Man Overboard

by Monica Dickens

  “Well,” Rose said impatiently, as Ben put down the receiver, “who was it?”

  “No one you know. You wouldn’t be interested.” He was not going to tell her. If he told her about Glenville Roberts, who sounded like a man with money and power, she might reconsider her dismissal of him. They might have to start all over again. Off, on. I’ll marry you, I won’t marry you. I love you, I don’t know whether I love you or hate you. He felt too tired to face the strain of it.

  He sighed. “Go on. Rose,” he said. “If you’re going, please go.”

  It was a shame that the telephone had spoiled her exit line. Because she could not think of another, Ben felt sorry for her and said, to help her out: “It’s been very sweet, my dear. Thanks—for everything.”

  The Noel Coward line revived her. “I’m sorry it had to end like this,” she said, on cue. “But it’s the best way, Ben.”

  “Yes, the best way.” She was very lovely, so he looked away from her as she gathered her coat round her and went out.

  After she had gone, he took a pair of scissors from a drawer and cut the strings of his apron. He bundled it up and put it in the drawer with the scissors, in case she wanted a memento of him. It took him half an hour to find his jacket, and then he went up to the deserted offices to look for a Who’s Who to find out who Glenville Roberts was.

  * Chapter 11 *

  Glenville ROBERTS was an author of comparatively small output, but considerable and somewhat flashy repute. He had written only two books, but they had both been best-sellers, because they were not only brilliant in an exhilarating though patchy fashion, but minutely descriptive of some of the aspects and aberrations of sex which are not usually recorded so photographically in print.

  Bishops had denounced them, and tabloid columnists, whose own minds were far dirtier than Glenville’s, had furthered the publicity by asking their readers, many of whom would not otherwise have dreamed of buying a book: “Would you let your daughter read this?” and “Why was this book ever published?”

  Both novels had been made into films, which were very successful, even with the sex watered down, and on the strength of his name and his work in adapting his books, Glenville Roberts was able to pick up a thousand pounds any time he needed it by writing a film script. He had a Midas touch. Although he was lazy and without any artistic conscience, and claimed that he only worked when he was forced to pay his income tax of the year before, he made money easily, which was galling for less-fruitful authors who slogged away day after day and believed in what they wrote.

  He was a flamboyant man in his middle forties, with a thickening figure, a deteriorating handsomeness which he knew looked best in profile, and a large head maned with abundant coarse grey hair. His clothes were superb, with just a touch of eccentricity— a hint of braid on the lapel, a glimpse of embroidery on a dress shirt—to distinguish him from anyone else who could afford a good tailor.

  Half by accident, half deliberately, he looked like a literary lion, which was gratifying for the small fry at Foyle’s luncheons and publishers’ cocktail parties, where most of the authors looked like schoolmasters or somebody’s aunt.

  Glenville Roberts had been called a genius by people who did not know what the word meant. For all his egotism, he was the first to disclaim that. He was, however, a man who had a flair for immensely stimulating prose and sudden swift sweeps of sparkling narrative which carried the reader, skipping blithely, over the patches of slipshod writing in between. His large readership was composed chiefly of skippers: those who were willing to skip the bad writing for the pleasures of the good, and those who skipped everything except the dirty bits.

  Besides being the author of two best-sellers, Glenville Roberts was also a skilful journalist, possessing the invaluable ability to write an article about almost anything under the sun at the drop of a hat, whether he knew anything about it or not. The Sunday paper for which he wrote outrageous and provocative articles which sounded convincing, although they were written with a lack of conviction that would have been cynicism if he had been a cynic instead of an opportunist, had played an important share in building him up into something of a national figure.

  He had appeared on radio and television, which had helped his notoriety because, like Sir Gerald Kelly, he invariably said something taboo, and like Gilbert Harding, he managed to sound entertainingly angry when he was suffering from no greater irritation than a mild indigestion.

  The indigestion was one of the things that were in Ben’s care as private secretary to the great man. It was an indeterminate job, encompassing many small tasks, from keeping the medicine cabinet stocked and reminding Glenville what he should not eat— it was no use reminding him what he should not drink—to discouraging bores and undesirables in the flesh, on the telephone and in the mail, and anyone at all in any medium before eleven o’clock in the morning.

  The typist, Priscilla Neave, was afraid of Glenville, which made her nervous and incompetent, except when her fingers were actually flying over the typewriter, which was as integral a part of her as a fifth limb. Priscilla’s skill on the typewriter and the shorthand pad was the sole justification for her conception, or the conception of any of her ancestors, Glenville Roberts said. Originally engaged to do for him everything he could not be bothered to do for himself, she was now confined to stenography, while Ben took over those less mechanical duties which used to be Priscilla’s until she had driven her employer to the edge of madness which had impelled him to telephone Ben at the television studio.

  In this way, Glenville could appear to put Priscilla cruelly in her place, while yet indulging the concealed pity which would not allow him to fire her. To ensure that the pity remained concealed, he was sadistically unkind to Priscilla, whose pale-lashed lids were pink by nature, and rubbed red when she had been crying over the typewriter; but to Ben he was as nice as he could be without lowering his standards of selfishness.

  “Call me Glenn,” he had said, flinging out a hand when they first met. “What do I call you—Benjamin or Ben?”

  “Ben, if you like.”

  “Fine. That’s settled then. You want the job, I take it.” It was not a question. There could be nothing but a statement of fact on the opportunity of working for Glenville Roberts.

  On an impulse, Ben had taken Amy with him. He had rushed her off as soon as she came home from school, without giving her a chance to change her uniform, which she felt put her at a disadvantage.

  “I look better when I’m not in this thing,” she said, tugging at the girdle of her gym tunic when Glenville told her that she was pretty.

  “Of course you do. The armour-plating is a sacrilege on a figure like yours. But never mind, we’ll put you in Miss Melbourne’s school, up on the hill. The girls wear what they like there. I often see them in the High Street. Quite big girls too.” He gave Ben a look that managed to be solemn and lewd at the same time.

  “She’s doing very well at the school where she is,” Ben said. “I want her to stay there.”

  “Oh, Daddy, no!” Amy turned on him, her bronze ripple of hair swinging with her. “What’s the point of you starting a new life if I can’t too?”

  “Don’t worry, my dear,” Glenville Roberts said. “We’ll work on him.” They smiled at each other, and initiated a liaison that was to last with affection and understanding all the time that Amy and Ben lived in Hampstead.

  It was a comfortable life. A daily maid called Mrs Bowstrom and a cleaning woman looked after the house so efficiently that Ben had little more to do with it than to pay the tradesmen’s bills and telephone the wine merchant. He and Amy had two pleasant bedrooms with their own bathroom, and a small upstairs sitting-room where Amy could do her homework and entertain her friend Susanna Clarke, a sophisticated child into whose company Amy had graduated since she had moved up in the world and came home on the Hampstead tube instead of the Inner Circle.

  She had not won her battle to change schools. Glenn, siding with her as he did
on any dispute between her and her father, had offered to pay Miss Melbourne’s excessive fees himself, a false move which had enabled Ben to insist that she must stay where he could afford to keep her.

  He did not want to tell Glenn yet that it was not worth changing schools because this was only a stopping-off place for Amy and him, to take them off Geneva’s hands and give them somewhere to live until Ben found a proper job. He did not tell him that he was still answering advertisements and had even risked being told that his métier in life was to peddle sweet bubbly drinks to tea-shops and confectioners by applying to the Industrial Employment Analysts for a test and a psychological interview.

  If he got the chance of a decent job it would be time enough to tell Glenn, who imagined that he had given Ben the ideal job for an ex-naval officer, and thought that he had come to stay. Meanwhile, Amy was happy here, and Ben was as near contented as long patches of boredom would allow.

  Susanna Clarke was an actress, like Amy. They assumed diverse roles and indulged in fancies that stopped just short of lies. As soon as they were out of school, they entered together on a complicated existence where neither was the same person for more than a few days, and their aliases were so real to them that they would not always answer when addressed by their own names.

  Glenville loved them both, although he was a little wary of Susanna, who appeared to have got his number the first time she came into the house, when she produced her sister’s autograph album and said: “I suppose you’d like to write in it.”

  Although he was suspect because he was famous, she accepted him because Amy did, and he was always welcome in the upstairs sitting-room, to which he made frequent trips to join enthusiastically in a lunch party between the mothers of débutantes, or the first concert of a child violin prodigy, or whatever was going on.

  He had been divorced many years ago and had a nearly grownup son whom he rarely saw and did not care for when he did.

  “I’d been thinking of marrying again,” he told Ben. “There’s a woman—Clara. You haven’t met her yet. She’s piqued with me at the moment, but she won’t stay away too long. But now that I’ve got Amy, I don’t know that I’ll bother with a wife. She’s all the woman in the house I need.”

  When Susanna had gone home to Belsize Park and Amy was in bed, Ben was occasionally able to use the upstairs sitting-room as a refuge from Glenn and his frequent guests. He could not often get away, except when there was a woman alone downstairs, for Glenn insisted that he should be present at all parties to mix drinks and help Mrs Bowstrom with the food and talk to anyone whom nobody else wanted to talk to.

  When Glenn was not having one of his violent spasms of work, which were short but concentrated, to the exclusion of all else, like Asian ‘flu, there was someone in the house almost every night, and often a lot of people, and it became a party that persisted into the small hours. Ben enjoyed at first mixing with people from a world that was comparatively new to him, although he had explored a small part of it with Rose. After a while, however, he found that this was the most tedious part of his job.

  He might hang about the house all day with very little to do, and then when he was beginning to think about going to bed, a party would suddenly develop out of the air—Glenn’s friends always seemed ready to come no matter how late he telephoned —and Ben would have to stay up for another four hours and be as tired the next morning as if he had done a worthwhile day’s work.

  Geneva loved to hear about his social life, and the Major never ceased to angle for an invitation to this place where it seemed that alcohol flowed out of the very bathroom taps, but Ben was soon sated with the voluble arguments and discussions in which everyone talked at once and listened to nobody, and with the half-drunken fooling that turned almost every party into a silly shambles before Glenn suddenly tired of humanity and pushed his guests hooting and laughing out of the door into the blossom-scented Hampstead night.

  The pretty white house with its arched windows and fragile balconies was in one of those carefully-preserved backwaters of history whose residents are always writing letters to the newspapers protesting about new street lighting or the cutting down of trees, and agitating, in a civilized way, to get a question asked in Parliament.

  Many of the neighbours were literary figures, not so well known or successful as Glenn, although, or because they had more genuine intelligence. That was one reason why Glenn had bought the house with the little paved garden in the middle of the street. There was no one famous enough on either side to outshine him, but they could supply the background that he lacked.

  He had made a point of knowing everyone in the peaceful, winding street, but most of them stayed away from his parties, and those who came usually left early, because, unlike Glenn, they planned to work the next morning.

  When his parties finally erupted into the narrow street with shouts and laughter and the banging of car doors and revving-up of sports engines, the neighbours turned over in their beds and reflected that there were other threats to their cherished preserve besides the philistine attitude of the works committee of the borough council.

  To complete the picture of himself as a successful literary man, Glenville Roberts had bought a property in the country which had thirty acres of grassland and a pink-walled farmhouse. Although he had rented the outbuildings and all the grazing to a neighbouring poultry and dairy farmer, he called it My Farm.

  After his first visit to the house, Ben doubted whether Glenn would ever live there for more than a few week-ends in the year; week-ends for which he would import his own companions. The farmhouse was in a lovely fold of gentle hills, with elm trees raising their cumulus shapes along the hedgerows; but it was five miles from the nearest village and ten miles from a town, and neither the village nor the town nor the scattered houses in between contained the kind of people whom Glenn would put up with for long.

  But he had fallen in love with the house. That was what he told people. He had first seen it by mistake, after losing his way on the drive back to town from seeing off a Very Dear Friend on the Queen Elizabeth.

  The phrasing was typical of Glenn. All his friends were Dear Friends, but a Very Dear Friend implied some superb and perhaps famous woman whose relationship with him had been too intimate to reveal her name. He had still not arrived quite far enough to consider it immaterial to the story whom he was seeing off, and whether they sailed in the Queen Elizabeth or in a cattle boat.

  Before his listeners could reflect on this, they were hearing that the house had struck an answering chord in Glenn’s heart as soon as he saw its dark-tiled roof rising beyond the little copse. Here he would be able to find the solitude and calm of spirit in which to finish the book which meant everything to him, his two-hundred-thousand-word novel about pre-war Berlin.

  He was not particularly interested in Germany, either before or since the war, but he had chosen the locale and the period because of its sexual decadence, which would give unlimited scope for those peculiar talents for which a large section of his public valued him.

  Ben had been put to work on research, which was one of the duties which had bogged down the hapless Priscilla, but Glenn had not yet got further than making notes for the first two chapters. Every time he decided to start work on the novel in earnest, a magazine editor or a film producer would come up with a tempting offer which would mean a quicker return for far less work.

  Meanwhile the house was being converted from its original design as a farmer’s home to a country place fit for Glenn to live and work in. He never had time to visit the house and study progress, so one of Ben’s duties was to make frequent trips to the country to talk to the architect and the builder and the plumber and the electrician and the landscape gardener, and make decisions about wallpaper and kitchen flooring.

  “I leave it to you,” said Glenn, who wanted to impress with the house, but did not want to bother with it until it was finished. “You are a man of taste.”

  Ben knew that he was not. His
lack of eye for variations on the spectrum amounted almost to colour blindness, but the local interior decorator was making all the decisions about colour schemes and curtains. Ben merely had to give the official approval, because the decorator, who knew that Glenn was unpredictable, did not want to find himself involved later in a lawsuit for having done everything wrong.

  The house was between Winchester and Andover. Glenn usually wanted the car for himself, so it was Waterloo Station again, and the London to Southampton line which Ben knew so well. His life seemed to be inextricably bound up with Waterloo and the Southern Railway.

  At least once a week, at the request of the decorator, or of the architect or the builder who were infected with his caution, Ben would take a day trip to the country and snatch two glimpses of the red-brick house by the railway from whose influence it seemed that he would never free himself.

  In the Easter holidays, he took Amy with him, and often Susanna as well, for their friendship did not end with the end of term. They would take sandwiches and fruit and chocolate, and picnic in the unfinished house, or in the garden if the day was warm enough.

  “This is where we’re going to live,” Amy told Susanna, as they sat on a broken garden bench in a sunny alcove at the side of the house. “Glenn will be here most of the time.”

  “Steady on,” Ben said. “I have a feeling we’ll still be in London most of the time.”

  “Oh, no. He’ll be here. He told me. And Mr Garrett is going to let me keep a pony in with his cows, and I shall go to school in Winchester. We’ll invite you to stay, of course, Sue, or you could come and live here all the time and go to school with me, if your parents would let you.”