The Husband's Story (27 page)

Altogether there were one-hundred-and-eighty-six files for Leviathan. Stan had got it all worked out. Left to himself, even with Christmas and a fortnight in the summer and bank-holidays and the occasional bit of sick leave, he could get through the job quite comfortably. That is, except for the size of the cassette inside the chronometer. The cassette would only take fifty-eight exposures. And, at that rate, Stan could see himself down there in the basement with his savoury roll and his cup of coffee every Monday for about the next five years.

Mr Karlin, however, did not seem unduly worried. He was getting what he wanted, he said; and he didn't mind how long it took.

‘You get on with the photography,' he said. ‘And leave everything else to me. If you get searched, I don't want anyone getting hold of one of these.'

He held up the little pea-sized cassette as he was speaking, and jogged it thoughtfully up and down in the palm of his hand.

‘The watch is different. You might get away with the watch. That is, if they didn't know what they were looking for.'

Stan felt one of his shudders pass through him as Mr Karlin said it. The possibility of his being searched seemed suddenly to have come so
much nearer; he could feel the hands moving up and down, frisking him. But Mr Karlin soon put everything right again. He was smiling when he came across the room to him. Leaning over the arm of the chair, he bent forward and gave Stan's ear a little playful tweak.

‘Don't think about it,' he told him. ‘It won't ever happen. Not unless you start getting careless, that is. Just keep at it, and remember where the money comes from.'

Mr Karlin's smile widened still further. He straightened himself and began patting at his breast pocket.

‘I was nearly forgetting,' he said. ‘You'll be wanting this, won't you?'

It was another of those fat envelopes of rather dirty-looking, used bank-notes that he was holding out to him. Only this time, Mr Karlin was teasing him again: he kept drawing the envelope back every time Stan reached for it.

The room where they were closeted was in one of the small hotels near Victoria Station. It stood in a long row of other small hotels, all equally run-down and sad-looking. And all identical. Mr Karlin had never before suggested that Stan should meet him there. Not that there was anything very surprising in that. Mr Karlin was scarcely what might be called a regular; more one of the moving-on kind.

For most people who live in the suburbs, British Rail acts as the great healer. It is the journey home with the evening paper that serves to bind up the wounds inflicted during office hours, just as it is during the trip back to town next morning that the scars of last night's domestic discord are finally washed away.

But for once the cure wasn't working. At least not for Stan it wasn't. It had been around seven o'clock when he left the hotel in Victoria and, by the time he reached Cannon Street, the rush-hour was all over. The station looked large and empty. The ticket collectors were standing about in pairs, talking; and Southern Region had laid on a whole trainful of coaches for Stan to choose from. In his favourite seat – right-hand side, facing the engine – and with his feet up on the upholstery opposite he should have been satisfied. But tonight things weren't like that. He was still resenting the fact that Mr Karlin had tweaked his ear. It wasn't the physical contact that had upset him. It was Mr Karlin's attitude that he resented. Mr Karlin had treated him the way an indulgent dog-lover might treat a pet spaniel.

Then Stan remembered about the money. Indeed, with the bulge
that the envelope of bank-notes made in his breast pocket, he could hardly forget about it: every time he bent forward there was a reassuring creaking sound to remind him. And, so long as he was paying him, Mr Karlin was, he supposed, entitled to behave pretty much as he wanted. That, Stan recognized, is the sort of power that money gives people.

What's more, in the meantime, Mr Karlin's money was certainly helping to tide things over. He didn't mind it nowadays when Beryl turned on him; he felt that he could ignore it. Or even, like tonight, afford to be indulgent. As it happened, Beryl was particularly annoyed this evening. And not unreasonably. She had been experimenting with a family-size, economy pack of a genuine San Francisco delicacy, called Kow Wong's Take-Away Prawn and Bamboo Shoot, prepared according to a secret recipe of the Old Chinese Imperial Court. Twenty minutes, according to the directions, was all that was needed to bring out its unique Oriental flavour. And Beryl had put it on at five minutes to seven. By ten past eight when Stan got back, San Francisco, Kow Wong, and the Old Chinese Imperial Court might all as well have been forgotten because the unique Oriental flavour had gone up in steam long ago.

By then Marleen was sitting up in bed with a glass of hot milk and a dish of Marmite sandwiches beside her, and Beryl said that she herself just wasn't hungry like, at least not by now she wasn't.

‘I don't know why I even bother,' she told him. ‘There must be something wrong with me. Really there must. It isn't as though me and Marleen minded. Don't imagine that I'd been looking forward to it because I hadn't. It was only…'

As it happened, Stan hadn't been listening. He was doing sums in his head. They were nice, comfortable sums. They made him feel good as he thought of them. By July he would have six hundred pounds of Mr Karlin's money to his credit. And he had just got the arithmetic worked out. This summer they would be able to relax a bit. Take things easy. Nothing ostentatious, of course. Nothing showy. No Cunard cruises or trips to the Caribbean. Just a quiet fortnight somewhere on the South Coast, with Beryl in a deck chair and Marleen lying on the sand beside her; both of them safe and secure in each other's company, leaving him free for once to get on with his photography.

Beryl's eyes brought him up with a jerk. They were fixed on him, unsmilingly.

‘Sorry, dear,' he said. ‘I was thinking about something else.'

‘You would be,' Beryl began again. ‘That's what I complain of about you. I might just as well…'

The fact that he raised his finger to stop her came as a surprise. In the ordinary way, he would never have dared to do a thing like that. But what he was saying was even more surprising. She let him go on out of sheer astonishment.

‘I'd been wondering what you'd like to do about holidays this year,' he told her. ‘I reckon a couple of weeks at the seaside might do us all a bit of good.'

Stan was rather pleased with the way he'd brought up the matter of the summer holiday. He hadn't forgotten Mr Karlin's warning. But, after all, most families on his kind of income managed something of the sort. It was only that, for the last two years, Beryl's other plans had cut across it. Two summers ago they'd had the expense of all that crazy-paving to convert the top end of the lawn into a patio and, next time, there had been the installation of the American-type shower in the bathroom. This year, however, if Beryl were to think up something at the last minute even that wouldn't matter. And there would still be nothing to draw attention to himself if the family packed up and went quietly away to a small seaside hotel somewhere; not one of the two-or three-star French-cuisine-a-speciality sort. More the kind that says TV room, children welcomed.

That, however, was not quite the way Beryl saw things. She was a great reader of travel literature and was more inclined towards Majorca or Minorca; or even Ibiza, wherever that was; though, of course, there was always one of those 10-day tours of romantic Rhineland with its castles and cathedrals seen through the non-glare glass of a luxurious, Pullman-built, reclinable-seating, air-conditioned motor-coach, or a trip round the fjords and Northern Capitals in a ten-thousand-ton cruise-liner that combined big-ship comfort and amenities with the distinction and exclusiveness of a private yacht. On the other hand, the fly-one-way-and-return-by-sea package deals made a special appeal to her and she more than half wondered about Bermuda. Or Malta, or the Everglades, possibly.

In consequence, during the next few days, the Pilgrim Travel Agency next door to the Post Office saw a great deal of Beryl. The manager even said that he envied her the kind of trip that she was planning, really he did.

That was where Stan had to step in. And that was where Beryl lost her temper.

‘First you say the seaside. And then you tell me not
that
seaside. How was I to know? After all the Mediterranean's still the sea, isn't it, even if it is over there?'

She paused, thinking what a disappointingly small-minded little man he was, and how silly it had been, after all these years, to have expected him to see her point of view.

‘It's Marleen I'm thinking of, not me,' she told him. ‘All the others in her form go abroad like. It breaks my heart to see the way her little face lights up when the holiday postcards start coming in. She keeps them in her treasure-box, you know; all of them.'

In the end it was a picture in one of the Sunday papers of Prince Philip, lean and classic-looking, silhouetted against the straining bosom of a spinnaker, that converted her. Cowes was where the picture had been taken and Cowes clearly seemed a distinct possibility – it was only that, after the talk about Ibiza and sea-and-air combined holidays, she felt that she could not face the man behind the desk at the Pilgrim Travel Agency to tell him so. This meant that she had to go all the way to Swallow Tours in Station Approach.

And, as it turned out, she could not have been more fortunate. The manager at Swallow Tours was himself an enthusiastic Isle of Wight man. He knew it like the back of his hand, he said, and could recommend it whole-heartedly. But not Cowes. Not for children, that is. And not unless you intended to spend most of your time afloat. Somewhere more like Ventnor or Sandown or Shanklin, he suggested. Or Bem-bridge, perhaps, or Seaview or Freshwater – the places came tripping off his tongue like names in the Old Testament.

And not to forget about holiday camps – the better ones, of course – he reminded her. There was something about a good holiday camp with its free entertainment and its sense of companionship that even the best of the hotels could not begin to offer. Personally, he would go for the one at Blackgang, with the Swiss carillon and the illuminated water-chute, he said.

But here he had made his mistake. He was wasting his time, Beryl told him. She regarded all holiday camps as vulgar, and felt certain that they would be full of families with the sort of boys of Marleen's age that Beryl particularly wouldn't want Marleen to meet. Also, she did not in the least like the idea of being called in the morning by a
bugle blown by the resident camp-master in a red blazer.

The manager, however, told her that it was not like that nowadays. Not in the upper price bracket, that is. Take Pineland Colony, for example, he suggested. Just a score of little detached chalets, more like log cabins really, all with their own TVs and individual fridges, set in isolation on a hill-top near Yarmouth, with a pool and a Trading Post and a Frontier Inn and a ranch for ponies in the middle of the clearing and an eight-foot stockade running right round the place to keep it private; film stars and radio announcers and people like that frequently stayed there, he told her.

The brochure was certainly an attractive one. Printed on very shiny paper, it was copiously illustrated with scenes of camp life showing the Beaver Pool diving board, the pony paddock, the Trading Post Boutique, the flood-lit reception area and, in close-up, one of the Frontier Inn's special prawn salads with real, Isle of Wight King-size Prawns.

All in all, Beryl could imagine herself being very happy there. Even with Marleen at half-price, however, the rates charged to the incoming summer trappers and prospectors still seemed to be exorbitant. Beryl pointed out that she could have done Corsica and back for less. But not in such style, not in such exclusive company, the manager assured her. And, when she showed the Pineland Colony brochure to Stan, she was taken aback to find that he didn't seem in the least put out. Nor was he. After all, it was Mr Karlin who was paying.

‘It's only once a year,' he said. ‘Let's give our Marleen something she'll remember.'

What with the surprise present of the yellow plastic bird that continued to take sips out of the glass in front of it provided you remembered to keep up the level of the water in the wine-glass, and the prospect of a fortnight at Pineland Colony, it promised to be the best summer that Beryl had known since her childhood. And the cheerfullest. It had been such a different Stan who suddenly hadn't minded about spending all that money on her and on little Marleen. She found herself somehow admiring him; even loving him a little.

And, in the meantime, there was certainly plenty to do. Like getting a complete three-piece suite of light-weight matching luggage and a brightly-coloured beach bag to go with it; and a few suitable clothes, ranch-style for daytime wear and something long and swirly for the
evenings; with, of course, the right kind of bathing costume – she was too full-bosomed for a bikini – and above all, the sort of wrap that would go with a decent pair of sandals and one or two pieces of good costume jewellery.

Beryl liked bathing pools, liked everything about them – the bright greeny-bluey colour of the water, the clean chloriney smell, the sound of splashing and of laughter, the little tables under their coloured sunshades, the open-airness of it all. Everything, that is, except the actual swimming. It wasn't that she couldn't swim and was afraid of the water. At school she had been first in the form team, then in the house team and finally in the school team of St Hilda's High. It was simply on account of her hair. If she attempted to wear a cap her whole hair-do would have been crushed flat and she would have to go straight back to be scolded by M. Louis, and, if she went in without one, she would come out looking all Afro. In consequence, though a regular pool-goer, she remained untouched by pool-water from one summer to another – which reminded her that she really ought to do something about getting Marleen some extra swimming lessons now, before it mattered about her hair, too.