Man Overboard (2 page)

“Don’t be a stinker,” Rose said. “Let’s have some brandy.”

They had the brandy. The producer and the author talked to each other while Rose entertained Ben, and made a few abortive attempts to entertain Amy. When the child did not react, Rose made a small grimace and said: “How well-mannered she is. Utterly delightful.” She had a deep, plummy voice, with a trick of pouncing emphatically on certain words, which was like a nudge or a tap on the arm.

“I’ve been watching you two,” she said, “and thinking what a charming picture you made.”

You too? Ben thought. Do you watch other people too, and kid yourself you’d like to be them? It was inconceivable that he should have found a kindred spirit in this glorious creature whose world was so far removed from his. It was a magazine-story adventure, unconnected with reality. And yet here he was, sitting opposite this glowing flesh and sparkling hair, and she was smiling and talking to him, and he was barely conscious of what she said, because he was imagining, with a thrill that was almost apprehension, what it would be like to touch her.

“Most fathers,” Rose said, “when they take children out to lunch, have that
hunted
look.”

The verbal nudge jerked Ben’s eyes away from the scented swell of her breasts, and he laughed. Rose laughed back at him, holding his eyes. He let himself go with the tide. It was absurdly school-boyish to be falling in love with an unattainable star, but Rose seemed to want it that way, and as if to indicate that she was not so unattainable, she invited him to bring Amy to the television studio when he was next in London.

Then Amy said: “Father, we’d better go if we’re going to have any time at the museum before it closes,” and Rose said: “What a
thrilling
way to spend your birthday,” and kept her hand in Ben’s for a warm and intimate moment as they said goodbye.

The producer and the author bade him a faintly cynical farewell, and Ben reeled out of the restaurant, wondering what the sub-lieutenants in his course at the submarine school at Gosport, who considered him a back number already on his way to the scrap heap, would say if they could see him now.

All the next day, which he spent in the familiar surroundings of H.M.S.
Dolphin
at Fort Blockhouse, Gosport, Ben had a curious feeling that his world had suddenly changed. He had always been an easy-going optimist, believing that things usually worked out for the best if you let them alone, but this was more than optimism. It was drawing back a curtain, opening a door. It was like walking from a deep patch of shade on the north side of a house, round the corner into warm and blinding sun.

It was a complete break in the monotonous stretch of days and weeks and months which he had ambled through at the submarine
school while the Admiralty was making up its mind what to do with him. He had thought of himself as the forgotten man of Blockhouse, glad to be forgotten when so many were being remembered and found redundant, but so bored at times with the prospect of being a shore-based sailor who might never go to sea again, that he would almost have welcomed the novelty of being thrown on the beach to fend for himself.

But something exciting had happened now. Life was suddenly the youthful, exhilarating thing it had been in the year after the war when he came home from Australia and met Marion, and the fatigue and austerity and the strange, bleak sense of anti-climax were blotted out behind the dazzling light of a hopeful future.

There had been few girls since Marion, and none of them stimulating. Well-worn Portsmouth hacks, self-centred London girls with jobs, unmarried girls of his own age, who were getting desperate, and showed it. Never anyone like Rose. Half an hour with Rose had made even the most commonplace actions, like catching a train or crossing a road, suddenly full of significance. She had turned on the lights, and although Ben told himself a dozen times that there was nothing in it, that he would take Amy to the studio and Rose would not be there and he would never see her again, he could not convince himself. His world had changed, and by the end of the evening, he found that he could not go to bed without telling somebody about it.

As the recipient of this staggering news, he made an unsuitable choice in Frank Daniels, a joyless bachelor who was spinning out an indefinite time at Blockhouse preparing for the Admiralty a new technical study of torpedo control, which was boring its author as much as it would bore those who had to read it.

Frank had been at Trincomalee with Ben during the war. They had been together in a T-class submarine, and had once nearly drowned together, an experience which had given them a basis for an ill-matched friendship, which they had renewed in a tranquil way when they found themselves together at Gosport.

Finding Frank in the ante-room, Ben fetched whiskies from the bar. When he brought them over, and Frank had put aside the
Illustrated London News
and resigned himself to the fact that Ben wanted to talk, Ben said: “Frank, an astonishing thing happened to me today.”

Frank, who had a noble but immobile face with expressionless
eyes, like a bust of Julius Caesar with hair on, kept his head in a listening position to imply, without the bother of words, that Ben might continue.

“I met a girl,” Ben said, looking down at his blunt fingers and feeling that he was being absurdly boyish. “Oh, not just an ordinary girl. A knock-out. She’s a television star.”

“Hardly your line, I should have thought,” Frank said, raising his glass to his unlimber Roman lips.

“I know. That’s what makes it so crazy. I met her in a restaurant. I picked her up, in a way. She didn’t seem to mind.”

“She wouldn’t,” Frank said, when Ben had told him who the girl was. “I read the tabloids. The woman is——” He waved his hand dismissively. Frank did not use words like hot or sexy.

“Oh, shut up. You don’t believe that filth, surely.”

“I have a healthy respect for the printed word,” Frank said flatly. His hand went hopefully towards the
Illustrated London News
, but Ben had not finished.

“Anyone with a name gets mud slung at them,” he said. “This girl is famous. She’s a great actress.”

“Have you ever seen her act?”

“Only for the last few minutes of a play. Have you?”

Frank nodded without comment.

“Well, anyway———” Ben was not going to have his glory tarnished. “I met her. She’s wonderful, and I’m going to see her again. And I have this curious feeling—I don’t suppose you’ll understand—that everything’s suddenly changed. I had one gin before dinner. I feel as if I’d had six. I’ve felt like that all day, as if I were on the threshold of something.” He caught a slight throaty tremor in his voice. The curious feeling was with him very strongly. It was like the exalted alcoholic illusion of being on the verge of a great discovery.

“The only threshold you’re on,” said Frank, picking up the magazine and holding it before him as a barrier against any more disagreeably emotional remarks, “is the door to civvy street. What scheme did you go for?”

An Admiralty Fleet Order had given officers the chance to apply for premature retirement sooner than stay to grow old in their present rank if they were passed over for promotion. A request for retirement did not mean that you would get it, any more than a request to stay ensured that you would be kept. The Fleet Order
appeared to be a device which would enable Their Lordships, faced with the necessity for getting rid of nearly two thousand officers, to say righteously: “We didn’t axe anyone without giving them the chance to ask for it.”

There seemed to be a catch in it somewhere, but no one at Gosport had been able to figure out what it was. The problem of whether you were worse off applying for Scheme A or Scheme B had been tormenting officers and their wives all through October. It seemed that you could not win either way, so Ben had solved the problem by not applying for either scheme, following the safe old Navy doctrine: “Never volunteer for anything.”

“Poor old Kenneth didn’t apply either,” Frank said tonelessly, without lowering the magazine. “He had a tactful little communication from Their Lordships today. You’re next, I imagine.”

“Why not you?”

“Oh, God, they’ll never sling me out. They can’t get enough people to write their beastly text-books. I’ll moulder along until I’m as much a fixture at the Admiralty as the plumbing. And about as antiquated. You’ll see. Only you won’t be around the Admiralty then.”

Since the reduction programme started, Frank had been prophesying the axe for everyone except himself, as if he were going to be left to run the Navy single-handed. Wetting his fingers, he turned over the pages of the magazine and began to read an article on Micronesian cooking pots. “It’s going to be pretty tough for you boys out there,” he said, without raising his marble eyes. “I hear they’re having a bad time finding jobs, and it’ll get worse as more of you come out. What would you try for?” he asked the question less from interest than from habit, for it was one which officers everywhere were discussing that winter.

“Oh, I don’t know. Not a chicken farm. Or a stone quarry. Or a non-existent uranium mine. I hope I’d have the sense not to be swindled out of my gratuity. There’ll be a lot of sharks about waiting for the innocent N.O. with his touching faith in human nature. I’d sell something, I suppose. Cars, radios, stocks and shares.”

“Brushes, more likely,” grunted Frank, but Ben was seeing himself in a narrow-trousered charcoal suit, entertaining Rose on an expense account.

“It might be rather fun,” he said.

Frank grumbled at him. “You’re always so damned cheerful. A
bloody Merry Andrew. I remember you in the sea that time, hanging on to the rope of a Carley float with your one good hand and laughing your silly head off.”

“What did you want me to do?” Ben stood up. “Sob on your shoulder? You were too damn wet already.”

Frank did not bother to answer. Ben said good night and left him there, static and running to fat in the chair where he sat night after night until the steward collecting ash-trays and dirty glasses began to trip over his legs.

On the staircase, Ben put his hand into his pocket to feel once more the folded picture of Rose which he had torn from the cover of a magazine he had found on the station bookstall. How awful to be Frank. How wonderful at this moment to be Ben.

When Ben was next in London, Amy did not want to go to the television studio, so Ben went alone. He had written to Rose, and she had told him, in a letter which now lived in his note-case alongside the folded photograph, that he and Amy were welcome to attend a rehearsal of her show. “I shall be delighted,” was what she had written, and by the time he reached the studios, which were a group of converted warehouses in a part of London all but inaccessible by any kind of public transport, Ben had read and re-read into that conventional phrase every possible variation of meaning.

When he arrived at last, after a ten-minute walk through streets where children played in the shadow of blank walls topped with jagged glass, and mysterious small parts were being made in flimsy, humming sheds, Rose’s rehearsal was over. She was drinking gin in a small, bare room to which Ben was conducted through a mass of passages by a man with no collar or tie, and a brown waistcoat which some needlewoman in the family had rebacked in a vivid sateen.

In spite of the letter from Rose, and Ben’s continuing belief that his life had taken a turn for the better, there was still, as the waistcoat charged upstairs two steps at a time and scuttled round corners as if bent on shaking him off, the possibility that she would not be there. Things like that happened, as Ben knew all too well. The more you looked forward to something, the less likelihood there was of its ever coming to pass, or if it did, of its coming up to scratch. Twisting himself sideways in the narrow corridors to
pass harried men with bright-brown moustaches and girls with hair trussed up in rubber bands, Ben was not thinking bitterly about life’s disappointments. To an optimist, they were never so bad as an outsider might think, unless a misplaced sympathy made them so.

That was one of the things that Marion had never been able to understand. When some eager scheme of Ben’s misfired, or when it rained when he had been looking forward to tennis, she had worn herself out saying What a shame, when he was already halfway to a new scheme, or cheerfully telephoning people for bridge. Ben never knew whether she was aware of how irritated he was by her unwanted solicitude, or whether she genuinely…. But this was no time to be thinking about Marion, when the half-and-half waistcoat was skidding to a stop, crying triumphantly: “Here you are, Captain!” and opening a door to show him Rose, coming towards him with her wide smile and both hands held out.

There were other people in the room with her. Rose introduced him to them emphatically as
Commander
Francis, and he had the idea that she would have been gratified if he had turned up with three gold rings on his sleeve. The others seemed to be actors and actresses, or people connected in some way with her show, but Ben was scarcely aware of them, for Rose blotted out all other life for miles round.

She was wearing a white sweater and a tight black skirt. She was more beautiful even than Ben had remembered. In that dingy room with the damp, green walls and dusty carpet, among the little group of unremarkable people with limp handshakes and indoor complexions, Rose glowed like an incandescent gas mantle.

Ben stood bemused and happy while she fetched him a warm drink in a small glass, the wrong shape for gin and tonic. She was quite possessive with him, and so the other people accepted him with no more than the lift of an eyebrow, the downward tweak to the corner of a mouth. If Rose wanted to give the impression that she knew him quite well, that was fine. Ben played up, and found himself talking to her with some ease, or rather listening, since Rose did most of the talking in any company. She did not mention Amy, so Ben did not bring out the story he had prepared to cover up the child’s lack of interest.

Rose seemed glad to see him. It was fantastic, better than anything he had dreamed when he had imagined himself watching
her in the studio from a distance, waiting for the bounty of a word of recognition. The first drink had been strong, because the tonic water was running short. Ben accepted a second, and his brain began to shout noiselessly: “This is terrific. She likes me!” His brain was standing straddle-legged on a wall, telling the open-mouthed crowds below that Rose Kelly was still standing by him, still talking to him, when she could have been talking to any of these other people in the room, who worked with her and were her kind.