The Sleeping Partner (14 page)

‘Make the best excuse you can. It doesn't matter much so long as it isn't the truth. Security won't want him here a minute longer than necessary.'

Just before it was time to break off, I went into the factory. As usual the main workshop had a rather echoing quietness about it, with people sitting and standing at their benches, but in the background was the muffled throbbing from the machine shop. It seemed as if I hadn't been in the place for weeks, I stopped and had a word with one or two of those who were on new work. I think they liked it but was never quite sure. I was never comfortable as the boss, and I sometimes wondered if they thought I was patronising them by chatting to them about things – like an MP being shown over. I didn't really know what they felt about me, yet I thought I ought to have done. It wasn't as if my upbringing had been materially different from theirs. I noticed McGowrie working away steadily, and saw that he was on a radar job that was fairly advanced but not exactly on the secret list. Piper didn't look up as I passed, but I caught the glimmer of Burgin's spectacles and nodded to him. At least they hadn't walked out.

I exchanged a word or two with Heaton and decided that, such was the hold up, he must be made an inspector even before he'd got his certificate. I speculated on why the girls always had to go to the toilet in twos; did they find it embarrassing walking away on their own or did they go off merely for a gossip? I remembered what the Ladies had looked like when the factory was new: shiny and spotless and chromium and glass; and how it had looked the Sunday before last when I'd wandered in: a corner of the mirror cracked, the walls stained, a crushed lipstick on the floor.

It wasn't the night for overtime; we did that twice a week; a shortage of workpeople suited those who were there because overtime meant a disproportionate rise in pay. Most of them were now quietly ending the day. The bell would go in ten minutes.

I waited till most of them had left and then picked up Stella and drove her home. We didn't speak for a time. She was sitting very much in her corner as if avoiding me. All it seemed to do was make me more aware of every movement and breath she took.

I said: ‘If it's something you feel you can talk about, how did you first meet John?'

‘He came over to see my chief at Oxford. We were carrying out some experiments he was interested in. I was there and we exchanged a few words; and the next day he wrote inviting me out to dinner.'

‘He's much older than you?'

‘Nineteen years. He was married before but his wife died. He has a son studying law in Canada … We lived in Cambridge until this started. But when it did, he didn't want people always calling, so we moved. He's anxious to miss the publicity, to avoid being called a martyr to science, that sort of thing.'

‘But you've no doubt that he is?'

She shook her head. ‘No, I've personally no doubt at all.'

We turned into the main street.

She said: ‘It's hard for you, who didn't know him, to imagine what he was like even twelve months ago.'

‘You were happy.'

‘Yes – we were happy.'

I said: ‘Stella, one thing.'

‘Yes?'

‘You talk of his almost saintly acceptance of this thing. How do you feel? Can you accept it the way he does?'

‘He hasn't ever expected me to. Perhaps he knows I'm too practical, too down to earth. Perhaps that's true of all women. I just see the personal tragedy for us, and the
waste.
I can't – relate it to any design …'

Past the one set of traffic lights, past the Old Bull, the turning to the station.

We were only a minute from the cottage now.

She sighed deeply, with a catch in her breath. ‘Oh, Mike, this is a mess, isn't it? If you're a long way from shore, how do you think I'm going on?'

‘That's what I'm rather anxious to know.'

She said: ‘I was trying to think of a verse all last night when I couldn't' sleep, but couldn't remember exactly. What is it? … Who swerve from innocence, who makes divorce, of something, something and a good name, recovers not his loss, but walks with shame, with doubt, with fear and haply with remorse. I can't think who wrote it, but he rather got my number.'

We stopped at the gate. There was no one in a shabby mackintosh lurking about.

‘Can you come in just for a minute?'

I saw it was going to help her if she hadn't to go in alone, so I followed her up the path and she let herself in. John Curtis was down again and not looking quite so emaciated.

‘Hullo, darling.' She kissed him. ‘ I brought Mike back for two minutes but he can't stay. You all right?'

‘Better than last night. Employ your two minutes on a drink, Mike. Trouble is with these slight temperatures, one gets so thirsty, and alcohol is not encouraged. You're in good time tonight, my dear.'

‘Yes.' She took off her jacket, and I watched the slip and flow of her young body as she straightened by the window and dropped the coat away from her. ‘Mike's getting indulgent.'

John raised his eyebrows quizzically. ‘He looks worried. Don't say the scintillometer is getting you down at this stage.'

I didn't reply. He said: ‘ I suppose, knowing who I am, you've no objection to her telling me these things—'

‘Oh, God, no.'

‘I wondered—' He stopped. ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you, Stella, there's a registered envelope for you on the bookcase. Over there. That's it. It came this morning, just after you'd left.'

He went on talking and I watched her go slowly across to it. I watched her with the fascination of someone in a nightmare seeing an approaching calamity he can do nothing to stop. Whitehouse hadn't warned me that petitions could be sent by registered post. But I knew what it was the instant she picked it up.

H
ER FINGER
went under the flap and broke the seal. Not suspecting, with a lifted eyebrow, she put her finger in and began to take out the paper.

As she did so I butted in in mid-sentence. ‘John, I
am
worried – and for a special reason. I've got something to tell you that you won't much like, and that's why I came in this evening.'

He'd stopped and was watching me with his alert eyes. But the tone of my voice told Stella at once what she hadn't known before, and she stopped and held the papers unlooked at in her hand.

In a cold sweat I said: ‘You knew my wife had left me, didn't you?'

‘Stella said something about it. But I got the impression she didn't know much herself.'

‘Lynn and I didn't quite hit it off; she made it fairly plain she was tired of the way we lived, and three weeks ago she left me. That I thought was all. Today – or rather last night – I had a nasty shock. I discovered that she has been having me watched for nearly three months. I've discovered it because she's had a divorce petition served on me. It absolutely floored me when it came. And the name of the woman she cites in this petition as having been – as being the woman I have …'

I stuck there and I saw his eyes change. He looked at Stella. ‘Not you?'

Her head came up and she looked back at him, not flinching or moving at all. Before she could speak I said: ‘Yes. I'll never forgive Lynn for this. Of course, it's a completely phoney trumped-up charge – as I don't think I need to tell you.'

After a second or so he glanced down and took out his pouch. He looked for his pipe and found it on the table beside him. With his long thin hands he began to roll some tobacco into a ball.

‘No,' he said. ‘ I don't think you need to tell me.'

I didn't dare to look at her now. She said slowly: ‘ Is this thing – the petition?'

‘I don't know. It may be.'

There was a crackle of the paper as she began to unfold it.

‘I can't say what hell this is to me, to bring this extra trouble on you both. When I do find her, which should be soon, I'll do everything I can to get her to play this thing straight.'

He pressed the tobacco down in the bole. ‘Presumably she wants her divorce; and it may be important to her to be considered the innocent party.'

‘If she wants the divorce, then I'll give her material for a divorce, but not this way.'

After that nobody spoke for a bit, because no one knew what to say next.

‘Yes, this is it,' Stella said, and put the papers down on the table in front of John. He made no move to look at them.

She said to him: ‘You know, there
isn't
a word of truth in this paper, darling.'

He looked up at her, and smiled. ‘Have I looked as if I thought there was?'

‘No, but so far you've only heard it from Mike. I wanted you to hear it from me.'

He patted her hand. ‘If I didn't trust you I shouldn't trust myself.'

There was another deadly hold up, which I broke as soon as I could think of words that would link together.

Stella quietly poured me a drink and brought it to me. She asked John but he shook his head. While we were talking she picked up the petition again and looked through it. The light from the window fell on her pale eyelids and the long dark glistening lashes. Presently she dropped the thing down and went out of the room.

I was thankful that I'd come in with her; but now that I was here I couldn't leave. After a while he asked me some question about Lynn.

I said abruptly: ‘I've never been more conscious than I am at this moment of the complete crack-up of everything in my life that up to now I've tried to persuade myself was worthwhile.'

‘If as you say you were fond of her—'

‘No, it isn't just that … I should have
known,
I feel that I've been too damned obtuse to have a notion of what she's been feeling and thinking for months. For that and for other reasons I find it quite hard to live with myself. Everything I've
done,
it seems to me, bears out your judgment of the type of man you told me I was.'

‘Hold hard. I hope I wasn't judging anybody.'

‘I don't know if life generally is a sordid and nauseating mistake, but mine certainly seems to have become just that. The intelligent ape; isn't that it? Full of ingenuity and technical tricks—'

‘Sit down,' he said, ‘and don't talk nonsense.'

‘The nonsense was yours, and it makes good sense to me at the moment. But I don't quite see your solution as a thing that would be a solution for me.'

‘My solution? What is it? Having some belief in the spiritual dignity of man? I don't know that it's a hold-all for everybody's perplexities. I don't find it much more than adequate at times.'

‘But adequate.'

He smiled. ‘Perhaps one of the more unagreeable truths is that man is born with a debt that for a time he isn't aware of owing. But all the time it piles up; and somewhere, usually in his middle years, life suddenly and unscrupulously presents him with an account rendered. Then it depends on the quality of the man, how and whether he tries to pay.'

There was a long silence. I said: ‘You've taken this petition, this – this eruption into your private life – which must become harder to take every second you think of it – without a complaint, without a question. I'm – more than grateful to you for that.'

‘Well … we're all in the mess together, aren't we?'

‘Thank you for saying so.'

‘Shut the window, will you, Mike; the evening's turning chilly for my thin blood … You'll stay to supper?'

‘I'd like to.'

When I came back from the window he had picked up the petition envelope and was looking at the address but making no attempt to open it. I said suddenly: ‘John, tell me how you would feel in my place – or no, not that. Tell me how you'd feel yourself if – if Stella, for instance, had come in with me tonight and said that the things in this petition were true.'

He got up slowly, moved to the fireplace.

‘That's two questions, isn't it – what I'd do in your case and what I'd do in my own.'

‘What you'd do in your own.'

‘… I'm not at all sure. But being in the shape I am, I think I'd take steps to remove myself from the scene.'

‘Completely from the scene?'

‘Yes. It's a thing a reasonable man may choose to do in certain cases, even though it's not to be approved of generally. There's a gas fire in the next room. The gas is non-poisonous, but it's inflammable and one could make a bang. I think it would appeal to my sense of humour, that way out. The
reductio ad absurdum
of atomic physics – the Victorian gas fire and the lighted match.'

‘Perhaps it's the recipe for me.'

‘No, not for you. You've still plenty of time to pay.'

When I left, which I did about nine, I drove into London to see Lynn's mother again. But she didn't seem able to help. The few hints and addresses I got smelt like old trails. I booked a room at a hotel in Piccadilly, garaged my car, and walked up to Grosvenor Court Mews. The time was just on midnight and there was a light in Miss Lord's flat but none in the one above. There were two windows of No. 9a flat looking out over the mews.

At half-past twelve the lights went out in No. 9. I waited a long time. A policeman glanced at me a couple of times but didn't tell me to move on. At two I went back to the hotel. Evidently Lynn wasn't coming tonight. But tonight was Wednesday. Miss Lord said it was Thursdays she came to pay her rent.

By lunchtime next day, having drawn a blank on Mrs Carson's trails, I rang the works and found that Frank Dawson was back from Llanveryan.

He said: ‘Only here for the day, Mike. Is it all
right
for me to go back tomorrow? I'm not a lot of use, but they seem to like someone on the spot.'

‘Yes, that's OK.'

‘You'll be in at the works today?'