Man Overboard

by Monica Dickens

  “The child is getting out of hand,” Glenn said with pleasure. “She was never rude to me in my house.”

  “You weren’t supposed to be in charge of her,” Ben said. “I was there, if you remember.”

  “How can I ever forget? Priscilla—she’s got acne now, by the way—never stops talking about you. She’s still in love with you.”

  “Oh, rot. She never was. Why don’t you leave the poor girl alone? It was bad enough telling Esther Lovelace she was in love with you.”

  “She probably is. When you’re that desperate, anything in trousers will do.” Glenn laughed, the malicious, smutty laugh that Ben had heard before, and which sounded all wrong in this house.

  Glenn’s visit was not a great success. He showed off a little, as he always did with new people. Even though the Hallidays were clearly not in his world and could do nothing for him, he could not help trying to dazzle them with his well-oiled impersonation of a great man.

  Ella did not know what to say to him. Mrs Halliday was still not quite sure why she ought to know who he was, and was worried because she did not know whether he expected to be asked to stay for lunch. Mr Halliday was disappointed because Harry would not let him make the drinks with his home-brewed vermouth. Betsy was huffed because Glenn paid so much attention to Amy and none to her children, and Harry quickly became bored with him, because in the duel between two men who both liked to hold the conversational floor, Glenn won.

  Just when Harry got a chance to tell him what was wrong with the modern novel and why there was no future in cheap journalism, Laura arrived, enormous in a hot-coloured orange dress, and sat down to fascinate Glenn, with her back turned to obliterate the rest of the company.

  “The Mrs is well away,” Roger said contentedly. “It’s remarkable how she can talk all the stuff about books and things.”

  But the Mrs failed to get anywhere with Glenn, who liked his women less obvious. After he had trapped her into admitting that she had not read a novel about which she was giving what she imagined to be clever opinions, he got up to leave, refusing the offer of lunch which Mrs Halliday hastened to make when she saw that he really meant to go.

  “Come and see us when you’re in these parts again,” Mr Halliday said. He had not liked Glenn, but he was going to enjoy discussing him after he had gone.

  “I don’t know that I shall be. I may sell the farm,” he told Ben. “It was all right when you were looking after it, but it isn’t finished yet, and I can’t face coping with these local idiots.”

  “We could go over and supervise it for you,” Amy said, “couldn’t we, Daddy?”

  Glenn said: “Oh, Daddy doesn’t want to get mixed up with me again,” and he and Ben laughed because it was what Ben had been thinking, and Glenn knew it. “By the way,” he said on his way to the door, “I saw your friend Rose Kelly the other day. She asked after you, rather tenderly I thought. She has a new boy friend. But she’s probably had at least six since you.”

  When he had gone, Laura pounced on Ben. “I didn’t know you knew Rose Kelly. How fascinating. What’s she like? Is she as sexy as she looks?”

  “No,” Ben said. “That is—I mean, I don’t know.”

  Laura looked at him with a new kind of look, speculative, sucking in her lower lip, and Ben turned away to follow Ella out to the kitchen, because he felt that he must explain about Rose.

  “Tell it to Laura,” Ella said when he started to explain. “She’s more interested than I am.” She did things noisily with saucepans and baking dishes, and then said reluctantly, not looking at him: “Why didn’t you ever tell me about Rose Kelly?”

  “Why should I? It was all over and finished long before I met you.”

  He told her a little about Rose, and when he had told her all that he intended to tell, Ella turned round and looked at him gravely. “Fancy you being engaged to her,” she said, and Ben did not know whether she meant to be insulting or not.

  * Chapter 15 *

  There was a boy at Greenbriars called Neil Hardcastle, a small, pallid child with hair sprouting in every direction from a spot on the crown of his head and moist, wistful eyes on either side of a nose that would dominate his face when he was older.

  He had been Amy’s friend when she lived with the Glynns, and when she left, he attached himself to Ben. He knew all Ben’s movements in a routine day, and whenever he could escape he would be found lurking in corridors or waiting round corners or sitting outside the gardener’s shed so as to be able to say: “Good morning” or: “Good afternoon. How are you today?”

  “In the pink, thank you, Neil. How are you?”

  “Likewise.” Neil would fall into step beside Ben and walk with him, making conversation, until a bell or a buzzer sent him scuttling off to the next duty of his regimented life.

  Sometimes on Sundays, Ben took him over to the Hallidays” house to see Amy, and the two of them would disappear into the tree-house with cakes, and play seriously at being someone else until it was time for Neil to go back to the school.

  Many of the parents came to take their sons out on Sundays, and Ben was expected to be on hand in the mornings to make himself known to those he had not met, and be greeted with confidential joviality by those he had; to escort anxious mothers to their sons” bedrooms, and if necessary to the kitchen, which was always scoured on Saturday night; to laugh at jokes about the bills, and rub his hands and be a bluff, breezy naval officer for the very rich, who seemed to like him that way.

  Neil’s parents never came. They were divorced. His father had married again, and lived in Ireland. His mother who was in the South of France, claiming to be an invalid, neither came to England nor sent for Neil to go to her. Both his grandmothers were dead. He spent his holidays with a married aunt in London, who made him feel a nuisance, or with a spinster aunt in Broad-stairs, who did not provide anything for him to do. Once there had been nowhere for him to go for the Christmas holidays, and he had stayed at the school with Mr Horrocks, whose wife was the matron.

  The Horrockses had been all right, he told Ben, and their grown-up children had come to stay and there had been a Christmas tree and presents, but they had left Neil alone to roam about the school and grounds by himself, and although he was not especially attached to any of the other boys, he had been overjoyed to see them all come back.

  “I was the only one who was glad when term started,” he said, not with self-pity, but as an item of information.

  His father had written to him that he thought of coming to England in July, and might come down for Sports Day, which was the big event of the summer term. Neil was holding on to this hope, and discussed the probabilities of will he, won’t he with Ben, ad nauseam.

  “I hope he doesn’t bring his wife,” Neil said. “You wouldn’t like her. She’s very fat and she does her nails all the time and she doesn’t speak properly to you until the evening, after she’s had cocktails. You’d like my father though.” Partly why he hoped so much for his father to come was that he wanted to display him to Ben.

  As the time went by, Ben began to know more and more of the boys, and was proud of having learned all their names. He made friends with many of them, but Neil was his special friend, his shadow, his dog.

  The masters did not think much of Neil, who was brighter out of the classroom than in it, and who had an irritating way of dreaming off when he was being addressed directly from the blackboard. The games master had no use for him because he handled a cricket ball as if it were a rolled-up porcupine, and had once let go from fright half-way up a rope in the gymnasium and had fallen so clumsily that he had managed to sprain his ankle, even though there was a mat. Old Hammerhead viewed him with mistrust not only because he might have to superannuate him, but because Neil was what he called a slippery boy. When the others were in groups during leisure hours, Neil was mooning off by himself, watching a caterpillar eat a leaf, or squatting by the pond at the back of the old barn, stirring its murky depths with a stick to see what aquatic
life came up.

  Neil had been quite unhappy at Greenbriars. He did not care so much now. Now he had Ben.

  One day, Neil caught a frog. He brought it to Ben in his hand and asked him how he could keep it. Ben got a tin basin from Tilly, and they put the frog in it with stones and weeds and water and covered the basin with a piece of wire netting.

  There was an unused shed away by itself behind the garage, and Neil put the frog in there and caught insects for it, and miraculously it did not die. Then he caught a newt in the pond, and he and Ben put that in a basin too, begged from Ella this time because Tilly’s ankles were playing her up. Presently some of the other boys began to get interested in what was in the shed, and two small fishes were caught, and another frog and brought to Ben in jars with the request: “Could you do something about them, sir?”

  “It’s a proper aquarium,” Amy said, when she came over with Ben to revisit her old haunts and to console Neil, who had been confined to bounds for neither knowing nor caring about the Battle of Bosworth Field. All Sunday afternoon, when most of the boys were off with their parents eating big lunches in the local hotels, Amy and Neil fished in the pond with two of Tilly’s kitchen strainers. They came out muddy to the knees with a few more hapless specimens of pond life, and that evening Amy got Mr Halliday to paint her a board which said Aquarium, and Neil tacked it up crookedly over the shed door.

  The inmates of the makeshift aquarium were dying like the flies which were so assiduously caught for them, and since several of the boys were interested by now, Ben decided to do something about it.

  The headmaster was surprisingly easy. Ben had him temporarily at a disadvantage, having recently discovered that the late bursar had been getting a higher salary than Ben was. When tackled about it, Mr Morton began to bluster about Ben’s retired pay, and when Ben told him what he thought of that as an excuse, Old Hammerhead had crumpled, and waved a flaccid hand at him and said: “All right, all right. Don’t shout at me. You’re responsible for the salaries. Fix your own the way you want it, but don’t bother me, with exams coming up.”

  Having been detected trying to fiddle Ben out of a fair salary, which may have been his wife’s idea, Mr Morton did not look him in the face for a while, and did not object when Ben asked him if he could buy a glass tank for the aquarium, in order to further this innocent and educational hobby. Ben and six boys went to the pet-shop in town on a wet Saturday afternoon when games were off, and spent a happy two hours setting up the tank and landscaping the bottom of it and filling it.

  A boy called Grover, who knew a lot of things, but never told you where you were wrong until after you had made your mistake, pointed out the next day that nothing would live in the tank without circulating water. Ben spoke to Mr Chivers, the handyman, who was graced on the school’s brochure as Superintendent of Grounds and Buildings. Mr Chivers, who was as sympathetic to the overworked boys as Ben was, did a little plumbing job and hooked up the tank to the water pipes in the garage.

  Mrs Morton had known about the aquarium all along. A group of boys out hunting for glow-worms had seen her limping up to the shed one evening in the dusk, and coming down the hill again with an inscrutable face. She bided her time. When more fishes were caught from the big pond across the main road, which was out of bounds, and Ben bought another tank and Mr Chivers hooked it up, she took action.

  She sent a boy to fetch Ben to her. It happened to be one of the boys who was sharing in the project in the shed. He told Ben glumly: “She’s hopping mad, sir. If it’s about our aquarium, see what you can do about it, won’t you, sir?”

  “I’ll do my best.” Ben endeavoured to combine in his voice both encouragement and enough terseness to indicate that he could not discuss the headmaster’s wife. Walking across the hall to her door, he felt almost sorry for Mrs Morton. She had not beaten him yet, and she was not going to beat him now. He had big plans for the shed. Stokes minor had caught a grass snake, and Neil had begged a ferret from the under-gardener, and the aquarium, if Ben had his way, was going to be enlarged into a full-scale zoo.

  Mrs Morton was standing in her favourite position by the window with the light behind her, leaning on her stick; a stiff, narrow and slightly ominous figure.

  “Mr Francis,” she said, when Lucy had shown Ben in, lingered to hear what she could, and been dismissed with an impatient outward jerk of the cane, “correct me if I am mistaken, but I have been given to understand that one of your functions here is to reduce the operational costs of the school.”

  “Rather,” Ben said, falsely hearty. Was she going to ask him to sit down? She was not. He stood on the hearthrug, put his hands in his pockets, took them out again and settled their restlessness by folding his arms.

  “In the pursuit of which undeniably worthy function”—Mrs Morton talked like this sometimes; it came from living so long among schoolmasters—”you have trodden on a great many toes, and caused a fair amount of understandable dissatisfaction, which you, no doubt, consider justified.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Ben felt uncomfortable before her empty stare. “It had to be done. The chaps don’t like not being able to order their own supplies any more, but they’ll get used to it. All for the best in the long run, and all that sort of thing.” If only she would move, it would be better. But she stood there with her stick, like the statue of Roosevelt in Grosvenor Square, and made him talk as if he were one of the boys at Greenbriars, instead of one of the staff.

  “Very well,” said Mrs Morton. “It had to be done. Then how, may I ask, do you justify this—this what I can only call insane waste of money by having water running day and night for what I can only describe as a silly toy?”

  “Oh, it’s all right.” Ben unfolded his arms and put them back in his pockets. “It’s the same water going round and round. I bought a filter.”

  “You bought a filter.” She limped towards him, and he thought for one wild moment that she was going to lay about him with her cane. “With the school funds.”

  “I’m responsible for the school funds,” he said, glad when she stopped walking and hung her stick on the mantelpiece. “I’ve only spent very little so far, and I———”

  “So far.” She considered him with her Egyptian gaze. “You mean you plan to enlarge on this folly?”

  “Sure. The boys are collecting animals now. They’re going to buy guinea-pigs and rabbits with their allowances instead of baked beans. We’re going to have a zoo. Oh, look here, Mrs Morton.” He grinned at her. Dammit, she was a woman after all, even though she was the headmaster’s wife, and a queer customer at that. “Don’t you understand what a lot of fun the boys are getting out of this?”

  “Fun.” She echoed the word mournfully. “They can have fun in the holidays. Their parents pay us to educate them, not to play with them.”

  “What’s the matter?” Ben asked. “Don’t you want to understand, or do you really not understand?”

  “I understand perfectly.” She sat down in a high-backed chair, which looked as unyielding as herself. “I’ve told you what I think. Now, if you want to dig your own grave, please go ahead and do it. I for one shall not weep at your interment.” She smiled suddenly and relaxed, curving up her eyes. When she suddenly gave up the struggle for no apparent reason, it was more disconcerting than if she had remained unapproachable.

  “Well, if that’s all,” Ben shifted his feet, “I’ll———”

  “Not quite all.” She was still smiling. Her pale, pointed tongue moistened her lips. “Why don’t you have a drink with me now that you’re here, just to show there’s no ill feeling?”

  He did not believe that there was no ill feeling, and he did not want to stay. It was only eleven o’clock in the morning. Ben was always ready to have a drink at any time, but not with her.

  “There is some whisky in the dining-room.” She turned her sleek, narrow head towards the archway between the two rooms and held it in that position, her eyes following him as he went into the dining-room
and opened the doors of the sideboard. “And some soda, if you want it. You can pour me just a small whisky neat. I have felt a little faint ever since I got up, and my disappointment in you has not helped.”

  “You never were anything but disappointed in me, as far as I can see,” Ben said, emboldened by being in the other room.

  He came back with the two glasses, afraid that she would be rigid with offence, but she seemed not to have heard him. She watched the glass all the way into her hand, held it for a moment, looking at it, then took a swallow and shuddered.

  “Like medicine, isn’t it?” She looked up at him, took another drink and set her glass down on a table beside her, keeping her fingers round it.

  “Oh, yes, I hate the stuff.” Ben laughed at his own feeble joke, because she did not. He drank his whisky quickly, wanting to get away. He thought that when he had gone, she would get up and go quickly into the other room, perhaps without the cane, and reach for the whisky bottle with a hand that trembled. He did not want to think this. He did not want her to give herself away to him. He did not want to feel sorry for her.

  He wanted to hate her, because she was trying to undermine ail the things he wanted to do. He knew that she influenced the masters and their wives, who might have left him alone if they had not valued their jobs enough to want to climb on the bandwagon of her approval. They had started by laughing at his aquarium, but when the zoo got going, with the boys building cages and hutches and catching mice and buying rabbits and birds and hamsters, they stopped laughing and began to complain.

  Ben had tried to be amiable with all of them. He got on all right with the desiccated Mr Glynn in his own house, and he had struck up some kind of pub-crawling friendship with Willis and Knight, who knew all the best bars for miles round; but he was not part of the scholastic group, and he felt that he never would be.

  He was not sure whether they were deliberately excluding him from their club, or whether he was just naturally not equipped to qualify. Old man Glynn would chat with him now and then about the old days at Cambridge in his aseptic sitting-room where smoking was forbidden. Willis and Knight talked his own language when they were doing the pubs together in Knight’s old racing Bentley with the outside pipes. But when Ben went into the common-room at tea-time, or at other times for company, it seemed as if they and the other masters conversed in a more esoterically academic way than necessary. Ben could not believe that they always spent their leisure hours discussing medieval church architecture, or the rise and fall of the European coalition under Pitt.