Flowers on the Grass Page 6

  “What’s the matter? Who’s that?” No. 4 sat up in bed, looking round him as if he could not think where he was.

  “Oh, he gave me a fright.” Doris drew great breaths. “Rising up at me from under the bed like one coming out of the sea.”

  “It’s all right. He won’t hurt you.”

  “Ah, I can see that. Oh, you beauty.” Doris set down the tray and bent to rub the dog’s head against yesterday’s dirty apron which she wore for morning work. “What have they done to your tail then? Fancy cutting your tail, poor fellow.”

  “He got it in a trap.”

  “Ah, they’re bringing a law against that in Parliament.” Doris read the papers from end to end, after supper, with her shoes off. “There’s a good dog. They always like me,” she said. “They know.”

  “Know what?” asked the gentleman in the bed, but Doris went over to the window, where she rattled aside the curtains with the dramatic cry: “It won’t do!” She turned round, her humpy shoulders making a right angle with her squat square sides against the morning light. “You can’t keep him here,” she said. “If Mrs. P. was to set eyes on him, she’d-” She did not know what Mrs. P. would do, for no one had ever tried to bring a dog into the Lothian Private, which had notices on its railings, in the hall, on the prospectus and on all the notepaper: “No Dogs.”

  The winter guests at the Lothian were mostly long-term although this lot had the air of being only there while they waited for something. Mrs. Lewin was waiting with her twelve-year-old son Curtis for her Canadian husband to send for her. Miss Willys was waiting for a man. She had been waiting all her life. Old Mr. and Mrs. Parker were waiting for their daughter to ask them to go up north and live with her. Miss Rawlings was waiting for her mother to die in the nursing home round the corner. She went in every day and read the Pilgrim’s Progress to her in Esperanto, but it had not killed her yet. Mr. Dangerfield, who was the M.C. at the Palace Ballroom, was waiting for the summer season, when he could stop giving private lessons and once more be Our Own Dudley Dangerfield in white gloves and tails to the ground, chanting into the microphone for the old-fashioned dances: “Swing your partners and turn around. Knees to the middle and bow to the ground”

  Mr. Finck had some job connected with building the new holiday camp outside the town. No one knew what he was waiting for. To pinch the spoons, Ferdie said.

  Just now they were all waiting for their supper. Mrs. P. liked everyone to be there before she started serving—to Facilitate the Smooth Organisation, etc. Five minutes after she had sounded the gong she looked through the hatch at the company docilely unrolling napkins in the cold shiny dining-room.

  “Where is Mr. Brett?” she asked Doris. “Run upstairs and tell him.”

  Doris never ran anywhere, but she went, at her own special gait, foot to foot, far apart, for her legs were set on square and wide.

  “Supper now?” he said. “It’s only half-past six.”

  “Now or never. Didn’t you see the notice?”

  “No. Oh that. Tell me.” He was sitting on the edge of the bed, and he leaned forward and looked up at her with interest. “If I do, will it give you felicity?”

  “Mrs. P. is waiting to serve supper,” Doris said firmly and led the way downstairs. She hoped he wasn’t going to be’ one of those who got larky. She’d had some of that. No thank you.

  Mrs. P. was ladling out soups when they came down. She never let the cook serve out the portions. Doris showed Mr. Brett to the table in the draught—the newcomer’s table—and began to fetch soup plates from the hatch. There was a noise of spoons and of mulligatawny going through Mr. Parker’s moustache.

  Mr. Brett turned up his coat collar. “What’s the good of a gas fire if they don’t light it?” he asked Doris, when she brought him his Cornish pasty.

  “Mrs. P. lights it when necessary.”

  “When is necessary?” But Mrs. P. was shoving not only vegetable dishes but her head through the hatch to see what Doris was up to.

  After the semolina, jelly, or cheese and biscuits, Mr. Finck stopped Mr. Brett on the way out. He had a nose like a piece of Government cheese, with a blob on the end that quivered when he talked. “Keep it up,” he said. “We may get that ruddy thing lit yet.”

  “Why don’t you ask?”

  “Oh, she’ll do it if you ask. Most obliging. Do anything. But she has her subtle ways of getting back at you.”

  How well Doris knew those small reprisals. The portion of stew all carrots and no meat. The outside slice of suet roll, from which the jam had retreated. The gravy poured back into the soup before the last plate had been wetted. “For Mr. Finck,” she would say. Or: “For Mr. Parker” (that day he had left the tap running in his basin and wet Miss Rawlings’s clothes on a chair in the room below), pushing the sweets of revenge through and slamming down the hatch.

  When Doris was going upstairs with an armful of hot-water bottles, Mr. Brett came out of the first-floor lounge, passing a hand across his forehead, as if it had tired him talking in there. “How am I going to get the dog in?” he asked.

  “Gracious, you’re never going to bring him back?”

  “What did you think I was going to do?” Doris had not thought. “I had the devil of a time getting him out this morning. People popping out of their rooms like jack-in-the-boxes. The caretaker at the art school has had him in his room all day, but he goes off at nine.”

  “So do I,” said Doris, suspecting that she was about to be embroiled.

  “Just wait while I fetch him, and watch out for me on the stairs.” He was gone from her and out of the front door. It made it difficult to say No to a person when they didn’t wait for you to say it. Doris began to lay the breakfast-tables. Mr. Brett gave her a start, looking round the door and saying: “Psst!” She was always getting starts and turns, and wondered sometimes whether she had a funny heart.

  “Where’s Mrs. P.?” he asked.

  “Having her supper.”

  “Lucky woman. She gets it at a respectable hour,” he said, although one of Mrs. P.’s trials was that she couldn’t sit down to a bite until turned nine.

  Doris went up to stand guard outside the lounge door while Mr. Brett ran up the stairs with the dog. She did not like doing this. She hated intrigues and secrecy, and liked nothing to happen in life that one could not speak about; but she hated upsets, too, so as he had already got the dog in the house, this was the only thing to do.

  “It was awful,” she told him when she went in to turn down his bed. “Someone started to turn the handle, so I locked the lounge door. Fancy! They were mad, in there. I pretended I’d been polishing the door-knob and turned the key by mistake. They must have thought me simple—at the Brasso this time of night. Oh dear.” . She turned down the counterpane neat and taut. “I wouldn’t have done it but for being fond of dumb animals. Never again.”

  “You won’t have to.”

  “That’s good then. I’ll be sorry to lose him though.”

  “Who said he was going? Come here.” He was standing by the window. “Look. Just the thing. Onto this roof, down onto that shed roof, and into the alley.”

  “Oh, but you can’t,” Doris objected. “I mean, you can’t go in and out of the hotel by the window.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I don’t know.” It was hard to explain, even to oneself, that however queer people could be, whatever things they might say to her or write on the walls, there were certain basic rules of hotel behaviour to which everyone conformed, and surely going in and out by the front door was one of them.

  He seemed to have made up his mind to it, however, so Doris decided to put it out of her head. She was going out of the room when he called her back to the window. “Who’s that spying in the house opposite?” he asked.

  “Spying? Whatever do you mean?” Mr. Brett seemed determined to have things not normal. This was as bad as during the war when someone had heard Mrs. P.’s electric refrigerator and reported her for having a r
adio transmitter.

  “Look, that crack of light—ah, it’s gone. See the curtain move? There she is again, peering round the corner.”

  “Oh, her,” said Doris, turning away. “She always does that. Been at it as long as I’ve been here. Oh, don’t ask me what for. If she’s got nothing better to do with her time, that’s her funeral, not mine.”

  Mr. Brett put his fingers to his nose and waggled them at the house opposite, then drew the curtains across. “I say, just do one more thing for me, will you?” he said, though it was after nine, and Doris had told him distinctly that she was off duty at that hour. “Sneak me up something for the dog to eat.”

  “Oh no,” she said, planting herself squarely. “That I can’t do.”

  “He won’t want much. He had something at the school. Just a few bits of meat-”

  Doris had to laugh. “Where d’you think I’d get meat from? That was the last of the joint went into the Cornish pasties—such as you could see for potato.”

  “Well, bread or something, or biscuits. Do find something.”

  He seemed to have no idea what he was asking. It meant getting past Mrs. P.’s sitting-room into the kitchen, groping there in the dark for fear Ferdie should see the light, having her heart nearly let her down when a saucepan lid clattered to the floor as she reached down the big tin of stale cake and bread slices that was always on hand for trifles and charlottes and bread-and-butter pudding, creeping into the pantry to pour on as much as she dared from the milk left out for her early-morning teas. By the time she got back to No. 4, dodging into the bathroom once when she heard Mr. Parker blowing his nose on the stairs, she felt as if she had been through something out of Dick Barton. She would have liked to convey to Mr. Brett an idea of what she had accomplished, but although he thanked her politely—he had a nice voice, she’d say that for him—he seemed to find nothing exceptional in what she had done. Took it for granted. That was the way he asked you to do things. He didn’t ask as a favour; just asked, and took it for granted you would do it. He could not have had much experience of private hotels.

  Although it was long after her time, she had just to stay and watch the dog eat. He was such a dainty feeder. It always seemed so clever of dogs to teach themselves to eat with mouths that shape.

  Mr. Brett unwrapped a bottle of whiskey from brown paper and poured some into a tooth-glass. “Oh dear,” sighed Doris, “now that’s two things you didn’t ought to have up here. Mrs. P. won’t have spirits in the house, except just for the Christmas pudding.”

  “Oh——Mrs. P.,” said Mr. Brett irritably, using a word that Doris did not like to hear said, even about Mrs. P.

  She lingered by the door, watching him drink the whiskey. “Have some,” he said. “Go and get yourself a glass.”

  “Oh no, thank you.” Doris retreated a step. “I’ve no objection to it, mind, for them who like it.. I just can’t fancy the taste of it myself.”

  “Oh well, you miss a lot,” he said, pouring himself out some more and lying back on the bed with his feet on the quilt. “I couldn’t sleep a wink without this stuff.”

  Was he going to turn out to be a drunkard, then? They had never had one of those. But the drunks Doris had seen in the streets were older, blobbier men, the kind you would draw away from instinctively, even without the danger that they might be sick on your shoes.

  “I’ll say good night then. And please, Mr. Brett, hide that bottle for pity’s sake.”

  “I’ve got some more.” He grinned at her, but not blobbily.

  “Hide them all then.” Doris went downstairs, took off her shoes and got herself interested in the papers.

  There was one thing you could say for Mrs. P. She did not try to catch you unawares. She told Doris: “I’m going to do a round of inspection—everywhere,” and it would be everywhere, but it gave you fair warning.

  Doris went up to No. 4 to get the dust out of the top of the wardrobe. Ah—he had hidden the bottles then, like she told him. She picked one up to get at the dust. It was empty. So were the others. Three empty bottles and he had only been there a week! No wonder he was so difficult to wake in the mornings. Well, sooner him than her. If she had to drink one, let alone three bottles of whiskey in a week, Doris believed that she would be dead. She took the bottles away, and after dark dropped them over the low fence into the dustbin of the hotel next door. Mrs. P. was not above inspecting the Lothian dustbins when the mood was on her. There had been that trouble not long ago when she had found all that bread. That was why there was never fresh bread at meals now. The old loaf had to be finished first, so by the time they got to the new one, that was old, and so it went on. Mr. Dangerfield sometimes took a slice to his room to clean the stiff collar and cuffs he wore for giving dancing lessons. He said, with his smile, that stale bread was better for this. He was always one for finding the silver lining, and had Patience Strong verses stuck round his dressing-table mirror.

  Mr. Finck had tried to be funny one day by pretending to break a tooth on the bread. No one had laughed except Mr. Brett, and they had both paid the price in jam sauce when the queen puddings came round.

  Mr. Brett continued to go in and out by the window, boosting the dog over the roofs. So far no one had noticed that he was never seen either going out to or coming in from work, and Doris herself had got quite used to it. It was as much a part of him as little Curtis Lewin’s spinal jacket was of him, though it had given Doris a turn when she first saw it sitting on a chair when Curtis was in bed.

  She had also got quite used to Mr. Brett drinking so much. He was getting worse, and Ferdie did a lot of conjecturing as to where he got his whiskey, and why he drank so much all lone up there.

  “He’s drinking to forget,” Ferdie said. Doris did not speculate what, but Ferdie did. He had turned quite nasty one day when Doris asked him to get rid of some empty bottles for her, so she did not ask him any more. She smuggled them away in a suitcase when she went out, and dumped them in a corporation bin.

  Sometimes Mr. Brett did his drinking out. When he stayed out to supper, he never remembered to tell Mrs. P. beforehand, which put her out with her portions. One week-end he had stayed out for every meal: dinner, tea and supper. The other guests had talked about him in the dining-room, hoping that he was having a gay time and enjoying himself, wherever he was. They were becoming quite fond of him, especially Mrs. Parker and Miss Willys and Miss Rawlings, with whom he would sometimes play whist in the lounge for a while before he went upstairs to his whiskey. Doris got quite a start when she went in to clear the coffee things to see him sitting there looking as out-of-place as a monkey at a funeral. Much too young, for even little Curtis had an old man’s face, and looking as if he could suddenly jump up and run if he wanted to, whereas the others, even Mr. Dangerfield, who was lazy after meals, thought twice about getting up to change the programme on the wireless.

  They all took an interest in Mr. Brett, for want of anything else in their lives, and when a young lady from the art school kept ringing up they teased him and wagged their fingers and said: “Ah-ha.”

  “A model, I daresay. Wish he’d bring her round here,” said Ferdie, who visualised models as more or less permanently in the nude.

  That week-end, when he had not come in to any meals, nobody knew that he had not come home at all on Saturday night. Doris discovered this when she took his tea, but she could not tell Mrs. P., so Mr. Brett’s Sunday egg was cooked in vain. Nobody else had it, for making distinctions in deprivations was one thing, but fair was fair and Mrs. P. did not think it right that one guest should have two eggs and the others only one. Doris privately thought it was because she did not like any of the guests enough to see them eating two eggs. The cook or Daphne would have liked it, but they could not eat it with Mrs. P. in the kitchen, and by the time she was gone the egg was congealed and nasty and even Ferdie could not fancy it.

  That Sunday night, Doris had managed to secrete some chop bones from the plates after dinner. She forgot about t
hem until she was undressed for bed, and then remembered that she had not taken up anything for the dog to eat. Her room, which she shared with the cistern, was on the top floor, so she had to creep all the way downstairs in her green wool dressing-gown and black slippers. Since Mr. Brett had come with his outlandish demands, she had got used to skulking about doing things she ought not. It had become as much part of the job as making his bed or emptying his wastepaper basket.

  Coming up with the plate of bones, she knocked on the door of No. 4 and called softly, meaning, since she was indecorously dressed, to leave the plate outside and go away. He did not answer. It was not like him to fall asleep so early, even when he had a lot to drink. She knocked again, but she could not stand knocking and calling there all night without doors opening on the staircase, so she went into the room, clutching her dressing-gown tight in front of her as if its buttons were not modesty enough.

  He was not back yet. The window was open a crack at the bottom, as she always left it when he was out, so that he could lift it from outside. She put down the plate and went to the window to look at the night and see if he were going to get caught in the rain. There he was, sitting on the lead roof below her, his back against the wall, cross-legged, with his dog sitting beside him as if they intended to stay there all night. Doris raised the window and he looked up and waved.

  “Come along in, Mr. Brett. Whatever are you doing?”

  “Can’t get in,” he said.

  Oh dear, yes, he had had too much to drink. Doris had heard his voice like this so often before, and recognised it as dispassionately as if it had been hoarse from a cold.

  “Funny thing,” he said, “but tonight I can’t make it. The dog can’t make it either. Funny thing.”

  “No wonder,” said Doris crisply, “since it’s you that always has to lift him in. Come on, Mr. Brett, give me your hands and I’ll help you in.” He was heavy and he was foolish, thrashing his legs about and not trying properly. She got him and the dog in somehow, expecting every minute to hear windows go up because of the noise. He did not seem to notice that she was wearing a dressing-gown, so she thought no more of it and behaved as if she were in her black dress and apron.