The Sleeping Partner (11 page)

‘Before you go,' he said, seeing my movement, ‘I rather wanted to say sorry for shoving my views down your throat that evening.'

‘I didn't notice it,' I said, flushing. ‘Anyway if there was any shoving done … you were at liberty to do it.'

He smiled slightly. ‘One has too many hours to brood, that's the trouble.'

I said: ‘I've got to tell you that Stella never told me who you were. I hadn't the
ghost
of an idea until Thurston told me this afternoon. I'm still buried under the debris.'

‘It's my fault Stella doesn't tell people. The fewer who know …'

‘But I mean merely your identity—' I stopped.

‘And not my illness? Well, one goes with the other doesn't it? I don't want to feel like Charles the Second.'

I got up to knock my ash off, and stayed up. ‘ These last few minutes I've tried to see myself in your place …'

‘It's always a useful exercise.'

‘This thing you've got. What does it amount to?'

‘My anaemia? An excess of white blood corpuscles. Very undramatic.'

‘And what can be done about it?'

‘One makes one's will. One loses one's fear of growing old.'

‘Because of doing things with radioactive materials?'

He shook his head. ‘I took a few chances. But that's no proof at all. It's only a theory.'

‘Whose theory?'

‘A medical theory.'

‘Which happens to be true?'

He shrugged. ‘We don't know enough about it. All we know is that we get a higher incidence of leukaemia among people who've been exposed to small over-tolerance doses of radiation. It's called a late proliferative response. The whole subject's tremendously interesting, but I certainly didn't intend to use myself as a guinea-pig.'

I walked up and down once. ‘You remind me of Stella,' he said.

‘What astonishes me—'

‘Go on.'

‘It'll lead to argument again.'

‘I've still time for that.'

‘What I can't understand is your being the way you are and holding the views you do.'

‘I don't see the connection. Surely nobody cuts his coat as obviously as that.'

‘I don't know. Perhaps nobody knows until it comes to the point. But you make me feel very small …'

He had been watching me. I tried to imagine what he had looked like before he was ill.

He said: ‘What I was trying to say the other night is this. D'you mind? …'

‘No.'

‘In fifteen years we shan't need coal. How old will you be then? Still under fifty? Men like you will be the new kings. That's one reason why
I'm
anxious about the future.'

‘You don't trust us,' I said. It was a pretty queer thing to say to him.

‘I don't trust you only because you yourselves have nothing to trust – or will allow yourselves nothing to trust.'

‘You mean because we're atheists or agnostics?'

‘I don't like the terms,' he said. ‘ They mean nothing. Selfishness is the only true atheism.'

‘Well, then?'

He stopped. ‘ Sorry. When I talk too much I lose my breath. Hold hard.'

I waited.

He said: ‘Science, I suppose you'd say, begins with observed facts systematically classified. Right? Well, there is one fact about man that has distinguished him from his first appearance on the earth. It marks him as different from all other creatures. That is, he's a worshipping animal. Wherever he's existed there are the remains in some form of his worship. That's not a pious conclusion; it's an observed fact. And all through pre-history and recorded history, when he's deprived himself of that he's gone to pieces. Many people nowadays are going to pieces, or they find the first convenient prop to tie their instincts on to. It's behind the extraordinary adulation of royalty. It's behind the mobbing of TV stars. If you don't give expression to an instinct, you've got to sublimate it or go out of your mind.'

‘And as for us …'

‘Well, the ordinary man has to work his own way through. I've no cure-all to suggest. What I'm concerned about is you people whose hands are going to hold so much power.'

‘I'm concerned with that too.'

‘I know. It's where we came in. But I thought I'd try to explain my rudeness.'

‘There wasn't any rudeness. I told you.'

He hesitated, his brows together and contradicting the upturn of his thin clever mouth. ‘As I see it, Mike – may I call you Mike?'

‘Of course.'

‘As I see it, Mike, science can't emancipate man from his own nature; it can only help him – if he has a certain amount of intellectual modesty – to understand it better. In times of crisis, if a man has no reference outside himself, even his best moral judgments straggle off into enervation and expediency. If you lose your sense of wonder you lose your sense of balance. Who was it said: “Here is a great man, here is my master – to betray him is to betray myself”? I don't think he was stating a religious fact but simply a principle of life.'

I glanced up and saw that Stella had come into the hall.

M
EETING HER
again was deadly with him there. And his being there was now so much worse than I'd ever reckoned on. Somehow we got through it. She was pale but quite in hand.

We talked about general things. I told her of Thurston's visit. She said she would be in at the usual time tomorrow. John Curtis wanted me to stay on to tea but I made an excuse and left. She seemed not to want to walk with me to the gate but I took her arm in my hand.

‘Stella,' I said. ‘I didn't
know.'

‘Know what?'

‘Who John was.'

‘He likes to be close about these things.'

I struggled with thoughts. ‘It doesn't, can't change what I feel about you. But it very much shakes up the way I feel about myself.'

‘I'm not very prideful either,' she said.

I stopped, fingering a branch of a cherry tree. ‘What happened, Stella, isn't pared down for me by any second thoughts I may have now. But hearing what I've heard today makes me feel – rather like an assassin.'

She stared across the garden rather blindly. ‘ You haven't killed him. Life's killed him.'

‘Your feeling queer after your visit to Harwell – was that something to do with John?'

‘Yes, that night he'd gone further than ever downhill … I'd never been to Harwell before. Of course he didn't work there; but seeing it suddenly like a great factory of the future and knowing what it had come to mean in the lives of just two people … I was nearly a casualty in the car.'

We went on to the gate.

I said: ‘ I must see you soon.'

‘I shall come tomorrow as usual. But I shall have to leave.'

‘Why?'

‘We can't go on after Sunday.'

Desperately I said: ‘He'll want to know why.'

‘I'll tell him I'm tired, want a break. And – he'll need more attention as time goes on.'

‘Isn't there anything at all to be done for him?'

‘The doctors say not.'

I said: ‘Stella, when things happen as they happened on Sunday, you don't add it up at the time. But obviously that … I want very much to know …'

I dried up, not able to go on.

‘If I love him?' she said recklessly. ‘Yes, I love him. It doesn't make Sunday any more admirable, does it?'

‘Hell. I don't know. I don't know.'

She shook her head. ‘There's something I feel I've got to say – even if you don't much like it, Mike.' She looked at me.

‘Go on.'

‘Ever since Sunday I've been thinking, trying to see it from a distance, as if it had happened to somebody else. And in a way it seems to me – how can I put it? … What happened happened more easily because I have been in love with John … If you've been happy with love you have less defence against it. You can pretend to yourself only for so long …'

There was a long silence.

I said: ‘ Tomorrow?'

‘Tomorrow.'

‘Stella, you've tried to tell me how Sunday looks to you. It isn't even necessary to tell you how it looks to me. The things I said to you then – if you remember them …'

‘I remember them.'

‘The things I said to you then I'm very much more sure of now than ever. I'd double the stakes. And double them again.'

In the sunlight her narrowed eyes had unusual lights and depths even for them. She smiled at me, not happily but with a glance of heightened sensibility that made my pulses thump. Then she turned away without saving what I hoped she might say but knew at heart she could not.

From there I went back to the works. When I got in I took out the
Who's Who.
My eyes skimmed over the entry when I found it. ‘Curtis, John Nigel, MA, Sc.D., b. 1910. Educated Shrewsbury and Balliol. FRS, 1947. Member Advisory Council Scientific Research, 1949. CB, 1952; m. 1st Rebecca Downing, 1935; 2nd Stella Vivien Norris, 1952. Publications: Mesons in Modern Physics; Uses of Radioactive Sodium in Plastic Surgery. Address …' While I was reading this Read came in and said the two men Burgin and Piper had asked to see me again.

It wasn't a good time.

Burgin was a man in his mid-twenties, ugly and tall, with concave spectacles. Piper was older, square-shouldered, dark. I said: ‘Mr Read tells me you'd both like to become inspectors. Do you have any qualifications?'

Piper said: ‘We've worked for five years with REC. I was a general fitter and my mate did assemblies. Before that I was with Merlin Radio and Burgin was in the RAF in a repair shop. There isn't much we don't know about our jobs, neither of us.'

I said: ‘ Of course you're both skilled men, I know that. But to be an inspector you have to be able to check and understand circuitry – and you have to have a certain amount of theoretical knowledge. If you could get your certificate I should be only too pleased to put you on today. As you can see, the shortage is holding us up.'

Burgin said: ‘What do you do to get this certificate?'

I glanced at Read who was standing by the hygienic Crittal window with no expression at all on his cheerful tough little mug. He didn't speak, so I went on: ‘There's a man called Heaton in the shop – I don't know if you've met him yet — he's studying two nights a week.

It's not really difficult – six or seven months at one of the night schools in Letherton or Chelmsford. As soon as he gets through he's sure of a job here. Why don't you do the same? It means an extra four pounds a week.'

Piper said: ‘ Two nights a week for six months is a lot of time. You'd make a lot if you worked that much overtime.'

‘Are the night schools free?' Burgin asked.

‘No. There's a charge, but it's not a large one.'

‘And who'd pay that?' said Piper.

‘You would. Who else?'

He said: ‘ Well, it's to the advantage of the firm, isn't it? They need the inspectors.'

I said politely: ‘We need inspectors but not that badly.'

A smile moved across Piper's face. He looked like a man who has just seen the catch in the three-card trick.

‘Well, if that's the way it is, I reckon we'd best be going. Come on, Jack.'

But it was the wrong day for me. I said: ‘Just a minute.'

Burgin, who had been about to follow Piper to the door, hesitated and Piper stopped.

I said gently: ‘People like you make me want to fetch up. You think I'm the boss, and so I am. You may think I'm doing very well for myself, and so I am. But it happens to be a fact that before I started in this business I was poorer than you – quite a bit poorer. And I'm not talking of back in Victoria's time. I'm talking of seventeen and fourteen and even ten years ago. When I was in my teens and trying to mug up this sort of work I needed books – and not books out of a library but books to live with. So I did without my lunch every day so I could buy them. I went on doing that and things like it for several years. I'm not a very admirable person – far from it – and I don't ask you to copy me; but what success I've got I haven't had handed to me on a plate. I've had to make sacrifices for it – and I still am making them. If you're both so gutless that you expect the welfare state to pay for your night school, then I give you up and I hope the state will too.'

Piper said: We came here to ask a civil question. Perhaps it's too much to expect a civil answer, eh?'

Burgin put his hand on Piper's arm. ‘Cut it out, Joe. This won't get us nowhere. Come on.'

Piper hesitated. I was tempted to say more but just held my tongue. He said: ‘Well, thanks for nothing, mister.'

They went out. I leaned back and carefully lit a cigarette. Read detached himself from the radiator on which he'd been leaning and looked at the marks on his hands.

‘Nice work, if I may say so, Mr Granville. Turves like that.'

‘I was a damned fool and lost my temper.'

‘Perhaps it would be better if you did it more often.'

But it seemed to me that I'd only been putting into my dislike of them something of my dislike of myself.

At Greencroft there was still no letter from Lynn. I wondered what I should have felt if there'd been word from her that she was coming home tomorrow.

The house was cold in spite of the weather. I opened one or two windows and switched off the electric water-heater, which had been left on all the time. On a larder shelf some tomatoes had gone bad, and in the bread-bin were three half-loaves green with mould. I threw them out.

Back in the drawing-room everything seemed dusty to the touch. I opened the gramophone and saw there were some records still on the turn-table, but I hadn't the interest to run them through. I tried the TV set and stared for a few minutes at a dull play about Florence Nightingale. I wasn't staying here tonight, but I felt I ought to see Mrs Lloyd to see how Kent was going on. Then it suddenly occurred to me to wonder if at any time during the weekend Lynn had been for her key.