Man Overboard Read online

  There seemed to be a catch in it somewhere, but no one at Gosport had been able to figure out what it was. The problem of whether you were worse off applying for Scheme A or Scheme B had been tormenting officers and their wives all through October. It seemed that you could not win either way, so Ben had solved the problem by not applying for either scheme, following the safe old Navy doctrine: “Never volunteer for anything.”

  “Poor old Kenneth didn’t apply either,” Frank said tonelessly, without lowering the magazine. “He had a tactful little communication from Their Lordships today. You’re next, I imagine.”

  “Why not you?”

  “Oh, God, they’ll never sling me out. They can’t get enough people to write their beastly text-books. I’ll moulder along until I’m as much a fixture at the Admiralty as the plumbing. And about as antiquated. You’ll see. Only you won’t be around the Admiralty then.”

  Since the reduction programme started, Frank had been prophesying the axe for everyone except himself, as if he were going to be left to run the Navy single-handed. Wetting his fingers, he turned over the pages of the magazine and began to read an article on Micronesian cooking pots. “It’s going to be pretty tough for you boys out there,” he said, without raising his marble eyes. “I hear they’re having a bad time finding jobs, and it’ll get worse as more of you come out. What would you try for?” he asked the question less from interest than from habit, for it was one which officers everywhere were discussing that winter.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Not a chicken farm. Or a stone quarry. Or a non-existent uranium mine. I hope I’d have the sense not to be swindled out of my gratuity. There’ll be a lot of sharks about waiting for the innocent N.O. with his touching faith in human nature. I’d sell something, I suppose. Cars, radios, stocks and shares.”

  “Brushes, more likely,” grunted Frank, but Ben was seeing himself in a narrow-trousered charcoal suit, entertaining Rose on an expense account.

  “It might be rather fun,” he said.

  Frank grumbled at him. “You’re always so damned cheerful. A bloody Merry Andrew. I remember you in the sea that time, hanging on to the rope of a Carley float with your one good hand and laughing your silly head off.”

  “What did you want me to do?” Ben stood up. “Sob on your shoulder? You were too damn wet already.”

  Frank did not bother to answer. Ben said good night and left him there, static and running to fat in the chair where he sat night after night until the steward collecting ash-trays and dirty glasses began to trip over his legs.

  On the staircase, Ben put his hand into his pocket to feel once more the folded picture of Rose which he had torn from the cover of a magazine he had found on the station bookstall. How awful to be Frank. How wonderful at this moment to be Ben.

  When Ben was next in London, Amy did not want to go to the television studio, so Ben went alone. He had written to Rose, and she had told him, in a letter which now lived in his note-case alongside the folded photograph, that he and Amy were welcome to attend a rehearsal of her show. “I shall be delighted,” was what she had written, and by the time he reached the studios, which were a group of converted warehouses in a part of London all but inaccessible by any kind of public transport, Ben had read and re-read into that conventional phrase every possible variation of meaning.

  When he arrived at last, after a ten-minute walk through streets where children played in the shadow of blank walls topped with jagged glass, and mysterious small parts were being made in flimsy, humming sheds, Rose’s rehearsal was over. She was drinking gin in a small, bare room to which Ben was conducted through a mass of passages by a man with no collar or tie, and a brown waistcoat which some needlewoman in the family had rebacked in a vivid sateen.

  In spite of the letter from Rose, and Ben’s continuing belief that his life had taken a turn for the better, there was still, as the waistcoat charged upstairs two steps at a time and scuttled round corners as if bent on shaking him off, the possibility that she would not be there. Things like that happened, as Ben knew all too well. The more you looked forward to something, the less likelihood there was of its ever coming to pass, or if it did, of its coming up to scratch. Twisting himself sideways in the narrow corridors to pass harried men with bright-brown moustaches and girls with hair trussed up in rubber bands, Ben was not thinking bitterly about life’s disappointments. To an optimist, they were never so bad as an outsider might think, unless a misplaced sympathy made them so.

  That was one of the things that Marion had never been able to understand. When some eager scheme of Ben’s misfired, or when it rained when he had been looking forward to tennis, she had worn herself out saying What a shame, when he was already halfway to a new scheme, or cheerfully telephoning people for bridge. Ben never knew whether she was aware of how irritated he was by her unwanted solicitude, or whether she genuinely…. But this was no time to be thinking about Marion, when the half-and-half waistcoat was skidding to a stop, crying triumphantly: “Here you are, Captain!” and opening a door to show him Rose, coming towards him with her wide smile and both hands held out.

  There were other people in the room with her. Rose introduced him to them emphatically as Commander Francis, and he had the idea that she would have been gratified if he had turned up with three gold rings on his sleeve. The others seemed to be actors and actresses, or people connected in some way with her show, but Ben was scarcely aware of them, for Rose blotted out all other life for miles round.

  She was wearing a white sweater and a tight black skirt. She was more beautiful even than Ben had remembered. In that dingy room with the damp, green walls and dusty carpet, among the little group of unremarkable people with limp handshakes and indoor complexions, Rose glowed like an incandescent gas mantle.

  Ben stood bemused and happy while she fetched him a warm drink in a small glass, the wrong shape for gin and tonic. She was quite possessive with him, and so the other people accepted him with no more than the lift of an eyebrow, the downward tweak to the corner of a mouth. If Rose wanted to give the impression that she knew him quite well, that was fine. Ben played up, and found himself talking to her with some ease, or rather listening, since Rose did most of the talking in any company. She did not mention Amy, so Ben did not bring out the story he had prepared to cover up the child’s lack of interest.

  Rose seemed glad to see him. It was fantastic, better than anything he had dreamed when he had imagined himself watching her in the studio from a distance, waiting for the bounty of a word of recognition. The first drink had been strong, because the tonic water was running short. Ben accepted a second, and his brain began to shout noiselessly: “This is terrific. She likes me!” His brain was standing straddle-legged on a wall, telling the open-mouthed crowds below that Rose Kelly was still standing by him, still talking to him, when she could have been talking to any of these other people in the room, who worked with her and were her kind.

  The door opened. Heads turned, Ben’s among them, as the producer, Bob Whiting, came in. He wore offensive pale suede ankle-boots, and a pistachio bow-tie, even narrower than the one he had worn in the restaurant.

  “Aha!” cried Bob Whiting, so that all the room might hear. “The gallant Commander. How are all those gorgeous sailors?” He affected a perverted lisp, and there was some laughter, which sounded sycophantic. He was evidently quite a big wheel at the studio. Someone brought him a drink, and Ben noticed that the others glanced at him out of the side of their corner conversations, as if checking his mood.

  “Well, Rosie,” Bob Whiting stood in front of Rose and Ben, with his childish mouth smugly pursed. “So it wasn’t just ships that pass in the night, I see.”

  “Don’t be a stinker,” Rose said lightly. “Did you get that straightened out, about the close-up? You were right about the man on that camera. See if you can’t get him changed next week. Please Bob?” Her saucer eyes appealed to him confidently. She liked him, that was the terrible thing. Ben was afraid that they were g
oing to slip into the kind of easy, esoteric exchange he had watched them enjoying in the restaurant, and he was about to climb down off his mental wall and say: “Sorry, everybody. I didn’t make it after all,” when Rose took some keys on a silver chain out of the pocket of her skirt and said: “How about getting the car, Ben? It’s at this end of the car park. I’ll meet you at the door.”

  Had she merely forgotten to tell him, or did she not want Bob Whiting to know that Ben did not know what kind of car she had? No matter, Ben took the keys as nonchalantly as if he had handled them many times before, found his way down the staircases and along the baffling corridors, and nodded good night to the front view of the waistcoat, crumpled over the evening paper. In the car park, he tried the ignition key in the dashboard of all the cars that looked as if they were owned by a woman until it fitted and turned in a pale-blue coupé with an endless bonnet and a rear seat designed for midgets.

  Backing it out, he scraped a bumper with a noise that threatened to bring not only Rose but the whole studio running out to see where the crash was. Nobody came. Ben moved the car forward to free it, and when he had backed it clear, got out to see the damage. This was his lucky day. Rose’s car was unharmed. The car he had struck, an ancient, hump-shouldered model with vulnerable bits of rusted metal sticking out at both ends, had the front bumper twisted out and up like a wild eyebrow. Glancing round, Ben kicked the bumper roughly back into shape, and climbed quickly back into Rose’s car as a figure in a muffler and duffle coat turned into the car park, obviously destined for the heap of old iron.

  Rose was already at the door, in a fur coat that looked like mink, when Ben drove cautiously up. Before he could get out of the low seat to open the door for her, she had stepped into the car beside him, eclipsing the smell of new leather with the heady, mysterious scent which emanated from her hair and her skin and her furs.

  “Where are we going?” Ben asked.

  “I thought you were taking me to supper.”

  “Of course.” Mentally he reviewed the contents of his notecase. Would they take a cheque at the kind of place where Rose would want to go? The average naval officer was not often enough in town or in funds to become known at any of the smart places, and Ben was an average naval officer. There was his club, of course———My God, no. He laughed inwardly at the idea of taking Rose to that temple of muted propriety, where people would not even turn to stare at the dazzle of her, but would keep their heads bent over the sole or the steak and kidney, and talk in rapid undertones, to prove she was not there.

  No, they would not be eating now. They would be sitting with glasses of port and crème de menthe, while the barman in the ladies’ lounge yawned behind his hand and wondered whether he should try for a job somewhere that was not so slow, and where Admirals’ wives would not address him as Steward.

  “I’m afraid it’s too late to get anything to eat at my club,” Ben said, swinging the racy car through the unfamiliar streets under Rose’s guidance. But she had already planned that they should go to “a funny little place I belong to”. In a mews in Knightsbridge, they went into a narrow room like a railway carriage, which had tables along the side walls, with a three-piece coloured band knocking themselves out in an alcove.

  The whole place was so small and the band was so loud that conversation was not easy. Ben did not mind. He was content just to sit beside Rose and get the scent of her and the occasional touch of her bare arm on his sleeve. She was busy at first looking round and waving to people she knew; but after the drinks came and they had eaten their melon and were having a second drink while they waited for more food, Rose suddenly took a deep breath, stared ahead of her and said: “Tell me about your wife.”

  Ben was startled. He had not realized that Rose was interested enough to want to know where she stood. With the noise of the band, he could not even be sure that she had said that.

  “Sorry?” He bent towards her.

  Rose frowned at having to repeat a question which had cost her some slight effort to ask. As she repeated it more loudly, the band abruptly stopped playing and a woman two tables away turned with interest to see who had said that to whom.

  “I’m not married,” Ben said quietly, and the listening woman turned away in disappointment because she could not hear.

  Rose’s face cleared. She relaxed against the back of the seat, studying Ben with her wide-open eyes. Then she frowned. Her frown was no more than a slight drawing together of her eyebrows, which barely wrinkled her creamy forehead. “But the child———”

  “My wife is dead. She died three years ago in a car smash.”

  “How dreadful for you.” Rose did not look away, as most people do when surprised with tragedy, but continued to stare at him. If she had read the newspaper stories about Marion three years ago, she had forgotten them, and Ben was not going to remind her. He had never discussed the truth with anyone except Marion’s mother. If he ever mentioned Marion, even to his own parents, who knew the truth and preserved it like a chronic sore, he always paid her the belated and unmerited tribute of talking as if her death had been the sad loss which Rose assumed it to be.

  “Amy lives with her grandmother,” he said. “She has a big ugly old flat in Bayswater. That’s where I stay when I’m in London.” He began to tell Rose about Marion’s mother and what a wonderful woman she was, but Rose did not want to hear about Geneva Hogg and how much she had done for Amy.

  “Let’s dance,” she said, as the band began to jerk and thump again.

  Although he guessed that the waiter bearing two steaming savoury dishes through the swing door was headed for their table, Ben stood up at once and followed Rose to the dance floor. Cold food was a small price to pay for the chance of holding Rose in his arms.

  When they danced, she was too tall for him. Ben danced well enough, but Rose soon said that she was hungry, and led him back to the table. Later, after several more drinks, they danced again, and Rose took off her shoes, placing them neatly on the little platform beside the grinning drummer, and some of the other women laughed and took off their shoes and danced in their stockings.

  Like this, Ben and Rose could dance cheek to cheek. Her cheek was like a rose, he told her, and she nestled her firm breasts closer against him and did not seem to think him as banal as he sounded to himself.

  When the dance was over, Rose went back to the table with her shoes in her hand. It was all right for her to take her shoes off here. People did that kind of thing. But they could not always come here. What would happen if Ben took her to the Savoy or the Berkeley, or any of the places he knew to take girls? She could not take her shoes off at the Savoy.

  When they were in her flat, and it was so late that Sloane Street lay as silent under the windows as a deserted canal, Rose took off her shoes again so that she was the right height to kiss.

  Later, Ben staggered through the pillared doorway that faced the wrong end of the Broad Walk, and shying away from the dark cavern of the lift, climbed the stairs to the second floor where Geneva Hogg lived in dilapidated disorder. Amy was sitting in the kitchen in a woollen dressing-gown with her hair in plaits, waiting for him. She did things like that sometimes. It was unnerving. While she heated the milk for the cocoa he did not want, Ben went to the sink and surreptitiously wiped the lipstick off his face with a smelly dishcloth.

  When Ben went to the television studio the next evening, the man in the satin-backed waistcoat had been replaced by a much less obliging person in a beige pullover the same colour as his hair.

  “Miss Kelly said for you to go along to her dressing-room,” he said in a sceptical way, as if no good could come of it. “Show you the way?” The idea was ridiculous. “I’ve got my job to do here. There may be a boy.” He put his sandy head round the corner of the stone corridor. “Boy!” he shouted without conviction.

  No boy came, so Ben set off alone, following vague directions. In spite of, or because of what had happened last night, he was more nervous than he had been yester
day. Then he had only been afraid that Rose would not be there. Now he knew she would be there, because she had her show tonight, but having had time to regret the whole thing, would she still want to see him?

  Last night had been—well, odd, in a queer, unsatisfactory way, Ben had seldom yet had cause to doubt his adequacy in the preliminary skirmishes of love. Marion had not complained. The Portsmouth hacks and the desperate thirties had been all too easily excited, and unwilling to stop outside the limits of compromise. But Rose had been satisfied with so little. Ben had only just been warming up when she pushed him happily away and breathed: “Darling—now I shall sleep tonight!” and moved towards the alabaster box on the mantelpiece where she kept a comb and lipstick secreted, as she did in every room of the lavish flat, including the kitchen.

  It had been marvellous, of course, just to have held her in his arms and to have had the few disciplined kisses which were more than he had dreamed of; and yet, as he hummed downwards in the polished lift, which would trap you with its automatic doors if you were not nippy, he had found himself asking, like a virgin bride: “Is that all?”

  Soberly the next day, it came to him that the disappointment was not his, but Rose’s. Although she had been polite enough to simulate content, she had been disappointed in him. She had only asked him to make the arduous trek out to the studio today so that she could tell him to go away and leave her alone.

  Perhaps it was just as well Ben could not find her. Wandering lost in the inner recesses of the labyrinth, he was rescued by, of all people, Bob Whiting. Bob had a sheaf of papers in his hand and was going somewhere very fast, but he stopped and pivoted in the suede boots, and gave Ben a slap on the back that nearly drove his spine into his breast-bone.