Man Overboard Read Free

wanted to talk, Ben said: “Frank, an astonishing thing happened to me today.”
    Frank, who had a noble but immobile face with expressionlesseyes, like a bust of Julius Caesar with hair on, kept his head in a listening position to imply, without the bother of words, that Ben might continue.
    “I met a girl,” Ben said, looking down at his blunt fingers and feeling that he was being absurdly boyish. “Oh, not just an ordinary girl. A knock-out. She’s a television star.”
    “Hardly your line, I should have thought,” Frank said, raising his glass to his unlimber Roman lips.
    “I know. That’s what makes it so crazy. I met her in a restaurant. I picked her up, in a way. She didn’t seem to mind.”
    “She wouldn’t,” Frank said, when Ben had told him who the girl was. “I read the tabloids. The woman is——” He waved his hand dismissively. Frank did not use words like hot or sexy.
    “Oh, shut up. You don’t believe that filth, surely.”
    “I have a healthy respect for the printed word,” Frank said flatly. His hand went hopefully towards the
Illustrated London News
, but Ben had not finished.
    “Anyone with a name gets mud slung at them,” he said. “This girl is famous. She’s a great actress.”
    “Have you ever seen her act?”
    “Only for the last few minutes of a play. Have you?”
    Frank nodded without comment.
    “Well, anyway———” Ben was not going to have his glory tarnished. “I met her. She’s wonderful, and I’m going to see her again. And I have this curious feeling—I don’t suppose you’ll understand—that everything’s suddenly changed. I had one gin before dinner. I feel as if I’d had six. I’ve felt like that all day, as if I were on the threshold of something.” He caught a slight throaty tremor in his voice. The curious feeling was with him very strongly. It was like the exalted alcoholic illusion of being on the verge of a great discovery.
    “The only threshold you’re on,” said Frank, picking up the magazine and holding it before him as a barrier against any more disagreeably emotional remarks, “is the door to civvy street. What scheme did you go for?”
    An Admiralty Fleet Order had given officers the chance to apply for premature retirement sooner than stay to grow old in their present rank if they were passed over for promotion. A request for retirement did not mean that you would get it, any more than a request to stay ensured that you would be kept. The Fleet Orderappeared to be a device which would enable Their Lordships, faced with the necessity for getting rid of nearly two thousand officers, to say righteously: “We didn’t axe anyone without giving them the chance to ask for it.”
    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