Man Overboard

by Monica Dickens

  Harry and Betsy had three children, a girl of nine, a boy of six, and a two-year-old baby who was violent enough for a boy, but who was actually a girl with sparse hair. In theory, it was going to be nice for Amy to have someone of her own age to play with, but it was a mistake to imagine that because she and Penelope were both children they would have anything in common at all.

  They had to share a bedroom, and after the first night, Amy told Ben that Penelope was an awful wet, stamped into her rubber boots and spent the rest of the day except meal-times out in the garden and the stable yard in the rain. Penelope stole Amy’s new ball-point pen and complained to her mother that Amy had too much nerve and was trying to tell her what to do in her own grandmother’s house.

  She said it in front of Ben, and Betsy did not try to hush her. She seldom hushed her children, because she believed in the free development of character, and in this case the child was voicing her mother’s own opinion. It was clear that Betsy resented Amy’s position in the house, and it was not surprising, because Mrs Halliday, who could not dissemble, made it unintentionally obvious that she preferred Amy to her grandchildren. There was no Come to Grandma, or bouncing of the baby on her knee that week-end, because she had borrowed a pony for Amy, and spent most of the time standing in a muddy field in a sou’wester and gumboots with Amy and the pony describing cautious circles round her at the end of a long lungeing-rein. She could not wait until the rain had stopped or her visitors had gone to start teaching Amy to ride. The pony was there, so they had to start. Amy could not wait either. They were very much alike.

  Penelope was terrified of horses, which was a blow to her grandmother, who had been wanting to get her a pony ever since she could walk. Betsy had forbidden it, but she now resented that there was a pony for Amy. She resented the intimacy between her mother-in-law and the usurping child, an intimacy that the querulous and neurotic Penelope had never shared with her grandmother.

  Betsy resented a lot of things that week-end. Ella had always been supposed to be the perfect aunt, whose brother’s children were “like her own”. She was still attentive and affectionate towards them, but now Amy was her responsibility too, in a way that Penelope and Dorian and the monster Julia were not and did not need to be.

  Amy’s relationship with Ella went deeper than her bond with Mrs Halliday. That was centred round the horses. With Ella, it included everything. They had made a pattern of life together. Every morning, they bicycled to the corner where Amy caught her bus for school. Every afternoon, Ella was waiting at the corner when the bus brought Amy back. Mrs Morton did not know that Ella left Greenbriars half an hour early in order to do this. Ben hoped that she would never find out.

  Ella fed Amy and washed and ironed her clothes and mended them with large, loose stitches that came apart again at the first sign of strain. She listened to Amy’s involved prayers and tried to help her with her homework and administered discipline when it was necessary.

  Betsy’s children did not get discipline, because the book said that the only permissible discipline was self-discipline, which they would administer to themselves when they were ready for it. They got guidance instead, which meant educational toys and serious, repetitive talks which went on and on in Betsy’s special voice for speaking to children. It was a slow, clear voice, hideous with patience and the conscientious determination to reach the child on his own level. When she first used it on Amy, Amy stared and said: “You don’t have to talk to me like that. I can understand if you talk the way you do to the grownups.”

  Betsy flushed and forgot her child psychology so far as to call Amy a precocious little brat, which Amy repeated to Ben with glee. It galled Betsy that Amy, with no proper guidance in her life, was not a problem child who screamed at night and pulled the legs off frogs, but contentedly independent and well adjusted.

  Adjusting was one of Betsy’s favourite words. Penelope had to be guided to adjust to Amy, and in consequence never did. All three children had to adjust to living in a different house for the week-end, and Betsy’s whole day, and part of her night, for the children went to sleep when they wanted to and not when they were told to, was given up to watching them and commenting on them and assisting them with their little problems. Since Julia had never been smacked for laying her rude hands on forbidden objects, Betsy’s life was ruled by the necessity for watching this destructive baby to see that she did not brain herself or poison herself or set the house on fire.

  Seeing how much trouble Betsy took over her children, and what a business she made of it. Ben wondered fleetingly whether Amy had been deprived by having had only the casual care that he and Geneva had given to her. Since she had more or less brought herself up, it was surprising how little trouble she was, but was she missing anything?

  Sitting in the hall trying to read the paper while Betsy was reasoning in the patient voice with Penelope and Dorian, who were whining to go out in the rain, Ben looked out of the window and saw Amy tramping through the yard with a sack over her head and a load of hay as big as herself on the end of a pitchfork, and did not think that she was missing a thing.

  The unremitting rain, which spoiled the plans for golf, picnics and the village fête, was not the only thing that went wrong with the week-end.

  The oil heater in Mr Halliday’s mushroom shed blew up, and the rickety little shack went up in flames, which might have spread to the stable if it had not been raining so hard. As it was, the fire turned to dense black smoke, which bellowed noxious fumes of overheated manure into the little crowd of amateur firemen who were sloshing about in the mud with hoses and fire extinguishers which they did not know how to work.

  Mr Halliday was interested only in saving his mushrooms, which were his special thing this year and had cost him quite a lot for the spore. Mrs Halliday and Amy and George were interested only in the horses. When Penelope, who loved to bring bad news, had spread the alarm—”I bet she lit it,” Amy commented, as she ran out—they had pulled the horses out into the yard, where they danced and circled at the end of halter ropes to the peril of the baby Julia, who had teetered out after her mother to see the sport.

  To create more drama than there was already, Amy had tied a wet cloth over the pony’s eyes, and having come out of the stable in spite of the cloth, it was now too wildly excited by the confusion to let Amy near its head to untie the knot. With the bandage slipped over one eye, it was plunging round in small circles with its head down, like a belligerent grey-haired pirate, with Amy gallantly swinging on the end of the rope.

  “Let me have him!” George kept shouting to her, but Amy, breathless, spindle-legged, determined not to be beaten in her first challenge with horses, pulled the pony away from George, half-sobbing: “I can handle him, I can handle him!” The pony plunged towards the baby, who was sitting in a mud puddle adjusting herself to the situation. Betsy screamed, Harry swung round and turned the hose on the pony, and Amy fell on her face in the mud as the pony tore loose from her wet hands and disappeared through the hedge and down the road towards its own home.

  Ella appeared at Ben’s side with a raincoat over her head and drops of water running down her nose, and said something to him which he could not hear because a train was racketing by. He looked up at the train and thought what a thrill it would have been if he had been in it and seen the fire, laid on for the benefit of his one brief glimpse. He would have seen the smoke and the horses and the figures of grown-ups and children slopping about in the pouring rain, and longed to be there with them, a part of what was going on.

  He wondered if anyone in that train had rubbed a space in a steamy window and had noticed the excitement and wanted to be down there in it; had noticed him and wanted specifically to be him, with an axe in one hand and an empty fire-extinguisher upside down in the other, and Harry in a sodden trilby jammed on his head with the brim turned down all round shouting at him: “Stand clear—she’s coming down!” as if the little shed was a four-storey warehouse building.

  �
�Amy’s not the only one with an over-developed sense of drama.” He turned to say this to Ella, and saw that she was crying. There was so much rain on her face that he was not sure at first, but then he saw her distorted mouth, the bottom lip pulled stiffly down below her teeth. He dropped the fire-extinguisher and put his arms round her, holding the axe behind her back. “It’s not such a tragedy, Ella. I’ll help your father build another shed. We’ll buy him some spore for his birthday. There’s plenty of manure, God knows.”

  She stood stiffly in his arms, looking at nothing over his shoulder. “It’s one of the dogs. I’d shut him in the kennel because he was wet and I’d swept the kitchen floor. Penelope let him out. She told me she had. “All dumb animals should be free,” she told me in that prissy voice. I couldn’t find him, but I knew where to look for him. He was on the railway.”

  “Not Geoffrey?” Ben could hardly say it. The shaggy dog was a part of Ella, a clumsy, straw-coloured shadow who sat and rose and walked when she did, and lay watching her with his humble eyes in the middle of the kitchen floor where he could feel her when she stumbled over him.

  “Oh, no, he’d never go on the line. It was the young one. The silly spaniel. Oh, Ben.” She put her face into his shoulder. She was taller than he, but it did not matter, because she was not always trying to make herself appear shorter, as Rose had done. If he were ever to kiss Ella properly, with her co-operation, she would not take her shoes off. She would just lower her face and it would all be quite natural and comfortable.

  He shifted one arm from behind her to push her chin gently upwards with the butt end of the axe handle. She looked at him with the vulnerable plainness of a woman in her thirties crying. He would try it now. No, he wouldn’t. Harry the fearless fire chief sloshed up with the trickling hose in his hand and said: “God, what a place to neck. Why don’t you go inside where it’s dry?”

  Ella pulled herself away from Ben and went to help her father, who was stamping about among the manure and charred wood of the smouldering ruins, hoping to rescue some grilled mushrooms from the holocaust.

  Nobody wanted tea after the fire. They all had a drink, and Betsy got mellow and forgot about putting her younger children to bed, and Julia crawled upstairs and into Amy’s room and upset her ant farm.

  The ant farm was one of Amy’s dearest possessions. It was a narrow, transparent plastic case, half-filled with sand. In the top half, the silhouettes of farm buildings and silos and windmills stood on a ledge where the ants made their heap. They tunnelled devotedly in the sand of the lower half and brought it up grain by grain through a hole in the ledge, patting each grain carefully into place over the pieces of sugar Amy dropped in and the curled-up bodies of their less fortunate comrades who had not been able to adjust to life inside a plastic sandwich.

  A reader in America had sent the ant farm to Glenville Roberts with a letter: “You who have made an exhaustive study of the sex habits of the human race may find it even more rewarding to study the sex life of the ant.”

  Glenn had given it to Amy. She had dug out some ants from a colony on Hampstead Heath, and six or seven of them had miraculously lived through being carried about the house and taken to school and moved to Greenbriars and finally to the Hallidays”, where they had come to rest on a table by her bed where she could study them while she waited for sleep.

  The Queen ant and the princes who mated with her had turned up their frail toes long ago. The half-dozen survivors were all barren female workers, who were labouring for nothing, since their world was doomed to extinction. They had made a marvellous network of looping tunnels in which they could clearly be seen through the plastic, scuttling about on vital errands, playing ball with a grain of sand, washing their faces and tapping each other on the head with their feelers when they wanted to exchange a piece of gossip.

  When the ants were first put in and started to work immediately, Ben and Glenn had the ant farm on the dining-room table and studied it at every meal, and bored all the guests with it. It was the sort of toy that was so fascinating for the first few days that they wondered how they had ever lived without it, until they reached the point where they began to wonder why they lived with it. Having overdone their enthusiasm, they gave it back to Amy, but she had never lost interest in it.

  She loved those ants. When the baby knocked them over and all the tunnels caved in, she was crying bitterly as she set the ant farm upright, because the ants had made their home and now they would have to start all over again, and she knew that they would start, shocked and aggrieved, but knowing no other way but to keep tunnelling. She forgot that she herself had knocked the ants over once, and so had Ella. She was furious with the baby. She smacked it, and was smacking it again when Betsy ran upstairs to see what the screams were.

  “I would have thought you had enough sense not to smack it when its mother was in the room,” Ben told Amy afterwards, when the commotion had died down.

  “I don’t care. She should do it herself. She lets that little gorilla do what it likes just because it’s two. As if being two made you God.”

  Amy was not the sort of child who enjoyed younger children. Betsy, who had been a little mother to her small sisters and brothers, could not understand this. Ben was staying the night, and when he went to bed, he heard her discussing Amy with Harry, through a bedroom door ajar.

  “Elsie shouldn’t have her here. She’s a peculiar child. There’s something psychotic about her, if you ask me. All this play-acting. I can’t think what they all see in her.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Harry was brushing his teeth. “I rather like the kid. Did you see how she hung on to that pony? She’s got some guts.”

  “Oh,” said Betsy, “so your own children have no guts.”

  “Listen, Mummy, I never said———”

  When Mr Halliday called his wife Mummy, it sounded nice, and she liked it. Harry was trying to mollify Betsy, but she snubbed him with: “I am not your mother. I am the mother of your three children, to whom I devote every waking hour, the best years of my life …” and so on, and so on. A regular married quarrel. Ben tiptoed past the door, feeling guilty because Amy had started it, which made it his fault too.

  To crown an unsatisfactory week-end, Glenville Roberts arrived on Sunday morning to see Ben and Amy. He had been to the school, and Mrs Glynn, with many becks and winks, had sent him to the Hallidays” house.

  The front door was open and he strode in, calling out: “Anybody home?” Amy was outside and Ben was upstairs helping Ella to make beds, since Betsy’s domesticity stopped at motherhood, and she hardly did anything for Ella in the house except litter the kitchen with jars of half-eaten baby food with the sticky spoons still in them.

  By the time Ben reached the hall, Mr Halliday had removed Glenn to view the remains of the mushroom-shed fire, and then on for a tour, since it was not raining at the moment.

  Ben caught up with them in the greenhouse, where Mr Halliday was demonstrating his latest invention, the cardboard cylinders from inside toilet rolls stacked like a honeycomb in a seed-box as individual containers for seedlings.

  “Ben, my friend!” Glenn turned with relief from a contemplation of withered geranium cuttings which Mr Halliday still hoped might take root. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you. Nothing has been the same since you walked out on me.” He put his arm round Ben and pushed him gently so that they could get out of the greenhouse.

  “Honestly?” Ben was pleased.

  “I swear it. You want to come back?”

  “No fear,” Ben smiled at the security of not being tempted to accept.

  “You should have stayed. I’ve had a marvellous time. Been half round the world since I last saw you, doing articles, and knocking around looking for ideas for stories.”

  “And running away from Esther Lovelace?”

  Glenn laughed. “That too. But I ran myself into some more trouble, of course. If you’d been with me in Barcelona, you could have pulled me out of it. She was a
princess. Fabulously rich, but a complete———”

  “How is poor Esther?” Ben did not want to hear about the fabulous princess in Barcelona.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her, thank God. She’s dead for all I know.”

  “Who’s dead?” Mr Halliday caught them up. “Forgive me,” he said to Glenn. “I’m insatiably curious. It’s almost my only failing.”

  “Quite your only one,” Ben said, and Glenn glanced at him sharply, surprised at the affection in his voice. “It’s an old girl friend of Glenn’s. He was madly in love with her.”

  “Well, it’s sad when they die,” Mr Halliday said vaguely, not sure whether it was a joke or not. “But if he had no further use for her———”

  “There’s only one girl friend I have any use for.” Glenn held out his arms as Amy came flying round the corner from the stable yard and jumped at him like a puppy. She was overjoyed to see Glenn. She dragged him off to see the pony, which had been brought back that morning, and would have kept him outside and to herself for the whole of his visit, but Harry, smelling a celebrity, came out with his personality smile and took him into the house for a drink.

  Amy went too, and sat on Glenn’s knee and rumpled his thick grey hair, and Ben saw that the family was surprised and a little disquieted to find her so friendly with him.

  Apart from a mild gratification at having a celebrity in the house, they did not like Glenn very much. Ella did not like the way he stroked Amy’s hair, and she invented an errand to get her off his knee.

  “I will in a minute,” Amy said.

  Glenn backed her up. “Don’t take her away from me. Can’t she do it later?”

  “She has to do it now,” Ella said in an unnatural voice that showed that she was making an effort, but was wishing she had not started it. When he saw that Ella was blushing, Ben ordered Amy to obey, and she kissed Glenn, got slowly down from his knee and stuck out her tongue at Ella as she went out of the room.