Man Overboard Read Free Page A

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. Abloody 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 topass 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