The Sleeping Partner (9 page)

‘Think it will get any worse?'

‘No, sir, it's the heat. It's been blazing all day in Hereford.'

I said to Stella: ‘Shall we eat here? You say.'

She nodded ‘ I'm hungry. But first I'll ring John and tell him we're on our way.'

‘Tell him we're only just on our way.'

She was some time away and when she joined me in the bar she'd taken off her light coat, combed her hair, and she certainly didn't look like a laboratory assistant. She looked young and composed and lovely, and a stranger, as if I'd never seen her in my life before. One or two men in the room obviously thought the same.

I ordered drinks and asked how her husband was.

‘About the same, thank you. But he was in bed so I didn't speak to him.'

‘What exactly is the matter with him?'

‘Leukaemia.'

‘Oh … that's bad, isn't it?'

Her face was clouded and I added rather clumsily: ‘We're both having trouble with our partners.'

‘Has anything happened about your wife since you told me?'

‘I wrote to her but she hasn't so far replied.'

‘I'm sorry.'

I turned the stem of my glass. ‘Just at the moment I'd be glad to forget it.'

‘Why now?'

‘Reaction. It's getting through with this job and …'

‘Yes, it is rather a relief.'

‘Optimism has been so absent from my life recently that I'd be very happy to let it run as long as it lasts.'

‘Then let it.'

‘Will you have another drink?'

‘I haven't finished this.'

‘Well, finish it and have another.'

‘No, thank you.'

‘It would please me quite a bit to feel that my collaborator in building this darned scintillometer was celebrating too.'

‘Oh, all right.'

After a while we went in. I ordered a bottle of claret, but after the first few mouthfuls of food I found I had no appetite. I can't remember what we talked about, but it certainly wasn't about detector responses. Once or twice I found we were arguing, as if there was antagonism between us. But it wasn't that at all. I still kept looking at her as if I was seeing her for the very first time, as if she'd that moment come in at the door. What made the food have no taste at all was the realisation that she had a good idea of what I felt and didn't seem to care.

We stayed longer than we should have done over coffee and a Cointreau. Now and then a queer tense silence would come down on us, like something stretched and ready to snap.

When we got out to the car the fog had gone. The AA scout wasn't there, but I decided to take his advice and make for Builth and Talgarth.

We'd been laughing about something as we got in but now she sat quietly beside me, her coat folded across her knees one hand resting on the ledge of the door. Now and then she gave her head an impatient backward flick, which was partly nervous and partly because one dark curl came too low on her forehead. The mood didn't change. I tried to think of Lynn sitting in that seat as she had done so many hundreds of times, but it didn't help. I only knew at that moment about Stella Curtis.

After we'd gone a few miles we came to a signpost marked Brecon, and I hesitated, not knowing what to do, because this looked like a side road. Brecon was obviously the direct route for Abergavenny, and perhaps this was the way the AA scout had meant. I took the road and all was well for another mile or so but then we began to climb. We must have been pretty high to begin with, but this road went up and up until we seemed to be fairly among the mountains. It just ran on unfenced through wild open land.

I said: ‘I think I've done the wrong thing. This is going over the top of the range.'

‘Well, the fog seems to have cleared.'

‘We shall probably end up in a farmyard.'

‘It definitely said Brecon.'

The light wasn't fading yet and you could feel the warmth of the sun through the cloud, even though the sunset couldn't be far away. We'd climbed probably a thousand feet and there was rough wild land stretching up on either side. But it was as if here we were above the fog. Then we passed a couple of grim granite cottages with a man working in a garden, so I stopped and asked the way. Yes, we were right for Brecon. Yes, we were crossing the mountains. Yes, it was still eleven or twelve miles to Brecon, now. But the road from here dropped most of the time, soon we should be following the stream. Comforted, I got back into the car and drove on.

Three or four miles later, gently dropping all the time as the man had predicted, we went down into a bank of fog that you could almost feel. It was like being in a plane when you fly into a cloud, only you had no blind-approach-beacon system to guide you. A few hundred yards after that, going pretty slowly but evidently not slowly enough, I ran off the road and split my left front tyre on a stone.

B
Y THE
time I'd come to the reluctant conclusion that, because of the angle of the car, I couldn't get the jack under, I was dirty and hot and the light was failing. She'd done what she could to help, and now we went round to the car and sat in it a few minutes and had a cigarette.

‘It's rather obvious,' I said, ‘that you won't be home tonight.'

‘Oh, well …'

‘If the man we asked was right we're about half-way between Llanwrtyd Wells and Brecon. But Brecon is downhill.'

‘Downhill sounds better.'

There are really three things we can do, aren't there? Sit here and hope for a passing car. Or you can stay here while I walk to Brecon. Or you can come with me and hope for a cottage or a farm.'

‘I'll come with you.'

‘It must be seven or eight miles.'

‘I've good shoes. And I don't much fancy staying here on my own.'

We set off. I knew she had good shoes.

After a while I said: ‘I'm damned sorry about this.'

‘It doesn't matter. I'm rather enjoying it.'

‘Enjoying it?'

‘Shouldn't I have said that?'

‘I'm very glad you are.'

‘It would be a pity to lose that wave of optimism so soon, wouldn't it? Merely over a fog and a burst tyre.'

‘Oh,
I'm
not complaining.'

This sentence got extra meaning into it. ‘Well, it's not unpleasant walking in the Welsh mountains. And it's certainly a change from Nobeloy resistors.'

‘I've often wondered about you, Stella. Why you went in for this sort of thing.'

‘I didn't really. It's a long story.'

‘Which you prefer not to tell?'

‘Oh, I'll tell you gladly sometime. But I don't think this is quite the time.'

‘Or the mood?'

‘Or the mood.'

‘Do you like it – the work, I mean?'

She hesitated. ‘Not the routine work – that bores me. I like things that have to be tackled and solved.'

‘In electronics particularly or in life generally?'

She smiled. ‘It reads the same either way up.'

‘It isn't the sort of job one usually associates with a woman.'

‘Isn't it?'

‘At least, not with one like you.'

‘Why not with one like me?'

‘You ought to know.'

She looked at me with grave eyes. ‘I don't know. I'm sorry.'

I said: ‘ Yes, you do know. And you're not sorry.'

‘All right,' she said. ‘If you think that I'm not sorry.'

‘… I wish we were a thousand miles from Brecon.'

She didn't speak.

I said: ‘ You heard what I said?'

‘Yes, Mike, I heard. But it isn't any good wishing, is it?'

There was a long silence. She said: ‘Perhaps it's good to wish it. Or it does me good to know of the wish … We'll be among cottages soon.'

‘To hell with the cottages.'

Again there was a pause. Slowly she said, pressing the words out: ‘I don't think that I'm – as free as you are.'

It brought a sudden cold turn to the conversation.

‘Sorry,' I said. ‘That makes me feel rather unoriginal.'

‘It wasn't meant to.'

I didn't speak.

‘Mike, it wasn't meant to.'

‘All right. But nobody will ever believe I didn't run into that stone on purpose.'

‘They will if we get to Brecon.'

We walked on for about half a mile. Some sheep were clustered beside the road staring at us. Behind them was a clump of trees, in line, regimented like soldiers. I thought I heard a motorbike in the distance but perhaps it was a plane.

I said: ‘There's a stream down there somewhere.'

She stopped and peered over a broken stone wall. ‘I can't see it. Oh, yes. It's quite close. See, there.'

‘I think I'll wash some of this muck off my hands.'

I climbed through the gap and through a yard or two of stubby undergrowth. It was one of those Welsh streams that in the summer are only a few feet wide but form deeper pools here and there along their courses. I rinsed my hands, and she came and stood beside me and after a minute crouched and rinsed her own. After the warmth of the evening the water was cold and fresh. We stood up together, wiping our hands on a bit of rag I'd had in the car. We smiled at each other, companionable again.

Her eyes went past me and she said: ‘Isn't that a cottage over there, among those trees?'

She was pointing across the stream. The fog had broken and there was certainly some sort of a roof showing.

‘I'll go and see.'

‘Wait. I'll come too.'

It meant jumping the stream, about four feet wide here, and I was going to help her but she was across before me. The shadowed blueness of her eyes showed brilliantly as she smiled at me and then began to climb the ground at the other side.

It was moorland and then a wall. This time, because it was higher, I was over first and put a hand up to help her down. She took it. Our hands were cold after the water. Then she was down and was against me. We looked at each other and I kissed her. It was a pretty ordinary thing to happen, no doubt, and hardly

unexpected after the way we'd been talking. So perhaps I was a

fool for feeling the way I did. I felt as if I'd been flying too high

in an unpressurised plane.
Afterwards she leaned against the wall and brushed her hair

back with a slow forearm.
I said: ‘ That before the cottage anyhow.'
She looked at me with a sort of uplifted pallor in her face, and

went on, pushing ahead of me through some thickets. We came to

a hedge and found a gap and there stopped. We'd come on a high

building of some description but it certainly wasn't a cottage.
‘It looks like a chapel,' she said.
‘Well, there must be a village somewhere near, then.'
We went round the high blank wall. At the front you could see

that her guess had been the right one. But grass sprouted between

the steps, and brambles lay across the overgrown path. I went up

to the door and tried the handle. It turned and I went in.
The light was almost gone now, but you could just see that the

place had been stripped. And you could see the lighter patch at

the other end where the roof had fallen.
‘Perhaps no village after all,' I said.
‘Don't go in far if the floor's rocky.'
It seems good enough. Probably there are disused mines about.

I shouldn't think this has been used for forty years.' I took out a

pocket torch that I always carried in the car and shone it round. ‘Probably lead,' she said. ‘There are some near Plynlimon, I know.

Thank goodness for a torch.'
I flickered it near enough to her to see her face, then I put out

the light and moved back to the door. There I stopped. ‘Stella.'
‘No, Mike.'
I caught her hand.
‘No, Mike.'
But her voice wasn't sure enough. I kissed her again. She felt as

if she had no bones in her body.
Somehow we got out into the gathering dusk; I don't remember

how.

She said: ‘Let's get back to the road.'

‘I wonder where this path leads.'

‘Nowhere, I should think.'

‘There might be a cottage near.'

We followed it for a couple of hundred yards, but her guess was right as usual. The path tapered off and ran into a shallow gully which looked as if it was man-made and might at one time have had a railway line laid along it.

‘Let's get back to the road,' she said again.

We veered left, in search of the stream, and soon found it. Here it was a trifle wider than where we'd crossed it first. We jumped together but she didn't quite make it and slipped with one foot. I pulled her out quickly and she grimaced and sat on the bank.

‘Hurt?'

‘No, only wet. And to think I won the long-jump once.' She took off one red shoe and emptied water out and wriggled her stockinged foot. I sat and looked at her foot. ‘Mike, you frighten me,' she said without in the least changing her tone.

‘I might say the same of you.'

‘Hon …!'

‘But it's true. It's true.'

We stopped talking for a moment, rather suddenly, faced with an almost overwhelming sense of being on the edge of things.

I said painstakingly: ‘It's queer how this has happened.'

‘What has?'

‘I only mean that I'm due for new tyres and they're waiting at the garage. If it hadn't been for this job I'd already have had them fitted.'

‘And a new one wouldn't have split?'

‘It might not have.'

‘It was a very sharp stone.'

‘Yes – a very sharp stone.'

I was looking at her again.

‘Mike …'

I said: ‘I'm as shaky as a man with a match in a gunpowder room.'

‘Put the match out.'

‘There isn't any way.'