The Husband's Story (37 page)

When they got to the Station, however, the sergeant refused to allow any of them to see Stan. He'd got his solicitor with him at the moment, the sergeant explained, and then he was about due to go off to the Magistrates' Court. They'd see him there, he said.

As he was speaking a small saloon car, like the one they had come down in, slid past the window behind the sergeant's desk. Marleen was the only one who happened to be looking, and what she saw was a glimpse of a russet-coloured sports jacket.

She gave Beryl's sleeve a tug.

‘Mum,' she told her. ‘He's started.'

Even the tears had dried themselves up by now. Her little face was still a trifle pale, but she was herself again. In her eyes was the excitement of the chase.

The Magistrates' Court was smaller than Beryl had expected; and shabbier. The brass facings of the stair-treads that led up to it had been worn paper-thin and, in places, the woodwork was already showing through.

The smallness was in itself a bit disconcerting. It was all right for the magistrates; they at least had a boarded-off private platform all to themselves. But down below in the body of the Court room it was turmoil: clerks, solicitors, ushers, witnesses, policemen all huddled up together and getting in each others' way in a space the size of a church vestry. The public gallery, to which Cliff and Beryl and Marleen were directed, consisted of a bench over at the far end.

Stan's solicitor might have been supplied in kit-form along with the Court room. He was small, frayed and worn-looking, too. Motoring offences, summonses for dog- and TV-licences, drunkenness, petty larceny and the swearing of oaths were his specialities. He came bustling up, tired, anxious and apologetic. He had been trying to contact them
at the holiday camp, he explained, but they had left before he could get hold of them. In any case, everything was in order. Just a few formalities to be seen to, one or two small details to be ironed out; and then, after the imposition of a purely nominal fine, the whole family, he was sure, would be back at Pineland in plenty of time for lunch.

Hand in hand, Cliff and Beryl sat and waited. It was only Marleen who disturbed them. She had lost the watch glass of her Ingersoll, and kept searching for it. More than once Beryl had to grope about to find her hand so that she could slap it and tell her to sit still.

Then the solicitor came over again. There were, it appeared, complications: he couldn't yet tell them what they were because he had only just heard about them himself. Not that there would be anything to worry about; everything was in order like he'd told them. He went away still muttering it. Next time he came across, however, he seemed less confident. There might be further charges, he had just learned, and even the question of bail might arise.

That was where Beryl found it so marvellous having Cliff with them. He was inclined to treat the whole thing as a bit of a joke.

‘Oh, the naughty boy,' he said. ‘I wonder what he's been up to.'

Then, giving Beryl's hand an extra squeeze before he released it, he turned to the solicitor.

‘About the bail,' he said. ‘Put it down to my account.'

The solicitor appeared surprised.

‘Up to what limit?' he asked.

Cliff gave a little smile before replying.

‘The sky,' he told him.

Beryl drew in her breath sharply as she heard him say it. Cliff, she reminded herself, was born that way: doing the big thing came naturally to him.

She was just about to whisper her thanks, when she had to break off to speak to Marleen. One more question about why anybody should have to stand bail for her Daddy, Beryl told her, and she'd find herself outside in the corridor where she belonged.

Even that bit had to be said under her breath because the Court was really filling up by now and twice she'd had to move further down the bench so that somebody else could sit down. She now had a total stranger, a man, jammed up close against her; just the sort of stranger, too, that she would have expected to find in a Magistrates' Court: someone who was common and shifty-looking. Come to that, glancing down the
row she noticed that, in their various ways, they all looked pretty common and shifty.

Her party – Cliff, Marleen and herself – were the odd ones out. The magistrate would be sure to notice that, she felt; and then he would see how ridiculous it was that they should be there at all. In the meantime, she found it difficult to forgive Stan for having dragged them down into the mire in this way; with a sensitive and impressionable child like Marleen it was the sort of nightmare memory that would go on haunting her forever.

Even when eventually the Court did get going, Stan's case did not come first; not that Beryl was in the least surprised. With a solicitor like the one they'd got she would have been quite prepared for it if his cases always came last. There was, however, nothing that they could do about it. They just had to sit back and listen. The cases were all so pathetically trivial, too; trivial and mostly sordid. They were about unpaid water rates; about uncleared garbage; about unattended vehicles; about child neglect. Then, quite suddenly – before they were ready for it, in fact – they heard the usher say: ‘Call Stanley Pitts.'

It didn't seem a very nice way of calling him, Beryl thought. The use of the prefix, ‘Mister', would have been more polite; as it was, it made him sound just like all the others. And she couldn't bear it when he did appear. He seemed somehow so small and so defenceless. She wanted to go right over and put his collar straight. If only she had known that he would have to stand there like that, she'd have arranged for Cliff to drop in at the Station with his proper clothes; the russet check sports jacket seemed somehow disrespectful in those surroundings.

What came as a shock to Beryl was the speed with which the law can work when it has to. There was a horrible precision to the whole thing as though it had been carefully rehearsed and timed beforehand. Disorderly behaviour was the charge, and Stan's solicitor did not even take the trouble to dispute it. Then, just as the magistrate seemed to be on the point of saying his standard piece about a three pounds' fine and the remembering to exercise more self-control in future, the policeman who had brought Stan along started to say something else. It was to tell the magistrate that he had to ask for a remand because further charges were pending. Even that, however, should have presented no difficulty. It was not until Stan's man, in a last desperate effort to remind everyone that he was still on the job at all, got up, that the nastiness occurred. He asked for bail and the policeman told the
magistrate that he had to oppose it.

Beryl heard – felt, almost – a ripple of astonishment run round the Court as he said it, and she saw a young man who she didn't know was a reporter start scribbling in his notebook. There was a hurried conference between the magistrate and his clerk, and the magistrate agreed that Stan should be remanded in custody.

That was all there was to it. Less than three minutes after his appearance, Stan had been taken away again. It had been the last few seconds that were the worst. The magistrate had finished speaking, and the policeman who had conducted Stan up into the dock had tapped him on the shoulder to let him know that he wasn't wanted any longer. Then, quite suddenly, he looked up.

Until that moment, he had seemed to be unaware of what was going on around him; just standing there, head bent forward, unseeing and unhearing, in a sort of daze. But when he did look up it was to look straight at Beryl. She could tell at once that he had known perfectly well what was going on. His eyes were fixed full on her and the corners of his mouth were turned down in a way that she had never seen before. But, worst of all, he was shaking his head at her. Not a word was spoken but the message was clear enough.

He was trying, desperately trying, to break it to her that the whole situation was now quite hopeless.

It was the mug of HM Prison tea that restored him. Hot, sweet and milky, it might have been prepared specially for reviving accident victims. And Stan was certainly one of those. It had all happened so suddenly, too, just the way accidents do occur: one day out taking colour shots of red sails against blue seascapes and, the next, sitting on the edge of a fixed wooden bedstead wondering if there really was a view out of the small barred window set six foot above floor level.

The strange thing was that he was already getting used to it – used to the metal mug, used to the door with no handle on the inside, used to being treated not as a normal human being but as an inmate. And not even an ordinary inmate at that; there was something special about Stan. You could tell that from the way they treated him, and from the type of visitor that he received. The Governor himself had just been down to see him, and now Commander Hackett was waiting for him in the interview room.

Stan was very glad to see the Commander. He provided the first real link with the outside world, and made Stan feel in touch again. Not that the meeting was an entirely easy one. There is something about all prison interview rooms that tends to inhibit smooth conversation. And Commander Hackett himself, Stan could not help noticing, seemed distinctly self-conscious. He shook hands almost as if apologizing, and reminded Stan not once but twice that he needn't say anything at all, unless he wanted to, without having his solicitor present all the time.

That part was all very formal and correct. The Commander would have liked to keep it that way, but he found it impossible. He could not forget that he and Stan were old friends: they had shared the same table in the Frobisher House canteen, gone turns with the same HP sauce bottle and the same sugar sifter, even played ping-pong together. And, after his second warning, the Commander could stand the strain no longer. He just gave up and blurted out what he was really thinking. ‘Well, bless my soul,' he said. ‘You of all people. I still can't quite believe it.' With that, he offered Stan a cigarette, took one himself and
rocked back as far as he could go on his chair, trying not to look self-conscious again.

Stan was the first of them to speak; he didn't mind in the least about the solicitor, he said. They could perfectly well start up without him. Secretly, he was rather relieved that the solicitor wasn't present; there was an air of anxiety about the man that Stan found rather unnerving. Also, he had one particularly upsetting habit: it consisted of drawing in his breath in short, disapproving hisses as though he felt that whatever it was that he was hearing would ultimately prove to be to his client's disadvantage.

Now that he had abandoned the official manner, Commander Hackett made no attempt to rush things. He asked Stan what kind of a night he'd had and agreed that all police cells ought to be provided with proper bathrooms. Then he came round to the real purpose of his visit.

‘How long's this been going on?' he asked.

Stan did not reply immediately. In his mind, he was working backwards.

‘Since February,' he said. ‘That's when it all started.'

‘All what?' Commander Hackett asked.

It was ten past eleven when he put the question and, two hours and a whole packet of cigarettes later, he was still asking questions and Stan was still answering. By then, Stan had been given the regulation prison lunch on a tray and had munched his way through it, talking all the time so as not to keep the Commander waiting. The Commander, for his part, had merely had a cup of tea, one of the hot, sweet, milky kind. He was beginning now to wish that he'd accepted the warder's offer and had taken his own share of sausages, boiled cabbage and tinned baked beans, too.

But he couldn't possibly have broken off'. Stan had far too much to tell him. And all so frank, too. It came out in a rush of Boy Scout honesty. There wasn't a thing that Stan kept back – the existence of his dual-purpose wrist-watch, the lonely lunchtime photographic sessions down there in the basement, the regular assignations in faded and obscure hotels.

What particularly delighted him was Stan's description of Mr Karlin. It was so exact: the smile, the large, smooth hands, the raincoat with its belt, and storm-flap at the back. If he hadn't skipped the country already, Commander Hackett reckoned that the other branch would
have him inside within forty-eight hours. There was only one thing that Stan hadn't told the Commander about Mr Karlin, and that was about his association with Helga. Stan himself had seen very little of Helga. And what he had seen hadn't been very nice. She had deceived and betrayed him. He knew all about that. But, no matter what happened to Mr Karlin, Stan couldn't bear to think of getting Helga into any trouble with the authorities.

As Commander Hackett listened, he glowed. In the small hours of the morning, when he had been telephoned at home and told to leave immediately for the Isle of Wight, he had feared the worst. Apparently, under his very eye, in the one department for which he was personally responsible, a Top Secret leakage had occurred. It was like the worst days of World War II all over again, with the threat of immediate court martial hanging over him and any thoughts about pension rights and civilian retirement thrust somewhere away into the background.

It was only as Stan went on talking that he began to feel better. Much as he liked him, he saw quite clearly that Stan was done for. With a confession of the length of the one that Commander Hackett had got in his notebook, nothing on earth could save him. On the other hand, that self-same confession would prove to be the Commander's own salvation; it was really a matter of presentation. Phrases like ‘… had been under observation for some time' and ‘… significant change in life-style had not passed unnoticed' should still enable him to keep his job.

His thoughts were interrupted because Stan was addressing him again. Only this time it was not to tell him anything but simply to put a question.

‘How long do you think I'll get?' he asked. ‘Now that I've owned up about it, I mean.'