The Husband's Story (6 page)

If you don't meet one lot either coming in or going out, once you're inside you're practically one big family with the other lot. Only a wall's width away, remember; and only a thin dividing-wall at that. If No. 14 had the radio turned up, Beryl could set her watch by the time signal; and, if the old-fashioned two-panel front door at No. 18 was banged shut instead of being closed gently, the hat-rack in No. 16 always rattled. The same upstairs, too. But worse. Shared noises like bath water running. Or plugs being pulled. Even snoring, sometimes.

For years now, Beryl had been saying that they ought to move right out somewhere. Into a little bungalow, preferably. No stairs. And, above all, no next-door neighbours. As things were, however, she had to admit that she was lucky in the neighbours she had got. Down the road it was different. At No. 35, for instance, there was a family with five children; five children in a three-bedroomed house: Beryl didn't like to think what it must be like there when any of the children got ill. And No. 28 was openly sub-let, with two bell-pushes for everyone to see. Then there was the house at the end that always had the blinds drawn, and never did anything about the front garden; and three doors down on her own side there was a red-haired woman, apparently without a husband, who gave parties and had the oddest-looking collection of friends who said noisy goodbyes on the pavement and woke up the whole street by slamming car doors before they went home.

More than once Beryl had wondered if it could be that the whole neighbourhood were going down, slipping away socially the way some places do. She hoped not, because she could not bear to think of spending money on the house if property values were falling. And, she
had decided, almost decided that is, to have the outside re-painted in pale apple-green. She had even got so far as wondering what colour the curtains would have to be to go with it.

Not that either No. 14 or No. 18 would be likely to mind very much either way. Mrs Thomson in No. 14 was an invalid; and, as she never went out, she could hardly be expected to see anyway. And, on the other side, there were the Ebbutts. Mrs Ebbutt was as nice a woman as you could meet. But married to a schoolmaster. And just not interested. All that they cared about in No. 18 was homework and revision and ‘O' Levels and that kind of thing.

If Beryl were to go mad and re-paint the woodwork pink or violet, Mrs Ebbutt would probably not even notice.

It was the letter from the Bank Manager that upset Beryl.

And it came on a Saturday of all days – one of the only two days in the week when she had a moment to herself in bed and wasn't rushing round all the time doing things for other people. Over the week-end Stan had always made a point of bringing her breakfast up to her; it had started right back from the very moment when, ever so long ago, they'd returned from their honeymoon. And now, of course, he had Marleen to help him: she looked after the toaster while Stan made the tea. It gave Beryl quite a lump in the throat sometimes to see the two of them come trooping into the room looking so pleased with themselves just because, instead of the other way round, for once in a while she allowed them to wait on her.

It was because it was a Saturday that the letter was there, propped up against the teapot like an invitation. And not knowing what it contained, she had opened it before she had taken so much as a sip of tea. In consequence, her whole mouth became bone dry as she went on reading.

If she had been fully dressed and with her make-up on, she wouldn't have minded so much. She could have coped. But, with just a short frilly jacket over her nightdress and her hair not even seen to, she felt defenceless.

The letter wasn't written in the way that Mr Winters usually wrote to her. All his old-time niceness seemed to have gone out of him. In hard, black typing he simply said that her account was now overdrawn by one-hundred-and-seven pounds and that the Directors had instructed him to see that it was put in funds again. He asked therefore that she
should arrange to come and see him as soon as possible, and hoped that in the meantime she would not be proposing to draw out any further amounts.

It made her go cold all over, that letter, and she could see the sheet of paper fluttering in her fingers as she lay there. What made it all so much worse was that, until now, she had always thought that Mr Winters was her friend. And now this horrible letter showed that he simply did not understand; come to that, never could have understood the first thing about her. Because her private bank account meant more to her than anyone else could ever realize. Her whole self-respect depended on it. It was what made her different from all the other wives in Kendal Terrace; different from all the other wives in Crocketts Green, she didn't wonder.

First there had been the money from her father's will. Nearly two thousand pounds of it. Then buying the house – Mr Winters had encouraged her in that. Then all the expense when Marleen had been so ill and Beryl had thought they were going to lose her. Then the rewiring when, without warning, the electricity people said the place wasn't safe. Then all the things she'd done to the house to make it a nice home for the three of them. That was when Mr Winters had offered – yes, actually
offered
– to arrange a mortgage. And she had been forced to go back to him a second time because otherwise there would have been no way to pay for summer holidays or winter clothes or even odds-and-ends like skates for Marleen when half her form had started going along to the ice rink, and naturally Marleen had to go, too.

It wasn't her fault that now there was nothing left. Nothing for anything. Now, whatever it was she wanted, she would simply have to do without. Or ask Stan for it. Even for the hundred-and-seven pounds to pay back to Mr Winters. And then where would she be? Just like all the other wives. Utterly dependent.

But what more could she have done to make things right? Heaven knows she'd been on to Stan often enough, begging him, imploring him, nagging – yes, actually nagging – him to do something about getting himself promoted. He'd tried twice already, once for a job on the Stores side, and once for something to do with Pensions and Sick Pay; and then only because she'd made him. But both times they'd turned him down.

And really she didn't wonder. You only had to look at him to see that there was nothing there. No real ambition. No confidence in
himself. Not like Cliff; not a leader. No drive. It was just like Stan to have to hang around and wait for someone else to retire before thinking of getting anywhere. Left to himself, he'd have been perfectly content just to go on forever doing whatever they asked him to do, being paid whatever they cared to pay him, provided he was left free to get on with his photography.

‘Oh, my God, Stan,' she suddenly heard herself say out loud, ‘you don't know what you're doing to me. You're killing me. That's what you're doing, killing me. Slowly, deliberately killing me.'

Even after the outburst, she was down at nine o'clock as usual, dressed in her blue shopping suit, properly made-up and her hair re-done exactly the way Monsieur Louis had shown her how.

But she wasn't really there at all. This was only the mechanical part of her, the machine that she had turned herself into just so that things shouldn't get out of hand and go sloppy. The true Beryl, the one with feelings, the one who loved and got hurt, was miles away. Up on a cloud somewhere, thinking about debt and Mr Winters; and by how much Stan's salary would go up when he got his promotion; and what life would have been like if, when only nineteen and still with a long pigtail down her back, she had agreed to run away with Cliff the way he had wanted her to.

And it was like that all day. She was two entirely different people. The one who trundled the metal trolley round the Supermarket picking up the giant economy sizes, the special offers and the new range packets, simply wouldn't have understood if the other one had suddenly come up and thrown her arms around her, bursting into tears because life was all so frightful, so hopeless.

Because Beryl was strangely silent at lunch, Stan asked if she was feeling all right. Only, of course, he was asking the wrong person. The sensitive, mature woman who had just sliced up a banana for Marleen and poured Express Dairy cream over it, and couldn't have been more in control of herself. And this was strange because at that very moment, face down and with her long hair trailing behind her, the one he didn't know about was already floating downstream somewhere, unconscious, to some hidden, watery grave, simply because she had decided to end it all.

It was not until the evening, after Marleen had gone to bed, that Beryl finally spoke to Stan. And by then she was pleased with herself to
find how calm and considerate she was. She crossed over to the television set and turned it off.

‘Sta-an,' she said, the word coming out rather slow and appealingly, ‘you don't mind not looking for a moment, do you? I just want to say something to you.'

But it happened to be another of those times when Stan had not even noticed that she had spoken to him. And she saw now that she need not have bothered to turn off the set. He hadn't even been watching. Instead, he was going, paragraph by paragraph, through the Used Equipment pages of
Amateur Photographer.

‘Sta-an,' she said again. ‘I'm talking to you.'

He looked up.

‘Yes, dear?' he asked, keeping the tip of his finger up against the small ad:
Zykton-Matic lens inc. case and adaptor 200 mm f. 3.5 auto, £25 19s 6d
that he had just been reading.

Beryl came over and, going up behind him, leant forward and spread her hands flat out across the page.

‘I want you to pay attention,' she said, making it sound all light and playful. ‘It'll only take a moment. Then you can go on reading your silly old magazine again.'

While she was standing there looking down at him, she could not help noticing that his hair, still wavy in front, was getting strikingly thin on top. His pale, pink skin kept showing through underneath, and she realized that in a year or two – say five at the utmost – he would be bald, really bald, like her own father. The sight rather shocked her. It was another of those awful reminders of how old they were both getting. It wasn't so far off now, that unthinkable moment when she would wake up one morning knowing that she would never see forty again.

But, with Mr Winters's letter in her handbag, she could not let thoughts like that distract her.

‘It's about the bank account,' she said. ‘You know, my private one. I've gone and overdrawn it.'

Her hands were resting on his shoulders by now. It seemed better that way, impersonal but still friendly. She was glad that she wasn't actually looking at him because, as soon as she even mentioned the words ‘bank account', she could feel him suddenly tightening up, could detect that all his muscles were contracting. And she remembered that it had been the same last time: Stan was always jumpy whenever
they started talking about money.

‘But you can't have,' he said. ‘Not again.'

‘Somebody's got to pay for things,' she snapped back at him. ‘They don't just deliver them free like. Not nowadays they don't.'

Hurriedly she checked herself. This was just the kind of thing that she had meant not to say. It was why it had all gone wrong so often before. She dropped her voice, and began speaking more slowly.

‘It was the curtains mostly,' she went on. ‘The ones with the pelmets, I mean. And the upstairs carpets, the fitted ones. You said yourself we had to have them. It just wasn't safe like. How would you have felt if Marleen had caught her foot in one of the bad places? She might have injured herself for life, she might really.'

Stan had got up, pushing away her hands as he did so. He threw his
Amateur Photographer
back into the chair, and stood facing her.

‘How much?' he asked.

She was looking straight at him by now. It was exactly what she had been wanting to avoid.

‘I'm afraid it's rather a lot,' she told him.

‘How much?' he repeated.

‘You're not going to be cross if I tell you?'

As soon as she had spoken, she wished that she hadn't said it. It sounded so absurd. She was behaving almost as if she were afraid of him. And the idea of anyone being afraid of a little shrimp of a man like Stan was just plain silly.

‘Go on. Tell me,' he insisted.

‘It's a hundred pounds,' she said. ‘Just a bit over. Anyhow, you can see for yourself if you like. Here's Mr Winters's letter.'

She didn't want Stan to see that her hands were trembling as she opened her bag, and she pretended that there was something wrong with it.

‘It's that stupid, cheap clasp stuck again,' she explained. ‘It's always going wrong. It's foreign. French, or something.'

The letter itself had got a bit crumpled. That was because her first instinct had been to screw it up and throw the beastly thing away. Stan had to smooth it out before he could read it properly.

Then, having read it, he stood there not saying anything. It was Beryl who had to speak first.

‘Well?' she asked.

And still Stan did not speak. He had drawn in one deep breath and
then another, and was simply staring down at the half-sheet of paper.

When he did speak, the words came out all in a rush, and Beryl couldn't help noticing how common, how downright uncouth, his voice could sound.

‘'S'no use asking me,' he told her.
‘I
can't help you. I haven't got it. 'S'matter of fact, I'm a bit overdrawn myself.'

This was too much for Beryl. Just for a moment – and only for a moment – she forgot how quiet and dignified she had intended that they should keep their conversation.

‘Well, if you can't I'd like to know who can,' she demanded. ‘The man-in-the-moon, I suppose.'

But Stan wasn't listening to her. Instead, he was repeating the words ‘a-hundred-and-seven-pounds'; saying them over and over again to himself as if they were some sort of incantation. In the end, Beryl had to stop him.