Ben’s mother went away with her sister that evening to spend an indefinite time with her at Reading. Edna’s children were grown-up and married and far away. Her husband was tolerant, and deaf as well, and would not mind all the talking.
Ben spent the night alone at Wavecrest, locked up the house the next morning, and was glad to get away on an early train for London. He telephoned Amy before he left, and she promised to be in the garden when the train went by.
The house would be on the corridor side of the train, and as the familiar bits of scenery came by, Ben went out there and stood by the door. He opened the window and the wind rushed by his face, fresh and exhilarating. After the depression and strain of the days at Wavecrest, he felt buoyant with release. He had no right to feel buoyant when his father was dead and his mother was in the red-brick villa at Caversham, being brought breakfast in bed when she would have preferred to go downstairs, and being asked twenty times a day whether she was all right. A stab of guilt dented the buoyancy for a moment, but failed to puncture it. He was so lucky. He was not dead. He was not in Caversham with Edna.
He was in a train going somewhere, with a face that could not help stretching in a smile to the sharp rushing air. He thought of offices and steel lockers in cloakrooms and swivel chairs at desks and all the indoor things which he must try for and fail to get and try for again until he ended captive in a job.
He could understand why ex-officers sank their gratuity blithely in chicken farms and country hotels and apple orchards. Perhaps he had been wrong in thinking that he was too clever to fall for that sort of thing. He was not clever at all. Not clever enough to find and keep a job that would offer security, success, any kind of position in the world.
Happier being nobody very special, Ella had said, and he had known it to be true then, when she said it. As the side of the iron bridge came up before his window and fell away to reveal the house, he pulled something out of his pocket—Cousin Doris’s voluminous handkerchief—and waved it mightily and shouted into the wind.
They were in the garden, waving like maniacs and jumping up and down, in white shirts, with their hair blowing. Ella and Amy, both unutterably dear to him, and suddenly it was all incredibly simple and nothing mattered any more except that they must be together.
What was he doing to let the train carry him away without convincing her of his love? He must go back and make her understand the truth; that nothing was any good alone, that if they were all together, something would turn up, and whatever it was, however small and unimportant, they could all be happy sharing it.
He went back into the carriage, took down his suitcase and went outside again to stand impatiently by the door. When the train stopped at Woking, he got out and walked down to the end of the platform to wait in the sun. He sat on a baggage truck, swinging his legs, waiting contentedly, with as much optimism as he had ever known, for the slow, stopping train to take him back to Ella.
To ROY
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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Copyright © Monica Dickens 1958
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ISBN: 9781448201143
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Man Overboard Page 31