Man Overboard (8 page)

When he told his parents that he must get the bus for Gosport before lunch, his mother put on a little act of bravery. She braced her small body in the cerise wool dress, jerked her chin up, and said: “We don’t want to interfere with your plans. I had made an apple pie for you, but I dare say your father and I will manage to eat a little of it.” Stepping rather high, like a pony, she went upstairs to telephone her sister in Reading and tell her about Ben, and spoil her day too.

Mr Francis went to look out of the bay window which faced across the sandy road to the Carsons’ house, where there was a flag-pole in the paved garden, and red and green running lights on either side of the gate.

“You know what did it, of course.” He turned round, and his voice was matter of fact, discounting argument. “It was the scandal. The Admiralty has all those newspaper clippings about your wife.” He hardly ever said Marion’s name. “They would be attached to your confidential reports, and they’ve counted against you.”

“That was more than three years ago. None of it was my fault anyway. They couldn’t hold that against me.”

“Then what else have they got against you?” Mr Francis looked defeated. His head sagged forward on his short neck, and you
could see what he would look like at eighty. “You’ve had a fine career. Never put a foot wrong, as far as I know. A good war record, and command of two subs since then.” He looked at the wall by the fireplace, where photographs of all Ben’s ships hung in chronological order, with the date of his service in them printed underneath.

With a disappointed little snort, he turned from the pictures and sat down heavily in his armchair. “I don’t know why this should happen to me,” he said in a wondering, child-like way. “I really don’t.”

“Please understand, Dad.” Ben made one more effort. “You shouldn’t take it this way. It’s happening to everybody.”

“So you tell me,” his father said mulishly. “So you tell me.” He picked up the newspaper and rustled it over to the page where he was pursuing, with every expectation of winning a speedboat or a six-cylinder car, a weekly competition to choose the six smartest cocktail dresses from some thirty small and ill-defined fashion photographs.

“Edna sends us all her deepest sympathy,” his mother announced, returning from the telephone. Ben hoped that he was not going to start getting letters of condolence from all the people to whom his mother had announced the tragedy. If Aunt Edna had the nerve to write patronizingly, after what the magistrates had said about her son, he would answer her on black-edged paper.

“Well, Benjy.” His mother stretched her pale lips into a gay little smile. “You’ll want to be getting along, I suppose. Daddy, shall we have the cold beef, or would you rather finish the curry? There’s still a spoonful of chutney left, I believe.”

If she had begged him to stay on bended knees, with tears streaming down her face, it would not have had as much effect as this bleak little speech. The thought of them at their Sunday lunch in the chilly little dining-room, passing things to each other across his chair pushed in against the table edge was more than Ben could bear. When he told his mother that he would take the afternoon bus, and she realized that her apple pie had not been cooked in vain, her face lit up and she turned swiftly for the kitchen, uttering little exclamations of joy.

“It makes me feel such a swine,” he told Geneva Hogg. “I do nothing for them. I don’t go there often enough. I want to get away from the place as soon as I arrive, and when I say I’ll stay two hours longer, they’re in heaven.”

“Don’t let it get you down,” Geneva said. “That’s parents for you. Only yours are more helpless than most.” She set down the two coffee cups, slopping into their saucers, stirred them, licked the spoon and sat down opposite him by the gigantic fireplace where Ben, ignorant of the price of coal, had built a huge and incandescent fire.

The fireplace was gigantic because everything had been planned on a large scale when this was built as a three-storey house for one family. It was a typical Bayswater house of that period: solid, big-windowed, with cowled chimney-pots set together in rows, a heavy cornice round the unseen roof, and just enough embellishment in the way of a pillared porch and black and white marble steps to give it an air of unpretentious prosperity.

The house was plastered on three sides and decorated in the cream colour beloved by London painters because it quickly becomes dingy and needs renewing. The back was plain sooty brick, because no one was supposed to see it except the servants when they came up from the basement to hang out the washing.

When there were no longer any servants to tackle a house of this size and therefore no families able to live in it, the landlord had converted it into four flats by the rudimentary method of dividing the big rooms by flimsy partitions. The moulding on the ceilings and the carved plaster friezes were cut off short by the new walls, so that the rooms always seemed to be what they were, just pieces of larger rooms.

In Geneva’s flat on the second floor, the partitions had been knocked up in a very arbitrary way, and the rooms had queer shapes and were in unexpected places. The bathroom, which was like a condemned cell, was on the other side of the kitchen, which had one corner less than a right-angle from which the dirt had to
be hooked with a finger, since it could not be got at with a broom. Amy’s bedroom and the spare room where Ben slept were higher than they were long, like upended shoe-boxes. Geneva’s bedroom had three doors and windows and practically no wall space, so that she had to keep most of her clothes outside in a top-heavy wardrobe which loomed at the end of the corridor, blocking the light. The pitch-dark corridor wandered like a canyon between the rooms, pushed out of the way in the middle by the side of the lift-shaft. Groaning like the souls in purgatory, the lift crept up and down in a wire cage festooned with dust. At night it crouched in the basement making restless ticking noises.

The drawing-room, dwarfed by its wide, draughty windows that looked to the Park over the tops of the Bayswater Road buses and by the mammoth fireplace whose mantelpiece was out of Amy’s reach, was the shape of half an octagon. All the small, amorphous rooms were filled with pictures and furniture with which Geneva could not bear to part when her husband died and she moved here from the country, but the drawing-room was the most crowded of all.

“I like to have my things where I can see them in the room where I live,” Geneva said, and had crammed them all in until there was scarcely any room for living. Getting to the other end of the room was hazardous. There was only one electric outlet from which a multiple plug sent fraying wires in all directions to trip you up and send the lamps flying.

It was mostly Ben who knocked the lamps off their rickety tables and stands, and Geneva’s clumsier friends, like the ham-handed Major. Amy was too nimble and too familiar with the flat to knock things over, and Geneva, though neither neat nor nimble, moved among her beloved shabby possessions with the instinctive avoidance of the blind. She loved her flat, with all its quirks and inconveniences. She had not cared for her square flint house at Maidenhead any more than she had cared for the husband who had tried for twenty years to make her conform to his brutally rigid code of behaviour, and who had died without achieving it. His name had been against him from the start. Having allowed him to impose that on her, she was not going to let him get away with anything else. He would have crushed the spirit of most women. Not Geneva. Her spirit, unlike her skin, had preserved its elasticity. At seventy-two, she was stripped down to her driving
mechanism of restless energy, with a cracked laugh and an opinion about anything that came up, especially when she knew nothing about it.

Slightly raffish in appearance, with her sparse ginger hair twisted into airedale curls, and a liking for big, shiny handbags and jewellery which clanked at her bony neck and wrists like a spectre’s chains, she was no one’s idea of a cosy grandmother. Amy and she loved each other with an independent, uncritical love which gave more than it demanded. Ben loved her too. She was one of the things he and Marion had fought about. Ben had wanted to invite Geneva out to Malta, or to stay with them at Portland. Marion did not want her because she said that her mother always had one gin too many at cocktail parties.

Geneva lifted her skirt a little to let the warmth of the fire get at her spindly legs, and leaned back to pour her coffee back from the saucer to the cup. The coffee table was a round brass tray on legs, which gave forth a thin, resonant sound when you picked anything off it. It could never be used as a tray, because without it the legs collapsed and could not be put together again.

Ben drank his coffee quickly. It was gritty and slightly oily, in spite of the new percolator he had given Geneva. He could make better coffee himself with an old tin mug and a can of condensed milk, but Geneva liked to do things for him. Ben’s mother would seldom sit down before lunch because of the Upstairs, but Geneva loved to drop whatever she was doing at any time of day and sit with him like this, talking, wasting the morning away, with the laundry unsorted and the sink full of breakfast dishes.

“Another thing,” Ben said, “that makes me feel guilty. I’m fonder of you than of my mother.”

Geneva neither protested at this nor fished for flattery. “It’s because I’m not your responsibility,” she said. “Poor Sybil is.” She had referred to his mother as Poor Sybil ever since she first met her at Ben and Marion’s wedding in that unfortunate royal blue three-quarter-length dress.

“With parents, you see,” she went on, “it’s like this. First you are their child. Then all at once you find the balance has tipped up and they are suddenly your children. It’s hard to say exactly when it happens. With my parents, it was after my honeymoon, when I found out my mother had told me the facts of life all
wrong. In your case, it was probably when they lost Matthew. That must have taken away a lot of the old dears’ stamina.” Geneva was older than either of Ben’s parents, but she referred to them as if they were a bygone generation.

“God, yes.” Ben leaned forward and looked into the quivering heat of the fire. “They were pathetic. I remember going home that time. They hadn’t written to me, oddly enough. It was the one time Mum didn’t rush to send bad news through the mail. Dad had got leave, but he was in uniform. One of his old ones, a bit shiny. He’d been quite robust at the beginning of the war. He can’t have been much more than fifty, but when I saw him then, he had sagged, and suddenly seemed much older in a feeble, rather childish way. My mother wasn’t talking much. She just blurted out: ‘Matthew is dead,’ and then they both sat there and stared at me helplessly, waiting to see what I could do about it.”

“Yes, I can see it. So you had to go into the Navy. I can see why. A toy for a crying child. Now the Navy’s putting you out and taking their toy away from them. Naturally the poor old souls are upset.”

“Won’t they set just as much store by me when I’m a company director?” Ben stretched back in the worn armchair, whose seat was so near the ground that it would take a block and tackle to get you out of it in a hurry. “I have a feeling I’m going to be terrifically successful.”

“You’ll have to, if you’re going to keep that Kelly girl.” Geneva laughed. It amused her to think of Ben and Rose. When she laughed, it was sometimes like the cawing of rooks before a storm, sometimes like the clamour of barn-yard fowl. “Or is she going to keep you?”

“Apparently not. She says I have to get a job.”

“What as? I wish you’d go into shipping. Jack Friedman could get you in with his lot. He’d do it for me.”

“No more ships. I want something new. God knows what, but I’ll find something. I’ll make a tardy but brilliant career, and set the old folks up in a fine house on the Beaulieu River, with maids.”

Amy came noisily into the room in a thick blue school overcoat with the collar turned up. She had been playing in a hockey match. She was in the fourth eleven, and she was very sporting at the moment, because she was in love with a girl called Fiona Maclaren, who was captain of the first eleven. She wore her long
bronze hair in tight pigtails and affected a slightly rolling walk.

She leaned over the back of Ben’s chair to kiss him, and ran her small hand through his short hair. “Feels like stroking a dog,” she said with satisfaction. She came round the chair to stand straddle-legged in front of the chair, smelling of cold outdoor London.

“I’ve been promoted,” she announced in the terse, tight-lipped voice she used for talking about hockey. “I played left wing today. When Miss Ascott said: ‘Amy Francis on the left wing,’ I almost died. Poor Brenda Sims is still right half. She’ll never get anywhere.”

Ben, who had played hockey for various naval teams, was aware of the subtle social distinctions between positions on the field, but Geneva asked: “Why is left wing any better than right wing, where you played last week?”

“Oh, Grandma, surely you’ve lived with me long enough to know that. It doesn’t matter who plays right wing, because no one ever passes to you on that side. In the first eleven they do, of course. Not in the fourth.”

Ben had not seen Amy since the letter came from the Admiralty. Geneva had told her the news, and he asked her what she thought of it.

“It’s hard cheese,” she said, in her new hockey language, “but Miss Maynard says there’ll be another war soon, so you’ll be back in before you know it. I hope so. It will be a pity not to say: My father, Commander Francis, any more. Or could I still?”

“I don’t think so. I’ll call myself Mister.”

“The Major doesn’t.”

“The Major. That’s different,” Geneva said, and they all laughed. They usually laughed when they spoke of the Major. He was a disreputable friend of Geneva’s who had been hanging around for years with his spattered veins and wobbly knees. He came in and out of the flat unheralded and at will, sometimes bringing a bottle in case Geneva was down to the last dregs of whisky or gin.

“Well, I’ll buzz off,” Amy said. “I have to oil my hockey stick.” She banged out of the door and went stamping and whistling down the passage to the kitchen.