Man Overboard (27 page)

Where had it happened? “Not in here?” Ben remembered the girls’ description of Glenn asleep with the strawberry lipstick on his face, and felt that if Esther nodded he would jump up from the sofa and never be able to sit on it again.

“Oh, no.” Esther glanced at the sofa with almost as much aversion as Ben had thought of it. In her room. A furnished room near Shepherd’s Bush. “Twice. The second time, the landlady asked me to move. It hasn’t been easy to find another room I can afford.”

“Do you want money?”

She shook her head. Her tears were drying up to intermittent gasps and sobs.

“Then why are you telling me this?” There could only be one reason. “Are you———?” Ben cleared his throat. She did not help him, and he had to ask the whole question.

Sniffing, she shook her head violently again, and Big Ben twitched from side to side like a puppy’s tail.

“What’s the trouble then?” He got up and went to the other end of the room, not wanting to look any more at Esther’s ruined
and swollen face. “You can’t accuse Mr Roberts of assault. After all, you asked for it by coming here in the first place.”

“You mean he behaves like that with every woman who admires him?” She was either criminally naïve or criminally insincere.

“No, you idiot.” The answer might be Yes, but Ben supposed that he was paid to be loyal. “But you did, sort of, offer yourself.”

“Oh, I know I did.” She swivelled round on the stool to face him. “I’m not complaining about
that”.
For a moment, her face was transfixed in the blank rapture with which it had left the house the day Glenn had pushed her on the stairs. Then it crumpled, and if her tear ducts had not been milked dry, she would have cried again. “It’s just that ever since—what I told you —he won’t see me any more. I don’t know what to do. He threatened to set the police on me if I tried to get in touch with him.”

“Why don’t you leave him alone? If I was a girl—thank God I’m not—I wouldn’t let him make a fool out of me.” Ben locked his jaws to smother a yawn. He wished that she would go. He was sorry for her, because she was such a fool, but it was a bit much to be playing True Confessions at the end of a depressing day. Damn Glenn. Was this one of the duties of his private secretary —to clean up the debris of his careless follies?

“I can’t help it.” Esther stood up, her raincoat bulging above and below the twisted belt like bags of dirty laundry. “I’m in love with him. You know that. I was before, and I’m even more so now.” She came over and put her hand with the bitten nails on Ben’s sleeve, and pulled gently, like a child asking for attention. “You must help me. You seem so kind. The only one in this house who is. That typist. I’ve never seen her, but I know she’s in love with him too.”

“Priscilla? She hates him.”

“No, she doesn’t. He told me.” Since Esther came into the house she had not once mentioned Glenn by name. “She’d scratch my eyes out as soon as look at me. You’re the only one who can help me. It was you I came to see tonight. Not him. I’d been waiting in the garden across the road. I saw you come in, then I saw him go out with all his fine friends,” she put her long nose in the air, “and I knew it was my chance.”

We’ll have to have the street patrolled with police dogs. “Your chance for what?” Ben asked. “I can’t help you. I’m Mr Roberts’
secretary, not his conscience. Look here—have a drink, won’t you?” He needed one himself. He released his arm from her clinging hand and went to the glass trolley where the bottles were.

Esther refused as if he had offered her poison, but he poured a stiff whisky for himself, and downed half of it before she came over to put her damp little hand on him again.

“I want you to be my friend,” she said, turning her eyes up at him so that the whites showed. “I’d be a nice companion for you. He told me you haven’t got a girl. I dance nicely too. Classic, of course. I don’t jive, but I don’t suppose you do either.”

“Why not?” Ben resented the inference that he was out of date. “I only jive,” he lied.

“We needn’t go dancing then, but we could go out together. That way I’d still be near him. I knew a girl who was jilted by a man, so she took up with his best friend and got engaged to him, and that made the first man so jealous that he wanted her back. Do you see?”

Ben saw. He drank the rest of the whisky and picked up the decanter again. “Nothing doing,” he said.

“Why not? Don’t you like me?” She tilted her fleshy chin and stuck out her bosom at him. She had no idea how unattractive she was.

“Of course,” he said nervously. “You’re a very sweet girl, but you’re much too young for me—and for Mr Roberts too.”

“I’m old in experience—now,” Esther Lovelace said, dropping her voice darkly and moving closer.

Trapped in the corner between the trolley and the arm of the sofa, Ben tried to fight his way out by saying: “I have got a girl. I’m engaged. I’m going to be married.”

“Who to?” The brown eyes sharpened, moving closer together. “Not to Rose Kelly. I know that’s over. He told me about that too.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t tell you about—about Marigold then, since he’s told you so much about everyone else’s business.”

“I don’t believe you,” Esther said. “It’s not fair to tell me lies. I thought you were a naval officer, and so honourable.”

“I was. I’m not now.” Ben put down his drink. The whisky was not helping him. He wanted only to go to bed. “You’d better go,” he told her. “It’s late, and I’m tired.” He began to manœuvre her towards the door.

“I’m tired too,” she said listlessly. “I haven’t slept properly for days.” She dragged her feet, scuffing the juvenile shoes into the rug. Ben was beginning to feel sorry for her again, when in the hall, she grabbed his hand and squeezed it. “Meet me tomorrow night,” she whispered, although there was no one else in the house. “The tube station at Piccadilly. Seven o’clock.”

“No,” he said, and tried to pull his hand away, but she squeezed it tighter and said: “If you don’t come, I’ll come here. He can’t object if it’s you I’ve come to see.”

Ben jerked his hand away and let her go to the door by herself. As she opened it, she turned and said with a thin, smug smile, “Seven o’clock. I’ll be waiting. I have a feeling you and I are going to be very good friends.”

When the door had closed behind her, Ben dragged himself up the stairs. His head felt as if it were hollow, and inside it, a lonely voice was shouting: “Help!”

He did not tackle Glenn about Amy or about Esther Lovelace the next morning. He woke still tired, and he had not the strength to tell the man what he thought of him. Instead he announced that he was going to take next week’s day off today, and although Glenn refused, he walked out of the house and made for Waterloo Station.

It would mean a fight when he got back, but there would be a fight anyway, because he was going to tell Glenn that he was through. First, he was going down to Southampton to ask his mother if she would take Amy for a while.

Poor Amy. He hated to do this to her when she was so happy. It would have been better if they had never gone to Hampstead. He should never have taken the job. Flattered into it, he supposed, and it had seemed a sensational climax to his farewell scene with Rose. What a fool he was. A fool and a failure. What had happened to all the high ideas and ambitions with which he had left the Navy? Six months out, and he had not had the smell of a decent job. All he had done was to walk out of the only jobs he had found. A quitter, that was what he was. A quitter. The Navy had been right to discard him.

The thought of explaining to his mother and father, and of their undisguised disappointment in him was unbearable. When he telephoned to say that he was coming, his mother had forced
surprise into her voice as she recognized him, and said: “Well, you’re such a stranger, I hardly recognized your voice.”

When he asked if he could come down, she had said: “You know your father and I just live for your visits, but I thought you were so busy that you couldn’t get away to see us.”

“Well, I’m not busy today.” Ben had managed a polite goodbye and rung off, grinding his teeth.

To satisfy his parents, he had given them a rather grandiose picture of his job with Glenn. Now they would be disappointed in him, either for having thrown away a good chance, or for having originally been deceived into thinking it was a good chance. Either way they would be heartsick, and his mother would only pick at her lunch. They would be glad to have Amy, but in a triumphant way. They might not actually say: “I told you so,” but they would imply it, and after he had left, they would talk about it with nodding heads, and his mother would ring people up and say: “The child should have come here in the first place.”

Poor little Amy, playing so happily with Susanna. Playing at weddings, perhaps, in sheets and cheese-cloth veils, with no idea of what was brewing for her. She ought to hate him for this, but she would not, because she would try to understand, and that was more than he deserved. He was a failure as a father as well as a civilian. She trusted him, and he had let her down.

He felt so dispirited that he did not think he could bear to look today at the house by the railway which seemed to embody the security of generations of settled family life; a house where children who had made a mess of things could always find a refuge, and someone to take their side.

If he could have taken Amy back to a house like that. … He pictured the stucco bleakness of Wavecrest, Firbanks Avenue, on to whose cement doorstep he would soon be putting his reluctant foot. The contrast was too painful. He would not look out of the window. But as the landmarks approached and passed him, the yellow house at the level crossing, the gravel pit, the patch of fir trees, he found himself leaning forward automatically.

The nearest meadow was dark with lush grass. They were growing it for hay. On the broken paving outside the back door, the older girl in a white overall was washing a dog in a zinc tub. As the train went by, she looked up, tossed back her hair and did a thing she had never done before. She waved. The soapy dog
jumped out of the bath-tub and then the house came between, and the side of the bridge, and it was all gone.

Why had she waved and smiled? Because it was warm in the sun and she was doing something she liked? Because she was happy today and felt friendly to everyone, even the unknown dolls being rushed south-westwards above her?

The wave was for Ben. When the train stopped at Basingstoke, he got out, convinced the ticket collector that there was sanity in not travelling as far as his ticket entitled him, found a garage and hired a self-drive car. He paid the deposit with the money he had brought to forestall anything his mother might think but not say about the extra expense of having Amy. He drove to the small station which came next on the line to the house, then using his navigator’s sense, he found the narrow road which ran past the house and under the railway.

He sat outside the gate for a moment, taking in the unfamiliar view of the garden hedge and the railway bridge, and the part of the flinty road he had never seen before, running under the arch and away round a corner on the far side of the line. He almost drove straight on. He turned the ignition key, then turned it back, got out of the car and walked quickly up the uneven drive before he could lose his nerve.

It was strange to see the house from this angle, an eye-level instead of a bird’s-eye view. It was higher than he had thought, and the gables and odd-shaped chimneys were not so apparent. The lawn did not look so patchy as it seemed from above, or perhaps the father had been giving it more care this spring.

A bicycle was leaning against the shallow brick porch, its back wheel partly across the doorway. The front door was open, and beyond a small lobby filled with coats and sticks and boots, Ben saw the hall for the first time, wide and rather dark, with many doors and passages leading from it, and a fireplace untidy with last winter’s ashes and the charred ends of logs.

There was a good smell. Not an exquisite country house smell of flowers, or lavender or furniture polish, but a homely smell compounded of many things, like roasting meat and leather and dogs and laundry soap.

Ben stepped round the bicycle wheel and pressed the knob of the large brass bell. It did not ring. He tried the knocker, and at least three dogs began to bark from the back of the house. The
tall girl came out of a doorway with her eyebrows raised, and put on a stiff, polite smile when she saw that it was a stranger. She was still wearing the white overall. It was dirty in the front, and the sleeves were rolled up over arms that were awkwardly long, with prominent elbows. As she came into the lobby, she tripped over the curling corner of a rug, blushed, pushed back her straight tawny hair, and said: “C-can I help you?”

She added as an afterthought, as if she had been told all her life not to keep people on the step, but was always forgetting it: “Please come in.”

Ben stepped over the low stone sill. He was in at last. Now he had to say something. He grinned, feeling the grin unnatural, and said: “I’m afraid I’ve lost my way. Can you tell me where the Martins live?” It was the only thing he could think of that would give him an excuse for at least a few minutes’ conversation.

He wished that it had been the pretty younger sister with the curly hair who had come to the door. She would have answered him easily and smiled, liking to meet new people, and perhaps taken him into the hall and asked him to sit down while she tried to think who the Martins were. Impossible ill-luck if they should be dearest neighbours, and someone should insist on telephoning to say that their good friend Ben was on his way.

The tall girl stood shyly in front of him, her feet rooted to the stone floor, frowning and not knowing what to say. “The Martins,” she said finally. “I don’t think I———”

A barking yellow dog with long matted hair like Nana in Peter Pan erupted into the hall, scattered rugs, and hurled itself at Ben’s shoes. The girl took hold of its collar and held it panting, while she turned to appeal to the man who followed the dog. It was the father, older than he had looked from a distance, with a thin, grizzled moustache on a long upper lip, and only a fringe of hair round the bottom of his skull. Ben had never before seen him without a cap. He wore a tweed jacket with leather patches, a shrunken wool tie, and creaseless flannels held round his concave waist with a cracked leather belt.