Man Overboard (5 page)

A middle-aged actor, with whom Ben had once had a beer at the studio canteen, sat at the table in a corduroy waistcoat and a collarless shirt, with his boots stuck out over a palpitating sheepdog.

“Can’t you stop him panting?” the actor said, squinting into the shadows beyond the lights. “The brute wouldn’t be panting at seven o’clock in the morning.”

“It’s the lights,” somebody said, and a man standing near Ben in plimsolls said sentimentally to no one in particular: “Poor creature. It isn’t right, you know.”

A square-hipped woman with a moustache, who was the dog’s trainer, came forward into the light, stroked the dog and gave it something from her closed hand, like a sailor palming a fag-end, and was sent shambling off sideways by Bob’s voice booming at her: “Get off the set!”

Suddenly Rose was there. She never came on to the set until the last minute. Ben got up and moved forward to where he could see all of her. She was looking towards him, and he smiled and moved his hand a little, but she did not smile back, and he did not know whether she could see him beyond the lights.

She was wearing a check gingham apron tied tightly round her tiny waist over a dress with a neck cut somewhat lower than is customary in the Border Country for milking cows before breakfast. Her hair was caught demurely back with a ribbon. Ben, who had watched the dress rehearsal, knew that later when she was all but seduced in a married man’s apartment, it would be brushed into a more sophisticated arrangement, to signify her transformation
from clod-hoppery, as when the mouse-like secretary in a film suddenly takes off her glasses and is revealed as a raving beauty.

Rose looked round the set in a dissatisfied way, and then went outside the flimsy door through which she would make her first entrance. Ben moved sideways so that he should see her come in, and knocked into a music stand which fell with a clatter. Several people shouted: “Quiet, please!” and an unseen voice grumbled: “Who’s that infernal man?”

“He belongs to Rose,” someone said.

As Ben tiptoed out of the way behind a piano, he heard the first voice say: “I wish she’d keep ’em in the bedroom.”

The floor manager, who was very young, with a headset over unruly yellow hair, began to say in a rapid, self-conscious monotone, as if he was proud yet embarrassed to be the only one talking: “All right, everybody. Quiet, please. Settle down, everyone.”

They settled. Ben watched the set. Listening to Bob’s voice through his headphones, the floor manager raised the board of papers in his hand, and swept it down dramatically. The door opened and Rose stood there, just a simple farmer’s daughter, as poised and glowing as she had been when Ben first saw her, making her entrance into the restaurant.

Rose’s weekly show was a toothsome mixture of soap opera and a Lonely Hearts column. The short plays were supposed to be based on actual letters sent in to Rose in her capacity as everybody’s girl friend. Before the play, an announcer, chosen for the sincerity of his soft moustache and compassionate eyes, would read, in a voice suitably charged with controlled emotion, the letter whose story of courageous suffering or despair or triumphant love was to be illustrated on the screen.

It was always a woman’s problem. Even when it was a story about a man losing his sight, or going to prison to protect a guilty friend, the drama was always presented from the point of view of the woman in the case, because the woman was Rose.

Taut production by Bob, and accomplished acting by the rest of the cast gave the show enough gloss to get by. Men watched it because it had Rose. Women watched it because the contents were skilfully geared to make them think: This could happen to me, or: This might have happened to me, according to their age.

Many women wrote to Rose, longing to see their own troubles
mirrored on the screen. They did not know that she never saw the letters. Many of them could not have been made into plays without violating the moral code, and the others were too dull or esoteric to make good entertainment. Occasionally a sure-fire situation came in, but most of the letters read on the air were composed, to match a play already written, by a morbid man called Bates, who had a flair that amounted almost to genius for sounding like an overwrought but courageous woman.

The play tonight, however, was based on an actual letter sent in by a homely girl from Wales, who longed to get off the farm and on to the boulevards. Sweating blood, a writer had made a play out of what might have happened if she did, the chief inconsistency being that the girl was now as beautiful as Rose Kelly, which would seem to remove all her problems. The scene had been shifted to Cumberland, so that no one in Wales could point a finger at a neighbour and say: “She wrote that letter.” Television logic reasoned that it did not matter if some lonely girl in Cumberland was stigmatized, since the accusation must be false.

Ben did not follow the play very closely. When Rose questioned him afterwards about her performances, he could never give a coherent opinion of what had been going on, because he was too busy watching her and hugging to himself the thought: She’s mine!

Well, almost his. And more his than any other man’s at the moment, as far as he knew. As she moved about the make-believe kitchen, waiting on her father, giving back soft answers to his grumbling, dropping on one knee to bury her sad face in the dog’s coat when the man went out, Ben was not thinking about what Bob had told him.

He was thinking: This is how she would look moving about my kitchen. Even first thing in the morning, she would look like this. I could buy her a gingham apron. This is how I would see her every day before I went to work. I could get her a dog.

Watching her, treasuring his plans, he forgot that Rose never got up until ten o’clock in the morning, and that she did not like dogs.

It came in a long, buff envelope, with “N.C.W. Branch, Admiralty” stamped in the left-hand corner. Ben did not have to open it to know what it was.

He kept it in his pocket all afternoon, and when his classes were over he went to his cabin, sat down on the sprucely made bed and slit the envelope with a pen-knife. This was not something that could be dragged open with the side of a thumb-nail. This was something that would have to be preserved, along with his birth certificate and his marriage licence and Marion’s death certificate, until Amy and her children threw it out with the rest of his papers after he died.

I am commanded by My Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty to inform you that with regret they find it necessary to terminate your employment on the Active List as a result of the planned reduction in the size of the Royal Navy
.

Well, there it was, and My Lords Commissioners had apparently decided to cut down on commas as well as commanders.

It was not a surprise, for he had already had the semi-official letter beginning: “My dear Ben,” from the captain he knew slightly in the Naval Conditions and Welfare Branch. No one could say that the Admiralty did not soften the blow, but for Ben it was still a blow, every bit as painful as if it had come out of the blue. Even after the captain’s friendly letter, there had still been the faint, unreasonable hope that perhaps there was some mistake. The captain had taken his name off the wrong list, a list of special people, whom the Navy could not spare.

Ben had never been anybody special. He had always been in the middle, in any group. At school and in the Navy, he had neither failed examinations nor passed them with honours. In games, he had always been a reserve for the team, never in the team itself. The middleweight semi-finals at Subic Bay were the nearest he had ever got to personal glory.

It was the same in the war. Other people did spectacular things, like sinking the
Karlsruhe
, and crippling the
Lützow
, and finishing off two out of three Italian liners in convoy with only four torpedoes.

Ben had done his job in submarines adequately and with a reasonable degree of fortitude, but he had never had the luck to be in at the death of any of the big prizes. The ships he had sunk were cargo vessels and coasters; the risks he had run were the everyday hazards of the war at sea. Even his ditching had been an inconspicuous affair of a British mine in an unexpected place. No tales to tell afterwards of German machine-gun bullets popping the water round his head and a grinning Prussian face leaning over the rail to jeer at him.

Other people came out of the war with Mentions and worthwhile gongs that tacked letters after their names. Ben only had the regular campaign medals, and a set of confidential reports that were satisfactory; neither outstanding nor peculiarly bad. If anyone at the Admiralty wanted a little light reading to while away the half-hour before the tea tray came, they would never pull out Ben’s file.

He folded the letter and replaced it in its envelope. What comfort to tell himself that he was only one of hundreds of commanders who would read these same words in the next two years? Only the outstanding and the very lucky would reach the rank of captain. There was something so ordinary about being axed. That was what hurt.

After all I’ve done for them, he told the mourning crowd. Did I want to join the Navy in the first place? You know I didn’t. But I’ve worked like a dog for them. Given them the best years of my life, and what do they do? Sling me out with a lump of money which I’ll probably squander on some hopeless venture, and tell me: “Thanks very much, it was nice knowing you, but don’t come round any more.”

He sat on his bed for a while, trying to work himself up into a high-class state of gloom, for this was, after all, a momentous point in his life. Then he got up with a sigh, changed into dog robbers and went into the town to get drunk.

Telling Rose was not easy. It had not been so bad telling Frank and the rest of the crowd at Blockhouse. They knew already,
because someone had seen the buff envelope and passed the word round. Naval Conditions and Welfare did not write to a commander to tell him how the ducks were standing the winter in St James’s Park.

Everyone was very nice to Ben, and wanted to buy him more drinks than he could stand after last night’s solitary debauch in the Gosport public houses. Their friendly regrets were genuine, but a certain brooding look in the eye showed that a part of their thoughts were on their own predicament, which Ben’s had brought that much closer, as they asked themselves: Who will be next?

Rose’s thoughts were almost entirely with herself, with only a passing consideration as to how Ben felt. By the time he saw her, he was not feeling so bad. His natural optimism had taken charge and twisted his head round so that he was not looking back to the lost years of his naval career, but forward to whatever this new civilian life had to offer. A dozen possible jobs played pleasantly round his head. He was not qualified for any of them, but everyone had to start somewhere. If he was an employer, he would much rather train an industrious chap of thirty-five than a goon of seventeen who lived only for clocking-off time.

Although he was not yet out of the Navy, he was already beginning to feel less a part of it. With no future in it for him, it was impossible to sustain any interest in the business of H.M.S.
Dolphin
, so he had decided to take the chance the Admiralty had given him to bow himself out at the end of the month.

When Rose had finished expostulating: “They can’t do that! They can’t just throw you out in that high-handed way. I’ll write to my M.P. Who is my M.P.?” Ben told her of his decision.

“Oh, no, darling.” She turned to him with one of those swooping movements she did so well. They were in the little kitchen of her flat, cooking supper with the maximum of disorder, but Rose could swoop in the most confined and cluttered space without knocking anything over.

“Why not? When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go, and I’d rather do it now. If I hang on until everyone else is out too, it will be that much more difficult to get a job. I’ll be that much older too.”

“But they
want
you to stay till the end of next year. They said so.” Rose could interpret even an official letter her way. She put
her wrists on his shoulders, hanging her hands over his back because they were greasy, and trying to hypnotize him with the brilliance of her eyes. “Stay till then. Perhaps they’ll change their minds by that time.”

Ben shook his head.

“Well, but anything might happen by then. There might be a war, or something. Stay a little while, Ben. I like you in the Navy.”

“I know you do,” Ben said. “What you mean is that in another year you probably won’t know me any more, but I may as well be called Commander Francis while you do.”

“Now you’re being silly,” Rose drawled the last word and turned away from him to fiddle with a pan on the stove.

“How about marrying me?”

She jerked her shoulders at him impatiently. “Don’t ask me that now,” she said. “We’re not discussing that.”

“Would you marry me if I hung on in the Navy until they threw me out at closing time?”

“Oh—I don’t know.” Rose fussed with the potatoes, shaking them and turning them over and over so that none of them had a chance to get brown. “I can’t think about that now. I’m all upset by what you’ve told me. And you’re not helping me by being so pigheaded.”

“I’ve merely made up my mind.” Ben poured himself a drink. “I don’t think that’s especially pigheaded. It’s my life, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t do what I like with it.”

As if summoned by a cue line in a play, Rose dropped the spatula and turned round. Ben set down his drink hastily as she came at him with open arms.

“It’s our life, darling!” she declared, as if that were also a line from a play. It probably was. “Don’t try to slip away from me.” Rose could not bear to let any man leave her under his own steam. If an affair was to break up, it had to be her idea.

She put her arms round Ben, and he kissed her. She responded with unusual warmth and murmured some rather suggestive things. It was hard to tell whether she meant it, or whether she was merely acting out a love scene, for sometimes when she seemed to be passionate, she would jerk abruptly out of his embrace with a remark as irrelevant and composed as if they had been simply shaking hands.