Flowers on the Grass Page 4

  Going into the sitting-room, he nearly died of fright. Daniel’s chair was empty, but there were feet on the hearthrug. Daniel was slumped asleep in the other armchair, the one that had been Jane’s, his face green and puffy in the moonlight.

  He cursed when Ossie woke him, and cursed all the time he was getting him upstairs and undressing him on his bed. Ossie found that he quite enjoyed doing all this, and could understand why women liked to be nurses. In bed himself, rolling over in a kindly glow, he fell asleep without remembering his biscuit.

  Next morning, Daniel would not get up. When Ossie tried to rouse him, he said: “For Christ’s sake, don’t nanny me!” and turned over, so Ossie got the car out and went to work alone.

  He hurried back that night, driving much too fast from the station so that he went off the road going round a corner and had a sudden vision of what Daniel would say if he found him and the car in a ditch.

  Daniel was mowing the lawn, looking surprisingly healthy in a terrible plaid shirt that Ossie did not allow him to wear.

  “You’re late,” he greeted him.

  “I’m not. I’m early.”

  “Well, it seems late. I’ve got company in there.” Daniel jerked his head at the house. “Been there for hours. Jane’s mother and her sister, collecting her things.”

  “Oh,” said Ossie, “how awful. You shouldn’t be there.”

  “Well, I’m not. I’m out here.” Daniel stuck in his pipe again and went on mowing.

  Jane’s mother—Daniel’s Aunt Dilys—was a tall, swaying woman with a general lavender-coloured effect about her clothes, hair, lips and skin. She had long narrow feet and legs whose thinness she tried to disguise with thick grey cotton stockings. Either sorrow or natural causes had made her droopy. Her back curved, shoulders sagged, her hair looped downwards and her hands when idle hung with fingers pointing to the ground, the edges of their long nails like drops of water about to fall. Her clothes looked too big for her and she trailed at arm’s length a squashy bag into which she was sadly putting knick-knacks from the sitting-room.

  Her daughter Lydia was still more colourless; not even lavender, but a fawnish no-colour which had spread from her personality to her clothes and hair. She was short and flat, and went about neatly, like a robot maid, doing the things that were necessary: folding clothes, sorting letters, packing books. When her mother, who was given to nervous repetition, asked her for the third time to do something she had already done, Lydia answered: “Yes, Mummy,” with a natural patience that required no effort. Decorous and undemanding, they moved about the house like wraiths, and Daniel, coming in sweating from work, seemed by contrast excessively alive. It was clear why Jane, reared in the hushed and pallid atmosphere which swathed her mother and sister like a mist, had needed to marry someone like Daniel, nourished to full vitality on freedom and the sun.

  His powers of recovery were astonishing. Looking at him, no one could have guessed that he had been dead drunk last night and incapable of speech or movement this morning.

  “I must say, you look very well, Daniel,” his aunt said uncertainly.

  “Me? I’m fine. I need a drink though. What are you going to have?”

  “Well, you know I don’t take anything usually, but I think today I would like a small glass of sherry, if you’ve got it, dear.”

  “Good for you. Lydia doesn’t, does she?”

  “No, Lydia doesn’t.”

  When he brought her drink, Aunt Dilys half put out a hand as if to touch his sleeve. “You’re so—so very good and brave, Daniel,” she said wonderingly. Though relieved to find him so normal, for it made their sad task easier, it seemed that in a way she would almost have preferred him to look peaky and mopy, so that she could have mourned with him, and they could all have loosed together the tears with which her throat was dry and her breast aching. In her, gladness that he could master his suffering fought with an involuntary resentment that he was not showing more suffering for her daughter.

  She got Ossie by himself in the bathroom. “How is he? ” she whispered, although Daniel was out in the garden again and could not possibly hear.

  “He’s not too bad. He has his bad times, of course,” said Ossie importantly.

  “Oh dear. I do wish I could do something for him. But no one has ever been able to do anything for Daniel, even when he was a child. When his mother died we all tried to help him, but he was so—so obstructive and remote. Not like other children. Oh dear …” She had found Jane’s sponge and stood looking helplessly at the hard, dry lump. Ossie went gently away.

  It was time to cook the supper. “Do we,” he asked Daniel, “feed them before they start back?”

  “If you like. If you’ve got anything to give them,” Daniel said, as if it was Ossie’s house, not his.

  Aunt Dilys offered to help with the supper, but Ossie wanted to show off his cooking. She stayed in the kitchen for a moment, looking round about the electric stove, as if seeking for something that was not there, and then went out to lay the table.

  “Napkins… . Where are the napkins? Lydia, ask Daniel where the napkins are.”

  “Daniel, where are the napkins?” relayed Lydia.

  “What napkins? I’ve never seen any.”

  “They haven’t got any napkins, Mummy,” Lydia relayed back into the dining-room.

  “Oh dear.” Aunt Dilys drifted round the table straightening cutlery and murmuring: “It’s all wrong, you know, these two men living here together in this way with no one to look after them. That village woman doesn’t seem to do much. Look, Lydia, at this glass.” She breathed a sad little mist on to it and rubbed it on her sleeve. “I do wish Daniel would-”

  “Pom—tiddy-pom-pim-pom!” trumpeted Ossie. “Soup’s up!” He did not want Daniel to hear her fussing.

  They had a quiet, polite meal. Aunt Dilys ate little, dabbing her mouth with a mauve handkerchief. Lydia ate whatever was put on her plate and would not help herself to anything, even salt, unless it was passed to her. When they had had coffee and the cases were in the car and it was time to go, and everyone was suddenly stimulated by relief that the awkward visit was safely over, there was a thud on the front door. It was not like someone knocking; it was like someone smaller than a person bumping against the door.

  Ossie saw Daniel’s face frozen into unbelief. He saw him look at the others, finding their gloves and being helped into coats by Ossie, but the sound meant nothing to them, until Daniel opened the door and Jane’s collie dog slid in, gaunt and mangy, with one torn ear raggedly healed and half his tail gone.

  Aunt Dilys gave a cry and burst into tears. Lydia clung to her and wept without noise. Daniel dropped on his knees and laid his cheek on the scarred yellow head. The dog, after greeting him no more effusively than if he had just returned from a day’s hunting instead of two months’ wandering, slipped away, down the step into the dining-room, over the cross-bar under the table and up the step into the kitchen, with the movements of old habit.

  Nobody said anything. It was as if Jane’s ghost, which had never troubled the house, had suddenly come back, with her dog.

  “We must go … must go.” Aunt Dilys groped to the door.

  “Yes, Mummy.” Lydia straightened her hat. Her short figure steered her mother’s tall one up the path in the dusk, while Daniel and Ossie followed.

  The box-like family car jerked to a start and wavered away up the lane, for Lydia was still crying. Daniel stood by the gate with his hands in his pockets and watched them go, then turned back to the house to find something for the dog to eat.

  Gradually Daniel was less and less at the cottage. Ossie did not mind so much sleeping there alone now that he had a dog. The collie became quite attached to him, which was gratifying, being the reverse of Ossie’s usual relationships with people; but when his master came home, the dog forgot Ossie, who had fed and petted him while Daniel was away.

  Ossie did not have so much time to worry about Daniel now, for shortly after the visit of
Aunt Dilys and Lydia the most extraordinary thing happened. Ossie got himself a girl-friend. It was more that she acquired him than he her, for although they had chatted often in the library, for she was a student at the college, it would never have occurred to Ossie to make the first move that would lead to better things.

  Even now, when she had made it quite clear that she liked him, Ossie still could hardly believe that he had a girl-friend. A regular girl-friend, belonging to no one else. A girl who kept evenings free for him. A girl he could nuzzle in cinemas, and kiss in the dark doorway of her block of flats. A girl who let him say: “I love you,” and did not laugh. He said it often, once he had overcome the first difficulty of getting it past his untutored lips. “I love you, Doreen,” he said, and although she had not yet said “I love you” in return, she appeared to like him saying it, and Ossie sat and dreamed about her in the late train going home, with a fatuous smile among his chins.

  Sometimes in the mornings, when romance was null, Ossie would look at himself in the long mirror and realise dejectedly that she was kidding him, or he kidding himself. A man who looked like that—what could he mean to a red-haired Aphrodite like Doreen? But then there she was, popping into the library half-way through the morning to say: “There’s a new film at the Empire tonight. Shall we go?”

  Sometimes in the late train, which wandered out of London stopping at every little station and picking no one up, Ossie dreamily wondered if one day he and Doreen would get married. It was an idea almost too revolutionary to be entertained, let alone voiced. It was an exhilarating thought, yet a disturbing one, too, because marriage had never entered into any of Ossie’s plans for life. Not that he had many plans for life. He was young yet; he had always thought he would just drift on and see what turned up. He had never thought of marriage turning up. When he looked at his middle age, he saw himself as a jolly bachelor uncle taking someone’s children—his sister’s if she ever married—to the circus, the pantomime, the fair on Hampstead Heath.

  Ossie did not tell Daniel about Doreen. He thought that it might hurt him. The idea of a man and a girl… Once when he had been with Daniel at a theatre, they had been talking in the interval and Daniel had suddenly stopped in mid-sentence and stiffened like a pointer, staring at the back of a pale blonde head two rows in front. When the girl turned to her companion so that they saw her profile, Daniel had relaxed, let out his breath and gone on talking.

  When Ossie stayed late in town he always told Daniel that he was going out with his sister or “with the boys”.

  “But where do you go?” Daniel asked. “Where does one go ‘with the boys’ if one doesn’t go to pubs?”

  “But I do.”

  “God,” said Daniel, “they’re dreary enough if you drink. Must be hell if you don’t.”

  Sometimes Daniel came home by the late train, too. Sometimes he didn’t come home at all. In September he had some kind of quarrel with Benita, the old Neapolitan woman in Battersea, and began to come home to the cottage again every night. Ossie felt bad then about going out so much with Doreen. If he was Daniel’s friend, living with him for company, then he must do the thing properly, not leave him there to lonely darkening autumn evenings with no one to cook his supper.

  He explained this to Doreen, but she did not understand. She was interested in Daniel and often asked Ossie things about him. Like most girls, she was attracted to him, yet peeved by the fact that girls did not seem to attract him. Not the ones at the college, anyway. He was polite with those he taught, or sarcastic if they were foolish, for all the world as if he were some sexless old professor who viewed them only as brains, not bodies. A girl might save herself the discomfort of an uplift brassiere for all the effect it had on Daniel Brett.

  One day Daniel was caustic to her about the perspective of her middle distances. It was that evening that she and Ossie had their first real quarrel.

  “Gigli’s at the Albert Hall next Wednesday,” Doreen said, in Lyon’s. “I’ve got no late class. You could sneak out early and we’ll queue like mad. We might get into the gallery.”

  “Not a hope.”

  “Why not? Don’t be so defeatist. Someone’s got to get in. Other people do.” “Not us,” Ossie said.

  “What’s the matter? Don’t you want to go? I thought you said you liked Italian music, or were you only pretending?”

  “I—pretending? You know me, Doreen; George Washington’s my middle name. It’s me arches, though. I can’t stand in queues.”

  “You did for the Crazy Gang.”

  “Ah …” Ossie snatched gratefully at the joke, like a dog at a bone. “That was ‘underneath the arches’. This is on them.”

  “Oh shut up,” she frowned. “I’m serious.” That was one of the privileges Doreen had brought him, serious discussion for the first time in his life, “I—want—to go,” she said, biting off her words like thread.

  “Well, I’ll see.” Ossie shifted his chair uneasily and a waitress knocked into him with a tray of tomato soups.

  “I know.” Doreen leaned forward, her pale-lashed eyes narrowed. “You don’t want to abandon your beloved Daniel, that’s it.”

  “No—but well, in a way it does seem a bit mean. After all, we’re going to the Palladium on Tuesday, and there’s that film on Thursday. I don’t feel I ought to go on the tiles every night. He’s pulling down an old shed, and I have to help him.”

  “I never heard anything like it in all my life,” said Doreen.

  “All right, if you don’t want to go to Gigli, I’ll get someone else. Morris will take me, I know.”

  “But Doreen!” cried Ossie desperately, stretching a hand across the table.

  “Daniel obviously means more to you than I do,” went on Doreen, with a noisy passion unsuitable to the crowded brasserie of Lyon’s Corner House. “What are you two, anyway— a couple of pansies?”

  “Doreen!” Ossie was shocked to the depths of his soul. If she could say a thing like that, he was not sure that he could go on loving her, but then he looked across the table and saw her fuzz of red hair, her thick creamy skin, her little sharp teeth, her shape under the green jersey.…

  She began to get up. “Oh, don’t let’s go,” he begged. “Sit down. Do. Have another Horlicks.”

  “No thank you,” said Doreen, and went, leaving him to pick up his hat, pay the bill and flounder after her.

  Ossie now went through a period of great mental distress. He could not be happy at the cottage; he could not be happy with Doreen. She would not let him kiss her now. He never kissed her without first asking: “May I kiss you?” and now she said: “No,” and went quickly up the stone stairs to her flat.

  Was it to be a choice between Doreen and Daniel? He could not desert Daniel now, yet Daniel would not need him all his life, and by the time he had helped him over his bad times he might have lost Doreen. He, Ossie Meekes, whose only worry in life had been that nobody needed him—his worry now was being needed by two people at once. Was this he? He hardly knew himself. He studied himself in the mirror as if he were a stranger, and fancied that one of his double chins had disappeared. Doreen had gone to hear Gigli with Morris. She would not tell Ossie what it had been like. He suspected that they had queued in vain and never got in, but thrust this base glee from his mind.

  “I suppose,” said Doreen, on a Friday, “it’s no use asking you what you’re doing this Sunday? You’re building sand castles with dear Daniel, no doubt.”

  “Well, I don’t know.… He talked of taking the car up to the Royston Downs and having a walk.”

  “You walk!” Doreen laughed and ran her eye up and down him.

  Oh, Doreen! cried Ossie’s soul. Don’t be like this. What has happened to you? You never used to mind my being fat.

  A proud girl, she was. Before he could betray her further, she said huffily: “Oh, don’t mind me. I’ve got other plans for Sunday. I only wanted to tell you not to count on me since I have an invitation to go out.”

  Ossie did
not believe her. He knew her so well, had studied her face in so many moods across so many teashop tables. He knew that when she slid her nut-coloured eyes away like that she was lying. She never went out on Sundays. She usually washed and ironed her underclothes and wrote letters to her family in New South Wales.

  When Ossie got home that night, Daniel told him that he was going away for the week-end. “Aunt Dilys and Uncle Hugh have been at me for ages to go there,” he said. “It’s a hell of a bore, but I’ll have to go sometime, so it had better be now before it gets cold, because they don’t light fires till November the first.”

  Ossie knew that Doreen would not come into the library on Saturday morning. If she was annoyed with him, she sent someone else for her books, or managed without. So he hung about in the corridor outside the ladies’ cloakroom, where he could catch her before she went home at midday.

  “What are you up to, Ozzie?” someone asked. “Don’t tell me you’re setting up as a D.O.M. That’s a criminal offence, you know, loitering with intent at a place like this.”

  Ossie laughed, and showed him a new joke on the same subject in his book, keeping an eye on the swing doors so as not to miss Doreen.

  When she came out, he grabbed her arm, masterful because he was happy about having this week-end uncomplicated.

  “Let go,” she said. “You’re pinching me. Great clumsy hand-”

  Ossie took it away and looked at it. True, it was rather like a bunch of sausages, but she used not to complain of it. She had even begun to teach him how to use it in the days before they had quarrelled. It would be all right now, however. He put the hand back on her arm, more gently, and steered her down the steps as if she were Queen Elizabeth.

  “Listen, dear,” he said. “Daniel’s going away for the weekend. You come down on Sunday, eh? I’d like you to see the cottage. It’s really twee. I’ll cook you lunch.” She did not object to that, because she could not do anything domesticated. If they ever married, Ossie had thought that he could do the cooking—well, what about French chefs? Doreen might even be the one who went to work while he stayed at home with an apron over his trousers. They could both be happy like that.