The Husband's Story (23 page)

‘What Mr Svenstrom is saying,' he explained, ‘is that you hold a very responsible position.'

Stan nodded.

‘That's right,' he said.

‘And you're proud of it, aren't you?'

‘I suppose I am, rather.'

‘So you should be. That's why it's all wrong.'

‘What is?'

‘Not giving you the top job. You deserved it.'

It wasn't something that Stan wanted to discuss. It was all too painful.

‘Can't be helped,' he said. ‘That's all over and done with.'

‘But there's the money side to it,' Mr Karlin went on. ‘They're under-paying you.'

‘I can manage.'

Whenever the subject came up, Stan always made a point of defending the Civil Service. Anything else would have seemed disloyal. It was only to himself that he admitted feeling badly about it.

‘But Mr Svenstrom doesn't want you just to manage,' Mr Karlin said. ‘Mr Svenstrom wants you to be comfortable. And you can be if you do what Mr Svenstrom says.'

‘What's that?'

‘Combine business with pleasure. There's a lot of stuff stored away in those records of yours that would hit the headlines if only we could get the sight of it. That'd be worth paying money for.'

Mr Karlin's hand was still resting on Stan's knee. Stan pushed the hand aside.

‘If you're suggesting what I think you're suggesting,' he said, ‘I'm not having anything to do with it.'

Mr Karlin looked surprised. Surprised and possibly a little hurt.

‘Pity,' he said.

‘What's more,' Stan told him, ‘it will be my duty to report this conversation. That's what the Official Secrets' Act says.'

‘Does it now?' Mr Karlin asked. ‘Does it really. But you wouldn't go and do anything like that, would you?'

‘Why wouldn't I?'

Stan felt rather proud of himself as he said it. He'd never imagined that he'd have the opportunity to say anything like that, and he only wished that Commander Hackett of Security could have been there to hear him say it.

But Mr Karlin didn't seem very much impressed.

‘Because it wouldn't be good for you,' he said. ‘Because you wouldn't like what would happen.'

‘Are you threatening me?' Stan asked.

Mr Karlin gave a little laugh.

‘No,' he replied. ‘I'm protecting you.'

‘What from?'

Mr Svenstrom brought his hand down with a slap on the glass table-top.

‘Show him the photographs,' he said.

‘O.K., if you think he's ready.'

‘He's ready,' Mr Svenstrom told him.

The photographs were in Mr Karlin's pocket. He pulled out an envelope and held it up for Stan to take.

Take a look at these,' he said

‘Why should I?'

‘Because you're in them. In every single one of them. Right up to your little neck, you are.'

Stan wished now that he had cut Mr Karlin short, hadn't allowed him to go on talking. It would have been better if he'd walked straight out of the room as soon as Mr Karlin had mentioned that bit about the headlines. All the same, he thought that perhaps it would be as well to see what it was that Mr Karlin was trying so hard to show him.

As he opened the envelope, one of the photographs slid out and fell down onto the floor. When he picked it up, Stan saw at once what it was. It had been taken in the little studio over by Praed Street. The twin columns of
Temple Gateway
showed up in the background and, in front, there he was standing talking to Mandy. It was like one of the conversation pictures in the society columns of the weeklies, only in this conversation Mandy hadn't got any clothes on.

‘Where d'you get this?' he remarked.

Mr Karlin was wearing his smile again.

‘Helga took it,' he said. ‘She's good, isn't she? Helga took all this lot.'

Stan opened up the envelope and glanced inside. Then he dropped the photograph of him and Mandy in along with all the others. He'd seen all that he wanted to see.

‘Well, what d'you want me to do with them?' he asked.

Mr Karlin's smile widened, it now reached right across his face.

‘Oh, they're not for you,' he said. ‘They're for the family. For the family and friends. One set for Beryl. And one set for Marleen's schoolteacher. And one set for the bank manager. And one set for Mr Parker…' It was evident that Mr Karlin knew everything about him.

Stan felt his stomach suddenly go cold and empty. He was afraid that he might be on the verge of being sick. But he wasn't going to let Mr Karlin know how he was feeling. He was determined to fight back.

‘You know what this is,' he said. ‘It's blackmail.'

Mr Karlin merely nodded.

‘You're too right it is,' he said.

‘Then I'm going to the Police,' Stan told him.

Mr Karlin, however, did not seem to think that was a good idea, either.

‘Take a look at these,' he said. ‘They're different.'

The photographs in the second envelope that he passed across were,
in Stan's opinion, technically pretty poor; just bad amateur stuff. And nothing much to worry about there. They were simply shots of Stan in the bar of that run-down hotel in Bayswater. A few included Mr Karlin, smiling and benevolent-looking, thoughtfully running his thumbnail across the wad of bank-notes. But, mostly, they were of him talking to Mr Karlin's assistant, the young man who had been so polite and attentive. One of the photographs showed Stan himself flicking through that same bundle of one-pound notes.

‘Helga never took that,' he suddenly blurted out. ‘Helga wasn't there.'

Mr Karlin gave a little sigh.

‘You're smart,' he said. ‘You notice things. That's my work. That's the one I took.'

‘Well, what about them?' Stan asked.

‘D'you know who that is?'

Mr Karlin was pointing to the young man, and he was smiling again.

‘Your assistant,' Stan told him.

Mr Karlin shook his head.

‘Not any longer,' he said. ‘He's left the country. MI5 were on to him. Suspected a spy-ring or something. Couldn't have anything like that in the agency. Had to get rid of him.'

Mr Karlin paused, and shook his head again.

‘Wouldn't look good, you know,' he reminded Stan, ‘you turning up in the photograph with a wanted man. Not with all that money in your hands. Whatever would Security start thinking?'

Mr Karlin had momentarily stopped smiling; instead, he was shaking his head sadly at the prospect.

Stan did not attempt to reply. The feeling of sickness was too much for him; and he had started to sweat.

‘Can I use your toilet?' he asked.

Mr Karlin pointed towards the corridor.

‘Second door on the right,' he said. ‘Can't miss it.'

It was nearly ten minutes later when Stan came back. His shirt-collar was still undone, and he was shivering.

‘You look terrible,' Mr Karlin told him. ‘Mr Svenstrom was just saying so. Think it over. There's no hurry. Give me a ring when you're ready. Then we'll arrange something.'

Stan steadied himself.

‘I think I will go home,' he said.

Mr Karlin seemed pleased.

‘Best thing you could do. Best thing in the world. Go back home and have a good night's rest.'

He got up and put his arm round Stan's shoulders. Stan felt too weak to push it away again. Then, suddenly, Mr Karlin remembered something.

‘Just a moment.'

He went through to the inner room and came back carrying a large brown-paper parcel.

‘Your album,' he said. ‘Better have it back. You may need it. I never opened it. Not our line really. Not that sort of photograph. We're technical.'

It was what Mr Karlin had said about the unopened photograph album that hurt most. Compiling it, re-printing all those old award-winners and trimming down the mounts had meant a great deal to him; the whole operation had shown that life as he had lived it had, after all, been worth the living. Or, rather, so it had seemed at the time. And, at the thought that really it had meant nothing, just nothing at all, Stan sat on the edge of the bed in that single room of his at the end of the landing in number sixteen, and wept.

On the whole, it was just as well that this was one of those periods when Stan and Beryl were not sleeping together. Not that there had been any unpleasantness about the arrangement. It was simply that she hadn't been feeling like it, Beryl explained; and she was awake such a lot too, she added, tossing and turning all night like. If Stan had been there alongside her she didn't see how he could have been expected to get a wink either.

As it was, Stan's crying had come on quite suddenly. At one moment, he had simply been sitting there, perched on the bed end, feeling sick and frightened. Then, without warning, something inside him had snapped. He was no longer Stanley Pitts, civil servant, aged thirty-six. He wasn't even young Stan, Boy Scout, aged nine. He was Little Stan, hope of the family and aged about six. The corners of his mouth went down, his shoulders started heaving and he threw himself full-length on the bed and sobbed into the pillow, pulling it close up round his face so that the others shouldn't hear him.

And, all the time, he kept thinking about those dreadful pictures of himself and Mandy. More than that, too. He kept thinking about those dreadful pictures being looked at by someone else. By Mr Winters. Or by Marleen's schoolteacher. Or by Mr Parker. Or, worst of all, by Beryl.

At the thought of Beryl with those pictures in her hand, his heart gave a great bump and he found himself gasping for breath as though he had just dived into icy water. He sat up in bed. He turned the light on. He tried to read. He couldn't concentrate. He put the book away. He
lay down. He turned the light off. He pulled the bedclothes up round him. He pushed them down again. By turns he was too hot and too cold. He shivered and he sweated. And he thought of ending it all.

When dawn came lighting up the fancy brickwork of the houses on the other side of Kendal Terrace, he was still awake. By then, he was not sobbing into his pillow any longer. There was no more cry-baby stuff. He was lying on his back, staring straight up at the ceiling, being brave. The eiderdown had got itself rolled up into a bundle and he was clasping it. It had become his Teddy-bear: Stanley Pitts was little Stannie again.

And what was so unnerving, so catastrophic, was the way the realization of the situation kept coming back to him all the next week. In the middle of routine filing, or merely when sitting in the canteen, or while washing his hands in the staff lavatory, he would, without warning, find himself abruptly and mercilessly launched into the appalling future.

It was at those moments that he would begin to tremble. It would start in his fingers, spread up to his elbows, move onwards to his shoulders, attack his knees and set his feet twitching.

He had one of those sudden spasms while quietly finishing his fish-fingers and frozen peas in the dinerette alcove on the Wednesday night. No danger signals, either. Not a hint of the impending panic. He was fond of fish-fingers and Beryl had cooked these to perfection. The frozen peas, too, were delicious, garden-fresh and faintly minty. He was still chewing away when, from nowhere, the full nightmarish awareness of things broke over him. He saw himself sent for by the Head of Personnel, and he knew just how it would be. Mr Parker would be standing on one side of him and, on the other, Commander Hackett from Security. Behind would be two strangers, large men with large red hands. At a nod from the Head of Personnel they would come forward. One of them would be holding something behind his back. Stan could feel the cold of the steel as, with a click of the lock, they snapped the handcuffs on.

Beryl couldn't help noticing. He must have got a chill, she told him, and he ought to go to bed. There was only one thing, she added: if he went up to bed as early as this it was to keep warm and go to sleep. There was no point in lying there, reading. It was just wasting electricity. She'd had to go along to the bathroom the other night, she said, and she'd noticed that his light was still full on.

That was the night when Stan had lain there, contemplating suicide if only she had known. Nor did the prospect any longer alarm him. Instead, he could see a sort of comfort in it, an end to all anxiety. It would spare Beryl and Marleen the shame that was stored up ready to descend upon them; it would show Mr Karlin that Stan wasn't just the puppet that Mr Karlin thought he was; and it might even make Helga feel sorry for what she had done to him. He minded a lot about Helga.

It was only the method that remained to be decided and, when you came to it, there wasn't really very much choice. To get hold of poison it was necessary to sign a register at the chemist's. And he couldn't blow his brains out because he hadn't got a shotgun. Besides, insurance companies could be very awkward about suicides, and Stan certainly didn't want to risk anything going wrong with the insurance. That would have been letting Beryl down instead of helping her.

Drowning was one possibility. But Stan had always been a rather good swimmer. Eight lengths of the baths breast-stroke; that sort of stuff. And he was afraid that if, say, he took a header off Hammersmith Bridge, he would turn the whole thing into a quite presentable swallow-dive and then instinctively strike out smartly for the Barnes waterworks when he came up again.

So he could see that it was a dry end that he would have to prepare for himself. But falling out of a window at Frobisher House wouldn't do, either, because his own office was stuck away down there in the basement: it would inevitably look suspicious if he took a lift up to Medical and Welfare on the top floor, only to come crashing down again into the forecourt a few minutes later.

By now, he was perfectly calm about it all; calm and resigned and determined. There was no other way for it. And he saw that the eight-ten was the answer. It was
his
eight-ten, that train that he had caught every weekday morning for the past fourteen years. There wasn't going to be any difference in the arrangement either; it was simply that this Friday he would be there on the platform waiting for it for the last time.