Free Man Overboard by Monica Dickens Page A

thought of them at their Sunday lunch in the chilly little dining-room, passing things to each other across his chair pushed in against the table edge was more than Ben could bear. When he told his mother that he would take the afternoon bus, and she realized that her apple pie had not been cooked in vain, her face lit up and she turned swiftly for the kitchen, uttering little exclamations of joy.

* Chapter 4 *
    “It makes me feel such a swine,” he told Geneva Hogg. “I do nothing for them. I don’t go there often enough. I want to get away from the place as soon as I arrive, and when I say I’ll stay two hours longer, they’re in heaven.”
    “Don’t let it get you down,” Geneva said. “That’s parents for you. Only yours are more helpless than most.” She set down the two coffee cups, slopping into their saucers, stirred them, licked the spoon and sat down opposite him by the gigantic fireplace where Ben, ignorant of the price of coal, had built a huge and incandescent fire.
    The fireplace was gigantic because everything had been planned on a large scale when this was built as a three-storey house for one family. It was a typical Bayswater house of that period: solid, big-windowed, with cowled chimney-pots set together in rows, a heavy cornice round the unseen roof, and just enough embellishment in the way of a pillared porch and black and white marble steps to give it an air of unpretentious prosperity.
    The house was plastered on three sides and decorated in the cream colour beloved by London painters because it quickly becomes dingy and needs renewing. The back was plain sooty brick, because no one was supposed to see it except the servants when they came up from the basement to hang out the washing.
    When there were no longer any servants to tackle a house of this size and therefore no families able to live in it, the landlord had converted it into four flats by the rudimentary method of dividing the big rooms by flimsy partitions. The moulding on the ceilings and the carved plaster friezes were cut off short by the new walls, so that the rooms always seemed to be what they were, just pieces of larger rooms.
    In Geneva’s flat on the second floor, the partitions had been knocked up in a very arbitrary way, and the rooms had queer shapes and were in unexpected places. The bathroom, which was like a condemned cell, was on the other side of the kitchen, which had one corner less than a right-angle from which the dirt had tobe hooked with a finger, since it could not be got at with a broom. Amy’s bedroom and the spare room where Ben slept were higher than they were long, like upended shoe-boxes. Geneva’s bedroom had three doors and windows and practically no wall space, so that she had to keep most of her clothes outside in a top-heavy wardrobe which loomed at the end of the corridor, blocking the light. The pitch-dark corridor wandered like a canyon between the rooms, pushed out of the way in the middle by the side of the lift-shaft. Groaning like the souls in purgatory, the lift crept up and down in a wire cage festooned with dust. At night it crouched in the basement making restless ticking noises.
    The drawing-room, dwarfed by its wide, draughty windows that looked to the Park over the tops of the Bayswater Road buses and by the mammoth fireplace whose mantelpiece was out of Amy’s reach, was the shape of half an octagon. All the small, amorphous rooms were filled with pictures and furniture with which Geneva could not bear to part when her husband died and she moved here from the country, but the drawing-room was the most crowded of all.
    “I like to have my things where I can see them in the room where I live,” Geneva said, and had crammed them all in until there was scarcely any room for living. Getting to the other end of the room was hazardous. There was only one electric outlet from which a multiple plug sent fraying wires in all directions to trip you up and send the lamps flying.
    It was