Man Overboard (35 page)

“Mr Francis,” she said, when Lucy had shown Ben in, lingered to hear what she could, and been dismissed with an impatient
outward jerk of the cane, “correct me if I am mistaken, but I have been given to understand that one of your functions here is to reduce the operational costs of the school.”

“Rather,” Ben said, falsely hearty. Was she going to ask him to sit down? She was not. He stood on the hearthrug, put his hands in his pockets, took them out again and settled their restlessness by folding his arms.

“In the pursuit of which undeniably worthy function”—Mrs Morton talked like this sometimes; it came from living so long among schoolmasters—”you have trodden on a great many toes, and caused a fair amount of understandable dissatisfaction, which you, no doubt, consider justified.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Ben felt uncomfortable before her empty stare. “It had to be done. The chaps don’t like not being able to order their own supplies any more, but they’ll get used to it. All for the best in the long run, and all that sort of thing.” If only she would move, it would be better. But she stood there with her stick, like the statue of Roosevelt in Grosvenor Square, and made him talk as if he were one of the boys at Greenbriars, instead of one of the staff.

“Very well,” said Mrs Morton. “It had to be done. Then how, may I ask, do you justify this—this what I can only call insane waste of money by having water running day and night for what I can only describe as a silly toy?”

“Oh, it’s all right.” Ben unfolded his arms and put them back in his pockets. “It’s the same water going round and round. I bought a filter.”

“You bought a filter.” She limped towards him, and he thought for one wild moment that she was going to lay about him with her cane. “With the school funds.”

“I’m responsible for the school funds,” he said, glad when she stopped walking and hung her stick on the mantelpiece. “I’ve only spent very little so far, and I———”

“So far.” She considered him with her Egyptian gaze. “You mean you plan to enlarge on this folly?”

“Sure. The boys are collecting animals now. They’re going to buy guinea-pigs and rabbits with their allowances instead of baked beans. We’re going to have a zoo. Oh, look here, Mrs Morton.” He grinned at her. Dammit, she was a woman after all, even though she was the headmaster’s wife, and a queer customer
at that. “Don’t you understand what a lot of fun the boys are getting out of this?”

“Fun.” She echoed the word mournfully. “They can have fun in the holidays. Their parents pay us to educate them, not to play with them.”

“What’s the matter?” Ben asked. “Don’t you want to understand, or do you really not understand?”

“I understand perfectly.” She sat down in a high-backed chair, which looked as unyielding as herself. “I’ve told you what I think. Now, if you want to dig your own grave, please go ahead and do it. I for one shall not weep at your interment.” She smiled suddenly and relaxed, curving up her eyes. When she suddenly gave up the struggle for no apparent reason, it was more disconcerting than if she had remained unapproachable.

“Well, if that’s all,” Ben shifted his feet, “I’ll———”

“Not quite all.” She was still smiling. Her pale, pointed tongue moistened her lips. “Why don’t you have a drink with me now that you’re here, just to show there’s no ill feeling?”

He did not believe that there was no ill feeling, and he did not want to stay. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning. Ben was always ready to have a drink at any time, but not with her.

“There is some whisky in the dining-room.” She turned her sleek, narrow head towards the archway between the two rooms and held it in that position, her eyes following him as he went into the dining-room and opened the doors of the sideboard. “And some soda, if you want it. You can pour me just a small whisky neat. I have felt a little faint ever since I got up, and my disappointment in you has not helped.”

“You never were anything but disappointed in me, as far as I can see,” Ben said, emboldened by being in the other room.

He came back with the two glasses, afraid that she would be rigid with offence, but she seemed not to have heard him. She watched the glass all the way into her hand, held it for a moment, looking at it, then took a swallow and shuddered.

“Like medicine, isn’t it?” She looked up at him, took another drink and set her glass down on a table beside her, keeping her fingers round it.

“Oh, yes, I hate the stuff.” Ben laughed at his own feeble joke, because she did not. He drank his whisky quickly, wanting to get away. He thought that when he had gone, she would get up and
go quickly into the other room, perhaps without the cane, and reach for the whisky bottle with a hand that trembled. He did not want to think this. He did not want her to give herself away to him. He did not want to feel sorry for her.

He wanted to hate her, because she was trying to undermine ail the things he wanted to do. He knew that she influenced the masters and their wives, who might have left him alone if they had not valued their jobs enough to want to climb on the bandwagon of her approval. They had started by laughing at his aquarium, but when the zoo got going, with the boys building cages and hutches and catching mice and buying rabbits and birds and hamsters, they stopped laughing and began to complain.

Ben had tried to be amiable with all of them. He got on all right with the desiccated Mr Glynn in his own house, and he had struck up some kind of pub-crawling friendship with Willis and Knight, who knew all the best bars for miles round; but he was not part of the scholastic group, and he felt that he never would be.

He was not sure whether they were deliberately excluding him from their club, or whether he was just naturally not equipped to qualify. Old man Glynn would chat with him now and then about the old days at Cambridge in his aseptic sitting-room where smoking was forbidden. Willis and Knight talked his own language when they were doing the pubs together in Knight’s old racing Bentley with the outside pipes. But when Ben went into the common-room at tea-time, or at other times for company, it seemed as if they and the other masters conversed in a more esoterically academic way than necessary. Ben could not believe that they always spent their leisure hours discussing medieval church architecture, or the rise and fall of the European coalition under Pitt.

Encouraged by Mrs Morton, they now never missed an opportunity to snipe at Ben’s zoo. If a boy’s marks fell below the average, they knew where to lay the blame, if the boy was one of Ben’s zoo-keepers. For boys who had pets in the shed, they delighted in finding some excuse to keep them in after hours, so that they would miss feeding-time.

The zoo was to be a show-piece for Sports Day. Ben and the boys had made up their minds about that. They now had about twenty-five pets of various kinds, besides the motley pond life in
the tanks. There were two wire-netting runs outside the shed, and inside there were pens and cages and a glass-walled box labelled The Pit of Death for the harmless grass snakes which Stokes minor caught faster than they died. Ben was enormously proud of what he and the boys had done, and if it meant spending a little money on wood and glass and chicken wire and paint, it was well worth it.

The masters did not think so. Mr Horrocks, who was the assistant headmaster, said to Ben: “Look here, Francis, I think you’re taking a gross liberty, if you ask me. You’ve had the infernal cheek to tell us all we’re wasting money, and here you go spending it like water on a ridiculous collection of tadpoles and white mice.”

“I’m spending it on the boys,” Ben said. “That’s the difference.” Mr Horrocks was one of those who had been making a good thing out of his deals with a wholesale stationery house, and he knew that Ben knew it.

“The boys got along very well before you came on the scene,” Mr Horrocks said. He was a moon-faced man in round pince-nez, with a voice like a creaking door.

“I don’t think so.” Since his zoo had become such a success, Ben was not caring so much what he said to people at the school who were against him. The boys were with him. That was what counted. “I think you all bother too much about what the boys do in the classroom and not enough about what they do outside.”

If Mr Horrocks had been the choleric type, he would have turned crimson. As it was, his face remained the colour of Caerphilly cheese, but his pince-nez quivered a little, as if they had a life of their own. “Since you know absolutely nothing whatever about the education of small boys,” he said, “I consider that you have gone too far.” He was not a man capable of strong language, but he flung his head backwards and sideways and looked down his nose, as if he had said something very challenging.

“If you feel that way, why don’t you complain to Mr Morton?”

“I have, of course, and I shall again.”

“It won’t get you anywhere though,” Ben said. “Since I told the old bird what a big hit this was going to make with the parents on Sports Day, he’s all for it.”

“He is?” Mr Horrocks lowered his head and pin-pointed Ben through his lenses. Although he knew that Old Hammerhead
agreed with everyone to their face and then decried them to the next comer, he did not know whether to believe this. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, and the Head, if you have trapped him into thinking that,” he said with a thin smile, “but I don’t believe the parents will be remotely interested. There will be so many other attractions. The sports, of course. The standard of athletics is very high this year, I understand. The concert after prize-giving. Quite a feature of our annual roustabout, as you will discover. And then, you know, we all have our displays in our own departments. The art gallery in the studio, the geology collection, the specimens in the lab. My own elaborate scale model of the first Pilgrim Settlement at Plymouth, Massachusetts, should attract more than a small amount of attention, I dare to think.”

“I see,” Ben said. “You’re jealous.”

“If you are a typical example of an officer in Her Imperial Majesty’s forces, I’m glad my son was too delicate to do his national service.” Mr Horrocks’ head, lowered with false modesty while he spoke of his Pilgrim Settlement, had gone up again to the duelling position. “You are very uncivil, Commander Francis. You are also a—a———” he could not say a damn fool, so he said: “a silly ass. With all this childish nonsense about a zoo, you are obviously playing for popularity with the boys. I’ve seen it before —masters who made fools of themselves because they wanted to be popular, and found that they were only despised. The boys are not your concern. Take my advice and leave them alone.”

“I can’t,” Ben said lightly. “They’re the only decent thing about this place.”

Except Ella. Ella was all right. She took no part in the petty squabbles within the school. She had all she could do to handle the squabbles among her own domestic staff. When Ben came to her on the premises to rail against the anti-zoo faction, she said: “Please don’t drag me into it”; but in her own home, she listened to him, and let him voice his enthusiasms and his vexations, and was stoutly on his side, and had promised to lend Neil one of the puppies to display to his father in the zoo.

If Neil’s father did not come, it would be a major tragedy. Neil was not running or jumping or throwing anything in the sports. He had neither instrument nor voice for the concert. He had not won any prizes, and none of his paintings were displayed in the studio. But it was he who had started the zoo with his frog.

He was head keeper, and had an armband sewn by Ella to prove it. All the boys who were zoo keepers had armbands, for Ben knew the value of even the hint of uniform, but Neil’s was the widest and the brightest colour and had the words Head Keeper lettered indistinctly round it in marking ink.

Sports Day was to be a big social occasion, with a buffet lunch in the dining-hall and a slap-up tea in a marquee. Ben was overwhelmed with organizational details, but the last garnishing touches to the zoo were the most important.

Mrs Halliday insisted on bringing Amy’s pony over in her trailer, and Ben had to borrow sheep hurdles from a farmer to make a pen for it. Its name was Rusty, but Amy had rechristened it Phoenix on the day of the fire. Mr Halliday painted another board, and the pony’s name was nailed to the hurdles as if it were a racehorse. The handyman’s sister, who had been brought over from her nearby smallholding to see the zoo, had screamed gratifyingly at the snakes, clapped her hand over her mouth to smother her exuberant delight at the whole project, and had come back next day with a pair of bantam hens.

“A surprise for the boys,” she said, laughing again and stifling the laugh in an embarrassment of generosity.

Ben put the bantams into a hutch with a suspicious rabbit, and began to make a coop for them out of a wooden box, working quickly to have the hens installed by the time the zoo keepers were let out of school and ran and hopped and shrieked and hurled each other joyfully to the ground, coming up the hill at feeding-time.

Squatting with his sleeves rolled up and a bunch of nails in his mouth, Ben realized how happy he was, and thought that perhaps Mr Horrocks was right. He was getting childish. It was said that Admirals began to go senile after they retired and suddenly had no authority. Perhaps the same thing happened to Commanders.

“I can’t do it, Commander, I really can’t.” Tilly Wicket sat down at the end of the long kitchen table and put her bad foot up on a little stool. “Even with extra help—and what kind of help can you get round here that’s any more use than a wet Saturday in March—I think it’s too much to ask.”

“I thought nothing was too much for you.” Ben sat down and ran his finger along a knife scar in the table.

“It didn’t used to be, but I’m not the same this term. Maids have come and gone here, and kitchen porters and the like, and they’ve said to me: ‘We admire that you can make do with it, Mrs Wicket, but that woman will get you down in the end.’ Well, now she has. My lady has overstepped the bounds this time, and if you won’t tell her, I will.”

“Oh, I’ll tell her,” Ben said. “It will mean a row, but I’d rather she had it with me than with you.”