His heart’s obviously in the police, you can’t ask him to leave the force.’
The smile vanished from Jean’s face. ‘He’s already applied for the security job.’ I saw to that, her look added. ‘Far better pay. I’m not just thinking of myself,’ she said defensively, ‘nor about luxuries like foreign holidays. We can give the kids a better start, we could buy a house of our own.’ Instead of living in a police house set in a kind of ghetto.
‘He would have a proper career in the police,’ her mother said with unusual firmness. ‘This Guardcash job would be just that, a job.’ She shook her head. ‘Mike’s the kind of man who needs satisfaction in his work.’
Jean set her mouth in a stubborn line. ‘It’s an administrative post he’s applied for. He wouldn’t just be one of the guards riding the vans.’ She stood up. ‘And anyway, he hasn’t got very far in the police. In a couple of years he’ll be forty and what is he? Just a sergeant.’
‘You’re lucky to have a good husband,’ her mother said in a low voice. Five years now since she’d been widowed and she still felt the loss almost as keenly as in those first dreadful weeks.
Jean sighed and glanced at the clock. ‘I must go, I’ve got to meet the twins.’ Her oldest daughter was fifteen, too late now to rescue her from the clutches of state education, but the twins were only seven and one of the first things Jean intended to do, as soon as Mike’s appointment with Guardcash was a definite fact, was to take the twins away from their primary school and send them to a select little private academy in Perrymount. In the best residential area of Perrymount, of course.
‘Remember your father’s Cousin Arthur,’ her mother said suddenly. Jean gave her an exasperated glance and went out into the hall to get her coat. Cousin Arthur was a new one on her but she was only too familiar with her mother’s habit of producing outlandish – and, Jean had a shrewd suspicion, mythical – relatives to illustrate a point or drive home a moral. ‘He was a plumber.’ Her mother’s voice winged its way from the sitting room. ‘A very good plumber.’ Jean pulled a face of distaste at this fresh plebeian sprouting from the ancestral tree. ‘His wife kept on at him to take up some more refined career. In the end he became a sort of glorified clerk in the gas showrooms.’
Jean came back into the room, wearing a light summer coat of pale cream with gilt buttons; after sixteen years of marriage she still looked slim, almost youthful. ‘He was as miserable as sin,’ her mother said. ‘He shrank into himself, he lost weight, he even got shorter.’
‘You’re making all this up,’ Jean said calmly. She picked up her silky gloves. ‘There never was such a person as Father’s Cousin Arthur.’
Her mother’s eyes widened in a look of bland innocence. ‘He stuck it for four or five years,’ she said, ‘and then he ran away with the barmaid from a pub fifty yards away from the gas showrooms. A very vulgar sort of barmaid, I believe, plump and jolly.’
‘And the moral of this tale, I take it,’ Jean said, repairing her make-up in front of the mirror, ‘is that Cousin Arthur went back to plumbing and lived happily ever afterwards.’
‘Whether he went back to plumbing or not,’ her mother said with an air of subtle cunning, ‘I have no idea. Neither he nor the barmaid was ever heard of again. Not in our family, that is. But Cousin Arthur’s wife spent the rest of her life wishing she’d left well alone in the first place.’
Jean turned from the mirror. ‘You ought to take up writing improving pamphlets.’ She stooped and kissed her mother’s cheek. ‘We’re setting off on Saturday morning,’ she added amiably. ‘I’ll try to pop in to see you on Wednesday or Thursday.’
‘And you ought to take up something yourself,’ her mother said on a sharper, more direct note. ‘You’ve plenty of intelligence, you had a good job before you were married. No reason why you shouldn’t earn a decent salary. You’ve got too much spare energy, that’s your trouble. You’re young enough, you’re only thirty-five, you could make a career for yourself, it would take your attention off your husband, you might let him alone to live his own life.’
Jean flicked her mother an unsmiling glance. ‘Don’t bother to come to the door,’ she said. ‘I can see myself out.’
At four o’clock on Friday afternoon Detective Sergeant Mike Ashton came down the steps of the central police station in Perrymount. The rain had cleared, the sun was shining brilliantly, the air in the streets was heavy with the moist jungly warmth of late July.
‘Hope you have a good holiday,’ they’d said in the canteen. ‘You need it.’ Meaning his irritability and moodiness hadn’t gone unremarked in the last week or two.
He got into his car and slammed the door shut. Might as well stop by Brigid’s school and pick her up. Jean would want her home early today, there’d be plenty of last-minute jobs for all hands if they were going to make a reasonably early start tomorrow. He wasn’t in the least looking forward to the drive down to the coast. Or to the holiday itself.
He drove slowly out of the car park, turning his head once and looking back at the clean modern lines of the police station. When he walked up those steps again in a couple of weeks it would very probably be to hand in his notice. He felt again the slow smouldering of suppressed anger. His own fault too, which made it no better. He could have kept his mouth shut about the approach from Guardcash, he didn’t have to mention it in casual chat over Sunday lunch. If Jean had never heard about Guardcash, she would no doubt have nagged him from time to time to change his job, but it would have been in a vague, general sort of way, she wouldn’t have been armed with a specific point, the offer of an attractive alternative. He’d have got further promotion in the police during the next year or two, there’d have been a little more money, she’d have got used to the whole thing, she’d have stopped grumbling in the end. She’d have had to.
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