Man Overboard

by Monica Dickens

  When they went into the house, Laura was in the hall in a yellow smock that stuck out in front like a half-open umbrella.

  “This is my daughter Laura,” Mr Halliday said. “Mrs Arnold.”

  Amy kicked Ben lightly on the ankle, and when Laura turned away to get him a drink, she whispered: “Bad luck, Daddy. Oh, what stinking luck.”

  “Listen,” he told Amy quietly, for Laura was busy at the table under the window and Mr Halliday had left the room, having sublimated all his hospitable instincts in the garden, “don’t expect it all to be like we imagined. Nothing ever is.”

  “That’s what’s so hateful about life.” Amy pulled at a loose thread on the back of a chair.

  “It isn’t. If everything happened the way you imagined it would, there’d be no point in ever letting anything happen. Because you’d know.”

  She frowned uncertainly, then switched into a smile and said gently: “Yes, Daddy dear,” for Laura had come up behind Ben with a glass. Amy had evidently decided on the role of docile daughter for Laura’s benefit.

  Ella knew her at the school as anything but docile, for she was with the boys and copying them whenever she could escape Mrs Glynn’s half-hearted supervision. Ben wondered how she would manage to combine the two roles when Ella and Laura were in the room together.

  When Mrs Halliday came into the hall, which was the gathering-place of the house, Amy changed again. She had an uncanny way of knowing immediately what people would want her to be. She had sensed that Laura did not particularly like children and would prefer not to hear from them, and so while she was talking to Ben, Amy picked up a magazine and sat quietly with her ankles crossed. But when Mrs Halliday came in, waistless in a dun silk blouse not properly tucked into her skirt, she got up and began to talk to her about the horses, which she had broken away from the tour of inspection to visit.

  Mrs Halliday, who was utterly and ineradicably horsey, although in a much gentler way than Ben had expected, welcomed Amy like Fuchs meeting Hillary at the South Pole; or rather Hillary meeting Fuchs, for Mrs Halliday had got there first. Everyone else in the house was tired of horses, but Amy was her disciple, sitting on a stool at her feet like the picture of The Boyhood of Raleigh, while Mrs Halliday, with a light in her mild amber eyes which may never have shone so tenderly for any of her babies, told her about the two horses which she trained as show hacks and took round to all the big shows in the summer. Since she was too fat to throw her legs across a horse any more, she rode side-saddle, which Ben was glad to hear out of the corner of his ear while he listened to Laura talking about herself.

  “May I really?” he heard Amy say. “Daddy, Mrs Halliday says I can go to some of the shows with her. She and George take the horse trailer and go hundreds of miles and sleep in the car.”

  “George is the man who drives, and helps me with the horses,” Mrs Halliday said. “My husband doesn’t like it, but of course I sleep in the front of the car and George sleeps at the back.” She said this with a sort of anxious gravity. Her face, under the loosely-pinned swags of yellow-grey hair, was creased with the necessity that Ben should understand.

  She was not tough and masterful at all, but disarmingly naïve. Ben had always thought of her as a leathery woman who would stand no nonsense from her horses or anyone else, but he saw now that what authority she had was confined to the stable, and that her horses had found themselves a lucky billet.

  “You will let me go, won’t you?” Amy got up from the low stool with a swift unfolding of her long legs and came to him, adding: “Daddy, dear,” for Laura’s benefit. “So now, you see, we must stay at the school.”

  “Oh?” Laura’s eyebrows, which were slightly out of drawing, went up. “Weren’t you going to?” She called across the hall to her sister, who came in from the kitchen flushed, with a lump of hair arched the wrong way over her parting: “Ella—you didn’t tell me Commander Francis was getting out. That’s five bob you owe me.”

  Ella wiped her hands on the dish-towel she was carrying and helped herself to a drink, stuffing the dish-towel between a cushion and the back of the sofa, where it might stay for days if this was the sort of house it seemed to be. “Laura bet me five shillings you wouldn’t stay more than a month,” she said, “but I knew you would.”

  “If only to win the bet for you,” Ben said. “But how did you know?”

  He thought she would say something flattering about his stamina, but she spilled a few drops of her drink on a table, swiped at it with the edge of her apron and said bluntly: “Well, you told me what a hard time you’d had finding a job, and even Greenbriars must be better than living with Glenville Roberts.”

  “Glenville Roberts?” Laura turned quickly to Ben. ”The Glenville Roberts? You lived with him?”

  “I told you,” Ella said wearily.

  “You never tell me anything that matters. Do you know Glenville Roberts?” Laura looked at Ben as if she liked him better. “He’s one of my favourite authors. I read his last novel twice.”

  “You would,” Ella said. “It was revolting.”

  “It wasn’t. Nothing is revolting when it’s good literature. It was realism, wasn’t it?” She turned back to Ben.

  Amy was looking from one face to another with interest, and he wished that they could stop talking about it before she popped up with some cosy detail of her life with Glenn. He said: “I thought he went too far.”

  Laura accepted this, since he had said it and not Ella. “You know what he’s like, of course. Is he really like that? I’d love to meet him.”

  “You might. He’s bought a house not far from here.”

  “Will you take me over? Oh, please.” She put on a babyish, flirting face. “I’d die if I met him. How exciting. We might ask him here, though I don’t suppose he’d come, Elsie”—both daughters addressed their mother by her Christian name—”get out the best silver. You might meet Glenville Roberts.”

  “Who’s Glenville Roberts?” Mrs Halliday had taken a steel curb-chain out of her pocket and was polishing it thoughtfully between the palms of her podgy hands. “Why do you laugh? Should I know? Bernie.” She dropped the curb-chain in her wide lap and reached up to take her husband’s hand as he came in from a room off the hall. “The girls are laughing at me. Should I know who Glenville Roberts is?”

  “No, darling, no.” He patted her hand. “Why should you? You’re much better off not knowing.”

  “She will soon. He’s coming here,” Laura said.

  “God forbid. Make an appointment with the dentist for me that day, Ella.”

  “You haven’t been to the dentist since you lost your teeth,” she said, staring at him seriously.

  “Don’t be so literal. A surgeon will do. I’ll have my gall bladder out.”

  After lunch, when Ben and Amy went out to the kitchen to help with the dishes, Amy caught at his hand as they followed Ella down the passage. “I see what you meant. They’re not like we thought. We’ve had that. Now we have them. I like it here, do you?”

  Yes, he liked it. And it was not so different. There was much that was familiar from his years of spying. As separate personalities they were different, of course, from what they had seemed when he had racketed by above them in the train; but together they had that casual, unquestioning family relationship which his imagination had treasured because he and Amy, in their different generations, had never known it.

  The house itself was the house he had always known. He had never visualised its interior in detail. When he had thought of it, it had been scarcely more than a vague atmosphere suggested by the outside, but he knew now that if he had imagined it, he might have guessed at this kind of furniture; at the rugs, the older ones good, the newer ones less worn but uglier; at the large and inconvenient kitchen, which would be very cold in winter, with a table scrubbed white over the years and crusted bowls of half-eaten cats’ and dogs’ food in all the corners.

  There should have been irony in his coming to the house after all these
years. Having imagined them for so long a secure and stable family, he should have found them all at loggerheads, the arguments not harmless minor ones as unremarkable as breathing, but fierce and bitter quarrels, with people locking themselves in their rooms and torturing themselves for days over the futility of life.

  Or, to make a morbid drama out of his dream, he should have come just too late ever to share the contented life he had admired from the train. He should have arrived just as Laura ran away with a drunken poacher, or the father hung himself with a dressing-gown cord behind the bathroom door, or Ella was killed trying to snatch a dog off the railway line, or Mrs Halliday was thrown from her side-saddle and turned into a crippled idiot for the rest of her life.

  There was no irony. No drama. There was only truth. He had not been deceived. For some reason, the house had singled him out from all the passengers on the Southern Railway to show him something of the truth of the life that was lived within its walls.

  After the first shock of finding that Laura was married, he did not mind that he could not be in love with her any more, because he would not have married her anyway, nor been in love with her, in any other than a dream world.

  She was not as pretty as he had thought. Her curls were not bubbling, but dry and artificial. Her teeth were a little rabbity, and her eyes were not as blue as summer skies, or sapphires, or forget-me-nots. They were merely blue, with a shiny bulge above them where she had plucked out too much eyebrow. Her legs were a little bristly because she had shaved them and they needed shaving again. She was an average, unremarkable girl, neither captivating nor plain, and with no great amount of any quality in her temperament. She was fairly good-natured, moderately intelligent, only occasionally perceptive, and not very witty, although she went in for bold statements which were not as shocking as she thought.

  She was, in short, a typical naval officer’s girl friend, passable but not devastating; all right to take out, but not necessarily to marry, although heaven knew, lots of the poor creeps did marry her type, and it turned into a captain’s wife or an admiral’s wife with no perceivable effort. Ben might have done the same himself if he had got mixed up with someone like Laura before Marion … before Rose.…

  Once in the train at night, Ben had seen the light from the french windows lying on the lawn like yellow moonlight. He had imagined himself in the garden and Laura stepping out through the window in a pale dress and coming into his arms with exactly the right words.

  “I knew you’d come,” she would have said. Or: “I’ve waited so long.”

  He knew now that she was the type of girl you did not meet in a moonlit garden. You met her on the beach, or in the post office, or in some not very chic night-club, and what she said was not: “I knew you’d come,” but: “I’ve been waiting hours.”

  Laura’s husband, who was a local doctor, came to fetch her after lunch, and she said to him: “I thought you were never coming. I haven’t felt too good,” although she had eaten twice as much as anyone else and generally behaved like a healthy pregnant woman.

  “Poor Roger, you’re doing too much,” her mother said, in the gentle voice which came surprisingly from such a sturdy, open-air woman.

  “You shouldn’t kill yourself for these hypochondriacal females,” Mr Halliday said. “Why have you been so long with Mrs Edgeworth? What’s she got this time?”

  Roger laughed. He had a bland fat face and a cheery air which was agreeable socially, but might be a little hard to take if you were dying. “Oh—something feminine.”

  “What?”

  “You know I never discuss my patients, even with you, Dad.”

  “Especially not with Daddy,” Laura said, “unless you want the gynaecological details broadcast to the whole county.”

  “How can I gossip? I never see anyone.”

  “I wish you would, dear.” His wife picked up what was evidently her side of a long-standing issue. “I wish you would get about more. You could come to some of the shows with George and me—and now Amy, of course.” She gave the child a private smile. “All right, I know, I know. But at least it would give you the chance to get about.”

  “How can I, Elsie, when I’ve all the work of this place on my shoulders? I’m not a smooth-tongued practitioner with a string of female patients inventing symptoms to pay my gardener’s wages.”

  He bared his long plastic teeth at Roger, who laughed, throwing back his affable head, and said: “You have George, complete with nasal polypi.”

  “That devil George never has time for anything but the horses.”

  “If you’d rather do the horses,” his wife said sweetly, “George can do the garden.”

  “Don’t tease him,” Ella said, and her mother looked surprised, as if her suggestion had been sincere. “Oh, I’m sorry, Roger, I forgot.” Ella went out to the kitchen and came back with a plateful of lunch she had been keeping hot for him, looking pleased, because she had been thoughtful for a busy doctor, and Laura had not. But Roger had stopped somewhere for a sandwich, and did not want the lunch, so Ella put the plate down on the floor by her feet for the big yellow dog who looked like Nana.

  Two days later, when Ben saw Ella in Mrs Morton’s drawing-room, where the staff were obliged to forgather every other Tuesday to drink sherry, whether they liked it or not, he said: “It was awfully nice of you to ask me to lunch. Amy and I had a grand time.”

  Ella looked surprised. “It was terribly dull. It was nicer for us than for you. We’ve got so used to seeing each other and the same old local crowd that it’s good to have someone new. I don’t count the strange people who come to talk horses with Elsie, because they mostly stand about in the yard with their heads down, talking at their boots.”

  “That’s odd,” Ben said. “It looks like the sort of house where there are people in and out all the time, and always something going on.”

  Ella shook her head. “It was. When my father was still practising, there used to be more people—clients, and barristers on circuit—and of course when we were younger we were always bringing our friends home. But when people get older and get married and bogged down with babies, they don’t want to come. Or if they do, it isn’t the same.”

  The sunless, uncomfortable room was full of masters and masters’ wives. The younger masters wore tweed jackets and slacks and needed a haircut. The older ones wore bow-ties and grey flannel suits that did not go often enough to the cleaners, although laundry and cleaning were on the house. The wives wore anonymous summer garments that revealed upper arms too bony or too massive and talked among themselves with the apathetic intimacy of women who live in a small and narrow community. The masters were mostly talking shop together, for they did not bother to make a social occasion of Mrs Morton’s sherry hours. Mrs Morton herself, with her stick swinging dangerously on the crook of her arm, was talking to the games master, a muscle-bound man too old for his job whom she had pinned up against a bookcase to hear what she thought should be done about Sports Day.

  Ben and Ella had found themselves in a corner with two glasses of sweet sherry and a dish of stale cheese straws, not deliberately ignored, but not quite part of the group. Ben’s latest ideas on procurement planning, based on a study of requirements for the last five years, had not increased his popularity, and Ella was only invited as a sort of charitable gesture, since Mrs Morton considered her really one of the maids.

  “When Laura married,” Ella went on, talking into her glass and not looking at Ben, “I thought: Oh, good, here’s some new blood. But Roger’s not exactly a thrill. My brother’s been married much longer, and he was engaged for ages, so we all got used to Betsy long ago, as if she’d been in the family for ever. She’s just as dull as we are, but the children are all right, when she lets them alone.”

  “I don’t think any of you are dull,” Ben said. He was afraid that she would not invite him home again if she thought he had been bored. He wanted to explain to her how wrong she was, if that was what she thought. He wanted to tell he
r about seeing the house from the train, and what her family had meant to him, and what it meant to get on the inside at last.

  He could not say it. He could not make any of the right words translate themselves into speech between his mind and his lips. He was afraid that he would not be able to make her understand, and she would frown at him and her brown eyes would grow troubled, as they had when he had tried to show her how to order soap and scouring powder on an annual basis without actually ordering a year’s supply.

  He said something about it being a shame that the railway was so close to the house, and with the memory of her in the garden looking up, he asked her: “Do you ever look up at the trains and wonder about the people in them?”

  “Occasionally. Sometimes I think it would be nice to be them. And perhaps,” she laughed, “because they are them, they’re looking into our garden and thinking it might be nice to be me.”

  Now he could tell her. “Listen, Ella,” he said eagerly, but she had caught at the skirt of the maid passing with a tray and said out of the side of her mouth: “Lucy, what are the chances of another sherry?”

  “You’ve had two, Miss Halliday,” Lucy said, glancing towards Mrs Morton. “That’s all she———”

  “We’ve only had one,” Ben said.

  “Two, Commander.” Lucy looked at him as if he were lying drunk in the gutter. “It’s as much as my job is worth.”

  “Don’t worry,” Ben said. “I’m the one who does the firing and hiring.”

  Lucy blew down her nose, which had a lump of flesh between the nostrils, like a petrified drop. “That’s what you think.”