The Husband's Story (49 page)

In one respect Stan was noticeably better off than most of the other inmates. There he was in a prison that contained a lot of very important people – ex-MPs, ex-Local Government officials, ex-company directors, ex-bank managers, even an ex-clergyman or two – and he was one of the few to have a cell entirely to himself. That was what came of being a high Security risk. All spies occupy a privileged position in the prison hierarchy; they are special.

Not that there aren't some disadvantages, of course. There's less social life, less mixing, for example. But, in the long run, most prisoners would opt for a private bedsitter in preference to doss-house conditions and half an hour of extra table tennis.

The arrangement certainly suited Stan perfectly. He had considered it carefully, and he was content. It gave him more time for communing with himself.

‘Eighteen years the Judge said,' he kept repeating. ‘And that means twelve if you behave yourself, my lad. You're no fool. You'll keep in step all right. You won't give them any trouble. It's only your brain you've got to think about. You don't want that to go stale. Not get soggy, your brain mustn't. You want to keep up with things. This is your big chance, Stan, if you use it properly. They're bound to have a library in a prison of this size. You get onto the subscribers' list. Nothing trashy, mind you. Nothing cheap – no sex, no murder stories. Something to improve the mind. That's what pays dividends – knowledge. Like French and history and economics. And accountancy, of course, and science. You've got time. And there's art, and literature. Read about them, too. Just play your cards properly and you'll be the best-educated man in the place. What about the Open University? How would you like to come out of here as Mr Stanley Pitts, BA? Well, why shouldn't you? This is your one big chance to better yourself. And you make sure you take it.'

As yet Stan's mind certainly showed no signs of sogginess. Already it was the matter of prisoners' correspondence that he was working on. He was quite prepared to accept that you couldn't have the plotting-and
breaking-out kind receiving letters by every post; with that amount of information in their possession, they would be up and over the wall and away in no time. But, with the reliable and trustworthy sort, he reckoned that a letter a day might do some of them a power of good.

If only the Governor had asked him, he would have found that Stan had got the whole thing worked out. A single sheet of paper to be handed to the new arrival as soon as he got to the prison was how he saw it; a single sheet that is, with three columns and three little boxes in which to put the ticks. Column one would ask, quite bluntly, how often the prisoner would like to hear from his wife, with three times a week as a cast-iron maximum; Column two was for solicitor and near relatives; with Column three in reserve for mere friends and acquaintances.

Outgoing mail, Stan reckoned, could be similarly handled, provided two things were properly looked after. The first was that no extra expense should fall on the tax-payer, which meant that to cover postal charges there should be a simple system of deduction from prison wages; and the second was an extra little tick-box in all three Columns to indicate whether it was first- or second-class mail that the prisoner had in mind.

Stan had not spent all those years within the Civil Service for nothing.

From the start, Stan had been against any suggestion of an Appeal. It wasn't that he didn't think that it would succeed. It was simply that everything at the trial had seemed perfectly fair to him, and he couldn't for the life of him imagine what there could be to appeal about.

All the same, it was rather nice to have something to look forward to, something to break up the monotony of the everlasting six-thirty roll call and nine-o'clock lights out.

That's what counts in prison; even if the prisoner isn't able to help in preparing his Appeal, at least he's allowed to attend the Court just to see how it's getting on. And that at least means a journey in the open air, with different faces, different sounds and, above all, fresh breezes.

Stan enjoyed every moment of it. It was like a trip to the seaside; brief but bracing. Indeed, the tonic effect became apparent straight away, and he could feel himself taking in deeper and deeper breaths. When he reached the Court, he was actually whistling quietly to himself; and he would have gone on doing so if the officer in the reception bay had not told him that, if not exactly forbidden, whistling
was nevertheless frowned upon. It was enough to put the Appeal Judges against him from the start, he added.

Nothing came of the Appeal, of course. All three of the Judges agreed with Stan that the whole trial could not have been more properly conducted; and that, with nothing less than the safety of the Realm at stake, eighteen years was a very reasonable sort of sentence.

The only thing that worried Stan was the matter of his cell. By now he had become used to No. 16 in D Block and, on the whole, rather liked it. The thought alarmed him that, in his absence, the room might have been let to a new arrival.

All that Stan wanted was to be left alone where he was and be allowed to settle down and get on with it.

Mr Cheevers had been getting on with it, too. He had his first, neatly-typed hundred pages to show for it, and was now well into his second clip-back folder. Not that it had been easy. Beryl was too impulsive a collaborator for that; too mercurial. Only last month she had suddenly asked: ‘Why not start all over again and do it like it was Stan talking? Then it would be more interesting like, wouldn't it? More exciting. Stan wouldn't mind. I mean, why should he? After all, it's for me and Marleen that he'd be doing it.'

At the outset it had been only once a week that Mr Cheevers had made the journey over to Crocketts Green. But, of late, in order to get on with things he had been stepping it up a bit – at week-ends mostly, but sometimes even twice on week-days as well. And Beryl always seemed pleased enough to see him. She had even taken to buying little delicacies, like tinned soft roes and steak-and-kidney pie in tin-foil, for the nights on which she knew he was coming. And, like the gentleman he was, Mr Cheevers never turned up without a little something himself. He had got over his earlier objection to flowers and the front lounge was now regularly ablaze with poinsettias, cyclamen, Russian violets; Russian violets especially because they lasted so well.

Having Mr Cheevers in the house so often, Beryl had naturally begun to make use of him. She put him on odd jobs like changing electric-light bulbs and re-fixing dislocated curtain runners. Also, more often than not, she allowed herself a drink from the bottle of sweet sherry or Dubonnet which Mr Cheevers would occasionally bring over in place of the flowers. Then, in the presence of the tirelessly bobbing-up-and-down bird, they would sit glass-in-hand, facing each other across the fireplace, going over, episode by episode, the various stages of Stan's career, private and professional, right up to the moment of his eventual downfall.

Now that Beryl was getting to know Mr Cheevers so much better she was ready to tell him so much more. Only last Tuesday she had revealed to him that, during the few remaining months of his freedom,
Stan had taken to drinking heavily. In vivid detail she described the night when he was so intoxicated on his return home that she had been forced to take Marleen into her own bedroom, being careful to lock the door behind her as she did so. Mr Cheevers was delighted. It was little touches like that, he told himself, that would make the book.

In the circumstances, with Mr Cheevers in the house so much, it was only natural that Beryl should find herself comparing him to Stan.

More than once, indeed, she had not been able to escape noticing how much alike physically Mr Cheevers and Stan really were. For a start, they were about the same height; and, come to that, about the same weight. There was, of course, one big difference. Mr Cheevers's hair was dark, like hers; almost raven. Whereas Stan's had been so much lighter; sandy as you might say, even verging on the ginger.

‘Had been
so much lighter': with a shock Beryl realized that already she was beginning to think of Stan in the past tense! Everything about him seemed to be something that had once happened. It amazed her to think that she should ever have been married to him at all.

For the first time since he had started, Mr Cheevers really believed that he would get his Stanley Pitts book finished.

He had been at work on it for nearly a year by now, and it seemed only like yesterday when he had started. The last six months had proved particularly fruitful. Buying Beryl a tape recorder had been one of his happier thoughts. Even at the manufacturer's recommended price, it was not an expensive one that he had chosen. Mr Cheevers had, however, bought it at a shop in Holborn which specialized in ignoring recommendations. Hong Kong was where the little recorder had come from; and, though its tone may have been a trifle nasal and Chinese-sounding, the play-back capacity was quite remarkable.

Beryl fell in love with it at first sight. She enjoyed speaking into the plastic mouth-piece. It made something to do when she was alone; also, it made her feel important. No other woman of her acquaintance possessed a Sabuki personalized recorder; and no other woman, she felt sure, had so much to say into it.

Of course, to begin with, she made her share of mistakes: beginners always do. For the most part, the tapes consisted of false starts, sudden re-winds and the intermittent sound of heavy breathing. But that did not matter. What was important was that Beryl was still trying; and
Mr Cheevers felt sure that, sooner or later, she would get round to the subject of her relationship with Cliff.

The year hadn't been passing quite so rapidly for Stan. But that is not to be wondered at. It's impossible to keep track of time in prison; and so easy to get confused, too. Indeed, he was a whole month out when, on one of his evening visits, the chaplain reminded him that, by the end of the week, he'd have done his first twelve months.

But looking back he had to admit that there was certainly plenty to show for it. He'd managed to make himself pretty useful all round; practically indispensable, in fact. That was because he was so good at checking things. In the carpentry and woodwork room, for instance, he had introduced a completely new system of receipts for timber handed out and counter-receipts for finished articles returned. Again, during the week while he had been lent to the Infirmary he had succeeded in tidying up the prison linen distribution so that no piece of clean linen went out until there had been a soiled one to replace it; and any day now they'd promised him that he should have a go at the Library. He'd already had a pretty thorough look round in there, and he had seen enough to tell him that the whole lay-out was wrong; amateurish to the last degree, in fact. But, once he had the new card-index system of his own design installed and the books themselves in proper order, he doubted if there would be any prison Library in the whole country that could compare with it.

And, in the meantime, Stan was making good use of the Reference Section. It was mostly legal works that he was consulting.

Naturally enough, the stress of prison visiting – coming on top of having to make a home for Marleen as well as helping Mr Cheevers with his book – had begun to get Beryl down. She could not sleep and, when she did, her dreams were both disordered and disturbing. On the third successive night when Cliff had come into them and had kept her awake because she could not stop thinking about him, she decided that there was nothing for it but to see her doctor. A short course of Valium was what he prescribed; and he advised, moreover, that for the time being she had better get someone else to take on the prison visiting.

That was how it was that Marleen came to see so much of her father. Up to that point, she had been Beryl's little girl much more than Stan's. But those fortnightly sessions served to bring them together. For the
first time in her life she became really close to her father; and Stan, for his part, became just as close to her. He only wished that he could have had his camera with him. A shot taken across the interview counter, with just a hint of the grille and the figure of the wardress and the barred window in the background could easily have turned into a prize-winner.
Across the divide
was what he would have called it.

The fonder Marleen grew of her father, the more she resented Mr Cheevers. She saw him not as a friend but as an intruder. And this resentment came quite unexpectedly to a head one evening. What made the whole affair so regrettable was that it could quite easily have been avoided; indeed, it had only been at the last moment that Mr Cheevers had finally decided to go over to Kendal Terrace.

For a start, the weather had been dreadful. Ever since tea-time, the rain had been coming down monsoon-fashion, with spiteful little side sallies of the sort that drenched people who thought that they were safely sheltering in doorways. If it had not been that Mr Cheevers was still determined to pin Beryl down about Cliff he would never have set out at all.

As it was, he got soaked through simply getting from his parked car to the front door of Number Sixteen, and Beryl made him take his jacket off to dry before they got down to work together. The sight of Mr Cheevers in his bright red braces seemed to upset Marleen; and when she asked him how much more he was going to take off, Beryl sent her from the room.

Apart from that, the session looked like passing off very smoothly. Beryl told Mr Cheevers all about Stan's bogus promotion and how he had made use of it as a cover-up to conceal where the extra money was really coming from. Then, to his delight, she brought Cliff into the conversation unasked. This was something that she had never done before.

‘The real trouble about Stan' – for some time now she had stopped referring to him as ‘my husband' – ‘was that he didn't impress people. He was ever so good at his work, he was really, but nobody ever seemed to notice him like. He was the exact opposite of Cliff. He was the one in the picture, remember. Nobody couldn't help noticing Cliff.'