Man Overboard (29 page)

Throwing out the dead wood had been Mrs Morton’s idea to raise the school’s prestige. Her husband would not have thought of it by himself, for he rather liked boys, and even felt a mild pity when he had to give one of them back to his chagrined parents. Neither the liking nor the pity, however, was strong enough to support him in a stand against his wife. If she said a boy had to go, he went.

Feeling rather like a substandard boy himself, Ben knocked at the entrance to Mrs Morton’s apartment and waited, shuffling his feet. When she summoned him, he went inside and found her standing up at the telephone in the little hall, with her black hair dragged into a netted doughnut at the back of her narrow head.

“I can’t talk any more,” she told the telephone, not politely, as if she did not want to keep Ben waiting, but insultingly, as if he were an eavesdropper. He could not step back because the door was behind him, and as she turned round quickly, the rubber-tipped cane she held under her arm caught him a dragging blow across the ribs.

This cane, with which she supported a limping gait, went everywhere with her and was like another limb. With it, she pointed at boys who were running in places where they should have walked, poked holes in flower-beds and sometimes through the crown of plants while she harangued the gardener, and thumped on the ceiling of her apartment when one of the older boys, who lodged above, gave forth the sort of adolescent guffaw she hated, or put on the kind of gramophone record she despised.

The two bachelor masters, Willis and Knight, who were indifferent to most women, but actively averse to Mrs Morton, were prepared to swear that they had seen her walking as sound
as a bell when she thought no one was looking. The boys claimed that she had been lamed for life when Old Hammerhead had thrown two volumes of the Latin dictionary at her and knocked her down the stairs. Mrs Horrocks, the matron, who was not only charitable, but liked to air medical knowledge, credited her with a congenital hip. Amy, after seeing the gross ginger cat which crouched all day jammed up against the glass of Mrs Morton’s front window like an overblown geranium, said that the cane was a broomstick.

Whatever the truth, the cane achieved one purpose in making a nuisance of itself in any room in which it appeared. It tripped people up. It jabbed itself on to unwary toes. It hung perilously on the edges of furniture and fell with a clatter as soon as someone reached the point of a story. Tucked under Mrs Morton’s arm, if she turned round suddenly it was liable to whack you in the chest, as it had just done to Ben.

“I’m sorry,” she said, watching him straighten his coat as if she did not like the material. “What can I do for you?”

“I don’t know.” Ben was a little afraid of her cold, dark eye, which had a shallow, unfocused look, like a bird, but he was determined not to show it, although she looked as if she knew already. “You sent one of the boys for me, and so here I am.”

Although the Morton’s private rooms were on the ground floor of the Old Building, she would never step across the hall to Ben’s office. She would rather go ten times as far looking for a boy to fetch him, so that she could have the advantage of having summoned Ben and of being on her own ground.

“Busy as I am,” he ventured to add, for the boy’s message had been “Mrs Morton wants to see you immediately,” as if she thought he had nothing else to do.

She ignored this. Limping with sideways thrusts of her cane which shifted two small rugs slightly to the right—would she push them back again when she went the other way?—Mrs Morton led Ben into the drawing-room, looked about for the most uncomfortable chair and offered it to him. She hooked her stick on the corner of the mantelpiece and sat down facing him.

She sat very upright, and the front of her plain linen dress was as flat as the back; flatter perhaps, because she had protruding shoulder-blades. She was not a bad-looking woman, but her hair was dragged so tightly back that it hurt to look at the skin round
her temples, and she had a curious lack of expression, like a woman asleep with her eyes open. Waiting for her to speak, Ben imagined what it would be like if he suddenly fell on her and kissed her. It would be like grabbing a telephone pole. He could not imagine Old Morton, with his ducking, nervous gestures, ever getting up the nerve to embrace her. Perhaps he never had. They had no children.

“I don’t suppose,” Mrs Morton said, in her flat, composed voice, “that you are surprised that I sent for you.”

“Surprised?” Ben cleared his throat. “Well, not exactly.” He had known that she would not like his instructions about the requisition forms. “But I’m always glad of the chance of a chat with you, of course.” No harm in trying to keep on the right side of her. Everyone in this place who wanted to keep their job knew that.

“This is not a chat,” said Mrs Morton, coming straight to the point before he could waste her time with flattery. “It’s a protest.”

“Against what?” As if he did not know.

“Against the impertinent note which you gave to my maid.” It was not her maid. It was Lucy, one of the school housemaids, who flicked through Mrs Morton’s room when she had the time. “No doubt,” said Mrs Morton, managing to look at him and through him at the same time, “you thought you were quite a somebody in the Navy, with people saluting you every five yards, but I’ve been the dietitian here for ten years, and I’ll not submit to changing my methods purely to satisfy your vanity.”

“It’s not a question of my vanity. It’s a question of economic efficiency. As I see it,” he leaned forward with his wrists between his knees and gave her a candid look, trying to make her believe that he was willing to discuss this thing sincerely, “the only way to cut the appalling expenses is to have a central purchasing department.”

“That’s you, I suppose. Forgive my curiosity, but how many schools were you employed in before you came to us?”

Ben sat back and stopped looking candid.

“Exactly,” said Mrs Morton. “And yet you propose to decide how much we need of any given item. Well, I don’t know what the others think about it,” she said, although she had undoubtedly discussed it with them and told them what they should think, “but I for one don’t like it.”

She leaned back in her chair as if the interview was over as far as she was concerned. Without mentioning chocolates or whisky, Ben tried to explain to her the advantage of centralised purchasing, but she closed her ears like a civil servant at the Admiralty being asked to consider the advantages of the Ministry of Supply.

Emboldened by the thought of the tinned beetroot rotting on the shelves, Ben stood up. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but this is the way it has to be. I was taken on to help cut down the expenses of this school, and I’m going to do it, just as I would have cut down the expenses of a ship under my command if I was ordered to.”

Mrs Morton smiled at him. Her smile was thin-lipped and almost sweet. It turned her eyes into half-moons. “Don’t talk so pompously,” she said. “This is a school, not a ship.”

Thrown off his balance by the sudden softening of her voice, he flung at her: ‘I wish it was a ship! I’d be able to do things right without an argument at every turn. I’ve had to fight with half the masters over this, not to mention the groundsman, and Mr Harbutt, who seems to have been playing fast and loose with the parents’ money and the school funds for years.” It would do her no harm to know that he was investigating the games master’s deals in cricket bats and boxing gloves. It might shake her.

She was not shaken. She looked up at him impassively, with the smile gone, but he caught the mocking shadow of it in her eyes. For an instant, he saw how she might look with the net and the pins yanked out and the black hair tumbling round that damned mask of a face. Then his vision cleared and he saw her as she was, a woman whose hair no one but a madman or a drunk would ever pull down, and he said curtly: “If you’ve made out your grocery order for today, I’ll take it while I’m here. I’m going into town to see the man myself and tell him that if he can’t give us a better deal, I’ll look for someone who can.”

“Mr Pearse? You can’t do that. He’s served this school for years.”

“That’s the trouble. He’s had it all his own way. I’m going to see all these dealers. Sharpen your pencils, boys, I’ll say. There’s going to be some competition.”

“Please don’t rehearse it in my drawing-room,” Mrs Morton said. “I’m getting a headache. You’ll have to go.” She moistened her straight lips and turned her head from side to side with
unusual nervousness, as if she thought there was someone behind her chair.

“I’ll be glad to,” Ben said, and meant it, “but I must insist that you give me your list.”

He put some force into his voice, expecting her to refuse. When she said tonelessly: “Did I say that I wouldn’t?” he was left feeling as if he had swung for a tremendous tee-shot and missed the ball.

She seemed suddenly to have lost interest. Was this her way of deflating him, to pretend that an issue was unimportant if she was not winning? “Help me up.” She put out a cold hand, laid it in his palm and got up with scarcely any pressure on it. “My cane.” He handed it to her, and she went to the desk on the other side of the room, with a slow limp that looked so exaggerated that Ben could not even be sure if she was limping on the right side.

She handed him the long requisition form as if it was last week’s newspaper to light the fire with. He was on his way out of the room when an item at the bottom of the list caught his eye, and he stopped and turned back. Got her. He had got her cold.

“Tinned beetroot,” he said triumphantly. “Two dozen of it. No, you can’t, Mrs Morton. You absolutely can’t.”

“Why not?” She was standing by the desk with her back to the light, thin and unbendable, watching him go. “It’s very nutritious.”

“But the stockroom is loaded with the stuff. I’ve just taken an inventory.”

“An inventory?” She leaned heavily on her stick, so that one shoulder was tilted sharply above the other. “There was no need for that. I made one myself at the beginning of term.”

“I’ve never seen it, I had to make my own, in any case. Basic logistics, Mrs Morton. You can’t argue with the Book.”

”Mister
Francis,” she said—everyone else called him Commander—”I begin to see why the Navy didn’t keep you.”

“I saw that long ago,” Ben said, not minding, because of the beetroot. “Why do you think it was?”

She did not answer. Her silhouette against the window, dim on this bright day because the house had been built in that sun-shy period when all the best rooms faced north, was motionless.

Ben turned and went to the door. Before he opened it, he took out a pencil, rested the grocery list against the wall, quite high up,
so that Mrs Morton could see what he was doing, and drew a thick line through the tinned beetroot.

Amy was outside the door, waiting for him. “War to the knife,” he told her.

“Oh, good. Who’s winning?”

“I am, at the moment. She probably will in the end. That sort always does.”

“Oh, Daddy, don’t!” Amy flung herself at his arm, twining both her own arms round it, so that her feet dragged sideways as they walked across the stone entrance-hall. “Don’t say things like that. You’ve got to be tops at this so we can stay here.”

“Why?” He stopped and looked down at her. “Do you like it so much? You hated changing schools, I know, and it isn’t especially homey for us, living with the Glynns.”

“It’s all right. The Glynns do try, and I’ll get used to the school. Daddy, don’t you see? We’ve got to stay somewhere. Not keep moving about like refugees.”

Her words were like a penance for his failures. He was going to say something serious and loving, when her strained expression suddenly lifted to a friendly grin, and she waved and whistled through her teeth at a boy who was crossing the gallery at the top of the stairs.

The boy whistled back, glanced behind him and ran out of sight.

Mrs Morton was not the only one who objected to Ben trying to run Greenbriars School like a ship. Almost all the staff, except Tilly Wicket and Ella, who were on Ben’s side, complained to Mr Morton. Instead of backing him up, Old Hammerhead had sent for Ben and told him: “Go a little easy, Commander Francis. Some of my teaching staff have been here for years, and it isn’t easy for them to accept new ideas. Rome wasn’t built in a day, you know.” Accustomed to using more esoteric clichés in dead languages among his intellectual equals, he produced this easy one for Ben with the skittish air of a man who fancies he is speaking cockney.

“It would never have been built at all if the job had been run this way.”

“Please don’t misunderstand me. You’re doing a fine job. A fine job.” He rubbed his hands and smiled the forced, closed-lip smile
which made him look like Punch. “I’ve told everybody not to get excited. To give you a chance until we see how it goes.”

“Why didn’t you tell them that I have your authority to make whatever changes I think necessary?”

“Oh, well, I did, of course———”

But he had not. He was the kind of weak well-wisher who would take all the credit for any success, but none of the blame for any unpopular methods of achieving it.

“Have you ever been unpopular?” Ben asked Ella.

They were in the linen-room, where Ella was counting the clean linen from the laundry and putting it away.

“I was once, at school.” She stood and thought for a moment, her soft brown eyes staring at nothing; then she went on bending and stretching her long back, taking the sheets from the basket and piling them on the shelves while she talked. “In my second term, I think it was. Nobody seemed to be paying much attention to me, so I started trying to curry favour by making people’s beds, and picking things up for them. I remember once picking up a book for a girl with pigtails—Alice Curran. She dropped it again right away on my toe and walked out of the room. It didn’t teach me. I used to go round asking people: ‘Will you be my friend?’ You can’t wonder I was unpopular.”

Ben leaned against the slatted shelves in the warm little room which smelled of ironing, and lit a cigarette. “I wish you wouldn’t smoke in here,” Ella said. “There’s no ash-tray.”