Flowers on the Grass Read online

  MONICA DICKENS

  FLOWERS on the GRASS

  “Where my caravan has rested,

  Flowers I leave you on the grass”.

  EDWARD TESCHEMACHER

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Jane

  Chapter Two

  Ossie

  Chapter Three

  Doris

  Chapter Four

  Mumma

  Chapter Five

  Geoffrey

  Chapter Six

  Valerie

  Chapter Seven

  George

  Chapter Eight

  Dickie

  Chapter Nine

  Pamela

  Chapter Ten

  The Nurses

  Chapter Eleven

  Nellie

  Chapter One

  Jane

  The Cottage door stood open, as it did all summer, and most of the spring when the sun was warm. Jane had been up to the farm for milk, but no one ever locked their doors in this village. There had not been a burglary within living or hearsay memory, and what the policeman did with his time except grow carnations nobody knew.

  The front door had been open the first time she saw the cottage. She had stood by the gate as she did now, looking down the cobbled path between the disorderly flowers. When a woman in an apron came out of the door tidying her hair, Jane had known at once: I want to be that woman. This is it.

  She wondered if Daniel ever stood at the gate like this to cherish the thought: I live here and it’s mine. She had seen him pause here, but with an artist’s objective eye, unbiased; the same that could paint Jane as she really was, not as his love saw her. Leaning on the white gate, he would study the way the apricot-coloured walls seemed to diffuse from themselves the soaked light of centuries instead of reflecting today’s light from the sun, or how the thatch turned up at the corners like dogs’ ears, and call to Jane to come immediately from whatever she was doing to see if she had ever noticed that one bedroom window was slightly higher than the other.

  Visually he was far more observant than she, but in other ways he was more vague. Time meant little in his life, he was as careless of his clothes as a child and never put anything back in its place. Jane did not mind. She liked running about after Daniel. She had to do it discreetly, because she knew that it irked him if she fussed or was too solicitous. He would shy away from her with that fugitive, sidelong look, as if he were afraid of being trapped by too much cosiness.

  Jane had prayed and prayed until she was nearly sick that her baby would be a boy. She knew that Daniel loved her, but it was not only because she was a woman. Sometimes she thoughi that it was in spite of her being a woman. He did not like excess feminity. A bedroom full of scent and silk stockings in the bathroom were not for him, and if Jane wanted a mouse-trap baited she had to do it for herself. He might not like a little girl who wore frilly knickers and went to dancing class, which was the kind of little girl Jane would like to have.

  He was so happy now, taking so kindly to this first domesticity of his life, that she was afraid of glutting him with females. So it would have to be a boy. He—she thought of it resolutely as he, as if that could change the perfectly formed being she carried—bothered her now as the telephone rang and she hurried clumsily down the cobbled path to answer it.

  “Darling, look—something’s happened.” Daniel invariable said that and then paused, leaving you to panic through all kinds of nightmare possibilities while he sought for words with the slight hesitation that was not quite a stammer. It only assailed him on the telephone, or when he was tired or nervous. Sometimes, when he was hung up for a word, he would beat his arms about like an exasperated child; but if you offered him the word you knew he wanted, he would reject it, and have to think of another.

  “Yes—what? Danny, what’s happened?” A train, a car, a bus, fire, pneumonia—Jane’s pregnancy quickened her to morbid fears for Daniel’s safety. “Where are you?”

  “In London.”

  “Oh Danny, you’ve missed your train again.”

  “Yes, because I’d forgotten about this staff meeting tonight. I’ll be a bit late. Listen, make me an enormous tea, will you, there’s a good girl. I’m starving. Didn’t get any lunch. I met Bob Ricketts in the King’s Road and we went to the Stag.”

  “Well, why didn’t you think-?” Jane was going to say: “of getting some sandwiches,” but that was the kind of thought he never had. Other men made elaborate plans to ensure that they got their lunch, believing that they would die without it. Daniel lived in a pre-war illusion that he could get food at any hour of the day or night, where and whenever he happened to be hungry. He was always being surprised by midnight stations, crowded restaurants and shuttered snackbars. She could imagine him today, drinking too many whiskeys with Bob Ricketts, realising at five to two that he had a class at two, that he was starving hungry and that all the sandwiches in the glass cases on the bar had been bought and eaten long ago by more provident men.

  When he had rung off, Jane went to the kitchen to make scones. She asked nothing better than to give Danny a big tea. That kind of thing fed her loving spirit as it fed his body.

  She had wanted to look after Daniel for the last twenty years, ever since she was nine, when she had seen him at his mother’s funeral. He was nearly fifteen, and his father had died when he was a baby. He was Jane’s first cousin, but when he was suddenly an orphan she had been shy because of this that had happened to him and made him a stranger. She would never forget seeing him at the funeral. He was at Eton then, too small still for a morning coat and too large for his short jacket. His top hat and everything about him was spotted and scruffy. His face was spotty, too, and dead white, without any expression, not even one of sadness.

  The undertaker’s was in a mews, and it was there that Jane, getting into one of the funeral cars, had seen him, kicking his already scuffed shoes about in the gutter. Although he must have been the most important person at the funeral, no one had thought of telling him which car to go in, and he was not going to ask.

  Jane, who had not been greatly upset by the news that Auntie Grace had gone to Jesus, cried then so much that her mother told her father: “I knew she shouldn’t have come. You’d make any excuse for a clan gathering,” and took her out of the car and into a taxi and home.

  After that, Jane hardly saw Daniel. He was sent to live with some other relations, a childless couple who had priceless antique chairs in which a boy must not sit, and carpets on which a boy must not walk without changing his outdoor shoes, but who housed him in memory of poor Grace. He came to some of the family parties, but he had changed. It was not only because he was set apart by being an orphan that you did not know what to say to him. He did not want to be talked to. He leaned about round the walls, watching people disparagingly from under his eyelids, repulsing relatives who came at him with trifles and ice-cream, shunning the games, or spoiling the charades with some sly, irrelevant practical joke.

  He became a problem child, a subject of family discussion. Jane wanted to defend him, but did not know how. After another term at Eton, something terrible happened. She did not know what it was, because people stopped talking about it when she came into the room.

  He was expelled from Eton. For such a thing to happen to a Brett was unthinkable. It was hushed up, and Daniel packed off like the prodigal he had become to a disreputable great-aunt who had hitherto been outside the pale, but now proved her uses. She kept a majolica and basket-weaving shop in Anacapri village on the island of Capri. Daniel could go to the English school in Naples, and that settled him. He was still talked about occasionally, but in the past tense, as if he were dead.

  “What a strange boy that was of
Grace’s, do you remember?”

  “Of course, it was the worst age to lose his mother, and she’d always spoiled him so, but still…”

  “He would never have been any use in the firm.”

  Jane thought about Daniel quite a lot. He had never before meant more to her than her other cousins, but now the idea of him haunted her like a legend. She bought a record of Gracie Fields singing “On the Isle of Capri”, but it sounded no different from any of those other places where people met or parted or sailed away to in songs. She could not imagine him there, or anywhere, going on with his life. He existed only in her mind, in static abeyance like far-off places which are not there without us, whatever the map says. She saw him, not in Italy, but always in the rumpled top hat and tight black suit in the mews on that raw windy morning.

  She did not see him again for twelve years. Her father saw him once. He went over to Capri when the great-aunt died and found that Daniel had not been living with her for a long time. He turned up from some room in a Naples alley where he was living (with a woman, Jane’s father suspected). A bony Italian-looking boy with hair too thick and long, fisherman-brown skin and clothes that—“Well, the whole thing is not very satisfactory. However, as he’s studying art, I suppose he feels obliged to wear that costume.”

  Jane’s father, who had made the summer journey there and back in a dark city suit, starched collar, waistcoat and watch-chain, could not believe that any Brett would wear a striped vest, washed-out cotton trousers and sandals from choice.

  But Jane went on thinking of Daniel in the top hat and black suit with that white, unapproachable face. It was a picture she could not get out of her mind.

  When the war began, if Daniel was mentioned, it was: “I don’t suppose that young man will come back. Got himself snugly interned, no doubt.” But he arrived, surprisingly from America, and was in uniform before any of the cousins.

  It was at a funeral again that Jane saw Daniel. There was the same raw wind that comes to winter buryings to make the mourners look more pinched and ugly than necessary; almost the same bleak black crowd, for it was another family funeral, and few of that long-lived stock had followed Daniel’s mother.

  The grandmother’s death this November had brought the clan together as she so often had in life, for war had not yet dispersed them. A strange young man in badly fitting khaki was seen to be wandering about among the graves. People whispered, and swivelled their eyes round without raising their heads while the preacher spoke. When they had all thrown in their flowers and were straggling to the cemetery gates, Jane looked for Daniel, meaning to pluck up the courage to offer him a lift, but he had already disappeared. No one seemed to know what regiment he was in, and no one seemed to care. He was the only Brett without a commission.

  Three years later, when Jane was an army driver, she was sent one night to pick up a party of officers who had been testing defences on the cliff. She found the place where the road ran between a cleft almost to the beach, switched off her engine and waited, hunched in her great coat, half asleep, in the cold black silence. She waited for an hour and woke in a fright to a furious voice coming at her out of the night.

  “God dammit, where have you been? We’ve been waiting an hour on the other road. Why the hell you women can’t listen to instructions—” He came up to the car window and they saw each other’s faces.

  “Good Lord,” he said. “I know you, don’t I?”

  “You ought to,” said Jane, calm with shock. “I’m your cousin.”

  It was a strange time, being there with him in that garrisoned seaside town where the stranded inhabitants went about quietly waiting for the war to be over and the soldiers and airmen to go away and give them back their hotels and beaches. Jane rid herself quickly of a mild liaison with a boy in the Air Force, for she now spent all her time off either with Daniel or within earshot of the telephone in the A.T.S. mess.

  He did not always telephone when he said he would. He did not even always meet her when and where they had arranged. That might happen to anyone at this time and place; but, unlike other men, when she did see him, Daniel offered no excuses or apologies. He was spoiled, not from too much care, but from neglect; from having no one but himself to consider.

  A lot of the girls were intrigued by him because he was a change from the three Service types of heavily married, wolfish, or cleanly pursuing. Like collectors who must trap and cage wild, exotic birds, it irked them that anything so attractive should be so free and independent. But he did not want any of them. He liked to be with Jane. He liked to talk to her. She thought that he must need somebody to talk to, for except on the days when he was glum and stammering and bored with the idea of everything she suggested, he told her a lot of things.

  She used to see other couples watching them sometimes, from benches on the sea front, or in the canteen, or the grill and bar of the White Hart. Couples with little to say to each other, without contact when they were not holding hands, wondering what on earth Jane and Daniel found to talk about all the time so eagerly.

  When they talked about marriage, Daniel always swore that it was not for him. “He travels fastest … he used to say, with a smugness that annoyed Jane quite a lot. After the war he was going back to Italy, if there was any of Italy left, to paint, or look at churches, or just sit about in the cafés at Amalfi and watch the coloured houses change in the taffeta light, and pretend that he could paint it if he tried.

  “But I could sit there with you,” argued Jane, who had admitted shamelessly quite early in their time together—the first time he had kissed her—that she wanted him to marry her.

  The situation was not embarrassing. It was not even a joke between them, just an unavoidable circumstance. Jane wanted to marry him, but he did not want to marry anyone.

  He catechised her, however, to make sure she had no other man up her sleeve. Daniel did not want to marry her, but nobody else might.

  Jane’s friend Edna, a proud, touchy girl, given to tossing her head and crying: “What a cheek!” about Hitler, her senior officers both male and female, her reluctant batwoman, the mechanic who whistled at her from under cars, and her floating population of boy-friends, told Jane that she was a fool to let herself be Daniel’s doormat. She said that Jane’s technique was terrible, and tried to educate her with long nocturnal chats on Army cots. Jane surprised Edna by refusing, for once, to do what she was told. She was not worrying. These few doldrum weeks at the seaside when there was not much work and no danger were an island in time, sufficient in themselves, without ties of the past or plans for the future.

  Looking back, she was surprised how shameless she had been in her attachment to Daniel. Foolish, too. Once, she had taken him home when they had a long week-end leave together and he had nowhere to go.

  It had been a great mistake. Jane had known that he had known he was going to be bored even as they turned in at the gate between the dark and flowerless shrubs. She had lived in her home so long that she did not properly see it any more. Now she was nervous of his reactions to the glass porch and the ecclesiastical landing window, and hurried him indoors. He was not like one of the family any more. It was like bringing an outsider home.

  Her mother and father were greatly relieved to find him so presentable. In uniform, of course, one could not look bizarre, although he seemed to have dodged the regimental haircut, and Jane’s father was willing to forget the sandals and grubby sunburned toes. It was very satisfactory of him to have got his commission. Why, he was a credit to the family, not its black sheep! In a heavy-handed way, they laid themselves out to welcome the prodigal home.

  Daniel, however, would not co-operate. The minute he entered the house, he behaved as if he wanted to leave it. He made no attempt to settle down for the week-end, unpacked nothing but a hairbrush, sponge and pyjamas, and when he sat in a room drummed his fingers and kept looking round as if to spy out the best way of escape. Jane’s mother wanted to look through his socks, and kept harping back to the p
ast with him, trying to draw him back into the family. Her father wanted to have long gruff talks with him about the war, but soon their enthusiasm for him waned. Jane felt a traitor to both camps, for whatever she did was wrong for one of them. Daniel did not like it when she went gossiping into the kitchen with her mother to wash up, or spent too long pasting cuttings into her father’s war album. Her parents did not like it that he always wanted to take her out, for walks on the heath, or to the cinema, or for a drink before dinner, or just—out. Anywhere to get away from the house. The very furniture seemed to oppress him. At lunch, Jane caught him looking balefully at the crouching, sway-bellied sideboard. In his room, he slept the wrong way round in his bed, pretending that the light was in his eyes; but Jane thought it was because he did not want to see the tall scrolled wardrobe which looked as though it were going to topple forward— and once had, with a housemaid inside, in the days when there were housemaids.

  She foolishly confided this to her mother, who said: “You must remember he has the artistic temperament, darling, and forgive it.” As if Jane were trying to criticise Daniel!

  On Monday, he made some vague excuse to go back to the coast much sooner than necessary, so Jane made an equally cursory pretence that she must go with him. The train was crowded. They sat on their suitcases in the corridor, hardly talking, and somewhere near Salisbury Jane apologised for the week-end, although it was really he who had spoiled it. Then, because she looked as if she were going to cry, he kissed her straight dusty-blonde hair and suddenly said for the first time that he loved her. He talked excitedly about this all the way to Yeovil, to the delight of a sentimental soldier who was jammed against the rocking wall behind them, listening to every word. Jane, resigned by now to the idea that she would always have to make the practical suggestions, mooted the question of marriage once more. Daniel, who had by now talked himself into a state of rapture, agreed as if it had been his own idea all along, and the sentimental soldier leaned forward and kissed Jane wetly, and insisted on giving her a clumsy lead signet ring he wore as an engagement present.