Man Overboard (31 page)

She was not as pretty as he had thought. Her curls were not bubbling, but dry and artificial. Her teeth were a little rabbity, and her eyes were not as blue as summer skies, or sapphires, or forget-me-nots. They were merely blue, with a shiny bulge above them where she had plucked out too much eyebrow. Her legs were a little bristly because she had shaved them and they needed shaving again. She was an average, unremarkable girl, neither captivating nor plain, and with no great amount of any quality in her temperament. She was fairly good-natured, moderately intelligent, only occasionally perceptive, and not very witty, although she went in for bold statements which were not as shocking as she thought.

She was, in short, a typical naval officer’s girl friend, passable but not devastating; all right to take out, but not necessarily to marry, although heaven knew, lots of the poor creeps did marry her type, and it turned into a captain’s wife or an admiral’s wife with no perceivable effort. Ben might have done the same himself if he had got mixed up with someone like Laura before Marion … before Rose.…

Once in the train at night, Ben had seen the light from the french windows lying on the lawn like yellow moonlight. He had imagined himself in the garden and Laura stepping out through the window in a pale dress and coming into his arms with exactly the right words.

“I knew you’d come,” she would have said. Or: “I’ve waited so long.”

He knew now that she was the type of girl you did not meet in a moonlit garden. You met her on the beach, or in the post office, or in some not very chic night-club, and what she said was not: “I knew you’d come,” but: “I’ve been waiting hours.”

Laura’s husband, who was a local doctor, came to fetch her after lunch, and she said to him: “I thought you were never coming. I haven’t felt too good,” although she had eaten twice as much as anyone else and generally behaved like a healthy pregnant woman.

“Poor Roger, you’re doing too much,” her mother said, in the
gentle voice which came surprisingly from such a sturdy, open-air woman.

“You shouldn’t kill yourself for these hypochondriacal females,” Mr Halliday said. “Why have you been so long with Mrs Edgeworth? What’s she got this time?”

Roger laughed. He had a bland fat face and a cheery air which was agreeable socially, but might be a little hard to take if you were dying. “Oh—something feminine.”

“What?”

“You know I never discuss my patients, even with you, Dad.”

“Especially not with Daddy,” Laura said, “unless you want the gynaecological details broadcast to the whole county.”

“How can I gossip? I never see anyone.”

“I wish you would, dear.” His wife picked up what was evidently her side of a long-standing issue. “I wish you would get about more. You could come to some of the shows with George and me—and now Amy, of course.” She gave the child a private smile. “All right, I know, I know. But at least it would give you the chance to get about.”

“How can I, Elsie, when I’ve all the work of this place on my shoulders? I’m not a smooth-tongued practitioner with a string of female patients inventing symptoms to pay my gardener’s wages.”

He bared his long plastic teeth at Roger, who laughed, throwing back his affable head, and said: “You have George, complete with nasal polypi.”

“That devil George never has time for anything but the horses.”

“If you’d rather do the horses,” his wife said sweetly, “George can do the garden.”

“Don’t tease him,” Ella said, and her mother looked surprised, as if her suggestion had been sincere. “Oh, I’m sorry, Roger, I forgot.” Ella went out to the kitchen and came back with a plateful of lunch she had been keeping hot for him, looking pleased, because she had been thoughtful for a busy doctor, and Laura had not. But Roger had stopped somewhere for a sandwich, and did not want the lunch, so Ella put the plate down on the floor by her feet for the big yellow dog who looked like Nana.

Two days later, when Ben saw Ella in Mrs Morton’s drawing-room, where the staff were obliged to forgather every other Tuesday to drink sherry, whether they liked it or not, he said: “It was
awfully nice of you to ask me to lunch. Amy and I had a grand time.”

Ella looked surprised. “It was terribly dull. It was nicer for us than for you. We’ve got so used to seeing each other and the same old local crowd that it’s good to have someone new. I don’t count the strange people who come to talk horses with Elsie, because they mostly stand about in the yard with their heads down, talking at their boots.”

“That’s odd,” Ben said. “It looks like the sort of house where there are people in and out all the time, and always something going on.”

Ella shook her head. “It was. When my father was still practising, there used to be more people—clients, and barristers on circuit—and of course when we were younger we were always bringing our friends home. But when people get older and get married and bogged down with babies, they don’t want to come. Or if they do, it isn’t the same.”

The sunless, uncomfortable room was full of masters and masters’ wives. The younger masters wore tweed jackets and slacks and needed a haircut. The older ones wore bow-ties and grey flannel suits that did not go often enough to the cleaners, although laundry and cleaning were on the house. The wives wore anonymous summer garments that revealed upper arms too bony or too massive and talked among themselves with the apathetic intimacy of women who live in a small and narrow community. The masters were mostly talking shop together, for they did not bother to make a social occasion of Mrs Morton’s sherry hours. Mrs Morton herself, with her stick swinging dangerously on the crook of her arm, was talking to the games master, a muscle-bound man too old for his job whom she had pinned up against a bookcase to hear what she thought should be done about Sports Day.

Ben and Ella had found themselves in a corner with two glasses of sweet sherry and a dish of stale cheese straws, not deliberately ignored, but not quite part of the group. Ben’s latest ideas on procurement planning, based on a study of requirements for the last five years, had not increased his popularity, and Ella was only invited as a sort of charitable gesture, since Mrs Morton considered her really one of the maids.

“When Laura married,” Ella went on, talking into her glass and
not looking at Ben, “I thought: Oh, good, here’s some new blood. But Roger’s not exactly a thrill. My brother’s been married much longer, and he was engaged for ages, so we all got used to Betsy long ago, as if she’d been in the family for ever. She’s just as dull as we are, but the children are all right, when she lets them alone.”

“I don’t think any of you are dull,” Ben said. He was afraid that she would not invite him home again if she thought he had been bored. He wanted to explain to her how wrong she was, if that was what she thought. He wanted to tell her about seeing the house from the train, and what her family had meant to him, and what it meant to get on the inside at last.

He could not say it. He could not make any of the right words translate themselves into speech between his mind and his lips. He was afraid that he would not be able to make her understand, and she would frown at him and her brown eyes would grow troubled, as they had when he had tried to show her how to order soap and scouring powder on an annual basis without actually ordering a year’s supply.

He said something about it being a shame that the railway was so close to the house, and with the memory of her in the garden looking up, he asked her: “Do you ever look up at the trains and wonder about the people in them?”

“Occasionally. Sometimes I think it would be nice to be them. And perhaps,” she laughed, “because they are them, they’re looking into our garden and thinking it might be nice to be me.”

Now he could tell her. “Listen, Ella,” he said eagerly, but she had caught at the skirt of the maid passing with a tray and said out of the side of her mouth: “Lucy, what are the chances of another sherry?”

“You’ve had two, Miss Halliday,” Lucy said, glancing towards Mrs Morton. “That’s all she———”

“We’ve only had one,” Ben said.

“Two, Commander.” Lucy looked at him as if he were lying drunk in the gutter. “It’s as much as my job is worth.”

“Don’t worry,” Ben said. “I’m the one who does the firing and hiring.”

Lucy blew down her nose, which had a lump of flesh between the nostrils, like a petrified drop. “That’s what you think.”

“You shouldn’t have said that,” Ella said when she had moved away. “She’s one of Mrs Morton’s spies. It all goes back to her.”

“Let it. I’m not afraid of her.”

“She can get you fired too.”

“Let her try.”

“Oh, she will.” Ella shrugged her wide shoulders and turned away from him as Mrs Glynn came up with her simpering, mumbling smile. “How are you this evening, Ella, dear?” she asked, as winningly as if she really cared. “I’ve never seen you looking so pretty. What have you done to your hair?”

“Oh—nothing.” Ella had brushed it neatly, but she put up a hand now and disarranged it.

“It looks charming.” Mrs Glynn, who was about a foot shorter than Ella, looked up at her, twinkling. “What do you think, Commander Francis?” Although Ben and Amy were living in her house, she would never call him Ben. “Don’t you think we have a charming housekeeper?”

It must have given her a crick in the neck to stand looking up at them and turning her smile from one face to the other. When she smiled, which was nearly all the time, she pushed her lips in and out and twitched the corners of her mouth as if she were talking to herself.

“Very charming,” Ben said shortly. He knew that Ella hated to be discussed.

“I
thought
so!” If Mrs Glynn had been holding a fan, she would have tapped him with it. She had been trying, in what she thought was a subtle way, to marry Ben to Ella ever since he came to the school. Having had twenty-five blissful years with what she called “My old Sweetheart,” which was the collection of dried-up skin and withered muscles known as Mr Glynn, the physics master, she wanted to mate everybody. For a long time she had been trying vainly to marry Ella to the bachelor masters, Willis and Knight. No one would ever be able to explain to Mrs Glynn why she was wasting her time, and no one had ever tried to.

Greenbriars School was less than three miles away from the Hallidays” house, and Ella went there and back every day on a tall old bicycle with a fraying basket on the handlebars. Sometimes when it was stormy, Ben would drive her home in the car which, now that he had a steady job, he had bought with some of the money with which the Navy had bribed him to retire.

Mr Halliday always gave him a drink, and Ben soon learned to ask for whisky, for Mr Halliday’s dry martinis were made with vermouth distilled by himself from the puckered grapes in the greenhouse which rose among the nettles that were taking over the vegetable garden.

Sometimes he was invited to stay for supper. The Hallidays” food was not exciting, but it was preferable to the food in the school dining-hall, which the lack of co-operation between the cook and the dietitian and the dietitian and the bursar had done nothing to improve. Preaching economy all round the school, Ben had told Mrs Morton that she must cut down her food budget. He had also offered his opinion that the boys were not getting their parents” moneysworth in either quantity or quality.

“You can’t have it both ways, Mr Francis.” Mrs Morton gave him that blank look as if she were not there behind her face. “If you will explain to me how to spend less and feed them better, I shall be very much obliged.”

“That’s not my province,” Ben said. “You’re the victualling officer. I’m sure it could be done though. As the Navy used to say during the war: The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little longer.”

“It was the Americans who said that,” Mrs Morton said coldly. “And I am neither in the Royal nor the United States Navy.”

Ben had hoped that time would mellow Mrs Morton, but it had not. They were still at war, although they were passably polite on the surface, and there had been one curious evening when he came to ask her something after dinner, and she had
talked to him quite gaily and garrulously, almost as if she were drunk.

Old Hammerhead had been out at a meeting, and perhaps she had been hitting the bottle by herself for want of anything else to do. Ben would probably be doing the same thing himself by the time he had been in this place ten years. He had not told anyone what he thought. Mrs Morton was still, to all intents and purposes, the Admiral’s wife, although he did not like her any better than he had liked that Admiral’s wife in Malta who had spread the story about Marion and the Surgeon-Lieutenant.

With Mr Pearse and his little kick-backs out of the picture, the food budget was reduced, but the quality of the meals did not improve. Tilly Wicket tried her best, but her mother was failing up at the hospital and her ankles were letting her down this summer, and she declared that because of Lady Peg Leg, she was losing her heart for the job.

Ben exhorted her and sympathized with her over pots of tea, and even raised her pay. However, neither he nor Tilly could order Lady Peg Leg out of the kitchen, and she had acquired a habit of limping in at all hours to unnerve Tilly’s kitchen help by standing at their elbows while they worked and giving them confusing orders in her dietitian’s voice about washing their hands and boiling the tea-towels.

The boys, of course, fared worse than the staff, and the time-worn phrase: “The food here is foul” had a new ring of truth in letters home that term. Ben ran a small tuckshop, and he served behind the counter himself, since the master’s wife who was supposed to be in charge was visiting a married daughter in South Africa. He could tell that the boys were even hungrier than normal boys of that age. Most of them had generous allowances, and they would clean him out of baked beans and bananas and bars of chocolate so fast that he often had to close the tuckshop early because there was nothing more to sell.

He was sorry for the boys, and increasingly so as he came to know more of them as individuals instead of nameless parts of a scuffling, shock-haired crowd. Because he did not have to teach them anything, they talked to him more freely than they did to the masters, and in the tuckshop they complained to him about a lot of things, and principally about the food. Ever since he had scored a minor triumph by spotting a boy’s missing camera in
the back of Mr Willis’s car and returning it quietly to the boy with the injunction that he would break his neck if he asked where it came from, the boys were always after Ben with their cry of: “Can’t you
do
something about it, sir?”