The Husband's Story (3 page)

‘Bo-zho-lay,' he said. ‘A bottle of Bo-zho-lay. That's for both of us. Something to celebrate with.'

Beryl stood there, staring at him. Two little spots of colour had appeared in her cheeks the way they always did when she was excited about anything. Suddenly she looked younger. Her lips were half-parted, and for a moment Stan thought that she was going to kiss him.

‘Stan,' she said breathlessly. ‘It's happened like. It's really happened. You've got it. And you never told me.'

She had come up close to him by now, and Stan had to put the bottle hurriedly down on the table-top to avoid dropping it.

‘No. Not that, dear,' he told her, edging away as he was speaking. ‘Not yet. That's not until next month, like I said.'

‘Like you said what?' Marleen asked.

There was a cold, accusing note in her voice as she asked the question, and her pretty blue eyes had gone hard and narrow. She had stopped playing with her new bag, buckling and unbuckling it: the bag just hung limply there with the front dangling wide open. She moved round so that she could face him. If there was one thing that she could not bear, it was the feeling of being kept out of a secret.

Nor could her mother. Still holding the silk scarf in her hand, Beryl simply flicked Marleen out of the way.

‘Well,
something's
happened,' she insisted, ‘I know it has. Don't you tell me…'

She stopped because Stan had taken a small white card from his breast pocket, and was holding it out to her.

Reading it took her some little time. That was partly because, though she didn't like to admit it, she should have worn reading-glasses, and partly because she was naturally just a rather slow reader.

‘Well, I never,' she said at last. ‘Not like again this year. Two years running. Just fancy that.'

But all the excitement had gone from her voice; there was even the faintest note of disappointment.

She passed the card across to Marleen as she was speaking, pausing long enough to make quite sure that Marleen would wait for it to be given to her properly.

Marleen was better than her mother at reading; top of her class, in fact. And her eyesight was young and perfect. She held the card straight up in front of her.

‘Civil Service, Admiralty Division,' she read out. ‘Photographic Society Annual Exhibition 1965. First Prize, Five Guineas, Stanley Pitts (Contracts Filing)'.

Then she paused, too, her eyes narrowed up again.

‘What's Contracts Filing?' she asked.

But Beryl was growing a trifle tired of Marleen's questions; even, for that matter, a trifle tired of photographic competitions.

‘It's what your father does,' she told her. ‘File contracts like. And now give it back to him. At once. He doesn't want dirty, sticky marks all over it, does he?'

But Stanley Pitts did not really seem to mind. He had not yet quite finished what he had in store.

‘And we had the Press along,' he said. ‘I think they liked
Hoarfrost
best. One of them gave me this.'

It was a smaller card that he took out of his pocket this time, a visiting card, and he did not let go of it.

‘“Max Karlin, London representative, Pictures International”,' he read out. ‘Said he'd be getting in touch with me.'

‘What about?' Marleen asked.

She still felt that there was something fishy somewhere, that she wasn't being told everything.

‘About buying some of my work for the papers,' Stan told her. ‘For the high-quality ones, of course.'

‘Coo!'

It was an expression that Beryl didn't like Marleen to use. It was vulgar. But she could not help being a bit impressed herself. It had never occurred to her that there might be money in photography. Secretly, it had always seemed to her to be just another hobby, like toy boats or model railways; something inexcusably selfish that made him set off by himself on Sunday mornings when he could have been indoors, like other husbands, helping her.

‘Well, let's only hope he does,' she said. ‘You've certainly been at it long enough. It's about time…'

The buzzer over the automatic cooker had sounded to tell her that the Oven-Fresh Old Style Farm House Cornish Pasties were ready. She'd set the automatic dial at ‘3'; and that usually took care of things,
unless Stan's train was really late, of course. But tonight they'd hung around undoing all those parcels. If she'd known, she would have set the dial at
or even ‘2'.

She turned and went back behind the ivory-enamel louvre. A sudden feeling of flatness – that awful has-it-really-got-to-be-like-this-forever-until-I'm-dead? sensation – had come over her. She'd been expecting Stan's big news, the news that was going to make all the difference to them, that at last he had got his promotion. And all that she'd got was talk about photographs again.

From the other side of the screen, she could hear him still going on about them.

‘The
Swans
was last year,' he was telling Marleen. ‘They're the ones in the lounge.
Hoarfrost on Wimbledon Common
was the year before. This year I sent in
Apple-blossom Time.
Can't afford to go on repeating yourself, you know. If you're a good girl, Marleen, next year, perhaps it'll be you. You, in your ballet skirt. Up on your points. Against a neutral background. Holding a Chinese lantern, or something.'

You can't expect to run around picking up big photographic prizes every day of the week; not Firsts, of Civil Service standard, that is. Even the most gifted competitors have to content themselves with a Second here or an Honourable Mention there, or even a Specially Commended; and usually that amount of acknowledgment has to see them over the whole twelve months.

In consequence, the rest of January came as a bit of an anti-climax for Stanley Pitts. There was the usual round of congratulations as the non-photographers in other Departments came to hear of his success; and the local paper carried a whole three-inch piece about him. But that was all. There was an undisguisable feeling of flatness to everything; flatness, and a sense of nervous expectancy about next month's Appointments Board.

Deep down in his own mind he kept telling himself that he had nothing to worry about; that the job was as good as his already. But little niggling doubts kept returning to him, and he was always glad in the evenings to get back to the warmth and security of Kendal Terrace. Friday evenings, of course, were best of all.

Like this particular Friday, for example. He hadn't been kept late at the office; the train had been on time; he'd changed into his week-end clothes; the meal was just over and, there in the small dining alcove, he and Beryl and Marleen were clearing the table to get it ready for breakfast next morning.

It was then that the front-door bell rang. No ordinary ring, either.
Ding, ding-a-ling-ding, ding-ding
, it went. And, at the sound of it, Beryl's heart turned right over; it went
bump-a-bump-bump
, like the door bell. That was because she knew it must be Cliff; her own, original Cliff, and no one else on earth.

She was thankful now, really thankful, that she had never had musical chimes installed instead of an ordinary door bell. Admittedly, in the ordinary way, they were more warm and welcoming. But they only went
ding-dong
no matter how you played about on the door bell-push.

She turned to Stan.

‘Well, aren't you going to answer it?' she asked. Then she turned to Marleen.

‘And up to bed you go,' she told her. ‘It's ever so late. You know it is.' It wasn't really very late: not late at all, in fact. But, now that they were going to have Cliff with them, she wanted to keep the whole evening as close and concentrated as possible. Much as she loved Marleen, even the presence of one child could, she knew, somehow produce a strangely diluting effect.

‘May'n't I just…?' Marleen began.

‘No, you may'n't. Upstairs like I said.'

Marleen went over and gave Beryl her obedient, good-night kiss. Then she moved slowly over to the doorway and hung about there.

‘Oh, hullo Uncle Cliff,' she said as she stepped through the bead curtain. ‘I was just going up to bed. Perhaps if you ask Mummy…'

But Uncle Cliff turned out to be on Mummy's side. He'd had a long day already, and didn't in the least want to spend the rest of it with an eleven-year-old hanging about in the background; didn't even particularly want to go on being called Uncle Cliff for the rest of the evening.

‘Now just you go on up,' he said, giving a teasing tug at the light gold curls as he was speaking. ‘And go off to sleep.' He kissed her twice on the forehead, cupping her face in his hands as he did so. ‘And if you're a good little girl you may find a present beside your bed in the morning.'

Then, because he was such an old friend of the family, practically one of them as Beryl was always saying, he slapped Marleen playfully on her little bottom. It was not the sort of thing of which Beryl, in the ordinary way, would have approved; but, coming from Cliff, she would have known that it didn't matter in the slightest. He was more like a second daddy, really.

And she had deliberately made a point of staying behind where she was in the dining alcove, and not rushing out to meet him in the hallway. This was important. Because she didn't want Stan, or Cliff for that matter, to think that she minded in the slightest whether Cliff came to see her, or whether he didn't.

But it was different, quite different, as soon as he was standing there in front of her. He had such an irresistible way with him. Like never actually speaking her name, just saying, ‘Hullo, Beautiful,' as if ‘Beautiful' really were her name; and saying it so casually, too, as though what he called her didn't matter to either of them.

When they had kissed, brother-and-sister fashion, he stood back and looked at her.

‘Been slimming again,' he said. ‘Just like I warned you not to. No point in taking chances. Wake up one morning, and you won't be there. All because…'

It was Beryl who stopped him.

‘I'm enormous,' she said. ‘You can see I am. I just don't know what to do about it.'

She swung round as she said it, so that the Sun-God buttons jangled, and the folds of the Mexican housecoat spread out around her heels. It was a brave and daring gesture. But she knew perfectly well that it was one that she could afford. Thanks to Mincal biscuits at lunchtime and no milk, no sugar in her tea at breakfast, and no tea even at tea-time, she had lost nearly seven pounds since October. Naturally, living with her all the time, Stan hadn't even noticed. Cliff was the one who had.

But she was no longer thinking of
her
appearance. She was thinking of Cliff's. And she had to admit that she had never seen him looking quite so marvellous. The new, long hair style for men might have been designed specially for him. There was something so raffish about it; so correct, too, in a vaguely naughty sort of way. And he had never before, to her knowledge, worn a shirt with thick horizontal pink lines running right across it; or a plain white collar. But she had to admit that they both went wonderfully with the broad blue pin-stripe that had turn-up cuffs on the jacket, and the double-breasted waistcoat, and the big, thin wrist-watch with the black face, and the chunky cuff-links and the dark chocolate of the laceless suede shoes. Only someone like Cliff, she reminded herself, could have carried the whole thing off so perfectly.

But already Beryl had remembered her manners; had realized to her dismay that she was just standing there. She gave him her quick, hostess smile.

‘A bite to eat?' she asked. ‘We've only just finished like. But it wouldn't take a jiffy. Not be any trouble, I mean.'

Pictures of the outsides of tins went flashing through her mind as she was speaking. Veal loaf, Spam, sardines in tomato sauce, salmon, celery hearts, baked beans, corned beef, Hungarian goulash – she could see them all. Left to herself for a few minutes she knew that she could
produce the sort of meal that any Woman's Editor would have applauded.

Cliff, however, was busy refusing.

‘No food, thank you,' he said. ‘Not good for me. I've got something in my bag outside. Something I brought specially.'

He turned to Stan, and let his hand rest lightly on his arm for a moment.

‘Be a good fellow and go and get it, would you?' he asked. ‘It's the little one. The air bag.'

He waited until he was out of the room, and then jerked his head over his shoulder in Stan's direction.

‘And how's the photographer?' he asked. ‘Taken any more nice pictures lately?'

Beryl frowned, bringing the corners of her mouth down as she did so.

‘You're not to talk about Stan like that,' she said. ‘I've told you that before. I don't care for it.' She paused. ‘As a matter of fact, he's…'

Stan had come back through the bead curtain by now, and was holding out the BEA air bag. Suddenly, Beryl felt sorry for him.