Man Overboard (26 page)

The story conference was not held the next day and Ben never went to the film studio, since the war film was shelved because of objections from the War Office, but Ben and Amy stayed on in Hampstead. Amy was very happy, and Ben waited, with slightly less than his usual optimism, for something to turn up, and thought that she might as well stay happy until it did.

Glenville Roberts received many letters: from fans and amateur critics and cranks, from people who wanted something, and people who did not know what they wanted, but wrote just the same, querulously, as if the misdirection of their lives were vaguely Glenn’s fault.

The choicer letters were answered by Glenn, dictating to Priscilla. Ben answered the others, for Priscilla was not allowed to compose. Ben dealt with the eccentrics and the beggars and the pests and the people who wanted Glenn to read their manuscripts, or wanted to sell him their life stories as material for a book.

One of the biggest pests was a girl called Esther Lovelace, who wrote about twice a week, crying: “Oh, Mr. Roberts, I must see you. It’s urgent. Please let me come and see you.
You will never regret it.”

Ben fobbed her off. He had to answer her letters, because the girl sounded so unbalanced that Glenn was afraid that she might commit suicide if he ignored her completely, and he might be involved at the inquest. There had been a case like that once, and because of the man’s reputation, no one had believed that he had never laid eyes or hands on the dead woman.

One Friday, Glenn was working furiously against time to finish his Sunday article. He had known the subject all week, but he never wrote it until the last minute, and Ben had to take it to the newspaper office, since it was always too late to post it. Ben had already answered the telephone three times to the impatient Features Editor, and finally he went in to Glenn to tell him that a messenger from the newspaper had roared up the street on a motor bicycle and was waiting in the hall.

“Tell the bastard to go away. Or give him a beer, or something.”

“He doesn’t want anything, and he’s been told not to leave here without the copy. He’s sitting in the hall with a crash helmet in his lap.”

Glenn groaned. “How anyone is expected to write under these conditions. … Get out of here, Ben. Bring me some coffee. No,
make it a whisky. Tell Nellie to stop that infernal vacuum cleaner. Tell Amy to stop playing the piano. Don’t they care if I go insane?”

By the time the article was finished, Amy and the cleaning woman were sulking, because they could not find anything to do that did not make Glenn shout for quiet, Mrs Bowstrom was angry because the lunch was spoiled, and the messenger had made several scratches in the polished wood of the hall floor by scraping his boots backwards and forwards. Priscilla was in tears because Glenn had flustered her into putting a carbon into the typewriter the wrong way round, and she had had to type the last page again with Glenn standing over her and swearing.

Everyone was upset, including the messenger, who had missed his lunch-hour. As Ben shut the front door behind him, Glenn came out of his room, with his hair on end and the top button of his trousers undone, and a girl in a green knitted cap came out of the little washroom under the curving stairs.

“How do you do?” She held out her hand to Glenn. “I’m Esther Lovelace.”

Glenn did not shake hands. “Why did you let her come here?” he asked Ben.

“Oh, he didn’t.” The girl, who was small and plump, with a ladder in her stocking and strawberry lipstick smudged on her teeth, stood herself right in front of Glenn and looked up at him adoringly. “The man on the motor cycle let me in. I’d been watching from the garden of the empty house across the road. I often do that, to see you come out or go in.” She giggled. “But suddenly today seemed like my lucky day—funny, on a Friday, when you think of it—so I knocked on the door and the man let me in and I hid in the w.c.”

“There’s a public convenience a hundred yards away.” Glenn turned to go up the stairs, but she skipped before him and stood on the bottom step, blocking his way with one hand on the wall and the other on the banister.

“You are awful, Mr Roberts.” She giggled again. She had a simpering, freckled face with a sharp nose and swimmy brown eyes set too close together. “I came to see you. Your letters have been so kind.”

Glenn glanced back and made a face at Ben.

“I can understand why you wouldn’t give me an appointment
to see you. You’re afraid of your power over women. So am I.” Her hand on the banister trembled. “But I came just the same, and so here I am, and now I’ve seen you in the flesh.”

“How do you like me?” Glenn became aware that the top of his trousers was unfastened, but did not bother to do anything about it. Once he had undone the button and let his stomach go, it was quite a struggle to do it up.

“I’m in love with you,” Esther Lovelace said. “You know that.”

“Get her out of here, Ben.” Glenn pushed her aside quite roughly and went up the stairs.

Miss Lovelace stepped down into the hall like a sleepwalker, with her eyes swooning into space. “He touched me,” she whispered. “He touched me for the first time. I shall never forget this moment.”

She went out of the house without protest, and Ben saw her swaying away down the street, veering from side to side of the pavement. At the corner, she stepped off the kerb without looking, unaware of the car which swerved and hooted and almost killed her.

“Good thing if it had,” Glenn said, as they discussed her over lunch. “Crazy woman. If you ever let her in here again, Ben, I’ll shoot you. Amy, you remember that too. Don’t ever open the door to a girl who looks like a lovesick ant-eater. If she telephones, I’m dead, or gone to Australia.”

“I don’t think she’ll come again,” Ben said. “She’s had her moment.”

“She will,” Amy said, without looking up from her food, “and Glenn will see her.”

“I will not.”

“I bet you do. It’s terribly flattering to have someone madly in love with you like that. You are a bit flattered, aren’t you?”

“Precocious brat.” Glenn made a face at her. “I am not.”

But he was, and he did see Esther Lovelace again. One afternoon when Ben had been out, he came in to find the green knitted cap and the limp fawn coat lying on a chair in the hall. The drawing-room door was shut.

Ben shrugged his shoulders and went upstairs. Presently the front door banged, and looking out of the window, he saw Esther Lovelace tacking away down the street on her cider-bottle legs.

When Amy and Susanna came in from school, they ran upstairs
to find him. “Who’s been here?” they asked. “Glenn’s asleep on the sofa in the drawing-room, and he’s got pink lipstick on his face.”

Esther Lovelace did not come to the house again. She did not telephone, and there were no more letters. When Ben asked Glenville how he had managed to discard her, Glenn smiled in a foxy way and said: “It’s easy if you know how. Don’t forget I’ve had plenty of practice in shaking off infatuated women.”

“You haven’t managed to shake off Clara,” Ben said. “She still wants to marry you.”

Clara had given him permission to say this if the occasion arose. She was a twice-divorced woman who had never been beautiful, even when she was on the right side of forty, and her pride, she said, had disappeared along with her second husband.

“Clara has her uses,” Glenn said. “All women do.” Priscilla came into the room at that moment, and he made a tigerish face at her. She dropped her pencil and sat down with a bump and began to flutter through the leaves of her note-pad in a panic.

Ben was glad to be free of the hysterical letters from Esther Lovelace. He wondered how Glenn had managed to kiss her and get rid of her at the same time, but Priscilla told him that one evening on her way to an Indian restaurant in Soho with her father, who had to have curry once a week, she had seen Glenn coming out of a cinema with “a poor-looking girl. Not his type at all. What do you make of that?”

“The same as you do, I suppose.”

“Oh, Commander Francis,” said Priscilla, who could not call anyone by their Christian name in less than a year’s acquaintance, “you never used to speak to me like that when you first came. I’m afraid you’ve lived too long with Mr Roberts.”

“You’re right there.”

“You’re not leaving?” Priscilla’s watery eyes were alarmed. “I’d hate to have to get used to someone new.”

“I can’t stay here for ever. This isn’t what I left the Navy for.”

“Mr Roberts won’t let you go,” Priscilla said, pursing her small mouth. “If there’s any changes to be made, he likes to be the one who thinks of it. He was always complaining about Mrs Stokes—she was the daily woman we had before Nellie—and yet when she walked out because of the mess he made of his bathroom, you should have heard him carry on.”

“If I’ve gone, I shan’t hear it.”

“No, but I shall.” Priscilla blinked at the thought of it. “And where will you go, you and Amy? It’s not easy to find a job when you’ve a child of your own. My sister Margaret———”

Priscilla had three sisters and could produce one to illustrate almost any situation. To halt the saga of the widowed Margaret, Ben said: “We’ll find something. We’ll go hop-picking. Join a circus, perhaps.”

“Would you really?” Priscilla took this literally. “I wish I had your nerve.”

Where would Ben and Amy go? It was a question to which Ben gave a lot of inconclusive thought. Sitting in the front of the church at Geneva’s wedding, his mind wandered away from the service to worry over the future of the child beside him, who sat bolt upright with her gloved hands clasped on the front of the pew, watching her grandmother with shining eyes. She and Susanna would be involved with weddings for many days after this.

Last night Ben and Amy had had dinner at Geneva’s flat, without the Major, just like old times. Under the influence of the champagne Ben had brought, Geneva had beaded her mascara with a small dribble of tears and said how happy she was that they were so comfortably settled with Glenville Roberts.

“I would never go through with this otherwise,” she had said. “I’m really fond of my old soak, apart from wanting so desperately to get rid of the name of Hogg, but you two come first with me, always.”

But Ben and Amy were fixed up satisfactorily, as far as she knew, and so she was going through with it, in a purple suit and hat, because purple was her best colour, although the Major had complained that she would look more like a funeral than a wedding.

“Mourning for my lost youth,” she told Ben, gripping his arm very tightly as they came into the church. “But I feel a lot younger today than the day I married Arthur.” She straightened the little spotted veil over her eyes and advanced bravely up the aisle in incredible heels to where the Major, splendid in sponge-bag trousers and lavender waistcoat, awaited her with braced legs, sober as a judge.

Geneva had had him watched all morning by the best man. Although the best man had neglected to watch himself, and was
swaying gently from foot to foot, the Major stood as if he were on the parade ground, and rapped out his responses with all the pride which filled his sentimental old heart because he and Geneva were going to share the last chapter of their lives together.

The following week, Ben went after a job in the personnel division of a firm near Oxford, and failed to get it because another naval officer was in ahead of him. Returning to London, he found Glenn and several friends having drinks and sandwiches before going on to a first night.

“Where have you been?” Glenn asked.

“It’s my day off.” Ben was tired from the train journey on top of the disappointment. “I don’t have to tell you where I’ve been.”

Clara, who was always ready to fill an awkward silence, laughed a little too shrilly, and the others pretended to talk again.

“Have a drink,” Glenn said, with a touch of condescension. “You’ll feel better.”

“No, thanks. I’m going up to see Amy.”

“She’s not here. She’s spending the week-end with Susanna.”

“I didn’t tell her she could go.”

“Oh, that’s all right.” Glenn waved a sandwich at him. “I told her.”

“Since when———” Ben saw the interested faces, amused at the sight of a row brewing between Glenn and his sailor. He shut his mouth and went out of the room.

When the party had gone, with a lot of noise in the street about who was going in whose car, Ben came downstairs again and finished what was left in the cocktail shaker. He was furious with Glenn. Whose child was it, anyway? He remembered all the times when Glenn had sided with Amy in some small dispute with her father, flattering her, joking with her when it was something that should be discussed seriously, trying to make Ben look like a kill-joy parent.

Tomorrow he would inform him who was going to run Amy’s life, and in terms that Glenn would understand. He thought of the night when he had almost hit him with the thermos flask, and felt a sensation in his hands that told him it might be a very satisfying experience to take a poke at Glenville Roberts.

Mrs Bowstrom had gone home, so Ben found a cold leg of
chicken and was gnawing at it thoughtfully, standing by the kitchen table, when the front door-bell shrilled on the wall above his head.

Wiping his mouth and his hands, Ben went to open the door, and found Esther Lovelace with a pictorial scarf of London over her head and her soggy eyes full of tears, which spilled over as soon as he spoke to her and ran down the channels between her long nose and her freckled cheeks.

Ben did not want to bring her in, but he could not leave her crying on the step. “Here, now.” He guided her into the drawing-room. “This won’t do. Take off your coat and tell me what’s the matter.”

She was too distraught to take off her coat or her scarf, on which a crude representation of Big Ben stuck out in a peak at the back of her head. She sat hunched-up on a footstool, looking like a refugee, and cried in a very ugly way, with words wailing out in half-coherent bursts through a wet, square mouth.

The old, familiar story. Ben had heard it once or twice from his crew’s pick-ups, but he had never had it told to him by a fat, hysterical girl in a bunched-up raincoat and blunt-toed shoes, whose abandoned bawling was more childish than tragic.