Man Overboard

by Monica Dickens

  “I do, old boy.” The Major’s face glowed with compassion.

  “I can’t marry you. And Rose wouldn’t like it at the———” The word eluded him. “Where I was this morning.”

  “Women never like where you take them. When I took my old trout to Aldershot she bitched the whole time. Doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “Suppose they didn’t like her?”

  “My friend.” The Major slapped him hard on the thigh. “The boys will adore her.” “That’s not the idea.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” The Major sat up straight, swaying a little, and regarded Ben severely. “Where are your guts, man? You love this wench, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Oh, yes.” When he was drunk, Ben was always violently and sentimentally in love with Rose. Hazily he saw a vision of the bungalow with the red door. The door opened and Rose came out, looking as she had in her last television show, when she had been a suburban housewife with a Mayfair suit and the kind of shopping basket women never carry in the street. “She’s really just a lovely, simple girl,” he said.

  “Well then.” The Major staggered to his feet. “Let’s get a taxi. You can put me off at home. I have no idea where I live at the moment, but the driver will know. They always do. A fine body of men.” He stood like a doll while Ben hung his coat on him, and then he took the wrong hat from the shelf and fitted it carefully down over his ears.

  “You’ve got someone else’s hat.”

  “They won’t mind.” Half-blinded by the hat brim, the Major began to grope his way down the stairs to the street, getting two feet on each step before he ventured down to the next. “Mine was a better hat.”

  The night porter in Rose’s block of flats glanced at Ben with an insulting lack of curiosity. Ben had thought of asking him to work the lift, but he lost his nerve. He plunged into the lift, pressed a button, got out at the wrong floor, checked himself just in time from ringing a bell marked Dr Lazarus, and stumbled down the service stairs and along a tilting corridor to Rose’s door.

  Rose had never given him a key. He kept his finger pressed on the bell. He had no idea what time it was, but when Rose opened the door cautiously, she was in pyjamas.

  “What on earth are you doing?” she asked, stepping aside as Ben made a grab for her and lurched into the little hall. “I was in bed.”

  “Marry me,” Ben said hoarsely. “Rose, you’ve got to marry me.

  “Darling, of course I will. You know that.” She patted him on the arm like a sister.

  “Now. Tomorrow.”

  “Oh, my sweet, I can’t. Ringler told me today there’s a chance of a stage part for me, in his new show. I can’t think of anything else just now.”

  “But Rose———” He stared at her. She had got her lines wrong.

  “This wasn’t what you said in the taxi coming here.”

  “You’re drunk,” Rose said, not unkindly. “Come on, you can sleep it off on the sofa.”

  Before she left him, she brushed her lips across his hair. He wanted to reach out with his arms, but he fell asleep before he could kiss her.

  * Chapter 7 *

  With the aid of the battered typewriter and the Paddington library and the Admiralty Resettlement Office, Ben persevered with applications and interviews for all kinds of jobs he had never known existed, most of which sounded so depressing that he was almost glad to be turned down for them. He was now on the files of so many firms and organizations that if they had all fulfilled at the same time their promise to let him know if a suitable vacancy arose, Ben would have been the most sought-after man in Britain.

  Meanwhile, the only people who wanted him were those who had turkey farms, fishing inns on the Welsh border, or guesthouses on the east coast to exchange for his gratuity.

  “Everyone is so damned nice,” he told Jack Frazer as they lunched together in a public house after a surprise meeting in the street. “Even the ones who aren’t trying to sell you a flooded gravel-pit. They sound as if they were trying to make up for ever having said: ‘Good show’ when Sandys decided to cut the defence budget at the expense of you and me.”

  They had last been together in a depot ship at Malta. Jack, who was commanding the spare submarine crew, had been a plump and rosy, rather too hearty man with a great capacity for beer. He had been out of the Navy several months longer than Ben, and was now touring the unlovelier Midland towns selling office equipment to people who already had enough of everything he was trying to sell them.

  His cheeks were paler now, and he was thinner and greatly subdued. He ordered the cheapest lunch, and refused a beer because of indigestion.

  “I know what you mean,” he said. “People are so decent that you almost think you’ve got the job until you find yourself at the door with your hat in your hand and the voice saying: ‘We’ll keep you in mind.’ ”

  “I thought it was going to be rather a lark, being a civilian,” Ben admitted, because he thought that Jack would understand. “An adventure, perhaps.” He laughed shortly, looking without enthusiasm at the plate of meat and vegetables that was set in front of him. “It’s not much fun not being wanted anywhere.”

  “We’re wanted, I suppose,” Jack said, “but not at our own valuation. When I came out as a commander, I thought I was a hell of a fellow. I thought people would be falling over themselves to make me a director, and Nancy would have a decent home of her own at last. So here I am selling refills for staplers, and Nancy has had to take a job so that we can keep the boys at school.”

  “There’s something wrong about being an officer,” Ben scratched the brown stubble of his hair, which he was keeping short so that employers should find him a neat and clean man at least, if not a genius. “Chaps seem to think we’ll be too dumb and limited to learn anything new, and too upstage to be able to take orders from anyone less than an Admiral. They don’t come right out with that, of course, but they imply it in some of the nicest ways. One man even told me I was too good for the job he had to offer. I say, Jack, I wish you’d have a beer. That glass of water looks like a disguise on you.”

  “It is. I’m disguised as a sales executive with an incipient salesman’s ulcer. What was the job?”

  “Some kind of personnel assistant in the packing department of a huge firm that makes some ghastly thing women clean houses with. No authority and a salary that makes a commander’s pay seem like a fortune.”

  “You’ve got beyond caring about that by this time, I imagine.” Jack pushed away his unfinished plate and brought out a bottle of pills.

  “I’d be a fool if I hadn’t, but this chap took me for the fool. When I told him that I thought I knew how to deal with men if nothing else, he said that handling men in the Service was very different to handling men in industry, as if he thought I was going to try and shove all the packers in cells the moment I got there. ‘I’m adaptable,’ I told him. ‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘but a lot of the men you’d be working with aren’t. They’ve been in the forces, or their fathers have.’ “

  “Resentful devils,” Jack said, “I’ve had a bit of that. The high-ups are all right, but as soon as the little Caesars find out you’re an ex-officer, they start thinking how to take you down a peg. However, it’s a job. Why don’t you have a bash at selling?”

  “At the moment I don’t feel as if I could sell a splint to a man with a broken leg.” Ben said. “How did you get it?”

  “Industrial employment analysts. They’re a cheery crowd of people who aim to fit you into your right niche. By the time you’ve had to answer No to most of the questions on their endless form and had an interview with a patient psychologist, you’re about ready to jump in the river; but they pulled me out and offered me this job, or a chance with an oil company in the Middle East. Why don’t you try them?”

  “I might.” Ben felt very depressed. It should have been comforting to talk to someone in the same predicament, and to renew a friendship with an old shipmate, but it was not. When they had last been together, they
had been sure of themselves and of their future. Jack’s conversation had always been full of bounce. He was deflated now and sadly changed. Ben saw himself changing too as he became, like Jack when he spotted him this morning in the street, just another tired, preoccupied man hurrying along the street with an attaché case.

  He did not want to sell paper-clips. He did not want to go to the Middle East. But he did want a job. When he went back to the flat to ask Geneva if she thought it would be all right for Amy to be brought up on the Persian Gulf, she came flying down the hall as soon as she heard his key in the door.

  “Where have you been?” She pulled open the door and he came with it. “I’ve found something marvellous. All your troubles are over.”

  They went into the kitchen, where Geneva had a newspaper spread on the table among the debris of an apple pie she had been making. “I had some pastry left over, and I was going to put it on the roof for the birds. I was just scooping the bits into yesterday’s newspaper when I saw this fabulous thing. It leaped at me from the page, as people say when they see the name of a husband they haven’t heard from for ten years. It’s absolutely fate, Ben. It’s simply too thrilling for words.” Her faded green eyes were moist with excitement. Her finger shook as she ran it haphazardly up and down the personal column, unable now to find the lines which had leaped at her.

  “There it is—there” She stabbed, wrinkling and tearing the paper with her finger, which had a lump of raw pastry on the nail. They leaned over the table and she read the advertisement out to Ben as he read it.

  Wanted: ex-naval officer of courage and initiative. A lucrative, adventurous proposition for a bold, resourceful man.

  “They want my gratuity,” Ben said at once.

  “Don’t be so suspicious. You’re like an old maid with a sock under the mattress. Come in the other room. I’m going to dial that number for you. They’re sure to have hundreds of answers. We may be too late already.”

  A girl answered the telephone, a girl with an intriguing, husky voice. You could almost smell through the receiver the kind of perfume she would use.

  “About your advertisement,” Ben said, with Geneva leaning on his back and breathing heavily over his shoulder.

  “I’ll let you speak to Mr Peale.” The girl’s voice was shrouded and beckoning, as if she were promising the secret favours of the harem.

  Mr Peale—the boss, presumably, but of what? The girl had merely repeated the number when she answered the telephone, without giving a name—was affable. No, the post was not yet filled. Yes, Ben could have an appointment. Tomorrow morning? “Good show, Mr Francis. Be grand to see you. Many thanks for your call.”

  He did not give any indication of what the job was, and he had rung off urbanely before Ben could ask him. When Amy came home, she found her grandmother and Ben having tea in the kitchen, and joined them in speculation.

  Ben had run through a dozen ideas, and was now wavering between an arctic expedition and a secret-service mission. Geneva thought it was a sunken treasure-ship off the Outer Hebrides. Amy, drawing up a chair and plunging in at once, thought it would involve sailing the Atlantic on a raft. Could she come too? She was doing the Mayflower at school, and was in a pioneering state of mind. She had been complaining recently that there was nothing to discover in Bayswater except the significance of the Rima statue in the Park, which last year had passed her by.

  Caught up in each other’s enthusiasm, elaborating and conjecturing and inventing wild and yet wilder possibilities, they did not pause to consider that Ben might not get the job. He was obviously just the man for it, whatever it was.

  Whatever it was, it was adventure. For this he had been waiting. For this his luck had arranged for him to be turned down for all the lesser, mundane jobs he had sought. They read and reread the advertisement. There was money in it, and danger too, and perhaps even fame. Ben caught himself once or twice talking in the clipped tones of a hero. Amy decided to cut her hair. Geneva dreamed of their all going to live in Spain when it was over.

  They talked excitedly all through supper, which was without the apple pie, because Geneva had forgotten to light the oven, and then Ben embarked on the arduous journey to the television studios, where Rose was appearing tonight as a guest star on a panel show. He had to see her. If things moved swiftly, this might be their last meeting.

  “It may be dangerous,” he told Rose, throwing the remark away casually as they drove from the studios in her car. He had told her the whole story, or as much as he knew of it, in the brief, disabused manner of a half-hour detective serial. It sounded better that way, and it was the kind of language Rose could understand.

  “Oh, darling.” She moved closer to him along the seat and slid an arm round his shoulders. “I can’t bear it. What should I do if anything happened to you?”

  “The same as you were doing when I met you tonight, I suppose. Sign autographs for the studio audience and try to get the best-looking man on the programme to go home with you and think it was his idea.”

  “Don’t be a stinker,” Rose said happily. She liked Ben in this masterful mood. He rather liked himself. In spite of Geneva’s and Amy’s preoccupation with beards and pemmican, he was inclined more and more to the idea that he was going behind the iron curtain. The girl’s voice on the telephone had smelled of top-secret refugees and smuggled arms. The fact that Mr Peale had a Harrovian instead of a Viennese accent was merely a blind.

  The thought of what might lie behind him, and of the kind of slouch-hat and trench-coat character he was shortly to assume, had given him more confidence than he had ever had with Rose when she was among other people. At the studio, he had shouldered his way through the crowd of infatuated autograph hunters and grunted in her ear: “Come out of this. I want to talk to you.”

  Ordinarily she would have refused curtly, without losing her public smile, but tonight Ben’s voice and his grip on her arm had surprised her into going with him. He could see that she had that long-lipped ass from the panel show lined up to take her home, but with creditable aplomb, Ben had taken her coat from the man’s arm, thanked him suavely for holding it, and swept triumphantly away with Rose, who was never averse to finding herself a shuttie-cock between two men.

  At the flat, Rose was very fond and solicitous of her hero. She shimmered about, waiting on him with sandwiches and drinks. When she had him comfortably settled, she sank to the floor in a becoming swirl of contrition and laid her arms and her head on his knee.

  “I’m so sorry I’ve nagged you about getting a job,” she said, with a trace of tears in her elastic voice. “Please forgive me. If I hadn’t driven you to it, you wouldn’t be going off tomorrow to God knows what.”

  “You didn’t drive me to it,” Ben said, through a salami sandwich; but she wanted it that way, so he let her go on. It was very pleasant to have her so loving. Perhaps after all she was not acting. The situation was one which was familiar to her from her plays. Since Ben had known her, she had said farewell on the screen to a test pilot, a racing driver with a damaged hand, and a blinded scientist off to try a kill-or-cure experiment on himself. But perhaps tonight her devotion was real. Ben began to let himself believe that she had really come alive to loving him.

  She was wearing a low-cut dress with a plunging neckline. The producer of the panel show, which was classed as “family,” had insisted on having the dress sewn up one inch in the front before she went on the air, and she got up now and fetched a pair of scissors to remove the stitches.

  “Let me do that.” Ben got up. She had taken off her shoes. She stood before him with her head on one side while he clipped at the stitches, his hand trembling a little.

  When the steel of the scissors touched her bare, creamy flesh, she gave a little shiver. Ben looked up at her, but her face was completely blank and serene. She did not feel anything, and she did not realize that she was supposed to.

  Mr Peale was a tall, casually elegant and youngish man, so loosely hung together that he coul
d not help lounging whether he was on his feet or sitting down. In a chair, he tipped it backwards, curving his relaxed spine and stretching out his endless legs, with the long feet flopping in what looked like hand-sewn shoes. Upright, which he never was completely, he could not stand without resting one hip like a tired cab-horse. His hands were often cradled in his pockets. He leaned on anything that was handy.

  When Ben came into the office, Mr Peale was leaning back in a tilted chair, with his feet on the desk and a telephone in his lap. It was a large, well-lit office, with two desks and a pale fitted carpet, and watercolours of aeroplanes on the walls. The pictures were effective rather than technical, but they hit Ben with a new and disconcerting idea. He had not thought of planes. Mr Peale could not expect him to fly one, but perhaps he was to be a guinea-pig for a higher and faster flight, the man who was strapped into a bucket seat with an automatic camera taking pictures of his contorted face muscles as the cramps hit him. His imagination turned and ran, but the heavy, resourceful shoes in which he had come to meet the challenge of adventure walked on across the room, making flat dents in the carpet.

  The girl in the outer office had not enquired whether Ben might come in. She had merely shown him in, opening the door and announcing Ben in an off-hand way, as if she had little respect either for him or Mr Peale. She was the girl who had answered the telephone, but her appearance did not match her husky, mysterious voice. She had an untidily cropped head with the greenish sheen of brown hair that needs washing, and a flat, unhealthy face with a few spots in the greasy areas round her nose and chin. Her figure was good, and rather consciously inviting. She was one of those girls who only comes into her own at a party when all the lights fuse.

  “He’s here now,” Mr Peale told the telephone, and rang off. He dropped his long legs to the ground and stood up, propping himself on the desk with one hand, while he offered the other to Ben. “Take a pew,” he said, and collapsed gracefully back into his chair.