The Husband's Story (39 page)

The
Sunday Sun
building was the last on the left going towards St Paul's, and the time was now four-fifteen.

In front of the Features Editor's desk stood Mr Cheevers, the author of the signed ‘Crimeograph' series. He was in shirt sleeves; but, because he was a neat, tidy sort of man, they were neat, tidy sort of shirt sleeves, with an expanding metal bracelet fastened round the turn-ups. In his hand he held a teleprinter tear-off.

The Features Editor was in shirt sleeves, too. But he was quite the other kind of man – large, shapeless and crumpled-looking. The ends of his shirt sleeves were loose and flapping.

‘It's O.K. if you want to go down there,' he said.

Mr Cheevers, however, only shook his head.

‘She won't be staying on,' he replied. ‘Not now. Not with those charges hanging over him. She'll be on her way back home with the kiddie. They all do it – go to ground for a bit.'

‘Got the address?'

Mr Cheevers nodded.

‘And the man's?'

‘ “Mr Fairbanks's”, you mean.'

‘Real name?'

‘Clifford Hamson. I'll be seeing him afterwards.'

Mr Cheevers ran a smooth, freshly-laundered handkerchief across his forehead. It came away limp and sodden. The Features Editor was scratching himself.

‘All right to put the two of them up somewhere – just till we've got the story?'

‘Keep the price down,' the Features Editor told him.

‘Go up to two?'

The Features Editor shook his head, and went on scratching.

‘Fifteen hundred,' he said.

Mr Cheevers had re-folded his handkerchief. Dry side outwards, it was now back in the breast pocket of his shirt.

‘Leave it to me,' he replied.

But the Features Editor was no longer listening. Not that it mattered. He usually let Mr Cheevers have his way. Besides, he was too tired to argue. He had gone over to the corner cupboard and taken out the whisky bottle and a single glass. He knew that Mr Cheevers did not drink.

‘Don't buy it unless it looks big,' he said.

Mr Cheevers allowed himself a little smile. It was a knowledgeable, professional kind of smile.

‘But what about the car, Mum? Who's going to collect it?'

Beryl did not answer. She was staring out of the train window, watching the trees, the cows, the cottages go past. She was, in any case, too preoccupied to think about the hire car; too preoccupied even to think about Stan. All her thoughts were concentrated upon Cliff.

Deep down in her heart she was sure that Cliff still loved her. It was just that circumstances had conspired against him. If only he'd not got mixed up with Service catering and had stuck to cheap watches and Japanese binoculars, she did not doubt that he would have been there beside her at this moment. But he'd always been one of the ambitious sort; reaching out for the stars, was how she liked to think of it.

For the first time in her life, she realized that she was alone in the world; really alone, with no one anywhere to turn to. It was Marleen who destroyed the thought.

‘Did you pack my sun hat?' she asked.

Again Beryl did not answer. But Marleen was getting used to that by now. And, in consequence, she was bored. She leant back in her
seat and kicked the upholstery opposite; under her breath she recited long passages from ‘Hiawatha' twice she warned Beryl that she might be going to faint.

It is always quicker by train. But to Beryl the journey seemed endless; same trees, same cows, same cottages. All that she wanted to do was to get back to Kendal Terrace. She knew, though she could not explain it, that once she had got inside No. 16 and had shut the door behind her, she would feel safer. Somehow, she and Marleen would be able to hold out there. They wouldn't be quite so defenceless.

Then she remembered about money. Would there even be any? she wondered. Did the Civil Service go on paying members of their staff who were remanded in custody? Or did National Insurance cover it? And suppose the worst happened, and they found Stan guilty? How would she be able to meet the bills for Marleen's dancing lessons then? As it was, it had been difficult enough to get Pineland Colony to cash a cheque just to pay for the railway tickets.

It was the end part of the journey that worried her most. From Pineland to the ferry and on to Waterloo had been all right. But Waterloo to Crocketts Green was something else again. Not that Beryl could have done anything else about it; with all Stan's luggage as well as hers and Marleen's, they'd never have allowed her onto public transport.

It had not been pleasant, however, watching the taxi meter tick up, and wondering if she'd have enough money to pay it. By the time they reached Kendal Terrace she reckoned that they would be just about all right, but only just, provided the driver was ready to give her a hand with the two heavy cases and then wasn't going to expect too much in the way of a tip.

It was then that, for the first time, Beryl met Mr Cheevers. He had been standing in the shadow of the rowan tree just beside the front gate.

‘Mrs Pitts?' he asked.

Beryl, taken by surprise, admitted it.

‘Then please allow me to look after this, madam,' he said. ‘I'm from the
Sunday Sun
. You go inside. I'll see to the driver.'

Distressed as she was, Beryl did not forget her manners. As soon as the driver had been paid off, she invited Mr Cheevers inside to have a cup of coffee. And, because it was the first time they had met and because he had come a long way to see her, she brought out the best china. She
even remembered to fill the little urn-shaped sugar basin with sugar of the multi-coloured kind.

Mr Cheevers was trained to take stock of his surroundings. He noted the glass-cased, all-electric clock; the triangular, marble-topped occasional table; the perpetual-motion drinking bird now temporarily stationary because its water beaker had not been re-filled.

In his mind he recorded, too, the brocaded rayon curtains, all on their patented tramline runners, and each with its individual drawstring; the pale Chinese rug spread in front of the cream-tiled fireplace; the standard lamp; the TV set; the telephone. All significantly above the general level for Kendal Terrace, he reckoned; and all so beautifully kept, so spotless.

He had plenty of time to look round because Beryl had been forced to leave him alone there. That was while she was upstairs making herself presentable. She changed hurriedly into her dark blue two-piece, switched over to plain gold earrings and did something to her hair.

It was the state of her hair that worried her most. Somewhere on the journey the white streak had become disarranged. Half of it was now on one side of the parting and half of it on the other. The effect horrified her; it looked as though she really were going white. That, and her eyes. They were terrible, too. But there was nothing that she could do about them. Red-rimmed as they were, it was obvious to anyone that she had been crying. Not that this mattered, she decided. For Stan's sake the last thing that she wanted was to appear callous and unminding.

Seated at her dressing-table she had been careful to leave the bedroom door open. That was to make sure that Marleen's door was kept shut. The last thing she wanted was to see a full-length interview with Marleen spread all over the front page of the
Sunday Sun.

She was all prepared for her own interview, however; had been composing it, in fact, while she was still dressing. She was rather taken aback therefore when Mr Cheevers kept on stressing that it was to be exclusive.

She toyed with her coffee spoon, stirring it round meaninglessly in the half-empty cup.

‘I don't know about being exclusive like,' she told him. ‘I mean some of the other newspapers might want to interview me, too. It wouldn't seem fair if they couldn't, would it? Not if they asked me like.'

Mr Cheevers was trying hard to sum her up. And he was baffled.
Even distraught and tear-stained, she remained so ladylike. While pouring out the coffee she had even found time to talk about the weather. She had told him that she wouldn't be surprised if it thundered: indeed, the way things were, she rather thought it would. The fact that he was prepared to offer her money appeared altogether to have escaped her.

‘It's got to be exclusive to be of interest to the
Sun,'
he told her. ‘Exclusive or nothing. I'm sorry, but I'm afraid that's the way it is.'

Beryl did not reply immediately.

‘I don't know. Really I don't,' she said. ‘I ought to ask…'

And there she had to break off. Because that was what was so dreadful: there was no one she could ask. She was all by herself now. That was what she had to remember. Slowly her eyes wandered up and down the trim, pin-striped figure of Mr Cheevers. He looked honest and reliable, she thought.

‘What would you advise?' she asked.

Mr Cheevers was an expert bargainer. Always first on the spot, he had more than once managed to secure a front-page feature at away-page rates. And this time he could tell that the Editor was going to be amazed by the deal that he was about to pull off.

‘Exclusive,' he said. ‘Five hundred pounds for the exclusive story.'

Beryl clinked her coffee spoon on the side of the cup before answering.

‘How many newspapers are there?' she asked.

The question surprised Mr Cheevers. He had thought that things were proceeding faster than that.

‘Just the Sundays,' he told her. ‘You can forget the rest. Just three or four of the Sundays that pay big money.'

‘Three or four.' Beryl slowly repeated the words after him. She seemed temporarily to have gone into a daze-state, a coma. Her lips were moving but she was not saying anything. Then, at last, she spoke.

‘If they all paid five hundred that would be two thousand like, wouldn't it? It's not a lot when you think of it that way, not really it isn't, is it?'

Mr Cheevers found Beryl's habit of ending all her sentences with a question strangely confusing. He was never quite sure which it was of the questions that he was supposed to answer first. He decided to go on explaining to her about exclusives.

‘But if all the papers carried the same story there wouldn't be any reason for our readers to go on buying our paper. They could buy just
any old paper. That's why we pay top prices for exclusives. Our readers expect to get something the rest of them haven't got. Otherwise they'd be disappointed.'

For a moment, Mr Cheevers thought that Beryl had seen the force of the argument.

‘Oh, I wouldn't want that to happen,' she said. ‘Not if they'd actually bought the paper like. Not paid for it, I mean. It wouldn't seem right somehow, would it?'

Mr Cheevers smiled encouragingly.

‘That's why I'm in a position to…'

It was a chime on the musical front-door bell that interrupted him. Beryl put her coffee cup back onto the table.

‘Please don't disturb yourself,' she said. ‘I'll answer it.'

Outside in the hallway, he could hear Beryl using her ladylike voice; it was the same one which she had used when welcoming him.

‘There's another gentleman heah already,' she was saying. ‘If it's an exclusive you want, Aim afraid Aye shell hev to ask you to wait out here in our little daining room. The lewnge is occupied, you see.'

When she returned, she gave Mr Cheevers a quick nod of understanding.

‘You were right,' she said. ‘He
was
after an exclusive, too. That's why I made him wait out there. I mean we can't all talk at once like. Not in front of each other, I mean, can we?'

Beryl's accent, Mr Cheevers noticed, had returned to normal. This pleased him. It showed that she was no longer treating him as a stranger. And it was encouraging that she should have come straight back to him in this way, shunting off his competitor as she did so.

But clearly there was no time to lose. He ran his hand down the knife-crease of his trousers to make sure that they were not riding up, and gave a little twitch to the handkerchief in his breast pocket.

‘Mrs Pitts,' he said, ‘to avoid placing any further strain upon you in having to be worried by people whom you need not see at all, I am prepared to increase my offer. And not merely increase it. I am prepared to double it. I will, here and now, on behalf of the
Sunday Sun
, offer you the sum of one thousand pounds for the exclusive rights.'

But Beryl did not appear to be listening. She was staring up at the motionless bird on the mantelshelf.

‘Poor thing,' she said. ‘It can't have had a drink for over a week like, can it? It's probably stuck like that forever.' She started to move
towards it and then checked herself. ‘You did say there were four Sunday papers, didn't you?' she asked. ‘I mean four like who'd want my sort of story?'

Mr Cheevers blew his lips out.

‘That's right,' he said.

And, because for a moment Beryl wasn't saying anything, he intervened.

‘It's your husband's story, too,' he reminded her. ‘His and yours. Our readers will expect to read both sides.'

Beryl nodded.

‘I see that,' she said. ‘It's only what's reasonable, isn't it? After all, it's his story like, really, when you come to think of it. I mean they wouldn't want to read about me, would they, if it hadn't been for him like.'

‘Well, what about it?'

Mr Cheevers had discovered that the terse, almost rude approach was often the best when it came to rounding off awkward negotiations. Not, however, with Beryl.

‘But that only makes two,' she said. ‘You in here with me and that other gentleman out there in the kitchen. There's still the other two like, isn't there?'

Mr Cheevers's eye caught hers.

‘Fifteen hundred.'

Beryl continued to hold the gaze. She appeared to be pondering. But before she could say anything there was another chime from the musical front-door bell.