The Sleeping Partner (6 page)

It wasn't a bad cottage and quite big, but the rooms were low, and as I bent to go in after her she said: ‘ John, this is Mr Granville. I asked him to come in for a minute or two.'

A tall bony man got up from sitting by a fire which made the room stuffy, I thought, and shook my hand. The first thing I noticed was that he was a lot older than his wife, then that his gaunt look wouldn't have mattered if it hadn't been so papery and bloodless.

‘I'm glad you've called in, Mr Granville. I've been hoping to meet you for quite a while.'

‘It's high time I did, to apologise for overworking your wife so much in the last two months.'

‘I think she's enjoyed it on the whole. This week has been a little hard.'

I took the chair and the cigarette offered me; Stella stood by the window, nervously I thought, smoothing her skirt, eyes on the garden.

I said: ‘I don't know if Stella has explained to you what we've been working on.'

He smiled slightly, with thin lips. ‘Something of it …'

‘The crisis this week,' I said carefully, ‘ was that we got all the equipment lashed up and ready for preliminary testing, and found as soon as we switched on that the circuit was insensitive and the triggering completely unreliable. I – don't know if that means much to you, but that's the chief reason I had to leave your wife on your doorstep at well after midnight last Monday.'

‘And did you trace what was wrong?'

‘Eventually. The people who supplied the transformer had used the wrong core material.'

There was a short silence. Stella said: ‘I thought we might have gone on an hour or so longer tonight.'

‘It's time we had a break. Overwork's like standing on the head of a broom: sooner or later the handle is bound to come up and hit you. It hit me last week.'

They waited for me to explain. When I didn't John Curtis said: ‘It happened to me once.'

‘Probably not with the same results.'

‘With unfortunate results anyway.'

‘Very unfortunate,' said Stella.

‘I'm sorry. Stella told me you were not well. But I don't quite know what—'

‘Oh, things will be better for me soon,' he said rather brusquely. ‘It's only a question of time.'

Again there was a short silence. ‘Anyway,' I said, ‘perhaps you'd like to know that your wife has been absolutely splendid on this job. It was almost by chance that I asked her to do this with me instead of Dawson, my head man, and she's been three times as good as he could possibly have been.'

Curtis glanced across at Stella. ‘She's three times as good at most things. Looking after me among them.'

Stella raised her head and her glance met mine for a second. She had flushed slightly but her eyes were quite clear. Then she looked at her husband in the same way.

‘Very handsome of you both. You know, most of the time I only do what I'm told. But I really think this calls for a drink.'

One thing about running your own factory and being answerable to no one but yourself is that it increases your all-round sense of responsibility. When I arrived on the Monday morning the big new metal press I'd bought had just arrived, and I went along at once to the rear gates where they were preparing to slide it off the lorry. I climbed over the side of the lorry and lent a hand to see that the thing was edged down the planks successfully. Even when we got the press safely to earth there was nearly an hour's sweating and straining with crowbars before it was manoeuvred across the works to the place it was going to occupy.

After it was done I walked back to my office alone. I noticed that the experimental radar job we were building was coming along fairly well. A pity in a way that it would render out of date all the equipment we'd delivered this year and all the contracts we were due to complete over the next twelve months. But that was the way it was in this business.

The buzzer was going in my office as I got in, and Miss Allen spoke through to me. ‘ It's that bank again. The manager wants to speak to you.'

‘Oh,' I said. ‘Put him through.'

‘Mr Granville? … This is Fellowes from the Pall Mall branch of the National Provincial Bank. We've just had a letter from your wife, Mr Granville. It came by the eleven o'clock post.'

‘Well?'

‘I'm afraid it's – not very helpful to you, sir. She simply – er – thanks us for our letter of the seventeenth and restates her request that we should not disclose her present address to anyone. I'm very sorry.'

I thought for a minute. ‘Did you tell her who wanted to know?'

‘Of course. I assumed you wished us to do that.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘Thanks.'

‘We will, of course, be glad to forward any letter …'

‘Thanks,' I said again.

After I'd hung up Miss Allen came in with her pad. I said: ‘ Not just at the moment. I'd like you to get me another number. It's – er – Purley 2108.'

While I waited I made stabs with the end of my pencil in the blotting paper. They were not angry stabs but perplexed and frustrated ones.

‘You're through,' said Miss Allen.

‘Mrs Carson?'

‘Speaking.'

‘Oh, this is Mike. Have you heard anything from Lynn since I phoned you on Thursday?'

‘Oh, Mike, I telephoned you twice yesterday but couldn't get any answer. I thought—'

‘No, I was out – at the works. Have you seen Lynn?'

‘I've had a letter. I had a letter on Friday.'

‘What did it say?'

‘Well, it made me feel quite ill. She said she was – leaving you. I'd hardly an idea in the world that everything wasn't going well between you. I was very upset indeed.'

‘No more than I was.'

‘Whatever has happened?'

‘I think maybe she's tired of me …' Lynn's mother didn't answer. ‘Does she give some other reason?'

‘She doesn't give her reasons at all. You might know that. It's years since she consulted me or asked my advice about anything.'

I said: ‘ Does she give her address in London?'

‘Yes, she does. I've written to her. I said to her I couldn't understand it at all, and I didn't think—'

‘What is her address?'

‘Oh, Mike, she told me not to tell you. That was the last thing in her letter. I'll be writing to you, she finished, perhaps next week—'

‘Don't you think I'm entitled to know?'

‘It isn't what I think, dear. I certainly think she should never have left you … Mike?'

‘Yes?'

‘Is there another woman in it – or another man?'

‘There certainly isn't another woman.'

‘Thank goodness. Then it may be patched up.'

‘It may be patched up. There's more likelihood of that if I can go and see her instead of being kept at arm's length by this damned silly secrecy.'

‘Are you telling me the absolute truth?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, it's – 9a, Grosvenor Court Mews, W1. Mike, dear, if you do go, don't tell her where you got the address. Whatever happens between you and her afterwards, if she knew she'd never speak to me again.'

‘I promise.' Yet, I thought swiftly, Lynn might have known her mother wouldn't keep information like that to herself – in any minor squabble she'd always favoured me. If Lynn had not wanted me to know …

‘If I might give you a word of advice, dear …'

‘Well?'

‘Be firm with her. I never could be firm enough.'

I said: ‘Nor I'

‘Perhaps that's it. Ever since she was a girl. And I never was able to argue with her without her making me feel pompous and Victorian. It's a way she has that puts you in the wrong.'

When I'd rung off I stared at the address scribbled on the memo pad. She'd gone to earth very much where one would expect. But now that I had the address I hesitated whether to use it. The episode of Friday night was heavy on my mind. Clearly she‘d not been willing to face me then. What
earthly
good would it do forcing myself on her if she were in that mood? Perhaps I too had to pick and choose the time of meeting.

W
HEN
I drove back to Hockbridge the afternoon's post lay ungathered on the floor and I picked it up, half hoping. But no luck. A driving licence reminder, the bill for a ton of winter anthracite we'd had in last week, a letter from someone in Southsea who described himself as a gentleman and offered to make my fortune with a pools syndicate.

I got a snack supper – corner of the kitchen table this time – drank rather a lot of whisky and went early to bed. I slept fitfully, dozing and waking, dozing and dreaming. Twice I thought I heard noises and went downstairs. But this time there was no one there.

The next day at the office I decided to write to her after all and keep the fact that I knew where she was as a last resort. But it was no use. My own feelings were so ravelled up I couldn't take any line. One time I began like a pompous ass, standing on my dignity; the next I seemed to be crawling.

That evening I may have been driving a bit faster than usual but a small boy on a Fairey cycle suddenly came wobbling out of a side turning right in front of me. There was about two feet to swerve without hitting a lorry and I took twenty-three inches of it. All the same the boy lost his balance and hit me as I came to a stop, and collapsed in the road on top of his bike. There was rather a fuss then because a car behind nearly butted into me. Stella Curtis and I picked the boy up from among his bike. He was only about eight and scared, but we couldn't find a bruise on him. His front wheel was bent like a trick cyclist's and there was a lovely long scratch down my rear wing.

After a good bit of talk the lorry and the other car went off, and I straightened the kid's wheel and asked him where he lived, and then took him along to see his mother and advised her that if she didn't want to be bereaved she should keep a boy of that age off the main road. The queer thing was that she didn't seem much upset and just kept saying in a wet voice: ‘Well I have warned 'im. He did oughter know better but he just won't be told.'

We drove on. I said: ‘My mouth tastes of pennies. Release of adrenalin or something.'

She said: ‘ You were lovely with the small boy. Most men would have raved.'

‘Better if I had. Obviously she wasn't going to.'

When we got to her house she said: ‘Do come in. You must need a drink.'

‘Well, I don't know if …'

‘John would like to see you again. He hasn't been well this week and you'd cheer him up.'

Cheer him up, I thought, that was comic. ‘Is he seriously ill?'

‘It's a form of anaemia.'

‘Quite bad?'

‘Yes, quite bad.'

So I went in again, and eventually found myself staying to supper. I wasn't particularly attracted to John Curtis. He was quite impressive but I suspected him of being very much the professional sick man; and it didn't seem a happy arrangement that a girl like Stella Curtis who was young and a looker should be tied to someone twenty years older than herself and very much of an invalid, who lived in an over-warm house and was perpetually chilly, had to have his slippers put on, his pipe fetched, his chair fixed. That was the impression I got; but the talk and the company did me good. I found when she was away from the laboratory atmosphere that Stella was quite different, eager, amusing, easy to be with; also whether you liked John Curtis or not, you didn't doubt his headpiece. More than once I found myself out of depth and glad to make for the shore.

I wondered what he'd been before he cracked up. Just before I left, the talk came round to the kid we'd nearly knocked down, and Curtis said: ‘Stella tells me you think it a mistake to have children these days.'

So she'd told him that, had she? ‘It's a matter of opinion.'

‘Because of the risk of atomic warfare?'

‘That among other things.'

‘But life never has been without risk, has it? Every generation has its own hazards.'

‘None quite so much as this, I'd say.'

He narrowed his thin brows. ‘In most centuries until this one, if you had ten children and four grew up, you were doing pretty well. Then, having grown up, blood poisoning, typhus and cholera were probably as lethal as most of the risks of today.'

I said: ‘ Perhaps I take this too personally. But you see for today's generation I'm concerned with lining up some of the potential cholera.'

After a minute he said: ‘I don't think you take it too personally. I wonder if you take it personally enough.'

‘What d'you mean?'

‘Well, doesn't it rather depend on the value you set on life? If life has any value at all, then it's worth creating.'

‘Even if if's burnt up in a single explosion that destroys the world?'

He took out his pipe and tapped the dead tobacco into his hand. ‘Well, even supposing that does happen – and there's no certainty that it will – the importance of being alive and what we do with our existence up to that moment hasn't been lost – surely. We're part of an evolutionary process. The end of the material experiment doesn't necessarily mean the end of the spiritual one.'

‘Doesn't it?'

‘Well, not unless you question the existence of the spirit at all.'

‘I think I doubt it as something that can be unhitched from the body.'

He stared at the flakes of half-smoked tobacco in his palm, then dropped them into the grate and reached for his pouch. Stella passed it to him with a swift rustling movement of her frock and then was quiet again, profile turned towards us, detached but listening.

He said: ‘I know there are an awful lot of people like you about. I've met them and wrangled mildly with them ever since undergraduate days, but I still don't know how any of you work. I don't know why the wheels continue to go round at all.'