Man Overboard (21 page)

Sometimes Geneva would alter the times of meals so that they could eat without him, but some bush telegraph seemed to warn the Major’s insatiable stomach, and he would come earlier or later, and catch them laying the table. When they were setting out to spend Ben’s pay packet, he was there outside the door when they opened it, with his bowler hat at an angle and his regimental tie arching out from the knot like a stallion’s neck, so they took him along.

It was the first money Ben had earned since he left the Navy. The Major got mildly drunk on the strength of it. Nothing more than a glazing eye and an inability to finish his food or the ends of stories. He was always a gentleman when Geneva and Amy were present.

Ben found himself watching the waiters with a new interest. He felt restless sitting at the table and behaving like a customer. He should have been up there on his feet with them, pushing in and out of the kitchen door with trays, and muttering close-lipped over the service tables the unfathomable dead-pan secrets that only waiters know.

The waiter at their table was slow and not efficient. He was an old man, past his job, if indeed he had ever caught up with it, and Ben felt that he could give him a few tips on the speedier handling of plates. When he was a long time coming to clear the table and take their order for dessert, Ben’s fingers itched to pick up the plates and cutlery himself and carry them away.

“Why don’t you?” Amy asked, when he told her this. “That old man would be glad to get some help.”

“He wouldn’t. He’d hate it. He may resent us for sitting here and enjoying ourselves while he’s working, but he’d rather run his flat feet into the ground than have us stack a plate.”

There had been a woman at the cafeteria late one afternoon when Ben’s beard was beginning to grow, who had said to him: “You poor man. You look so tired. Let me help you.” She had got up in a confusion of handbags and shopping baskets and begun to put the dirty dishes from the table on to Ben’s trolley. Her face was ennobled with the clear light of charity; but the other people at the table had stared at her as if she were insane, and although the wide-hipped girl was off sick and Ben and Sir Thomas were coping with her tables, Ben had found, perversely, that he was not grateful for the woman’s help.

He remembered a time when he had taken Amy to a seaside hotel, soon after her mother’s death. Amy was nearly seven, and just beginning to be conscious that other people had lives too. The hotel was understaffed. Meals in the dining-room were interminable ordeals of spinning out the sardine and beetroot
hors d’oeuvres
, the suspect soup, the overdone meat, the apple pie and custard, to try to minimize the gaps between each course while the sweating waitresses pounded through the room with trays for everyone but them.

Ben was annoyed at the poor service when the hotel charges were so high, but Amy, with her new-found humanity, had suffered agonies for the overworked waitresses, one of whom had a built-up shoe. Seeing a tray, she had got up and begun to collect plates from nearby tables. The guests murmured how sweet she was, and put out tentative hands to touch her long chestnut hair, but after she had carried away the tray, she came out of the kitchen in tears, and dragged her father out of the dining-room, although they had not got further than the glued turbot. Afterwards, the manageress had tackled Ben and told him that she could not have the child upsetting her staff.

Ben had been angry at the time, and had left the hotel, but he could understand it now. For some reason that had nothing to do with unions, there was a barrier between the serving and the served, and it must never be crossed.

At the cafeteria, nobody except the missionary-faced woman
ever attempted to cross it. Mostly the customers paid as little heed to Ben and his trolley and cloth as if their tables were being cleared by automation.

The Major had said to him: “Good God, man, what if some chap came in who knew you? You’d never be able to show your face in the club again.”

Apart from the fact that Ben had already resigned his club membership to save money, he was not afraid of recognition. People simply did not look at him, and although he sometimes wanted to talk to a pretty girl, or to throw a remark into a conversation, he very rarely spoke to the customers. He and they were in different worlds.

If he was promoted to counter work, he would have to speak to them, but they would still be in different worlds, with the space barrier of the stainless-steel counter between them. The customers would hear his voice asking: “With sugar?” or: “Do you want chips with it?” but they were not likely to remove their attention from the consideration of what they were going to eat to observe the face that belonged to the voice.

Amy came in sometimes for tea with a school friend. When they had filled their trays with strange mixtures of food, Ben would find them an empty table by the wall and clean it off with a flourish and tip up the other two chairs, as he had seen Sir Thomas do for his friends from the college, knowing that the British public would walk round the cafeteria all day looking for somewhere to put down its tray sooner than dispute the privacy of a tipped-up chair.

Amy, who was in a gregarious phase of being popular at school, brought a variety of friends, including the daughter of the Mayor, who was one of the trustees. It must be all over the school by now that Amy Francis’s father was wiping tables in a cafeteria. The headmistress with her college gown and her study full of diplomas and netball cups must be quite shocked, but she could live with that as long as Ben paid the fees. Amy and her friends were not shocked. They seemed to like it. It gave them quite a thrill to have their tea in a place where they knew a member of the staff who would bring them more of anything they wanted from the counter, while the other customers had to fetch their second helpings for themselves.

Amy tried to persuade her grandmother to go to the cafeteria, but Geneva refused. “I strike,” she said. “I’m proud of your father
for working like a dog, but I will not go to a place where I have to carry my own tray. The only time I ever went to one of those places, the crowd rushed me along the rails so fast that I fetched up at the pay desk with nothing on my tray at all and the cashier wanted to have me committed.”

One day, Ben’s mother arrived. She had come to London for shopping and a matinée, and when she went to look for Ben at the flat after the theatre, Geneva sent her to the cafeteria, thinking that the shock would do her good.

Ben was near the door when she came in, looking uncertainly about her, for Geneva had not told her what Ben’s job was, and she imagined that he was in an office behind the scenes.

“Hullo, Mum.” He stood before her in his long apron, limp and stained at the end of a long afternoon’s work. His mother was wearing a fiery suit and an electric-blue turban which looked as if it was on back to front, from beneath which her hair fussed out in twiddled curls, some black, some grey. She stood and stared at him with round, incredulous eyes while people pushed past them, and her unpowdered face grew red, as if she were going to cry.

“Don’t make a scene, Mum,” Ben said, as he had said so often as a boy when his mother had been displeased in shops and restaurants. “Brace up. I’ll find you a table and get you some tea.”

His mother put out a hand blindly and leaned on the trolley for support. “How could you, Benjamin?” she said faintly. “How could you?”

“I should have told you,” he said, “but I knew you wouldn’t like it. Just a temporary thing, to give me something to do while I———”

“Ben, Ben!” Sir Thomas Beecham came up wringing his hands, his long face twisted with anxiety. “Please do something. Your tables by the wall are absolutely piling up, simply piling, and people have nowhere to put their trays. Oh, why do you have to slack-off just now when it’s our busiest time? You know what the next shift are like if they think we’ve left too much for them.”

“Calm down,” Ben said. “I’m on the job. This is my mother. Mum, this is Tommy Maverick, the future organist at Westminster Abbey.”

“Oh, shut up.” Tommy ducked his head sideways. “You know I’ll never get
that
job. Your mother—I say, how wonderful. I’m delighted to meet you.” Mothers to Tommy were almost as
sacred as organs. “Please excuse me, Mrs—er, I can’t stay. I simply must———” He panicked off, his apron flapping round his legs like a wet sail.

Mrs Francis had given him neither word nor glance. She was still staring at Ben in a kind of stupor. He led her to a table, sat her down, and brought her a cup of tea, and she rallied enough to say: “But you didn’t bring me any sugar.”

“Hang on there,” he said. “I’ll be off in twenty minutes, and we’ll go somewhere and talk.” Working like a beaver to catch up on the time he had lost, for on this job and at this time of day you could not afford to take two minutes off for a chat, he looked across the crowded room and saw that she was crying, dabbing at her nose with a screwed-up handkerchief in between sips of tea. Two girls at the table were talking across it spellbound, un-noticing, but a middle-aged woman sitting opposite his mother was nodding and smiling at her, apparently trying to comfort her. Ben wondered what his mother was telling her. He could not go to her then, but when he handed over his trolley to the sub-alcoholic on the next shift, and went over to tell her that he was going to get his coat, she was not there.

“Did the lady go, who was sitting here?” he asked the middle-aged woman.

“Yes, just now. What’s wrong?” The woman’s face brightened. “Didn’t she pay for her tea? Poor soul, she’s in trouble. Her son has let her down, she was telling me. After all she’s done and hoped for him, he’s broken her heart. Why be surprised? I told her. The pains we suffer in childbirth are only the beginning.”

When Ben got back to the flat, his mother was not there. Later, he telephoned her at home, but there was no answer. His father must have gone to meet her train. He imagined her telling him, crying out the bad news as soon as she hopped off the train, hanging on his arm and gabbling out her heartbreak as they went past the ticket collector and out through the crowd to the car. Damn. Now his father would start writing again to say that he could get him the job of secretary to the Nautical Club at Hamble if only he would come home.

At the end of his second week at the cafeteria, Ben decided that Rose had suffered enough, and he went down to the television studio to see her.

It was the evening of her show, and he timed himself to arrive about half an hour before she went on the air, when she would be alone in her dressing-room, “growing into her part,” as she told people.

Ben knew that she would be more likely to be eating a sandwich. The camera fright, which Rose concealed but had never completely overcome, had the effect of making her hungry. Nobody but Ben knew about the little packet wrapped in greaseproof paper which travelled at the bottom of her cosmetic case. The sandwich was one of the most endearing things about her. The moment when she had admitted its presence to Ben, and had stood before him in a sequinned dress and full television make-up tearing at it like a hungry schoolgirl, had been more intimate than if she had taken off all her clothes.

Tonight when Ben told her that he had held a slave’s job for two weeks, and showed her the unopened pay packet with which he was going to take her to supper, she might not need the sandwich. She would be so glad to hear what he had done for her sake that she would go radiantly on to the set and give the best performance of her life. That would make her still happier, and there would be no problem about the rest of the evening.

“Nice to see you back, Commander,” said the man in the satin-backed waistcoat, to whom Ben had become almost as familiar as if he were one of the staff. “You been away?”

“I’ve been too busy to get down here,” Ben said. “Working on a big project.”

“Ah,” said the man, imagining heaven knew what. “I know how it is.”

Turning the corner into the familiar corridor which led to Rose’s dressing-room, Ben ran into Bob Whiting, who was travelling fast on his small, light feet, with a board full of papers
under his arm and a discontented pout to his childish mouth.

“What’s the headache?” Ben asked. “I thought you were off Rose’s show.”

“I am, but the headaches are still there. I’m filling in this week for Alan Rickie as interviewer on
Who’s Doing What
. God, what a mess. The people are all cranks. They have some impossible job, or they do some crazy thing like making music with spoons and a kitchen chair, or teaching parrots to recite the Ten Commandments. They’re all half bats, and one of them hasn’t turned up at all. Just rung up from Chichester to say he missed the train. That’s what you get for relying on a man who makes model railways out of toothpicks. I’ve got to use that revolting girl from the typing pool who makes bird noises. She’s been trying to get on the show for weeks. Catch my act,” he said, patting Ben on the arm as he turned to go. “I’ll be a riot. Nice to see you again, Ben old boy. You haven’t been around lately. I suppose you’ve had a row with little Rosie, like everyone else.”

“Not exactly. I’ve been working.”

“Got that directorship at last? More power to you.”

Bob was already beginning to walk away when Ben said, to amuse him, for it was flattering to be able to make a cynic laugh: “I’m working in a cafeteria, clearing tables and mopping up.”

Bob stopped as if he had been shot, pivoted on one suede boot and stepped back. “Say that again,” he growled, thrusting his face close to Ben’s.

Ben said it. Encouraged by the sight of Bob’s streaked eyeballs, which only protruded like this when he was interested, he began to fill in some details.

“All right, all right.” Bob held up his fleshy white hand. “Save it for the air. I want it fresh. Come with me.” He took Ben’s arm in a pinching grip and hustled him protesting down the stairs and into the office of the producer of the
Who’s Doing What
show.

“Tell that girl to stuff her bird noises,” he said, sweeping Ben up to the desk. “Here’s our number three spot.”