Man Overboard Read online

  “How’s the Commander?” he asked in an offensively hearty tone, which managed to convey a subtle derision of the entire Royal Navy. “You’re going the wrong way, cock,” he said, without asking where Ben was going. “She’s on the next floor. I’ll show you.”

  Ben would have loved to say that he was looking for the manager’s office, or the men’s room, or anywhere except Rose’s dressing-room; but he could not waste any more time stumbling about on his own, so he followed Bob to a peeling green door which had Rose’s name on a card.

  Bob knocked and opened the door in the same movement. Rose was sitting in a yellow silk dressing-gown at the shelf under the long, smeared mirror, doing something to her eyelashes. She pulled the neck of the dressing-gown together, then said: “Oh, it’s you,” and relaxed.

  “Me and the gallant Commander.” Bob stepped aside to let Ben into the room. Rose smiled at him, and Ben stood there just inside the door, smiling back in a foolish kind of trance. Suppose this was a bedroom, his head was saying. And she was sitting at her dressing-table and turned round to you like that with her lips parted. And it was your bedroom too.

  Bob looked from one to the other of them, shrugged his hock-bottle shoulders, and went out, banging the door.

  Ben still stood for a moment transfixed. What would she expect him to do? Then she got up, and he saw that she had her shoes off. She stood before him proudly, with her hands at her sides and her chin tilted, and he was reminded for a split, disconcerting second, of how he had seen her on the television screen, standing before her make-believe husband.

  “Well, Ben,” she said. “Are you afraid to kiss me?”

  Yes, he was afraid. Afraid of finding that, like hothouse strawberries, her lips looked better than they tasted.

  * Chapter 2 *

  In the weeks that followed, Ben was with Rose whenever he could get to London, and both the satin-backed waistcoat and the beige pullover began to accord him the confidential nod reserved for habitués of the studio. Frank Daniels, who was not so uncommunicative that he did not enjoy dropping an odd nugget of gossip here and there, had told a few people at Gosport about Ben’s liaison with the glamorous Rose Kelly, and the word had spread as rapidly as might be expected.

  Ben’s stock went up like a skyrocket. The sub-lieutenants in his course, who had previously shown no more interest in him than in any of the other instructors, now treated him with a new mixture of respect and ribaldry. At a Monday class, and especially on Tuesday afternoons, when Ben was back from his long “Friday While”, the innocently polite enquiries of: “How was London, sir?” were underlaid by a current of subdued but meaningful noises made by the tongue inside the cheek, or the breath between pursed lips.

  When he told Frank Daniels about this, Frank had spread his nostrils in disapproval and said: “I’d run the swine in.”

  “Maybe,” Ben said, “but at least they’ve stopped thinking of me as their palsied grandfather.”

  The ratings at the submarine school also took a new view of Ben. They were more respectful about Rose, but also more forthright. Able seamen would approach him with autograph books. “It seems that you know Rose Kelly, sir. Might I trouble you, next time you see her———”

  “Could you get us a picture of Rose Kelly, sir?”

  “Could you fetch us back a signed photograph—for my little daughter, of course, sir.”

  One of the mess stewards, a grizzled pensioner, took to breathing into Ben’s ears as he set down the soup: “My compliments to Miss Kelly, and will you tell her from me there’s one down here as thinks she’s a angel?”

  All in all, Fort Blockhouse approved, and was proud of Ben. So was Amy’s grandmother, Geneva Hogg, in whose uncomfortable spare bedroom, cluttered with the overflow of clothes and furniture from every other room in the flat, Ben stayed when he went to town. Geneva, an indomitable old widow who was not aware that she looked her age, liked a name as well as anybody. If Ben had to get mixed up with a woman—and God knew the poor man needed a bit of fun—it might just as well be someone famous.

  Amy was glad about Rose, because it brought her father to London more often, but for no other reason. On the two occasions when Ben and Rose had taken Amy out together, Rose had remembered or invented some appointment, and disappeared before the afternoon was half over, and Amy had only then started to enjoy herself. Rose was doing her best, but she had a theatrical way of sinking to one knee and enveloping Amy in scented furs which would make the most oncoming child draw back, and Amy, though poised for her age, was too self-contained to be oncoming.

  Once, when she was seeing Ben off on the train at Waterloo, she said: “If you marry again, do I get any say about who you marry?”

  There was no time to discuss this, because the train began to move, and Amy, who was playing the part of a bride of the first world war, was left waving gallantly on the platform, with her knock knees, and her red beret slipping backwards off the long and beautiful hair which was the best thing Marion could have bequeathed to her.

  Amy was always in Ben’s mind when he and Rose talked of marriage, as they did occasionally in a friendly, unexcited way, as one might plan a possible holiday. Ben had not yet explained to Rose how precarious was his position in the Navy. Rose would not want to hear that. She liked the Navy. That is, she liked her idea of it, a sort of old-fashioned hearts-of-oak conception, trailing power and glory.

  Ben could not see Rose as a Navy wife, living in a flimsy furnished house at Gosport, or a stone cottage at Rothesay; but Rose could see herself quite easily, and she appeared to enjoy the vision.

  She would not give up her work, of course. Having got so far, it would be madness to throw away her success. It would hardly be fair on her public. After all, some of them wrote to say that they had bought television sets for the specific purpose of being able to welcome Rose into their home every Sunday night. Think of that. Ben thought of it, and remembered how he too had toyed with the idea of sending Rose a fan letter the first time he saw her on the screen. He would have sent it if he had known she took the letters so seriously.

  If they were married, she said, it would have to be a week-end kind of marriage. They could have a housekeeper to take care of Amy. And think how proud Ben would be to have a wife who was not just one of the service mares with a limited conversation and a seated skirt to her tweeds.

  Rose’s conversation was also limited—to the subjects which interested her—but her skirts were never seated. Of course Ben would be proud of her, and familiarity had not made her any less dazzlingly beautiful, although she had turned out to be not nearly as sexy as she looked. That might be quite a relief, though, in the long run of marriage. Ben’s experience with Marion had taught him what an oversexed woman could be like as a wife. It had not cured him of the habit of marriage, however. He would like to marry again. He was lonely. He hated his bachelor cabin at Gosport with its all-male smell of shoes and cigarettes. And Amy could not go on living with Geneva for ever.

  But did he want to marry Rose? The world into which she had taken him was so refreshingly different from the stagnant limbo of his present Navy life, and he was still, when he looked at it objectively, so staggered with the idea of himself as the cavalier of a goddess over whom millions of women sighed and millions of men drooled every week, that he was unable to understand clearly whether he was in love with her.

  Sometimes, and especially when he was watching her among other people, he thought that he was. Sometimes, and especially when they were alone together, he thought that he was not.

  Was she in love with him? Impossible to say. Sometimes she said that she was, but it sounded more as if she were speaking words from a play than from her heart. Studying himself in his cabin mirror, which had been hung in the place least likely to get either day or artificial light, Ben wondered what Rose saw in him that she could not have found in any of the men who were queue-ing up behind him for the chance to take her out and to spend more money on her in one day than Ben
made in a week.

  Romantic-looking men, too, like that actor with the swept-bact hair, who would lean from his willowy height to murmur things that made Rose purr, and who could not tell you the time of day without making it sound poetic. Ben’s hair was so thick and unruly that it had to be cut very short all over his head to make him look like any sort of a naval officer. It was so many years since he had seen it long—that time when it had grown out in hospital while his shoulder wound was mending—that he had almost forgotten its rich brown colour. It was nondescript now, like a small, furry animal that camouflages itself among the dead leaves of the hedgerows.

  His skin had never completely lost its tan. That was better than being sickly pale, like Bob Whiting; but his face was too square, not narrowing enough towards the chin to give him that lean-cheeked look a girl like Rose might go for. His eyes were a conventional blue, with stubby lashes and no mysterious depths. His nose—Ben rubbed his chin, wondering whether there was time to shave before he caught the London train—his nose had been his beauty, short and straight and classic, until that chief bosun’s mate in the United States Navy had knocked it sideways for ever in the semi-finals of the middleweight championships at Subic Bay.

  Why does she want to marry you? Ben asked the face in the shadowed mirror. The face could not say.

  That Sunday evening, he was waiting with Rose among the cables and cameras and lights and grey flats of scenery in the big studio where an army of young men in sports shirts and crêpe-soled shoes were making the final preparations for her show. Bob Whiting came down from the little eyrie where he sat before a row of screens, controlling the three cameras and organizing their different shots into the polished production the public saw.

  From up there in the control booth, he talked to the technicians on the floor by means of the headphones they wore, but before they went on the air, his instructions to Rose and the rest of the cast came through the talk-back loudspeaker which everyone in the studio could hear. Bob was not charitable, and he often broadcast in this public way remarks that made the supporting actors feel homicidal. Rose, however, was a valuable property, and had developed enough temperament to match her star position, so when Bob felt like speaking his mind to her, he came down to the floor to do it.

  When he had finished telling Rose that she had hammed her scene with the seducer at the final run through, and she had finished telling him that since his mother had been on the halls, he ought to know what a ham was, Bob patted Ben on his short, stiff hair as if he were a dog, and asked: “How’s old faithful?”

  Although he had grown accustomed to the sight of Ben around the studio, Bob still treated him as if he were a barely permissible joke. He lost no opportunity for veiled innuendo against the Navy or its gallant Commander, whom he now referred to familiarly as the Gall. Comm. The only reason that Ben had not punched him on the nose was that he knew that Bob was vital to the success of Rose’s show. She could not have managed with a less-cunning producer. Bob could get out of her what he knew the public wanted her to give, and he knew her limitations as well as he knew the limitations of his own digestive system.

  Bob had weak eyes, and when the fierce white lights were on, he wore a silly-looking eyeshade with an elastic high up the back of his head, like a snood. He looked sideways at Ben from under the shade and said: “These must be nervous days for you, skipper. When are they going to sling you out?”

  “What do you mean?” Rose turned her headlamp eyes from one man to the other, the false lashes which were part of her television make-up standing up on her lids like a doll’s. “Who’s going to sling Ben out of where?”

  “Their Lordships of the Admiralty. Out of the Navy,” Bob said. “They’re running down their numbers—didn’t you know? In two years, they’ll have cut down the hump of captains by one in three, so your Gall. Comm. is less likely to make captain than to make a bowler hat. Ask him.”

  Damn the man. How did he know so much? Ben could cheerfully have dragged the eyeshade down over Bob’s face and smashed his fist into the lot. Rose’s thickly pencilled eyebrows were drawing together into the nearest she would let herself get to a frown. Her glistening, painted mouth was turned down. “Why didn’t you tell me this, Ben?”

  “Well, there’s nothing in it, really, I———”

  “You never tell me anything. Don’t just stand there and grin at me. You’re so damned inarticulate about anything that really matters.”

  Bob hoped, and Ben feared, that she was going to give him a full-scale trimming on the floor of the studio where in half an hour’s time she would be convincing her enraptured audience that she was a sweet little farm-girl from Cumberland, all but ruined by the city’s lure; but Bob was disappointed, and Ben relieved, by the arrival of the make-up girl to remove Rose for touching-up.

  Bob laughed. “She didn’t like that, did she?”

  “Why couldn’t you mind your own business?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Bob said airily. “It’s about time someone warned her, if you hadn’t. Rose doesn’t read the papers, or talk about things that go on in the great world. It wasn’t very sporting of you, sir, to hook her under false pretences.” He peered at Ben from under the eyeshade. “Or is it possible that even you don’t know what she’s up to?”

  “Oh look here,” Ben said uncomfortably. “I wish you’d shut up and leave Rose and me alone.”

  Turning to get away from Bob he tripped over a large metal junction-box, where several thick cables met in a writhing tangle. Bob caught at his arm to steady him, and turned him round again.

  “Don’t you know about Rose, then?” he asked, not spitefully, but with a sort of baffled surprise that Ben found more unnerving than spite. “Rose thinks that a naval officer is a pillar of respec-ability. That’s why she thinks she’ll marry you. Poor darling, she’s never really known many respectable people. Her family is—well, my God! —and Rose was Well, my God too, until some boy friend pushed her out of Canvey Island and into a modelling job. She came here as part of a shampoo commercial. You know, the girl who’s disgusted with one side of her hair and delighted with the other half.” Bob pulled two faces to illustrate. “Somebody spotted her and tried her in a small part, and she was just so damned beautiful that she never looked back until she found herself where she is now.”

  If Bob had intended to spoil Rose for Ben, he had failed. Ben was experiencing a feeling of tenderness towards her that had never been engendered by the fancy little life history she had thought up for him. Suddenly he wanted more than anything to marry her and make her feel secure.

  “Our Rose may not have much above the ears,” Bob went on, “but she’s cute enough to know that her kind of success doesn’t last long in this game. Television audiences get sated. They get sick of their dream girls and lover boys because they see too much of them. And Rose has no talent. It’s my job to make sure that the dim-wits out there are too dazzled by the looks of her to spot that. But I can’t go on doing it for ever. That’s why she wants what she thinks you could give her. Mrs Commander, Mrs Captain, Mrs Admiral. It wouldn’t be much use to her to be the Mrs of an ex-N.O. who’s out there grubbing for jobs with the rest.”

  As Ben opened his mouth to speak, Bob held up his hand. It was a white, fleshy hand with a huge amber signet ring on one of the fingers. “Don’t curse me,” he said. “You’ll live to thank me. What do you want with Rose for a wife? You won’t be able to look at her all the time, you know. The lights will be out. Haven’t you found out yet that she’s as cold as a witch’s———”

  “Shut up,” Ben said roughly. He felt himself growing hot and shivery at the same time.

  “Well, it’s true,” Bob said calmly. “I’ve tried. But Rose———”

  He made a face. “She just wants to play around a little to satisfy her ego that she’s desirable. Nothing more.”

  “By God,” said Ben, his anger mounting in him like a fever, “if you were in the Navy, I—I’d axe you.” It was the worst thin
g he could think of at the moment.

  “I’d be delighted. I was, for four years in the war. They couldn’t let me out fast enough. I got as far as leading seaman,” Bob said. “Not bad, considering that all my officers loathed me.”

  “Bob!” A disembodied voice materialized through the talk-back. “Are you coming up?”

  Bob snapped his hand to his eyeshade in an impeccable salute. “I might add that the loathing was mutual.” He walked away, weaving a path through the cables and cameras and perspiring men with the neatness of habit.

  Ben sat down on a chair. His legs felt weak, but he was not angry any more. The man’s a swine, he told himself, but his inner voice lacked conviction. For no reason that Ben could understand, there was something about Bob that was beginning to be faintly likeable. Rose liked him too. Perhaps they would all end up in a furnished flat south of the river, with Bob as the friend of the family keeping Rose company while Ben was out pounding the pavements in search of a job.

  The tempo of the studio suddenly quickened. Ben had seen enough television shows produced to recognize that swift transition from “Loads of time before we’re on the air” to “This is it, chaps.” People who had been lounging stood up straight. The cameraman with the broken shoe-lace abandoned his attempts to knot it and climbed up to his perch on the big dolly camera. The last battery of lights was switched on to flood the first set with colourless brilliance. The diverse attentions of some forty men and girls were concentrated in unison towards the island of lights which enclosed the corner of the farmhouse kitchen with the black iron range and the wooden clock and the carefully battered chairs.

  A middle-aged actor, with whom Ben had once had a beer at the studio canteen, sat at the table in a corduroy waistcoat and a collarless shirt, with his boots stuck out over a palpitating sheepdog.