Flowers on the Grass (2 page)

“God dammit, where have you been? We’ve been waiting an hour on the other road. Why the hell you women can’t listen to instructions—” He came up to the car window and they saw each other’s faces.

“Good Lord,” he said. “I know you, don’t I?”

“You ought to,” said Jane, calm with shock. “I’m your cousin.”

It was a strange time, being there with him in that garrisoned seaside town where the stranded inhabitants went about quietly waiting for the war to be over and the soldiers and airmen to go away and give them back their hotels and beaches. Jane rid herself quickly of a mild liaison with a boy in the Air Force, for she now spent all her time off either with Daniel or within earshot of the telephone in the A.T.S. mess.

He did not always telephone when he said he would. He did not even always meet her when and where they had arranged. That might happen to anyone at this time and place; but, unlike other men, when she did see him, Daniel offered no excuses or apologies. He was spoiled, not from too much care, but from neglect; from having no one but himself to consider.

A lot of the girls were intrigued by him because he was a change from the three Service types of heavily married, wolfish, or cleanly pursuing. Like collectors who must trap and cage wild, exotic birds, it irked them that anything so attractive should be so free and independent. But he did not want any of them. He liked to be with Jane. He liked to talk to her. She thought that he must need somebody to talk to, for except on the days when he was glum and stammering and bored with the idea of everything she suggested, he told her a lot of things.

She used to see other couples watching them sometimes, from benches on the sea front, or in the canteen, or the grill and bar of the White Hart. Couples with little to say to each other, without contact when they were not holding hands, wondering what on earth Jane and Daniel found to talk about all the time so eagerly.

When they talked about marriage, Daniel always swore that it was not for him. “He travels fastest … he used to say, with a smugness that annoyed Jane quite a lot. After the war he was going back to Italy, if there was any of Italy left, to paint, or look at churches, or just sit about in the cafés at Amalfi and watch the coloured houses change in the taffeta light, and pretend that he could paint it if he tried.

“But I could sit there with you,” argued Jane, who had admitted shamelessly quite early in their time together—the first time he had kissed her—that she wanted him to marry her.

The situation was not embarrassing. It was not even a joke between them, just an unavoidable circumstance. Jane wanted to marry him, but he did not want to marry anyone.

He catechised her, however, to make sure she had no other man up her sleeve. Daniel did not want to marry her, but nobody else might.

Jane’s friend Edna, a proud, touchy girl, given to tossing her head and crying: “What a cheek!” about Hitler, her senior officers both male and female, her reluctant batwoman, the mechanic who whistled at her from under cars, and her floating population of boy-friends, told Jane that she was a fool to let herself be Daniel’s doormat. She said that Jane’s technique was terrible, and tried to educate her with long nocturnal chats on Army cots. Jane surprised Edna by refusing, for once, to do what she was told. She was not worrying. These few doldrum weeks at the seaside when there was not much work and no danger were an island in time, sufficient in themselves, without ties of the past or plans for the future.

Looking back, she was surprised how shameless she had been in her attachment to Daniel. Foolish, too. Once, she had taken him home when they had a long week-end leave together and he had nowhere to go.

It had been a great mistake. Jane had known that he had known he was going to be bored even as they turned in at the gate between the dark and flowerless shrubs. She had lived in her home so long that she did not properly see it any more. Now she was nervous of his reactions to the glass porch and the ecclesiastical landing window, and hurried him indoors. He was not like one of the family any more. It was like bringing an outsider home.

Her mother and father were greatly relieved to find him so presentable. In uniform, of course, one could not look bizarre, although he seemed to have dodged the regimental haircut, and Jane’s father was willing to forget the sandals and grubby sunburned toes. It was very satisfactory of him to have got his commission. Why, he was a credit to the family, not its black sheep! In a heavy-handed way, they laid themselves out to welcome the prodigal home.

Daniel, however, would not co-operate. The minute he entered the house, he behaved as if he wanted to leave it. He made no attempt to settle down for the week-end, unpacked
nothing but a hairbrush, sponge and pyjamas, and when he sat in a room drummed his fingers and kept looking round as if to spy out the best way of escape. Jane’s mother wanted to look through his socks, and kept harping back to the past with him, trying to draw him back into the family. Her father wanted to have long gruff talks with him about the war, but soon their enthusiasm for him waned. Jane felt a traitor to both camps, for whatever she did was wrong for one of them. Daniel did not like it when she went gossiping into the kitchen with her mother to wash up, or spent too long pasting cuttings into her father’s war album. Her parents did not like it that he always wanted to take her out, for walks on the heath, or to the cinema, or for a drink before dinner, or just—out. Anywhere to get away from the house. The very furniture seemed to oppress him. At lunch, Jane caught him looking balefully at the crouching, sway-bellied sideboard. In his room, he slept the wrong way round in his bed, pretending that the light was in his eyes; but Jane thought it was because he did not want to see the tall scrolled wardrobe which looked as though it were going to topple forward— and once had, with a housemaid inside, in the days when there were housemaids.

She foolishly confided this to her mother, who said: “You must remember he has the artistic temperament, darling, and forgive it.” As if Jane were trying to criticise Daniel!

On Monday, he made some vague excuse to go back to the coast much sooner than necessary, so Jane made an equally cursory pretence that she must go with him. The train was crowded. They sat on their suitcases in the corridor, hardly talking, and somewhere near Salisbury Jane apologised for the week-end, although it was really he who had spoiled it. Then, because she looked as if she were going to cry, he kissed her straight dusty-blonde hair and suddenly said for the first time that he loved her. He talked excitedly about this all the way to Yeovil, to the delight of a sentimental soldier who was jammed against the rocking wall behind them, listening to every word. Jane, resigned by now to the idea that she would always have to make the practical suggestions, mooted the question of marriage once more. Daniel, who had by now talked himself into a state of rapture, agreed as if it had been his own idea all along, and the sentimental soldier leaned forward and kissed Jane wetly, and insisted on giving
her a clumsy lead signet ring he wore as an engagement present.

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.