Flowers on the Grass Read online

  She kept it always. It had a horseshoe seal on it, and she looked at it sometimes and wondered whether the soldier had given away his luck with it and whether he were alive or dead. It was the only engagement ring she ever had. Before he could organise himself into buying her one, Daniel went abroad and was taken prisoner.

  When he came home, nearly two years later, Jane had to start all over again with him. None of her letters had reached him, and he had not written to her because he had assumed, for some reason, that Jane would by now have attached herself to some steady young chap with a safe job to return to after the war, who could give her the kind of home and family in which she had grown up.

  “And God knows I can’t do that,” said Daniel, who was gloomy now after his first proud joy at finding her still waiting for him. “I never could have. We were kidding ourselves, you know, and I’m less marriageable now than I ever was.”

  Jane patiently persuaded him towards marriage again. “She got at me when I was weak,” he liked to tell people afterwards.

  It was many months before his restless spirit could adjust itself to the freedom for which in the prison camp he had pined into sickness and nearly died. He could not settle down with her, even to the unsettled existence of furnished rooms and flats which at first was theirs.

  In the self-contained university which grew up in the camp Daniel had discovered that he was a better teacher than he would ever be an artist. Long ago in Naples he had suspected that he would never paint or design well enough to make a living, or even to please himself. He admitted this now and found a job teaching architectural drawing and lecturing on Italian art at a technical college in Chelsea. He and Jane lived up and down the King’s Road, hopping from room to horrid room, into a leaky flat and out again, like birds not knowing where to build their nest.

  Daniel would not settle anywhere. Almost as soon as they moved into one place, he would weary of it and want to move on. He was sure they could find somewhere better. He could not suffer another day that colonic cistern, the engines racing at dawn in the mews, the smell of the landlady’s curry.

  He had all the habits of the chronic homeless, Jane discovered. He did not want to eat at regular times, and when he was hungry would rather go out for a meal than wait for Jane to cook it. When they did sit down at a table together, he read the paper and ate too fast. He preferred to live in his boxes instead of putting his things into drawers. He accumulated dirty laundry in undiscovered places. He had no hobbies of any kind. He would not sit peacefully after supper, but walked about the room talking to Jane, or took her out to the pub or cinema or down to the river to watch the colours that followed sunset. He would just as soon make love to her on a sofa as in bed.

  Jane accepted all these things, even the knowledge that he was not as happy as she was, because she knew that it would all be different once she got him into their own home. His mother had left him a little money, just enough to buy a house, but he would not begin to look for one. Jane wanted them to be in the country, somewhere with a garden, near enough for him to come up to London every day and back again to peace at night. He would not believe her when she told him how happy they would be.

  “We don’t want to clutter ourselves up with possessions,” he said. “I don’t want to have to poke in drains and mend broken fuses. What are you trying to do to me? I won’t be made smug. I won’t be made into a mild little man who travels back and forth like a tram with the morning paper one way and the evening paper the other and fools about all Sunday with a watering-can. It’s all right for you. You were brought up that way, but—well, I mean, honestly darling can you see me?”

  Yes, she could. She did not tell him so, but went to agents on her own and saw one or two houses while he was at work. Then she came to the white gate and saw the cottage. There it sat, looking as if it had grown out of the earth instead of being built onto it. The thatch was so thick that you could sit on a bench outside in the rain and not get wet. The wood fires were laid on beds of never-cooling ash inside chimneys as wide as a little room. You could trace the traffic of four hundred years by the places where the red tiles were most worn, and the easiest way to go upstairs was on all fours.

  Other people were after it. The owner wanted a quick decision, but Daniel would not make up his mind, so Jane had to tell him about the baby. She had not meant to tell him yet, because she did not want to use it as a weapon. He was staggered, almost as surprised as if he had been told he was going to give birth to a baby himself, but he bought the cottage for her.

  They had not meant to have a baby yet. Daniel, who still had fits of class reserve in which he would hide all his thoughts from her, did not say much about it, but she caught him looking at her sometimes with a contemplative, conceited smile, and knew that he was pleased.

  Jane was thankful now that they had not waited. She thought that the baby would be all that was needed to seduce him completely to this new home-life that was creeping over him with insidious content.

  He liked it. He was happy here. He unpacked his clothes. He bought books instead of borrowing them, and knocked up shelves to hold them. He began to meddle with the garden, and then, when things grew for him, began to get possessive about it and bored visitors, just like any country husband.

  People said that Jane had done wonders for Daniel, but she thought it was the cottage. Some of the family had been dubious at first about her marriage. They pretended that it was because they did not approve of cousins marrying, but she knew that it was because they did not approve of Daniel. They could not forgive him for having been a liability sixteen years ago. Jane laughed to herself now sometimes, wondering what they had expected to see at the wedding. Some of the aunts could not disguise their surprise at finding Daniel so normal—personable even, better than some of them had got for their own girls.

  When the family got used to being able to stomach Daniel now that he was respectably married to Jane, they came down to visit them at the cottage. Daniel could stomach them, too, now that he was secure as host, with something of his own to show off, and could savour the pleasure of seeing them go and turning in again at his own door to a room empty of voices.

  One Sunday he nearly killed a fat and foolish man from the college who made a joke about first cousins having idiot babies. Jane laughed, and the child moved within her as if he thought it funny, too; but Daniel went white and clenched his fists and stammered, and the man became nervous, fearing that he was going to be sent home before lunch.

  When Daniel was angry, you could usually storm him out of it by making him laugh; but about this he had replaced humour with stubborn old-world propriety. He did not like the man even mentioning the baby, although Jane’s slight frame was so monstrously distorted that she thought that it was only by mentioning it freely that she could avoid embarrassment.

  That evening, after the people had gone, Daniel was in one of his moods when he hardly knew how to be loving enough to make up for the times when he was casual to her. When he felt like talking, he would talk all night to her if she could keep awake, and she would tell him of thoughts she scarcely knew she had until she wanted to put them into words for him. They would talk themselves into oneness until the birds stirred and tried a few notes and the sky crept into light and colour over the wide Cambridge fields.

  That night, they talked about what Jane would do if Daniel died. He had found Robert Bridges’s poem:

  “If death to either should come,

  I pray it be first to me.

  Be happy as ever at home

  If so, as I wish, it be.

  Possess thy heart, mine own,

  And sing to the child at thy knee,

  Or read to thyself alone

  The songs that I made for thee.”

  “That’s how I’d like it,” he said.

  “That’s a selfish outlook, Danny,” Jane said. “‘I pray it be first to me.… It’s all right for the one who dies first, but what about me here without you?”

 
“But I am selfish. You knew that, I thought.” Daniel was sitting on a stool, jabbing at the fire with the bellows. “But what would you do, Janie?” he persisted. “You’d give me a village funeral, I hope, with people saying, “E was a lovely gentleman,’ and children throwing posies of wilting wild flowers?”

  He niggled on at the subject, morbidly attracted by the thought of himself lying dead in his grave. “What would you do? Would you be brave and statuesque, and people would say you were ‘wonderful’? Or would you weep until they feared for your reason? How long would you weep for me?”

  “How long? Forever. No, I wouldn’t, because I’d die.”

  “You’re not an Indian wife. You don’t have to die because I do,” said Danny, talking as if he were already moribund. “‘Possess thy heart,’ the poem says. You’d have to go on being yourself, the same as you did before we knew each other four years ago.”

  “I knew you long before that. I’ve loved you since I was nine.”

  “Oh shucks!” he said, pleased. “Look, Janie, one day I’ll write you a poem, then you can sing it to the child at your knee when I’m gone. Would you go on living here? ‘Be happy as ever at home… Perhaps you could be. People would say: ‘She lives on there with her memories of him, like a shrine. His chair, his desk, his empty napkin ring…..’”

  He drooled happily on, but Jane wished afterwards that they had not talked like this. She dreamed of him without a head and woke screaming. He was quite cross then, although it had been his fault for harrowing her before she went to sleep.

  He was inconsistent like that, and in other ways. Although he was growing more domesticated, he would still wander off at times into detachment. He would suddenly choose to sleep in the spare room, or to go out walking all Sunday when people were coming for lunch. He would stay late in town for no reason. Once or twice he didn’t come home all night, but would arrive the next day with no excuses, quite serenely.

  Jane tried not to worry. When she was not pregnant any more it would be easier. Today, for instance, she expected him home at half-past seven after the meeting, but he might easily stop for a drink on the way to the train, miss it and not come home until nearly nine. For an hour she would have to pretend that she was not worrying. He would not ring up again. He never had enough small change to ring the country from a call-box. He only telephoned her from the college.

  When he did come home he might want tea, and supper round about midnight, or he might want to have supper first, in which case they would probably have tea and scones in bed at midnight. There was no planning meals beforehand with Danny. He had cured Jane of any hidebound niceties she had inherited from her mother. She had to be prepared for anything, and was expert now at managing without fuss. He hated her to be in the kitchen all the time when he was at home.

  She made the scones and put them to keep warm, cooked some potatoes and put out eggs and a tin of beans. She prepared everything they would need for whatever meal he might want, then made up the fires, did her face and hair and fed her yellow collie, who went straight out again after eating to watch for Daniel. He had not transferred his devotion; he had simply picked up some of hers, growing like her in soul as Danny said he grew like her in face.

  When it was nearly half-past seven she went into the kitchen to put on the kettle. It gave a little “phut!” and sparked as she switched it on. She was wary of electricity. Daniel terrified her by carrying lit lamps about and changing wall plugs without switching them off. Jane turned off the kettle and pushed the plug in more firmly before switching it on again.

  She thought she heard the car, far away at the turning off the main road. Sound carried a long way over the broad flat fields. He had not stopped for a drink, so he would be dying for his tea. She listened again, but the kettle interrupted by beginning to hum. Vaguely, with her mind far away, she did what she was always telling Daniel not to do. She lifted the lid. Then it happened.

  She could not lift the lid. Her hand was on it, but she could neither pull the lid free nor let go. She put her other hand on the kettle to push herself off, and that was held too in an iron grip that clutched vibrating right up her arm and through her body, and the roar of the kettle was inside her, splitting her head.

  She opened her mouth and shouted, but could hear no noises. She could hear nothing but the battering and banging inside her head. Her baby kicked in his prison as if fighting to get out. She was shaking all over now, losing sight, sense, sound—the world, the world was going, spinning away above her as she dropped into the sucking blackness with the last very sad thought: “Who will give Danny his tea?”

  Chapter Two

  Ossie

  It was bad luck on any boy to be called Merlin. Especially a chubby, unmysterious boy with cheeks like rosy ping-pong balls, a mouth like a pink buttonhole for the button nose above it and a cowlick of chocolate-coloured hair that would never do anything but stand up in a butcher-boy quiff. When he grew up looking like one of those dolls that won’t knock over, no one but Mr. and Mrs. Meekes would have continued to call him Merlin; but having christened him that, they were capable of anything. Mr. Meekes had been reading the Idylls of the King during his wife’s confinement, and it was touch and go that the jolly round baby was not called Gawain.

  At school, he was always called Wizard, and the name stuck to him through college and into the Army, until a girl in the Naafi canteen started to call him the Wizard of Oz. After that, he was Oz, or Ozzie to everyone. Daniel called him Ossie, believing that his name was Oswald, so Merlin kept his real name dark, for Daniel and everyone else laughed at him enough already. He did not mind. He had been laughed at all his life, and it was better to be a buffoon than a nobody. He had discovered that at school, and exploited it. Although technically a mere dreg, a day boy, with no ability at anything, he had become a kind of court jester, acceptable to both masters and boys as a foil who could never be a rival.

  When he was eighteen and disposed to Weltschmerz, he would have liked to be serious, at least for just a short wallow in the sumps of puberty, but boys from his school went with him to college, and so did his reputation. He had only to raise his voice in class for it to be drowned in a roar of laughter, even if he was going to be right. People did not like him when he was serious. He bored them and they walked away. Like a jolly mongrel, he liked all humanity and craved their approval, so he gave up being serious about anything, ever.

  It had advantages. He loved his food, and could get away with untold excesses, because his greed was a stock joke. He never had to strive, because the more inept, the funnier and more popular he was. Before he could discover that it was not so funny to be unable to get a job, the war came and he fell happily into the position of regimental buffoon.

  No one expected him to be able to drill or handle a rifle or look anything but ludicrous in battledress. He was Hitler’s Secret Weapon. Before he was faced with the serious business of fighting, he developed varicose veins, which was a scream in itself, and was put to a desk job, where he could provide comic relief without danger of killing his own side.

  He did not have to make many jokes. He just had to be Ozzie, uttering foolish exaggerations in that chirruping voice coming so inadequately out of the cushions of flesh wherein his mouth was bedded. Men in the mass will laugh at anything, and many was the wife who feared that the Army had deranged her husband’s sense of humour when he tried to tell her of the absurdity of Ozzie.

  “But what does he do, darling, that’s so funny? Growing mustard and cress on flannel on the window-sill doesn’t sound very witty to me.”

  “Oh, but you don’t know Ozzie. It’s not what he does, it’s the way he does it, you know. And that voice—and those double chins—if you could see him shaving!”

  “Yes, well, look, darling, you’ve only got thirty-six hours, so don’t let’s talk about Ozzie any more. …”

  How, after the war, he had ever chirped his way into a job at a college in Chelsea was the subject of a whole mythology of c
onjecture and fable. Some said that he was the illegitimate son of the Principal. Others that he was a spy from the Kremlin. There were those who maintained that he had wandered into the library one day to shelter from the rain and never found the way out. Anyway, there he was, in charge of the reference library and museum of specimens, and if he or anyone else suspected that he was quite efficient they kept it dark. One did not only go to the library for information. One went to have a laugh with Ozzie Meekes.

  For two weeks now Daniel had not laughed either with or at Ossie. He came in and out of the library without seeming to notice that he was there. This was disturbing, since Ossie imagined that he was Daniel’s friend, which was more than most people at the college could say. Ossie valued this. He himself was everybody’s friend, of course, but the others were easy. Daniel had that tantalising detachment of self-sufficiency that made you want to make him notice you, to need you, if only for the occasional laugh. He had asked Ossie down to his cottage one Sunday not long ago, when he had wanted light relief from his father-in-law. Ossie had earned his lunch. Daniel and his wife had been able to go off for a walk while Ossie entertained the father-in-law by telling him naughty stories into his little deaf-aid box, like a radio comedian going on the air.

  Ossie, like the conscientious professional humorist he was, kept a notebook to fall back on when his own native drollery failed. In this book he copied out rude stories in the peaky hand which was so like his voice and so unlike his figure. He also collected newspaper cuttings—advertisements from Continental papers, printers’ errors or naively-phrased remarks from public speeches. People saved them for him as if he were a small boy with a stamp album.

  “Poor old Ossie doesn’t have a sex life,” they said, “so he has to get it this way.” But Ossie kept the notebook more for others’ amusement than his own. He did not aspire to a sex life. It did not enter into his design for living. Pierrot has Pierrette, Harlequin has Columbine, but there is no girlfriend for Pantaloon.