Flowers on the Grass (17 page)

The envelope was propped against the coffee-pot. As Geoffrey flattened the bedclothes to receive the tray from her, he noticed that there was some mud on the sheets. How on
earth had he brought mud into his bed? Extraordinary thing.

“DEAR GEOFF,” the note said.

“Next time you go sleep-walking take a water pistol. I got you back to bed O.K. without anyone knowing you’d ever been out of it, so don’t tell them. Take care of yourself. My ankle hurts like hell, thanks.

“DANIEL.”

“It still hurts, you know,” Daniel said. “Don’t press on it like that.”

“Don’t fuss.” Valerie compressed her lips as she always did when she was concentrating on doing something with her hands. “It’s practically healed. About time, too. You must be terribly unhealthy, Dan, to have gone so septic.”

“It wasn’t me. It was that bullet. It had been in the gun seven years, fermenting germs from a dead German. Thank God that boy didn’t know how to aim.”

“He sounds a menace.” Valerie smoothed the strapping round Daniel’s ankle and sat back on her heels to look at him. “Why do you go to these peculiar places?”

“Got to go somewhere. It was free living, and remote. I was in hiding at the time.”

“What for?”

“Stealing a car.”

Valerie laughed and got up, collecting the dressings into her first-aid box, which was as neat and well-equipped as her work-basket, her kitchen and her wardrobe.

“I suppose that means it was something worse,” she said, “something too bad to tell me. Never mind. You’re respectable now.”

He wiggled his ankle, made a face and complained that she had made the strapping too tight. “Is it so respectable,” he asked, “my living here with you?”

“Heavens.” Valerie realised that it was rather unflattering to Daniel that this had not occurred to her. “No one thinks anything of women having P.G.s nowadays. Especially widows. They used to be merry and dangerous. Now they’re just a nuisance, because there are so many of them.”

“And there’s always Mr. Piggott.”

“Oh yes,” she sighed, “there’s always Mr. Piggott. Shall we ever get round to calling him Alec, do you suppose?”

“Steady,” he said. “He’s only been living with you for six months.”

Valerie March and her husband had not been rich while he was alive. After Philip was killed in the last month of the war Valerie found that not the least of her troubles was that she was very badly off. Unless she added to her pension, she could not go on living in the Chelsea flat or send her son to the school that Philip had wanted. She was thirty-five then, and young Philip was seven.

Having abandoned office work gratefully to get married ten years ago, she could not face the idea of starting again. It had been depressing enough when one was a girl with hopes instead of a widow with none. She had forgotten how to type, and her shorthand had always been amateurish. Her employer had thought it more important that his secretary was beautiful and companionable than able to do eighty words a minute, but she would never find anyone like dear Dobbie again. The world was different now. People moved faster and were less charitable. No one would ever give her a job and she could not cope if they did.

She was wholly feminine, utterly dependent. Marriage to Philip had been her refuge as well as her joy. She loved home like a cat. All her talents had gone into the big-windowed, airy flat which opened straight onto a quiet green garden. It had been her home for ten years and she could not leave it. If she must earn her living, she would stay there and let her living come to her. When she had recovered from the first lassitude of grief, when she could be with people normally again without suddenly having to rush from the room, she began to take paying guests.

Since then, the years had made her more independent. She had learned to discuss money without embarrassment and not to lower the rent to everyone who made her feel sorry for them. She had learned to be tough about damages and grumbles. She knew how to get rid of people she did not like and men who liked her too much. In spite of this last complication, she had found that men were easier to have in the flat than women, if only because they talked less. She had
learned how to combine privacy with companionship and to jigsaw bath and shaving times. She did not have to learn how to make people comfortable. She had always been able to do that.

She had no difficulty in getting paying guests. Sometimes they were friends, or country friends’ husbands who went home at week-ends. Her two spare rooms were hardly ever empty, because people who had been with her would always recommend her to anyone looking for a bed in London.

That was how Daniel had come: through a man in the advertising agency where he had a job doing strip drawings. Mr. Piggott had appeared out of the night six months ago, pale, like a little deep-sea fish and faintly common, murmuring that he had got into conversation on a 31 bus with her son, who had told him that his mother needed a lodger in her back room.

Mr. Piggott always spoke in a tiny voice because he had some chronic affection of the throat. He had warned Valerie that it would become worse in autumn and winter, and as September paled into October it did. He could not call from room to room as one does in a flat. If Valerie were in the kitchen while he was in the drawing-room next door waiting for his supper he could not call out, as Daniel did occasionally: “Need any help?” He had to get up and go padding out to her on his little turned-out fishtail feet, following her round the kitchen, getting in her way, until she sent him kindly back to the drawing-room.

She was used to his voice. If she listened carefully, she could hear nearly everything he said, which was seldom worth the effort. Daniel said that she was like a dog that can hear a whistle pitched on a note inaudible to humans. He nearly always had to say “What?” to Mr. Piggott.

In the mornings he did not even say that to him. Valerie knew that to have Mr. Piggott at breakfast passing him things he did not want was about as much as he could stand, without conversation as well. So she, in a housecoat, but with her hair and face properly done, would talk to Mr. Piggott while Daniel read the paper. Mr. Piggott did not want to read the paper yet, for he had quite a long train ride out to Isleworth, where his business was. He read the evening paper in the train coming home, so when Daniel came home and wanted to read the paper Mr. Piggott was ready to talk. They would have a
drink. Mr. Piggott had quite taken to cocktails since Daniel kept the flat supplied with gin, but he insisted on taking his share, and came home now and again with a bottle of British sherry.

When he had had a drink, Daniel would discuss bits of news with Mr. Piggott and ask him if he had had a hard day at the office and say “What?” to his answers. Daniel was quite nice to Mr. Piggott. Valerie was very nice to him, but since Daniel had come, he seemed sometimes
de trop
, because she and Daniel got on together so well.

Daniel was often out in the evenings and sometimes away at week-ends, but Mr. Piggott was always there, with his chlorotic, transparent skin and his whisper. She heard his key in the lock punctual to the minute at six-thirty, and, picturing him attached to the door by his key chain, like an umbilical cord, thought how terrible it would be if Mr. Piggott was your husband and that was all a key in the lock meant to you when it ought to be the most exciting sound of the day.

If Mr. Piggott were your husband you wouldn’t go out to the hall with floury hands and have to brush the collar of his coat afterwards. You would let him come to you in the kitchen.

Mr. Piggott liked to find Valerie in the kitchen, which was where he usually did find her, for she cooked, as she did everything else—housework or sewing or dressing herself or doing her face—with care and artistry that took a lot of time. She gathered, for he never made direct personal remarks, that he liked her as a Domesticated Little Woman, and never admired her so much as in an apron or overall. When she was dressed to go out, in one of the frivolous hats which were all she retained of a once too ornamental taste in dress—the rest of her was now slick and tailored—Mr. Piggott was not at ease with her.

He was part-owner of a small firm that manufactured in a small way very small articles like shirt buttons and press studs and gilt safety-pins. His partner seemed to take only a small share of the work, for Mr. Piggott was always bringing home letters and accounts that he had not had time to finish during the day. Valerie offered to help him, but he would not allow it, not because he thought, as she herself did, that she would not be much help, but because such things were not for her. She must be forever the Little Woman, shielded from the coarse world of commerce.

Daniel, on the other hand, resented her domesticity. She wondered how his wife had managed if he was always shouting at her to come on out of the kitchen and have a drink and be sociable. If Valerie forgot to take off her apron after she had put dinner on the table he would undo the knot behind her and tear it off.

He liked her in hats and high heels. He liked her with groomed hair and ear-rings. He liked her nails to be long and red and her fingers white and perfumed. Mr. Piggott, no doubt, would have preferred them to smell of onions.

Unlike Mr. Piggott, Daniel wanted her to be interested in his job, which she was, and to help him in the evenings, which she enjoyed. He used to make rough sketches at home for his work next day, and Valerie’s help took the form of posing for the various rôles required by the products whose merits he must dramatise in a way that even the semi-literate could understand.

He was working on a laxative at the moment. Valerie had been the Girl Who Came Top In The Exam because her inside was as slick as her mind, with pigtails, spectacles and her morocco-bound edition of Browning clasped ecstatically to her chest. She had been the wife of the Man Who Lost The Job because he was sluggish in the mornings, and the wife of the Man Who Got It because he was foully bright. She had been the men themselves, too, crawling out of bed with a hangdog look, or flinging off the sheets with a glad cry. Mr. Piggott had been quieter than usual that evening, and would take no part in the fun, because he did not approve of Daniel going into Valerie’s bedroom, even in the cause of art. He would not come in himself to see Valerie’s masterly interpretation of a costive riser, but had gone to his room which looked up into the well at the back of the flats and had not even come out again to clean his teeth.

Daniel was now doing the Man No Girl Would Kiss. After supper he would not let Valerie wash up, but made her put a flower in her hair and portray the nauseated expression on the face of the girl at the dance when she smelled the breath of the man who did not take Evacu-pep.

Daniel sat on a stool looking like a pixie, viewing her with his head on one side. “Won’t do,” he said. “Much too refined. You look like a district visitor. Think of the most
disgusting thing you can—no, don’t tell me. Your face is bad enough. That’s fine. Hold it. Now lean over backwards, as if his clammy hand had you in the back of your waist.” Valerie overbalanced and fell onto the sofa.

“I can’t do it without the hand,” she complained.

“Let’s get Mr. Piggott to be it. His is clammy enough. Where is he?”

Valerie went to fetch him. He had sneaked into the kitchen to do the washing-up for her. He had one of her best towels round his waist and was using the last of her soapflakes. She dragged him away. He let her lead him into the drawing-room, but he did not want to pose.

“Think,” said Daniel. “You’ll be seen in every newspaper in the country. That’s fame.”

“I—no, I couldn’t do it correctly.”

“Oh, come on,” said Valerie. She took the towel from his waist, planted him opposite Daniel and stood facing him. “Now the clammy hand—there!” She picked up his cold, limp hand and put it in the small of her back.

“Here,” said Daniel.
“She’s
supposed to look disgusted, not you. You’re supposed to look desirous,” for Mr. Piggott was leaning back with an agonised expression, sweating lightly. They could not get him to lean forward. It was as if Valerie had the plague.

“Never mind,” Daniel said. “I’ll just do you, Val. That’s fine.” She put on a face of unutterable loathing and Mr. Piggott looked hurt.

Daniel sketched rapidly before he could break away. When Valerie relaxed, Mr. Piggott took away his hand and stepped back at once, breathing quick and shallow.

“Now,” said Daniel, “we’ll do the Man The Girls Queued Up For. You stand there, Mr. Piggott, with an air of lustful triumph, and Val—fluff out your hair a bit—you’re swooning towards him as if you were smelling violets, or a steak.” She swooned. This was too much for Mr. Piggott. He broke away with a low cry, and they heard him lock the door of his room, as if he feared for his honour.

“Poor little man,” Daniel said. “We shouldn’t have made him do it. It wasn’t fair, when he’s so crazy about you.”

Valerie was startled. This had never occurred to her. Because Mr. Piggott was unlovable, it had not seemed possible that he could love.

“That’s a typical woman’s reasoning,” Daniel said. “You’re so busy analysing your own emotions that you never think about other people’s. You should think of these things before you take lodgers. For all you know
I
might be in love with you.”

“You want me to ask you if you are,” she said, “so that you can say No.”

“That’s it,” he said. He had a disconcerting way of admitting or pretending things against himself.

“It’s late,” she said. “I’m going to bed.” She wanted to lie and remember things about Philip. She could do this now, sweetly, without anguish. It was a great comfort.

“Half a minute.” He was finishing his drawing of her smelling a steak. “I want you to be the Happy Bride.” But she would not wait. She was weary of his pictures, and of the futility of being kept from one’s bed for something that would be looked at once and then go round the fish and chips.

One Sunday in November, after a week of rain, it was suddenly a bright day. When Valerie got up to make the tea, she found Daniel in the kitchen in pyjamas and bare feet, trying to make tea with water that was not boiling.