Man Overboard (37 page)

“Much too young to be away at school,” Ella said as she bent to pull the blanket over him and stroke the hair away from his forehead.

“God, yes,” Ben said. “Don’t let’s send our sons to prep. school.”

Ella stood up and looked at him doubtfully. “Are we still being Mr and Mrs Horrocks?”

Ben thought of all the times when he had meaninglessly played at discussing marriage with Rose. You could not do that with Ella. He sighed and said: “I suppose so.”

Passing an open window on their way back to the parlour, they heard a door below and to the right bang shut. Mrs Morton’s side door.

“A night prowl?”

“It was open before,” Ben said. “Perhaps I didn’t shut it properly, and it blew open.”

“There isn’t any wind.”

Ella walked on down the corridor and Ben asked her back: “Did you know that she was an alcoholic?”

“Oh, yes.” Ella shrugged her shoulders without looking round.

“Everyone knows it—except the parents. She’s lucky she can drink so much and that it doesn’t show in her face.”

“It does show though,” Ben said. “She has that look all the time of not being there. You know how people look sometimes at cocktail parties. She looks as though she were permanently two martinis up on you.”

Ella sat down again in the parlour, but Ben remained standing. “I’d better go,” he said. “If Mrs Morton sees your light and comes up to tell you to turn it off, we’ll probably both get fired.”

“Would you care?”

“Lord, yes.” He was surprised that she asked that, as if it would be nothing to have fiddled about as a civilian for six months and then lose the first decent job you found. “I want to stay here. I can make a success of this, I think.” He sat on the corner of the table.

“Nobody else thinks so. I’m sorry, Ben. I didn’t mean that the way it came out. I meant that they don’t want to give you a chance.”

“Yes, I know. It’s a closed shop. I’m an outsider, and a pompous naval officer, which makes me need to be taken down several pegs, and I’ve had the nerve to cut off some of their perks. They think I’ll give in and go their way in the end, but I won’t. I’m going to make a taut ship out of this place if it’s the last thing I do.”

“Make a tight ship out of it,” repeated Ella, who was leaning drowsily back with her arms along the arms of the chair and not listening properly, “and then get out?”

“Probably. There are better schools than this. If I do a good job here, I could go on to a public school with a bigger salary. I might even get into a college eventually.”

Ella smiled. “You’re very ambitious,” she said, as if ambition were a quaint idiosyncrasy.

“I’m not really. I’m making myself be. I wasn’t ambitious enough in the Navy. If I had been, perhaps I wouldn’t have been slung out. But the Navy’s a feather-bed. You can be a nonentity and still draw your pay and be sure of your position. It’s different on the beach. Nobody’s going to give you the time of day unless you fight for it.”

She did not say anything. She sat with her eyes half-closed, her long, bare legs stretched out, the heel of one slippered foot rubbing gently on the instep of the other.

“What’s wrong with ambition?” he said, irritated by her silence. “What’s wrong in wanting to push yourself a bit nearer the top?”

“Oh, nothing.” She opened her eyes and looked at him mildly. “But if you don’t want so much, you don’t get so many disappointments.”

“That’s defeatist. You’ll tell me next that a man who lives in a condemned slum with one cold tap in the yard is happier than a man who has a bathroom, because it doesn’t occur to him to worry about keeping clean.”

Ella considered this, frowning at the cold, bare fireplace. “He might be,” she said. “It would depend on a lot of things besides the bath. The man with the bathroom might want a yacht, you see, and not be able to appreciate his nice house because he couldn’t have the yacht.”

“Therefore, the man in the slum is happier.
Q.E.D
. You should take over the geometry class, Ella.”

“Don’t laugh at me, Ben. I wish everyone wouldn’t always laugh at me when I try to say what I think about life.”

“I’m not laughing. I agree with you in a way, not about the bathroom, but about being happier if you don’t want too much. But I daren’t let myself go on using that as an excuse for not trying to get somewhere. A girl I knew once called me a nobody. I hadn’t minded being a nobody up till then, but when she said it, it hurt.”

“Rose Kelly?”

He nodded.

“How unkind.” With her elbows on the chair, she linked her fingers and looked down at them. “All the s-same,” she said, with the slight hesitation, not quite a stammer, which only checked her speech when she was shy, “you seem like the sort of person who’ll always be happier being nobody very special.”

“Thanks.” He slid off the table and put his hand on the top of her hair. “You said that in a much nicer way than Rose did.”

Ella jerked her head away from his hand and stood up. “You’d better go. Mrs Morton is quite likely to come up.”

“She’s probably blind to the world. But just in case———-” He went to the door and switched off the light. The moon was in the room, and he sat Ella down on a terrible little settee by the window, and the skin of her face and arms was young and pearly
in the cold light. Ben sat close beside her. She neither held herself away nor snuggled up to him. He did not know where they would go from there, but meanwhile it was very peaceful.

“If she does come up,” Ella said, “this will be worse.”

“Give the old girl a thrill.” He put his arm round Ella’s waist to see what she would do. She did not do anything. “Why does she hate me so much?” he asked.

“Didn’t you know?” She turned to him so that her waist slid away from his arm. “Didn’t you know about Mr Butterick?”

“My predecessor? Only that he left a bit of a smell behind him.”

“She had him fired.”

“What’s that got to do with me? You mean she has to hate all bursars now because she didn’t like poor Butterick?”

“Not exactly. She hates you because you’re not him.”

“I don’t get it.”

“They had a—well, an affair, I suppose you’d call it. About two years ago, it started. Everyone knew about it, including Mr Morton, but of course he wouldn’t dare try to stop it. It was Mr Butterick who stopped it. He got mixed up with a girl who used to come here to give piano lessons—she doesn’t come any more, of course—and so Mrs Morton saw to it that he lost his job.”

“You mean she won’t have a bursar on the place unless he’s prepared to take her on as well? Is that why she hates me— because I’ve never made a pass at her? My God, I’m not brave enough for that.”

“It isn’t so simple. She got him fired, but now because he isn’t here, no one else will do. I honestly think the poor woman was in love with him.”

“You sound as if you’re sorry for her,” Ben said. “You’re sorry for everybody, aren’t you? It must be very tiring.”

“I’m not. I wish I could be. But with the world so crammed with fear and misery, you’d die if you minded about everyone. It’s like seeing those old pictures of concentration camps. If there was just one skeleton walking about, you’d care desperately. When there are thousands, you haven’t enough pity to stretch far enough, however hard you try. But with her———_” She bent her head so that her hair swung across the shining moonlit curve of her forehead. “It’s easy to be sorry for her because I can’t help
understanding how she felt. It isn’t any fun to have a man you’ve allowed yourself to love calmly walk away from you with someone more attractive.”

“Who was the swine who did it to you?” Ben took her hand. “I’ll kill him.”

“You can’t. He’s in New Zealand. I don’t care any more, anyway. I don’t even remember much about him. It’s funny. They say you remember the happy things and forget the painful ones, but the only thing I remember about being in love with him was the way I felt when I lost him.”

“Is that why you didn’t want me to kiss you in the kitchen that day at your house—because you’re disillusioned about all men for ever? Through with sex, and all that?”

“Don’t be silly.” Ella tried to pull her hand away and stand up but he held her down and put both his arms round her.

“Why, then?”

She turned her head away.

“Tell me.”

“No.”

“Please, Ella.”

“No. Well then—it was because I thought you were only trying to be nice because you were sorry for me because I’m thirty-five and not married.” She turned in his arms to look at him, and he saw that she was speaking the truth.

“That’s neurotic,” he said. “Why should I be sorry for you? Are you sorry for me because I’m thirty-six and not married?”

“It’s different for a man. For a man, it’s quite—quite glamorous to be unattached. It isn’t for a girl.”

“Glamorous or not,” Ben said, “at the moment, it’s damn convenient.” He shifted his arms to pull her close against him. It was a wonderful kiss. The only thing wrong with it was that they had wasted all these weeks by not kissing like this before. “I’ve changed my mind,” Ben said. “You’re not neurotic.”

The settee was narrow and slippery and as unsympathetic to their love-making as if Mrs Horrocks had instructed it to discourage anything like this in her absence. Presently they slid to the floor and stayed there quietly, not kissing for a while, but just holding each other in the natural comfort of two married people in bed. They began to talk about things they had never told each other before. Without thinking how he would explain it, Ben
found himself telling Ella how he had been watching her house nearly all his life, and what her family had meant to him.

She listened as calmly as if she knew it already. He was glad that he had waited to tell her alone. If he had told it in front of all the family, there would have been questions and exclamations and jokes, and Ella’s understanding might have been swamped.

“It’s funny,” she said. “I don’t often look at the trains, except occasionally to wish I was somebody going somewhere. But once when I did, I saw a man looking out. Just for a second, but I saw what he looked like. It was the day you first came. When I saw you standing in our front doorway, it was a shock, because you looked like him.”

“I was him. I saw you washing the dog. You waved, and I got off at the next station and came right back. I didn’t know what I’d say. Don’t tell Old Hammerhead, but I’d no idea the school even existed until your father suggested it.”

Ella knelt up and ran her hand over his cropped hair in the gesture that Amy used when she was feeling tender. “Like corn in the moonlight,” she said. “Your hair. It springs back after my hand like corn does when the wind passes over it.” She stroked it again and then dropped her hand and sat back on her heels, away from him. “You came to our house after all those years, and then,” her voice flattened, “you found we weren’t a magic family at all, but just ordinary, and you were disappointed in us.”

“I wasn’t. It was much better than magic. It was real. Darling, I loved you all. I love you, Ella.”

“You don’t.” It should have brought her close to him again, but she did not say or do any of the things he had thought she might do when he told her this. “You just enjoy kissing me, and you say that because you think I’m the sort of nice wholesome girl who needs to be told it before she can enjoy it too.”

“Oh, yes,” Ben said bitterly, “and the moonlight has gone to my head, and I need a woman as much as you need a man. I’ve changed my mind again. You are neurotic.”

“Go away.” She stood up and pushed back her hair. “I—I———” She stammered as she had stammered when she had greeted him uncertainly in the doorway of her home. “I wish you’d never got off the train.”

She went towards the door, and stumbled over an upholstered stool. Ben caught her and tried to twist her round to him, but she
was strong enough to break away, and she went into the bedroom and shut the door.

For at least five minutes, Ben stood in a patch of moonlight in the room and looked at the door. Then he went out silently so that Ella would not know that he had been standing there wondering whether to go in after her.

When he woke the next morning, he wanted very badly to see Ella, so he dressed quickly and stepped out on to the cob-webbed grass.

“Where are you going?” Mrs Glynn’s head, shrunken by pin curls and a hair net, looked out of her kitchen door. “I’m cooking breakfast.”

“Just up to the zoo.”

“You and that menagerie.” The head wagged. “That’s all you think about these days.”

That’s all you know, my good woman. Ben went across the grass to the Old Building, but when he reached the door, he thought: Why not? He would go up to the zoo first and then see Ella. If she had watched his approach from the window, it would do her no harm to be baffled by his sudden change of direction. Keep “em guessing, that was the way, he told himself, although he knew that he would never be like that with Ella.

But she would be chivvying the boys into their clothes now, and tying ties for the smallest incompetents who had been spoiled and nannied all their lives and suddenly pitched out of the nest into prep. school. He would catch her when the boys had gone down to breakfast, and she was making tea and toast because she hated to have meals in the dining-hall. He would catch her alone and make her listen to him, make her believe that he really loved her, force her to believe that she was lovely.

As he went up the hill to the zoo, a small boy came running down, stumbling, half-failing, crying so desperately that he would have passed Ben without seeing him if Ben had not caught him by the arm as he ran blindly by. It was Neil. He was sobbing so violently that no coherent words came out. He gasped something about: “The zoo … our zoo!” and flung himself face down on the ground in a frenzy of grief.

The zoo was almost totally destroyed. The flimsy door with its cheap padlock from some boy’s bicycle had been wrenched open. Inside, the pens and hutches were smashed or torn open. Cage
doors gaped. The window of the Pit of Death lay in slivers at the bottom of the box on top of one dead grass snake whose neck had been pierced by a spike of falling glass. All the animals and birds were gone. The tanks were shattered and the fish lay pale and dead-eyed in the damp stain where the water had soaked into the earth floor. High up on a ledge under the roof, a solitary budgerigar chirped and chattered to itself like a madman chuckling over the end of the world.