The Husband's Story (43 page)

It was strange about Marleen. He was very fond of her; proud of her, too, when he came to compare her with other people's children. But she had never been really close to him; she had always been Beryl's little Marleen rather than Stan's little Marleen.

With his mind more or less at rest for the moment, he blew out his cheeks and allowed himself the luxury of a long, deep sigh. ‘You did the right thing, Stan, when you signed that confession of yours,' he said. ‘It was the only way. You wouldn't have wanted to have all that on your conscience for ever.'

Then from nowhere and with no warning, all the old anxieties came crowding back. What was worse was that one of them, the most pressing
one, wouldn't go away again.

‘If you go to prison,' a different voice kept asking, ‘what's going to happen to your pension? And if your pension stops, what are they both going to live on? That's what you've got to think about – not about how much better you feel simply because you decided to come clean.'

That was when he got up and kicked the painted brickwork beside the door.

‘I suppose I'll have to say it was sunstroke,' he said. ‘Tell ‘em one big lie and be done with it.'

There's a lot that can be said against the law – that it's unjust, antiquated, inhumane. But no one can say that it rushes things. Stan's four-and-a-half weeks had become three months by now, and still there was no sign of the trial coming any nearer. All that had happened so far was that they had moved him up to the third floor – cell 22 this time, the exact duplicate of his old one, merely one storey higher.

Also, for no reason except that he'd had nothing else to do, he had grown himself a moustache. It was not really much of a moustache, because Stan's hair was too thin and pale for it to show up properly, and it didn't bristle outwards as much as moustaches should do. It was simply a limp band of down. But Stan was pleased with it. He kept stroking away at his upper lip; even at times wondering what Beryl would say if he should decide to grow a beard as well.

Because of the delay, Mr Marbuck had practically given up seeing him. He had, indeed, only been to the prison on Stan's account once since Stan had been moved up a floor. Not that Stan held it against him in any way. Mr Marbuck had done everything that could have been expected of him; and, ever since Stan had agreed that the confessions must have been forced out of him, Mr Marbuck had become his friend again. What was so strange about it was that he was beginning to believe that they had been.

As it happened, Beryl's visits were becoming less frequent. Last week, for instance, she had skipped it altogether, merely telephoning through a message about not being well or something. It hadn't, however, upset Stan too badly; had hardly upset him at all, in fact. Beryl's other visits had all proved strangely upsetting – they had reminded him too much of the other world outside. And this was something that he had to avoid at all costs. Stan, indeed, was in process of learning the first great law of prison life – and that is to live it.
It's the same with soldiers serving overseas. Letters from home aren't always the little rays of sunshine they are supposed to be; quite often they simply unsettle distant sons and husbands who have grown used to being away. There's very little room for sentiment where armies or prisons are concerned.

And remember that Beryl had her own problems. Like the prison social worker, for instance. The woman had arrived at Kendal Terrace without prior notice and had straight away begun asking her questions.

What's more, the timing could hardly have been worse. It was three o'clock in the afternoon when she got there. Beryl had taken off her dress and was lying down on the large double bed with the pillows humped up in the nape of her neck so as not to disarrange her hair-do. The curtains were half drawn; last week's issue of
Woman's Own
was spread face downwards, open upon the bedclothes; and, on the oval bedside table, lay a half-eaten Mars Bar. Beryl was just beginning to feel sleepy, drifting gently away to nothingness, when she heard the chimes of the front-door bell.

Because it was a bay window, it was just possible to part the curtains and peer down onto the doorstep. The canopy was an obstruction: it cut off the upper part of anyone standing there. But it left the whole of the feet and legs showing. These were feminine and looked respectable enough, not like the feet and legs of anyone likely to be selling things. Beryl grew curious and put on her dressing-gown.

The visitor had the advantage of experience on her side. There was no doubt about that. She had called not merely on dozens but on hundreds of other women in Beryl's position, and she knew exactly how to put them at their ease.

‘It is Mrs Pitts, isn't it?' she asked, speaking throughout at top speed, as soon as the front door was opened. ‘I do hope this isn't inconvenient for you. I know what a nuisance people are when they drop in like this, but I wanted to have a word with you about your husband. I'm from the welfare department, you see. You don't mind, do you?'

In the end, it proved to be quite a long visit; nearly a full hour, in fact. That was because first Beryl had to excuse herself while she went upstairs to put a dress on – the one that she had been wearing, the blue check one with the open neck that was draped over the back of the bedroom chair didn't somehow seem quite suitable; then she had to go through to the kitchenette to make some tea for both of them; and finally, quite deliberately, she kept her visitor back showing her photo
graphs of little Marleen as a baby, simply dragging things out long enough for her to be able to show off little Marleen herself on her return from school.

The way things had turned out, Beryl found herself enjoying every minute of it. She saw so few visitors in any case, and this one proved to be so sympathetic, so understanding. She knew exactly the right questions to ask, the probing ones that really made it possible for Beryl to open up. And, in the result, they talked about money, and sex, and nervous shock, and the unfairness of life, and the strain of bringing up even one child, and interior decoration and hairdressers, and the pangs of sudden bereavement, and cut-price supermarkets.

It was while she was talking that she realized what a relief it was to have found someone who really wanted to listen. Stan himself had never been a good listener. She had always suspected him of thinking about something else even while he pretended to be paying attention; and more than once she had caught him out afterwards.

But there was more to it than that. It wasn't just the sheer pleasure of being listened to that counted: it was the way it took your mind off things. And this was funny when you came to think of it. Because the whole, the sole reason of the visit had been Stan; and, looking back on it, they had hardly even mentioned him. More talked round him like.

There was only one thing throughout the whole fifty-five minutes that had kept on worrying her and that was the way her visitor was dressed. She could not understand how any woman in her official position – especially anyone who had to go around meeting people – could carry a black handbag when she was wearing a blue dress and brown walking shoes.

All the same, Beryl hoped that she would come round again some time. And Marleen hoped so, too. Marleen liked her. The lady had said what pretty hair Marleen had.

Nowadays, however, there is more to human welfare than just welfare workers. There are psychiatrists as well. Stan, in fact, was on his way to see one at the moment.

It was quite a walk, too, from D Block over to G where the medicos lived. That was because the prison had been built on the wrong-shaped site. Seen on the map, it resembled a capital ‘L' with the base and upright both the same length. To reach G, Stan and the warder had to go along the length of the exercise yard, past the chapel and the bakery,
through the courtyard leading to E, and then turn right by the clock tower and keep straight on to F, bearing off to the left a little to reach the laundry, the mortuary, and eventually the dispensary and the sick bays.

Stan was rather glad of the walk. Apart altogether from the pleasure of being in motion, it was nice to be actually going somewhere, not simply round and round the asphalt pathway that fringed the exercise yard. And the warder – or rather the ‘screw' as Stan had now learnt to call him – was one of the friendly sort. He talked: Association Football was his subject and he brought Stan up to date on everything in the game – results, gates, transfer fees, penalties, sackings. Stan kept nodding his head, and thanking him for the information.

But Beryl had been quite right about him. He wasn't really listening. He was thinking of his desk down in the sub-basement at Frobisher House, and wondering who was sitting there now. Even though he had never liked it so much as his old desk upstairs with the view down the corridor, it hadn't proved too bad once you got used to it. It was quiet; and it was private. In fact, one way and another, you could have a perfectly good time down there amid the filing cabinets and the card index systems – that is, if you didn't mind working in artificial light and re-circulated air the whole time.

When Stan finally got to G Block, he could tell at once that it wasn't a regular prison doctor, not a staff man, that he was seeing. All prison staff had the same pale, waxy look as the other inmates, whereas this one seemed fairly brimming over with good health. He was surprisingly young, too; younger than his patient, Stan reckoned. And well dressed in a smart, trendy kind of way. No baggy trousers protruding from under a long white overall for him. No clip-on thermometer. No stethoscope.

‘Come in,' he said to Stan. ‘Sit down. Make yourself at home.' Then he turned to the accompanying warder. ‘Shan't be needing you,' he added. ‘Not just now, that is. Give me twenty minutes. Better make it half an hour. Thanks for coming over.'

It was certainly a change from ordinary prison life, hearing people being spoken to like that. Even the room itself was different; deliberately, defiantly different. The walls were peach-coloured, and they had pictures on them. Two of them were of country landscapes – one of winter and one of harvest time. But it was the other two that attracted Stan's attention. One of those was a French colour print of a small boy
relieving himself into a pond of what would otherwise have been fresh drinking water. Stan remembered that he had seen it before in a print-shop window and had always considered it to be in pretty poor taste.

What surprised him more, however, was the one over the fireplace. That was a matt print of a good-looking studio nude. The photographer had posed her up against one of those old-fashioned cheval-glass mirrors so that, in a single shot, most of both sides of her were showing. The lighting was good, distinctly good. Tungsten probably, Stan thought. By any standards it was a thoroughly professional sort of job.

While Stan was looking at the photograph, the psychiatrist was observing Stan. And the psychiatrist was very pleased with himself. The nude photograph trick was something that he had devised himself. It was now an integral part of his clinical technique and, once again, it was working perfectly.

‘Would you like to have taken that photograph?' he asked.

Stan did not reply immediately. He was too busy admiring the sheer mastery of the lighting. Now that he'd had time to study it, he was really envious.

‘Not half,' he said, running his tongue across his lips as he said the words.

The psychiatrist allowed himself a little inward smile. By old-fashioned conventional methods it would have taken weeks, months probably, to elicit such an admission, and here the patient was blurting it out before he'd even had time to sit down. No wonder that the psychiatrist's latest paperback, ‘Sex and Sanity', was prominently displayed on all the bookstalls, and that the BBC was repeating his series, ‘Your Other Self', on the Third Programme.

He decided to probe a bit deeper.

‘You could have done, you know. You've got a camera, haven't you?'

The mention of his camera suddenly made Stan feel very unhappy. He'd been missing it terribly. Also, he had been reminded of those awful girls that Helga had brought along to the little studio off the Edgware Road. Looking back on it, that had been where all his trouble had really started.

He shook his head decisively.

‘Not my line,' he said.

The psychiatrist did not attempt to press him.

‘Come over here and sit down,' he said. ‘Just take it easy for a bit.'

Again it surprised Stan that the psychiatrist should take the hard
swivel chair and give him the low, upholstered one.

‘And put your feet up,' he went on. ‘You'll be more comfortable that way.'

The cushions gave out a gentle wheezing sound as he sank into them, and he found himself wishing that he could have had an easy chair like this one over in cell 22 in D Block. He closed his eyes for a moment in sheer pleasure.

‘And how is your wife keeping?'

It was another of the psychiatrist's catch-questions; something tossed out quite casually as though by an old family friend.

Stan did not know what to say. The last few visits hadn't gone off at all well, and he did not want to be reminded of them. But he remembered his manners. If the psychiatrist was polite enough to ask, he supposed that it was up to him to show a little politeness, too.

‘Pretty well, considering,' he said. ‘In all the circumstances, you know.'

‘You must be missing her.'

Even though it wasn't a question at all, Stan reckoned that it called for some kind of an answer, and a pleasant one at that. But, try as he would to think of something nice to say, the words seemed to stick in his throat. The best that he could manage was a low, meaningless gulp.

Even so, it was enough: it told the psychiatrist all that he wanted to know. He recognized instantly that here, stretched out on the couch beside him, was a man who, in layman's language, was heart-broken.