Man Overboard (10 page)

He was far away from them. He was in the control-room, the centre of a submarine’s world, and all around him was the casual presence of men he knew well. Like a wave of sickness, the memory of that unique brand of shut-in companionship came back to him. He was not remembering the faces of men. It was just the familiar, predictable sound and smell and movements of them. Fifty fathoms under the sea, there was an uncomplicated security unmatched above the surface.

In a submarine, men with whom you had little in common on shore became your closest friends. You were dependent on each other. You worked and ate and slept together, and shared the jokes, crusted with repetition, and talked and argued and sometimes unleashed surprisingly private thoughts in the wardroom when the ship was surfaced at night. Tongue-tied men became articulate. Dull men were occasionally almost witty. Pigheaded sticklers for Navy dogma relaxed into real people.

The older ratings fathered you, because they knew more about the job than you did. Each one had the sober pride of a specialist, and there was a great respect between you. The younger ones were more like sons, seeking advice, trusting you with their problems. A wife was unfaithful. A gossiping neighbour was trying to make trouble. A child was very sick, but the patchy letter forgot to say what the sickness was.

The war had nothing to do with it. What mattered was not the training or the hardships, the escapes, the triumphs, the risks. The Navy was a continuity, running before and through and beyond
war. It was a dependence of men on each other. This was what had been important. This was what Ben was losing. Frank Daniels was behind him. Ben straightened his back and turned round. He put on a smile, but Frank, with perception unapparent in his passive face, muttered: “Don’t let anyone see you care.”

“I don’t.” Ben widened his smile. “I swear it.” But as he spoke, he heard Amy’s blithe voice telling him: “There’ll be another war soon, so you’ll be back in before you know it.”

A world calamity staged for the sole purpose of putting Benjamin Francis back into uniform again? “I hate my guts,” he said to Frank.

“Why worry about that?” Frank said. “I often feel the same. I take a dose of salts for it, myself.”

“I THOUGHT you said you were going to give up smoking,” Rose said.

“I am, tomorrow.” Ben put away the packet. “I didn’t say that, anyway. I said I wouldn’t buy any cigarettes until I got a job. Bob gave me these.”

“Sponging now.”

“Just one of his little charities. Helping the unemployed.”

Bob Whiting had been much more friendly towards Ben now that he was out of the Navy. When Rose was difficult, which she was in increasing ratio to her success, it was almost as if they were in league, the lover and the colleague both trying to defend themselves against her egotism.

Once when Rose had fought with Ben before a rehearsal and fought with Bob during the rehearsal, the two men had gone off together afterwards and left Rose, who hated to drive herself home, to fall back for escort on her male lead of that week, who disliked her as much as she disliked him, but disliked the Underground even more. Bob and Ben had ended the night in the Ambassadors, and had met Jayne Mansfield. It was many days before Rose would forgive either of them.

Bob had dropped his sneers, and no longer referred to Ben as the Gallant Commander. He called him Ben old boy, and had even negotiated for him a job of sorts, but Rose said that she would have nothing more to do with him if he took it. She would not have Ben scuttling up from the basement when somebody yelled: “Where the hell are the seagulls?” She was not going to be seen leaving the studio with the junior assistant to the assistant manager of Sound effects.

Although he was living in London, Ben did not go often to the television studio. The novelty had long ago worn off, just as the novelty of Rose herself was wearing off and bringing to the surface the beginnings of an old-shoe relationship, which was less glamorous, but much less tiring. Her glowing beauty never ceased to enchant him every time he saw her, but the excitement of
having a girl who looked like that was giving place to a tolerant fondness that recognized the sweetness buried too deep under the humbug. He now wanted to protect her from her own absurdities.

Rose had other men round her, but they came and went like July butterflies, while Ben was more or less a permanency. He had learned not to mind too much about Rose’s other men, for he could not cure her of her habit of picking up admirers as easily as a naval uniform picks up lint. When she wept to him sometimes after she had cast them off, and cried: “Oh, darling, I’ve been unfaithful to you!” he was not crazed with jealousy, because he believed that technically she had not erred. Unlike Marion, it was only men’s scalps that Rose wanted. She constantly had to prove her power; then she would return tranquilly to Ben, almost as if he were a husband.

They still talked of marriage in a leisurely way, and there were many times when Ben felt sure that if he could land a decent enough job to support his pride against Rose’s earnings, they could get some happiness out of it. Other men had married famous women and kept their self-esteem by leading a life of their own and letting their wives get on with being famous by themselves, taking only a background part in the career that brought the fame. And there was always the sustaining thought that Rose would surely not be famous for ever.

It was no longer a thrill to Ben to be seen out with a woman whom everybody recognized. At first he had liked it when taxi drivers slid back the front window to say something appreciative, but now he wished that they would leave the window shut and keep the draughts out. In public places, he used to enjoy his position on the edge of the stares, and to relish the glances of envy from other men, but he was growing tired now of tagging along behind Rose. He was not going to walk through marriage one step behind her, holding the mink on the edge of the crowd which clamoured for her autograph, waiting out of camera range while she posed for a picture, stopping with her at tables on the way out of restaurants, while she sparkled at people whom he did not know, and to whom he could find nothing to say when he was introduced.

Although he had told her not to, Rose still persisted in introducing him as Commander Francis. At parties, people sometimes
followed this up with a polite: “Where are you stationed, Commander?”

Rose did not like him to say: “I’m out of the Navy,” so he would give random answers like: “Wapping Pier”, or “Mumbles Lighthouse”.

Afterwards Rose would complain: “Why do you tell such silly lies?”

“Why do you go on calling me Commander?”

“It sounds better,” was her crisp reply, and she would study him for a moment with the stupendous orbs narrowed to the size of ordinary eyes, as if she were speculating whether he was fit to be seen out with her.

If things went on like this, the day would come, Ben knew, when someone would address him as Mr Kelly. The thought of this spurred his ambition. He must find himself a niche in life where there would be people who would say: “There is Benjamin Francis. He’s married to someone or other. Somebody one knows.” He must be able to walk before Rose into restaurants and tackle head waiters on his own. He must hear people call Rose Mrs Francis, in a natural way, not as if it were some temporary and faintly comic joke.

With this in mind, he began to apply for jobs that offered: “Excellent prospects for right man”, and “Unlimited opportunities for advancement”. He answered impossible advertisements for posts like Advertising Manager, or Senior Consultant in Management Accounting, or Assistant Sales Manager with Extensive Experience of Marketing a Variety of Merchandise. He was not surprised when he received no answer from many of the firms. When there was one, it was the bleakly familiar: “The post has been filled”, or the more courteous brush-off: “We will keep your letter on record in case a suitable post arises.”

“I’m starting at the top and working down. I’ll let you know when I reach office boy,” he told Geneva, as he sat down once more at the scarred dining-table and pulled his typewriter towards him. It was a pre-war portable that had been half-way round the world with him, and had suffered greatly from the sea change. It shifted the paper sideways towards the bottom of the page, and was apt to write everything in capitals if you did not watch the shift-lock key like a hawk and catch it as it started to go down. When he was composing an application, Geneva would sometimes ocp/1127—c
come behind him and rest a painful bracelet on his shoulder and protest: “You can’t say that. It’s a lie.”

“It doesn’t matter. They’ll know it’s a lie if I don’t give references, but they might respect my ingenuity. It’s all part of the game. The advertisement says: ‘Since the company’s approach to its more unusual problems is adventurous, the post demands a resourceful personality.’ What is more resourceful than a lie?”

It started as something of a game, whiling away the too-empty hours of freedom with the advertisement pages of the newspapers in the Paddington library, pouring himself a beer and drafting and redrafting masterpieces of persuasion to try to trap an employer into granting him at least an interview.

It was not long, however, before the game sobered into reality, as Ben became increasingly aware of two serious facts. One was that he must find a job as soon as possible if he were not to dribble away his meagre retired pay in supporting himself and Amy and catering to Rose’s ideas of where to go and what to do in London. The other, still more depressing, was that jobs for an ex-naval officer of thirty-six were not easy to find.

It was small comfort to know that there were many men in the same boat. In one of the few interviews Ben achieved, the nonchalant man swivelling back and forth on the other side of the desk had said: “I had three of you chaps in yesterday. One poor devil was a group-captain with three kids, two of them at public school. The hell of it is, we owe our lives to blokes like you; but this firm’s a profit-making concern, not a charitable organization.”

Ben read a newspaper article in which he and the other ex-officers were referred to as The Lost Men of Britain. Everyone was sorry for him, it seemed, but what use was that? He did not want to be treated like a paraplegic charity case. He wanted a decent job.

He was too old, too inexperienced, too bare of academic qualifications. His technical knowledge of such things as engineering and radio and radar was no more than basic. In a submarine, there had always been an engineer officer and highly qualified technical ratings to depend on. The Navy had cast Ben out fit for nothing more useful than to command a submarine, and if there were any commercial firms engaged in undersea projects, they were not advertising the fact.

Ben went to several employment offices and had friendly or irritating chats with sympathetic or superior clerks; but neither
the sympathy nor the hauteur yielded any success. With his experience of handling men, which was one of the few saleable attributes he could lay claim to, Personnel was the thing to go for, they told him. But for each vacancy for welfare officer or personnel manager, there were dozens of applicants, mostly ex-officers, falling over each other to get in first.

One day, when the sun came out over icy pavements which bit like iron through the trodden-over boots of the old ladies creeping towards Whiteleys, Ben crunched across the Park through the thin, dirty snow and wandered into an employment bureau in Kensington.

It was a small and unprosperous concern, two flights up over a chemist’s shop, with the linoleum showing its threads on the stairs. The office was just one room with two kindly women and a thin young girl who had a typewriter in an adjoining cubicle the same shape and size as a train toilet. It had the same kind of basin, too, deeper than it was wide, with a cracked glaze and awkward taps from which the girl filled the kettle to make tea. Ben knew about the basin, because once when he was the only client in the office and the girl was tired, sitting in a chair without her shoes and twisting her chilblained toes, he made the tea for all of them.

It was obvious at his first visit that Ben had come to the wrong place from which to be launched on his meteoric career; but after his second visit, when he and Miss Arkwright and Mrs French and Jessie had enjoyed an all-round unburdening of some of their hopes and dreams, Ben and the bureau became very attached to each other. He often walked across the Park, more for the exercise and to see his three friends than for the hope of finding himself a job.

If there was anyone in the office, which was not often, Ben would wait on one of the hard chairs on the landing outside. Then he would go in, with a bunch of flowers or a bag of jam tarts, and draw up a chair, and Miss Arkwright would give him one of the filter-tipped cigarettes, “named after my darling Sir Larry”, which were one of the few things on which she spent money for herself.

Mrs French, a motherly lady with soft white hair and a fancy for brown dresses with glimpses of lace at the neck, was at the desk which dealt with the affairs of employees; but in Ben’s case, Miss Arkwright, who handled employers, and even Jessie, who did not
handle anything except the typewriter and the teapot, chipped in with ideas and advice. Nothing ever came of it. The bureau dealt mostly in domestic posts, and as there were few people who wanted to be maids and almost as few who could afford to employ them even if they could find them, business was steadily dropping off. Sometimes they talked with mouselike courage of widening their scope. Miss Arkwright had once found a hosiery buyer for a desperate department store, and they had never forgotten it They had wanted to have the contract framed to hang on the wall.

Miss Arkwright was gentle and dovelike, and should have found a husband long ago. She intimated once that she had lost a lover in the war, but no one, including herself, seemed quite to believe it. It occurred to Ben that if he could introduce her to Frank Daniels, she would make a wonderful wife for him. Frank loved to wear knitted cardigans and woollen gloves, and Miss Arkwright was always knitting. If a client came in, she would stub out her cigarette and thrust needles and wool into a drawer of her desk, looking up with her bright, businesslike smile, as if she had been putting away important papers connected with the bureau’s crushing load of work.