Man Overboard

by Monica Dickens

  Bob took off his head-set, twitched at his pale-grey tie, passed a hand over his receding hair and assumed an unfamiliar gregarious smile of welcome for the rat breeder and the public as the floor manager, crouching beside the camera in a pair of earphones that made him look like Mickey Mouse, flung a pointing arm at Bob, and the show was on the air.

  Ben sat on the edge of the piano stool and watched the little woman prattling away as unhesitatingly as if she were working from a script. He was too far away to hear what she was saying. She was just a harmless, mouthing doll, and yet because of her, people all over the country who had been sitting comfortably in chairs with little tray-tables of snacks beside them were even now springing up and dashing for the telephone.

  After the rat breeder came the man with the spoons and the kitchen chair. He worked himself into a frenzy, beating his insane tattoo on the chair, the floor, himself, and even the top of Bob’s head. Ben stood near the set and watched him gloomily, biting at a piece of skin at the side of his thumbnail. The spoon percussion was torture, as much for the man as for the audience, but Ben wished it would go on for ever, even if it meant the end of the man, who with contorted face and rasping breath seemed already to be nearing the end of his rope.

  The floor manager had signalled to Ben. This was it. He was next. He felt that he was trembling all over, but when he took his hand away from his mouth and held it in front of him, the fingers did not move at all. The trembling was inside him, cold, griping at the roots of his teeth like neuralgia. What was he going to say? His mind was not only a blank, it was not there at all. He could remember nothing about the cafeteria, and everything that had happened to him since he left the Navy was receding fast away, like the corners of a bedroom where you lie sick with a high fever.

  He would be able to say nothing. Bob would be glossy and poised, as he had been with the other two—but dammit, this was his job—and Ben would stutter and gawp like a yokel and make a complete ass of himself, and tomorrow people would nudge each other in the street and whisper behind their hands.

  The man with the spoons dropped them into a capacious poacher’s pocket, picked up the persecuted chair and staggered off panting, as if he had run a four-minute mile. Bob said a few genial things towards the camera, turned with his hand outstretched as Ben came on, taking small steps because of the apron, and they shook hands in a sickeningly hearty way.

  Although Bob appeared so cool, his hands were sticky with sweat. Ben conquered a desire to wipe his palm on his apron, and felt his own sweat beginning to run into the pencilled eyebrows as he stood and grinned stiffly towards the camera, with the fierce, hot lights beating at his face.

  “Don’t be fooled by the disguise, folks,” Bob was telling the ghoulish crowd who lived out there in space beyond the camera. “This is, or rather was, a naval officer. Commander Benjamin Francis, Royal Navy.” He looked at Ben with his curved eyebrows raised, and Ben could only nod, running his tongue over his lips, which felt as cracked and speechless as if he had been in the desert for days.

  Bob was talking suavely and sympathetically about the reduction in Service personnel, making it sound real for people who had never heard of it, or never given it a second thought. Even in his predicament, stuck in the spotlight with the small army of technicians wasting their brains and experience and valuable equipment to bring Ben’s paralysed face into a million homes, Ben had enough wits left to admire the professional charm of Bob’s television personality. Off the set, he behaved as if he expected people not to like him. Now, in front of the cameras, with his fancy waistcoat caved in at a relaxed angle and his soft, pink mouth jovial as Father Christmas, he was playing for popularity as if he were sure of getting it.

  When Ben saw him pulling out all the stops of his unsuspected charm, there flashed across his mind what Bob had once said about his experimental relationship with Rose. Had he wooed her deliberately like this, as if she were an unknown woman sitting before a television set? As Ben’s imagination plunged away towards a series of disturbing pictures, he realized that Bob was asking him a question. Well, of course, he could not hope to stand here and listen for ten minutes. He was here to talk. Desperately he grabbed at his mind and dragged it back, and as he began to answer the question, hearing his own voice strange and stilted, he caught sight of himself on the small monitor screen at one side of the cameras.

  God, what was it doing here, that sturdy figure with the cropped head and the anxious expression and the lower half of its body swathed in the ridiculous creased apron? It looked like the worst half of a comedy team. An officer and gentleman. Retired Admirals must be having cataleptic fits all over the south of England.

  The figure on the tiny screen squared its shoulders and grinned, and he turned the grin away from it towards the camera. What did he care? He could not be court martialled for this. They could not even stop his pension. He had let Bob push him into this, and he might as well make the best of it. He was here to do a bit of good for all the poor blokes like Jack Frazer, peddling his way round Sheffield with a brief-case full of gummed reinforcements for the holes in ring-books.

  He glanced at Bob, and Bob winked with a flicker of a lower lid, and suddenly it was a bit of a lark after all. Ben’s voice began to come out more naturally, and the blank pistol eye of the camera was no longer an enemy but a receptive friend. Bob was kidding him along, asking the right questions, letting him talk freely when he saw that Ben was warming up and beginning almost to enjoy himself.

  Was anybody listening, out there in the world? Ben imagined that they had all switched off, or turned the dial testily over to the B.B.C. That made it easier for him to tell them what he wanted to say. Here in the studio, there were people listening. The studio manager and the carelessly-dressed men round the cameras and in the shadows beyond were watching Ben, half-smiling, wanting to be diverted. Ben told them, with a tinge of affectionate regret, for he had a feeling that he might never see any of them again, about Sir Thomas Beecham, and the old Polish woman, and Ethel, and May, and Babyface Briggs. He tried to do them justice. He wanted them to like him for this. If they were listening, he wanted them to jerk upright with a proud smile and cry: “That’s me!”

  Under Bob’s skilful prodding, Ben remembered things that had amused Amy and Geneva, and told them again. When he told about the day the vegetable cook had gone after one of the counter hands with a knife and sliced all the buttons off the front of his jacket, one of the assistant cameramen threw back his head and laughed, and Ben understood, in that heady, dizzying moment of success, why Rose would never give up acting.

  A boy with a loose forelock was holding up a board which said 4 mins.

  “It all sounds like a lot of fun,” Bob said, dipping his face and his voice smoothly to seriousness, “but let’s not forget what’s behind it. You’ve served your country for seventeen years as an officer in Her Majesty’s Navy. Now you’re out, through no fault of your own, and you’ve had to take this—this, let’s say unsuitable job, because although you’re a man who’s held responsibility and command, you couldn’t get anything else. Right?”

  “In a way,” Ben said. He could not tell the world that he had taken the job because he was angry with Rose. Bob was playing for sympathy now, overdoing it a bit, so when Ben answered his questions about job-hunting and interviews and rejections, he kept the grin on his face, in case anyone imagined that he felt sorry for himself. He was here to make people feel sorry for the other chaps, not for him.

  As if he understood that, Bob said, with a glance at the boy, whose board now said: 2 mins.: “It’s toughest, of course, on the men who have wives and families. You have a small daughter, I know, but I understand, Commander Francis, that you’re a widower.”

  Why bring that up? Blast you, Bob. Now there would be letters from all the frustrated women who thought that they could get husbands by writing to strangers. He wished he had not mentioned his gratuity. If the anti-vivisection group had cleared off the telephone lines, the s
pinsters and widows might already be calling in. Ben glanced at the monitor set to reassure himself that the most desperate woman could hardly want to marry that aproned figure of fun.

  Except perhaps Rose, who was not desperate. He had nodded in confirmation of what Bob was saying before he realized exactly what he had said.

  “Wonderful, wonderful,” Bob purred. “Our own Rose Kelly and a man who has about touched bottom in his search for a decent job. Surprise you, folks? Quite a fairy story, isn’t it?”

  The floor manager was going crazy. Crouched on one knee beside the camera, he was waving his arms back and forth like giant scissors, but Bob went blandly on.

  “How does she like you in this outfit?” He tweaked at Ben’s apron.

  Something had gone wrong. Bob’s face had lost its geniality. He was still smiling, but his smile was not for the folks out there. It was for himself, and catty. “How does she like it?” he asked again.

  “I don’t know.” Ben had to say something, and he could think of nothing but the truth. “I haven’t told her yet about the———”

  “Then she wouldn’t like it? But Rose is so democratic, so human.”

  The floor manager was throwing some kind of epileptic fit, almost lying on the floor, his face working, his hands clutching towards Bob, doing everything but leap on to the set and strangle him.

  “I’m surprised she’s not working right there at the cafeteria with you. As she had shown us in so many of her plays, a woman’s place is at her man’s side.”

  Bob smiled sentimentally at the camera, but Ben saw that the knuckles of the hand which clutched his lapel were white, because the hand was tense. Then the boy with the flopping forelock, looking as unhappy as everyone else, was holding up a board which said: 15 secs., and Bob was shaking Ben’s hand and wishing him luck. Ben walked awkwardly off the set, trying not to trip over his apron, while the floor manager, with a face of despair as if he had seen his job fly out of the window, waved forward an elderly gentleman whose face was related in every feature to the monkey he carried on his shoulder.

  Without waiting to see what the man and the monkey would do and say, Ben groped past the hazards at the back of the studio and hurried towards Rose’s dressing-room. The door was locked. He banged on it and called, but she was not there.

  Turning away, wondering where he had left his jacket, he saw Rose come round the bend of the corridor. Although she still had her make-up on, she had changed from the black dress she had worn for her show into a scarlet dress which fitted her tightly all the way down until it came to a little fan of pleats in the front which flared and bounced before her as she tap-tapped towards him on very high heels.

  She did not speak to him. Ben held out his arms, but she brushed past him as if he were air, put her key in the lock and went into the dressing-room. Ben followed her inside before she could shut the door.

  “Get out of here.” Rose sat down at the long mirror, banged a huge tin of cold cream in front of her and began to spread it on her face.

  “What’s the matter?” Ben stayed where he was, near the door.

  “What’s the matter?” With savage tugs, Rose peeled off the strips of false eyelashes. “What do you think? I’ve just come from the viewing-room. I saw you.”

  “Were you proud of me?” Ben ventured a few steps forward, kicking aside the sagging apron like a clumsy Edwardian débutante. “I didn’t think I was bad, considering it was my first shot. I made one of the cameramen laugh. No one ever does that, I understand, except Danny Kaye.”

  “I asked you to get out of here.” Rose began to wipe off the cold cream methodically, pulling her face about, which still did not make it look ugly.

  “Don’t mind me. I’ve seen you take off your face before.” Ben stood behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. She did not shrug them off, but she humped her shoulders and stared with chill antipathy at his reflection in the mirror above her own.

  “You humiliated me. You deliberately and cruelly humiliated me. Shut up,” she said, as Ben opened his mouth to speak. “You’re going to make some stupid joke, and I can’t stand it.”

  Ben saw that her eyes had shifted slightly downwards to study her own face as she talked. “I was going home,” she said, the tight scarlet dress rising and falling as her breathing quickened, “when Bob sent me a message to stay and watch his show because there was a man on it I must see. “You might be able to use him,” he said. I thought he meant on my show, of course—oh, that man is a devil—so I stayed, like a fool. I wish I hadn’t. No, I don’t. I’m glad I did. It opened my eyes to just what you are, just how low you can be.”

  “You mean because he dragged your name into it? Poor taste, I agree, but that wasn’t my fault.”

  “Not your fault!” She tore her eyes away from her reflection and swung round to face him so violently that he dropped his hands and stepped back. “Don’t make me laugh. I know you cooked it up, you and Bob between you, to make me look a fool. You let Bob use you to get his own back at me. I hate you.”

  She stood up. She was two inches taller than Ben in those heels. Clean of all make-up, her skin was like a petal, like a sun-bloomed fruit. Her lips were soft and pink, but the lower one was pushed out sullenly. If she had been an ordinary woman, Ben would have kissed her, forcibly if necessary, and standing on tiptoe if necessary, and compelled the lips to melt and part and the rubber-taut body to relax against him.

  As it was, he stayed two feet away from her and said: “Look here. Rose, even if Bob was using me as a weapon in his private war with you, I had nothing to do with it. I had no idea he meant to say what he did. I was just there to try to do a good turn for the other poor devils who nobody wants. And for a bit of fun too, of course.”

  “Fun.” Rose had an objectionable way of picking out a word or a phrase from what you had said and repeating it as if it smelled. She sat down again and began to put on her street make-up, staring without expression at the face on which she worked. “You make me sick. I suppose you think it’s fun to have that damn-fool job, to wear that ridiculous toga. If you only knew what you looked like in it.” She blended rouge deftly, turning her face this way and that.

  “I do. I saw myself on the monitor. I look like hell, but that was half the point.”

  “I’m surprised she’s not working right there at the cafeteria with you,” Rose mimicked, through a cloud of apricot powder. “My public is just going to love that, aren’t they?”

  “Why not? It’s not a bad job, apart from the pay. I do pretty well at it. The manageress says I’m the best man she’s had for ages.”

  “A dish-washer.”

  “You weren’t listening to the programme. May does the dishes. I clear the tables.”

  “That’s worse.”

  “If you don’t like it, it’s your fault. “Don’t come near me until you’ve got a job,’ you said. Well, I’ve got a job, so here I am.”

  Rose said nothing. She was occupied with her lipstick. Then she dropped it into her bag, snapped shut her cosmetic case, stood up, dusted off the front of her dress and went over to the corner where her coat hung.

  Ben was trying to untie his apron, but the strings were knotted and he could not undo them. As she came towards him, he turned his back to her. “Help me, would you? I can’t get this thing off.”

  “Then you’ll have to keep it on.”

  “But I can’t take you home like this.”

  “You’re not going to take me home.” Rose stood with her hand on the door-knob, her beautiful head flung back, her words coming out as clearly and effectively as if she had been rehearsing them for days with every possible inflection.

  “You’re not going to take me anywhere, ever again. I’m through, do you understand? I’m finished with you. This is the end.”

  Ben believed that she meant it. He ought to feel sick, or faint, or violently angry. Instead, to his surprise, he experienced a curious feeling of relief, a comfortable, relaxed feeling as if he were si
nking down on to a bed without a care in the world and nothing to look forward to but a good night’s sleep.

  “All right,” he said, “but I wish you’d untie my apron before you go.”

  Rose jerked her head with an impatient exclamation which might have been written in one of her scripts as “faugh!” She wrenched open the door, but as she did so, the telephone on the make-up shelf began to ring, and she had to shut the door and come back into the room. Even though it spoiled her exit, Rose could not bear to let a telephone ring without finding out who it was.

  “Let me.” Ben moved towards the telephone.

  “Don’t you dare.” Rose picked up the receiver, and made a face as she listened. “It’s for you.” She held it out at arm’s length. “What a nerve they’ve got, thinking you’d be in here with me.”

  “Well, I am.” Ben took the telephone. “Hullo?”

  “Commander Francis?” It was a man’s voice, resonant, authoritative, no one he knew. “I saw you on television. Thought I’d call up to congratulate you.”

  “Well, thanks.” Ben sat down to enjoy this. “That’s awfully nice of you.” He looked at Rose. She had gone back to the door and was standing with it half-open, torn between wanting to sweep out and slam it and wanting to know who was talking to Ben.

  “This is Glenville Roberts,” the confident voice said, and paused as if this should mean something impressive to Ben. Vaguely it did, but he could not at the moment think why. “I’m offering you a job,” the voice continued, “if you’ll take it. I like your looks, and I like your guts.”

  Ben maddened Rose by smiling broadly. “What is it?” he asked.

  “Come and be my private secretary.”

  “I can’t type very well, and I———”

  “That doesn’t matter. I’ve got a girl for that. Come and see me tomorrow and we’ll discuss it.” Without waiting for Ben to agree, he gave an address in Hampstead, and Ben grabbed a make-up stick and scrawled it on the side of a box of tissues. “You can live at this place, if you want, and I’d be glad to have your daughter too. I love little girls. Oh—not in that way, of course.” He chuckled. “Till tomorrow then. Don’t come until after eleven. I’m a bastard before that.”