The Sleeping Partner

  ‘I’ll say goodbye to my bed for the next ten days.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Your part’s finished. If there’s any panic overtime I’ll do it alone – or with Dawson.’

  ‘D’you mean you’re taking me off the job?’

  ‘Heavens, no. I want you to keep hard at it till the whistle blows. And that won’t be on Friday week, believe me. I can picture myself spending quite a bit of August in Wales.’

  ‘Then as to staying late …’

  Our eyes met. ‘As to staying late, that’s my affair. For – reasons that you know, I’ve no ties at present.’

  ‘Whereas I have.’

  ‘Whereas you have. Exacting ones, however pleasant.’

  Her blue eyes nickered away. ‘I don’t think you ought to hold my private life against me.’

  ‘I don’t hold it against you, but you’re too valuable to be worked to death.’

  She took in a slow breath, embarrassed. ‘Thank you. I’m sure that justifies a rise.’

  ‘I’ll give you one.’

  ‘Make it guineas.’ She stopped and flushed. ‘ Sorry. But you do see, don’t you, that if I’m here as an employee – as I am – you can’t begin to take in all sorts of private pros and cons before you ask me to stay late or do extra work. Besides … I want to do it. I want to see it through.’

  I said: ‘It means we’ve simply got to throw the thing together. We must have a few days for testing here before it goes out.’

  ‘They know that as well as you,’ she said. ‘ I shouldn’t worry.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve given up worrying about that.’

  I decided to spend this last rush period at the Old Bull at Letherton. Kent, still staying with the Lloyds, seemed fairly quiet, and, although Mrs Lloyd peered at me through her microscopes when I said I hadn’t yet heard when Mrs Granville was coming back, she didn’t ask any questions. I thought of telling her of Lynn’s key under the geranium so that she could go in and clean up once in a while, but I thought Lynn might come for it sometime and prefer no one to know. The house wouldn’t go to pot in a week or so, and I could run over myself every day for the post.

  Before I left Greencroft I packed a few things. I had to open her wardrobe, which I’d not done since she left. The white evening frock she’d worn at Glyndebourne twisted slightly on its hanger and that perfume came from it. It gave me a nasty turn, a sort of nostalgia, and above all a need to see her and talk to her again. I felt as if I’d thrown away all the things that mattered in life for the sake of a certain amount of not very important prestige.

  On the Sunday, finding my own company suddenly just not to be lived with any longer, I rang Simon Heppelwhite and said could we meet for a drink somewhere. He said he was just leaving for the Criterion where his stage sets for Volpone were going up; but if I liked to meet him there he’d be delighted to see me.

  When I got in, Simon was sitting in the stalls dwarfing the producer beside him like a lion beside a badger, while spotlights were being switched on and off a bit of Venetian Gothic. One or two people whom I took to be actors were drifting about in the half-lit auditorium. I shouldn’t altogether have been surprised to find Joy Fraser with him, but she wasn’t there. Or even Lynn …

  At first I was sorry I’d come, as he seemed too explosive and temperamental to have much attention for outside things but after a while the producer went off to argue with somebody at the back of the stage. We talked for a minute or two and then I told Simon about Lynn.

  He didn’t give much, but sat sideways with his elbows on the back of the seat in front, rubbing his chin on his thumb.

  ‘I’m sorry, Michael. Very sorry indeed.’

  ‘Did you know about it?’

  ‘Not altogether. But I suspected something. I think you’ve been wise in not following her.’

  ‘Why particularly?’

  ‘Well, in my opinion she’s behaving like an immoderate little fool. If there is a hope of patching this up – and I don’t in the least propose to guess what your feelings are for each other now – if there is a hope it lies in leaving her on her own to work this over for herself and find her own way out of it.’

  I was a bit surprised at the strong way he’d put it. ‘Have you seen her?’

  ‘No.’ After a second he added, lisping: ‘Of course I should be the last person to discourage you from meeting her half-way. But to go after her now, to meet her on her own terms, so to speak, giving her the impression that she’s more sinned against than sinning, would put an end to any hope there ever was of your coming satisfactorily together again. I know Lynn.’

  ‘Perhaps she is more sinned against than sinning.’

  ‘Oh, nonsense.’ He pulled at his big knitted tie until it came still looser. ‘What woman hasn’t been neglected sometime in her life because the man is buried in his work? You’ve slept at home most nights, haven’t you? And has it escaped everyone’s notice that you’ve been working for her? Where did she get that handsome piece of cat she usually wears on her back – or her car, or the money to decorate her new home according to her most extravagant fancy? And isn’t she a partner in the firm? Didn’t you tell me that?’

  ‘She’s got a small stake, yes.’

  He didn’t speak for a while but frowned penetratingly at the stage. ‘The difficulty with a doll’s size theatre like this is one has to be so careful not to dwarf the actors and the audience. One has to suggest magnificence in miniscule. Tell me, Michael, what your own feeling about Lynn is at this moment.’

  I said: ‘I think Lynn’s a person with a very keen artistic and creative side to her. If you starve that, she starves. She’d probably have been much happier with a different sort of man.’

  ‘Such as?’

  I looked at him. ‘ Well, such as yourself, for instance.’

  He stood up suddenly and shouted: ‘No, no, take it off! Take it off!’ Some men moved across the stage and he slumped back in his seat. ‘The idea did cross my mind when I first met her. But it wouldn’t have worked. Any other suggestions?’

  ‘Well, Ray French perhaps.’

  ‘An artist, I agree, and a good one. But very much a man on the make. Anyway, she couldn’t have him, he’s engaged.’

  ‘I hadn’t heard.’

  ‘It was in The Times recently. Someone called du Caine.’

  ‘Oh, yes, we met her with him at Glyndebourne. Anyway, I’m not saying you or him, but someone in that general group.’

  He said: ‘Hearing you talk, Michael, it seems to me that Lynn has given you a very serious sense of inferiority about yourself and everything you do. You always liked music when I first knew you. Now you start apologising because you don’t understand Hindemith … What is this you’re working on at present, this scintillation something or other? Is it on the secret list?’

  I pushed down the seat beside me and rested a hand on it. ‘You know uranium – deposits of uranium in the earth – give off gamma rays that can be picked up by a man walking over them with a Geiger counter?’

  ‘Yes. I had a vague idea of that.’

  ‘Well, a low-flying plane can take the place of a man and do the job a hundred times quicker. But in a plane a Geiger counter’s no use because of the swamping effects of cosmic radiation. So this later thing is used instead.’ I let the seat go and it sprang up again. ‘The way you make a scintillation probe unit is to get a crystal of a special kind and mount it in a sealed box with a window at the end and a photomultiplier tube shoved against the window. The gamma rays pass through this particular type of crystal and cause tiny scintillations of light which the photo cathode converts into electrical impulses and amplifies several hundred million times until at the anode end they can be counted and checked. In the equipment we’re making now there are various complications, but that’s the general principle of the thing.’

  Simon said: ‘I wonder if Lynn realises that you’re a much rarer bird than she is or her dilettante friends. I know you keep it all well out of sight
behind an unexceptionable frontispiece, but in fact you’re a morbid, introspective, sensitive brute, with just as many peculiarities as any artist and just as emotionally involved in your work. It’s a gift you’ve got to use, and in your ordinary life allowances have to be made for it,’

  I said: ‘I wonder what Lynn’s doing with herself now. I wonder who she’s with.’

  We got the thing working by the Wednesday morning. Frank Dawson was very helpful at this stage, and on the Thursday I phoned Thurston to say that we could at least try it out on the day. I asked Frank to go, expecting that Stella wouldn’t be able to make it; but at the last minute she said she’d found someone to look after her husband for a couple of nights, so in the end I took them both.

  I didn’t get a reply from Lynn. Every morning or evening I went over to Hockridge, but there was nothing there. On Wednesday Ray rang me at the office.

  ‘Oh, hullo, Mike, is Lynn back at Greencroft now or still madly sowing her wild oats in London?’

  ‘Still in London.’

  ‘Ah, I thought so. I tried your phone three or four times. What’s her number in Town?’

  ‘… She hasn’t got one.’

  ‘But she must have, dear boy, she rang me on Friday. Unless it was from a call box. She’s still staying with Hazel – what’s it – Hazel Boylon, then?’

  I hesitated. ‘At …’

  ‘At Swiss Cottage.’

  ‘That’s the latest information. Oh, I believe we should congratulate you, Ray.’

  ‘Thanks. I feel quite blissful. You met Margot?’

  ‘Yes. When are you getting married?’

  ‘Early next month. Mike, it’s going to be a very quiet wedding – Margot’s as shy as a deer but I hope very much you and Lynn will be able to come.’

  When I rang off I thought, so she’s moved on. I wonder why she’s moved on. But in a way it was more satisfactory to know she was with Hazel Boylon. It was the last time I thought about Lynn for several days.

  Chapter Eight

  WE LEFT just after eight. Stella and Frank Dawson shared the back seat together, and the front passenger’s seat and the boot were occupied by three not particularly bulky packages wrapped in blankets which represented most of the primary headaches of the last few weeks. We were in Brecon soon after twelve-thirty and reached Llanveryan about an hour later in time for a rather delayed lunch.

  Llanveryan had been an aerodrome – a glorified landing strip – in the first place; then it had been where some of the early work on guided missiles had been tried out. It was on the sea side of the Cambrian Mountains and in the winter would be a bleak spot, but Friday was such an unexpectedly hot day that one could almost picture oneself out in the Sudan.

  Thurston and Steel were there to meet us, and another man, Rhodes, who was to be the pilot.

  It took the rest of the day fitting the thing up, and dusk was not far away by the time it was ready. We didn’t fly with it that night but tried it out on the ground. As soon as it was switched on, the rate-meter started putting up spurious counts of its own; but after a few minutes we found that one of the luminous dials on the plane hadn’t been scraped clear. When this was fixed the whole thing behaved in a very gentlemanly fashion.

  Stella went to bed at eleven but I stayed up talking with Thurston until after one. I had thought he intended going abroad with the survey unit; but he said he could not, so it looked as if it was going to have to stand up to our claim to be operable by non-technical personnel.

  On Saturday Rhodes and Thurston took the plane up, and then I went up with Rhodes. The detector response was very good indeed, but after a while I noticed that the power input had dropped very sharply, and I switched off and told him to fly back.

  It took us a time to find out that the fault lay in the arrangement to draw power at six volts through a carbon pile regulator off a section of the aircraft’s battery. It just wasn’t going to work, and it meant our introducing a small additional six-volt accumulator, float-charging from the main supply.

  We were being put up at the hostel which was part of the old aerodrome, and it was all fairly stark and wartime-emergency style. There were eight of us altogether, and Stella was the only woman. Somehow it wasn’t until you got her away from her own surroundings that you realised how attractive she was. Her dress was plain and innocent enough, but she drew the eye. Even Thurston – but, then, I remembered Thurston before. One could never tell with scientists.

  Sunday morning there was fog but it cleared soon after nine, and at eleven Rhodes and Thurston took off. They were going to fly a grid pattern for two hours over picked ground. Several 88mc. radium sources had been placed in various degrees of availability, but neither Rhodes nor Thurston knew where the plants had been made.

  After the little plane had droned out of sight the rest of us walked back towards the hostel.

  I said: ‘If this first full test makes sense I shall go home tonight.’

  Stella didn’t say anything but Frank Dawson screwed up his sardonic face. ‘ That’ll cause a riot.’

  ‘No, I’ve been talking with Thurston. We can be in telephone contact, and it’s only five hours to get here again.’

  Frank said: ‘Anyway we can’t let the factory go to pot even for this job. And it soon would with Read in charge.’

  Stella transferred her eyes to me. There was a look of companionable understanding in their depths.

  I said: ‘Well, he’s only had a day and a half of working time to ruin the place.’

  Frank had a sense of humour over most things, but not over Read. He said: ‘Well, hell, he’s like a little Czar; you ought to be there, then you could talk,’ and went off hunching his shoulders.

  I said: ‘Frank Dawson’s being very difficult these days. He might owe me a personal grudge.’

  ‘Has he been with you a long time?’ Stella asked.

  ‘Well, yes. In fact he could have been my partner if he’d been willing to carry some of the weight.’

  ‘I don’t think he would have done as a partner for you.’

  It was odd, the sense of having nothing to do for two hours. The weight lifted off your head. ‘He’s a very practical bloke.’

  ‘Oh, yes, in his own work. But don’t you differ altogether in your attitude towards the factory? He wants it to prosper as a factory, but it doesn’t awfully matter to him what it’s making – logarithmic rate-meters or brass nails.’

  ‘Perhaps his is the more sensible attitude.’

  ‘Yes … but don’t you see, if it wasn’t for you it soon would be making only brass nails.’

  ‘Maybe it will even yet,’ I said, thinking of the plane on its travels.

  She stooped to pick a yellow daisy of some sort flowering in a crack in the tarmac. ‘ It’s not like an ordinary factory at all. It’s built round one man. Without you the place would fall to bits in a week.’

  ‘You’re being very long-sighted this morning.’

  ‘No. But an onlooker sometimes—’

  ‘You being the onlooker.’

  She smiled, all her face rounding with it. ‘Well, in this I am.’

  ‘Have you come to any other interesting conclusions about me and the firm?’

  ‘Not really …’

  ‘Cough them up.’

  ‘When I know you better.’

  ‘Don’t you know me well yet?’

  ‘Not very well.’

  ‘You’ve seen a great deal more of me in the last two months than my own wife has.’

  Her eyes glimmered bluely as she looked beyond me. ‘D’you count knowing by the quantity of time spent …?’

  ‘Not necessarily—’

  ‘It’s the quality of the time, isn’t it? The—’

  ‘And ours has been without quality. Yes, I see that.’

  She looked a bit startled, uncertain, like someone who hasn’t seen a move at chess. ‘Not altogether without quality perhaps but without …’

  ‘Personality?’

  ‘Well,
only in a sense. You must know what I mean.’

  I suppose it was the way I’d phrased things that made the conversation important, that marked the change. Yet I couldn’t say there was anything deliberate about it. The words came that way and the change took place. No doubt it was all only reflecting what had been going on unknown to me for some time, and by chance I let her know it at the same time as I realised it myself.

  About twelve-thirty the fog came down again. You could feel the heat of the sun through it and occasionally see a blurred yellow disc staring. There was no radar on this disused strip, but presently we got in touch with Rhodes on the short-wave radio, and after a bit we could hear him circling around somewhere not far away. When he got down he came in swearing madly because he’d buckled one of his wheels, but Thurston was very pleased with the way the surveyor had behaved and we spent most of the afternoon checking the results.

  I thought I’d leave at five-thirty but Thurston said: ‘ I’m wondering if you could leave one of your people behind, in view of this new urgency and in case anything unexpected crops up. Mrs Curtis would be ideal, that’s if she’s able to stay.’

  ‘I don’t think for family reasons that she’d want to stay.’

  He nodded. ‘Well, Dawson will do. It doesn’t matter about theory: we’ve plenty of theorists here.’

  So I left Frank behind.

  The fog had nearly cleared when we left about six-fifteen. I was suddenly lighter-hearted than I’d been for weeks. The fact of getting this job satisfactorily done even against the revised delivery date made me suddenly realise how much its failure would have meant to me. I knew very well the feeling of satisfaction couldn’t last against the loss of Lynn, but temporarily it was there. With an hour for a meal somewhere it seemed likely that we should be home before midnight, but after about thirty minutes’ driving I blamed myself for not ringing the AA to see how far the fog persisted. It kept coming in patches blotting everything out, and I’d have to slow to an absolute crawl. Driving through fog in the day is worse than at night because even your lights don’t help. The white line was a life saver, but after about an hour we ran on to a patch of newly tarred road and I had to stop to wipe all the windows clear.