Man Overboard (17 page)

The exhausted Jimmy Peale also woke to a livelier show of spirit during these enthralling playlets. His comfortable seat assumed the aspect of a folding canvas chair with a film director’s name stencilled across the back. From the unsuspected labyrinths of his ninepin head he produced an assortment of characters for Ben to practise on.

“You’re an engine-room artificer’s wife in a pre-fab at Weymouth,” he would tell Mitzi. “You’ve got three small children and you’ve lost your figure and you’re trying to cook a meal and keep the baby out of the coal-scuttle and you haven’t any time for Ben. Got that, everybody?”

Mitzi took up her stand by Jake’s desk, as if she were stirring saucepans. Jimmy leaned back in his chair with his eyes narrowed and his hands folded on his stomach, and Ben went outside the door and tried to imagine himself coming up a garden cinder path.

“Action!” Jimmy called.

Ben knocked on the door, and Mitzi opened it, pushing back her hair with her wrist, as if she had flour on her hands.

“Mrs Bloggs?” Ben asked in a courteous way, neither too deferential nor too demanding.

“That’s right.” Mitzi slapped backwards at an imaginary child.

“Mrs Bloggs,” Ben said, “I have come to help you.”

“If you’re from the Seventh Day Adventists, we’re Chapel,” Mitzi said and prepared to shut the door.

Ben put his foot in the crack and kept on talking. It didn’t matter much what you said in the face of a closing door, Jimmy had told him, as long as you kept the words coming fast enough to hold the woman’s curiosity. He dried up before long and stood helplessly with his foot in the doorway, his salesman’s smile replaced by his normal grin.

“Do I let him in this time?” Mitzi asked.

“I think so. He looks rather cute,” Jimmy said, so Mitzi heard milk boiling over on the stove and let go of the door, and Ben came in, patting the heads of the older children and waggling his finger at the baby.

Mrs Bloggs was back at the stove, stirring vigorously, with an unapproachable back.

“Won’t she ask me to sit down?”

“Later she may,” Jimmy said. “Not till she knows what you
want. There isn’t anywhere to sit, anyway. There’s a cat on one chair and a pile of wet nappies on the other, and the kiddies have the others upside down to play Daddy’s boat.”

Ben was stranded in the middle of the floor. He set down his brief-case on the ironing board, put his hands in his pockets, took them out again and scratched his head.

“You’ll have to let that hair grow, Ben,” Jimmy observed. “It looks too military for the family’s best friend.”

“It looks like hell if it’s any longer,” Ben said. “Women don’t mind it. They say it’s like stroking beaver’s fur.”

“Enchanting.” Jimmy closed his eyes. “Go on.”

Ben cleared his throat. “I’ve come to help you,” he told Mitzi’s back.

Jimmy clicked his teeth. “You’re slipping. When you repeat yourself do it in different words.” “Can I light a cigarette?” “Not in her kitchen.”

Ben approached the stove. “Give me a break, Mitzi,” he said. “I’m stuck.”

“All right, I will this time, But Mrs Bloggs won’t.” She turned round and asked him: “You’re selling something, aren’t you? Well, you’ve come to the wrong house. We’ve got the telly, and Dad doesn’t hold with the
Encyclopaedia Britannica”

“You’re right,” Ben said, gathering strength, “I am selling something. But it’s something that no one has ever tried to sell you before, believe me, dear lady. Dear lady… too much?”

“Too much,” Jimmy said, without opening his eyes.

“What I have for sale,” Ben ploughed on, “is happiness. The happiness of your future, Mrs Bloggs. I want to make sure that the years ahead for you and your family shall be secure and free from worry.”

“Who are you kidding?” Mitzi asked, putting her hands on her prominent hips. “With the price of everything going up, and Dad not knowing if he’ll be able to sign on again at the end of his time and that child’s chest—cough, cough, cough, every winter———”

“You could use some more money, couldn’t you?” Ben came out with it boldly. “You have some savings no doubt. I can tell from your home what an able and prudent manager you are.”

“The gas has just gone out,” Mitzi said unco-operatively. “They threatened they’d cut me off if I didn’t pay this month.”

“You have some savings, damn it,” Ben insisted. Then more smoothly: “I am here to show you how you can make your savings work for you, how you can be sure that there will always be money when you need it badly. Suppose,” he coughed discreetly, “something were to happen to Mr Bloggs. Unthinkable, of course, but our lives are, after all, but a brief span snatched from the tentacles of death———”

“Not that word,” Jimmy said sharply.

“Sorry. From the tentacles of chance. Surely his last thought would be: ‘Thank God they’re provided for’.”

Mitzi snorted. “Don’t make me laugh. That time the motorbike skidded with us all on the Portsmouth road, his last words were: ‘We’ll never make it before the pubs close.’ Look, Mr Whatsit, if it’s insurance you’re selling, I’ve got no money to spare for that out of the housekeeping.”

“Yes, it is insurance, in a way, but there are no premiums. A free insurance policy is only one of the benefits I’m offering you. Would you like to hear the rest?”

“I don’t mind.” Mitzi wiped her hands on her skirt. “Eric! You stop that screaming and let’s hear what the gentleman has to say.”

Sometimes Mitzi would allow Ben to persuade her into an investment. Sometimes she held out, and Ben would have to leave the house, being regretful, but still polite, lest the word got round the neighbours that he was no gentleman. Sometimes they all three collapsed in laughter and decided to chuck it and go out for a drink.

So sluggish as her normal self, Mitzi unearthed a surprising scope and invention when she was acting. Sometimes she was a push-over, sometimes a stubborn wife, sometimes blankly stupid, sometimes craftily one step ahead of Ben in her conviction that he was a swindler.

As the lessons went on, half in earnest and half in laughter, Ben began to find his part getting easier. Ever since he left the Navy, he had been discovering how many things he could not do. Here was something he might be able to do at last.

From time to time, Jake Beckett would come round from the Back Office to see how Ben was getting on, and they would stage a little scene for his benefit.

Their favourite was the Admiral’s widow. Lady Arbuthnot, with the spaniels and the budgerigars, who made Ben stay to tea
and flirted decrepitly with him over the madeira cake. She had tried to seduce him once, but that was only Mitzi reverting to type, and Jake had slapped her back to the Maltese lace tablecloth and the bird-seed, “and while you’re up, Commander Francis, would you just turn his cuttlefish round so that he can nibble at the clean side.”

It was more play than work, although Peale and Beckett insisted that it was deadly serious. Ben had a good time, but he was not looking forward to the day when the fun would be over and he would have to go out by himself and tackle the real women, who would give him all the wrong answers and get him as confused in his sales talk as an actor suddenly given a cue from the next act.

When Mr Beckett announced that he was ready to try his luck in the field, Ben did not know whether to be glad or sorry. He was proud of his progress, and the solemn removal of two of the aeroplane pictures, to be replaced by impressions of destroyers surging bows-under through tumultuous seas, was a salesman’s graduating ceremony.

He would miss the lessons though. He and Jimmy Peale and Mitzi had been through so many Mrs Bloggs and Lady Arbuth-nots together that they were as companionable as the cast of a play after a year’s run. It had been fun, but he could not stay in the nursery for ever. Now he must venture out to prove himself against the world. It was a challenge, and something of an adventure after all to go into the houses of strangers and see how they lived and how they would treat him.

It was not going to be easy. He would have to telephone Jimmy every day to report progress, and he had a feeling that if he did not keep coming up with results, the atmosphere in the front office of the Services Investment Association was not going to be so genial.

When he told Rose that he was off to Rosyth to begin work in earnest, she gave him a rabbit’s-foot charm and promised to be a good girl until he returned.

“When you come back, let’s talk some more about getting married,” she said cosily. It was a subject she enjoyed, since it was purely personal, and no harm could come of it, because they never reached a decision.

She kissed Ben tenderly, and waved him down the corridor towards the lift with a touching little sideways gesture of her
hand, as if she were a young bride watching her man stride off to conquer the world via the eight-fifteen.

As he turned the corner at the end of the corridor, Rose dropped the lonely bride and called rather raucously after him: “I hope you make a million”

Ben turned back to give her the victory sign, but the door of her flat had banged shut.

He had not admitted to Rose that he was nervous, and he would not show it to Amy and Geneva, who believed in him. He had been practising on them at home, but it did not work as well as with Mitzi, because Geneva was too prejudiced in his favour, too ready to fall in with anything he suggested. After he had practised one of his sales talks on her at breakfast when Amy had left for school, it was all he could do to stop Geneva going round to the bank without doing her face and drawing out all her money.

“Why not?” she protested. “If you don’t think it’s safe, you shouldn’t be in it.”

“I am in it,” Ben said seriously, “and I do think it’s safe. I have to believe that if I’m ever going to sell the idea to anyone.”

“Why not to me, then?”

“I don’t know. You haven’t got enough, anyway, to make a worthwhile profit, and you need every penny of it. You shouldn’t gamble with it.”

“I thought you said the S.I.A. was as safe as a bank. Even if it was gambling, I wouldn’t mind having a little flutter on it. Ben———” She lifted her creased face, with pins sticking out from all the little ginger curls. “I’ve been trying to tell you this for two days, but I was afraid you’d think me an old fool. It’s possible that I shall be a little better oiled in the near future.”

“Geneva, that’s wonderful! Has somebody died?”

“It’s the Major.”

“Good God—the poor old chap. Why didn’t you tell me? What happened—a stroke?”

Geneva shook her head, watching his face cautiously. “He wants me to marry him. Oh, Ben———” She reached her skinny, freckled arm across the table to him. “Please, please don’t laugh. I know it’s funny, and everyone will think so.”

“I don’t,” Ben said. “I think it’s a damn good idea. I can’t think why I didn’t think of it myself.”

“Do you really?” Geneva’s face lit up. “Oh, I am relieved. I
was afraid you’d be horrified at the idea of me throwing in my lot with such a shocking old character. But he was sober when he suggested it, honestly.”

“I believe it. He could never have such a good idea when he was drunk.” Ben went round the table to kiss Geneva on top of the hairpins. She did not like to be kissed before she had done her face. “The more I think of it, the better I like it.”

“You swear it?” Geneva twisted her neck to stare up at him to see if he was serious. “I shouldn’t thing of it really, I suppose. Poor William must be whirling in his grave. He never could stand Hubert. He is an old rogue, I know, but I’m fond of him in an exasperated way. And I get lonely, you know, at times. I’ve got friends, and I’ve got my darling Amy, but it isn’t the same as having a man, even a man like the Major. I’ve had you, but now that you’re going to be in high finance, with everything you touch turning to gold, you’ll want to go away and get a place of your own, and you’ll want Amy with you. That’s what brought this whole thing up, as a matter of fact. I was telling the old buffer how I’d feel without you, and he takes a deep breath and blows out his cheeks and says: ‘Why not let me move in?’ ‘As a lodger?’ I said. ‘No, madam,’ he replies, as gallant as you please. ‘As your husband’.”

Ben went away to take a bath. While he was soaking in the old-fashioned boarded tub, he thought about himself and Amy and where they would live. They would rent somewhere at first, and later, if things went well, they could think of buying. Amy would have to stay with Geneva for a while until Ben got into his stride, but he could not leave her in the flat after the shocking old character moved in.

And Rose? Now he would have to decide about her, and she would have to stop being cosy and make up her mind about him. “Let’s talk about getting married when you come back,” she had said. But this time he would pin her down to talk about it in earnest

When he came home that evening, he went into Amy’s bedroom, where she was standing up doing homework, with the exercise-book spread out among the china animals and photographs on her dressing-table.

“You can’t work like that,” Ben said. “What’s wrong with the dining-room?”

“Geneva keeps talking to me. She’s so excited. And she wants to sing.”

“You know why?”

Amy nodded, drawing a line neatly under something she had written. She was wearing blue jeans and a cotton shirt. Her legs looked very long and her waist and back looked frail, with the shoulder-blades sticking out under her plaits.

“What do you think of the news?” Ben asked, sitting down on the bed.

Amy turned round to see from his face what she ought to think of it. He smiled at her, so she said: “I think it’s smashing. She told me I could be a bridesmaid. And she told me another thing. She said that you and I were going away to live in a place of our own. Is that true. Daddy?”

“I may be able to swing it pretty soon. You and I should be together, although Grandma would love to keep you, of course.” He wanted Amy to think that she was a valued possession, wanted by everybody. He was not going to have her feeling like a dependent child for whom suitable arrangements must be made so that the grown-ups could do what they wanted.

“I’d rather come with you.” Amy sat on the bed and ran her hand over his hair. “Perhaps we could still have the flat over the garage, and Grandma could come there when she wanted a rest from the Major. He’s better in small doses. When she first told me about him—ages before she told you, by the way, but she made me promise not to let on—I was terrified that I might have to go to Southampton. I’m sorry. It’s your mother and father, I know, but you do understand. Oh, Daddy!” She jumped off the bed and whirled round excitedly with her hands in her pockets, kicking out at the furniture. “Where shall we live? Could we have a garden? Will I go to a different school? That would suit me down to the ground. I’m going to be in terrible straits with the geometry exams. Miss Harbutt says I’ll never pass, but it would be a sell for her if I could leave before she had the chance of being right.”