The Husband's Story (42 page)

‘But they weren't. They were true. Every word of them.'

Beryl could feel her hands tightening up in anger.

‘Well, you don't have to go on saying so, do you?' she snapped back at him. ‘Stop thinking of yourself for once. Try to remember about me and Marleen.'

This time it was Stan's voice that faltered.

‘I do,' he told her quietly. ‘I remember about you and Marleen all the time.'

‘Then tell ‘em it was sunstroke. Say you were all confused like and can't remember anything about it.'

Stan did not reply immediately. He just sat there, silent and tightlipped.

He was about to speak when the prison officer interrupted him.

‘I'm sorry,' he said, ‘but that's all for this afternoon. I've given you an extra couple of minutes as it is.'

It was not only Beryl and Mr Marbuck who were worried about Stan's obstinacy; there was Mr Cheevers as well.

Mr Cheevers, indeed, was in the worst position of them all. He had already chanced his arm, and his whole professional reputation was
now at stake. Fifteen hundred pounds the Features Editor had said, and Mr Cheevers had gone up to two thousand; been driven up to it, rather. And if, as Mr Cheevers had heard, Stan really had made a full confession, there wouldn't be anything for the front page at all; just a side-column piece headed something like ‘ADMIRALTY CLERK ADMITS SELLING SECRETS'.

It was in order to get hold of as much of the drama as was still rescuable that Mr Cheevers paid another of his visits to Crocketts Green. Using one of the company's pool cars the journey took him only just over forty minutes. That was because he had come to know the route by heart. Turning right at Whitecross, thus skirting Mandley Green altogether, meant that you could cut out the notorious traffic black-spot of Crocketts Green High Street; and it was a tip worth knowing. Nowadays Mr Cheevers reached Kendal Terrace via Derwent Gardens and Fell Road, and
not
down Westmorland Avenue at all.

Once inside No. 16, it was the orderliness of everything that so impressed Mr Cheevers. And it was always the same – nothing out of place, everything freshly polished, no finger-marks, no dirty ashtrays, no squashed-down cushions on the three-piece suite; altogether, it might have been a show house, something in an Ideal Home Exhibition designed to set an example for the newly married. Mr Cheevers made a note of the fact and, as he did so, a disturbing thought came to him. It was only in a dominantly feminine ménage that everything could have been kept so perpetually neat as all that. Mr Cheevers found himself wondering how well Stanley Pitts had fitted into those surroundings; and, for an instant, the extraordinary thought flashed across his mind that it might have been in a mood of sheer rebellion that he had suddenly broken out.

Beryl herself was as immaculate, as poised, as ever. It was her Mexican housecoat, the one with the Sun God buttons, that she had decided to wear. And the decision had not been reached without something of a struggle. Beryl was naturally sensitive on all matters of etiquette, and on matters of dress etiquette in particular. There must, she felt, be something that was
right
for a woman whose husband was in prison to wear, something that wasn't too much like mourning, as if in her mind poor Stan was condemned already and, at the same time, wasn't too modish and might make it appear as though she simply didn't care.

Mr Cheevers had just reached the point of explaining to Beryl that she would have to cast her mind back to that single moment in time when she had first learnt of Stan's arrest, and then deliberately relive the whole episode in her memory. Only by this means, he assured her, would she be able to recapture the authentic mood of anguish; and that, he went on, was what the readers were waiting for.

‘Just tell me simply in your own words,' Mr Cheevers was advising her. ‘It doesn't matter how they sound. I can always re-phrase it for you so that our readers will be able to understand what you were up against.'

‘Why couldn't they understand like I told it to them?'

Mr Cheevers smiled.

‘It's really a question of what they're used to,' he said.

‘And they wouldn't like something different for once? Not something to take them out of themselves like?'

Mr Cheevers told her that he did not think so. Sunday newspaper readers, he stressed, were a strangely loyal band, practically a mystic society; a brotherhood that reassembled every sabbath. Beryl understood. She and Stan had been readers of the
Sunday Sun
for years.

‘You ready?' she asked. She had closed her eyes by now, and she was breathing deeply.

Mr Cheevers nodded and then, realizing that she could not see him, added: ‘Carry on.'

‘What was it like when I learnt that my husband had been arrested on a charge of espionage?' she started, speaking very rapidly. ‘That bit goes into italics because that's not like me speaking. This is me now. New paragraph. Black type.'

‘But…'

Mr Cheevers tried unsuccessfully to intervene. Beryl, however, was determined to continue.

Beryl kept her eyes closed and began again. Her voice had dropped to a low monotone, and it was almost as if she were reading. Mr Cheevers's shorthand notebook lay open on his knee.

‘It was like an Atomic Bomb, capital “A” capital “B”, exploding in my heart scratch out “heart” and make it “soul” ', she said. ‘Everywhere was darkness. I was left numb, speechless, obliterated. Above me hung a great mushroom cloud of misery. For myself I was nothing. All I could think of was poor Stan and little Marleen…' She paused.
‘Go back and say “My thoughts were only for my man and for our child.” Then go straight on. “How can I save them? How can I avert disaster?” I kept asking. But no answer came. It was a moment when prayer itself was without avail. It was the abyss.'

This time when she paused it was only to take breath. Mr Cheevers, however, was trying hard to check her.

‘Keep it personal,' he said. ‘I want little things, like making yourself a cup of tea or having to take an aspirin.'

Beryl nodded.

‘Horrified I drew back,' she resumed. ‘The tempest of my fears raged round me. I…'

It was Marleen's return from school that cut Beryl short. The child looked flushed, and it was obvious that she had been crying. She ignored Mr Cheevers completely.

‘Tracey kicked me,' she said.

Beryl got up, smoothed the housecoat down as she rose.

‘Manners, darling, manners,' she said. ‘Come and say how-do-you-do to Mr Cheevers.'

Marleen came forward. It was a hot, unwashed hand that she held out, and Mr Cheevers was surprised to find how damp it was; Mr Cheevers did not like children.

‘How's little Marleen?' he asked.

The ‘little' had slipped out quite unintended; Marleen was actually far bigger than he had first expected.

Marleen stared back at him.

‘All right,' she said.

This was where Beryl had to come to Mr Cheevers's rescue; it was one of her rules of life that visitors had to be put at their ease at all times.

‘Now be a good girlie and run along,' she said. ‘Because Mr Cheevers is interviewing me like. I'm telling him what happened so he can write about it in the newspaper.'

‘Why?' Marleen asked.

‘Because Mr Cheevers writes about all the big trials where they have judges and that kind of thing, don't you, Mr Cheevers?'

Mr Cheevers gave a little smile.

‘That is so,' he said modestly.

Marleen's gaze softened.

‘Have you ever met a murderer?' she asked.

It was one question too many. Beryl wanted to go on with her own reminiscences, and not have to listen to other people's. She went over and gave Marleen a nudge with her elbow.

‘Your tea's all ready for you,' she said. ‘There's fresh pineapple juice in the fridge.'

It wasn't really fresh: it came out of a collapsible waxed cardboard container like everything else nowadays. But it said on the label that it was fresh, and so Beryl supposed that it must be; fresher at least than all the other makes that didn't even pretend to be fresh.

‘Well, go along with you,' she said.

But Marleen didn't move. She had turned to Beryl again.

‘You will write a note, won't you, Mum?' she asked. ‘Because Tracey's got it in for me. She kicked me on purpose. And can I have a Band-aid to go over the place, Mum? It's all bleeding.'

Beryl had her arm round Marleen's shoulder by now, and had managed to work her over to the door.

‘Band-aid in the get-well-soon box in the corner cupboard,' she said, using her specially-musical voice this time, the one that sounded as though she could never possibly get upset about anything.

Out of sight behind the shelter of the half-open door, Beryl was able to give her a little push. Then she turned back to Mr Cheevers.

‘Was what I was telling you all right like?' she asked. ‘Is it what the readers are waiting for?'

Before he could reply, the telephone had started to ring, and Beryl went across to answer it.

The room, even with its Summerland extension and the sliding aluminium doors leading onto the patio, was still only a small one. And the telephone itself was a comparatively new instrument, with a powerful diaphragm in the ear-piece. Mr Cheevers could overhear every word perfectly.

‘That you Beryl?' the voice asked. ‘Cliff here.'

It seemed to Mr Cheevers that, for a moment, Beryl hesitated. He noticed that the fingers of her free hand had suddenly closed up as if she were grasping something. Then, as suddenly, she released her grip again. And there was no hesitation whatever about her reply: this time it was not even her musical voice that she was using, merely her social one.

‘Aim afrayed you heve the wrong number,' she said, speaking slowly and distinctly. ‘Aih doan't knoew anyoen of thet naeme.'

Having said it, she put back the receiver. Everything that she had done had been neat and controlled and orderly. It was only that, in Mr Cheevers's opinion, she had put the receiver back rather more firmly, more decisively, than is usual with just an ordinary, everyday wrong number.

Even though it had only been a matter of weeks – four-and-a-half to be exact – that Stan had been lodged in Cell 16, second landing, D Block in Her Majesty's Prison, he now felt as though he had lived there all his life.

Everything about it was now familiar – the size; the colour; the smell; the noise; the texture of the mattress; the red-bound Bible with the words ‘Holy Bible' at the top and ‘Property of HM Prison Commissioners' across the bottom; the antique-looking slop pail.

Already, he had discovered several very interesting things. About the bars at the window, for instance. They were what had worried him most when he had first gone in there; they were what had produced that zoo-like, caged-in feeling. But not so any longer. He had found out that if you faced up square to the window and gazed at it long enough, the iron bars slowly disappeared, eventually vanishing clean away to nothing, leaving you staring out at clear sky and clouds and the occasional bird that might with luck be passing over. Admittedly, it wasn't very comfortable because the window was set so deliberately high in the wall. Indeed, it was obvious that the prison architect had put it up there specially to discourage peepers. This meant that you had to tilt your head right back, with your throat drawn tight as though waiting to be shaved by a barber. You couldn't, in fact, go in for very much of that kind of window-gazing because quite soon you got a high-pitched ringing in the ears and then, if you persisted, you went dizzy. More than once Stan had been forced to sit on the edge of his bed with his head between his knees simply to recover.

That was where he was sitting at the moment. But there was nothing wrong with him this time. He was just meditating. One after another, a whole procession of disconnected thoughts had been passing through his mind. He had been thinking, for example, of how strange it was that the number of his cell should be sixteen which was the same number as his house in Kendal Terrace. That had put him on to wondering how Beryl's cottage-type dish-washer was working; labour-saving though it could be – with a complete three-cycle wash
and dry
all executed within sixty minutes – it did tend to go wrong rather too frequently. Stan knew just where the design-fault lay: that was why he was able to put things right so quickly. But, without his help, Stan reckoned that by now poor Beryl would probably have been driven back to the indignity of the washing-up bowl. And this made him feel very miserable because he knew that, of all household tasks, washing-up was the one that Beryl most detested. Then, before he knew what was happening to him, he was back into his old trick of talking to himself.

‘Well, there you are, Stanley, my lad,' he began. ‘It's nobody's fault but your own. You're the one who's got her into all this trouble. If it hadn't been for you, she'd be living a happy, contented life like other people. It's quite a nice little house really. But she'll never forgive you if she can't finish off that attic-conversion idea of hers. She's set her heart on getting the attic right. That's something she's bound to be angry about.' He broke off and, hands folded in his lap, stared blankly at the wall in front of him. For no particular reason he was recalling how Beryl had lost her temper when he had first told her that he wouldn't withdraw anything in any of the confessions that he had made. And as it came back to him, he started up the conversation again. ‘Perhaps it's just as well for you that's the way she does feel,' he reassured himself. ‘It's better that she's mad at you. If she was just sorry that would really break your heart, that would.'

Because the edge of the bed was a hard one, and because he had been sitting there for some time, he felt the pain of pins-and-needles running all down his left side. He stretched himself, and re-crossed his legs. And that time it was about Marleen that he consoled himself. ‘She'll be all right. I know she will. Nothing to worry about there. Beryl'd never let anything happen to her little Marleen.'