Flowers on the Grass Read online

  She approached Mr. Brett’s room with a new interest, a quickening of pleasure. When she went in, she saw that the drawers were open and empty, his clothes, his brushes, his sponge, his suitcases were all gone, only an empty whiskey bottle lay half in and half out of the overturned wastepaper basket. Automatically, Doris bent to pick it up. The bottle was broken and she cut her finger and stood sucking it, looking round the room with vacant eyes. When she found the five-pound note on the dressing-table, she took off her glasses and began to cry.

  Chapter Four

  Mumma

  The Boys told Mumma that she was a mug to bother herself letting rooms, when money could be earned more easily in so many other ways. But Mumma had always had a lodger in that top back room, and intended to go on doing so. It gave her a bit of money of her own, without having to ask the boys or Pa, and it made one more in the house, which she liked. If the house had been bigger, she would have had more lodgers. She liked to live in a home with bulging walls, filled all day long with voices.

  There were ten of them here now, since Esther and her husband and children had settled into the other top rooms. Mumma and Pa; Lew and Hymie; Esther, Morris and Joey, who was more trouble than six children, and the shiny, black-eyed baby Vernon; Rosie—no, one must remember to call her Rosetta—and this new lodger that Rosetta had brought home for her mother. Mrs. Weissman has been a little nervous of having someone interested in Rosetta living under the same roof, although the male lodgers were usually interested in her before long. This one, however, seemed to be no more interested in her than she was in him. She had brought him home for her mother, not for herself, because the top back room was empty, and because he had nowhere to go that night she got talking to him at the Venus Club.

  He had been drunk the night that Rosetta brought him home. He had been ill, too, and Mumma kept him in bed for a week, panting up three flights of stairs with trays for him of things he would not eat. Pa, who could not drink because of his ulcer and so had no sympathy with alcohol, prophesied trouble, but Mumma, sitting like a great collapsed jellyfish in the corner from which she could not get out when all the family were in the kitchen, said: “No, Felix. He will not be drunken always. He is not the type.” She was right. He had been more or less sober after that first night.

  “I’m off it,” he told her. “I used to try and get paralytic every night to make me sleep, but after a bit it doesn’t work. Gives you an hour or two of dreams that are worse than your thoughts, then the rest of the night lying awake with a head splitting with thoughts that are worse than the dreams.”

  “It is terrible not to sleep,” Mumma said. She turned all her remarks into pronouncements. Trivialities from her were oracular, and people came from all round the Elephant and Castle seeking advice. This young man had not told her yet what was troubling him, but he would. Everybody did.

  “You should not take those powders, however,” she told him. “They will do you no good.”

  “Mumma,” he said, “but I must sleep.”

  “They wouldn’t hurt a child. Safest thing out,” Lew said in his quick, seller’s lisp. “Easy to get, too. I’ll always see you right for them, Daniel boy. Don’t you worry.”

  “All the same, Lew, I do not like it,” his mother said.

  “Ah, there are a lot of things you don’t like, my dear,” Lew said, kissed her affectionately on the lips and went out with Daniel.

  Sitting by the kitchen window, she watched their legs go past the area railings. It was true what Lew said. There were some things she did not like. Since the swelling of her legs had practically confined her to the house, she had given much time to thinking about the life she could not share, and what was wrong and what was right. She was old-fashioned, she knew, living in a bygone age, they told her, but one of the things she had never really liked was that Lew and Hymie were not in regular work.

  “We are in regular work,” they told her. “Regular profitable it is, too.” They brought home more money than their father made, but Mrs. Weissman wished they would not clutter up the ground-floor back room with their buying and selling. It was always full of wireless and television sets, gramophones, cameras, typewriters, chocolate, rolls of silk and boxes of nylons. They usually operated separately, rivalling each other in their deals; but when there was a big thing on, or one was in difficulties, then they became corporate as Siamese twins. Lew would trade in anything from a barrow-load of bananas to Cup Final tickets. Hymie, being younger and more flamboyant, went for things like furs and jewellery. He could not keep away from furs, young Hymie; and Lew, scolding like a wife, sometimes had to extricate him from rash enterprises. Mumma flattered herself that she had brought them up to know right from wrong, so she did not ask herself why some of their business associates never came to the door in the daylight. She did not ask the boys either, for they would not have told her. If she did show too much interest in something that was causing them to talk to each other out of the sides of their mouths, they only kissed her and gave her a funny answer.

  She did not mind about the petrol coupons, or the clothes ration books, which were brought to the door by little old women in black. There was nothing wrong in going one better than the Government, and coupons took up no space in the back room.

  Since Pa had the ground-floor front room for his tailoring workshop, and the floors above that were full of large downy beds, that left only the basement kitchen for the family to eat, laugh, quarrel, drink, scheme and entertain their friends in. As she sat there watching the legs going past on the pavement and finishing off hems and buttonholes for Pa, all her thinking always led Mumma round to the comfortable truth that she was a lucky woman to have her family closely round her. That was the most important thing.

  She thought that she was lucky now to have Daniel in the house. She liked him better than any of her lodgers, even dear Mr. Moss, who had died in her top back room. Daniel was different. Mumma knew that he was a gentleman, though she would not have breathed this to her family, whose vocabulary did not include the word. Either you made a success of life or you didn’t. Birth was a thing no more important than the colour of your hair. They did not wonder, as Mumma did, what had brought Daniel here. They only knew that he had not made a success of his life, and treated him with tolerance and no respect, as if he were the family runt.

  It was because he was not a success that Mumma was growing so fond of him. Like the ugly duckling, he appealed to her motherhood. The others were so independent now. They did not need her as she felt that Daniel did. Lew, Hymie and Rosie never asked for her advice. She often gave it, but they did not need or take it. Esther never wanted advice about the children. She would sooner do things all wrong than draw on her mother’s wise experience. True, Daniel did not want to be mothered. He turned his face to the wall and groaned if she fussed about in his room too long, but he was physically so low that he had to let himself be looked after, so Mumma took her opportunity. She would have kept him in bed much longer if she could, although the stairs were as tiring to her as a cross-country marathon.

  When he was better, and mooching about the house in a pair of old slacks and a jersey, for he did not seem to have many clothes, Mumma liked to see him there at meals, laughing and squabbling as if he were really one of the family. Meals were her high spots. Everyone was together then, dependent on her for food, and she was the boss, serving out the things she had spent all day preparing, relishing their enjoyment of the food as keenly as she enjoyed what was on her own plate.

  One of the things that kept the family all at home and deterred the boys from marriage was Mumma’s cooking. Rosie—Rosetta—would alternately bless and curse her mother; bless her before a meal, when she came in hungry from a dance rehearsal, and curse her afterwards when she thought what it had done to her figure. She would run round to the chemist to weigh herself and then get into a panic and hardly eat a thing for three days. Then she would get into another panic that she was starving herself ugly, and put on the pounds ag
ain in ten minutes by stuffing herself to indigestion with her mother’s deep fat Krullers.

  Mr. Weissman was a little quiet man with an earth-coloured face and hair like grey lambswool. Ever since his family could remember he had been putting in nine hours a day at his sewing bench. He only went out to get materials, and once a week on the Sabbath, first to the Synagogue, then to the sooty gardens to watch the children playing. He did not need any exercise. He got enough treadling his machine and lifting the chunky irons from the gas-ring to the steaming cloth and back again. He emerged from the front room for dinner, when he would read the paper amid the noise and eat with a fork in his right hand, for he had worked in America for many years. At supper he would take off his spectacles and listen gravely to the events of everybody’s day. Afterwards, if he did not go back to the workroom, he would sit neatly at the table and read a Victorian novel, which was his favourite, indeed his only form of literature. Now that they talked of ending clothes rationing, Pa had not been making so much money. The war had brought him a whole new clientele of people with more money than coupons, but if rationing was to end there was no point in coming all the way out to Walworth for a suit and waiting six months for it, for Mr. Weiss-man was slow, and getting slower with each new rheumatic crystal that settled in his seventy-year-old knuckles.

  One Friday Pa could not give Esther enough money when she went out to do the shopping. She went back into the kitchen, where she had left her baby Vernon playing round his grandmother’s feet.

  “Mumma,” Esther said, “Pa is either mean or poor. I must have some money.” She never said please or thank you. She was a blunt, noisy, determined girl who always got her own way through strength of limb if not of character. Although her mother admired her, she was disappointed that she had not turned out soft and slender like her younger sister. Esther’s lips were thick and red, her nose high-bridged, her eyebrows densely black and her hair so strong and wiry that it pushed her hats out of place. She had never got her figure back after her babies. She was going to be fat like her mother, but as yet everything that in her mother drooped and sagged and overflowed in Esther was firm and taut, and solid as furniture if she knocked into you.

  Mumma had hoped that marriage would gentle her down, but it had made her rougher, for she and Morrie were always fighting, with fists as well as words, and she manhandled her children as if they were rubber. It had made them rubbery. Seven-year-old Joey was a bouncing smart-Alec, whom no one could worst. The baby, who could not yet walk, hurtled about like a tennis ball with three diapers under his knickers as much for his own protection as other people’s.

  He came at his mother under the kitchen table now with his rolling crawl and she dug him in the ribs with her foot, fairly gently. He bellowed with laughter and began to lick the polish off her shoe.

  “Money, Mumma. Kopecks, shekels, pazzaza,” Esther said impatiently. “How do you expect me to do your shopping for you?”

  “One moment, love. I’m looking.” Mrs. Weissman was plunging about in the great swollen handbag that held everything—combs, hairpins, scissors, spectacles, letters, photographs, old newspapers, medicines. For years she had put things in and taken nothing out. The zip fastener had given up the struggle long ago and the whole bursting, overflowing pantechnicon was much the same shape as its mistress, who never moved a step without it.

  The purse, when she found it, was full of newspaper cuttings. She took them out, looked for money, shut the purse, opened it and pretended to look again. It was an awkward moment, with Esther staring and hustling her. Lew and Hymie, coming in search of coffee and cinnamon schnecken, grasped the situation with the speed at which they registered anything financial.

  “But you should have money today, Mumma.” Lew poured himself coffee and took a warm schnecken slice out of the oven, where they were always to be found in the middle of the morning. “Daniel pays his rent on Fridays.”

  “Or does he?” Hymie narrowed his eyes at his mother.

  “Don’t inquisition me, son. Sometimes I forget to ask him.”

  “He’s upstairs. I’ll go and ask him for you.”

  “No, Hymie, please. The rent is my affair.”

  “How much is he paying you, anyway?” Lew asked, wiping his fingers on a silk handkerchief and taking a comb out of his breast pocket. “I know what he ought to pay,” he went on, slicking his hair at the mirror, “but does he pay it? Why do you never have any money?” He turned and pointed the comb at her, like a barrister intimidating a witness with tortoiseshell spectacles.

  Mrs. Weissman hedged. Daniel had not paid her anything for three weeks, and she had not dared to mention it, in case he should leave. Lew and Hymie, who could smell out the truth of anything to do with money, were shocked and disappointed in her.

  “It’s not good business, Mumma,” Hymie said sadly, his big brown eyes sorrowing at her over his coffee cup.

  “This is not business,” she said. “This is a friendly arrangement.”

  “It’s the same thing,” Hymie said, twitching his upper lip, for he was growing a moustache, and it tickled.

  “And while you stand arguing,” said Esther in a far more argumentative tone than anyone had yet used, “I’m waiting to go to the shops. I do all the work in this house and get all the kicks. Ow! You devil, Hymie!” She kicked him back and they began to tussle, with the baby gurgling and crowing round their feet. Esther’s hat came off. She bit Hymie and he released her and went out of the room whistling happily, flinging his head back in the stimulated way of one who has just taken refreshing exercise.

  Mrs. Weissman performed the large-scale operation of getting to her feet. “Please go away, everybody,” she said, “and leave me to cook the dinner. Lew, give your sister some money, and get off the table. I want to chop onions where you are sitting.”

  Lew gave Esther some pound notes and she went out, pushing past Daniel who was coming in. He recovered from the impact and came into the kitchen heading for the coffeepot, kissing Mrs. Weissman good morning on the way. She insisted on being kissed by everyone. She loved to be kissed.

  Daniel took his coffee and three cakes from the oven and sat on the table swinging his legs on the same place from which Mrs. Weissman had removed Lew. Because she thought he looked tired, she took her onions and knife to another corner.

  “A good thing you’re not in a job, Daniel,” Lew said. “You’d be late to work every morning.” He had on his shrewd face, soft grey eyes narrowed and bright as wet pebbles.

  “Yes,” said Daniel, picking up the paper. “I was always late when I was a teacher. Used to miss the first class. The students didn’t care. They simply came late, too.”

  “Weil, I do care,” said Lew so nastily that Mrs. Weissman said: “No, no, Lew,” and waved the knife at him.

  “About my sleeping late? It’s your fault. You get me the dope.”

  “On tick,” said Lew, even more nastily. “I’m not getting you any more until you find some work to do.”

  “For the good of my soul?” Daniel asked with his mouth full. “Don’t give me that, for God’s sake. Why does everyone always want to save me? I didn’t think I’d get that in this house.”

  “No,” said Lew, “for the good of my mother’s purse. How much longer are you going to live here on her charity?”

  “Lew!” His mother banged the table with the handle of the knife. “I will not let you talk like that to Daniel. Leave him alone. My affairs are my affairs.” She sat down, the better to make this weighty pronouncement.

  Daniel was not offended. He got up to get another cake from the oven. “I’m terribly sorry, Mumma,” he said. “Honestly, I’d no idea you wanted the money till the end of the month. I’ll have to get hold of some. Trouble is, I’m not getting the rent for my house any more. The tenants left.”

  “You have a house?” Mumma was astonished. “Why don’t you live in it?”

  Daniel shrugged his shoulders.

  “Why not get another tenant?” Lew ask
ed.

  “I can’t be bothered to find anyone. The last two were all right. No trouble. But one of them went and died.”

  “You must let it again or sell it,” Lew said. “I can get you a good price for it.” He was interested now and had forgotten his grievance.

  “What’s the use,” said Daniel, staring at nothing, “if people are always going to die in it?”

  “Nonsense.” Mrs Weissman put her hands on her knees and pushed herself to her feet. “If it’s their time, people will die wherever they are. Not sooner, not later.”

  “Let me fix a let for you,” said Lew, “or a sale. Might be the right thing to auction it. There are some beautiful prices being paid for house property.”

  “I can’t be bothered,” Daniel said. “All that fuss about inventories and sewers and repairs. Possessions are a curse. It’s best to forget about them.”

  “But it’s such a crying waste.” Lew was really upset. He began to walk up and down in the narrow space between the table and the wall, planning what he would do with Daniel’s house.

  “Do leave it alone, Lew,” his mother said. “Don’t keep on at Daniel.”

  “It’s all very well, Mumma, but he’s got to make money. Why should he be the only one who doesn’t bring anything to the house?”

  “Oh, all right, all right,” Daniel said sourly. “I’ll get a job.

  God knows what at.” He put his cup in the sink and went to the door.

  “You can paint,” Lew said eagerly. “I know a man who has a sweet little business copying antiques and old masters——”

  Daniel went out, and they saw his feet going up the area steps and wandering away down the street.

  Mumma took her pan of onions to the stove and stood there lifting saucepan lids and stirring. When she was at the stove she did not look so gross and unwieldy. She was a craftsman, appropriate to her environment. She even had a kind of ponderous grace as she reached to her spice shelf and shook nutmeg into a pan of dumpling soup, whose smell alone might have been enough to justify her whole existence.