Man Overboard (6 page)

She was pleasantly passionate now, and Ben was stretching out
a hand to turn off the gas flames under their supper, when Rose said in a small, preoccupied voice: “If we got married when you were out of the Navy, could you still be married in uniform?”

“Oh, I don’t think so.” Ben left the gas taps alone. “A bit off, that would be.”

“The swords,” Rose said dreamily, “and the gold braid. It would make some marvellous pictures.”

The next morning, Ben went down to Southampton to break the news to his mother and father. He had not written, because they were not very good with letters. They were apt to read into them all sorts of things that were not intended.

It was better to tell them himself, and to try to cheer them up. They would be heartbroken, or at least they would say that they were. They used words like heartbroken and sick at heart in a rather loose way. Their lives would not be completely shattered, but they would be very upset to think that the Navy did not want their son. Ben’s mother would shut herself into her room with the telephone and his father would go down to the Nautical Club, to broadcast their distress to the retired maritime community on the east bank of Southampton Water. That was why Ben had not already warned them that he might be selected for what the Admiralty politely called Premature Retirement. His father, who read the papers from end to end as part of the illusion he fostered of a busy day, was aware of the Service cuts, but Ben had allowed him to go on believing that this was something that happened to other people’s sons, not his. No sense in their going about telling everyone that they were sick at heart before it actually happened.

He supposed that he should have gone straight from Gosport before he went to London to tell Rose, but he was cowardly enough to want to take his candy before his medicine. Even when she was annoyed with him, Rose was lovely. Ben had no idea whether he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, but he still took enormous pleasure in having the right to her company whenever he wanted it, which was whenever he could get to London.

He had sought to refresh himself with an evening with Rose before he tackled the effort of Saturday and Sunday with his parents. If only he had a sister, or Matthew were still alive. Ben was everything they had, that was the trouble. It was not strictly
true, for they had each other, and a few depressing relations, and their clubs and their newspaper competitions and their narrow, busy social life; but they told themselves that it was true, and that was what made the trouble, both for them and for Ben. They were inevitably disappointed in him, and he, recognizing their self-deception, could not help being disappointed in himself for not being able to live up to it.

Since their eldest son had lost his life off Heligoland in one of the first submarine actions of the war, they had declared that they lived for Ben. This was an exaggeration, for they saw so little of him that if he were the breath of life to them, they would have suffocated long ago.

“He is my life,” Ben’s mother was wont to say, and his father had been known to embarrass people by intoning: “Everything I ever wanted for myself is centred in that lad,” and unhooking the wire earpiece of his spectacles to wipe away the moisture.

They were going to be hurt by Ben’s news. It was not his fault, but without accusing him, they would make him feel that it was. As he sat in the train and watched Surrey go by, he wished that it would not pass with such speed. That child perched on the embankment fence would not wave him on so gaily if she knew how reluctant he was to arrive at the prim stucco house in the Southampton suburb which never felt like home, and which he could barely enter without wishing to leave.

He was sitting on the right side of the train, as he always did when he made this journey, for there was a house on that side he had to see.

His parents had lived in or near Southampton for as long as he could remember, and he had travelled on this line hundreds of times, and knew all its landmarks. Over the years, he had learned quite a lot about the people who lived along the line. He had seen farms and cottages swallowed up by expanding towns. He had watched, with as much interest as if he had money in the venture, a man build a small factory on waste land at the end of a cinder track, and gradually enlarge it with shed after shed until now it was quite a proud concern, with cars as well as bicycles waiting outside, and a paved road, and all the windows lit at night for twenty-four-hour production.

He had seen houses change their character with different owners, and whole streets deteriorate from semi-detached respectability
where housewives fought the railway for the whiteness of their curtains, to bomb-scarred, untenable slums with boards nailed across the broken windows.

He had watched the progress of the lean man and his muscular wife as they painstakingly landscaped a garden neglected for years, and then created a model turkey farm at the end of it. He had sorrowed over another garden, once beautiful, but gradually reverting to weeds and jungle, because the gardener left during the war and the old man in a flat cap who used to potter with a trowel had disappeared, presumably to the grave, and the old lady who used to sit and watch him from a wicker chair retired behind her curtains and was never seen out again. Did she live alone? She was still alive, because her bulky shadow could occasionally be seen on the blind of a dimly lit downstairs room. As the train racketed by the unheeding house, Ben looked anxiously to see if there was a collection of unopened milk bottles on the back doorstep.

There was one house on the London side of Basingstoke which never changed. The same family had lived in it for as long as Ben could remember, and the house itself remained the same, neither prosperous nor down at heel, unaffected by wars or weather or the growing up of the family whose biography Ben had constructed from glimpses snatched as the train crossed the bridge over the road which ran by their front gate.

The house had first begun to fascinate Ben when he was a boy, making the journey to London and beyond to the second-class public school preferred by his father to the local day school, which could have provided a comparable education, but not the cachet of “sending my boy away to school”, Matthew was away at Dartmouth. Ben must go away too and learn to stand on his own like a man. Once when Ben had had pleurisy and was not man enough to go back to school without his mother accompanying him to warn the matron about his chest, he had tried to share his interest in this house with her.

The little wood went by, the huge elm in the middle of the field, the sides of the bridge rose up—“Look, Mum, there it is! ”

“Where, dear?” She peered out much too late as the train took the curve and the house was gone. Stimulated by a glimpse of the two girls in the garden—the boy would be at school, for Ben was late going back this term—he told his mother some of the things
he knew or had made up about the family. Sitting back in her corner, with her gloves on and her ankles crossed, she had wagged her head at him, marvelling at his imagination without making any effort to share it.

“You always were a fanciful child, Benjy,” she told him, and when he paused in his enthusiastic story, she began to talk about where they would have lunch when they changed trains in London.

Ben did not point out the house to her any more when they went to London together. She did not remember about it, but Ben went on watching and noticing and imagining until he built up a sort of distant intimacy with it and the family who lived there.

It was an early Victorian house of darkening red brick, with many gables, ill-matched chimneys, and weathered white paint round the windows. The side nearest the train was bulky with ivy. Once they had stripped it all off, but it grew back again in two years, up to the crooked iron S which held the top part of the house together.

There was a garden all round the house, lawns and shrubs and evergreens, with a small, neglected orchard where the washing lines hung, and a group of tall trees near the road where the children had made a ramshackle house among the branches. There was a moss-blurred driveway, some outbuildings at the back, and two untidily hedged fields with the gateways trampled to mud or caked earth according to the season.

The house had obviously been built before the railway, perhaps by the great-grandfather of the present owner. What bad luck for the first generation to have their peaceful corner of countryside invaded by the mechanical dragons of the London and South-western Railway. The family did not seem to notice the trains now, for they seldom looked up; but it must have taken their ancestors a long time to get used to them. Ben could imagine that first owner, with mutton-chops and tweed knickerbockers, waging a furious war when the railway was first mooted: writing letters to
The Times
, signed “Indignant Landowner”, bullying his M.P. about opposing the Railway Bill, stumping among the workmen who were laying the lines, prodding at things with an ash stick and threatening to shoot anyone who put a foot on his land.

When the first trains began to go by, and the children in their big hats and cumbersome clothes ran out into the garden to shout
and scream at the novelty of this marvellous chugging monster which snorted clouds of steam and sent the rooks cawing round the sky, the father would watch dourly from an upstairs window, shaking his fist and saying it would not last. He kept a gun in the bedroom in case of thieves, and his faded wife, worn out with child-bearing, lived in terror that he might take a pot-shot at the late train when it woke him in the night.

The railway was there to stay, and gradually the family grew used to it. For a few months perhaps the children stood by the fence like the little smock-and-knickerbocker group in
The Railway Children
, and waved to the trains, but as the novelty wore off they went back to their old games, and the father stopped writing letters and did not wake any more in the night.

Perhaps they talked occasionally of moving, but they loved the house and so they stayed. They assimilated the trains as a part of life, and each succeeding generation assimilated them too, and only hated the railway when another maid left because of soot on the laundry, or yet another foolish dog lost its life on the rails.

The mother of this present generation kept horses in a stable behind the house, and there was a horse trailer under an open shed. That implied a certain amount of money, although nothing else about the family spoke of wealth. Perhaps her husband was always complaining that she spent too much on the horses, but she had a little money of her own and did not see why she should not spend it how she liked. Ben sometimes saw her in the yard, doing things with buckets and pitchforks.

When the children were young—the two girls younger than Ben, the boy about his own age—there had been ponies. Now that they were grown-up, Ben did not see them on a horse. Perhaps the mother’s enthusiasm had discouraged them. He had once seen the elder girl ambling down the road, slopping long-backed in the saddle, as if she had learned nothing from her mother.

The girl got her long back from her father. He was a lean and stringy type, seen sometimes in overalls, hammering and sawing around the house. It was probably he who had pulled down the ivy, but inefficiently, so that it started to grow again immediately. He had dug a pond once in the front lawn. It had never held water.

The other sister was small and lively, but the son was as tall as his father. Ben had watched him grow from a gangling youth into a presentable man, who for years now had been seen only
occasionally at week-ends, once getting out of a car with two small children and a plump girl who must be his wife.

Quite an ordinary family, but fascinating to Ben because he only knew them in his mind. Perhaps they disliked each other and were each discontented in their separate ways, but he preferred to believe in them as he saw them. They represented something which he had never had, even when Marion was pregnant with Amy and had come as near as she ever could to domestic serenity.

As the train passed the familiar landmarks, Ben leaned forward so that he should not miss anything that was going on about the house. There was a new horse in the field. It threw up its head and ran as the train approached. The next time Ben came by, it would have seen so many trains that it would not twitch an ear.

Greedily, with a swift, practised eye, Ben took in all the details. A bucket tipped over outside the stable. A cat mewing to get in at the kitchen door. A hanging, broken branch which the father should get at with his saw. Too cold for there to be anyone in the garden. Yes, there was. A girl in an old sheepskin coat. Not the pretty one with whom Ben was in love, but the older one, throwing a stick for a dog which bounded in a flurry of dead leaves. She looked up for a moment as the train rushed by above her, then the side of the bridge rose up and she was gone.

Ben sat back in his seat. Why did she look up at the trains, the untidy one with the long, schoolgirlish legs? The others never did, and she never used to when she was younger. For a fraction of a second as he passed over her garden, it had seemed that she caught his eye. Did she see him through the space he had wiped on the steamy glass and wish that she were Ben, going somewhere, envying him because he was on the move; just as he envied her because she was playing in the leaves with a dog and he was travelling sedately to Wavecrest, Firbanks Avenue, where there was no garden worth the name, and no dog, and a difficult two days ahead of him?

Lunch was cooking when Ben arrived at his parents’ house—he never thought of it as home. As he stood on the doorstep between the pair of curly Chinese dragons which fitted so ill with the square concrete and stucco house and the geometrical flower-beds, edged with looped wire, he could smell beef roasting. Well, that was something. He was to be given the prodigal’s welcome, with
Yorkshire pudding and all the trimmings, although his mother would overcook the beef and it would be as tasteless as slate when they had it cold for lunch tomorrow. Perhaps he could get away early.