Read Man Overboard for Free Online Page A

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.
    “Can’t you stop him panting?” the actor said, squinting into the shadows beyond the lights. “The brute wouldn’t be panting at seven o’clock in the morning.”
    “It’s the lights,” somebody said, and a man standing near Ben in plimsolls said sentimentally to no one in particular: “Poor creature. It isn’t right, you know.”
    A square-hipped woman with a moustache, who was the dog’s trainer, came forward into the light, stroked the dog and gave it something from her closed hand, like a sailor palming a fag-end, and was sent shambling off sideways by Bob’s voice booming at her: “Get off the set!”
    Suddenly Rose was there. She never came on to the set until the last minute. Ben got up and moved forward to where he could see all of her. She was looking towards him, and he smiled and moved his hand a little, but she did not smile back, and he did not know whether she could see him beyond the lights.
    She was wearing a check gingham apron tied tightly round her tiny waist over a dress with a neck cut somewhat lower than is customary in the Border Country for milking cows before breakfast. Her hair was caught demurely back with a ribbon. Ben, who had watched the dress rehearsal, knew that later when she was all but seduced in a married man’s apartment, it would be brushed into a more sophisticated arrangement, to signify her transformationfrom clod-hoppery, as when the mouse-like secretary in a film suddenly takes off her glasses and is revealed as a raving beauty.
    Rose looked round the set in a dissatisfied way, and then went outside the flimsy door through which she would make her first entrance. Ben moved sideways so that he should see her come in, and knocked into a music stand which fell with a clatter. Several people shouted: “Quiet, please!” and an unseen voice grumbled: “Who’s that infernal man?”
    “He belongs to Rose,” someone said.
    As Ben tiptoed out of the way behind a piano, he heard the first voice say: “I wish she’d keep ’em in the bedroom.”
    The floor manager, who was very young, with a headset over unruly yellow hair, began to say in a rapid, self-conscious monotone, as if he was proud yet embarrassed to be the only one talking: “All right, everybody. Quiet, please. Settle down, everyone.”
    They settled. Ben watched the set. Listening to Bob’s voice through his headphones, the floor manager raised the board of papers in his hand, and swept it down dramatically. The door opened and Rose stood there, just a simple farmer’s daughter, as poised and glowing as she had been when Ben first saw her, making her entrance into the restaurant.
    Rose’s weekly show was a toothsome mixture of soap opera and a Lonely Hearts column. The short plays were supposed to be based on actual letters sent in to Rose in her capacity as everybody’s girl friend. Before the play, an announcer, chosen for the sincerity of his soft moustache and compassionate eyes, would read, in a voice suitably charged with controlled emotion, the letter whose story of courageous suffering or despair or triumphant love was to be illustrated on the screen.
    It was always a woman’s problem. Even when it was a story about a man losing his sight, or going to prison to protect a guilty friend, the drama was always presented from the point of view of the woman in the case, because the