Man Overboard (20 page)

“You’ll kill yourself, dear,” said the remains of the old Polish woman who worked on the next section. “What you are trying to do? Show us up? I don’t care. Tomorrow I quit.” She moved slowly away on her skeleton legs, clattering half the dishes off a table and leaving the rest, swiping at the plastic top with a stained and dripping cloth which added its own unsavoury contribution to the smears and puddles it missed.

Ben cleared two of her tables behind her back and returned to his own. Just a little science, that’s all it needs to get it squared off, he told the customers, who did not hear him, since he did not speak, and did not see him, since he was doing the kind of job which is remarked only if it is not done.

“Do you think you’ll be able to manage the work?” the manageress had asked him, tapping her teeth doubtfully with a pencil. “You don’t seem quite the type.” She was a middle-aged, harassed woman in a loosely knit black cardigan, with a girlish velvet ribbon threaded through her thin grey hair. She lived in a tiny office off the clamorous kitchen, with an open door through which disgruntled members of the staff constantly charged with complaints against the customers and each other.

“Of course,” she smiled at Ben through her built-in frown, “we get all sorts. Students and the like. We even had a débutante once. I put her on the teas. It was not at all satisfactory. The newspapers came after her to take her picture, and got everybody upset.”

“I can do the job all right,” Ben said, “if you’ll let me have it. I’m desperate for work.”

The manageress looked down. “Your troubles are your own affair,” she said quickly, as if she had heard too many hard-luck stories to be able to stand any more. “I’d advise you to keep quiet about them,” she added, looking at Ben’s suit, “for there’s many here that must be much worse off than you.”

After he had signed on, she took him to the cloakroom, where he took off his jacket and put on a stiff bleached apron which covered the front of his shirt and tied round the waist with tapes frayed from much laundering. It stood away from his body like
sailcloth, moving a little distance apart from him, as if it had an independent life of its own.

“You don’t quite look the part, I must say.” The manageress tilted her head and frowned sideways at him. “Oh, dear, these are funny times.”

A girl came out from the women’s section of the cloakroom. “Ethel,” the manageress said, her voice regaining authority, “this is Mr Francis. He’s to work on the tables. Will you pass him on to someone out there who will show him what to do?”

The girl was heavy bosomed and dark skinned, with a starched white crescent of cap fastened with many iron pins at an impossible angle on her piled-up hair. “Another one for the salt mines?” she said cheerfully. “We just buried the last. What’s your name?” she asked, as they passed through the inferno of the kitchen.

“Ben.”

“Hullo, Ben.” She smiled at him invitingly, assuming a slight American accent. “Where did you come from, baby dear?”

I don’t know much, Ben thought, but at least I know enough not to say From the Navy.

From the office of a pair of crooks off the Euston Road, he could have said, but he told her: “From a hotel. I was a kitchen porter.”

“Oh, well.” Ethel accepted this gratifyingly. “This will be a breeze for you. Two days here, though, and you’ll wish you’d stayed in the hotel. Why didn’t you?”

“I couldn’t.” Ben raised his voice as they passed from the clatter of the kitchen through the kicked metal door to the tea-time roar of the cafeteria. “There was some trouble with one of the guests.”

“A woman?” Ethel’s dark gaze swept him hopefully up and down his independent apron.

Ben nodded. A woman in an obliterating felt hat caught at his arm as they passed her table. “This tea’s sugared,” she complained. “I asked for it without.”

“I’m so sorry, madam.” Ben picked up the cup. “I’ll get you some more. Show me where,” he said out of the side of his mouth to Ethel.

“I’ll get it.” She took the cup. “Madam, he says. That’s a word I never heard in these parts before. No wonder you got one of the guests into trouble.” She winked at him, raising one side of her mouth to meet the wink. “Here, I’ve got to get back behind
the counter. Doris wants to get off. I’ll give you to Sir Thomas Beecham. He’s queer too. You and him will get along fine.”

Sir Thomas Beecham was a tall young music student who was labouring after college hours with trolley and dish-cloth to pay his room rent. His name was Tommy Maverick, and his growth was all towards the ceiling. There was no bulk in him anywhere, and very little sinew. His apron went one and a half times round him. His long arms and legs flopped and dangled awkwardly, like a puppet with an amateur at the strings.

His long, immature face was perpetually troubled by the complications of life. Where there were none he made them. He took Ben over anxiously and proceeded to make mountains for him out of the molehills of the cafeteria.

“You’d better come with me,” he said, “and watch what I do, before I let you have a trolley of your own. I wouldn’t want you to get into any trouble on your first day.”

He handed Ben a cloth, the essential tool of his trade, and they worked together all down one side of the long, garish room, its pink walls and yellow table-tops flattened to the livid colours of nightmare by the panels of harsh light in the low ceiling. No cochineal or spinach water could ever have evolved such tints on the icing of the cakes. No tomatoes could have produced the blood-orange pools of ketchup which smothered the suppers which were beginning to be eaten side by side with the teas.

While he worked, Sir Thomas instructed Ben under his breath in a nervous mumble. “It’s not as easy as it looks, actually. There are all sorts of snags. Sometimes they leave a plate with heaps of food on it. They may have pushed it aside, so you think they’ve done with it, but sometimes they’re going back to it, and it’s dreadful if you take it away by mistake. I asked a woman once: ‘Have you finished?’ and she said: ‘None of your business.’ I felt such an ass.”

Working together in their long, unwieldly aprons, they soon had the trolley stacked high on both levels with plates and cups and sliding cutlery. “And that’s another thing.” Sir Thomas leaned over the head, fussing and prodding at it with long, knuckly hands. “If you pack it too full, some of the stuff will fall off, and they take the breakages out of your pay. And then the cloths. That’s a terrible worry. There are never enough clean ones. You have to take them out to the kitchen and rinse them out, and
there isn’t a proper sink, you see, like at home, because of the dish-washer, so you have to use the tap where they wash the vegetables, and there’s a man there—he doesn’t like it at all. He turns the hot tap on suddenly while you’ve got your hands under it.

“And then there’s May.” He lowered his voice as they approached the dish-washing machine with their load. “She’s not a bad sort really, and the poor old soul has a crippled husband, they say, and some frightful disease that puts water in all her limbs. She’ll tell you. It aggravates her, and sometimes whatever you say to her, she says something nasty. She said a horrible thing to me once. I couldn’t repeat it to you. I wouldn’t even tell my own brother. Some more. May,” he said nervously, wheeling the trolley alongside May’s messy counter and beginning to unload the dishes.

“Of course it’s some more,” May grumbled, her swollen arms flailing about among the china. “It’s more, more, more all the time. The glasses over there,
please
. You ought to know that by now. If you’d just do the job instead of gab all the time, we might all get along a lot better.”

“I’m sorry, May,” Sir Thomas plunged forward to separate the glasses.

“I’ll do it.” She pushed him aside with her bulk. “You’ve brought a cellar out again.” She threw the salt-cellar back on to the trolley. “I’ve a good mind to report you to the manageress.”

“Oh, don’t, May,” Sir Thomas said, as if he thought she meant it. “Look, this is Ben. He’s come to work here.”

“They come and they go,” May said, hurling a pile of plates into the moving racks which carried them into the maelstrom of hot, soapy water. “What do you expect me to do about it?”

“You see?” Sir Thomas said as they pushed the trolley away. “You see how difficult it all is? Come on, I’ll get you a trolley, if you’re sure you’ll be all right on your own. Come to me if you get into any difficulties. I hope you’ll manage. I don’t suppose you’ll stay though. Most of them only last a few days. Casual labour. Except me. I’ve been here five weeks.”

“Why don’t you get moved up to a better job at the counter?”

“Oh, I don’t want to. I know this job now, you see. I know where I am.” He found Ben a trolley and parted from him reluctantly, clearing plates, wiping tables with stooping, anguished care,
occasionally throwing up his long, bony head to look for Ben across the room and make sure that he was all right.

When Ben had been on the job three days and was falling into the trauma of feeling that he had been here all his life and could only be released by death, a stubby, round-faced man came up to him in the staff canteen.

“I know you,” he said. He looked about him to see if anyone was listening, and dropped his voice. “I served in the
Tigress
with you, sir. Remember me? Henry Briggs, Telegraphist, First Class. Babyface Briggs, they used to call me. I got out at the end of the war. Regretted it ever since.”

Ben remembered him. Babyface Briggs, a wireless operator, cheerful, conscientious, knowing his job, but not much else: a boy straight from his mother’s skirts, who believed everything his shipmates told him. If there was a practical joke afoot, it was always played on Babyface Briggs. There had been some trouble with a girl in Ceylon. A prostitute. Babyface had believed that he ought to marry her, and although Ben was a year younger than he was and scared stiff of prostitutes himself, it had been his job to explain to Babyface why he should not.

Over corned beef sandwiches made from two-day-old bread and cups of tepid tea, they reminisced about this and other shared experiences. Babyface was working on the big griddle underneath the open hatch between the kitchen and the serving counter. Ben did not ask what fortune had brought him here instead of using his knowledge of radio on a better job. Babyface did not like to ask Ben what had brought him to the trolley and the damp cloth.

He asked tentatively: “You here for a lark, sir—on leave, like?”

When Ben shook his head and said: “I’ve been axed. I need a job,” Babyface whistled softly through a gap in his teeth and said no more.

With a reversal of the relationship which had been theirs when they served together, he took Ben under his protective wing, proudly because he had been an officer, and with a pitying concern because his commission had unfitted him for the realities of life. Babyface was no longer the ingenuous boy, easy victim of practical jokes. He had learned a few tricks since he left the Navy, and when they were off for meals at the same time, he often managed to smuggle a freshly-grilled sausage or a thick slice of ham into the staff canteen for Ben.

“Who’s your pal?” the other short order cook asked, when Ben stopped by the griddle to speak to Babyface. “I heard you talking about the war.”

“We were in the Navy together,” Babyface said.

“Not on the lower deck. Looks more like a ruddy officer to me.” The cook slapped a fried egg on to a plate and followed it with a scooping of chips from the deep fryer. “Though if he was, he wouldn’t demean himself to speak to you.”

Babyface laughed. “An officer! That’s a good one. Ordinary Seaman Francis, that was old Ben. Never went no higher before they gave him his walking papers.” He winked at Ben as the other cook turned his back to dive a dirty knife into the butter can. “Commie,” he said under his breath. “Don’t you ever let on you was an officer, sir, or your life here won’t be worth twopence.”

“Not, mind,” he explained later, when they were discussing it over the Friday plaice and chips which was the canteen’s best menu, “that he don’t get a kick out of working heel and toe with you here, same as I do, him having been a sick-berth attendant with a bad record, but he isn’t never going to admit that, even to his self, see?”

Ben saw. He had been out of the Navy long enough to see.

At the end of the week, Ben drew his pay packet from the manageress, who seemed surprised to find him still there, and spent most of it on taking Geneva and Amy and the Major out to dinner. Now that Geneva and the Major were officially engaged, although Geneva refused to fix a wedding date until Ben and Amy had found a home, the Major had to be included in their outings. It would have been almost impossible to leave him out, for he was constantly at the flat, turning up at all hours with a bunch of violets for Geneva, all leaf and no flower, or a small phial of cheap perfume, which she poured down the sink with her head averted as soon as he had gone, and washed it down with onion water in case he should smell it when he came back. In his new role of fiancé he was very courtly, especially when he was in liquor. He referred to Geneva as My Betrothed, or My Queen, and would seize her hand and press it to his shaky lips with a daring air, as if the next thing he planned to do was to run his moustache up and down her arm.

Geneva was torn between wanting to be kind to him, and not wanting to spoil Ben and Amy’s last weeks with her. The Major
had an uncanny instinct for turning up whenever there was a meal cooking. “Irish stew,” he would say, rubbing his knotted hands as he came into the flat, and sniffing the air with his cut-away nostrils.

“I suppose you want some.” Geneva, in a frilled apron, with a wooden spoon in one hand and a cocktail glass in the other, addressed him sharply from the kitchen doorway.

“No, no, my birdie, I wouldn’t dream———”

“You know you would, you cunning old devil. Did you bring your teeth?”

He lifted his top lip to gnash them at her.

“All right, I’ll feed you. I’ve got to feed you for the rest of my life, just because I never could say No to a handsome man.” She patted his mulberry cheek with the wooden spoon and went back to the kitchen, while the Major ambled happily off towards the drink cupboard.