door and off you go.'

Back at his desk down below in the basement Stan picked up his ruler and, raising it to eye-level, looked down the length of it as though it were a shotgun. It was an old habit of his; something left over from quite early childhood. But nowadays he did it only when he was thinking about something. And this time he was thinking about how clever he had been.

Of course, he knew perfectly well that two Second Class returns and a Child's was cheaper than hiring a Mini. It stood to reason. But it also stood to reason that he had to cover up for himself. He was only sorry that Mr Karlin hadn't been there to watch him do it. If Mr Karlin had been sitting at the table with the rest of them, he would very soon have realized that Stan wasn't just the raw, untrained amateur that he sometimes seemed to take him for.

Then, just when everything seemed to be proceeding so smoothly
and the whole family future looked happy and secure, there came the disturbing incident of the man from the Electricity.

On the face of it, there was nothing to it. Merely the most ordinary of routine visits. It had certainly not alarmed Beryl in the slightest. She had merely mentioned it casually over supper by way of illustration of the kind of petty annoyances to which housewives are nowadays subjected by the nationalized industries; and that sort of thing was, she had added, getting worse all the time, not better.

Apparently, in the middle of the morning, the Board had sent someone along to read the meter. So far, there had been nothing remotely unusual in that; and, she had felt forced to admit, the man had shown himself to be thoroughly nice, polite and considerate. Actually on her side, as he had kept telling her. Because the fault that he had detected as soon as he could reach the box was something that could, he said, have cost the consumer as much as an extra ten or even fifteen pounds a quarter. For, with everything in the house securely switched off as it seemed, the meter under the stairs was quietly ticking away all the time, the little dials busily turning, adding kilowatts to the invoice; in short, defrauding the householder.

And, being the honest servant of the Board that he was, that man had insisted on going all over the house to find out why. In the result, he had checked lamp-sockets, power points, the fridge, the washing-up machine, the boiler, the Hoover and the spin-drier. He had even, at some cost. to his neat blue trousering, clambered up into the loft to check the thermostat.