Man Overboard (25 page)

But he had fallen in love with the house. That was what he told people. He had first seen it by mistake, after losing his way on the drive back to town from seeing off a Very Dear Friend on the
Queen Elizabeth
.

The phrasing was typical of Glenn. All his friends were Dear Friends, but a Very Dear Friend implied some superb and perhaps famous woman whose relationship with him had been too intimate to reveal her name. He had still not arrived quite far enough to
consider it immaterial to the story whom he was seeing off, and whether they sailed in the
Queen Elizabeth
or in a cattle boat.

Before his listeners could reflect on this, they were hearing that the house had struck an answering chord in Glenn’s heart as soon as he saw its dark-tiled roof rising beyond the little copse. Here he would be able to find the solitude and calm of spirit in which to finish the book which meant everything to him, his two-hundred-thousand-word novel about pre-war Berlin.

He was not particularly interested in Germany, either before or since the war, but he had chosen the locale and the period because of its sexual decadence, which would give unlimited scope for those peculiar talents for which a large section of his public valued him.

Ben had been put to work on research, which was one of the duties which had bogged down the hapless Priscilla, but Glenn had not yet got further than making notes for the first two chapters. Every time he decided to start work on the novel in earnest, a magazine editor or a film producer would come up with a tempting offer which would mean a quicker return for far less work.

Meanwhile the house was being converted from its original design as a farmer’s home to a country place fit for Glenn to live and work in. He never had time to visit the house and study progress, so one of Ben’s duties was to make frequent trips to the country to talk to the architect and the builder and the plumber and the electrician and the landscape gardener, and make decisions about wallpaper and kitchen flooring.

“I leave it to you,” said Glenn, who wanted to impress with the house, but did not want to bother with it until it was finished. “You are a man of taste.”

Ben knew that he was not. His lack of eye for variations on the spectrum amounted almost to colour blindness, but the local interior decorator was making all the decisions about colour schemes and curtains. Ben merely had to give the official approval, because the decorator, who knew that Glenn was unpredictable, did not want to find himself involved later in a lawsuit for having done everything wrong.

The house was between Winchester and Andover. Glenn usually wanted the car for himself, so it was Waterloo Station again, and the London to Southampton line which Ben knew so
well. His life seemed to be inextricably bound up with Waterloo and the Southern Railway.

At least once a week, at the request of the decorator, or of the architect or the builder who were infected with his caution, Ben would take a day trip to the country and snatch two glimpses of the red-brick house by the railway from whose influence it seemed that he would never free himself.

In the Easter holidays, he took Amy with him, and often Susanna as well, for their friendship did not end with the end of term. They would take sandwiches and fruit and chocolate, and picnic in the unfinished house, or in the garden if the day was warm enough.

“This is where we’re going to live,” Amy told Susanna, as they sat on a broken garden bench in a sunny alcove at the side of the house. “Glenn will be here most of the time.”

“Steady on,” Ben said. “I have a feeling we’ll still be in London most of the time.”

“Oh, no. He’ll be here. He told me. And Mr Garrett is going to let me keep a pony in with his cows, and I shall go to school in Winchester. We’ll invite you to stay, of course, Sue, or you could come and live here all the time and go to school with me, if your parents would let you.”

“They would.” Susanna rolled off the bench and lay on her back in the uncut grass of the lawn. “They’d be glad to get rid of me. They never wanted me in the first place. I’m not their child, you know. I was left on their doorstep—the back one—on a wild December night.” She rolled on to her face and beat on the ground with her clenched fists. “How many, many times they’ve regretted their kind impulse to take me in!”

“Susanna!” Ben said, wondering, as he did occasionally, whether this was the right friend for Amy. “You know that isn’t true.”

“Of course it isn’t,” Amy said impatiently, “but she’s a foundling just now. Don’t spoil it. This evening—not now, because we’re going to help Mr Garrett collect the eggs before the taxi comes—I’m going to be the rich benefactress who rescues her from her cruel foster-parents and gives her the first real happiness she has ever known.”

Ben had always talked to Amy about the house by the railway, and they had watched it cheek to cheek from the train window
whenever they travelled to Southampton together. The saga of the family who lived there had captured her fancy much as his, and on these trips to Glenn’s farmhouse, both the girls were avid for the glimpses of the house and the chance to observe some new detail, commonplace in itself, but fascinating when their imaginations had trimmed it.

Once they saw the son’s wife playing with a toppling baby outside the back door.

“She’s left her husband,” Amy declared. “I always said it wouldn’t last.” Mrs Bowstrom had been saying that about her niece.

“Nonsense,” Ben said. “She’s just there for the holidays. He has to stay in town, because of his work, but he comes down at weekends.”

“Let’s go to the farm next Saturday and see,” Susanna suggested.

“That wouldn’t prove a thing,” Amy said. “He’d be indoors. He’s the indoor type.”

“But we’d see his car in the trailer shed. There isn’t room for more than one in the garage,” said Ben, whom the years had made familiar with these details. “In any case, if she’d left him, he might be there, but not her. She’d be with her own parents.”

“In Guildford. It was a local match. Yes, I hadn’t thought of that. But perhaps,” said Amy, who wanted the drama of a broken marriage, “she likes his parents best, and they’ve taken her side.”

The daffodils were out in the corner of the garden where the tree-house was. Once they saw the mother picking them. She was wearing a tweed skirt, perfectly square, and what was either a riding coat or a man’s sports jacket. As the train went by above her, she straightened up to stare at it, the bunch of daffodils clutched awkwardly upside down in her hand like a club.

“She won’t arrange them, of course,” Amy said, as they all settled back into their seats with a sigh because it was over so quickly. “The younger daughter, the pretty one, will do that. She’s clever with her hands.”

“And artistic too,” Ben said. “She paints, and has a potter’s wheel in the bathroom. There’s nothing that girl can’t do.”

“Daddy’s in love with her,” Amy explained to Susanna, to the amused interest of a woman in the other corner of the carriage, who did not look as grand as her suitcase, which was stamped:
“E. de la R. H.”. “Perhaps when we live at the farm, Daddy, we could get to know them somehow. It can’t be too far away. We could give a hunt ball, or something, and invite them, and then you can marry her, now that you———”

She coughed and looked down at her hands. Ben had told her that he was not going to marry Rose Kelly or ever see her again, and she had received the news in careful silence, and had never mentioned Rose since.

The woman in the corner, who had been smiling to herself in a comfortable way, got up and turned her smile to Ben. “I’m going to have lunch,” she said. “If you’re going to the dining-car, you’d better go now, because it fills up after the next stop. I know this line.”

“Oh, so do we,” Amy said. “But we never go to the dining-car. It’s too expensive. We’re going to have a picnic.”

“What fun,” the woman said. “I wish I could join you.” She went out into the corridor and slid the door shut with a nod and a smile.

“Ernestine de la Rue Harrison,” Amy said at once. “I wonder where she lives?”

Glenville Roberts was idle about starting work, and would conjure up any excuse to postpone sitting down at his desk with the mug of sharpened pencils and the scribbling-pad from which it was poor Priscilla’s lot to decipher and translate into type his vile handwriting; but once he had forced himself to start, he went at it like a demon.

He had to, because he always left until the last minute any articles that had been commissioned. As the deadline approached, Glenn would utter an oath, take a stiff whisky and plunge into a fury of high-pressure creation, yelling at intervals for Ben to bring him nourishment, for he would not let Priscilla or Mrs Bowstrom into the room when he was working.

Sometimes he would hear the call to arms late in the evening, and he would turn any guests out of the house and sit up in a silk dressing-gown which the Very Dear Friend had sent him from Sulka in New York, writing far into the night.

He expected Ben to stay up as long as he did, or to get out of bed every time he shouted for coffee and sandwiches. One day, Ben bought a thermos flask, and the next time Glenn started
to attack his scribbling-pad at eleven o’clock at night, he made a great pile of sandwiches with Glenn’s special low-calorie bread, wrapped them in a plastic bag, filled the thermos with hot coffee and put the tray without a word on the corner of Glenn’s wide, chaotic desk.

Glenn stabbed at the end of a sentence, made a huge black question-mark, and crossed the whole thing out in the same movement. Straightening the silk-clad hump of his shoulders, he looked at the tray and then looked up at Ben.

“What’s this?” he asked. “Are you going out, or something? Don’t tell me you’re on with that Kelly bit again.”

“You know I’m not. Rose and I are through. She has a South American singer now. I saw a picture of him carrying the mink.”

“Poor sod. You were well out of that. I hope you’ve picked something a bit higher grade this time.”

“There’s no one. I’m not going out, Glenn. I’m going upstairs to bed.”

“And you don’t intend to get out of it. I see.” Glenn nodded at the tray. “Very ingenious. What’s in the sandwiches?”

“Ham and chicken.”

“Delicious.” He spoke so pleasantly that Ben was taken by surprise and caught the sandwiches full on the side of his face when Glenn threw them at him. “All right. Now pick them up.”

“I’ll be damned if I do.” Ben knocked some crumbs down from behind his ear to join the mess of bread and meat on the floor.

“Then you’ll have to make me some more.” Glenn picked up his pencil. “And when I ask for them, not just whenever it suits you to bring them.”

His heavy head looked threatening, but Ben clenched his fists along the sides of his legs and held his ground, and said: “What the hell do you think I am?”

“What the hell do you think I pay you for?” Glenn’s eyes flickered downwards for a moment to Ben’s hands to see if the crazy fool was going to hit him.

“God knows,” Ben said. “You could live without me, but you asked me to come.”

“And you jumped at it. I suppose now you’re going to tell me that you wish you’d stayed at the cafeteria.”

“Perhaps. At least no one ever threw food at me there.”

Glenn flung down his pencil, breaking the point, dumped his
elbows on the desk and ran his hands through his thick, untidy hair. “Come off it,” he groaned. “If you’re going to be dignified, it’s the last straw. I should have known better than to take on a brasshat—however tarnished. But I’m giving the orders now. You can get the hell out of here into the kitchen and make some more sandwiches, and then you can get the encyclopaedia and look up some dates on the Industrial Revolution. I’m going to need them before I’m through with this thing.”

“Yessir.” Ben knocked his heels to attention.

“I’m not laughing. And you can take that away and heave it.” Glenn jerked his head at the thermos. “Those things make coffee taste as if it came out of a sewer,”

Satisfied that he had put Ben in his place, he chose another pencil and began to write again, his cramped hand pushing the lead deep into the paper. Ben paused behind his back with the thermos, wondering whether he should hit him on the head with it. He probably would not even feel it through all that hair. Ben went out, his shoulders and neck and face hot and tingling with rage.

It was the first battle between him and Glenn, but by God, it was going to be the last. For two pins he would have woken Amy and walked out of the house; but Amy was ill with ‘flu and could not be moved. That was the way life was. There was always something like a child’s temperature or a flat tyre to spoil your big gestures.

The next morning, Ben kept out of the way, but Glenn sought him out and asked him: “Did you throw away that thermos?”

“No.” Ben did not commit his face either to sullenness or friendship. “I kept it for our picnics at the farm.”

“Good. I’ve changed my mind. I may use it at night after all. You’re planning to ask for your cards this morning, I suppose.”

“I was.” If Ben had heard from the Industrial Employment Analysts that his application form had been approved, he had been going to tell Glenn what he could do with his job. But there had been nothing for him in the morning mail.

“Hang on till tomorrow,” Glenn said. “I want you to come down to the film studio with me. We’re having a story conference on this war film they want to do, and there’s a chance I can get you the job of technical adviser on the naval side.”

Glenn went out to lunch and came home with a mammoth box
of chocolates for Amy and a silver cigarette lighter for her father. Ben would not take it, but Glenn dropped it into his pocket and said: “It’s your birthday present. I didn’t give you one.”

“I haven’t had a birthday.”

“You must have had one last year. Everybody does.” He continued to be very friendly towards Ben, and Ben thawed out to the conclusion that Glenn had only thrown things at him because he had been disturbed while he was working. Priscilla told him that he had once thrown an inkwell at her when she had interrupted his work, even though it was to tell him that the boiler chimney was on fire.