Man Overboard

by Monica Dickens

  It was strange to see the house from this angle, an eye-level instead of a bird’s-eye view. It was higher than he had thought, and the gables and odd-shaped chimneys were not so apparent. The lawn did not look so patchy as it seemed from above, or perhaps the father had been giving it more care this spring.

  A bicycle was leaning against the shallow brick porch, its back wheel partly across the doorway. The front door was open, and beyond a small lobby filled with coats and sticks and boots, Ben saw the hall for the first time, wide and rather dark, with many doors and passages leading from it, and a fireplace untidy with last winter’s ashes and the charred ends of logs.

  There was a good smell. Not an exquisite country house smell of flowers, or lavender or furniture polish, but a homely smell compounded of many things, like roasting meat and leather and dogs and laundry soap.

  Ben stepped round the bicycle wheel and pressed the knob of the large brass bell. It did not ring. He tried the knocker, and at least three dogs began to bark from the back of the house. The tall girl came out of a doorway with her eyebrows raised, and put on a stiff, polite smile when she saw that it was a stranger. She was still wearing the white overall. It was dirty in the front, and the sleeves were rolled up over arms that were awkwardly long, with prominent elbows. As she came into the lobby, she tripped over the curling corner of a rug, blushed, pushed back her straight tawny hair, and said: “C-can I help you?”

  She added as an afterthought, as if she had been told all her life not to keep people on the step, but was always forgetting it: “Please come in.”

  Ben stepped over the low stone sill. He was in at last. Now he had to say something. He grinned, feeling the grin unnatural, and said: “I’m afraid I’ve lost my way. Can you tell me where the Martins live?” It was the only thing he could think of that would give him an excuse for at least a few minutes’ conversation.

  He wished that it had been the pretty younger sister with the curly hair who had come to the door. She would have answered him easily and smiled, liking to meet new people, and perhaps taken him into the hall and asked him to sit down while she tried to think who the Martins were. Impossible ill-luck if they should be dearest neighbours, and someone should insist on telephoning to say that their good friend Ben was on his way.

  The tall girl stood shyly in front of him, her feet rooted to the stone floor, frowning and not knowing what to say. “The Martins,” she said finally. “I don’t think I———”

  A barking yellow dog with long matted hair like Nana in Peter Pan erupted into the hall, scattered rugs, and hurled itself at Ben’s shoes. The girl took hold of its collar and held it panting, while she turned to appeal to the man who followed the dog. It was the father, older than he had looked from a distance, with a thin, grizzled moustache on a long upper lip, and only a fringe of hair round the bottom of his skull. Ben had never before seen him without a cap. He wore a tweed jacket with leather patches, a shrunken wool tie, and creaseless flannels held round his concave waist with a cracked leather belt.

  “It’s someone looking for someone called Martin,” the girl told him. Her voice held the remnants of a confused schoolgirl gabble.

  “Martin … Martin. …” The father scratched his bald skull which was the colour of scorched paper. “Doesn’t mean anything to me at the moment. What’s the address? Come in, come in. We’ll try to help you.”

  The girl stepped back, still hanging on to the dog, who was quiet now, trying to lick the hand that held him. “I don’t know the exact address, sir,” Ben said, stealing glances round the hall to see as much as possible before he had to go. “They only gave me directions. About three miles from the village, and up a hill and down a hill—you know the sort of vague things people tell you when they know a place well themselves.”

  “The vaguest person I know around here is—got it!” The father showed his long, ugly false teeth in a surprised smile. “Up a hill and down a hill. The Mortons, of course. Ella, you got the name wrong.”

  “I didn’t,” she said gruffly, as if it mattered. Why? She was about thirty. Perhaps she had lived too long at home.

  “No, I did say Martin,” he explained. “I must have read the signature wrong. Good thing you told me before I got there.”

  “Why?” asked the father inquisitively, “Are you going after the job. Forgive my curiosity. Been my weakness all my life, but when you live in a dead end like this, with the chariots of the Southern Region your only contact with civilization, you want to know everything that’s going on. And of course we have an interest in the school, because of Ella.”

  The girl mumbled something.

  “She’s the housekeeper there,” her father said, and the girl bent to stroke the dog, as if she did not like to be talked about. “Does a good job, too, as you’ll find out, if they take you on. Navy, aren’t you?” Ben was wearing a blazer with naval buttons, because his father liked to see him in it.

  “Ex-Navy, sir.”

  “You’re in, my boy. There’s a snob appeal about having a retired officer as bursar of an outfit like that.”

  So it wasn’t teaching. And it wasn’t a girls’ school. You wouldn’t have a male bursar for a girls’ school. Nor a teacher either, for that matter, but Ben had not had time to think of that. This is Commander Francis, our new bursar. The headmaster would like to use his rank. Ben saw himself on Speech Day, making his number with mothers in garden-party hats. What did a bursar do that Ben could not do? He could find out, at least.

  “How do I get there?” he asked. “How do I get to the school?”

  * Chapter 13 *

  It was the tinned beetroot that started it. Mrs Morton was such an unpalatable woman that if she were mixed up in some small racket, it was fitting that her hand should finally be called over something like tinned beetroot.

  The trustees of Greenbriars Preparatory School for Boys lived too far away, or were too richly disinterested or too senile to question the staff appointments made by the headmaster. This was lucky for Ben, who had got in on his own bluff and the character references supplied by the Flimsies of his Confidential Reports. It had also been lucky for Mrs Morton. As headmaster’s wife, she held the post of dietitian, for no better reason than that she had told her husband to appoint her, and he had made up his mind twenty years ago that his only chance of happiness was to let her have her own way.

  Ben discovered the tinned beetroot when he was taking his inventory of stores, which common sense and his naval training told him was one of his first jobs as bursar. If Old Hammerhead, as he had already learned to call the headmaster, who had a clawlike nose and a bony knob at the back of his skull, wanted him to save the school from financial ruin, the first thing was to check on their tangible assets.

  “Stores are money,” he told Tilly Wicket, the cook, who was as wide as she was high, but more active than any of her dispirited kitchen helpers.

  “I dare say, but it’s an awkward time to come into my kitchen.” Tilly was drinking tea at a scrubbed kitchen table in the lull between lunches gone and teas and suppers to start; but this was her normal greeting for anyone who did not come into her kitchen to work. “Him that was here before you never wanted to pry into my stockroom at all hours.” Tilly never gave a name to Mr Butterick, the late bursar, who had departed under a veil, as yet unlifted by Ben. He was reminded of Esther Lovelace, and her refusal to speak the name of Glenville Roberts.

  “If he had, it might have been better for everyone. No offence, Miss Wicket, but———”

  “Everyone calls me Tilly,” she snapped. “Even you.”

  “No offence, Tilly, but all this stuff has been paid for by the school. I must know what our assets are.”

  “You’re talking very legal,” Tilly said, pouring a cup of tea for him from a pot she had made for herself which would hold enough for twelve, “but it’ll rub off. I’ve seen all kinds. Masters. Mensana incorporate sano, one of them said to me once after the corned beef went bad. Nurses. Matrons, they cal
l themselves, although none of them could hold their own in a stand-up fight with Miss Welsh up at the hospital, where my mother is. I’ve had them come in here turning over my pans, hoping to find last week’s scrambled egg on the bottom, and looking under my stove as if they expected to find dead mice. ‘You won’t find them there,’ I told them. ‘In the flour bin’s the place to look.’ I’ve had nurses. Don’t you take sugar? Well, it takes all sorts. But things have quieted down in that department now that we’ve got Mrs Horrocks. She’s not much of a nurse, as those poor little boys could have told you when the ‘flu hit us like old Nasty himself, but she’s a master’s wife and they’d have to keep her anyway, so it saves the keep of one, and she gets a cushy job.”

  “Well, we must economize,” Ben said heartily, seizing the opportunity to get back to the subject of stores. “Thanks for the

  tea, and now if you’d just unlock the stockroom———”

  “Don’t make me laugh.” Tilly looked at him as if he had said something absurd. “There isn’t even a lock on that door, let alone a key.”

  She pushed herself to her feet and led the way with her brisk, rolling walk, which listed her vast hips from side to side like shifting cargo in a rough sea. Following her, Ben took out the black notebook in which he was recording all the things he hoped to get done, and wrote: “Lock and key for stores.” He had seen the kitchen helpers. Two of them were permanent but shifty. The other two were transient dish-washers, who were replaced at frequent intervals by the unemployment office when they fled in the night, taking heaven knew what with them.

  He had not been in the stockroom ten minutes before he was back in the kitchen. “Miss Wicket—Tilly. What on earth are all those tins of beetroot? There must be five dozen of them.”

  Tilly was marshalling her vegetable helper for the potato salad. “Very nourishing,” she said, tight-lipped. She did not talk in front of the Help.

  “Who eats tinned beetroot?”

  “The boys.” She shooed him with her apron back into the stone passage that led to the stockroom. “If they’re hungry enough” she added in a lower voice. “But I don’t often have the heart to serve it.”

  “Why did you buy it?”

  “Don’t look at me. Mrs Morton bought it. She does all the ordering. The grocer and the butcher and them send up every day to get the list. Of course she pads it, and don’t think they stop her. ‘We’ve a lovely line of tinned beets,’ Mr Pearse will say when he’s got some cases he can’t shift on to anyone else. He often comes up himself for My Lady’s order. Oh, yes, they’re very good friends. Don’t ask me how those big boxes of chocolates and fruit get into Mrs Morton’s rooms, not to mention that case of whisky last Christmas. Just don’t ask me, that’s all.”

  Having told Ben what he needed to know without being asked, Tilly trundled back into the kitchen, calling out in a coster-monger’s voice to the dreamy girl who was standing by the chopping board with her mouth open and the knife poised motionless in her hand, as if she were in the castle of the Sleeping Beauty.

  Ben went back to his office, which was a small room, still cluttered with the impedimenta his predecessor had not bothered to remove, on the ground floor of what was called the Old Building. This was the original square stone manor house which stood a quarter of a mile back from the road in its own small park, where goal posts and bowling screens and practice nets and a cinder running track now adorned the gentle slopes where cattle or deer had once grazed under the ancient oaks.

  The house had been extended at the back with two new wings which did not match it. The stables and coach-house had been converted into classrooms. A gymnasium, an assembly hall, and masters’ houses had been added at various times and in various styles to complete what was now one of the most expensive, and possibly the worst-run, preparatory schools in the south of England.

  In his office, Ben prepared a Fleet Order, which he circulated to all departments. Henceforth all requisition forms must be signed by him before anything was purchased, from a bottle of Worcester sauce to a set of new tyres for the small bus which conveyed boys to and from the station and was known locally as the Black Maria, because the boys travelling from the station in it always looked so miserable.

  During those last difficult days in Hampstead, when Glenville sulked and Esther Lovelace hovered in the garden across the road like a virulent germ, Ben had slipped out through the back door and over the wall to pay a visit to Peale and Beckett at the Services Investment Association. Nicely set up now with a less squeamish lieutenant-commander canvassing the dockyards for them, they welcomed Ben and gladly offered advice.

  “You’re the only businessmen I know,” he told them, while Mitzi perched on the edge of Jake’s desk and listened, with a wad of chewing gum in one side of her slack jaw. “Give me a few tips. This is the best chance I’ve had. If I don’t make a go of it, I’ll re-enlist as an ordinary seaman.”

  “Always glad to help an old colleague,” Jake had said, picking his teeth delicately with a slim gold instrument. “You’ve been engaged to make this small-boys’ penitentiary show a profit, or else. Elementary. I wish I had your chance.”

  Beckett and Peale had never been bursars of a school, but they viewed the problem from the other side—what they would do if they were on the staff, with the opportunity to make a little gravy on the side. “I can’t recall ever giving this advice to anyone before,” Jake said, “but I give it to you now, Benjamin. Be dead honest yourself. Be dead honest, but don’t expect anyone else to be. Nail ‘em down. Don’t give ‘em any rope.”

  “Run it Navy style, I would,” Jimmy Peale said. “That’s all you know, anyway, old boy. Let’s face it. Mitzi, get the glasses and let’s crack a bottle to good old Ben’s success in the seats of higher learning.”

  As he typed out his Fleet Order, which he had to copy several times, because he could not find any carbon, Ben could hear Jake’s flat northern voice: “Don’t give ‘em any rope.” From what the book-keeper had shown Ben of last year’s accounts, too much rope had been given for too long. The expenses of the school were even more staggering than the fees. Small wonder, when a dozen different people were ordering food, text-books, stationery, sports equipment, garden supplies, and the pay-roll was swollen with incubi like Mrs Morton, who was undoubtedly not the only one who was making a good thing out of it.

  Not Ella, of course. There was nothing, except muddle, wrong with the housekeeping department. Ella Halliday, her name was. Ben had sometimes thought that if he ever learned the name of the family in the house by the railway, it would spoil the magic. Now he knew their name, but the magic still held. He could not wait to get back into the house.

  The headmaster, nervously crossing and uncrossing his small, pointed feet, and squinting towards the finger which rubbed at the perpetually red bridge of his hooked nose, had told Ben that if the school’s expenses were not cut down, he would have to appeal for donations among the capitalist parents. All the parents were rich, but some were capitalists, which was Mr Morton’s word for having more money than was good for you.

  “Think how shaming! There are those who could buy us out tomorrow without feeling the draught, but charity’s a different matter.” He took his hand away from his nose to choose a curly pipe from the lopsided pipe-rack which one of the boys had made in Handicrafts, and his eyes straightened out again, blinking weakly, as if he needed glasses. “I’d lose prestige. That is, the school would. There might be boys removed. Our best boys.”

  “The sons of the capitalists?”

  “Please, Commander.” Old Hammerhead blew down his nose like a horse. “I don’t want cynicism from you. I want your help. My last bursar failed me … rather badly, I’m afraid.” He dropped his head and fumbled with the pipe, scattering shreds of tobacco on the desk. “Chap called Butterick. He thought less of doing his job than of—well, no matter. Suffice it to say that he let me down. He dropped the torch. I look to you to pick it up, to raise the flag of Greenbriars on high.�
�” He wandered vaguely off into a maze of chivalrous exhortations with which he had been appealing ineffectually for years to boys who seemed to have less and less team spirit as the terms went by.

  Whatever his scholastic endowments, Old Hammerhead was, as one of the boys had recorded in linesman’s chalk on the back wall of the lavatories, a prize drip. He was actually also a brilliant classical scholar, and the boys who came from Greenbriars were usually a year ahead of their age when they went on to public school.

  This sort of thing pleased the parents, although it would not do the average boy much good in later years when he had forgotten most of the Latin and Greek he had ever learned and remembered only that he had had to work too hard too young.

  The standard in all subjects was high, and the parents of boys whose work persistently fell below a certain level were politely informed that the school would be a better place without them. This put a great strain on the dull boys, especially those whose parents’ ambition was as swollen as their wallets, but it gave the school the kind of intellectual snob appeal which ensured that for every boy pushed out there were ten waiting to get in.

  Throwing out the dead wood had been Mrs Morton’s idea to raise the school’s prestige. Her husband would not have thought of it by himself, for he rather liked boys, and even felt a mild pity when he had to give one of them back to his chagrined parents. Neither the liking nor the pity, however, was strong enough to support him in a stand against his wife. If she said a boy had to go, he went.

  Feeling rather like a substandard boy himself, Ben knocked at the entrance to Mrs Morton’s apartment and waited, shuffling his feet. When she summoned him, he went inside and found her standing up at the telephone in the little hall, with her black hair dragged into a netted doughnut at the back of her narrow head.

  “I can’t talk any more,” she told the telephone, not politely, as if she did not want to keep Ben waiting, but insultingly, as if he were an eavesdropper. He could not step back because the door was behind him, and as she turned round quickly, the rubber-tipped cane she held under her arm caught him a dragging blow across the ribs.