The New Collected Short Stories

by Jeffrey Archer

  ‘Hello, Chris,’ Mrs Smart greeted him as he joined his mother on the platform. ‘Was Sue on the train with you?’

  ‘I didn’t notice,’ said Chris, as Sue walked up to join them.

  ‘I expect you see a lot of each other now you’re based at the same camp,’ suggested Chris’s mother.

  ‘No, not really,’ said Sue, trying to sound disinterested.

  ‘Well, we’d better be off,’ said Mrs Haskins. ‘I have to give Chris and his dad dinner before they go off to watch the football,’ she explained.

  ‘Do you remember him?’ asked Mrs Smart as Chris and his mother walked along the platform towards the exit.

  ‘Snotty Haskins?’ Sue hesitated. ‘Can’t say I do.’

  ‘Oh, you like him that much, do you?’ said Sue’s mother with a smile.

  When Chris boarded the train that Sunday evening, Sue was already sitting in her place at the end of the carriage. Chris was about to walk straight past her and find a seat in the next carriage, when he heard her say, ‘Hi, Chris, did you have a nice weekend?’

  ‘Not bad, Corp,’ said Chris, stopping to look down at her. ‘Grimsby beat Lincoln three–one, and I’d forgotten how good the fish and chips are in Cleethorpes compared to camp.’

  Sue smiled. ‘Why don’t you join me?’ she said, patting the seat beside her. ‘And I think it will be all right to call me Sue when we’re not in barracks.’

  On the journey back to Mablethorpe, Sue did most of the talking, partly because Chris was so smitten with her – could this be the same skinny little girl who had handed out the milk each morning? – and partly because he realized the bubble would burst the moment they set foot back in camp. Non-commissioned officers just don’t fraternize with the ranks.

  The two of them parted at the camp gates and went their separate ways. Chris walked back to the barracks, while Sue headed off for the NCO quarters. When Chris strolled into his Nissen hut to join his fellow conscripts, one of them was bragging about the WRAF he’d had it off with. He even went into graphic detail, describing what RAF knickers look like. ‘A dark shade of blue held up by thick elastic,’ he assured the mesmerized onlookers. Chris lay on his bed and stopped listening to the unlikely tale, as his thoughts returned to Sue. He wondered how long it would be before he saw her again.

  Not as long as he feared because when Chris went to the canteen for lunch the following day he spotted Sue sitting in the corner with a group of girls from the ops room. He wanted to stroll across to her table and, like David Niven, casually ask her out on a date. There was a Doris Day film showing at the Odeon that he thought she might enjoy, but he’d sooner have walked across a minefield than interrupt her while his mates were watching.

  Chris selected his lunch from the counter – a bowl of vegetable soup, sausage and chips, and custard pie. He carried his tray across to a table on the other side of the room and joined a group of his fellow conscripts. He was tucking into the custard pie, while discussing Grimsby’s chances against Blackpool, when he felt a hand touch his shoulder. He looked round to see Sue smiling down at him. Everyone else at the table stopped talking. Chris turned a bright shade of red.

  ‘Doing anything on Saturday night?’ Sue asked. The red deepened to crimson as he shook his head. ‘I was thinking of going to see Calamity Jane.’ She paused. ‘Care to join me?’ Chris nodded. ‘Why don’t we meet outside the camp gates at six?’ Another nod. Sue smiled. ‘See you then.’ Chris turned back to find his friends staring at him in awe.

  Chris didn’t remember much about the film because he spent most of his time trying to summon up enough courage to put his arm round Sue’s shoulder. He didn’t even manage it when Howard Keel kissed Doris Day. However, after they left the cinema and walked back towards the waiting bus, Sue took his hand.

  ‘What are you going to do once you’ve finished your National Service?’ Sue asked as the last bus took them back to camp.

  ‘Join my dad on the buses, I suppose,’ said Chris. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Once I’ve served three years, I have to decide if I want to become an officer, and make the RAF my career.’

  ‘I hope you come back and work in Cleethorpes,’ Chris blurted out.

  Chris and Sue Haskins were married a year later in St Aidan’s parish church.

  After the wedding, the bride and groom set off for Newhaven in a hired car, intending to spend their honeymoon on the south coast of Portugal. After only a few days on the Algarve, they ran out of money. Chris drove them back to Cleethorpes, but vowed that they would return to Albufeira just as soon as he could afford it.

  Chris and Sue began married life by renting three rooms on the ground floor of a semi-detached in Jubilee Road. The two milk monitors were unable to hide their contentment from anyone who came into contact with them.

  Chris joined his father on the buses and became a conductor with the Green Line Municipal Coach Company, while Sue was employed as a trainee with a local insurance company. A year later Sue gave birth to Tracey and left her job to bring up their daughter. This spurred Chris on to work even harder and seek promotion. With the occasional prod from Sue, Chris began to study for the company’s promotion exam. Four years later Chris was appointed an inspector. All boded well in the Haskins household.

  When Tracey informed her father that she wanted a pony for Christmas, he had to point out that they didn’t have enough room. Chris compromised, and on Tracey’s seventh birthday presented her with a Labrador puppy, which they christened Corp. The Haskins family wanted for nothing, and that might have been the end of this tale if Chris hadn’t got the sack. It happened thus.

  The Green Line Municipal Coach Company was taken over by the Hull Carriage Bus Company. With the merger of the two firms, job losses became inevitable, and Chris was among those offered a redundancy package. The only alternative the new management came up with was the reinstatement of Chris as a conductor. Chris turned his nose up at the offer. He felt confident of finding another job, and therefore accepted the settlement.

  It wasn’t long before the redundancy money ran out, and despite Ted Heath’s promise of a brave new world, Chris quickly discovered that alternative employment wasn’t that easy to find in Cleethorpes. Sue never once complained and, now that Tracey was going to school, took on a part-time job at Parsons’, a local fish-and-chip shop. Not only did this bring in a weekly wage, supplemented by the occasional tip, but it also allowed Chris to enjoy a large plate of cod and chips every lunchtime.

  Chris continued to try and find a job. He visited the employment exchange every morning, except on Friday, when he stood in a long line, waiting to collect his meagre unemployment benefit. After twelve months of failed interviews, and sorry-you-don’t-seem-to-have-the-necessary-qualifications, Chris became anxious enough to seriously consider returning to his old job as a bus conductor. Sue assured him that it wouldn’t be long before he was once again promoted to inspector.

  Meanwhile, Sue took on more responsibility at the fish-and-chip shop and a year later was made assistant manager. Once again, this tale might have reached its natural conclusion, except this time it was Sue who was given her notice.

  She warned Chris over a fish supper that Mr and Mrs Parsons were considering early retirement and planning to put the shop up for sale.

  ‘How much are they expecting it to fetch?’

  ‘I heard Mr Parsons mention the figure of five thousand pounds.’

  ‘Then let’s hope the new owners know a good thing when they see it,’ said Chris, forking another chip.

  ‘The new owners are far more likely to come with their own staff. Don’t forget what happened to you when the bus company was taken over.’

  Chris thought about it.

  At eight thirty the following morning, Sue left the house to take Tracey to school, before going on to work. Once the two of them had departed, Chris and Corp set out for their morning constitutional. The dog was puzzled when his master didn’t head for the beach, where he could en
joy his usual frolic in the waves, but instead marched off in the opposite direction, towards the centre of the town. Corp loyally bounded after him, and ended up being tied to a railing outside the Midland Bank in the High Street.

  The manager of the bank could not hide his surprise when Mr Haskins requested an interview to discuss a business venture. He quickly checked Mr and Mrs Haskins’ joint bank account, to find that they were seventeen pounds and twelve shillings in credit. He was pleased to note that they had never run up an overdraft, despite Mr Haskins being out of work for over a year.

  The manager listened sympathetically to his client’s proposal, but sadly shook his head even before Chris had come to the end of his well-rehearsed presentation.

  ‘The bank couldn’t consider such a risk,’ the manager explained, ‘at least not while you have so little security to offer as collateral. You don’t even own your own home,’ the banker pointed out. Chris thanked him, shook him by the hand and left undaunted.

  He crossed the High Street, tied Corp to another railing and entered Martins Bank. Chris had to wait for quite some time before the manager was able to see him. He was greeted with the same response, but at least on this occasion the manager recommended that Chris should approach Britannia Finance, who, he explained, were a new company specializing in start-up loans for small businesses. Chris thanked him, left the bank, untied Corp and jogged back to Jubilee Road, arriving only moments before Sue returned home with his lunch: cod and chips.

  After lunch, Chris left the house and headed for the nearest phone box. He put four pennies in the box and pressed button A. The conversation lasted for less than a minute. He then returned home, but didn’t tell Sue who he had an appointment with the following day.

  The next day Chris waited for Sue to take Tracey off to school before he slipped back upstairs to their bedroom. He took off his jeans and sweater, and replaced them with the suit he’d worn at his wedding, a cream shirt he only put on for church on Sundays, and a tie his mother-in-law had given him for Christmas, which he thought he’d never wear. He then shone his shoes until even his old drill sergeant would have agreed that they passed muster. He checked himself in the mirror, hoping he looked like the potential manager of a new business venture. He left the dog in the back garden, and headed into town.

  Chris was fifteen minutes early for his meeting with a Mr Tremaine, the loans manager with Britannia Finance Company. He was asked to take a seat in the waiting room. Chris picked up a copy of the Financial Times for the first time in his life. He couldn’t find the sports pages. Fifteen minutes later a secretary ushered him through to Mr Tremaine’s office.

  The loans executive listened with sympathy to Chris’s ambitious proposal, and then enquired, just as the two bank managers had, ‘What security do you have to offer?’

  ‘Nothing,’ replied Chris without guile, ‘other than the fact that my wife and I will work all the hours we’re awake, and she already knows the business backwards.’ Chris waited to hear the many reasons why Britannia couldn’t consider his request.

  Instead Mr Tremaine asked, ‘As your wife would constitute half of our investment, what does she think about this whole enterprise?’

  ‘I haven’t even discussed it with her yet,’ Chris blurted out.

  ‘Then I suggest you do so,’ said Mr Tremaine, ‘and fairly quickly, because before we would consider investing in Mr and Mrs Haskins, we will need to meet Mrs Haskins in order to find out if she’s half as good as you claim.’

  Chris broke the news to his wife over supper that evening. Sue was speechless. A problem Chris had not come up against all that often in the past.

  Once Mr Tremaine had met Mrs Haskins, it was only a matter of filling in countless forms before Britannia Finance advanced them a loan of £5,000. A month later Mr and Mrs Haskins moved from their three rooms in Jubilee Road to a fish-and-chip shop on Beach Street.

  The Middle

  Chris and Sue spent their first Sunday scraping the name PARSONS off the front of the shop, and painting in HASKINS: under new management. Sue quickly set about teaching Chris how to prepare the right ingredients to make the finest batter. If it was that easy, she kept reminding him, there wouldn’t be a queue outside one chippy while a rival a few yards up the road remained empty. It was some weeks before Chris could guarantee his chips were always crisp and not hard or, worse, soggy. While he became the front-of-house manager, wrapping up the fish and dispensing the salt and vinegar, Sue took her place behind the till and collected the takings. In the evening, Sue always brought the books up to date, but she didn’t go upstairs to join Chris in their little self-contained flat until the shop was spotless and you could see your face in the counter-top.

  Sue was always the last to finish, but then Chris was the first to rise in the morning. He would be up by four o’clock, pull on an old tracksuit and head off for the docks with Corp. He returned a couple of hours later, having selected the finest cod, hake, skate and plaice, moments after the trawlers had docked with their morning catch.

  Although Cleethorpes has several fish-and-chip shops, it was not long before a queue began to form outside Haskins, sometimes even before Sue had turned the closed sign round to allow the first customer to enter the shop. The queue never slackened between the hours of eleven a.m. and three p.m., or from five to nine in the evening, when the sign would finally be turned back round – but not until the last customer had been served.

  At the end of their first year the Haskins declared a profit of just over £900. As the queues lengthened, the debt to Britannia Finance diminished, so they were able to return the loan in full, with interest, eight months before the five-year agreement ended.

  During the next decade, the Haskins’ reputation grew on land, as well as sea, which resulted in Chris being invited to join the Cleethorpes Rotary Club, and Sue becoming deputy chairman of the Mothers’ Union.

  On their twentieth wedding anniversary Sue and Chris returned to Portugal for a second honeymoon. They stayed in a four-star hotel for a fortnight and this time they didn’t have to come home early. Mr and Mrs Haskins returned to Albufeira every summer for the next ten years. Creatures of habit, the Haskins.

  Tracey left Cleethorpes Grammar School to attend Bristol University, where she studied business management. The only sadness in the Haskins’ life was when Corp died. But then he was fourteen years old.

  Chris was enjoying a drink with some fellow Rotarians when Dave Quenton, the manager of the town’s most prestigious post office, told him that he was moving to the Lake District and planning to sell his interest in the business.

  This time Chris did discuss his latest proposal with his wife. Sue was once again taken by surprise and, when she recovered, needed several questions answered before she agreed to pay a return visit to Britannia Finance.

  ‘How much do you have on deposit with the Midland Bank?’ asked Mr Tremaine, recently promoted to loans manager.

  Sue checked her ledger. ‘Thirty-seven thousand, four hundred and eight pounds,’ she replied.

  ‘And what value have you put on the fish-and-chip shop?’ was his next question.

  ‘We will be considering offers over one hundred thousand,’ said Sue confidently.

  ‘And how much has the post office been valued at, remembering that it’s in such a prime location?’

  ‘Mr Quenton says that the Post Office is looking for two hundred and seventy thousand, but he assures me they would settle for a quarter of a million, if they can find a suitable applicant.’

  ‘So you’re likely to be a little over one hundred thousand short of your target,’ said the analyst, not having to refer to a ledger. He paused. ‘What was the post office’s turnover last year?’

  ‘Two hundred and thirty thousand pounds,’ replied Sue.

  ‘Profit?’

  Once again, Sue needed to check her figures. ‘Twenty-six thousand, four hundred, but that doesn’t include the added bonus of spacious living accommodation, with rates and taxe
s covered in the annual return.’ She paused. ‘And this time we would own the property.’

  ‘If all those figures can be confirmed by our accountants,’ said Mr Tremaine, ‘and you are able to sell the fish-and-chip shop for around a hundred thousand, it certainly appears to be a sound investment. But . . .’ The two would-be clients looked apprehensive. ‘And there always is a but, when it comes to lending money. The loan would, of course, be subject to the post office maintaining its category A status. Property in that area is currently trading at around twenty thousand, so the real value of the post office is as a business, and only then if, I repeat, if, it continues to have category A status.’

  ‘But it’s been a category A post office for the past thirty years,’ said Chris. ‘Why should that change in the future?’

  ‘If I could predict the future, Mr Haskins,’ replied the analyst, ‘I would never make a bad investment, but as I can’t I have to take the occasional risk. Britannia invests in people, and on that front you have nothing to prove.’ He smiled. ‘We would, as with our first investment, expect any loan to be repaid in quarterly instalments, over a period of five years, and on this occasion, as such a large sum is involved, we would want to take a charge over the property.’

  ‘At what percentage?’ demanded Chris.

  ‘Eight and a half per cent, with added penalties should increments not be paid on time.’

  ‘We’ll need to consider your offer carefully,’ said Sue, ‘and we’ll let you know once we’ve made our decision.’

  Mr Tremaine stifled a smile.

  ‘What was all that about category A status?’ asked Sue as they walked quickly back towards the seafront, still hoping to open the shop in time for their first customer.

  ‘Category A is where all the profits are,’ said Chris. ‘Savings accounts, pensions, postal orders, vehicle road tax and even premium bonds all guarantee you a handsome profit. Without them, you have to rely on TV licences, stamps, electricity bills, and perhaps a little extra income if they allow you to run a shop on the side. If that was all Mr Quenton had to offer, we’d be better off continuing to run the fish-and-chip shop.’