Man Overboard

by Monica Dickens

  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 f
lurry 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.

  The front door was locked. Ben had a feeling that the doors of the house by the railway were never locked. Firbanks Avenue was a quiet street, on the way to nowhere except a disused gravel-pit, and there were no mental institutions nearby, and nothing in the house to steal except Ben’s father’s oriental souvenirs from the days when he was in the P. & O., but there were double bolts on all the doors, and little chains and pegs fitted to the windows to stop them being opened from the outside far enough to get an arm through. This also meant that they could not be opened from the inside far enough to get an arm through, or to get any appreciable amount of air; but Ben’s mother did not shake dusters or mops out of windows. She shook them on to a piece of newspaper. His father had once had malaria, which had never recurred, but had given him an excuse to keep out the good sea air and enjoy a comfortable stuffiness.

  Ben would not use the electric chime—his mother’s pride—so he thumped on the frosted glass at the top of the door, and heard her quick feet coming tap tap along the linoleum.

  “Don’t bang on the glass, dear,” she said automatically. She wiped her hands on her apron and stood on tiptoe to kiss him, for she was very small.

  All the way from London, Ben had rehearsed how he should break the news. Better perhaps to tell them as soon as he stepped into the house rather than let them think that this was just a friendly visit prompted by nothing more sinister than filial affection. If he let them preserve that illusion any longer than necessary, there would be a double-edged accusation hanging in the air. Not only had he let himself get kicked out of the Navy, but he had let them welcome him as if everything was all right. He would tell his mother immediately, and then she could go running in to his father crying: “Tommy, Tommy, the most disastrous thing has happened!” and his father would puff out his cheeks and look as if he had been struck by lightning, and they could get the worst of it over right away perhaps, and then get on with lunch.

  “Mum,” he began as she helped him off with his coat, but she was not listening to him.

  “I quite thought we would see you yesterday,” she was saying.

  “I was surprised when you phoned to say you wouldn’t be here till Saturday, with the week-end half gone.” No matter how glad she was to see him, she invariably managed to make him feel guilty for not having come sooner.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I had to go to London.” He would let her finish fussing with his coat, brushing the collar with the edge of her hand and squaring up the shoulders on the hanger, and then tell her.

  “Tommy! Benjy is here!” she called, although Ben’s father was already opening the sitting-room door and could see for himself.

  “Well, well, well,” he said, rubbing his hands and nodding his head. “So you’re here at last, Benjamin. Quite a sight for sore eyes.”

  “He didn’t come last night, because he had to go to London,” Mrs Francis told him, as if answering a question they had been discussing at some length.

  “I’ve come to tell you, Dad,” Ben began. “I———”

  “Come in, come in,” his father said. “Don’t stand there like a stranger.”

  Another moment was lost, and Ben followed his father into the sitting-room. His mother came too, taking off her apron. She never wore it in the sitting-room in case someone came unexpectedly to call, although, as her husband never heard the door chimes, and nobody without gelignite could get into the house unless she shot back the bolts for them, there was not much chance of her being caught off her guard.

  They all sat down on various pieces of the embossed suite of furniture which had managed to remain as unreceptively convex as when it was bought five years ago. Ben’s mother sat on the edge of the chair with her ankles crossed and her hands clasped, and looked at him with her bright, beady eyes. She was a spry little woman with a magpie look about her greying black hair and a taste in clothes which ran to the sulphur-yellows and heliotropes and that sickly colour which was once foisted on to a loyal public as Marina green when the Duchess of Kent was married. Only her skin was grey and colourless, and appeared more so because of her bright clothes and hats. She could have refurbished it to match her apparel, but in her code you did not do things to the face God gave you.

  Ben’s father sat in his chair with his thick thighs apart and his torso laid between them like an egg. He too looked at Ben through his round spectacles, and Ben took a deep breath and started to say: “Well, the axe caught up with me at last.”

  As he spoke, his father spoke too, in his louder boom. “Sun’s over the yardarm.” He pushed himself upright and went over to the cupboard under the gramophone, from which he produced a new half-bottle of gin, and broke the seal. It was always a new bottle, bought expressly for Ben’s visits. A generous gesture in a frugal household, but one which succeeded in making him feel that they thought of him as an alcoholic who would not come at all if he was only going to be given beer.

  He poured pink gins for himself and Ben and a small gin and orange for his wife, which she held up to the light with her head on one side as if it were a ruby wine before sipping at it with puckered lips.

  “Welcome aboard,” Ben’s father said, and Ben said: “Glad to be aboard, sir,” and looked into his glass to find the words to tell him that except as a visitor he would never be aboard one of H.M. ships again.

  “So you went to London,” Mr Francis said, stretching out his short legs and leaning back in a man-to-man way. “Went to see Rose Kelly, eh?”

  Ben had not originally told them about Rose, but they had found out about her from Geneva Hogg’s sister, Marion’s Aunt Florence, with whom Ben’s mother had maintained a regular correspondence, although since Marion’s death she had lost touch with Geneva, whom she had never liked.

  She met Aunt Florence for lunch at Stewart’s once a year when she went to London to do her Christmas shopping. Between Christmases, they exchanged animated letters, mostly about the illnesses and bereavements of people unknown to each other, but none the less interesting for that. Then there had been the juicy piece of news about Ben, and when he had come to Wavecrest one week-end to mention casually that he might marry a television star, they had already known about Rose and been able to get in first with: “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  They were familiar with Rose’s appearance on the television set which perched insecurely on narrow, pointed legs in the corner of the sitting-room, and Mrs Francis’s first reaction had been: “Why did you have to pick another one who was so—you know?” Sexy was a word she might use to Ben when she was roaming chattily round his room at night when he was in bed trying to read, but she would not use it in front of her husband.

  Rose would not go to Southampton and Ben’s parents seldom went to London, s
o that they had never met. Rose was not curious about the parents of Ben, or anyone else. She was not interested in the contents of people’s lives which did not directly affect her. Ben’s parents were curious about her, but not enough to make them drive their little car all the way to London or to do what they called “facing the trains”, so that they talked about her with a certain amount of suspicion, as if she were something that was being kept from them. Ben wished that they could meet, for Rose, who wanted everyone to like her, would be very charming and gracious, and would captivate his mother out of telling his father and people on the telephone: “I fear the worst.”

  “We saw your lady friend on that thing last week,” Mr Francis said, jerking his head to the set whose existence he would not dignify with a name. He watched it by the hour, but would never admit that television was here to stay.

  “She was good, didn’t you think?”

  “So-so. Pretty girl.” He drained his glass and set it down with a little gasp. “When are you going to make an honest woman of her, Benjamin?” He did not think that his son was living with this woman, but it was just as well to be jocular about it, in case he was.

  “I honestly don’t know,” Ben said truthfully.

  “An actress,” his mother said. “I don’t know. It worries me sick to think what kind of wife she would make for a naval officer. If only she was on the B.B.C., it wouldn’t seem to matter so much.”

  Now was the time to tell them that he would soon no longer be a naval officer; but his mother was off to the kitchen to dish up the lunch, and if Ben told his father while she was absent she would say that they were trying to keep things from her.

  He could not mention it during lunch either, because the commotion with knife sharpeners and vegetable dishes and tipping the platter to extract the gravy from under the meat, and a long and inconclusive discussion as to whether this new butcher was any better than the Co-op, made any serious announcement impossible.