Man Overboard

by Monica Dickens

  Encouraged by Mrs Morton, they now never missed an opportunity to snipe at Ben’s zoo. If a boy’s marks fell below the average, they knew where to lay the blame, if the boy was one of Ben’s zoo-keepers. For boys who had pets in the shed, they delighted in finding some excuse to keep them in after hours, so that they would miss feeding-time.

  The zoo was to be a show-piece for Sports Day. Ben and the boys had made up their minds about that. They now had about twenty-five pets of various kinds, besides the motley pond life in the tanks. There were two wire-netting runs outside the shed, and inside there were pens and cages and a glass-walled box labelled The Pit of Death for the harmless grass snakes which Stokes minor caught faster than they died. Ben was enormously proud of what he and the boys had done, and if it meant spending a little money on wood and glass and chicken wire and paint, it was well worth it.

  The masters did not think so. Mr Horrocks, who was the assistant headmaster, said to Ben: “Look here, Francis, I think you’re taking a gross liberty, if you ask me. You’ve had the infernal cheek to tell us all we’re wasting money, and here you go spending it like water on a ridiculous collection of tadpoles and white mice.”

  “I’m spending it on the boys,” Ben said. “That’s the difference.” Mr Horrocks was one of those who had been making a good thing out of his deals with a wholesale stationery house, and he knew that Ben knew it.

  “The boys got along very well before you came on the scene,” Mr Horrocks said. He was a moon-faced man in round pince-nez, with a voice like a creaking door.

  “I don’t think so.” Since his zoo had become such a success, Ben was not caring so much what he said to people at the school who were against him. The boys were with him. That was what counted. “I think you all bother too much about what the boys do in the classroom and not enough about what they do outside.”

  If Mr Horrocks had been the choleric type, he would have turned crimson. As it was, his face remained the colour of Caerphilly cheese, but his pince-nez quivered a little, as if they had a life of their own. “Since you know absolutely nothing whatever about the education of small boys,” he said, “I consider that you have gone too far.” He was not a man capable of strong language, but he flung his head backwards and sideways and looked down his nose, as if he had said something very challenging.

  “If you feel that way, why don’t you complain to Mr Morton?”

  “I have, of course, and I shall again.”

  “It won’t get you anywhere though,” Ben said. “Since I told the old bird what a big hit this was going to make with the parents on Sports Day, he’s all for it.”

  “He is?” Mr Horrocks lowered his head and pin-pointed Ben through his lenses. Although he knew that Old Hammerhead agreed with everyone to their face and then decried them to the next comer, he did not know whether to believe this. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, and the Head, if you have trapped him into thinking that,” he said with a thin smile, “but I don’t believe the parents will be remotely interested. There will be so many other attractions. The sports, of course. The standard of athletics is very high this year, I understand. The concert after prize-giving. Quite a feature of our annual roustabout, as you will discover. And then, you know, we all have our displays in our own departments. The art gallery in the studio, the geology collection, the specimens in the lab. My own elaborate scale model of the first Pilgrim Settlement at Plymouth, Massachusetts, should attract more than a small amount of attention, I dare to think.”

  “I see,” Ben said. “You’re jealous.”

  “If you are a typical example of an officer in Her Imperial Majesty’s forces, I’m glad my son was too delicate to do his national service.” Mr Horrocks’ head, lowered with false modesty while he spoke of his Pilgrim Settlement, had gone up again to the duelling position. “You are very uncivil, Commander Francis. You are also a—a———” he could not say a damn fool, so he said: “a silly ass. With all this childish nonsense about a zoo, you are obviously playing for popularity with the boys. I’ve seen it before —masters who made fools of themselves because they wanted to be popular, and found that they were only despised. The boys are not your concern. Take my advice and leave them alone.”

  “I can’t,” Ben said lightly. “They’re the only decent thing about this place.”

  Except Ella. Ella was all right. She took no part in the petty squabbles within the school. She had all she could do to handle the squabbles among her own domestic staff. When Ben came to her on the premises to rail against the anti-zoo faction, she said: “Please don’t drag me into it”; but in her own home, she listened to him, and let him voice his enthusiasms and his vexations, and was stoutly on his side, and had promised to lend Neil one of the puppies to display to his father in the zoo.

  If Neil’s father did not come, it would be a major tragedy. Neil was not running or jumping or throwing anything in the sports. He had neither instrument nor voice for the concert. He had not won any prizes, and none of his paintings were displayed in the studio. But it was he who had started the zoo with his frog.

  He was head keeper, and had an armband sewn by Ella to prove it. All the boys who were zoo keepers had armbands, for Ben knew the value of even the hint of uniform, but Neil’s was the widest and the brightest colour and had the words Head Keeper lettered indistinctly round it in marking ink.

  Sports Day was to be a big social occasion, with a buffet lunch in the dining-hall and a slap-up tea in a marquee. Ben was overwhelmed with organizational details, but the last garnishing touches to the zoo were the most important.

  Mrs Halliday insisted on bringing Amy’s pony over in her trailer, and Ben had to borrow sheep hurdles from a farmer to make a pen for it. Its name was Rusty, but Amy had rechristened it Phoenix on the day of the fire. Mr Halliday painted another board, and the pony’s name was nailed to the hurdles as if it were a racehorse. The handyman’s sister, who had been brought over from her nearby smallholding to see the zoo, had screamed gratifyingly at the snakes, clapped her hand over her mouth to smother her exuberant delight at the whole project, and had come back next day with a pair of bantam hens.

  “A surprise for the boys,” she said, laughing again and stifling the laugh in an embarrassment of generosity.

  Ben put the bantams into a hutch with a suspicious rabbit, and began to make a coop for them out of a wooden box, working quickly to have the hens installed by the time the zoo keepers were let out of school and ran and hopped and shrieked and hurled each other joyfully to the ground, coming up the hill at feeding-time.

  Squatting with his sleeves rolled up and a bunch of nails in his mouth, Ben realized how happy he was, and thought that perhaps Mr Horrocks was right. He was getting childish. It was said that Admirals began to go senile after they retired and suddenly had no authority. Perhaps the same thing happened to Commanders.

  “I can’t do it, Commander, I really can’t.” Tilly Wicket sat down at the end of the long kitchen table and put her bad foot up on a little stool. “Even with extra help—and what kind of help can you get round here that’s any more use than a wet Saturday in March—I think it’s too much to ask.”

  “I thought nothing was too much for you.” Ben sat down and ran his finger along a knife scar in the table.

  “It didn’t used to be, but I’m not the same this term. Maids have come and gone here, and kitchen porters and the like, and they’ve said to me: ‘We admire that you can make do with it, Mrs Wicket, but that woman will get you down in the end.’ Well, now she has. My lady has overstepped the bounds this time, and if you won’t tell her, I will.”

  “Oh, I’ll tell her,” Ben said. “It will mean a row, but I’d rather she had it with me than with you.”

  He did not mean that he thought he could win where Tilly could not, but he would rather Mrs Morton were rude to him than to Tilly. He could take it. She had already called him a penny-pinching, ignorant prig because he had said that her elaborate plans for the lunch and tea on Sports Day we
re too extravagant Now when he told her that it was not fair to expect Tilly to rise to such heights of culinary display, she could only play a variation on the same theme.

  He was not afraid of Mrs Morton any more. He thought he had got her number. She was trying to impress the parents. That was all right. Everyone was doing that, including Ben with his zoo, but Mrs Morton’s plans for lobster salad and chicken in aspic and foie gras en croute were not only to make a good impression, but to cover up the truth of how badly the boys fared on any day that was not Sports Day.

  When their sons told them, hanging round the cars as they drove off, that the meals all term had been lousy, the parents would dismiss it as automatic schoolboy grumbling. “Look at the spread Mrs Morton put on today,” they would say. “The woman’s a genius. If that’s any indication of how you’re fed every day, your standards of lousy are different from mine, my boy. When I was a lad———”

  And the mothers would say: “I think you must be exaggerating, darling. The lunch and tea were marvellous. If Mrs Morton can cater like that for hundreds of extra people, it must be easy for her to feed a hundred boys well. You don’t look exactly starved, either.”

  “Well, I am,” the boy would say. “There’s such a thing as filling you up with bread and potatoes and porridge.”

  And the fathers and mothers would laugh indulgently and drive off in their shiny cars, confident in the fullness of lobster and foie gras and excellent chablis that they were lucky to have their boys in the care of such an exceptional woman as Mrs Morton.

  She would be gracious and impressively ladylike on Sports Day. Ben had seen her at that game with parents who came on Sundays. She would fool them all that she was the right kind of cultured, well-bred, sensitive woman to have as headmaster’s wife, and she would take all the credit for the magnificent hospitality, although it would be Tilly’s labour and Ben’s ability somehow to absorb the staggering cost into his budget that would have made it possible.

  If she were allowed to get away with it, that was. Ben had not given up the fight yet, and he advanced on Mrs Morton in defence of Tilly.

  “She’s done it before,” Mrs Morton said. “She can do it again.”

  “She’s never been asked to do so much before. She told me.”

  “If you believe everything that fat megalomaniac tells you, you are not as shrewd as you are always trying to make me believe.”

  “It’s too much for her.”

  “You’re heading for trouble when you start coddling the staff. If she doesn’t like it, she can go. I can get another cook.”

  “You’ll never get another who works as hard as Tilly.” And puts up with you as dietitian, Ben added in his head.

  “Must we discuss the servants?” Mrs Morton smoothed her hair with stiff, turned-back fingers. “I find it very boring.”

  “All right. We’ll discuss the lunch again. I haven’t changed my mind. It’s ludicrous, Mrs Morton. The school’s in debt. We can’t afford it.”

  “We were always able to afford it before you came.”

  “Not on a scale like this. No, not only what Tilly told me. I’ve seen the records. What are you trying to do—upset my budgeting so that you can prove at the end of term that I haven’t saved the school any money?”

  “You’re being childish, Mr Francis.” Why did everyone call him that? Was it because they had been among small boys for so long that the word nuisance was synonymous with child? “A little extra expense isn’t going to matter once a year.”

  “Once a year. That’s the point. If we’re going to spend extra money on food, we should be spending it on the boys, not on their bloated parents, who can get this kind of food any time they want by paying for it.”

  “You don’t understand anything about running a school, do you?” Mrs Morton looked at him, not with anger, but with a kind of distant pity for his ignorance.

  “I’m beginning to understand a lot,” Ben said, “and much of it I don’t like. Now please give me the menus you’ve made out for this feast, and we’ll revise them together.”

  “We’ll do no such thing.”

  “All right, then I’ll plan the menu myself and get the orders in.”

  She smiled at him in such a superior way that he added: “And look here, Mrs Morton, if you try to cheat me by ordering all this fancy stuff yourself, I shall tell the tradesmen that you have no authority to give orders, and they’ll have to take the stuff back. That’s going to make you look just ducky, isn’t it?”

  “Just ducky.” She fixed him with her eye. He tried to stare her out, but she was looking at him as if he were a boy in the Lower Fourth with egg on his tie and ink in his hair, so he turned and walked off with what he hoped was a stern and resolute stride. Now she could go away and get drunk.

  When Mr and Mrs Horrocks had the week-end off, Ella had to sleep in their room at the school, in their bed, which was comfortable enough, but offensively connubial when you considered who normally shared it.

  Since Mrs Horrocks was the matron, they did not live in a separate house, but in a three-roomed flat at the top of one of the wings of the Old Building, where Mrs Horrocks had her sick-bay and her little dispensary stocked mostly with Milk of Magnesia and ear-drops, and where she could supervise the corridor where the smallest boys slept, three to a room.

  The boys enjoyed Ella’s occasional nights at the school, because she would gather them all together in one room and read them a story, and she did not mind if they were eating chocolate in bed when she came to turn their lights out. Sometimes she forgot to turn their lights out, and Mrs Morton, seeing from her side window that there were squares of light on the garden where no squares of light ought to be, would call down one of the older boys and send him to Ella with an order disguised as a message.

  On the night after his last battle with Mrs Morton about the lobster and chablis, Ben was out in the garden late, walking back from the building where the maids slept.

  Apart from a few steadies like Tilly and Lucy, who had been at the school for so long that they had forgotten any other way of life, the maids were always changing. The local girls got married, or got fed up, or got pregnant. Living-in staff were hard to find, and the numbers often had to be made up from migrant labour: strange, feckless girls who would steal anything if they got the chance, slow men, beaten down by misfortune or beer, sad-eyed women who were getting away from somewhere they did not want to be, negligent girls on the way to somewhere else.

  They came and went, a constant worry to Ella, and also to Ben, who was responsible for hiring them and for finding replacements when they slipped cable in the night, with or without spoons or articles of someone else’s clothing.

  He had recently engaged a girl who did not seem right even by the low standards he had to make shift with. She looked like a prostitute, and a bargain-priced one at that, and she had not been in the place a week before Lucy informed Mrs Morton, who informed Ben, censoriously, as if it were his fault, that her appearance was not deceptive.

  Since the girl was working well enough, and it seemed hardly worth looking for another so near the end of term, Ben made a trip to her room every night to make sure that she was not entertaining a man again. He hated to have to open the door and look in on the girl in bed, and the first night he had done so, she had welcomed him delightedly, until he explained the purpose of his visit. After that when he opened the door, she would favour him at the top of her voice with some colourful opinions of his virility, so he left his visits until as late as possible in the hope that she would be asleep.

  This night, it was after eleven when he left the snoring lump of girl in the bed which looked as if it was never made. He wanted to go up to the zoo with his torch to visit the pets, but they were so instantly aware and eager for food when you woke them that it seemed unfair to disturb them. He walked past the front of the Old Building on his way to the Glynn’s house. All the lights were out, except in Mrs Morton’s drawing-room.

  The curtains were
not drawn, which was unusual, for Mrs Morton generally pulled them sharply across before the red sun had given its last wink through the trees on the hill. Ben stood for a minute or two and watched the window from a distance.

  He imagined that he did not know the interior, nor who was in it, so that the lighted room looked like a room in a proper home, inviting, secure, because he was an outsider looking in.

  If he stepped closer and looked right into the room, the attraction would vanish. The room would repel rather than invite him, because of all the times he had stood on that hearthrug and tussled with Mrs Morton in that disturbing, unsatisfactory way which left him not knowing whether he had won or not.

  He felt impelled to sneak up and see what she was doing now. It was unfair, and also dangerous, because she would have him fired if she caught him, but the temptation to catch that inscrutable figure unawares was too great to resist.

  He stepped softly forward over the lawn, holding his breath as he crossed the gravel drive on tiptoe, then stood in a flower-bed against the wall of the house and looked in sideways. There was no one in that end of the room, which contained the high-backed chair where Mrs Morton usually sat. Ducking down, he passed beneath the window and slid a glance into the other end of the room. No one there either. She had gone to bed and left the light on. Wasting the school’s electricity. He planned words of reprimand for the morning, knowing he would not say them.