Man Overboard (11 page)

It was her sister’s children for whom she knitted. Her sister had produced babies in a regular but improvident fashion, and Miss Arkwright’s life outside the office was devoted to auntly services. Before that, it had been her brother’s children, who were now grown-up and needed mufflers rather than matinée coats. Like Georgina Hogarth, Miss Arkwright had always been so busy with other people’s children that she had never had the chance to find a man to give her some of her own.

The three women in the little office with the grimy window between them and the perpetual noise of the traffic in Kensington High Street grew very fond of Ben. They were always glad to see him, and they tried their hardest to help him, although the nearest they came to finding him a job was to arrange an interview with a lady who wanted a personal bodyguard for her daughter, which fell through when the lady telephoned to say that the daughter had run away and married the man against whom she had desired to guard her.

Ben grew fond of the three women, and found himself almost as concerned about finding a husband for Miss Arkwright as about finding a job for himself. He even went so far as to write to Frank
Daniels, suggesting that he should come up for a week-end in town, during the course of which Ben planned to stage a meeting with Miss Arkwright. After an interval, Frank replied that the Admiralty was sending him to Scotland. “No time to get to town, even if I wanted to,” Frank wrote, not knowing what he was missing. Surly devil. Perhaps Miss Arkwright was better off with her nieces and her nephews, one of whom had been expelled from two nursery schools and was claimed to be a proper tartar.

One evening when Ben breezed into the office near closing-time and found the women pulling on rubber boots and dabbing at their noses with little velour puffs, they greeted him with twittering excitement. Something wonderful had happened. Miss Arkwright had answered an advertisement for an Appeals Organizer for a charitable organization. A gentleman called Sweeting—such a pretty name—had telephoned at two o’clock —”No, it must have been two fifteen, because I was naughty enough to get back late from lunch”—and an interview had been arranged for Ben the next day.

“We didn’t want to tell you until we’d heard from him,” Mrs French said, beaming at Ben as if he were her favourite child. “We wanted to surprise you, and we were afraid of disappointing you in case he never answered Phoebe’s letter. We’ve been trying to reach you all the afternoon. Your mother-in-law said she didn’t know where you were. ‘For all I know,’ she said, ‘he’s run away to sea.’ She’s very humorous,” Mrs. French added doubtfully. She did not like jokes about Ben and the Navy.

“I went to the cinema,” Ben said.

“To the cinema, on a day like this!” Jessie exclaimed. “Oh, but of course, you didn’t know. How could you? You couldn’t, of course.” Jessie often asked questions of herself and answered them in the same breath, a habit acquired from living with a large family who never listened to each other. “Isn’t it exciting, Ben? Yes, tremendously so.” She stretched her mouth in a wide smile beneath her gaunt cheeks. She was in love with Ben, but it did not matter. She had a young man with whom she was properly in love, with holding hands and kissing and looking at three-piece suites in shop windows. Her feeling for Ben was deliberately unreal, like an enjoyable dream of Tony Curtis. It was sufficient just to be daring enough to call him Ben, and to take more trouble with her hair and the seams of her stockings in case he dropped in.

Miss Arkwright was sitting in the chair by the gas fire, zipping up stout boots. Her expression was smug. While Jessie and Mrs French babbled, she told Ben the details tautly, as if she negotiated thousand-pound-a-year jobs every day of the week. She was the one who had done it. She had seen the advertisement. She had written the letter. She had talked on the telephone with the great Sweeting and had been shrewd enough not to say anything that would put him off.

“A real gentleman,” she said, stretching her feet out to the fire for a last warm-up before she joined the frozen queue for the bus. “I think you’ll enjoy working for him.” The boots began to smell a little.

“Steady on,” Ben said. “I haven’t got the job yet. An interview’s only the start. What do I know about raising funds?”

“You’ve always claimed you could bluff your way into anything.” Miss Arkwright turned her large doe eyes on him reproachfully. “You wouldn’t go and let me down, surely?”

“You will go to see him?” Mrs French asked nervously. If he failed them now, it would be the end, after all their efforts for him, and Jessie making a novena at Saint Patrick’s. Bulky in their outdoor clothes, they all looked at him, their white-haired boy, the pride of the Phillimore Employment Bureau.

He hastened to reassure them. “And I did once pass round the hat for old Corky’s silver wedding,” he added. “I made a good job of that, even though his wife never liked the tray.”

“There you are, you see!” Miss Arkwright turned off the gas fire and stood up, pulling a felt hat down over her fluffy hair. “You can do it. Go to it.” She grasped her umbrella before her as though she were presenting arms. “Go in and win.”

“The very best of luck to you, my dear boy,” Mrs French said moistily. For two pins she would have kissed him.

“Ditto from yours truly.” Jessie tied a long woollen scarf over her hair and flung the ends back behind her narrow shoulders. “I’m sure I’ll never get any work done tomorrow for thinking about you.”

Ben found himself shaking hands solemnly all round. Then he left them, galloping down the treacherous stairs two at a time, their sailor knight off to the jousts.

Geneva and Amy were almost as excited as the three women in
the Phillimore Bureau. The Major was at the flat when Ben reached home, and they drank to his success in large martinis.

“When you get dug in there,” the Major said, “you might look about you and see if there’s a trifling little job for me.” He had not worked for years and did not intend to, since his wife had left him enough money to sustain life, but he frequently talked about what he would do if someone would only give him half a chance. “I might be useful to you. Give you some tips. I know all about these shows. Colossal expense accounts. You’ll be doing all your business over lunch at the Savoy Grill, I dare say.”

His smile was canny. The Major was a man who prided himself on knowing a thing or two. He had a loose, discoloured face, bruised purple in the cold weather, and black hair streaked painstakingly but inadequately across his skull. His figure was still carefully martial, the shoulders braced, the growing paunch manfully sucked in. When he expounded his inside information about life, he would bend and stretch his knees like a stage policeman. He bent them outwards now, but since he was on his third martini, he could not stretch them again, so he continued downwards into an armchair, knocking his glass off a little table.

“I don’t think so, sir,” Ben said, while Amy, who was being domesticated today, went silently to fetch a cloth. “This outfit sounds pretty genuine.”

“Of course it’s genuine,” Geneva told the Major sharply. “Don’t try to crab everything everybody else does, you idle old rascal. This is the first real nibble of a job Ben has had. You should rejoice with us.”

“I do, my dear, I do,” the Major said. “And if you will kindly bring over that cocktail shaker, I shall rejoice with even better heart.”

Amy had a holiday from school next day, the relic of some bygone anniversary which had never been relinquished along with the piece of empire it commemorated. She insisted on accompanying Ben to his interview. Nothing that he could say would dissuade her. She would no more let him go alone than if he were a four-year-old child wanting to travel across London by himself, although she did make the concession that she would not follow him right into Mr Sweeting’s office.

Everybody in the flat helped Ben to dress for the occasion. The
Major had passed out the evening before and spent the night on the sofa. His recuperative powers were remarkable, and after monopolizing the bathroom for half an hour and using Ben’s electric razor and a quantity of Geneva’s talcum powder, he appeared at breakfast in the kitchen ready to tackle a large whisky and water. After breakfast he polished Ben’s shoes for him with the spit-and-rub technique he had learned from a long-ago batman. Amy laid all her father’s ties out on his bed and picked out the one which seemed to be the most persuasive. Geneva went over the collar and lapel of his best suit with cleaning fluid and drawing her mouth into a hundred tiny puckers, removed Rose’s powder and two of her strong hairs from the shoulder.

Rose had telephoned last night, but although Ben had wanted to share his excitement with her, the general hysteria surrounding the forthcoming interview had still left him enough sanity to wait until he got the job. If he failed, she would be more discouraged with him than she was already. If he got the job, he would swoop down on her and carry her off in astonishment to a champagne dinner.

Ben established Amy in a café near Victoria Station with a chocolate milk shake and a plate of hot buttered toast. He hovered for a moment by the table where she crouched with sucked-in cheeks over the straw.

“Are you scared, Daddy?”

“In a way.”

Amy looked up at him and raised her hand in a grown-up gesture, startlingly reminiscent of her mother, to pin up a short wisp of the long chestnut hair which she wore today in a pony-tail, to make her look older. “Remember you are a naval officer,” she said.

Walking towards Grosvenor Place, Ben passed a public house which was just opening. He would have welcomed a drink for the strange dryness in his mouth and the hollowness inside his waist, but Mr Sweeting would not care for whisky on his breath, and peppermints afterwards would be just as incriminating.

Waiting to cross the road, he looked at himself in a shop window, and saw that he appeared the same as usual. A man no longer boyishly young, but far from being irrevocably mature, of medium height, with broad shoulders and rather short arms, wearing a soft felt hat, a tweed coat over a grey flannel suit, and
shoes that shone like an advertisement. From the looks of him no one would guess that here was a Navy throw-out, on his way to the first important testing of himself as a civilian, with a stomach that seemed to have done nothing at all about the bacon and eggs he had put into it three hours ago.

He adjusted the hat to a better angle. What would such a man be doing here at this hour of the morning if he were not going to see Mr Sweeting? It was much too late to be coming in on the train to work unless he were the very highest class of executive, and the soft brown hat and the tweed coat denied that.

What business had a man at Victoria Station late in the morning? The women, that was easy. They had come up to shop from the country or the suburbs. For a moment, Ben saw himself in a red-brick house in Reigate with a wife who looked like that girl over there in the coat with the high fur collar cuddling her neck, who would not be so busy buying things for the children and the house that she could not find time to slip in a little something for him.

The men were more difficult. There were crowds of them about, going in and out of the station, or hurrying in every direction along the pavements, as insanely purposeful as ants. They must be going in or out of offices in the neighbourhood, or travelling to or from factories south of the river. But what would they do when they got there, and where would they go when they left? Ben’s imagination struck, protesting to him that it knew nothing about the world of affairs, at Victoria or anywhere else. And yet in a few months, if his luck held—he could never think of himself as anything but lucky—he might be one of these men striding with a brief-case in and out of the station, looking as if he knew what he was about. What would he be doing at Victoria Station in the cause of charity? Going to Brighton, of course, comfortably on the noonday pullman, to see a rich old widow about her donation.

Mr Sweeting’s office was in a converted Belgravia house. Waiting in the reception-office where the sleek, straight up and down girl had shown him a chair and returned to her ivory-coloured, noiseless typewriter, Ben began to think that the Major might have a point when he talked about large expenses. There was an air of muted luxury about this outfit which did not come from paring down your budget.

Ben was early for his appointment—Miss Arkwright had suggested,
as if it were a highly novel plan: “If I were you, I wouldn’t be late”—and he sat with his hat on his knee and looked at a picture on the pastel wall. It was a dark watercolour of the back of a row of little houses, all exactly alike, separated from each other by a narrow space that would barely let a bicycle through. Under the identical gables were tightly shut bedroom windows, and in the foreground house, under the window, a sloping roof covered what looked like a lean-to kitchen with three wooden steps slightly askew outside the back door. Snow lay on the roof and along the window-sills and was piled in a little drift between the steps and the house. Against the dark wall of the kitchen two windows and the top half of the back door shone with a warm yellow light.

There was someone in the kitchen, indistinguishable as either a man or a woman, with one arm hanging forward and down as if the sleeve were being rolled up. A man washing at the sink after work. A woman preparing supper. It was a poor house, a house probably ill equipped to keep out the weather which had brought the snow. The bright kitchen was perhaps only a small stuffy room with grease behind the stove and people who had nothing new to say to each other, but as long as you remained outside, it had the’ secret charm of any lighted place at night.

The artist had caught this covetous feeling of being outside and wanting to go in, because he knew he was not going in. Perhaps the man or woman had looked out of the window as they rolled up their sleeves, and seen him standing in the snow in a cap and muffler making a sketch for his picture, and envied him the adventure of his creation, because they were not going out to share it.

A discreet buzzer. “Mr Sweeting will see you now,” the flat girl, said, and Ben pulled himself out of the picture, wrenched at his persuasive tie, and followed her along the soft carpet to the door at the end of the corridor.