Man Overboard (39 page)

When it was time to stand up, Mrs Francis had checked her tears, and Ben took all the crumpled handkerchiefs away from her and stuffed them in his coat pocket. The improbable-looking pall bearers of ill-assorted sizes shouldered the coffin away with measured tread. Ben followed with the coffin’s widow and sister-in-law and cousin.

The fact that his dead father had so clearly absented himself from the proceedings seemed to bring him to a much closer understanding with Ben than they had had for years. It was his way of reassuring Ben that now that he was dead, he found that he did not mind it. Untrammelled by the locomotion problems of an earthly body, it was as if he had slipped quietly into Ben’s mind and said: “I’m off, Benjamin. See this thing through for me like a good chap.”

The ordeal of walking down the aisle was worse than walking up, because now Mrs Francis must look people in the face, and not know whether to smile at them or not. She half-smiled shyly at one or two people, and they did not know whether to be glad that she had singled them out for recognition, or to wish that she had not, because there was the danger of smiling back too broadly and looking as if they were trying to turn the thing into a social picnic.

Ben helped his mother and Aunt Edna into the car, and there was a slight hold-up, because a lorry was parked half-across the road, and the hearse could not move until the driver was found. Waiting behind the hearse, Ben looked out of the back window of the car and saw the people coming out of the church. He saw them greeting friends on the steps, lifting hats, chatting on the pavement for a moment before they went to their cars. Some of them looked almost jaunty, as if they were relieved to find themselves alive when poor old Tommy Francis was not.

He saw one couple inviting another to get into their car. They might stop for a drink on the way home. “I need one after that,”
one of the men would say, and they would all be rather pleased with themselves for having given up the best part of their morning to come to the funeral. Driving away, they would begin to say things about the dead man and his widow which they would not have said before the funeral.

Why not? Ben had done it himself at the funerals of people whose death made no difference to his life. He remembered driving away with some senior officers and their wives from the funeral service of a not very popular captain who had died of a heart attack. They had all been serious and subdued on their way to the church. Afterwards, they had begun to discuss how the dead man had consistently drunk more than was good for him. They recalled how his wife had once walked out on him at a party and left him to make a fool of himself alone. They recollected that two days before his death, she had made him change a wheel in a snowstorm, although she was fifteen years younger than he and twice as strong. They intimated, without saying it, that she might be responsible for bringing on the heart attack. They had to find someone to blame. They were in their fifties, and if they could not find some definite reason for the captain’s coronary thrombosis, then they must face the thought that it could happen to them out of the blue.

Ben’s mother went away with her sister that evening to spend an indefinite time with her at Reading. Edna’s children were grown-up and married and far away. Her husband was tolerant, and deaf as well, and would not mind all the talking.

Ben spent the night alone at Wavecrest, locked up the house the next morning, and was glad to get away on an early train for London. He telephoned Amy before he left, and she promised to be in the garden when the train went by.

The house would be on the corridor side of the train, and as the familiar bits of scenery came by, Ben went out there and stood by the door. He opened the window and the wind rushed by his face, fresh and exhilarating. After the depression and strain of the days at Wavecrest, he felt buoyant with release. He had no right to feel buoyant when his father was dead and his mother was in the red-brick villa at Caversham, being brought breakfast in bed when she would have preferred to go downstairs, and being asked twenty times a day whether she was all right. A stab of guilt
dented the buoyancy for a moment, but failed to puncture it. He was so lucky. He was not dead. He was not in Caversham with Edna.

He was in a train going somewhere, with a face that could not help stretching in a smile to the sharp rushing air. He thought of offices and steel lockers in cloakrooms and swivel chairs at desks and all the indoor things which he must try for and fail to get and try for again until he ended captive in a job.

He could understand why ex-officers sank their gratuity blithely in chicken farms and country hotels and apple orchards. Perhaps he had been wrong in thinking that he was too clever to fall for that sort of thing. He was not clever at all. Not clever enough to find and keep a job that would offer security, success, any kind of position in the world.

Happier being nobody very special, Ella had said, and he had known it to be true then, when she said it. As the side of the iron bridge came up before his window and fell away to reveal the house, he pulled something out of his pocket—Cousin Doris’s voluminous handkerchief—and waved it mightily and shouted into the wind.

They were in the garden, waving like maniacs and jumping up and down, in white shirts, with their hair blowing. Ella and Amy, both unutterably dear to him, and suddenly it was all incredibly simple and nothing mattered any more except that they must be together.

What was he doing to let the train carry him away without convincing her of his love? He must go back and make her understand the truth; that nothing was any good alone, that if they were all together, something would turn up, and whatever it was, however small and unimportant, they could all be happy sharing it.

He went back into the carriage, took down his suitcase and went outside again to stand impatiently by the door. When the train stopped at Woking, he got out and walked down to the end of the platform to wait in the sun. He sat on a baggage truck, swinging his legs, waiting contentedly, with as much optimism as he had ever known, for the slow, stopping train to take him back to Ella.

To ROY

This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

Copyright © Monica Dickens 1958

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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ISBN: 9781448201143
eISBN: 9781448202461

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