Man Overboard (16 page)

“Why the wives? Are they more gullible?”

“No, no, Benjamin.” Mr Beckett slipped in his name as easily as if they had been on Christian-name terms for weeks. “There’s nothing to be gullible about. But the wives are more available, and they usually wear the trousers.”

“I’d feel as if I was peddling vacuum cleaners,” Ben said. “That was the one thing I didn’t want to do.”

“That’s a lucrative enough job in its way,” Mr Beckett mused, as if he had tried and enjoyed it. “But you’ll be an investment salesman. That sound toney enough for you? Selling futures, that’s what it is. Selling future happiness, future security. Building an estate for these deserving women—the backbone of the country, mark you—assuring that they and the kiddies will have a nest-egg in case something happens to their dear ones.”

“Are those the sort of things I’d have to say?”

“In essence. You’ll put it in your own words, of course. I envy you, Benjamin. I’d much rather be out in the field than in the office. It’s the human side of the business. You’ll love it.”

“I haven’t said yet that I———”

Mitzi came into the office and said familiarly: “There’s another naval officer out there, Jake. He says he has an appointment.”

“Tell him the post is filled.” Mr Beckett stood up, pulling down his short, neat jacket and twitching at the three-fold peaks of his breast-pocket handkerchief. “How about shaking hands on our future, Benjamin?”

Ben felt himself going under like a submarine. They shook hands.

Geneva took it well. “I knew it sounded too good to be true. There’s always a catch in those things,” she said, as if she had never been deceived by the challenging advertisement. “I’m awfully glad really, Ben.” She kissed him. “Amy and I would have had fits if you had gone into any danger.”

Geneva was a true optimist, like Ben. That was one of the
reasons they understood each other so well. She was hopefully enthusiastic before the event, but when it did not come off, she buried it gladly and switched her enthusiasm without effort to the next thing that came along. She now applied herself, with the stub of a pencil and the backs of old envelopes, to reckoning up how much money she could make if she entrusted her tiny savings to the Services Investment Association, and how much commission Ben would make on her if she did.

“But you’re not a naval wife.”

“Don’t kid yourself, sweetie. Your Peale and Beckett would make poor old William a posthumous Admiral if that was the only way they could get my cash.”

The Major was quite excited. The S.I.A. would obviously set its sights next on the Army, and what better man than Major Hubert Grantley Flood, D.S.O. (retd.) to be their agent around the camps and barracks?

“You’ll put in a word for me, no doubt, when the time comes. I could do it on my head. Aldershot, Catterick, Woolwich—I know ’em all like the back of my hand. Call on me any time. I shall be honoured to work with you, Ben, my boy.”

Amy, usually so ready with an act to fit any situation, looked to Ben to see how she should take this new development. She had been keyed up to play the part of the tight-lipped hero’s daughter, or the fisherman’s child, waiting at the cottage window with her eyes glued on the storm-tossed sea. She could not assume her new role until she saw how much her father minded.

She brought him the newspaper advertisement from above her bed. “Shall I burn this beastly thing?” she asked, to see if he was feeling bitter. “Or shall I keep it in my album as a memento of what might have been?”

“Keep it as memento of what is,” Ben told her. “I think it’s the start of a new life for you and me, Amy. It’s the chance for me to work for us at last. I’m going to make some money. We’ll have a place of our own, a car, holidays abroad. When I take you to America, it won’t be on a raft, but first-class in the
Queen Elizabeth.”

“The raft would have been fun,” she said, and then discarded it to join him in building extravagant, impossible plans for their prosperous life together, which had to include Geneva.

“In a flat above the garage, I think,” Amy said. “Then she could
be a part of us, but on her own at the same time.” For a child who had never had a proper family life, she was very alive to the subtleties of family relationships. “I wouldn’t want her to be like Jane Egerton’s grandmother, who gets shoved upstairs with a tray when they have people to supper.”

Geneva laughed. “If I’m living over the garage, you can go one better than that. When you get sick of me, you can run the engine of the car all night and let the carbon monoxide seep up through the floor.”

The ladies at the Phillimore Bureau were enchanted. Ben took them a bottle of sherry, and they drank it out of the tea-cups, although Jessie’s boy friend, who was a militant teetotaller, would half kill her if he knew.

“I’m so happy for you, Ben,” Mrs French said, doting on him with her head on one side, the sherry warming her to gentle sentiment. “My only regret is that we shan’t see you here any more.”

“I’ll visit you,” Ben said, “to bring you news of the world of finance. I may need some tips from you too, on how to talk persuasively to women.”

“Don’t look at me,” Jessie giggled, as drunk as if she had had three whiskies. “You wouldn’t need to do much talking to persuade me.”

“Jessie!” Miss Arkwright wagged a scandalized finger, and Jessie clapped a hand over her mouth and giggled through it.

Miss Arkwright raised her tea-cup in a toast. “May good fortune smile on you in your new career,” she declaimed. “I can’t help wishing you had got something through us though,” she said, giving him her sweet smile. “You never were in our line, of course, but I was always hoping. I didn’t tell you, but we always planned that if you did get something, we wouldn’t ask any commission from you, even if it meant cooking the books. That was our secret.”

“I’ve got a job,” Ben told Rose triumphantly. She did not say: “And about time.” Rose nagged, but when you did what she wanted, she was ungrudgingly delighted.

She kissed him and gave him her wide-eyed, searching look, lips slightly parted, sweet breath coming softly between her
comely teeth. “Oh, darling, I’m afraid for you. Is it as dangerous as you thought? You’re probably not supposed to tell me what it is, but tell me, anyway. I’m like the grave.”

When he told her, she moved away, pouting, and stood running her forefinger along the piping at the top of the sofa. Her shortsighted egotism was occupied with the disappointment of not being privy to a secret. Ben had the idea that she could have borne the news that he was going to ram a ship with a human torpedo, as long as she could have been the only person to know about it.

When her mind expanded slightly to enquire for more details of Ben’s new job, he did not tell her too much. She was concerned about his social status, so he tried to make the S.I.A. sound as impressive as possible, stressing the shrewd, successful aspect of Mr Beckett, and the old Harrovian polish of Jimmy Peale. His own part in the business, and the financial prospects, he painted for her in phrases that Mr Beckett himself could not have bettered.

“A financial agent.” Rose tried the words to see how they would sound to describe Ben to other people. “An investment salesman. Yes, I see. Like a stockbroker,” she said comfortably.

“Like a stockbroker,” Ben agreed and left her happy.

Travelling down to Southampton to tell his parents that he was no longer unemployed, which would put a stop to the wistful letters from his mother telling him of situations she had seen advertised in the local paper, which would suit him nicely if he lived at home, Ben felt the old familiar excitement as the landmarks passed by, heralding the approach of the house by the railway.

When it came, with the father burning a pile of fiercely smoking rubbish at the edge of the orchard, much too near the laundry line, and one of the bedroom windows wide open to the gusty morning with a flowered curtain streaming out, Ben felt more like reaching home than he ever did when he arrived on the draughty doorstep of Wavecrest.

Craning back to see the last of the narrow chimneys and the tops of the bare trees before the side of the bridge cut off his view, he wondered whether he would ever get the house out of his blood.

“A place you know?” asked the man to whom he had been talking, as Ben turned round and sat back again in the carriage.

“Yes, pretty well. I’ve never been there, actually.”

The man looked uncomprehending, and went back to his impressions of John Foster Dulles, to which Ben gave only half an ear.

Will I ever go there? I must go there some day. It will spoil it, of course. The fascination will fade like a mirage, and it will be just a house with people doing ordinary things and dogs’ hairs on the furniture. But I want to know.

No chance that the father might be a retired naval officer. He had been around too consistently for as long as Ben could remember. He had only seen the son once in the last two years, getting out of the car with his plump wife. The car did not look like anything you might see parked in the dockyard at Portsmouth. He might be in the Air Force, though. Ben could trespass on the group-captain’s field and get off the train, at Easter perhaps, when the son would come home, to try to interest him in a little investment.

The man who hated Dulles got out at Winchester and Ben sat alone in the carriage with the morning paper still unread on the seat beside him. If he began to make the kind of money Mr Beckett promised him, would he marry Rose? Would she marry him? He would have to be away a great deal, and she would be free to go on acting for as long as the public could stand her.

It would be the kind of marriage she had been almost prepared to make when he was still in the Navy. They could have a house in the country, not too far from London. A reliable couple to look after things and keep Amy happy. There could be a pony, dogs, a house in a tree. Their friends would be the sort of people like the family who lived in the house by the railway. They might even take a house in that neighbourhood, and their friends could actually be that family. Rose would not like them, but she would still have her London crowd, the television people, and if she pulled off this stage part, people from the theatre too. She could have them down for week-ends, and they could stand about in pea-green sports jackets, drinking cocktails before lunch and making witty jokes about Ben’s neighbours, and Ben would suffer them courteously and pour more drinks, knowing who his real friends were.

Mr Beckett spent most of his time in what was known as the Back Office, where the foreign investments were handled, and a book-keeper looked after the accounts of the Services Investment Association.

Cheques and cash received by Mr Peale were taken either by him or Mitzi to the Back Office, which was only a few streets away, somewhere off the Euston Road. Ben offered once or twice to take the money round for them, to see if they trusted him with it, but apparently they did not, for Mr Peale made some excuse for wanting to go there himself, and so Ben never found out what the Back Office was like.

Jimmy Peale was astute enough, but Jake Beckett was clearly the brains of the organization, and the Back Office was where most of the serious work was done. The Front Office, with its luxurious carpet and its big windows opening on to the sooty trees of a Bloomsbury square, was not much more than a reception-room, designed to please the eye and soothe the mind with the tangible evidence of the S.I.A.’s prosperity.

Jimmy was a kind of front man, a liaison officer between the field and headquarters, and he did not allow his job to tax him unduly. He was never in the office before ten, never took less than an hour and a half for lunch, and was invariably gone by four. He handled the correspondence, dealt with callers, either reassuringly, persuasively or sympathetically, according to their requirements, held long telephones with the group-captain, who was reaping a fair harvest among the airmen at Farnborough, and filled in his spare time training Ben to reap a similar harvest among the personnel of the Royal Navy.

Mitzi filed her nails, read library books, ate apples and toffees, and occasionally typed letters and took a little slapdash dictation, using a code she had evolved after two weeks’ stenography at a night school, which looked more like kindergarten pictures than shorthand symbols. It was soon clear to Ben, and indeed nobody made a secret of it, that Mitzi held the job more for
what she did for Mr Beckett outside the office than within.

She was a costive, pouting girl with a good opinion of herself that was not justifiable to the dispassionate observer. When Jimmy Peale was talking to a client, or had slipped off to the Back Office, and Ben had nothing to do, he would sit with Mitzi and she would tell him: “This place smells. I wouldn’t be here at all if I hadn’t had such bad luck.”

She had trained for six months at a dramatic school, but had to leave because of jealousy among the students. “I was getting the best parts,” she said smugly. “I was good enough for them too. It had nothing to do with one of the instructors being in love with me, although he was, poor man. He wanted to leave too when I left.”

Mitzi was always talking about men who were or had been wildly in love with her. Ben was the captive audience for long sagas of dubious passion, which Mitzi recounted with a hypnotized look in her small, muddy eyes, and the same relish with which she sucked at caramels. She told Ben that Jake Beckett had a wife and three children whom he would eventually leave for love of her, although it was obvious from their vulgarly casual attitude towards each other that there was nothing more between Mitzi and Jake than a convenient arrangement which suited them both for the moment. Jake would drop Mitzi any time he felt like it, and Mitzi would probably drop Jake any time she could get her graceless hands on another man.

She suggested once when they were alone in the office that Ben might be that other man. She was quite crude about it, so he was able to be quite crude about turning down the offer. After that, they understood each other and became rather good friends.

Mitzi helped Jimmy with Ben’s training, and the three of them had more fun over it than Ben had expected would come an embryo salesman’s way. Mitzi sublimated her theatrical frustrations by acting as the guinea-pig for Ben’s experimental sales talks, using her experience from the dramatic school, which perhaps had lost an actress when it slung her out. Playing every variety of naval wife, her sluggish personality came alive at last. Once, acting the part of the starry-eyed bride of a sub-lieutenant, she was almost beautiful, but only for a moment. Dropping her role to swear at Jimmy with a man’s epithets for interrupting her big speech, she was just Mitzi again.