The Husband's Story (19 page)

‘So you don't care for it?' Mr Karlin asked. ‘You think it's too big? It looks vulgar, is that it?'

He slid back his shirt-cuff as he was speaking and revealed another watch just like the one that Stan was holding. Mr Karlin, Stan noticed, had very hairy arms.

‘It looks all right on you,' Stan told him.

‘Look all right on you, too, once you're used to it. If you don't want it, give it to your Marleen. All little girls like presents.'

Mr Karlin was already getting up. He leant across the table and helped Helga to her feet.

‘If Mr Pitts won't have another drink there's no point in hanging
around here, is there?' He paused. ‘We got off cheap tonight. I was going to offer Mr Pitts a separate advance for his nude work. Now we don't have to, do we Helga?'

Mr Karlin had opened his jacket by now, and his hand was in his breast pocket. He kept drawing his thumbnail across something that was hidden there. It made a sound that Stan recognized; the one like cards being shuffled.

Helga looked up at him.

‘It is a big pity. A very big pity. All that work, and you won't do it for us. So highly paid, too. I can place it anywhere. Think it over, Mr Pitts. For my sake, think it over.'

Mr Karlin was still smiling.

‘That's right, Helga,' he told her. ‘Let Mr Pitts think it over. We'll still be around if he wants us.'

Because there had been no fresh cash advance from Mr Karlin, it had to be the cheaper kind of Beaujolais that Stan bought. Not that it was without character. On the contrary, strangely acid and at the same time distinctly sweetish, it dissolved in the mouth like a fruit drop. And the colour was quite remarkable, too: a deep, almost purple, amethyst-like hue that was opaque even when held up to quite a strong light. In short, at five-and-nine a bottle, it had everything that could reasonably be expected of it.

And Beryl had been at her most inventive about the meal to go with it. Even rather daring. This was because she had used a recipe that she'd been keeping by her for some time. ‘Why Be Ordinary?' it was entitled, and it had come from a woman's magazine that she had read while sitting in her dentist's waiting-room. The friendly, understanding style of the article had appealed to her. And, because she had been alone in the waiting-room at the time, she had simply ripped the page clean out. With one swift
creech
it was hers and, folding it twice over, she had popped it into her handbag.

It came in particularly handy because it covered the whole course of the meal from lighting the joss-sticks before starting to serve, to offering little chunks of Turkish Delight, impaled on cocktail sticks, along with the coffee. And all three courses were just as thoughtfully conceived. It was the salad, in particular, that pleased her. There had been a colour illustration of it in the magazine and she had followed the design exactly. With the ingredients – the silvery sardines, the sticks of celery, the slices of carrot, the black and green olives, the radish discs, the banana strips, the segments of grapefruit – arranged radially, the effect was most striking. Seen from above, it was like the principal flower bed in a Corporation public garden.

Because Marleen wasn't sitting up for dinner, Beryl naturally didn't take quite the same trouble over hers. Not with the arranging, that is. But it was all there on her plate, Beryl assured her; a little bit of everything that Mummy and Daddy and Uncle Cliff were going to have.

As it turned out, the meal could not have been more successful. In
fact, it was well-nigh perfect before it had even started. Stan had seen to that. Cliff had hardly got his coat off before Stan had handed him the envelope with the cheque in it. And he did it most gracefully. Even nonchalantly, in a way that made Beryl rather admire him for it.

‘Thanks very much, old chap,' he said. ‘Very good of you. Very good indeed. Much appreciated. But we couldn't take it from you. Besides, we don't really need it. Not now, we don't, do we, Beryl?'

The question caught Beryl unawares. The whole speech had been so polished that she had not expected it to end so soon. But she saw that some kind of reply was needed.

Pursing up her mouth into a little smile, she answered him.

‘Well, not if you say we don't, we don't, do we?' she said. ‘I mean it's not like having to have it if you haven't got it, is it?' She turned towards Cliff. ‘But it was ever so sweet of you to offer. It was really. I shall never forget it. Never.'

Beryl was aware that, at best, it was a poor, stumbling kind of response. But, at least, it was entirely spontaneous. Stan's, on the other hand, had been most carefully rehearsed. In the train he had gone over it again and again, sometimes merely saying the words to himself, sometimes repeating them out loud until the other passengers had become uneasy and had begun to move away from him.

Chicken à l'Abraham Lincoln was what the woman's magazine had recommended for the main dish. Apparently the great liberator had been peculiarly partial to boiled fowl with a kind of thick white parsley sauce, and out there in the kitchenette of Beryl's log-cabin the chicken, deep-frozen, had been patiently thawing itself out all through the afternoon.

It was while Beryl was seeing to the parsley sauce that Stan showed Cliff the watch that Mr Karlin had given him. Cliff examined it carefully.

‘Your friend got the agency?' he asked.

‘Don't think so,' Stan told him. ‘Said they were being given away.'

Cliff tapped his front teeth with his thumbnail. It was a habit of his while thinking.

‘Find out who by,' he said. ‘Good-looking watch. Might even be interested in handling it myself.'

He started tapping his teeth again. He could see it all so clearly: the small ads in the Sunday papers; the cash down and six monthly-instalments; the offer of money back if not entirely satisfied; the
parchment guarantee certificate with the big red seal.

They were still talking about the watch when Beryl called them through to the dining alcove. At once she became interested.

‘Did you find out about it like I asked?' she demanded.

‘I couldn't,' Stan told her. ‘I haven't seen anyone to ask.'

Beryl turned to Cliff.

‘I just want to know if they do a lady's model,' she explained. ‘I mean the same like. Only smaller. I thought perhaps…'

It was Cliff who changed the subject. The joss-stick that Beryl had so thoughtfully lit was fuming away inside the miniature china pagoda that had come along with it in the same packet. Up there on top of the free-standing kitchen unit, it provided just that rich, exotic note that Beryl had intended. Little lavender-coloured tendrils of smoke were drifting gently upwards through the tiny windows.

Cliff began sniffing.

‘Hullo, hullo,' he said. ‘Call the Fire Brigade. House on fire. I smell burning.'

Stan was grateful to Cliff for the interruption. He had already lied to Beryl about where his hundred pounds had really come from; and she had believed him. He could hardly expect her to believe that the Civil Service had suddenly decided to present him with a king-size chronometer as well. That was why he had invented a brand-new lie about having just won a photographic competition with the wrist-watch as first prize.

They were entirely white lies; both of them fully justified and thoroughly well-intentioned. All the same, they meant that for the first time in their marriage he was living another secret life entirely of his own.

Even though the Beaujolais had not been exactly pleasant it must have possessed a certain potency. There was now more colour in Beryl's cheeks than when she had sat down, and Cliff himself was in the best of high spirits. He told Beryl that her cooking was better than at the Ritz. He kept congratulating Stan on his promotion. He remembered his first motor-car, a grey Jaguar with red upholstery, and became sentimental about it. He showed them a balancing trick using two forks and a tablespoon. He spoke of an evening up in town just for the three of them. And, as soon as the old-style caramel whip – another, so the
magazine said, of the dead President's prime favourites – was finished, Cliff suggested that the men should take their coats off and do the washing-up.

But Beryl wouldn't hear of it. Not with the Dishmaster standing there doing nothing, she wouldn't. It shouldn't take a jiffy, she said. And the saucepans were all the quick-clean kind anyway. What she wanted was to get the menfolk into the lounge so that she could see Cliff's face when the coffee was poured out and she produced the Turkish Delight impaled on the little cocktail sticks.

It was over coffee that Stan remembered about Cliff's Jaguar. That long-ago August Bank Holiday came back to him. He could see Cliff, bow-tie and sports jacket and all, sitting behind the long, low bonnet. And naturally he'd taken a few snapshots of the car. One of them in particular had been rather more than a snapshot. It was a composition. With the camera held at radiator height it made the bonnet look even longer, with Cliff away in the distance half-hidden by the steering-wheel.

A happy thought came to him.

‘You two be all right if I just go upstairs to fetch something?' he asked.

As it turned out, he was away longer than he had intended; much longer. In the first place, Marleen's light was still on and he sat down on the end of her bed to talk to her. Not just an ordinary talk, either. It was fatherly, counselling stuff about not crying yourself to sleep just because you haven't been allowed to sit up for supper.

And it was the same upstairs in his workroom. That took longer, too. It wasn't because the print of the Jaguar wasn't indexed. All his prints were numbered and entered in the reference register. He was rather proud of that register. It showed that he maintained his high professional standards even in his hobby. But it didn't speed things up. It was simply that he found his other early work so interesting. ‘Toadstools', for example. Or
Easter Parade.
Or a study of passengers waiting at a bus stop on a rainy day:
Les Parapluies
that one was rather daringly entitled. Stan could hardly have been more than twenty when he had taken it and, looking back, he could not help admiring himself for such clever and effective use of the French language.

The picture of the Jaguar was precisely as he had remembered. It was a good, powerful piece of photography that brought out the hard,
masculine contours of the machine. But it was sad all the same because the driver looked so disarmingly, so heart-breakingly, young in it. It was hard to believe that the direct descendant of that sprightly bow-tied figure was the middle-aged man waiting in the lounge just below.

It was on the way downstairs that Stan decided to play a little trick on Cliff. He would hold the photograph up in front of him and, making the
vroomp-vroomp
noise of Cliff's present Jaguar, suddenly thrust the door open and burst in upon them. That was why he tiptoed so quietly down the last flight. He wanted the whole thing to be a surprise.

The door was no more than three-quarters shut. A tall, vertical slice of the room stood revealed to him. And, framed by the doorway, he could see Cliff and Beryl. They were seated side by side on the couch with their backs towards him. Cliff's arm was around her, and Beryl had her head down on Cliff's shoulder.

Stan stood there, the motor-car photograph in his hand. He was trying to catch what Beryl was saying. And it wasn't easy. Her face was too far snuggled-down for that. All that reached him were little snatches.

‘… no proper holiday this year, either… not grumbling, just explaining… girl of Marleen's age got a right… do away with myself, I could really…'

There was more of it in the same vein. All unhappy, mumbled stuff. Then Cliff spoke.

‘Always got me,' he reminded her.

Stan was leaning forward by now, listening intently. He heard Beryl give a long, deep sigh.

‘… get up and walk out,' was the next little burst that he caught. Then there was a pause as though Beryl were reconsidering things. ‘… if it wasn't for little Marleen,' the words reached him. And this was followed by ‘… whatever would her teacher say?'

‘You married the wrong man,' Stan heard Cliff say.

Beryl must have shifted her head. He could hear her quite distinctly this time; too distinctly, in fact. And what made it worse was that, in her own way, she was defending him.

‘It's not Stan's fault,' she said. ‘Not really, it isn't. Not Stan's. It's just that he's not up to it. Like not being made head of his department, I mean. Well, they couldn't have chosen Stan, could they? Not to be in charge like. He's not cut out for it. He'd still be the number two even if he was the only one there, Stan would.'

Stan put up his hand and coughed. It wasn't simply that he couldn't bear to hear anything more about himself. He was ashamed of himself for listening; eavesdropping, and on his own wife too, seemed a pretty despicable kind of thing to do.

At the sound of the cough, Beryl sprang away from Cliff and sat bolt upright. She was indignant.

‘Oh, you gave me such a start,' she said. ‘Coming in like that, indeed. I wondered whoever it could be standing there. Where
have
you been?'

‘Fetching this,' Stan told her.

He handed Cliff the photograph.

‘This remind you of anyone?' he asked.

It was no use, however. What he had just heard had knocked all the fun out of it. He didn't mind giving the print away. But he was in no mood for tricks. He simply hadn't got the heart to do the
vrooomp-vrooomp
bit as well.

It was because he couldn't sleep that he went back upstairs to his workroom. And he was careful to be very silent about it. He didn't want Beryl to open her door to find out what was going on, or have Marleen call out after him.

Once up there, with the door closed after him, he felt better. More secure. This was a part of his private world, the world where Beryl couldn't enter. This was where Stanley Pitts really came into his own and could do his dreaming.