Man Overboard

by Monica Dickens

  “You mean that?” Jake’s eyes were dark and shrewd.

  “I mean it. Here’s the office key.” He flung it on the desk. Damn. He had pulled out the key to Geneva’s flat. His effect spoiled, they watched him in silence while he fished in his pocket for the key to the Front Office.

  “You’re making a big mistake,” Jake said. “You’ll regret it. However,” he raised his head, his features lighting up with a sharp commercial clarity, “to show you there’s no hard feelings, should you ever think in the future of investing some of your gratuity with us, we———”

  “I’d rather sew it in my corsets,” Ben said, and suddenly the atmosphere of nervous distrust cleared, and they all looked at each other unguardedly and laughed. His decision made, jobless, disenchanted, Ben felt oddly carefree. Because he was free of Peale and Beckett and their dangerous game, he felt better disposed towards them than at any time since he came into the Back Office and saw the counter and the wire grille.

  He shook hands with them both. He still liked them. He could not help it. “Say good-bye to Mitzi for me,” he said, as if he were parting with congenial hotel acquaintances after a holiday.

  “Will do,” Jimmy said, and ambled to the door to open it for Ben. In the loan office, a small hungry-looking man was talking to the yellow old man through the grille, whispering intimately, as if it were visitors’ day in prison.

  “One thing———” Ben turned back, and the hungry man and the yellow man stopped listening to hear what he was going to say. “I left a picture on your desk, Jimmy. Rose. Put it in an envelope, will you?’

  “Sure thing.” Jimmy drooped one lazy eyelid. “You going to invite us to the wedding?”

  “Of course.” He probably would. That was the ridiculous thing.

  He picked an unfortunate time to go and see Rose. Several things had combined to put her in a bad temper. Her West End play had been abandoned for lack of support; she had had the bitterest of her many fights with Bob Whiting, who had walked off the set and told her to find another producer; and her parents had turned up unexpectedly from Croydon and were sitting with grease-proof paper in their laps eating the sandwiches they had brought, when Ben arrived at the flat.

  “Just as if it was a pub,” Rose railed at Ben in the hall, hardly bothering to lower her voice.” ‘We don’t want to put you to any trouble,’ they say. ‘We’ve brought enough food for all of us.’ Why can’t we all go out and buy lunch, for God’s sake?” She shot a disgusted glance through the half-open door of the room where her mother was sitting with her hat on and her knees apart, chewing placidly on a hard-boiled egg.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” Rose turned sulkily back to Ben. “I thought we said good-bye.”

  “We did, but—look, let me go and say hullo to your parents. They’ll think it queer if we stand here muttering in the hall.”

  “They think everything queer,” Rose said. “But come on. You asked for it.” She led the way defiantly into the room, introduced Ben in a slap-dash way, and ostentatiously knelt down to gather up a very few crumbs from the rug by her mother’s chair.

  She had never allowed Ben to meet her parents before, although he had wanted to, and he saw now that she was ashamed of them, angry with them for being here when Ben came, and angry with him for coming when they were here.

  They were delighted to meet Ben. They stood up beaming, the father brushing crumbs off his grey moustache, the mother dabbing at her mouth with a paper napkin.

  “This must be the naval gentleman we’ve heard so much about,” Mrs Kelly said, wagging her head with arch approval.

  “Oh, Mum, for heaven’s sake———”

  “No need to be embarrassed about it, Rosie.” Her father moved his yellowish dentures slightly to free a crumb. “He’s a fine-looking lad.’

  “Hardly a lad, I’m afraid, sir.” Ben sat down, and the three of them smiled at each other. They were a cosy, friendly couple, unpretentious and oddly alike, with their thick grey hair, rounded cheeks and mild, uncritical eyes. Sitting opposite each other in identical chairs, their legs planted straight out and down, and their feet polite and small, they looked like Tweedledum and Tweedle-dee.

  “Have a sandwich, Commander,” Mrs Kelly urged. “I’m sure you haven’t had your lunch. I brought enough for Rosie, but she’s always on with this nonsense about her figure, though she’s a right to be proud of it, I must say.”

  “You can say that again.” Ben winked at Rose, to Mr Kelly’s delight, and accepted a ham sandwich gratefully, which annoyed Rose even more than the wink.

  “How about some coffee, Rose?” he asked. “I’ll make it if you like.” No harm in showing his future parents-in-law that he was perfectly at home in their daughter’s flat.

  “They like tea,” Rose said crushingly. “I can make some, I suppose.” She walked away, clicking the heels of her mules on the polished floor.

  Her mother was searching in a black leather carry-all which looked like a midwifery bag. “I brought you a packet, dear, in case you were short.” She had apparently never outgrown the habit of compromising with wartime shortages. She held out the packet of tea as if it were a priceless gift, but Rose banged through the swing door into the kitchen without paying any attention to her.

  Ben ate all the sandwiches that Mrs Kelly had brought for Rose, and they had a lively conversation about the old days of the war, which had been the high spot of the parents’ lives. Mr Kelly had been a sergeant in the Engineers, and Mrs Kelly had been in charge of an air-raid warden’s post near the Elephant and Castle. Mr Kelly talked with long-winded relish of his exploits in North Africa, and his wife told of the exciting nights when the whizz-bangers were dropping like hail all round the Elephant, and of how little Rosie used to tap-dance and sing for the people in the shelters, and of the night when someone brought a headless body into the warden’s post, and it turned out to be a dummy from a shop window.

  “I haven’t laughed so much since the day the bed fell on father,” she told Ben, laughing again, and enjoying his laughter.

  When Rose came back with the tea, which had taken her a long time to make, Ben and her parents were old friends, which should have pleased her, but did not. When the parents left for the early house at the Palladium, extracting promises from Ben to come and look them up very soon, even if Rosie would not bring him, he knew as he shut the front door behind their twin roundabout figures that Rose was going to be difficult. Remembering the many times when Marion had quarrelled with him after Geneva left them, he thought that he was fated to get on better with the parents of the women he married than with the women themselves.

  When he told Rose that he had abandoned his job with the Services Investment Association, she was very difficult. “It takes you ages to find a job, and when you do, you can’t even stay in it two weeks,” she told him. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you want to work?”

  “You know I do.” He tried to touch her, but she slid away, and stood frowning at him with her arms folded. She was very poised and beautiful, like an outraged heroine in a film.

  Ben tried to explain. “I had to get out, don’t you see? They’re not exactly swindlers, but they’re liars. I can’t go round telling lies to sailor’s wives about insurance policies and investments that don’t exist. I’m thankful I had the sense to get out before I took anyone’s cash.”

  “If you call it sense,” Rose said scornfully, “to throw away a perfectly good job, the only chance you’ve had to make some real money.”

  “I don’t want to make it that way.”

  “You’re so smug. The perfect naval officer,” Rose grumbled, inconsistently, for she had preferred him as naval officer to a civilian. “What are you going to do now—go to the police?”

  “God, no, I wouldn’t do that. Jake and Jimmy aren’t really crooks. They’re just—manipulators, and it may be all quite legal. None of their promises are put on paper. They’re just talked about by some mug like me, with his foot in th
e door and an ingratiating smile on his face.”

  “If it’s legal, why did you run out on them?”

  “I told you. I don’t want to tell lies. I don’t want to be mixed up in their game. I thought you’d understand.”

  “I don’t understand anything.” Rose’s enormous eyes looked at him blankly, with neither affection nor distaste.

  “Don’t look at me as if you’d never met me.” Ben moved towards her. “I didn’t come here to fight with you. I came to ask you to marry me.” He took her hand. She did not pull it away, but let it lie limply in his, without warmth.

  “How can I marry you?” she said slowly. “Who are you, anyway?”

  “At school they used to call me B.F.” Hopefully he tried to turn her towards a joke.

  “Don’t fool. I’m serious.” Rose bit her soft red lip. A small pulse throbbed gently in the smooth hollow under her creamy neck. “You know what I mean. As a naval officer, you had some kind of position. Now you have none, until you make it for yourself. Listen, Ben.” Her hand was still unresponsive in his. She looked at him coldly, talking in a flat voice, as if she hardly cared whether he understood or not. “I’ve got somewhere. I’ve made myself into the kind of person I’ve always wanted to be. How can I marry someone who’s so—so terribly just nobody?”

  “Bitch,” Ben said, and dropped her hand.

  Three weeks ago, Rose had slapped a man’s face on the television screen, and the sound had echoed satisfyingly through a million living-rooms. She was going to do it again now. Almost impersonally, Ben watched her arm go back from the shoulder, straighten out towards him, and—crack! There it was, perfectly aimed and timed, just as Bob Whiting had taught her.

  There is nothing like a blow in the face to stimulate the circulation to anger. Ben left the room without a word, grabbed his hat and coat and slammed through the front door of the flat.

  Behind him, he heard Rose wrench the door open. “Get out!” she shouted after him, as if the expensive block of flats were a tenement building. “You stay away from me, do you hear? Don’t come back until you’ve got a job! “

  A door along the corridor opened, and a head with a turban over pin curls looked out and stared at Ben’s flaming cheek. He raised his hat politely and rounded the corner to the lift.

  Out in the street, he walked rapidly for some time, going nowhere in particular, bumping into irresolute shoppers, crossing against traffic lights, glowering at motorists. As he passed a large cafeteria, with steam on the lettered windows and people already going in for tea, the corner of his eye was caught by a notice stuck on the inside of the plate glass: “MEN AND WOMEN FOR COUNTER AND KITCHEN WORK.”

  As if the corner of his eye were attached to the notice by a string, he jerked to a stop, reversed his course smartly, entered the cafeteria and got himself a job.

  * Chapter 9 *

  “Is it some sort of a stunt?” Geneva asked.

  “No, it isn’t a stunt. It’s a job. ‘Don’t come back until you’ve got a job,’ she said. All right, I’ve got a job.”

  “So now you can go back to her?”

  “Not yet. She can stew for a while.”

  “Why go back at all?” Geneva blinked her eyelids very fast, as she did when she was trying to sound casual about probing for an answer.

  “I’m going to marry her,” Ben said, “but she can wait. I’m busy at the moment.”

  The cafeteria was a large and popular place of refreshment with a heterogeneous clientele of workers, shoppers, students, lonely men with strange faces, exhausted elderly ladies who could not face cooking a meal or who had forgotten what it was like to have a kitchen to cook in, and people of all ages and shapes and creeds and colours who could find no better way to pass the time until death than by putting solids and liquids into their stomachs.

  The huge, low-ceilinged room with the cruel neon lighting and the endless loaded counter was full at any time of day, and at mealtimes it was jammed. The line of discreedly watering salivary glands waiting to reach the point where the trays and cutlery were and the steel rails led to nourishment wound like a snake among the tables to the door, and sometimes right out on to the pavement, for London is the only city in the world where anyone but the destitute will wait patiently in the street to be fed.

  On wet days, when even the Londoners would not wait outside, the line of fishy-smelling raincoats would, in a miracle of discipline, accommodate itself in hairpin loops within the room, so that Ben had to make detours round the walls to get from table to table with his trolley.

  Ben’s job, the starter’s job, from which, if he was diligent, he might progress to such eclectic tasks as slicing pies or browning the tops of welsh rarebits, was to collect dirty plates, wipe the tables with a sodden cloth and wheel the trolley when it was full out through the armour-plated swing door to the back end of the kitchen, where May and her swollen arms and legs fought their day-long battle with the rapacious dish-washing machine.

  On the return journey, Ben brought back wire baskets of china and cutlery and glasses, still hot and not quite dry, and dumped them down behind the counter, so that they could be dirtied again and washed again and dirted again in the endless cycle of satisfying a civilization which believes that the machine will run down if it is not refuelled every four hours.

  He also had to collect the metal trays, wipe them and return them to the end of the counter. There were wide shelves all over the cafeteria, with notices which said: “Please Place Trays Here”. Some people obeyed, but many either ate off the trays and left them askew on the tables, or leaned the trays against pillars or the legs of chairs, whence they fell with a hollow crash under the feet of anyone carrying a load of food.

  The crash of the trays was only one of the many noises which went to make up the vast conglomerate din of the cafeteria. For the first half-hour of his first day, Ben had felt as if the noise beating in at his ears would meet under pressure in the middle and split his head wide open. Then suddenly the noise became a part of the background of life, like the howls and thuds and tortured creakings of a prolonged storm at sea. He could live with it. He did not mind it, any more than he minded the yellow shreds of cigarettes in slopped saucers, the discarded fat, the half a sausage chewed and spat out with all the gristle showing, the spilled ice-cream dripping from the table edge on to the floor, the cake crumbs and the sticky, crumpled straws in the lemonade glasses. There was no time to mind. These things had to be dealt with, and he dealt with them, in a seamanlike and efficient way of which he could not help being proud.

  One quarter of the room was his responsibility. Impossible for four people—a gangling student, an old woman, a wide-hipped young slattern, and Ben—to keep pace with the eat-and-run technique of most of the customers. You could never stand back for a moment and say: There, that’s done. Everywhere you looked, there was another emptied tea-cup with its slug’s trail of lipstick, another brimming ash-tray, another abandoned plate Uttered with the debris of some finicky eater who did not know enough to eat what he had paid for. Undaunted, Ben laboured on, determined that as long as he could stand the job, his tables should be the cleanest and most frequently cleared, his customers the most consistently spared from having to eat with one elbow in a predecessor’s soup bowl.

  “You’ll kill yourself, dear,” said the remains of the old Polish woman who worked on the next section. “What you are trying to do? Show us up? I don’t care. Tomorrow I quit.” She moved slowly away on her skeleton legs, clattering half the dishes off a table and leaving the rest, swiping at the plastic top with a stained and dripping cloth which added its own unsavoury contribution to the smears and puddles it missed.

  Ben cleared two of her tables behind her back and returned to his own. Just a little science, that’s all it needs to get it squared off, he told the customers, who did not hear him, since he did not speak, and did not see him, since he was doing the kind of job which is remarked only if it is not done.

  “Do you think you’
ll be able to manage the work?” the manageress had asked him, tapping her teeth doubtfully with a pencil. “You don’t seem quite the type.” She was a middle-aged, harassed woman in a loosely knit black cardigan, with a girlish velvet ribbon threaded through her thin grey hair. She lived in a tiny office off the clamorous kitchen, with an open door through which disgruntled members of the staff constantly charged with complaints against the customers and each other.

  “Of course,” she smiled at Ben through her built-in frown, “we get all sorts. Students and the like. We even had a débutante once. I put her on the teas. It was not at all satisfactory. The newspapers came after her to take her picture, and got everybody upset.”

  “I can do the job all right,” Ben said, “if you’ll let me have it. I’m desperate for work.”

  The manageress looked down. “Your troubles are your own affair,” she said quickly, as if she had heard too many hard-luck stories to be able to stand any more. “I’d advise you to keep quiet about them,” she added, looking at Ben’s suit, “for there’s many here that must be much worse off than you.”

  After he had signed on, she took him to the cloakroom, where he took off his jacket and put on a stiff bleached apron which covered the front of his shirt and tied round the waist with tapes frayed from much laundering. It stood away from his body like sailcloth, moving a little distance apart from him, as if it had an independent life of its own.

  “You don’t quite look the part, I must say.” The manageress tilted her head and frowned sideways at him. “Oh, dear, these are funny times.”

  A girl came out from the women’s section of the cloakroom. “Ethel,” the manageress said, her voice regaining authority, “this is Mr Francis. He’s to work on the tables. Will you pass him on to someone out there who will show him what to do?”