Man Overboard (30 page)

“I don’t need one.” He tapped the ash into the end of a matchbox, Navy style. “If there’s a fire, I can try out my new fire drill. Can you remember what it felt like to be unpopular?”

Ella stopped working to think again, and then shook her head. “No. I can remember things like Alice Curran’s name, but not how she made me feel. Why?”

“I just wondered. I remember when I was in a cruiser as a midshipman. We had the Germans boxed-up in the Norwegian fjords, and we’d been hanging about for months without seeing any action, and everything had slipped a bit, including the Old Man. Then he was relieved by a captain who talked through his teeth, like this,” he clenched them at her, “and turned the ship upside down to get it back into shape. We had all become such a lot of slobs that we hated him for it. He didn’t seem to care what
anyone thought of him, but I’m beginning to understand how he probably felt. Are you listening, Ella?”

She was running her pencil down the laundry list. Her mind was apt to wander away sometimes in the middle of a conversation.

“Of course.” She sucked the pencil and looked at him.

“This is what it feels like to be unpopular, since you’ve forgotten. You feel cheated. Not hurt, or angry, or vindictive. Just cheated. When you haven’t done anything wrong by your standards, it seems damned unfair that if people are going to dislike you anyway, you haven’t had the fun of being really vicious. Don’t you remember feeling that at school when you said ‘Be my friend’, and they dropped books on your toes?”

“I suppose so,” Ella said vaguely. “I don’t remember. You’re not unpopular, anyway.” She was not interested in recollecting her own feelings when his appeared to need soothing. Ella was a great soother of feelings, but she usually managed to make you feel worse, like a clumsy nurse knocking into the end of the bed in her hurry to fetch something to relieve your pain. “It’s only that people think you don’t know anything about the job; but I think you manage very well, considering you don’t.”

“Thank you.” Ben changed the subject. “How’s the family?” He was always trying to get her to talk about her home.

“Oh, all right.” She sounded indifferent. How was that possible when she was privileged to be a part of Ben’s provocative dream?

“It’s a nice old place you have there.” He had been angling for an invitation ever since he had begun to work at the school with Ella.

“I suppose so. I like it, but I’ve lived there so long, I can’t imagine what it looks like to a stranger.” She was going out of the door with a pile of towels for the boys’ bathroom when she turned and said: “That reminds me. My father told me to ask you over to lunch next Sunday. With Amy, of course. Or would she be bored?”

“She’s never bored.” This was not true, but Amy was just as anxious to get into the house as he was. “We’d love to come.”

Ella looked at him with her chin resting on the top towel and said: “It won’t be exciting. Just a family lunch, and I cook at the week-ends, which is bad luck for you.” Ella had acquired her housekeeper’s post on the strength of a diploma from a domestic
science school, but it was generally agreed that the diploma must have been forged.

As if she knew what he wanted to ask, she added: “My sister will be there, anyway. You’ll like her. She’s the gay one. You know —at children’s parties: ‘That’s Laura Halliday, the gay one. The other one’s Ella. She grew too fast.’ ”

“Ella,” Ben said, as she turned away. “You’re gay, and I like you.” But she was gone, hurrying down the corridor and knocking into a very small boy who was below her line of vision under the towels.

It had never occurred to Ben that the younger sister Laura, with the short, pert curls and the slick figure would be married. It was some time since he had seen her from the train. He had not known that her figure would not be slick any more when he found her in the hall as he came in from the tour of inspection to which Mr Halliday subjected all new guests, if he could catch them between the car and the house.

“Pay no attention to me,” he said. “You get like this when you’re retired and don’t have enough on your mind. It’s just something I have to do once, and then it will be over.”

“But Amy and I want to see everything,” Ben said. Mr Halliday looked at him suspiciously, and when he saw that he meant it, he was so pleased that he enlarged the tour, and would have tramped Ben to the top of the second field to see the view if Ella had not caught him making for the gate, and called to him from the kitchen window.

As it was, he introduced Ben to almost every plant, of which not many were flourishing, and to the mushroom shed and the compost heap and the nursery bed dug out of the orchard grass, where the weeds were growing faster than the seedlings. Mr Halliday seemed to be quite pleased if he could find five or six struggling plants in a row where he had sown two packets of seed. This was the sort of gardening Ben understood, the only kind he had ever done, when he and Marion had the bungalow at Portland, and he could never stop her picking his few precious flowers as soon as they came frailly into bloom.

When they went into the house, Laura was in the hall in a yellow smock that stuck out in front like a half-open umbrella.

“This is my daughter Laura,” Mr Halliday said. “Mrs Arnold.”

Amy kicked Ben lightly on the ankle, and when Laura turned away to get him a drink, she whispered: “Bad luck, Daddy. Oh, what stinking luck.”

“Listen,” he told Amy quietly, for Laura was busy at the table under the window and Mr Halliday had left the room, having sublimated all his hospitable instincts in the garden, “don’t expect it all to be like we imagined. Nothing ever is.”

“That’s what’s so hateful about life.” Amy pulled at a loose thread on the back of a chair.

“It isn’t. If everything happened the way you imagined it would, there’d be no point in ever letting anything happen. Because you’d know.”

She frowned uncertainly, then switched into a smile and said gently: “Yes, Daddy dear,” for Laura had come up behind Ben with a glass. Amy had evidently decided on the role of docile daughter for Laura’s benefit.

Ella knew her at the school as anything but docile, for she was with the boys and copying them whenever she could escape Mrs Glynn’s half-hearted supervision. Ben wondered how she would manage to combine the two roles when Ella and Laura were in the room together.

When Mrs Halliday came into the hall, which was the gathering-place of the house, Amy changed again. She had an uncanny way of knowing immediately what people would want her to be. She had sensed that Laura did not particularly like children and would prefer not to hear from them, and so while she was talking to Ben, Amy picked up a magazine and sat quietly with her ankles crossed. But when Mrs Halliday came in, waistless in a dun silk blouse not properly tucked into her skirt, she got up and began to talk to her about the horses, which she had broken away from the tour of inspection to visit.

Mrs Halliday, who was utterly and ineradicably horsey, although in a much gentler way than Ben had expected, welcomed Amy like Fuchs meeting Hillary at the South Pole; or rather Hillary meeting Fuchs, for Mrs Halliday had got there first. Everyone else in the house was tired of horses, but Amy was her disciple, sitting on a stool at her feet like the picture of The Boyhood of Raleigh, while Mrs Halliday, with a light in her mild amber eyes which may never have shone so tenderly for any of her babies, told her about the two horses which she trained as
show hacks and took round to all the big shows in the summer. Since she was too fat to throw her legs across a horse any more, she rode side-saddle, which Ben was glad to hear out of the corner of his ear while he listened to Laura talking about herself.

“May I really?” he heard Amy say. “Daddy, Mrs Halliday says I can go to some of the shows with her. She and George take the horse trailer and go hundreds of miles and sleep in the car.”

“George is the man who drives, and helps me with the horses,” Mrs Halliday said. “My husband doesn’t like it, but of course I sleep in the front of the car and George sleeps at the back.” She said this with a sort of anxious gravity. Her face, under the loosely-pinned swags of yellow-grey hair, was creased with the necessity that Ben should understand.

She was not tough and masterful at all, but disarmingly naïve. Ben had always thought of her as a leathery woman who would stand no nonsense from her horses or anyone else, but he saw now that what authority she had was confined to the stable, and that her horses had found themselves a lucky billet.

“You will let me go, won’t you?” Amy got up from the low stool with a swift unfolding of her long legs and came to him, adding: “Daddy, dear,” for Laura’s benefit. “So now, you see, we must stay at the school.”

“Oh?” Laura’s eyebrows, which were slightly out of drawing, went up. “Weren’t you going to?” She called across the hall to her sister, who came in from the kitchen flushed, with a lump of hair arched the wrong way over her parting: “Ella—you didn’t tell me Commander Francis was getting out. That’s five bob you owe me.”

Ella wiped her hands on the dish-towel she was carrying and helped herself to a drink, stuffing the dish-towel between a cushion and the back of the sofa, where it might stay for days if this was the sort of house it seemed to be. “Laura bet me five shillings you wouldn’t stay more than a month,” she said, “but I knew you would.”

“If only to win the bet for you,” Ben said. “But how did you know?”

He thought she would say something flattering about his stamina, but she spilled a few drops of her drink on a table, swiped at it with the edge of her apron and said bluntly: “Well, you told
me what a hard time you’d had finding a job, and even Greenbriars must be better than living with Glenville Roberts.”

“Glenville Roberts?” Laura turned quickly to Ben.
”The
Glenville Roberts? You lived with him?”

“I
told
you,” Ella said wearily.

“You never tell me anything that matters. Do you know Glenville Roberts?” Laura looked at Ben as if she liked him better. “He’s one of my favourite authors. I read his last novel twice.”

“You would,” Ella said. “It was revolting.”

“It wasn’t. Nothing is revolting when it’s good literature. It was realism, wasn’t it?” She turned back to Ben.

Amy was looking from one face to another with interest, and he wished that they could stop talking about it before she popped up with some cosy detail of her life with Glenn. He said: “I thought he went too far.”

Laura accepted this, since he had said it and not Ella. “You know what he’s like, of course. Is he really like that? I’d love to meet him.”

“You might. He’s bought a house not far from here.”

“Will you take me over? Oh, please.” She put on a babyish, flirting face. “I’d die if I met him. How exciting. We might ask him here, though I don’t suppose he’d come, Elsie”—both daughters addressed their mother by her Christian name—”get out the best silver. You might meet Glenville Roberts.”

“Who’s Glenville Roberts?” Mrs Halliday had taken a steel curb-chain out of her pocket and was polishing it thoughtfully between the palms of her podgy hands. “Why do you laugh? Should I know? Bernie.” She dropped the curb-chain in her wide lap and reached up to take her husband’s hand as he came in from a room off the hall. “The girls are laughing at me. Should I know who Glenville Roberts is?”

“No, darling, no.” He patted her hand. “Why should you? You’re much better off not knowing.”

“She will soon. He’s coming here,” Laura said.

“God forbid. Make an appointment with the dentist for me that day, Ella.”

“You haven’t been to the dentist since you lost your teeth,” she said, staring at him seriously.

“Don’t be so literal. A surgeon will do. I’ll have my gall bladder out.”

After lunch, when Ben and Amy went out to the kitchen to help with the dishes, Amy caught at his hand as they followed Ella down the passage. “I see what you meant. They’re not like we thought. We’ve had that. Now we have them. I like it here, do you?”

Yes, he liked it. And it was not so different. There was much that was familiar from his years of spying. As separate personalities they were different, of course, from what they had seemed when he had racketed by above them in the train; but together they had that casual, unquestioning family relationship which his imagination had treasured because he and Amy, in their different generations, had never known it.

The house itself was the house he had always known. He had never visualised its interior in detail. When he had thought of it, it had been scarcely more than a vague atmosphere suggested by the outside, but he knew now that if he had imagined it, he might have guessed at this kind of furniture; at the rugs, the older ones good, the newer ones less worn but uglier; at the large and inconvenient kitchen, which would be very cold in winter, with a table scrubbed white over the years and crusted bowls of half-eaten cats’ and dogs’ food in all the corners.

There should have been irony in his coming to the house after all these years. Having imagined them for so long a secure and stable family, he should have found them all at loggerheads, the arguments not harmless minor ones as unremarkable as breathing, but fierce and bitter quarrels, with people locking themselves in their rooms and torturing themselves for days over the futility of life.

Or, to make a morbid drama out of his dream, he should have come just too late ever to share the contented life he had admired from the train. He should have arrived just as Laura ran away with a drunken poacher, or the father hung himself with a dressing-gown cord behind the bathroom door, or Ella was killed trying to snatch a dog off the railway line, or Mrs Halliday was thrown from her side-saddle and turned into a crippled idiot for the rest of her life.

There was no irony. No drama. There was only truth. He had not been deceived. For some reason, the house had singled him out from all the passengers on the Southern Railway to show him something of the truth of the life that was lived within its walls.

After the first shock of finding that Laura was married, he did not mind that he could not be in love with her any more, because he would not have married her anyway, nor been in love with her, in any other than a dream world.