Man Overboard (36 page)

He did not mean that he thought he could win where Tilly could not, but he would rather Mrs Morton were rude to him than to Tilly. He could take it. She had already called him a penny-pinching, ignorant prig because he had said that her elaborate plans for the lunch and tea on Sports Day were too extravagant Now when he told her that it was not fair to expect Tilly to rise to such heights of culinary display, she could only play a variation on the same theme.

He was not afraid of Mrs Morton any more. He thought he had got her number. She was trying to impress the parents. That was all right. Everyone was doing that, including Ben with his zoo, but Mrs Morton’s plans for lobster salad and chicken in aspic and
foie gras en croute
were not only to make a good impression, but to cover up the truth of how badly the boys fared on any day that was not Sports Day.

When their sons told them, hanging round the cars as they drove off, that the meals all term had been lousy, the parents would dismiss it as automatic schoolboy grumbling. “Look at the spread Mrs Morton put on today,” they would say. “The woman’s a genius. If that’s any indication of how you’re fed every day, your standards of lousy are different from mine, my boy. When I was a lad———”

And the mothers would say: “I think you must be exaggerating, darling. The lunch and tea were marvellous. If Mrs Morton can cater like that for hundreds of extra people, it must be easy for her to feed a hundred boys well. You don’t look exactly starved, either.”

“Well, I am,” the boy would say. “There’s such a thing as filling you up with bread and potatoes and porridge.”

And the fathers and mothers would laugh indulgently and drive off in their shiny cars, confident in the fullness of lobster and
foie gras
and excellent chablis that they were lucky to have
their boys in the care of such an exceptional woman as Mrs Morton.

She would be gracious and impressively ladylike on Sports Day. Ben had seen her at that game with parents who came on Sundays. She would fool them all that she was the right kind of cultured, well-bred, sensitive woman to have as headmaster’s wife, and she would take all the credit for the magnificent hospitality, although it would be Tilly’s labour and Ben’s ability somehow to absorb the staggering cost into his budget that would have made it possible.

If she were allowed to get away with it, that was. Ben had not given up the fight yet, and he advanced on Mrs Morton in defence of Tilly.

“She’s done it before,” Mrs Morton said. “She can do it again.”

“She’s never been asked to do so much before. She told me.”

“If you believe everything that fat megalomaniac tells you, you are not as shrewd as you are always trying to make me believe.”

“It’s too much for her.”

“You’re heading for trouble when you start coddling the staff. If she doesn’t like it, she can go. I can get another cook.”

“You’ll never get another who works as hard as Tilly.” And puts up with you as dietitian, Ben added in his head.

“Must we discuss the servants?” Mrs Morton smoothed her hair with stiff, turned-back fingers. “I find it very boring.”

“All right. We’ll discuss the lunch again. I haven’t changed my mind. It’s ludicrous, Mrs Morton. The school’s in debt. We can’t afford it.”

“We were always able to afford it before you came.”

“Not on a scale like this. No, not only what Tilly told me. I’ve seen the records. What are you trying to do—upset my budgeting so that you can prove at the end of term that I haven’t saved the school any money?”

“You’re being childish, Mr Francis.” Why did everyone call him that? Was it because they had been among small boys for so long that the word nuisance was synonymous with child? “A little extra expense isn’t going to matter once a year.”

“Once a year. That’s the point. If we’re going to spend extra money on food, we should be spending it on the boys, not on their bloated parents, who can get this kind of food any time they want by paying for it.”

“You don’t understand anything about running a school, do you?” Mrs Morton looked at him, not with anger, but with a kind of distant pity for his ignorance.

“I’m beginning to understand a lot,” Ben said, “and much of it I don’t like. Now please give me the menus you’ve made out for this feast, and we’ll revise them together.”

“We’ll do no such thing.”

“All right, then I’ll plan the menu myself and get the orders in.”

She smiled at him in such a superior way that he added: “And look here, Mrs Morton, if you try to cheat me by ordering all this fancy stuff yourself, I shall tell the tradesmen that you have no authority to give orders, and they’ll have to take the stuff back. That’s going to make you look just ducky, isn’t it?”

“Just ducky.” She fixed him with her eye. He tried to stare her out, but she was looking at him as if he were a boy in the Lower Fourth with egg on his tie and ink in his hair, so he turned and walked off with what he hoped was a stern and resolute stride. Now she could go away and get drunk.

When Mr and Mrs Horrocks had the week-end off, Ella had to sleep in their room at the school, in their bed, which was comfortable enough, but offensively connubial when you considered who normally shared it.

Since Mrs Horrocks was the matron, they did not live in a separate house, but in a three-roomed flat at the top of one of the wings of the Old Building, where Mrs Horrocks had her sick-bay and her little dispensary stocked mostly with Milk of Magnesia and ear-drops, and where she could supervise the corridor where the smallest boys slept, three to a room.

The boys enjoyed Ella’s occasional nights at the school, because she would gather them all together in one room and read them a story, and she did not mind if they were eating chocolate in bed when she came to turn their lights out. Sometimes she forgot to turn their lights out, and Mrs Morton, seeing from her side window that there were squares of light on the garden where no squares of light ought to be, would call down one of the older boys and send him to Ella with an order disguised as a message.

On the night after his last battle with Mrs Morton about the lobster and chablis, Ben was out in the garden late, walking back from the building where the maids slept.

Apart from a few steadies like Tilly and Lucy, who had been at the school for so long that they had forgotten any other way of life, the maids were always changing. The local girls got married, or got fed up, or got pregnant. Living-in staff were hard to find, and the numbers often had to be made up from migrant labour: strange, feckless girls who would steal anything if they got the chance, slow men, beaten down by misfortune or beer, sad-eyed women who were getting away from somewhere they did not want to be, negligent girls on the way to somewhere else.

They came and went, a constant worry to Ella, and also to Ben, who was responsible for hiring them and for finding replacements when they slipped cable in the night, with or without spoons or articles of someone else’s clothing.

He had recently engaged a girl who did not seem right even by the low standards he had to make shift with. She looked like a prostitute, and a bargain-priced one at that, and she had not been in the place a week before Lucy informed Mrs Morton, who informed Ben, censoriously, as if it were his fault, that her appearance was not deceptive.

Since the girl was working well enough, and it seemed hardly worth looking for another so near the end of term, Ben made a trip to her room every night to make sure that she was not entertaining a man again. He hated to have to open the door and look in on the girl in bed, and the first night he had done so, she had welcomed him delightedly, until he explained the purpose of his visit. After that when he opened the door, she would favour him at the top of her voice with some colourful opinions of his virility, so he left his visits until as late as possible in the hope that she would be asleep.

This night, it was after eleven when he left the snoring lump of girl in the bed which looked as if it was never made. He wanted to go up to the zoo with his torch to visit the pets, but they were so instantly aware and eager for food when you woke them that it seemed unfair to disturb them. He walked past the front of the Old Building on his way to the Glynn’s house. All the lights were out, except in Mrs Morton’s drawing-room.

The curtains were not drawn, which was unusual, for Mrs Morton generally pulled them sharply across before the red sun had given its last wink through the trees on the hill. Ben stood for a minute or two and watched the window from a distance.

He imagined that he did not know the interior, nor who was in it, so that the lighted room looked like a room in a proper home, inviting, secure, because he was an outsider looking in.

If he stepped closer and looked right into the room, the attraction would vanish. The room would repel rather than invite him, because of all the times he had stood on that hearthrug and tussled with Mrs Morton in that disturbing, unsatisfactory way which left him not knowing whether he had won or not.

He felt impelled to sneak up and see what she was doing now. It was unfair, and also dangerous, because she would have him fired if she caught him, but the temptation to catch that inscrutable figure unawares was too great to resist.

He stepped softly forward over the lawn, holding his breath as he crossed the gravel drive on tiptoe, then stood in a flower-bed against the wall of the house and looked in sideways. There was no one in that end of the room, which contained the high-backed chair where Mrs Morton usually sat. Ducking down, he passed beneath the window and slid a glance into the other end of the room. No one there either. She had gone to bed and left the light on. Wasting the school’s electricity. He planned words of reprimand for the morning, knowing he would not say them.

He stepped out of the flower-bed and put out a foot to kick over his footmarks, but drew it back. If the dents in the soft earth started a scare about a Peeping Tom, it would make some excitement for the boys, who would start sleuthing, and give the old girl something new to worry about. Or better yet, she might think she had an admirer, who fed his love with secret glimpses. It was probably what she needed to make her human. Being married to Old Hammerhead had not helped her at all.

Passing the corner of the house, he saw that the side door to the Morton’s apartment was open. That, too, she had forgotten. She must have gone to bed tight tonight. Thank God she had the sense to do her drinking when no one knew about it. Or did everyone know? It had not taken Ben long to find out. You only had to see the way she handled a glass to know what the stuff in it meant to her. Perhaps the masters all knew, but were excluding him from the knowledge, as they tried to exclude him from their fraternity. It was not loyalty to Mrs Morton that kept their mouths shut. They were not that kind of team. Most of them were petty individualists who fed on gossip and spite.

But they grudged Ben this juicy bit of gossip in the same way that they appeared to grudge him his position at the school.

He shut Mrs Morton’s door quietly, in case she should awaken and cry Thief, and then he saw that there was a light on the top floor of the wing. A light from the Horrocks’ bedroom. Ella’s light. She was probably reading in bed. He had seen her in a dressing-gown at home when she got up to make early morning tea, and had imagined what she looked like in the nightdress underneath it. He imagined it again now. She was strongly built and big-boned, but she went in and out in the right places, and that time when he had held her crying against him in the rain, she had been satisfactorily soft, even through their two raincoats.

He pictured what she would look like sitting up in the big bed, which probably had a sag on Mrs Horrocks’ side, for she was a good stone heavier than her husband. Ben knew, because he had seen her when she first got up, that Ella’s lips without lipstick would still be pink, and her skin without powder would not be rough and shiny. Her heavy, dark-blonde hair would be brushed back, but she would still be putting it away from her eyes with an automatic gesture of her hand. She might be eating an apple or a bar of chocolate in bed, or even drinking a mug of cocoa while she read. Unmarried women of thirty-five got into these habits. It was better than nothing.

The air was growing chilly. He would go. The bottom of Ella’s window was open, and she probably would not shut it, even if it got colder. As Ben was turning away, Ella, fully dressed, appeared in the window with her arms raised to shut it. She saw him, so he called up Hullo.

“What are you doing down there?”

He wanted to say: “I was looking at your window and imagining you in bed.” If it had been Laura, he would have said it. To Ella he said: “I’m the new night watchman. Hadn’t you heard?”

“I’ve just made some tea.” It was vaguely an invitation, but not so definite that he need accept if he did not want to.

“I’ll be right up.”

They sat in Mrs Horrocks” parlour in which all the tables and shelves and chests had pieces of cloth laid over them. Even the mantelpiece had a white linen runner with lace hanging down at both ends, as if it was an altar. They sat on either side of the fan of
paper in the fireplace in chairs that had extra pieces of material laid on the back and arms, and pretended that they were Mr and Mrs Horrocks, but had to give it up almost at once because they could not imagine what the Horrockses found to talk about.

“Do you always stay up so late when you have to get up early in the morning?” Ben asked. “You look like a healthy girl who gets plenty of sleep.”

Ella made a face, and he saw that he had worded his compliment wrong.

“One of the boys has been having nightmares,” she said. “He’s been calling out and crying. He was afraid that I wouldn’t hear him, so I promised him I wouldn’t go to bed for a long time. I’d better go and look at him now.”

Ben went with her, and they stepped softly into the room where the three little boys were sleeping in strange attitudes in their wooden beds. Ella had put a night-light by the bed of the boy who had been dreaming. In the flickering light, he lay sprawled outside the covers, his hands flung out, his spiky hair damp on his flushed forehead, his mouth pure as a baby’s.