The Sleeping Partner by Winston Graham
if you happen to notice I’m not there when you get home.
Perhaps that’s the last bitchy thing I’ll need to say in this
letter. I hope so. But Mike, I’m leaving you. Does that surprise
you? And will you really mind?
Mike, I’m the wrong sort of wife for you. You must have
realised it. At least you’ve made it very clear. Oh, there have
been times, I know, but they don’t happen any more for either
of us, so it’s not a lot of good going on pretending. I won’t
be around any longer to trouble your conscience or to cramp
your style.
I’m taking a flat in London for a few weeks while things
straighten themselves out. I’m not leaving the address because
I think you might try to see me, and I believe it would be
better if we didn’t meet again. If you really want to say anything
in answer to this, write to the bank and they will forward it.
I’ve taken a few clothes, but if I want more I’ll send for them.
With regret and – still some affection.
Lynn.
Someone was knocking. I folded the letter and put it back in its envelope. ‘ Michael Granville Esq.,’ she had written, ‘Greencroft, Hockbridge, Beds.’ I shoved the envelope into the pocket of my dressing-gown and went to let Mrs Lloyd in.
‘Good morning, Mr Granville. Nasty morning, isn’t it.’ She folded her umbrella and propped it by the door and insinuated herself past me. ‘You never can trust those bright evenings. But the weather forecast was wrong – all wrong.’
I said: ‘My – watch stopped. I forgot – to wind it.’
She glanced inquisitively at me through her thick spectacles and then at the mess I’d left in the kitchen from making the evening meal. ‘I expect it’s keeping these late hours. I always go to bed as soon as telly finishes. Otherwise I shouldn’t be up to see Mr Lloyd off. I’ll make you a cup of tea right away.’
Mrs Lloyd was always a shade too sweet for me. I said bluntly: ‘Mrs Granville’s not here.’
‘No, Mr Granville, so she told me. You’ll be quite the bachelor for a few days, I suppose.’
I looked at her but her glasses had glinted away. ‘You knew?’
‘Mrs Granville told me just before I left yesterday. She walked down to the corner with me to post two letters. I said I’d post them, but she said she wanted to do it herself. I expect we shall manage, shan’t we?’
‘Yes,’ I said, wondering whom the second letter was to. ‘I expect we shall manage.’
‘I’ll get everything for your supper so you’ll just have to switch on. I’ll lay it for you ready and then you can leave everything for me to clear tomorrow. I hope her mother will be better soon.’
‘Yes,’ I said. So Lynn had covered up. Mrs Lloyd with her intense nose for scandal hadn’t smelt this one out yet. She soon would. Presently I found I’d gone upstairs and was shaving. I cut myself on the chin, and couldn’t find my own toothpaste and had to use Lynn’s.
I wondered then, and tried to think it out, where the first crack had really shown, where the first wrong move was made. Had I made a bloomer in ever building a new factory with a government priority and encouragement in a satellite town, and uprooting Lynn from our tiny flat in London and expecting her to take new roots in the country? Should I have stayed where I was, cramped and rat-ridden in EC? But could overwork and neglect ever really break a marriage that hadn’t got dry rot already in its foundations? Perhaps the smart boys were right and the seeds of this sort of crack-up were sown twenty or thirty years ago among the frustrations and fixations of childhood.
I went to the works as usual. Sometimes when you’ve had a partial knock-out something goes on functioning even when the higher levels are closed.
I remember getting into the car and carefully noting that the petrol was low. And I remember as I turned in the drive I thought, I wonder if those laurels will get rooted out after all. I stopped at the garage at the corner and got ten gallons and then was going to drive off without paying. The man there grinned and said: ‘Shall I book it, Mr Granville? Any time … Your credit’s good, you know.’
My credit was good. Different from ten years ago when I’d started with a capital of £100. It had all come so quickly, perhaps too quickly. And perhaps my credit wasn’t as good as it had been twelve months ago in places where it mattered. Maybe success had to be slow to be solid and enduring; even success in marriage and in love.
It was a twenty-five-minute drive to Letherton. The firm of Granville and Company was still very much a one-man affair, and in my brighter moments I sometimes speculated how long it would go on if I took ill or was knocked down by a taxi.
There was really nobody at all able or willing to take authority even for a short time, and this had been the chief cause of the mess up in February, when the details of the move into the new factory had completely swamped me, and the production had had to be left to Read and Dawson, who for some inexplicable reason hated each other’s guts and got in each other’s way at every opportunity. Harwell had reacted violently — unreasonably to my view – to two late deliveries; and no doubt I’d been tactless too. Anyway it had finished our association, and the outcome had been that the factory’s production was truncated and being forced into commercial channels that I wasn’t interested in.
As usual this morning there was a pile of letters on my desk and I’d dictated a couple of replies when Frank Dawson came in. I’d forgotten about his telephone call last night and I didn’t feel very much more patient now than I’d done then. I half expected him to pitch straight in about being cut off so sharply, but instead he said: ‘I brought you this, Mike. It should rejoice your soul. Exhibit D; the fourth in two weeks.’
It was a bit of work done by a new hand and ruined by having had a 5/16 screw used in place of a quarter inch. Bill Read, the works manager, was trying to improve production by switching some of the workers about, and this, Frank maintained, was the outcome. I pacified him as best I could, half concerned and half no longer caring; and presently, getting precious little response from me, he dried up and stood pushing back his black hair and staring out at my car waiting patiently at the front door in the rain.
I said: ‘Anything else, Frank?’
‘Yes. When you’ve time. I’ve made a final selection from the IDA drawings, but I want your approval before I go ahead. There are one or two I’m not sure about.’
I sighed. Like most of my other attempts to shift decisions on to other people, this one didn’t look as if it was going to be a great success. ‘Where are the plans? All right I’ll come and look in a few minutes. I must do a bit of phoning first. Is Mrs Curtis in the laboratory?’
‘Yes. Do you want to see her?’
‘No … I’ll see her when I come out to you.’
He hesitated at the door, thin-featured, bright-eyed, moody. ‘There’s one other thing. I’ve a basket of strawberries for Lynn. Home grown. They’re particularly good this year.’
‘Oh, thanks,’ I said awkwardly. ‘I – you have them with you?’
‘Yes. I’ll shove them in the back of your car.’
‘Thank you, Frank. That’s very nice of you. You must – look in and see us sometime.’
‘You’re a bit distant now. Twelve miles is twelve times as far as it was in the old days.’
When he’d gone I sat for a minute. I lit a cigarette. Then I put it out, angry that my fingers fumbled the job. I pressed the switch of the intercom thing and told them to get me the manager of the Pall Mall branch of the National Provincial Bank. While I was waiting I fiddled with the piece of damaged equipment.
‘The manager is on the line now, Mr Granville.’
I said: ‘Good morning. My name is Granville. My wife, Mrs Lindsey Granville, still banks with you, I think. Until early this year we lived at 5, Grosvenor Lane, off Clarges Street.’
‘Oh ?
‘Yes, well … She’s staying in London at the moment in a flat lent her by a friend, and I don’t happen to have the address by me. I wonder if you could tell me what it is.’
There was a pause at the other end, and then a dick. ‘Hullo,’ I said.
‘Er – where are you speaking from, Mr Granville?’
‘My works in Letherton.’
‘Yes, I see. Er—’
‘You have her address?’
‘Yes, we have it. She gave it us this week when she called in. We were to forward any correspondence.’
I said: ‘Would you care to ring me back? That would establish who I am.’
‘Of course. Yes … Actually this puts us in rather a difficult position because Mrs Granville left us with instructions not to give her address to anyone asking for it. Naturally—’
‘I do happen to be her husband.’
‘Exactly. Nevertheless in the face of these explicit instructions … I wonder if you would allow us to write to Mrs Granville and get her formal permission?’
Someone tapped and half entered but I waved them angrily out.
‘Can’t you ring her?’
‘Unfortunately she didn’t leave a number.’
I thought quickly, wanting to slap down the receiver but knowing I wouldn’t.
‘When would you hear?’
‘Let me see, today’s Friday. Posted this morning we might get our answer tomorrow. But Monday would be safer. If you’d care to ring us again then … or we’ll ring you.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you’ll ring me.’
When I put down the phone Bill Read the works manager came in and we talked for a time on routine business; but I think I gave him even less attention than I’d given Dawson. What made me feel most sore and angry was that as early as last Monday Lynn had hinted to Ray French that she was going away; she had called, to see the bank manager and arranged things with him; she had warned Mrs Lloyd; only I had been kept in the dark. I was the enemy, the one she made plans to defeat.
I went with Read into the factory to inspect some monitors we were making for a South African diamond syndicate for fixing at the gates of the mine so that if anyone went through carrying a diamond – even if it was inside him – an alarm bell rang. While we messed about, and in spite of Lynn, things registered; chiefly that the shortage of inspectors was the biggest bottleneck. Completed parts were piling up for lack of people with the technical knowledge to check them.
Suddenly Read said: ‘ What about this girl who’s made a pig’s ear of the delay lines?’ When I stared at him he said: ‘Dawson complained, didn’t he?’
‘My dear Read,’ I said, ‘ Frank’s been with me from the start and he has a privileged position. He’s head of the laboratory and pretty smart there but he doesn’t understand a thing about factory organisation. On the assumption that you do I employ you to make what arrangements you think fit. Well, make them. I can’t be a universal Aunt Nellie for the whole bloody workshop.’
The saving grace of Read was that you could talk to him like that. He grinned his fox-terrier grin. ‘Anyway, don’t you want to know what I’ve done about it?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Thanks … In fact I’ve taken steps. I don’t think it’ll happen again.’
I went down the passage to the laboratory. Only Frank Dawson was there, and Stella Curtis. Because there was a row outside they didn’t hear me come in and I stared across at her for a bit. If my marriage had smashed up for the reasons Lynn implied and not because she was just fed up with me, then the job this girl was working on was as responsible as any other single thing for the break.
Or perhaps the cynics would have said it was because of Stella Curtis herself.
Chapter Three
I’D ENGAGED her in March as Frank Dawson’s assistant in the laboratory. She’d come in answer to a rather hopeful advertisement I put out after his last assistant had plugged in an experimental job on the wrong voltage and blown about eighty pounds worth of valves. She was, I suppose, about twenty-six, had got a good degree and had worked for a couple of years at the Nuffield Research Laboratories at Oxford. That was four years ago and apparently she’d left there to get married. She didn’t explain why she wanted a job now.
She was an attractive, pale girl with dark curly hair, and those noticeable blue eyes which some dark girls have, in which even the whites seem slightly blue. What interested me was that she seemed to know quite a lot about the theoretical side of our work, and had even earned Frank’s respect. Read said mischievously it was because Dawson had fallen for her legs; I knew it was because he recognised somebody with a more inventive brain than his own.
All the same, although I knew she was a find, I didn’t have a lot to do with her personally for the first seven or eight weeks, and it wasn’t until the thing with Thurston suddenly flared up that I decided that she was just the person to help me.
Thurston was a queer chap, half scientist, half civil servant, who divided his time between Harwell and St Giles’s Court. After meeting on various back-room jobs during the war, we’d kept in touch because of a common interest in airborne prospecting. With his help I’d built an entirely new and simplified type of scintillometer and had tried it out in an old Land Rover with very promising results.
After my bust-up with Harwell in February he had remained my only contact; and one day in May he’d telephoned to say was I willing to take on a rush job of making an airborne scintillometer for an urgent government requirement – if so this was my big chance, not only to see my own particular scientific baby produced with unlimited backing, but to put the firm of Granville & Co. back where everyone wanted it to be.
I didn’t take long to think that over, so he came and explained exactly what was in the wind, and I had Stella Curtis in to meet him. The upshot was that when I went to Harwell I took her with me.
Harwell is forty miles from Letherton and we had to be there by ten, so she got a train from Letherton where she was living and I picked her up at Hockbridge station.
When we got there I found it was a rather more imposing conference than I’d even been to before. Dr Bennett, who was in charge, I knew slightly and liked. Steel also was there – the geophysicist whom I’d had words with at our last meeting – but he greeted me today in a bluff friendly manner as if it was all forgotten, and I was rather relieved. In addition to these two there was a Wing Commander Parkinson from Farnborough, a man called Porter, from the Foreign Office, three or four minor people, and of course ourselves and Thurston.
Bennett began by explaining that certain territory situated between the Sudan and Uganda was due to be handed over to the Sudan; and although a date was not fixed by treaty for the actual transfer, it was expected to be about six months after formal Sudanese independence was granted – that was to say, six months from the coming August.
Not surprisingly, this territory, had never been fully prospected – it was in any case a very large tract to cover by normal means – and recently there had been reports of uranium mineralisation. It was the opinion of the Government that we couldn’t afford to let radioactive sources still technically in our hands drift without safeguard into the possession of a country which, under the influence of Egypt, might lease them irresponsibly; but before diplomacy could move it had to make sure of its facts. That could only be done quickly enough by aerial survey.
He went on: ‘In the United States a lot of big and ingenious equipment has been used for prospecting ground from the air, normally mounted in a Dakota; but even if that much elaboration were desirable it isn’t really practicable in the present case where we want to be as unobtrusive as possible and to use the smallest plane that will serve. As it happens, over the last year or so, Mr Granville, with Mr Thurston’s co-operation, has been developing a new piece of equipment that he claims and we hope may be the answer.’
I didn’t know I’d cl
They looked at me and I said: ‘ The design is reasonably orthodox; its chief newness is its simplicity. And of course we’re using a very much larger crystal than has ever been used before. But up to now we’ve only been able to test it by car. If this—’
‘My department is very anxious to get quick results,’ Porter said. ‘It’s a matter of the highest diplomatic urgency. We’d like to see the plane in operation by early September.’
Dr Bennett said: ‘What plane?’ and looked at Wing Commander Parkinson.
Parkinson gave his moustache a couple of quick wipes and said: ‘The stuff the US use in their Dakotas weighs three or four hundredweight. The Canadians have boiled it down a bit and use an Anson. But obviously our choice of plane depends on what it has to carry.’
They looked at me again. I said: ‘Our equipment in the Land Rover weighs about a hundred pounds.’
‘Yes, well, that’s getting somewhere,’ agreed Parkinson. ‘ The chief headache from our point of view is that none of these featherweight planes has much of a range, and in the special circumstances of this case it obviously won’t be desirable to be always popping back to base to refuel. So that means extra petrol tanks and a careful watch on every pound we carry. There are disadvantages to the helicopter, so personally I’d suggest an Auster A.O.P.9. The engine develops more soup than the earlier marks, and at the same time it’s smaller and easier to handle than a Prentice.’
Steel said: ‘What sort of terrain is this that has to be covered? Desert?’
‘Marsh and savannah and low scrub,’ said Bennett.