Man Overboard

by Monica Dickens

  “Why worry about that?” Frank said. “I often feel the same. I take a dose of salts for it, myself.”

  * Chapter 5 *

  “I THOUGHT you said you were going to give up smoking,” Rose said.

  “I am, tomorrow.” Ben put away the packet. “I didn’t say that, anyway. I said I wouldn’t buy any cigarettes until I got a job. Bob gave me these.”

  “Sponging now.”

  “Just one of his little charities. Helping the unemployed.”

  Bob Whiting had been much more friendly towards Ben now that he was out of the Navy. When Rose was difficult, which she was in increasing ratio to her success, it was almost as if they were in league, the lover and the colleague both trying to defend themselves against her egotism.

  Once when Rose had fought with Ben before a rehearsal and fought with Bob during the rehearsal, the two men had gone off together afterwards and left Rose, who hated to drive herself home, to fall back for escort on her male lead of that week, who disliked her as much as she disliked him, but disliked the Underground even more. Bob and Ben had ended the night in the Ambassadors, and had met Jayne Mansfield. It was many days before Rose would forgive either of them.

  Bob had dropped his sneers, and no longer referred to Ben as the Gallant Commander. He called him Ben old boy, and had even negotiated for him a job of sorts, but Rose said that she would have nothing more to do with him if he took it. She would not have Ben scuttling up from the basement when somebody yelled: “Where the hell are the seagulls?” She was not going to be seen leaving the studio with the junior assistant to the assistant manager of Sound effects.

  Although he was living in London, Ben did not go often to the television studio. The novelty had long ago worn off, just as the novelty of Rose herself was wearing off and bringing to the surface the beginnings of an old-shoe relationship, which was less glamorous, but much less tiring. Her glowing beauty never ceased to enchant him every time he saw her, but the excitement of having a girl who looked like that was giving place to a tolerant fondness that recognized the sweetness buried too deep under the humbug. He now wanted to protect her from her own absurdities.

  Rose had other men round her, but they came and went like July butterflies, while Ben was more or less a permanency. He had learned not to mind too much about Rose’s other men, for he could not cure her of her habit of picking up admirers as easily as a naval uniform picks up lint. When she wept to him sometimes after she had cast them off, and cried: “Oh, darling, I’ve been unfaithful to you!” he was not crazed with jealousy, because he believed that technically she had not erred. Unlike Marion, it was only men’s scalps that Rose wanted. She constantly had to prove her power; then she would return tranquilly to Ben, almost as if he were a husband.

  They still talked of marriage in a leisurely way, and there were many times when Ben felt sure that if he could land a decent enough job to support his pride against Rose’s earnings, they could get some happiness out of it. Other men had married famous women and kept their self-esteem by leading a life of their own and letting their wives get on with being famous by themselves, taking only a background part in the career that brought the fame. And there was always the sustaining thought that Rose would surely not be famous for ever.

  It was no longer a thrill to Ben to be seen out with a woman whom everybody recognized. At first he had liked it when taxi drivers slid back the front window to say something appreciative, but now he wished that they would leave the window shut and keep the draughts out. In public places, he used to enjoy his position on the edge of the stares, and to relish the glances of envy from other men, but he was growing tired now of tagging along behind Rose. He was not going to walk through marriage one step behind her, holding the mink on the edge of the crowd which clamoured for her autograph, waiting out of camera range while she posed for a picture, stopping with her at tables on the way out of restaurants, while she sparkled at people whom he did not know, and to whom he could find nothing to say when he was introduced.

  Although he had told her not to, Rose still persisted in introducing him as Commander Francis. At parties, people sometimes followed this up with a polite: “Where are you stationed, Commander?”

  Rose did not like him to say: “I’m out of the Navy,” so he would give random answers like: “Wapping Pier”, or “Mumbles Lighthouse”.

  Afterwards Rose would complain: “Why do you tell such silly lies?”

  “Why do you go on calling me Commander?”

  “It sounds better,” was her crisp reply, and she would study him for a moment with the stupendous orbs narrowed to the size of ordinary eyes, as if she were speculating whether he was fit to be seen out with her.

  If things went on like this, the day would come, Ben knew, when someone would address him as Mr Kelly. The thought of this spurred his ambition. He must find himself a niche in life where there would be people who would say: “There is Benjamin Francis. He’s married to someone or other. Somebody one knows.” He must be able to walk before Rose into restaurants and tackle head waiters on his own. He must hear people call Rose Mrs Francis, in a natural way, not as if it were some temporary and faintly comic joke.

  With this in mind, he began to apply for jobs that offered: “Excellent prospects for right man”, and “Unlimited opportunities for advancement”. He answered impossible advertisements for posts like Advertising Manager, or Senior Consultant in Management Accounting, or Assistant Sales Manager with Extensive Experience of Marketing a Variety of Merchandise. He was not surprised when he received no answer from many of the firms. When there was one, it was the bleakly familiar: “The post has been filled”, or the more courteous brush-off: “We will keep your letter on record in case a suitable post arises.”

  “I’m starting at the top and working down. I’ll let you know when I reach office boy,” he told Geneva, as he sat down once more at the scarred dining-table and pulled his typewriter towards him. It was a pre-war portable that had been half-way round the world with him, and had suffered greatly from the sea change. It shifted the paper sideways towards the bottom of the page, and was apt to write everything in capitals if you did not watch the shift-lock key like a hawk and catch it as it started to go down. When he was composing an application, Geneva would sometimes ocp/1127—c come behind him and rest a painful bracelet on his shoulder and protest: “You can’t say that. It’s a lie.”

  “It doesn’t matter. They’ll know it’s a lie if I don’t give references, but they might respect my ingenuity. It’s all part of the game. The advertisement says: ‘Since the company’s approach to its more unusual problems is adventurous, the post demands a resourceful personality.’ What is more resourceful than a lie?”

  It started as something of a game, whiling away the too-empty hours of freedom with the advertisement pages of the newspapers in the Paddington library, pouring himself a beer and drafting and redrafting masterpieces of persuasion to try to trap an employer into granting him at least an interview.

  It was not long, however, before the game sobered into reality, as Ben became increasingly aware of two serious facts. One was that he must find a job as soon as possible if he were not to dribble away his meagre retired pay in supporting himself and Amy and catering to Rose’s ideas of where to go and what to do in London. The other, still more depressing, was that jobs for an ex-naval officer of thirty-six were not easy to find.

  It was small comfort to know that there were many men in the same boat. In one of the few interviews Ben achieved, the nonchalant man swivelling back and forth on the other side of the desk had said: “I had three of you chaps in yesterday. One poor devil was a group-captain with three kids, two of them at public school. The hell of it is, we owe our lives to blokes like you; but this firm’s a profit-making concern, not a charitable organization.”

  Ben read a newspaper article in which he and the other ex-officers were referred to as The Lost Men of Britain. Everyone was sorry for him, it seemed, but what use was that?
He did not want to be treated like a paraplegic charity case. He wanted a decent job.

  He was too old, too inexperienced, too bare of academic qualifications. His technical knowledge of such things as engineering and radio and radar was no more than basic. In a submarine, there had always been an engineer officer and highly qualified technical ratings to depend on. The Navy had cast Ben out fit for nothing more useful than to command a submarine, and if there were any commercial firms engaged in undersea projects, they were not advertising the fact.

  Ben went to several employment offices and had friendly or irritating chats with sympathetic or superior clerks; but neither the sympathy nor the hauteur yielded any success. With his experience of handling men, which was one of the few saleable attributes he could lay claim to, Personnel was the thing to go for, they told him. But for each vacancy for welfare officer or personnel manager, there were dozens of applicants, mostly ex-officers, falling over each other to get in first.

  One day, when the sun came out over icy pavements which bit like iron through the trodden-over boots of the old ladies creeping towards Whiteleys, Ben crunched across the Park through the thin, dirty snow and wandered into an employment bureau in Kensington.

  It was a small and unprosperous concern, two flights up over a chemist’s shop, with the linoleum showing its threads on the stairs. The office was just one room with two kindly women and a thin young girl who had a typewriter in an adjoining cubicle the same shape and size as a train toilet. It had the same kind of basin, too, deeper than it was wide, with a cracked glaze and awkward taps from which the girl filled the kettle to make tea. Ben knew about the basin, because once when he was the only client in the office and the girl was tired, sitting in a chair without her shoes and twisting her chilblained toes, he made the tea for all of them.

  It was obvious at his first visit that Ben had come to the wrong place from which to be launched on his meteoric career; but after his second visit, when he and Miss Arkwright and Mrs French and Jessie had enjoyed an all-round unburdening of some of their hopes and dreams, Ben and the bureau became very attached to each other. He often walked across the Park, more for the exercise and to see his three friends than for the hope of finding himself a job.

  If there was anyone in the office, which was not often, Ben would wait on one of the hard chairs on the landing outside. Then he would go in, with a bunch of flowers or a bag of jam tarts, and draw up a chair, and Miss Arkwright would give him one of the filter-tipped cigarettes, “named after my darling Sir Larry”, which were one of the few things on which she spent money for herself.

  Mrs French, a motherly lady with soft white hair and a fancy for brown dresses with glimpses of lace at the neck, was at the desk which dealt with the affairs of employees; but in Ben’s case, Miss Arkwright, who handled employers, and even Jessie, who did not handle anything except the typewriter and the teapot, chipped in with ideas and advice. Nothing ever came of it. The bureau dealt mostly in domestic posts, and as there were few people who wanted to be maids and almost as few who could afford to employ them even if they could find them, business was steadily dropping off. Sometimes they talked with mouselike courage of widening their scope. Miss Arkwright had once found a hosiery buyer for a desperate department store, and they had never forgotten it They had wanted to have the contract framed to hang on the wall.

  Miss Arkwright was gentle and dovelike, and should have found a husband long ago. She intimated once that she had lost a lover in the war, but no one, including herself, seemed quite to believe it. It occurred to Ben that if he could introduce her to Frank Daniels, she would make a wonderful wife for him. Frank loved to wear knitted cardigans and woollen gloves, and Miss Arkwright was always knitting. If a client came in, she would stub out her cigarette and thrust needles and wool into a drawer of her desk, looking up with her bright, businesslike smile, as if she had been putting away important papers connected with the bureau’s crushing load of work.

  It was her sister’s children for whom she knitted. Her sister had produced babies in a regular but improvident fashion, and Miss Arkwright’s life outside the office was devoted to auntly services. Before that, it had been her brother’s children, who were now grown-up and needed mufflers rather than matinée coats. Like Georgina Hogarth, Miss Arkwright had always been so busy with other people’s children that she had never had the chance to find a man to give her some of her own.

  The three women in the little office with the grimy window between them and the perpetual noise of the traffic in Kensington High Street grew very fond of Ben. They were always glad to see him, and they tried their hardest to help him, although the nearest they came to finding him a job was to arrange an interview with a lady who wanted a personal bodyguard for her daughter, which fell through when the lady telephoned to say that the daughter had run away and married the man against whom she had desired to guard her.

  Ben grew fond of the three women, and found himself almost as concerned about finding a husband for Miss Arkwright as about finding a job for himself. He even went so far as to write to Frank Daniels, suggesting that he should come up for a week-end in town, during the course of which Ben planned to stage a meeting with Miss Arkwright. After an interval, Frank replied that the Admiralty was sending him to Scotland. “No time to get to town, even if I wanted to,” Frank wrote, not knowing what he was missing. Surly devil. Perhaps Miss Arkwright was better off with her nieces and her nephews, one of whom had been expelled from two nursery schools and was claimed to be a proper tartar.

  One evening when Ben breezed into the office near closing-time and found the women pulling on rubber boots and dabbing at their noses with little velour puffs, they greeted him with twittering excitement. Something wonderful had happened. Miss Arkwright had answered an advertisement for an Appeals Organizer for a charitable organization. A gentleman called Sweeting—such a pretty name—had telephoned at two o’clock —”No, it must have been two fifteen, because I was naughty enough to get back late from lunch”—and an interview had been arranged for Ben the next day.

  “We didn’t want to tell you until we’d heard from him,” Mrs French said, beaming at Ben as if he were her favourite child. “We wanted to surprise you, and we were afraid of disappointing you in case he never answered Phoebe’s letter. We’ve been trying to reach you all the afternoon. Your mother-in-law said she didn’t know where you were. ‘For all I know,’ she said, ‘he’s run away to sea.’ She’s very humorous,” Mrs. French added doubtfully. She did not like jokes about Ben and the Navy.

  “I went to the cinema,” Ben said.

  “To the cinema, on a day like this!” Jessie exclaimed. “Oh, but of course, you didn’t know. How could you? You couldn’t, of course.” Jessie often asked questions of herself and answered them in the same breath, a habit acquired from living with a large family who never listened to each other. “Isn’t it exciting, Ben? Yes, tremendously so.” She stretched her mouth in a wide smile beneath her gaunt cheeks. She was in love with Ben, but it did not matter. She had a young man with whom she was properly in love, with holding hands and kissing and looking at three-piece suites in shop windows. Her feeling for Ben was deliberately unreal, like an enjoyable dream of Tony Curtis. It was sufficient just to be daring enough to call him Ben, and to take more trouble with her hair and the seams of her stockings in case he dropped in.

  Miss Arkwright was sitting in the chair by the gas fire, zipping up stout boots. Her expression was smug. While Jessie and Mrs French babbled, she told Ben the details tautly, as if she negotiated thousand-pound-a-year jobs every day of the week. She was the one who had done it. She had seen the advertisement. She had written the letter. She had talked on the telephone with the great Sweeting and had been shrewd enough not to say anything that would put him off.

  “A real gentleman,” she said, stretching her feet out to the fire for a last warm-up before she joined the frozen queue for the bus. “I think you’ll enjoy working for him.” The boots began to smel
l a little.

  “Steady on,” Ben said. “I haven’t got the job yet. An interview’s only the start. What do I know about raising funds?”

  “You’ve always claimed you could bluff your way into anything.” Miss Arkwright turned her large doe eyes on him reproachfully. “You wouldn’t go and let me down, surely?”

  “You will go to see him?” Mrs French asked nervously. If he failed them now, it would be the end, after all their efforts for him, and Jessie making a novena at Saint Patrick’s. Bulky in their outdoor clothes, they all looked at him, their white-haired boy, the pride of the Phillimore Employment Bureau.

  He hastened to reassure them. “And I did once pass round the hat for old Corky’s silver wedding,” he added. “I made a good job of that, even though his wife never liked the tray.”

  “There you are, you see!” Miss Arkwright turned off the gas fire and stood up, pulling a felt hat down over her fluffy hair. “You can do it. Go to it.” She grasped her umbrella before her as though she were presenting arms. “Go in and win.”

  “The very best of luck to you, my dear boy,” Mrs French said moistily. For two pins she would have kissed him.

  “Ditto from yours truly.” Jessie tied a long woollen scarf over her hair and flung the ends back behind her narrow shoulders. “I’m sure I’ll never get any work done tomorrow for thinking about you.”

  Ben found himself shaking hands solemnly all round. Then he left them, galloping down the treacherous stairs two at a time, their sailor knight off to the jousts.

  Geneva and Amy were almost as excited as the three women in the Phillimore Bureau. The Major was at the flat when Ben reached home, and they drank to his success in large martinis.

  “When you get dug in there,” the Major said, “you might look about you and see if there’s a trifling little job for me.” He had not worked for years and did not intend to, since his wife had left him enough money to sustain life, but he frequently talked about what he would do if someone would only give him half a chance. “I might be useful to you. Give you some tips. I know all about these shows. Colossal expense accounts. You’ll be doing all your business over lunch at the Savoy Grill, I dare say.”