Man Overboard (9 page)

“Don’t worry,” Geneva said. “It won’t last.”

“Grandma!” Amy’s voice came thin and piercing from the other end of the flat. “Gregory’s here! ”

“Oh, my God.” Geneva clapped a hand to her forehead. “I forgot it again. Tell him to come in here!” She raised her voice in a shout which cracked on the last word and set her coughing.

A young man in a green coat embroidered with the name of a laundry appeared in the doorway. “Basket’s empty, Mrs. H.,” he said. “Looks like you’ve fallen down on the job again.”

“Oh, Greg.” She ravished him with one of her special smiles. “Couldn’t you just make a few other calls and then come back? I’ve been so busy, I haven’t had a moment to do it, and if I don’t send the sheets this week, Amy and I will be sleeping in blankets like refugees. And the Commander, too, if he slings his hammock here. The Navy’s through with him.”

“Is that so, sir?” Gregory turned his round, black head to look at Ben compassionately. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Oh, don’t be.” Geneva flapped a hand at him. “He doesn’t give a damn, any more than you did when they threw you and your ulcer out of the Air Force. How is it? Been acting up again?”

“So-so. I get my turns.”

“You should have gone to see that man I told you about. I said I’d pay. These National Health people will kill you. You will come back, won’t you, Greg?” She put her head on one side, charming him like a pet bird that does not know what it looks like in the moulting season.

“If you’ll get that basket packed right away. I’ve only a few calls to make round here, and I’m not coming back for the fun of it, even for you, Mrs. H.”

“Of course, of course. I’m on my way already.” Geneva made no attempt to move.

The laundryman looked at her suspiciously, said: “All the best, Commander,” and went out.

“Ask Amy to give you some coffee!” Geneva called after him.

The polished black head reappeared round the door. “You want to kill me?”

“Oh, of course.” They nodded solemnly at each other, in silent homage to the ulcer.

“Quite the nicest man,” Geneva said when the head withdrew. “Of course, it wasn’t the Air Force that gave him the ulcer. It was his wife. She’s a bitch on wheels, from what he tells me. Had all
her teeth pulled out when she was twenty-five because she couldn’t stand the drill. I can imagine what she looks like in bed at night.”

“Even if you know all the details of his private life,” Ben said mildly, “do you have to tell him about mine?”

“Why not? He takes a great interest. I hope you’re not going to be touchy about being kicked out of the Navy. I’m beginning to think it may be the finest thing that could have happened to you. You were getting rather stuffy and parochial. I hope you’ll get out as soon as you can, now you’ve got the chance. Poor Sybil and the old man are crazy to want you to hang on like a drowning man. Why waste your time?”

She got up, but it was not to do the laundry. It was because when she was working herself up about something, she could not talk sitting down. She had to move about, touching things, jerking the furniture about; or stand shifting from foot to foot, clasping her hands, twisting her necklace, scratching her thigh.

“You’re not a coward. Get out and see what you can do,” she exhorted Ben. “Don’t listen to those timid old Jessies at Southampton or to that glamour girl you’re chasing, who just wants to keep you in storage at Gosport where you won’t meet any girls who don’t look like the back of a bus. The Navy says they’re through with you. All right, tell ’em you’re through with them, and let them find some other stooge to teach the infant class. There’s other things in life besides being called Sir and having all that pretty gold stuff on your hat.”

“Perhaps I’ll get a job where someone will call me Sir.” Ben was half ashamed of himself for saying this, but he was always honest with Geneva. “I don’t care about the scrambled egg, but it may be a bit tough at first, not being an officer.”

“You see—that’s what the Navy’s done for you. Made you think you’re somebody.” Geneva put on a mocking face, then she suddenly took it off and reached out a hand to stroke the top of his head in Amy’s fond gesture. “If it’s going to be tough, Ben, do it quick.”

“As a matter of fact,” he twisted his head unobtrusively away as one of her big rings caught him on the ear, “I’ve already told Their Lordships I want to get out next month. I didn’t tell you or Rose or the old folks, because I wanted you all to agree to it first. You see, I am a coward.”

“You’re not. You’re just too lazy to enjoy arguments. Not like
me.” Geneva smacked her lips, smudged at the corners with the mulberry lipstick that never would stay where she put it. “I thrive on ‘em.”

“Why did you tell the laundryman I’d be moving in here? You can’t take on me as well as Amy.”

“Why not? You ought to be with her, and you can’t pay a decent rent until you get a job, if you’re going to invest all your gratuity for Amy. You’ll have to pay me something, of course.” Geneva tightened her lips practically. “I’m flat broke. I’d been thinking of taking in a lodger, only I couldn’t stand a woman; she’d want to wash her stockings in the bath and hang them on a string, and people would talk so if I had a man.” Geneva felt that she would never be too old for scandal. “A son-in-law would be different though.”

“My parents will want me to live with them.” Ben said gloomily.

“You’d die. We’ll think up some excuse so as not to hurt them. They won’t like your being here, any more than they like me having Amy. She tells me that when she goes to see them they make veiled little hints about how badly I bring her up. No wonder I practically have to drive the child there with a whip.”

“I would never have let them have her,” Ben said. “I was a pretty stolid child. I could take it, but I would never let Amy be so bored. I don’t know what I would have done without you, Geneva. You’ve been wonderful to her.”

“Stuff,” Geneva said. “She’s been the making of me. Kept me young.” She stood on a frayed tapestry stool to look in the mirror which hung over the mantelpiece, tipped forward because it was too high, so that she saw the top of her thinly-covered scalp and a foreshortened view of her deeply lined face. “Even if I didn’t love her,” she said, addressing him from the footstool, “I would have done anything to make up for what her mother did to you.”

“What do you tell her about Marion?”

“The same as you do. That she was killed in a car. I don’t say who was with her, and she’s never asked. She doesn’t seem to take much interest in Marion, except as a sort of tragic death figure. When I told her last month that it was the anniversary of her mother’s death she stuck a black ribbon bow on her picture with cellophane tape and put a pot of those awful little dried flowers people sell in the street in front of it. She rather enjoyed it.”

Geneva fell off the stool, stumbled in her tarnished brocade mules, and stood up on one leg like a pelican to take off the slipper and rub at her long yellow foot.

“Will she ever find out the truth?” Ben asked her.

“Not unless someone tells her. Your poor mother might, in a fit of exhibitionist honesty.”

Listen, Ben told his mother in his head, if you ever tell Amy that Marion was killed driving with a Chief Petty Officer she’d been sleeping with for months, I’ll shoot you.

“SUBMARINE COMMANDER’S WIFE KILLED, LOVER ESCAPES,” the headlines had said. The bloody man had talked at the inquest. It could have been hushed up. He had not been asked to tell more than the details of the accident but before the coroner could stop him he had dashed into an orgy of confessing—or was it boasting? The local press had picked it up naturally and the London papers got it. Whether or not the Admiralty had preserved the cuttings, pinned to his confidential reports like dirty washing, Ben knew that his parents had kept them. They never wanted to forget how much they hated Marion.

“Geneva,” he said, “did Marion ever come to this switch of relationship with you—of feeling that you were her child?”

Geneva laughed, her cawing laugh, which was her least amused one. “She felt that way all her life. She used to scare me even when she was a baby by looking at me cynically when I was feeding or changing her, as if she thought I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t, most of the time. She patronized me. I was rather a nuisance to her, I think. When she was at school I always said the wrong thing to her friends or wore the wrong sort of hat on Speech Day. When she first brought you to meet me, she behaved as if she was ashamed of me.”

Ben remembered noticing that and putting it out of his head, as he had tried to put away discoveries about Marion that dismayed him, after he was committed to marrying her. He had not known that Geneva had noticed it. She had welcomed him that day as if he had been one of the family for years.

“It wasn’t until I met you,” he said, “that I was finally sure I did want to marry your daughter. I like you, Geneva. Let’s have a drink.”

“Oh, do let’s. How gay. It isn’t nearly twelve o’clock.”

As Ben threaded his way through the furniture to see what
Geneva had in the sideboard, he said: “Are you sore with me for being kicked out of the Navy? Everyone else seems to be.”

“Hell, no. I think it’s a damn fine thing. You’d have been impossible as an Admiral. Hearty, perhaps, and liking your port, but dreadfully
passé
, wanting to revive the era of the battleship, and things like that. I’d have been dead, anyway, so—oh, go away, Greg.” She waved her slipper at the laundryman, who appeared once more at the door.

“You haven’t done it,” he accused her. “I can’t wait, Mrs. H. I’m due back at Purley before one.”

“Why do they always have laundries in such impossible places?” Geneva hopped, putting on her slipper, and made for the door. “Please wait, Greg.” She looked up at him, blinking her stiff eyelashes in what she thought was fascination. “It will only take me a minute. Have a gin with the Commander.”

Gregory made a vomiting face.

“Of course not. Amy!” She went down the passage, yelling. “Bring some Ovaltine at once. It’s an emergency.”

“My spies at headquarters,” said Frank Daniels raising a gin and tonic to his lips with no more enthusiasm than if it were medicine, “tell me that a resettlement officer is coming down next week to help you chaps into a happy and profitable retirement. Too bad you won’t be here.”

“He’s come already,” Ben said. Encased in his bubble of phlegmatic indifference, Frank was always several days behind with the news. “I’ve avoided him, though. I’d rather struggle along on my own, although they tell me he has some nice lines to offer in the way of sanitary inspection, or personnel officer in a cement works on the upper Tyne. Kenneth told me he felt like a discharged prisoner being helped to go straight. I already feel like a bereaved widow, the way that new man Parkins treats me.

Lieutenant-Commander Parkins had been sent to relieve Ben at the submarine school. He treated Ben with nervous deference, as if he were apologizing for being still in the Navy when Ben was going out. Ben kept trying to corner bim for a drink and talk about what he might run into with the course; but the new instructor did not drink, and he seemed anxious to keep out of Ben’s way, as acquaintances avoid a bereaved person when they
are not sure how to express their sympathy, or whether to express it at all.

It was Ben’s last night at Gosport, and he was as thankful to be getting it over as Parkins would be tomorrow to have him out of the way. Ben was at the bar in the ante-room with Frank Daniels and some other officers who were buying him drinks, trying to ensure that his last memories of the place would be the splitting hangover he took to the station tomorrow.

Several people came up to Ben and slapped him on the back, and unlike the craven Parkins, who shied off the subject like a startled faun, found some joke to make about being axed, and said simple, hearty things like: “Here’s to a bowler hat.” Many of them were unsure of their own positions, and they felt supersti-tiously safer if they voiced their doubts, as people will swear that they have failed an examination, even when they know they have done well.

Ben had dreaded this last evening, afraid that he would feel envy for these officers who would be drinking here tomorrow, while he would be in town ploughing through the Situations Vacant with a cup of Geneva’s coffee at his elbow. Now, curiously, he found he did not care. After a few drinks, he began to feel almost sorry for the others, because he knew his fate and they did not. It seemed to him that he had not felt so bad after he received the Admiralty’s letter as when he was wondering whether it would come.

He was headed for the new world. They were stuck behind in the world of routines and regulations, important enough while you were a fixed part of it, but diminishing behind you as you approached the way out. He was like a boy leaving school, suddenly mature across the widening breach between him and the pimply ones who will still wear the blazer next term. No regrets. No nostalgia. Not until the novelty of freedom wears off does the boy pull out his blazer with the frayed binding and ponder on the happiness of the prison.

Ben got a little drunker. Not foolish, but nonchalant enough to satisfy the general idea that old Ben must go out with a bang. Before the evening was over, three officers came in together. They were from a submarine which had just returned from exercises. Pale, tired, relaxed in the familiarity of each other’s company, they brought with them an air of reality and achievement which seemed
alien to the idle, smoke-hazed room. They were in clean uniforms, but as Ben watched them come up to the bar, he saw them in the thick white sweaters, the tattered jackets, the bashed-in headgear of a submarine crew at sea.

“Good cruise?” Ben asked one of them.

He answered non-committally. It had been a tedious, uneventful exercise. He wanted a whisky and a lot of sleep. Ben knew how he felt. He knew the fatigue, the disoriented sensation when you first came ashore, as if the earth were pushing the sole of your foot into your knee joint, the lingering indigestion. The three men who had been at sea together wandered up to the bar, keeping together from habit, not because they were talking. Ben stayed a little apart, leaning on the bar stroking the side of an empty glass, not wanting and not able to join them.