The Sleeping Partner (21 page)

‘Yes … Stella, he knows that I love you.'

‘Why?
How?'

‘He asked me. When it came to the point I found I couldn't lie to him about it. In fact I think he knew.'

‘It wouldn't be hard to guess, would it? You – don't seem able to hide it.'

‘I'm
sorry.'

‘What did he say?'

‘He asked me if you loved me too.'

She put her fingers on the gate. ‘Well?'

‘I said he ought to know that you didn't. I think he believed what I said. But the ice is thin.'

‘Do you know why I really came to Hockbridge this afternoon?'

‘No, I—'

‘It was to say I didn't think I could go on without telling him.'

After a while I said: ‘Don't you sometimes hurt a man more by telling him the truth than by lying to him?'

‘But when someone has absolute
trust
in you …' She moved angrily, defensively. ‘ If I don't play straight in this it makes a sham of everything I do for him. The faithful loving ministering wife …'

I thought it out, trying to be absolutely honest with myself, trying not to let other considerations crowd us.

‘But it isn't a sham; because if s true. You are the faithful loving ministering wife. If he's
got
to know about us, then I'm willing to face it; but I don't think we should insist on telling him because of some discomfort in ourselves. We're not entitled to make him sleep worse at nights so that we can sleep better. The thing's our burden, not his. If we unload it, we're not nobler, we're squaring our consciences at his expense.'

She said: ‘ If I cared for him less I should care for myself a lot more.'

We were going to separate then, but I made a slight movement towards her. ‘No, Mike,' she whispered. ‘Everything will become impossible if you—'

‘I
know,'
I said, not able to explain the conflict even to her. ‘ I wasn't going to … But a lot of things may happen before we meet again.'

‘What sort of things?'

‘Ask John tomorrow.'

‘What sort of things?'

‘Darling, I can't tell you … Let me say good night to you now.'

So I kissed the inside of her hand and left her. Even that respectful gesture made my heart thump and wasn't gone through without feeling that I was blundering over the boundaries of the peculiar thing that had built up between the three of us. But perhaps love and betrayal are always nearer to each other than we realise.

W
HEN
I got back to the Old Bull I went straight to bed but couldn't sleep, dozing a dozen times and starting awake again as if sleep were an enemy. My thoughts were on the edge of a precipice; to let go would be to fall into the pit. But in the end I couldn't last out any longer and I suppose about four I gave in. Then, oddly, there was no nightmare about the expected things: it was about the scintillometer and the trials at Llanveryan. I thought the man Holborn from Canada had come to the conference and was shooting the whole of our work and theories to pieces. The thing about it was that he seemed in the dream to use arguments that a misguided but knowledgeable man might have used in real life if he'd wanted to sink the whole idea. I had to answer him. That was obvious. I had to answer him; and in the madly silly way that dreams have I got to my feet and then couldn't remember any of the figures we'd worked out. I'd begin: ‘But in a case of that sort the rate-meter output shows a characteristic pattern. Where
u
is the effective gamma-ray absorption of air, you can express it as
F (t) = I oe – u
over …' and then I wouldn't be able to remember what it was over and knew in any case that I'd left something out. So it went on. Each time I'd try to justify what we'd done, and each time I was pushed into a corner. When the phone went to tell me it was eight o'clock I was in a sweat and knew that the whole of our work was going to be thrown over for an enormous gadget that he had made and which I was absolutely certain would let them down as soon as they got out in the desert.

Before getting up I lit a cigarette and smoked it slowly, watching the smoke as it drifted across the room. Then I had a bath and breakfasted quietly in the over-timbered drawing-room among the pewter and the willow-pattern. There was a paper on the next table and I saw a heading which said: ‘State of Emergency in Southern Sudan. Eighty Killed.' I thought, of course Thurston will keep his end up and can probably hold his own with them all on the theoretical side; but it's on the practical side that he'll be outpointed. But anyway, how important
is
our equipment? Can it do something in these peculiar circumstances that no other equipment can? If I believe it can, then it's important it should be approved, for much larger reasons than petty personal ones, and important it should be used irrespective of what happens to the man who made it, or to his factory. What was it Porter from the Foreign Office had said in his rather florid way – ‘necessary to England'? At half-past nine I phoned Bouverie 6775.

A woman answered and I gave my name and stated my business.

‘Oh, is that Mr Granville,' she said. ‘This is Mrs Hamilton. Dr Curtis rang about you last evening, didn't he? I'm very sorry but my husband has been delayed in Paris. He rang me late last night and hopes now to be home on the last plane tonight.'

‘Oh,' I said.

‘From what Dr Curtis said, your business is rather urgent, isn't it? I don't know if you have anyone else in mind whom you would like to approach instead.'

‘No. No, I haven't.'

‘My husband's office would be able to recommend someone … Or if you can wait that long, ring tomorrow any time after nine.'

‘Sunday morning?'

‘Oh, yes, that won't matter. I mentioned Dr Curtis's call to Digby, and he said he would certainly see you as soon as he got home.'

I thought it out. ‘ Is your husband likely to be detained again?'

‘He can't be. There are several things needing attention before Monday.'

‘And I shall be adding to them.'

‘I don't think he would look on it in that light.'

I considered again. ‘Thank you, Mrs Hamilton, I'll phone you tomorrow.'

I hung up and rubbed my hand along the sore place at the back of my head. Then I rang Stella. I said: ‘Stella, don't disturb John. Give him a message, will you? Tell him not to bother ringing Digby Hamilton this morning. Tell him Hamilton isn't home today but that I've arranged to meet him tomorrow. And tell him I'm going to spend today at Llanveryan.'

All the roads were crowded, it being a summer Saturday morning, but I drove as if there was a posse of police cars on my wheels, and got to Llanveryan about ten past two. There I found no trials had taken place in the morning after all because the plane had broken an oil feed and wouldn't be ready to take off for some hours yet. This at first looked like a stroke of luck.

Holborn was a big sharp-boned fellow of forty-odd with nothing much to say and a cagey expression. When I met him he was talking to Steel, who hailed me as if I were an old golfing friend. But I didn't believe a word of it this time. I had five minutes alone with Thurston but didn't get to speak to Frank Dawson at all because, everyone else having arrived, it was decided to have a preliminary meeting right away.

Thurston led off with a highly technical account of the test trials so far. Porter was there, and I wondered what he made of it. Almost certainly nothing at all. Then after we'd discussed them Bennett asked what were Mr Holborn's impressions so far as they at present went?

Holborn picked up a pencil in his big bony hands, and said that obviously he couldn't as of here and now say much about the practical operation of the equipment. Running the apparatus in the plane on the ground had given him the impression that it was a little more sensitive to cosmic radiation than his own, and it seemed to him a pity that no cosmic cancellation circuit had been incorporated. He made one or two other minor comments but didn't mention what most of us had in mind. Steel said:

‘And as to the absence of a radioaltimeter?'

Holborn put the pencil behind his ear. ‘You're asking me to talk out of turn, Dr Steel. But in principle I should say that's quite a disadvantage. It increases the likelihood of error — either error in mistaking worthless activity for a valuable ore body or in overlooking the genuine deposit when you come on it.'

Thurston said: The risk of error is always there. Without discussing the merits of this particular instrument, the increase of risk must depend largely on the type of country you're prospecting.'

‘Oh, yes, surely. Our machine was designed for rugged country. The flatter the terrain, the less your altitude varies as your plane passes over it in level flight. That stands to reason.'

Bennett said: ‘I think we have to take into consideration the circumstances for which this particular instrument is designed. And I think before going any further we should hear from Mr Thurston his reasons for considering this device and then rejecting it.'

Thurston looked at me and said: ‘This is really your territory, Granville.'

I said: ‘ What sort of a plane were you flying, Mr Holborn?'

‘At first we had an Anson V, and then we put it in a Beechcraft Expeditor.'

‘Much bigger planes than the Auster we're using …'

‘Oh, yes, twice the size. Our apparatus was altogether bigger.'

‘And by how much did the radioaltimeter increase the weight?'

‘I suppose by about thirty-five pounds.'

I said: ‘ That was one of our objections. Another is that you need elaborate test gear that has to be carted from place to place. And at the end it didn't seem to us that one ever has a reliable signal-to-height relationship. It was better, we reasoned, to have no correction than one that couldn't be trusted.'

‘Also,' said Thurston, ‘ you need a highly technical personnel on the spot, first for constant checking and second to interpret the results.'

‘Don't you always need a technical personnel?' Holborn discovered a second pencil and drew gentle figure eights on the table-top with it. ‘ But don't get me wrong. I think there's an area of misunderstanding in our conversation. Are you supposing that we used an altimeter with an automatic electronic compensator?' He looked round the table inquiringly.

‘That was my impression,' said Bennett.

‘Well, it's wrong, sir. It's used on some of the American machines, but we considered it and discarded it for some of the reasons Mr Granville has put forward. We simply have a radioaltimeter and an aerial camera, both continuously running, and each can then be compared with the record of the counting rate-meter and any significant signals checked against variations in height and terrain.'

No one spoke for a bit. Steel blew his nose noisily.

Flight Lieutenant Rhodes said: ‘But the additional weight will still remain?'

‘Yes, the additional weight I told you still remains.'

Rhodes said to Porter: ‘This unrest in the Sudan, sir. Is it near our piece of country?'

Porter looked over the top of his spectacles. ‘ The territory to be prospected was at one time part of Equatoria where the chief rioting is taking place, and the tribes are still emotionally linked.'

Rhodes said: ‘I can only just get her completely airborne now. If I carry another two and half stone of equipment we'll
have
to reduce the fuel carried.'

‘Or use a bigger plane,' said Steel.

We talked for a while and then Bennett said: ‘I don't think we can really go any further until Mr Holborn has had a chance to test the instrument in flight. Do you know when the plane will be ready?'

‘About five, I hope,' said Rhodes.

We broke up then. At five I went out to the plane, but the mechanics said it would be another hour yet. On the way back I saw Dawson crossing the tarmac with his limping walk. I fell into step beside him.

‘Walk with me as far as the end of the runway,' I said. ‘ There's something I want to ask you.'

‘What's the matter, has Read joined the Communist Party?'

‘Frank, when was the last time you saw Lynn?'

He cocked his head, bright-eyed, sardonic, narrow-lipped. ‘Lynn? I don't remember. Ages. Why?'

‘We've broken up. Did you know?'

Rather surprisingly he flushed. ‘When?'

‘A few weeks ago. Can you remember when you last saw her?'

‘What's gone wrong between you?'

‘When did you last see her?'

‘… Oh, it would be February, I suppose; that time she came down to the works just after we'd moved. I don't get the chance now of dropping round for a drink the way I did in London. I miss that, you know.'

‘I had to go through some of her things on Thursday night and found this.' I took out the scribbled message and handed it to him. I knew it already by heart, and watched him frowning at it as if the writing were too small for him to read. We had stopped, and the afternoon sun coming, suddenly through the clouds fell on us like a klieg light.

He said: ‘ This was written ages ago.'

‘When?'

‘I can't remember. Last year.' He handed the paper impatiently back.

‘The ink doesn't look old to me.'

‘What are you getting at?'

‘Only the truth.'

He turned his frown on me, his eyes black in the sun. ‘ Look, Mike, you're on the wrong station. I'm not used to being called a liar.'

‘This note has been written since February. It was in the pocket of a frock she didn't even have then. How often have you been seeing Lynn?'

He began moving again. ‘ Why the hell shouldn't I see her? We were friends at one time before you made this move – remember? Or has that conveniently escaped your notice since you became so much the boss?'