Man Overboard (22 page)

The producer, a dynamic type in giant horn-rimmed spectacles, slapped his thigh at what Bob told him and gave them both a drink. “Are you sure he’ll talk?” he asked Bob, as if Ben were not there. “We don’t want another lemon like that woman who put the holes in processed cheese. Have you got time to rehearse him?”

“We’ll play it by ear. He’ll be all right. I know old Ben. He’s solid, aren’t you?”

“Possibly, but look here, Bob, I don’t think I want to———”

“Of course you do. It’s your big chance. Get a little public sympathy for all the poor devils who’ve been kicked out of the Services and can’t get a decent job.”

“I don’t think the Admiralty———”

“Who cares? They should have thought of this before they started swinging the axe. Don’t be selfish, Ben old boy. There are men out there who need you, and by ten o’clock tonight you’ll be a ruddy hero.”

“I’ll be out of a job if the manageress has a television set. When the débutante———”

“Don’t ramble. I want your mind on this.” When Bob was on the job, his voice lost its querulous drawl. “England expects, and all that sort of filth. We’ll get you an apron from the canteen. The viewers will eat it up. Come on.” He put down his glass. “I want to catch Rose’s show.”

“I hear she’s terrible,” the producer said, not without satisfaction.

“So do I,” said Bob happily. “That’s why I want to see it.”

He took Ben to a small, hot room where a television set was playing loudly to some empty chairs and a table covered in brown serge. Bob turned down the volume and they sat down and waited for the familiar sentimental music that would lead in
The Rose Kelly Show
.

“Maybe you shouldn’t see it,” Bob said, “if you’re still doing the moth and candle act, but I suppose it will do you no harm to know the worst. I think the poor darling has really laid an egg this time.

“Yes, yes.” He clapped his hands softly, as the announcer appeared on the screen and began to read, with a controlled sympathy worthy of the B.B.C., a letter from a miner’s wife whose husband had been trapped in a pit disaster. “There she goes. This beastly thing has been in the files for ages, but I would never let her do it because it was much too grim for her to handle, and she couldn’t get within a mile of the accent. As soon as she got me off the show, she persuades Pete to let her do it. You know how Rose persuades, and Pete is so astonished to find himself suddenly
producing a major show that he hasn’t got her number yet. Or else he’s sleeping with her. I don’t know.”

Ben said: “Shut up,” not knowing what else to say.

“I know, I know. You love her, and all that vomit. But if you marry her, don’t ask me round unless she’s out. Rose and I are through. After doing everything she could to push me off her show, she was so mad with me for leaving it when she found out how much of the show was mine that she tried to make some trouble for me with the high-ups. It didn’t get her anywhere, but you can’t expect me to send flowers and good-luck telegrams to her dressing-room. Look at that! Oh, my God, look at that.”

He covered his face with his hands as the announcing was faded discreetly from the screen and Rose was revealed standing bowed before an iron gate, with black stockings on her shapely legs, and her huge eyes, with the glycerine already forming tears on the lids, staring at the camera from beneath the decoratively arranged folds of a woollen shawl.

Bob peeped through his fingers, moaning lightly, then took down his hands and smacked them on his knees. “She’s furious,” he announced. “I can tell it. I know that face better than my own, and I like mine better. Something’s going wrong. Look, that other woman moved right in front of her as she began to speak. They’ve botched the whole thing. She turned on the tears too soon, and now she isn’t going to have anything left when the man comes up to the other side of the gate and it isn’t her man. Oh, God, she’s so tied up with the accent, she’s going to muff her lines.” He leaned forward and hitched his chair closer to the set. “This is going to be good.”

Ben sat and watched the play in silence. In spite of the drab costume, Rose was as beautiful as always, and considering how wrong the part was for her, he thought that she was doing nobly. Bob kept muttering gleefully: “God, she’s bad. She knows it. She’s livid. I hope the critics are getting this.”

Damn Bob. It was his fault that Ben had not been able to see Rose before the show and make her happy by telling her how he was working for her. If she was worried, he could have given her confidence by saying: I love you. What woman would not act better if someone said that to her just before she went on the air? He must get to her before he himself was put to the ordeal of the cameras. How had he let himself be railroaded into this? Damn
Bob again. But if Rose were to tell him: I love you, he would not care how much of a fool he made of himself.

But she would not be thinking about love. She would be thinking about her show. If she was satisfied with her performance, he could tell her how marvellous she had been. If she was depressed, he could console her and tell her that it was everyone else’s fault. His fault, perhaps. He should not have stayed away from her for so long. Perhaps she was pining. …

No, no, said the voice from the third row of the empty stalls, listening to the dress rehearsal of his thoughts, now you’re going too far.

“She stinks,” Bob said with satisfaction, as the commercial blasted its way in half-way through the play, leaving Rose in the chapel in widow’s weeds.

“I thought,” said Ben, louder than necessary, “that she was jolly good.”

Bob stared at him, and Ben kept his eyes on the screen, feigning absorbed interest in a working diagram of what would happen to the tubes and little doors of his digestive system if only he would put a certain pill into it.

Before the play was over, Bob switched off the set, dusted off his hands as if Rose were on them and became business-like, for
Who’s Doing What
would be on the air in forty minutes.

“I want to see Rose,” Ben said.

“Later, later. No time now.” Bob hustled him off to the makeup room where Ben enjoyed the attentions of a cool-handed girl who sent him away with unnaturally dark eyebrows and a complexion that looked as if he had spent the last six months in the Mediterranean. In the canteen the clean aprons were too white for the television cameras but the cook found a dirty one crumbled at the bottom of a laundry basket yellowed with age and tea stains.

It was too long for Ben. When he took off his jacket and hitched the apron high above his waist it still covered his shoes.

“I could never work in this,” he complained.

“That’s right,” said the cook, pursing her mouth and speaking to him as a colleague. “Nor could I.”

“Stop being so professional,” Bob said. “It’s perfect. The sloppier the better, in contrast to what you looked like as a naval officer.”

“Look here.” Ben’s hands went behind him to untie the apron.

“I don’t think I like this.”

Bob lit a cigarette. “O.K.,” he said, breathing smoke through his curved nostrils like a delicate dragon. “So you’re going to let down two thousand unemployed naval officers. I’m glad I wasn’t in your submarine, Ben. I’d have worn a Mae West all the time.”

“Don’t tease him,” said the cook, not understanding, but knowing Bob well enough to know what he was at. “It’s only stage fright. Don’t worry, dear.” She tightened the knot of the apron again and gave Ben a little pat behind. “You’ll be lovely. I wish I had your chance. I’ve been here two years, and they’ve never even asked me to read the weather forecast.”

In the corridor, Ben started for the staircase which led to Rose’s dressing-room, but Bob switched him round a corner and through the heavy door which led to the studio. By the time the floor manager had shown him where to stand before the cameras, and had tested his voice and told him what his cue would be to come on to the set, the huge studio clock with the thin red hand sweeping away the seconds like the wing of death showed eight minutes to air time.

Ben sat on a piano stool by the wall and prayed that Rose would not be gone before his part in the programme was over. Let her take a long time removing her make-up. Let her stop for a drink with someone. If she does go, let her not go out to supper. Ben would rush straight to the flat without taking off his Mediterranean face, and if she was not there he would squat in the corridor like a Maltese beggar. If she came home with the new producer, Pete —well, Pete would have to clear out. If Pete would not go, Ben would throw him out. Let Pete not be a heavy-weight.

“You’re on the show, aren’t you?” A small, thin woman with make-up running into lumps and crevasses on her pinched face, and hair that was either a wig or had not been combed out since she left the hairdresser, sat down on the other end of the piano stool. “What do
you
do?” She looked down at the folds of dirty apron which swirled round Ben’s legs and feet.

“I work in a cafeteria.”

“Oh? So does my niece.” The woman patted her ridged hair.

“They never asked her to go on T.V.”

“Well, you see.” It was going to sound silly, but she would know it soon enough. “I was a naval officer, and so———”

“Oh, yes,” said the woman, losing interest. “That’s nice. I’m self-employed, myself.” She looked at him with her head on one side. She was obviously waiting for Ben to ask her what she did, so he asked her.

“I breed rats,” she told him. “White ones. For experimental purposes, you know.”

“Vivisection?”

“It’s more for psychology. I breed neurotic rats. But I know what you’re thinking. There’ll be people calling up the studio as soon as I get on the air. When I was on
What’s My Line
last year,” said the woman, who was apparently a professional television amateur, “they had forty telephone calls in ten minutes. And the letters I had—I wish you could see them. Some of the nasty words, I’d never even heard of. I had to look them up in the dictionary. I expect I’ll get a lot more after tonight.”

“Don’t you mind?”

“It’s good publicity. You can’t sell anything these days without advertising, even rats. Well, thanks for the chat. I’m on first. Top of the bill.” She got up and moved towards the lighted set where Bob was talking through a headset to the producer in the control-room. The little rat breeder took her place beside him under the hanging microphone and waited smiling, showing her front teeth like one of her nurslings, supremely confident in the knowledge that in two minutes she was going to have the studio switchboard jammed with abusive calls.

Bob took off his head-set, twitched at his pale-grey tie, passed a hand over his receding hair and assumed an unfamiliar gregarious smile of welcome for the rat breeder and the public as the floor manager, crouching beside the camera in a pair of earphones that made him look like Mickey Mouse, flung a pointing arm at Bob, and the show was on the air.

Ben sat on the edge of the piano stool and watched the little woman prattling away as unhesitatingly as if she were working from a script. He was too far away to hear what she was saying. She was just a harmless, mouthing doll, and yet because of her, people all over the country who had been sitting comfortably in chairs with little tray-tables of snacks beside them were even now springing up and dashing for the telephone.

After the rat breeder came the man with the spoons and the kitchen chair. He worked himself into a frenzy, beating his insane
tattoo on the chair, the floor, himself, and even the top of Bob’s head. Ben stood near the set and watched him gloomily, biting at a piece of skin at the side of his thumbnail. The spoon percussion was torture, as much for the man as for the audience, but Ben wished it would go on for ever, even if it meant the end of the man, who with contorted face and rasping breath seemed already to be nearing the end of his rope.

The floor manager had signalled to Ben. This was it. He was next. He felt that he was trembling all over, but when he took his hand away from his mouth and held it in front of him, the fingers did not move at all. The trembling was inside him, cold, griping at the roots of his teeth like neuralgia. What was he going to say? His mind was not only a blank, it was not there at all. He could remember nothing about the cafeteria, and everything that had happened to him since he left the Navy was receding fast away, like the corners of a bedroom where you lie sick with a high fever.

He would be able to say nothing. Bob would be glossy and poised, as he had been with the other two—but dammit, this was his job—and Ben would stutter and gawp like a yokel and make a complete ass of himself, and tomorrow people would nudge each other in the street and whisper behind their hands.

The man with the spoons dropped them into a capacious poacher’s pocket, picked up the persecuted chair and staggered off panting, as if he had run a four-minute mile. Bob said a few genial things towards the camera, turned with his hand outstretched as Ben came on, taking small steps because of the apron, and they shook hands in a sickeningly hearty way.

Although Bob appeared so cool, his hands were sticky with sweat. Ben conquered a desire to wipe his palm on his apron, and felt his own sweat beginning to run into the pencilled eyebrows as he stood and grinned stiffly towards the camera, with the fierce, hot lights beating at his face.

“Don’t be fooled by the disguise, folks,” Bob was telling the ghoulish crowd who lived out there in space beyond the camera. “This is, or rather was, a naval officer. Commander Benjamin Francis, Royal Navy.” He looked at Ben with his curved eyebrows raised, and Ben could only nod, running his tongue over his lips, which felt as cracked and speechless as if he had been in the desert for days.

Bob was talking suavely and sympathetically about the reduction
in Service personnel, making it sound real for people who had never heard of it, or never given it a second thought. Even in his predicament, stuck in the spotlight with the small army of technicians wasting their brains and experience and valuable equipment to bring Ben’s paralysed face into a million homes, Ben had enough wits left to admire the professional charm of Bob’s television personality. Off the set, he behaved as if he expected people not to like him. Now, in front of the cameras, with his fancy waistcoat caved in at a relaxed angle and his soft, pink mouth jovial as Father Christmas, he was playing for popularity as if he were sure of getting it.