Man Overboard

by Monica Dickens

  “A financial agent.” Rose tried the words to see how they would sound to describe Ben to other people. “An investment salesman. Yes, I see. Like a stockbroker,” she said comfortably.

  “Like a stockbroker,” Ben agreed and left her happy.

  Travelling down to Southampton to tell his parents that he was no longer unemployed, which would put a stop to the wistful letters from his mother telling him of situations she had seen advertised in the local paper, which would suit him nicely if he lived at home, Ben felt the old familiar excitement as the landmarks passed by, heralding the approach of the house by the railway.

  When it came, with the father burning a pile of fiercely smoking rubbish at the edge of the orchard, much too near the laundry line, and one of the bedroom windows wide open to the gusty morning with a flowered curtain streaming out, Ben felt more like reaching home than he ever did when he arrived on the draughty doorstep of Wavecrest.

  Craning back to see the last of the narrow chimneys and the tops of the bare trees before the side of the bridge cut off his view, he wondered whether he would ever get the house out of his blood.

  “A place you know?” asked the man to whom he had been talking, as Ben turned round and sat back again in the carriage.

  “Yes, pretty well. I’ve never been there, actually.”

  The man looked uncomprehending, and went back to his impressions of John Foster Dulles, to which Ben gave only half an ear.

  Will I ever go there? I must go there some day. It will spoil it, of course. The fascination will fade like a mirage, and it will be just a house with people doing ordinary things and dogs’ hairs on the furniture. But I want to know.

  No chance that the father might be a retired naval officer. He had been around too consistently for as long as Ben could remember. He had only seen the son once in the last two years, getting out of the car with his plump wife. The car did not look like anything you might see parked in the dockyard at Portsmouth. He might be in the Air Force, though. Ben could trespass on the group-captain’s field and get off the train, at Easter perhaps, when the son would come home, to try to interest him in a little investment.

  The man who hated Dulles got out at Winchester and Ben sat alone in the carriage with the morning paper still unread on the seat beside him. If he began to make the kind of money Mr Beckett promised him, would he marry Rose? Would she marry him? He would have to be away a great deal, and she would be free to go on acting for as long as the public could stand her.

  It would be the kind of marriage she had been almost prepared to make when he was still in the Navy. They could have a house in the country, not too far from London. A reliable couple to look after things and keep Amy happy. There could be a pony, dogs, a house in a tree. Their friends would be the sort of people like the family who lived in the house by the railway. They might even take a house in that neighbourhood, and their friends could actually be that family. Rose would not like them, but she would still have her London crowd, the television people, and if she pulled off this stage part, people from the theatre too. She could have them down for week-ends, and they could stand about in pea-green sports jackets, drinking cocktails before lunch and making witty jokes about Ben’s neighbours, and Ben would suffer them courteously and pour more drinks, knowing who his real friends were.

  * Chapter 8 *

  Mr Beckett spent most of his time in what was known as the Back Office, where the foreign investments were handled, and a book-keeper looked after the accounts of the Services Investment Association.

  Cheques and cash received by Mr Peale were taken either by him or Mitzi to the Back Office, which was only a few streets away, somewhere off the Euston Road. Ben offered once or twice to take the money round for them, to see if they trusted him with it, but apparently they did not, for Mr Peale made some excuse for wanting to go there himself, and so Ben never found out what the Back Office was like.

  Jimmy Peale was astute enough, but Jake Beckett was clearly the brains of the organization, and the Back Office was where most of the serious work was done. The Front Office, with its luxurious carpet and its big windows opening on to the sooty trees of a Bloomsbury square, was not much more than a reception-room, designed to please the eye and soothe the mind with the tangible evidence of the S.I.A.’s prosperity.

  Jimmy was a kind of front man, a liaison officer between the field and headquarters, and he did not allow his job to tax him unduly. He was never in the office before ten, never took less than an hour and a half for lunch, and was invariably gone by four. He handled the correspondence, dealt with callers, either reassuringly, persuasively or sympathetically, according to their requirements, held long telephones with the group-captain, who was reaping a fair harvest among the airmen at Farnborough, and filled in his spare time training Ben to reap a similar harvest among the personnel of the Royal Navy.

  Mitzi filed her nails, read library books, ate apples and toffees, and occasionally typed letters and took a little slapdash dictation, using a code she had evolved after two weeks’ stenography at a night school, which looked more like kindergarten pictures than shorthand symbols. It was soon clear to Ben, and indeed nobody made a secret of it, that Mitzi held the job more for what she did for Mr Beckett outside the office than within.

  She was a costive, pouting girl with a good opinion of herself that was not justifiable to the dispassionate observer. When Jimmy Peale was talking to a client, or had slipped off to the Back Office, and Ben had nothing to do, he would sit with Mitzi and she would tell him: “This place smells. I wouldn’t be here at all if I hadn’t had such bad luck.”

  She had trained for six months at a dramatic school, but had to leave because of jealousy among the students. “I was getting the best parts,” she said smugly. “I was good enough for them too. It had nothing to do with one of the instructors being in love with me, although he was, poor man. He wanted to leave too when I left.”

  Mitzi was always talking about men who were or had been wildly in love with her. Ben was the captive audience for long sagas of dubious passion, which Mitzi recounted with a hypnotized look in her small, muddy eyes, and the same relish with which she sucked at caramels. She told Ben that Jake Beckett had a wife and three children whom he would eventually leave for love of her, although it was obvious from their vulgarly casual attitude towards each other that there was nothing more between Mitzi and Jake than a convenient arrangement which suited them both for the moment. Jake would drop Mitzi any time he felt like it, and Mitzi would probably drop Jake any time she could get her graceless hands on another man.

  She suggested once when they were alone in the office that Ben might be that other man. She was quite crude about it, so he was able to be quite crude about turning down the offer. After that, they understood each other and became rather good friends.

  Mitzi helped Jimmy with Ben’s training, and the three of them had more fun over it than Ben had expected would come an embryo salesman’s way. Mitzi sublimated her theatrical frustrations by acting as the guinea-pig for Ben’s experimental sales talks, using her experience from the dramatic school, which perhaps had lost an actress when it slung her out. Playing every variety of naval wife, her sluggish personality came alive at last. Once, acting the part of the starry-eyed bride of a sub-lieutenant, she was almost beautiful, but only for a moment. Dropping her role to swear at Jimmy with a man’s epithets for interrupting her big speech, she was just Mitzi again.

  The exhausted Jimmy Peale also woke to a livelier show of spirit during these enthralling playlets. His comfortable seat assumed the aspect of a folding canvas chair with a film director’s name stencilled across the back. From the unsuspected labyrinths of his ninepin head he produced an assortment of characters for Ben to practise on.

  “You’re an engine-room artificer’s wife in a pre-fab at Weymouth,” he would tell Mitzi. “You’ve got three small children and you’ve lost your figure and you’re trying to cook a meal and keep the baby out of the coal-scuttle and y
ou haven’t any time for Ben. Got that, everybody?”

  Mitzi took up her stand by Jake’s desk, as if she were stirring saucepans. Jimmy leaned back in his chair with his eyes narrowed and his hands folded on his stomach, and Ben went outside the door and tried to imagine himself coming up a garden cinder path.

  “Action!” Jimmy called.

  Ben knocked on the door, and Mitzi opened it, pushing back her hair with her wrist, as if she had flour on her hands.

  “Mrs Bloggs?” Ben asked in a courteous way, neither too deferential nor too demanding.

  “That’s right.” Mitzi slapped backwards at an imaginary child.

  “Mrs Bloggs,” Ben said, “I have come to help you.”

  “If you’re from the Seventh Day Adventists, we’re Chapel,” Mitzi said and prepared to shut the door.

  Ben put his foot in the crack and kept on talking. It didn’t matter much what you said in the face of a closing door, Jimmy had told him, as long as you kept the words coming fast enough to hold the woman’s curiosity. He dried up before long and stood helplessly with his foot in the doorway, his salesman’s smile replaced by his normal grin.

  “Do I let him in this time?” Mitzi asked.

  “I think so. He looks rather cute,” Jimmy said, so Mitzi heard milk boiling over on the stove and let go of the door, and Ben came in, patting the heads of the older children and waggling his finger at the baby.

  Mrs Bloggs was back at the stove, stirring vigorously, with an unapproachable back.

  “Won’t she ask me to sit down?”

  “Later she may,” Jimmy said. “Not till she knows what you want. There isn’t anywhere to sit, anyway. There’s a cat on one chair and a pile of wet nappies on the other, and the kiddies have the others upside down to play Daddy’s boat.”

  Ben was stranded in the middle of the floor. He set down his brief-case on the ironing board, put his hands in his pockets, took them out again and scratched his head.

  “You’ll have to let that hair grow, Ben,” Jimmy observed. “It looks too military for the family’s best friend.”

  “It looks like hell if it’s any longer,” Ben said. “Women don’t mind it. They say it’s like stroking beaver’s fur.”

  “Enchanting.” Jimmy closed his eyes. “Go on.”

  Ben cleared his throat. “I’ve come to help you,” he told Mitzi’s back.

  Jimmy clicked his teeth. “You’re slipping. When you repeat yourself do it in different words.” “Can I light a cigarette?” “Not in her kitchen.”

  Ben approached the stove. “Give me a break, Mitzi,” he said. “I’m stuck.”

  “All right, I will this time, But Mrs Bloggs won’t.” She turned round and asked him: “You’re selling something, aren’t you? Well, you’ve come to the wrong house. We’ve got the telly, and Dad doesn’t hold with the Encyclopaedia Britannica”

  “You’re right,” Ben said, gathering strength, “I am selling something. But it’s something that no one has ever tried to sell you before, believe me, dear lady. Dear lady… too much?”

  “Too much,” Jimmy said, without opening his eyes.

  “What I have for sale,” Ben ploughed on, “is happiness. The happiness of your future, Mrs Bloggs. I want to make sure that the years ahead for you and your family shall be secure and free from worry.”

  “Who are you kidding?” Mitzi asked, putting her hands on her prominent hips. “With the price of everything going up, and Dad not knowing if he’ll be able to sign on again at the end of his time and that child’s chest—cough, cough, cough, every winter———”

  “You could use some more money, couldn’t you?” Ben came out with it boldly. “You have some savings no doubt. I can tell from your home what an able and prudent manager you are.”

  “The gas has just gone out,” Mitzi said unco-operatively. “They threatened they’d cut me off if I didn’t pay this month.”

  “You have some savings, damn it,” Ben insisted. Then more smoothly: “I am here to show you how you can make your savings work for you, how you can be sure that there will always be money when you need it badly. Suppose,” he coughed discreetly, “something were to happen to Mr Bloggs. Unthinkable, of course, but our lives are, after all, but a brief span snatched from the tentacles of death———”

  “Not that word,” Jimmy said sharply.

  “Sorry. From the tentacles of chance. Surely his last thought would be: ‘Thank God they’re provided for’.”

  Mitzi snorted. “Don’t make me laugh. That time the motorbike skidded with us all on the Portsmouth road, his last words were: ‘We’ll never make it before the pubs close.’ Look, Mr Whatsit, if it’s insurance you’re selling, I’ve got no money to spare for that out of the housekeeping.”

  “Yes, it is insurance, in a way, but there are no premiums. A free insurance policy is only one of the benefits I’m offering you. Would you like to hear the rest?”

  “I don’t mind.” Mitzi wiped her hands on her skirt. “Eric! You stop that screaming and let’s hear what the gentleman has to say.”

  Sometimes Mitzi would allow Ben to persuade her into an investment. Sometimes she held out, and Ben would have to leave the house, being regretful, but still polite, lest the word got round the neighbours that he was no gentleman. Sometimes they all three collapsed in laughter and decided to chuck it and go out for a drink.

  So sluggish as her normal self, Mitzi unearthed a surprising scope and invention when she was acting. Sometimes she was a push-over, sometimes a stubborn wife, sometimes blankly stupid, sometimes craftily one step ahead of Ben in her conviction that he was a swindler.

  As the lessons went on, half in earnest and half in laughter, Ben began to find his part getting easier. Ever since he left the Navy, he had been discovering how many things he could not do. Here was something he might be able to do at last.

  From time to time, Jake Beckett would come round from the Back Office to see how Ben was getting on, and they would stage a little scene for his benefit.

  Their favourite was the Admiral’s widow. Lady Arbuthnot, with the spaniels and the budgerigars, who made Ben stay to tea and flirted decrepitly with him over the madeira cake. She had tried to seduce him once, but that was only Mitzi reverting to type, and Jake had slapped her back to the Maltese lace tablecloth and the bird-seed, “and while you’re up, Commander Francis, would you just turn his cuttlefish round so that he can nibble at the clean side.”

  It was more play than work, although Peale and Beckett insisted that it was deadly serious. Ben had a good time, but he was not looking forward to the day when the fun would be over and he would have to go out by himself and tackle the real women, who would give him all the wrong answers and get him as confused in his sales talk as an actor suddenly given a cue from the next act.

  When Mr Beckett announced that he was ready to try his luck in the field, Ben did not know whether to be glad or sorry. He was proud of his progress, and the solemn removal of two of the aeroplane pictures, to be replaced by impressions of destroyers surging bows-under through tumultuous seas, was a salesman’s graduating ceremony.

  He would miss the lessons though. He and Jimmy Peale and Mitzi had been through so many Mrs Bloggs and Lady Arbuth-nots together that they were as companionable as the cast of a play after a year’s run. It had been fun, but he could not stay in the nursery for ever. Now he must venture out to prove himself against the world. It was a challenge, and something of an adventure after all to go into the houses of strangers and see how they lived and how they would treat him.

  It was not going to be easy. He would have to telephone Jimmy every day to report progress, and he had a feeling that if he did not keep coming up with results, the atmosphere in the front office of the Services Investment Association was not going to be so genial.

  When he told Rose that he was off to Rosyth to begin work in earnest, she gave him a rabbit’s-foot charm and promised to be a good girl until he returned.

  “When you come ba
ck, let’s talk some more about getting married,” she said cosily. It was a subject she enjoyed, since it was purely personal, and no harm could come of it, because they never reached a decision.

  She kissed Ben tenderly, and waved him down the corridor towards the lift with a touching little sideways gesture of her hand, as if she were a young bride watching her man stride off to conquer the world via the eight-fifteen.

  As he turned the corner at the end of the corridor, Rose dropped the lonely bride and called rather raucously after him: “I hope you make a million”

  Ben turned back to give her the victory sign, but the door of her flat had banged shut.

  He had not admitted to Rose that he was nervous, and he would not show it to Amy and Geneva, who believed in him. He had been practising on them at home, but it did not work as well as with Mitzi, because Geneva was too prejudiced in his favour, too ready to fall in with anything he suggested. After he had practised one of his sales talks on her at breakfast when Amy had left for school, it was all he could do to stop Geneva going round to the bank without doing her face and drawing out all her money.

  “Why not?” she protested. “If you don’t think it’s safe, you shouldn’t be in it.”

  “I am in it,” Ben said seriously, “and I do think it’s safe. I have to believe that if I’m ever going to sell the idea to anyone.”

  “Why not to me, then?”

  “I don’t know. You haven’t got enough, anyway, to make a worthwhile profit, and you need every penny of it. You shouldn’t gamble with it.”

  “I thought you said the S.I.A. was as safe as a bank. Even if it was gambling, I wouldn’t mind having a little flutter on it. Ben———” She lifted her creased face, with pins sticking out from all the little ginger curls. “I’ve been trying to tell you this for two days, but I was afraid you’d think me an old fool. It’s possible that I shall be a little better oiled in the near future.”