Man Overboard (38 page)

There was no question about who had done it. Even if Ben had not already known, there was the handle of Mrs Morton’s cane lying among a heap of splintered wood where it had broken as she laid about her in her drunken passion.

When Ben went down the hill, Neil had gone. Ella looked out of her window and called to him gently, but he could not stop. Running, half-sobbing with rage, he burst through Mrs Morton’s side door, calling for her at the top of his voice. He did not care if Old Hammerhead heard him. He did not care who heard.

Mrs Morton appeared on the stairs clutching a wrapper round her, her hair hanging down her back like seaweed, her face as white as the bellies of the dead fish in the zoo. When she saw him, she did not go back or come down the stairs. She stood motionless on the top step with her hand on the banister while Ben stood in the hall and bellowed at her all the abuse he could think of, and none of it was bad enough for what she had done.

“You’ll have to go, of course.” The headmaster rubbed his nose and squinted at his finger. He would not look at Ben.

“Of course. I realize that.” Ben stood and looked over his head. He would not sit down and he would not call him sir.

Old Hammerhead cleared his throat. “Do you want to stay until the end of term?” he asked stiffly.

“I hardly could after what I said to your wife.”

“You could apologize to her?” Mr Morton looked up at him tentatively. “No. I see. Well, it’s a pity. You were beginning to get a grip on things here, it seemed. Now I shall have to … well, no matter. But we shall miss you on Sports Day. Several of the parents have remarked that they thought you were quite an asset to the school.”

“Thank you.” Ben bowed. “Like the art gallery and the concert and the mustard and cress in saucers and Mr Horrocks” Pilgrim Settlement.” He wished that Old Hammerhead would stand up and threaten to knock his block off for insulting his wife. If the man had been a different shape, they could have fought, and Ben could tell him what he could do with his school, and storm away in a cloud of anger which would have been a more satisfactory end to this miserable thing than the unwelcome feeling of pity with which he was forced to take his leave of the ineffectual little man.

“I’m sorry,” Ben found himself saying, and his hand stretched out across the desk.

Mr Morton tottered to his feet and shook hands limply. He swallowed and said with difficulty. “Thank you for apologizing to
me
, at any rate.”

Ben did not disillusion him. The least he could do for the Old Hammerhead was to let him believe that he was sorry for what had happened and not that he was sorry for him because he had to live with his wife.

Ben went up to London to stay with Geneva while he looked
for another job. The Hallidays would keep Amy until he had found something and was able to make some kind of home for her. He had no idea what he would find, nor how he and Amy would live. They were back where they had started. Ben was back on the books of the employment liaison officer at the Admiralty, back with his hat in his hand in the waiting-rooms of employers who were still sympathetic and still promising to let him know if a suitable vacancy occurred.

It was like the sort of bad dream where you try to pack a suitcase, or cross London to catch a train, or escape down a corridor to save your life, and find that you can only stay in the same place, making no progress at all.

Before he left the Hallidays” house, Amy had done a curious thing. Despondent, he had talked with her in her bedroom, which was the only place where they could get away from well-meaning people reviling the Mortons and telling him how sorry they were. He could not raise any optimism for Amy, although he knew that he should try, and after a while she had gone to the table by her bed and with a calm movement of her hand, knocked over her ant farm.

She picked it up and set it straight. The tunnels were caved in. Most of the ants were submerged in sand. Two of them were running about in a panic on the top of their shifted hill.

“Now look. Daddy,” Amy said. “They’re going to start all over again, right away, and make a new city. They’ll hate me for this.” She stroked the top of the plastic case lovingly with her finger. “But I wanted to show you.”

Since Ben could not go back to the school, Ella brought Neil over in the car to say good-bye. Ben did not know what he would say to the boy, but when he saw him, Neil did all the talking. His father had telephoned from London. He would definitely be there for Sports Day. He was taking Neil back with him to Ireland for the holidays because his wife was going away.

“Perhaps she’ll never come back!” Neil cried, making a song of it. He was bright-eyed with happiness. In the excitement of the imminent future, he had forgotten about the zoo, and forgotten to be upset because Ben would not be at Greenbriars next term. He could not see that far ahead.

When Amy reminded him, rather sharply, he said: “I’ll miss you terribly, sir. The boys are all sick as mud about what
happened.” Then he began to talk extravagantly again about his father.

“Thanks for bringing Neil over,” Ben said to Ella when she came back from returning the boy to school.

“I thought you were a bit hurt,” Ella said, “because he wasn’t more upset about you going.”

“No. Oh, no,” Ben said quickly, because it was true. “Thank God somebody’s happy, at any rate. It was nice of you to think of bringing him.”

Ella blushed. They were walking back from the garage, where Ben had gone out to meet her when she came back with the car. “It was something I could do,” she said. “I want to do something for you, but I don’t know what.”

“You’re keeping Amy for me.” They walked apart, not touching.

“Yes, but that’s for myself. I want her. That’s nothing. In books you always read about women who know exactly the right thing to do when there’s a crisis. They boil water, or appear suddenly with a tray of coffee and sandwiches, or if somebody dies, they take all the children quietly away to the cinema without being asked while the body is being got out of the house. What do they boil water for? I don’t even know. If somebody suddenly started to have a baby with me, it would be in a car, or in a railway carriage without a corridor, where there wasn’t any water anyway. If I made coffee, everybody would want tea, or they’d all have gone somewhere else by the time I’d cut the sandwiches. If I took the bereaved children off to the cinema, I’d find people waiting impatiently when I got back, saying: “Where have you been? The children have missed their train for Grandma’s.” “

“Silly,” Ben said. “There’s nothing wrong with you. I love you.”

“I don’t know.” They stopped outside the back door and Ella stood on the worn stone step and looked down at him with her gentle eyes. “I think perhaps you say that because you need someone to love, and you think that I do too. Ben, I’m sorry I said I wished you’d never got off the train. I didn’t mean it. I’m glad you did.”

“So am I. Come with me to London, Ella. Marry me.”

She shook her head without looking at him. “You’ve got troubles enough now without me as well.”

He did not know what to say. He wanted to cry out his need for her, but a deadening depression was closing in on him to kill the words before he could say them. He had no right to ask her now. He had no job. He had nothing but uncertainty and worry and perhaps failure to give her. Why had he not asked her when his job was secure at the school, when he was on the upgrade, doing well, seeing a successful future before him? If only he had not let that go. If only he had held his tongue. Why was Mrs Morton ever born to wreck his zoo, his job—he looked at Ella standing uncertainly, waiting for him to say something—his love?

When Ella saw that he had nothing more to say, she turned and went into the house, and Ben did not follow her. He did not see her alone again. He said good-bye to her with all the rest of the family, and climbed into the little car to drive to London and try to start building up his life all over again, like Amy’s ants.

On the day when he was to go for an interview with a large manufacturing firm who were offering a job in their central personnel department, Geneva woke him early and said: “Your Aunt Edna’s on the telephone. She sounds very peculiar, even for her.”

“Benjamin?” His mother’s sister projected crisis shrilly over the wire. “Prepare yourself for a shock. Your father died in his sleep last night. Yes, his heart. Thank God I was here.”

A big help you must have been, was Ben’s first barely comprehending reaction. You’d be the last person I’d want if—but, of course, it was much better that his mother had not been alone.

“What. … What?” Aunt Edna kept saying, as he was silent, realizing the truth, feeling already the first scouting party of remorse seeking him out, sniping at him because he had not been kinder, had not gone down to see the old man for so long. …

He asked to speak to his mother, but Edna, who was past-master at her sister’s brand of suggested reproof, said: “Oh, Benjamin, how can you ask that? How could you expect her to talk on the telephone at a time like this? She wants you here. You’ll come at once?”

“Today? … Yes, yes, Aunt Edna, of course. I didn’t mean … I’ll take the first train I can.” There went his interview, and the job. Why should they hold it for him, with dozens of ex-officers panting on their doorstep?

Ben did not want his mother to go to the funeral, and Edna had
said proudly: “She’s not able for it,” but Mrs Francis insisted that she must go, and even made Ben drive her into Southampton to buy a black hat, since she had none that were not gaudy. “Your father would want me to look my best in front of all his friends,” she said with shaky bravado.

She was being incredibly brave. She had wept to Ben when he first arrived, but not again after that, and she had not spoken at all of what the loss of her husband meant to her.

All her life she had been heartsick and stricken to the core by things that hardly affected her at all. Now that the substance of her life was dissolved, she had no words for it. She was not stunned into silence, as she had been when Matthew was drowned. Her quick sparrow energy was unslackened, and she never stopped talking all the three days that Ben was with her at Wavecrest, except when Edna forced phenobarbital down her and put her to sleep.

Edna did not approve of her being so normal. Her sister had wanted to break the news to Ben herself, but she had not let her use the telephone. In Edna’s book, widows were desolate, to be treated like a cross between an invalid and a lunatic. If her sister went out of the room, she would whisper to Ben about her: “Do you think she’ll break down?” or: “How does she seem to you today?” and break off very obviously when the door opened, putting on a false bright smile which showed the arches of moist, pale gum which had receded from her long teeth.

She would not allow her sister to do anything in the house, so Mrs Francis had nothing to do but sit about and talk. She talked to Ben unceasingly about his childhood and her life with his father, not nostalgically, but just to keep on talking, as if she were staging a filibuster.

She talked all the way to the church in the car, making gallant little comments about the shops and the weather, to which Edna replied: “Yes, dear,” soothingly, as if she were delirious. Mrs Francis was anxious not to be late, so they arrived too early. At the suggestion of the undertaker, who looked like Abraham Lincoln, and who also had a special voice for the widow, not soothing, but deferential like an old-style family grocer, they stayed outside in the car for a few minutes. It was better than sitting in the church to be stared at or deliberately not looked at by the people arriving for the funeral.

Ben watched his father’s friends going up the steps into the church. They were mostly married couples, with some women alone or with grown-up daughters, and a few retired widowers from the Nautical Club. Their faces were carefully grave. The hats of some of the women looked as if they had been kept for years for occasions like this. Although it was fairly warm, one or two men had brought out black overcoats, old-fashioned in cut and rather tight over the hips.

When Abraham Lincoln said that it was time, Ben led his mother up the aisle, leaving Aunt Edna to follow with his father’s cousin Doris, who had come panting down the pavement from the bus stop at the last minute, with her stockings twisted and a vast tooled-leather handbag under her arm like a brief-case.

His mother’s black-gloved hand lay on his arm, and he squeezed her wrist tightly against him. She was very small in the unfamiliar dark clothes and the ugly black hat which swamped her colourless face. It was a terrible ordeal for her to walk between the rows of people, some of whom could not help stealing sideways glances to see how poor Sybil was taking it, involuntarily wanting to be able to report that she was taking it very hard. At least they could sit up at the front of the church, where they could not see people looking at them, but Ben could feel their stares on his back. It was like getting married.

The coffin was on a trestle at the head of the aisle, covered with a dusty black pall which had some blotches of candle-grease round the trailing edges, for this was a rather high church. All through the service, Ben watched the coffin, trying to visualize his father lying in it, but he could not believe that the coffin was anything but an empty box, placed there for effect. His father was not there. He was taking no part in any of this, because through living his life and dying, he had earned the right to absent himself from anything so tedious as his own funeral.

Ben’s mother kept looking at the coffin too. He wanted to tell her not to let it make her cry, because the man for whom she wept was not there; but a loud hymn started up, and she would not be able to hear his whisper, and if she heard, she might not understand. She might think that he meant that the undertakers had made some terrible mistake.

When the hymn stopped, she could be heard crying noisily. Ben had his arm round her and had replaced her soaked handker
chief with a clean one, but she continued to sob wetly, providing the authentic touch for Edna, and enabling the congregation behind to be moved to pity. Cousin Doris opened her leather bag with a loud snap, rummaged about inside among what sounded like a collection of nuts and bolts, produced two large and not very clean handkerchiefs and shut the bag again with a noise like gunfire.