Man Overboard (32 page)

“I’ll see what I can do, chaps,” he would say, but when he tackled Tilly Wicket about baked hearts for supper twice in one week, she would tell him:
”She
ordered them hearts. I only cooked “em,” and when he tackled Mrs Morton, she would raise her smooth black eyebrows and say primly: “You told me not to be extravagant. I’m only obeying orders.”

He longed to say: “Oh, dammit, order steaks for them all tomorrow,” but he dared not give her that much rope.

When Amy went to meals at the Hallidays, she had two helpings of everything and went back to the school with cakes and rolls in her pockets. Mrs Halliday was only too glad to feed her and Ben any time they wanted to drive over, and it was during a Sunday lunch, when Roger and Laura were there, that a sudden lull in the conversation disclosed Amy saying to Ella: “Of course, that was one of the older boys. I wouldn’t let anyone less than a prefect do that to me.”

“Amy!” Ben jumped on her, and she looked so surprised that he wished that he had let it pass.

Laura made it worse by saying: “That’s right, Amy, never cheapen yourself,” and her mother said with unusual assertive-ness: “Be quiet, Laura. Amy, you needn’t stay while we have coffee. Take some sugar out to the horses. Take a lot.”

She gave her the whole bowl of sugar, and Ella got up and went out for some more. Ella was always trying to do things that were thoughtful or quietly efficient. She was one of those people who never get enough recognition for what they do, because she was fated always to arrive with the wrong thing, or the right thing too late, as now when she came back with a packet of sugar and Laura had already reached backwards and taken another sugar basin from the sideboard.

“Who can’t do what?” Ella asked, catching the fag-end of what her mother was saying.

“Amy. She can’t stay at that school. It isn’t proper.”

“Oh, Elsie.” Ella dropped the unwanted packet of sugar into a tarnished silver-plated bowl which her mother had won at a horse show. “She was talking about swopping stamps.”

“Next time she won’t be. You’d be appalled at some of the things I could tell you,” said Roger, who liked to hint at the unmentionable horrors of his professional experience. “Elsie’s right. It’s a bad situation for the kid.”

“It can’t be helped,” Ben said a little irritably, but Mrs Halliday sat up very straight and said rather loudly, for she was not accustomed to making bold statements: “It can be helped. She can come and live with us.”

Flushed, and breathing rather quickly, she looked round the table at her family, challenging them to object.

They could not object, since Ben was there, so he said on their behalf: “Oh, look, that’s sweet of you, but she really couldn’t.”

“Of course she could. No, don’t interrupt me, Bernie. I know what you’re going to say about not interfering in people’s lives, but you’re the last one to talk after what you did about poor Mrs Sykes and the council house.” She turned to Ben. “I’ve been thinking about this for some time. I want to have her. Let me, Ben. She’d be so near, you could see almost as much of her as you do now. I wish we could have you here too, but———”

“Oh, he couldn’t do that,” Mr Halliday broke in quickly, alarmed at the idea of his house being turned into a hotel. “He has to get his moneysworth of free board and lodging out of Morton. Couldn’t let the old brigand get away with that.”

Ben looked at Ella. She was the one who would have most of the care of Amy if she came here. He wanted her to say something. She did not say anything, but when Amy’s head appeared at the open window with the empty sugar bowl, Ella turned round in her chair and said: “How would you like to come here and live with us?”

“You’ve spoiled it,” Mrs Halliday said with a little cry. “I wanted to be the one to tell her.”

“I’m sorry.” Ella never spoiled anything for anyone on purpose. “So did I.”

They looked at each other with understanding, and then they looked at Amy, who had shouted: “Can I, Daddy?” and vaulted over the low window-sill with her hair flying like a blown flame to run to Ben and hug him. Ben sat with his arms round her thin body and thought that he had never been so happy for her since the morning when he had seen Marion with her beautiful hair damp and tangled on the pillow, smiling down at the new-born
baby with the promise of the love he did not know she would not keep.

“I hope you didn’t think,” said Mrs Glynn, her smile a little strained, as if she knew that he had thought it, “that I did not look after Amy properly.”

“Of course not. You’ve been wonderful to her. But it isn’t really the best thing for her to be here in the middle of a crowd of boys.”

“Little boys,” Mrs Glynn said distantly. “How surprising that anyone should even think———Dear me, Commander Francis,” she pushed her smile in and out at him, “what grubby minds some people have.”

“All right, then, it wasn’t that. It was just that the Hallidays were so keen to have her. They love little girls, and Ella is very fond of Amy.”

“I love little girls too,” Mrs Glynn said wistfully, although she had never been particularly nice to Amy. “But of course, I see which way the wind blows. With Amy there, you have
carte blanche
to go over whenever you like, and I know that the food is not the only attraction in
that
house.” She ogled Ben obscenely and went away to hang out Amy’s blankets and scour her room as if the child had been a typhoid case.

Ben did go very often to the Hallidays, and although it was to see Amy and not especially Ella, he was always glad to see Ella, because she was so gentle and friendly. She seemed to be quite fond of him, and he was fond of her, sometimes with a sudden stab of tenderness when something went wrong for her, because she was so vulnerable.

With her careless, impulsive movements that might have been graceful in an adolescent, and the thick tawny hair that flopped over her eye when the pin slid out of it, she had something in common with the big shaggy dog that trailed her everywhere when she was at home. The dog was amiable and unassertive and would let puppies and cats take the food from his bowl right under his nose. Everybody loved him and called him Poor Old Geoffrey, although he was in the prime of life and perfectly happy.

Everybody loved Ella, and her brother Harry did frequently refer to her as Poor Old Ella. Ben loved her too, in a damnably brotherly sort of way which he was going to have to overcome if
he was going to kiss her, as he planned to do, to see how they both would like it.

He picked a bad time to try it. Harry and his plump wife Betsy had come for the week-end with their three children. Betsy did not do anything in the house except be a mother, and Ella was rattled because she had too much to do.

Ben kissed her in the scullery, and she tasted clean and nice, because she did not smoke. She pushed him away with wet hands and said: “Oh, don’t start that, Ben. There isn’t time.”

“What do you mean, not time?” He had never heard that raised as an objection before.

“I’ve got a lot to do.” She put her strong, rounded forearms back into the sink and her hair swung forward over her face.

She sounded neither annoyed nor surprised that he had kissed her, which was more deflating than if she had slapped his face. Piqued, he went away and left her to finish the saucepans by herself.

It was a rather unsatisfactory week-end, which did not work out in the way that Ben had hoped. It was the first time that he would meet all the family together, and he had planned that when Laura came on Sunday, he would tell them of his lifetime’s association with their house and them.

He imagined their surprise: how they would look, what they would say; which of them would perfectly understand, and which of them would think it more of a joke than anything else. Laura would undoubtedly be pleased at the idea of anyone watching her over the years. She enjoyed everything more if she had an audience. Even if she was only reading a book, she preferred there to be someone in the room, so that she could think to them: Look at me reading. If the family urged Ben to tell them all that he had imagined about them, he would have to think of some way of saying that he had always dreamed of being in love with Laura, without making it too obvious that a closer acquaintance had woken him up.

He would tell them on Sunday. Amy and he would tell it together. He could imagine all their faces looking within themselves and backward as they tried to remember some of the things they might have been doing when Ben sped by above them in the train.

Then Harry and Betsy arrived, and he knew that he would not tell them. Not this week-end at any rate. Perhaps never. With Harry came a breath of conscious sophistication. He was not just naturally urban because he lived and worked in London. He carried about with him deliberately, like a rolled umbrella, the aura of clubs and boardrooms and being welcomed by name by tail-coats in the best restaurants and white jackets in the more exclusive bars.

He was about Ben’s own age, and he had grown from the stocky boy Ben remembered, who sometimes jeered rudely at the trains from a perch in a tree or on an outhouse roof, into a rather handsome man with hair slicked up above the ears, and a businessman’s figure that would not look as good in swimming trunks as it did in a well-tailored suit.

He knew people. He dropped names. He had lunch with Chaps in the House, and dinner with the brother of a Character who played polo with Philip. He had a Jaguar, nominally owned by his firm, and his wife had a double row of real pearls round her soft, plump neck.

Ben knew that they were real, because they were a new acquisition and there was a fair amount of talk about them. Mr Halliday tested them with his teeth, and Ella tried them on and looked dubiously at herself in the mirror, and Mrs Halliday thought that Betsy should not wear them in the country.

“The old girl”—that was what Harry called his wife, the old girl—“is just as likely to lose them in London, and I rather hope she does, because they’re insured for more than I gave for them.” That was the way that Harry had grown to be. It was not the beauty of the pearls on his wife’s creamy skin that gave him pleasure, but the thought of what he could get for them. His life in London had put much more than fifty miles between him and the house by the railway.

You could clearly imagine him saying to his wife before this week-end: “I suppose it’s about time we gave the old folks a treat.” Once there, he was affectionate to his mother, teasingly familiar with his father, and good tempered to his sisters, but although he made himself very much at home, he had the air of a bird of passage, merely pausing there until it was time to go back to London.

He was quite affable to Ben, although plainly surprised at the
frequency with which Ben arrived in the little car which he had to park well away from the Jaguar to stop it looking pathetic. He told Ben what was wrong with the Navy and how the cuts could have been avoided, which was a big help to Ben since he had already been axed. Then he told him what was wrong with Greenbriars School and how Ben should run his operations there.

After Harry had been in the house a few hours, Amy came into the garden where Ben was standing with his head back, watching a train go by and trying to capture the feeling of being in it and looking down at himself in the garden.

When the last carriage had whisked by and taken the noise with it, Amy said: “Let’s not tell them, Daddy.”

“Tell them what?” He had imagined himself so completely into the train that it seemed odd to find himself left behind here and not on his way to Waterloo.

“About seeing them from the train. I don’t think Harry would understand. The others might, but he would think us silly. Or pathetic, that would be worse.”

“As if you and I were poor children outside a sweet-shop window. He might. When shall we tell them, then?”

“Let’s not ever. When you’ve enjoyed something by yourself, it always spoils it if you try and share it. Like seeing a film you love, and then going again with someone else, and they won’t cry too.”

Harry and Betsy had three children, a girl of nine, a boy of six, and a two-year-old baby who was violent enough for a boy, but who was actually a girl with sparse hair. In theory, it was going to be nice for Amy to have someone of her own age to play with, but it was a mistake to imagine that because she and Penelope were both children they would have anything in common at all.

They had to share a bedroom, and after the first night, Amy told Ben that Penelope was an awful wet, stamped into her rubber boots and spent the rest of the day except meal-times out in the garden and the stable yard in the rain. Penelope stole Amy’s new ball-point pen and complained to her mother that Amy had too much nerve and was trying to tell her what to do in her own grandmother’s house.

She said it in front of Ben, and Betsy did not try to hush her. She seldom hushed her children, because she believed in the free
development of character, and in this case the child was voicing her mother’s own opinion. It was clear that Betsy resented Amy’s position in the house, and it was not surprising, because Mrs Halliday, who could not dissemble, made it unintentionally obvious that she preferred Amy to her grandchildren. There was no Come to Grandma, or bouncing of the baby on her knee that week-end, because she had borrowed a pony for Amy, and spent most of the time standing in a muddy field in a sou’wester and gumboots with Amy and the pony describing cautious circles round her at the end of a long lungeing-rein. She could not wait until the rain had stopped or her visitors had gone to start teaching Amy to ride. The pony was there, so they had to start. Amy could not wait either. They were very much alike.

Penelope was terrified of horses, which was a blow to her grandmother, who had been wanting to get her a pony ever since she could walk. Betsy had forbidden it, but she now resented that there was a pony for Amy. She resented the intimacy between her mother-in-law and the usurping child, an intimacy that the querulous and neurotic Penelope had never shared with her grandmother.

Betsy resented a lot of things that week-end. Ella had always been supposed to be the perfect aunt, whose brother’s children were “like her own”. She was still attentive and affectionate towards them, but now Amy was her responsibility too, in a way that Penelope and Dorian and the monster Julia were not and did not need to be.