Flowers on the Grass (25 page)

“No wonder he didn’t want to go. He hasn’t got any kids,” said Nora, who always miraculously knew the life history of all the campers. “His wife had an operation when she was only twenty-five.”

“Ee,” said Les. “Poor soul.”

On the stage, the inevitable solemn, wrongly taught child was dancing, hopping backwards as if she had a stone in her shoe, with a basket clutched before her like a bowl held out for free soup. After her, the inevitable man with a troublesome Adam’s apple swallowed half of “Who is Sylvia?” and let the rest out in uncertain baritone bubbles. Loud applause
from the third row showed where his family was sitting. Mr. Brett woke with a start and seemed surprised to find himself where he was.

Two girls in identical cotton dresses crooned a duet, bothered by their hands. For a while it was questionable whether they were singing the same song, but Kenny at the piano sorted them out, and they finished more or less at the same time, if not in the same key.

A small boy with adenoids recited, his eyes on his mother, who was performing a kind of mime in the front row, so that his prompted gestures did not always synchronise. A pretty girl in shorts did a tap dance, and a young man took his girl on a very slow boat to China indeed. No one minded how bad the concert was. They were here to enjoy themselves and sing any choruses that might be going. Les kept the thing together with patter, the girl in shorts won the prize and was kissed by all the Blue Boys, and everyone was happy.

Dickie found Mr. Brett in the bar. “Better have a drink,” he said, “after all you’ve been through.”

“I’m O.K.,” said Dickie. “I enjoyed it. Wasn’t so bad tonight, I thought. The campers liked it, anyway.”

“Mass hypnotism,” said Brett hollowly into the bottom of his glass.

“Bilge,” said Dickie. “They like it. We wouldn’t do it if they didn’t. That’s the whole principle of the camp. They love it.”

“That’s what you keep saying, but really it’s you who like making them like what you think they ought to like.” If that meant what Dickie thought it did, he did not want to hear it.

“I must go,” he said. “Got to do my stuff in the balk room.”

“Dancing with all the wallflowers, I hope?” “Of course,” said Dickie. “That’s one of the things we’re here for.”

“You’re a marvel.” Brett laughed. “A bit smug at times,, but I like you. I wish I had half your enthusiasm.”

Dickie grinned at him. “Come and dance then. Do you a, power of good.” He wanted everyone to be happy.

“When the bar closes I might,” said Brett.

Ronnie Cucciara’s band was giving of its best, and the vast painted ballroom, which was the pride of the camp, was a kaleidoscope of coloured lights whirling over the heads of the
shifting, shuffling dancers. You saw good dancing at Gaydays, better than Dickie ever saw in London. There were solemn couples, making an art of it with complex steps; lively young ones, laughing at each other; romantic ones, jammed very close, with moony faces; jitterbuggers who had to be curbed by the Blue Boys, for Captain Gallagher black-balled jive.

Dickie was a good dancer himself—all the Boys had to be— but most of the girls he plucked from the walls were not. He pushed them gently round, making jokes for them, blaming the congestion when they missed his steps, and saying: “Whoops! My fault, lady,” when they fell over his feet. There were comic community dances, and Dickie, doing “Knees up, Mother Brown” with an energetic matron, whose dress was going under the arms, saw Brett’s face as he came in at the door and viewed the hilarity.

“What I can’t get over,” he said afterwards, “is that everyone is
sober”

“Well, of course-” began Dickie, but having been called smug once he did not like to expand on the Gaydays spirit. Brett had better meet the Old Man tomorrow and get the benefit of some of his slogans. Dickie was going to introduce him to some girls, but when Ronnie and the boys picked it up sweet and hot again, with Mara in apple-green organdie sobbing into the mike, he saw that Brett had found one for himself. The best-looking girl in the camp, of course, Shirley Ann, who had won the beauty contest last year and been given the job of a Green Girl as part of her prize. She should not be dancing with Brett. She was supposed to be doing for shy men what Dickie was doing for shy girls. When the Paul Jones started, Brett would not let her break away from him to join the ring in the middle of the room, but kept her dancing in a corner while everyone else changed partners.

Shirley Ann came up to Dickie later at the soda fountain and asked him who Brett was. “He’s all right,” she said. “He’s going to get a car tomorrow and take me for a drive.”

“The hell he’s not,” said Barney raising his head from a glass of ginger beer with foam on his moustache. “You’re on the job tomorrow. What d’you think this place is anyway— a holiday camp?”

“Oh, darling Barney,” said Shirley Ann in her soft pouting voice, “you are a hard man.” She stood on tiptoe and kissed the foam off his moustache. Bystanders whistled and cheered,
some youths made the sucking noises they were wont to do at the cinema, Barney raised clenched hands above his head in a prize-fighter’s victory gesture, and everyone was happy.

At midnight the camp song was followed by “God Save the King”, which Ronnie pitched too high, so that it sounded a little thin after the rousing, roared rhythm of “Gaydays are Playdays”. The crowd dispersed, and Dickie called hundreds of good nights and responded to hundreds of jokes about not being late in the morning for his Easter egg.

A few children who had escaped bed were collected asleep from corners where they had finally succumbed. Dickie was carrying one away pick-a-back when Brett caught up with him on the brightly lit path where campers were loitering along to their cabins with the lazy, easy air of people going home after a good party.

“When you’ve parked that,” he said, “come along to my cell and tell me what you think of the sketches.” He lifted the tangled hair that flopped over Dickie’s shoulder.

“Nice-looking child,” he said. “Girl-friend of yours?”

“She loves me,” Dickie said. “She woke up to ask me to marry her, only she went to sleep in the middle.”

“What is she—about eight? And you’re what—thirty? Queer to think that in ten years’ time at a pinch you could.”

It was queer. Ten years would change this little girl so much, but Dickie, with luck, would not be so different at forty. He might even still be here, although he would be on the wane, not in his zenith, as he was now. “God,” he said, “I don’t want to be forty. Getting older is horrible.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Brett said. “It helps, I think. You expect less, so you seem to get more.”

When Dickie had left the child and made his way to B.39, he found that Brett had got a bottle of whiskey and was pouring some into two celluloid tooth mugs. “Oh, come on, smug,” he said, when Dickie began to refuse. “I pinched one of these mugs for you from an old gentleman’s cabin. He’ll have to put his teeth in his handkerchief. Don’t let him make that sacrifice for nothing.”

Dickie giggled and someone in the next cabin thumped on the thin partition. Brett stuck his tongue out at the wall.

The sketches were good, though slapdash. They were lively and true, but Brett had drawn peculiar, derogatory things. Gaping faces turned to the sky with Dickie rolled
up in a ball half-way between the diving-board and the water. The vastness of the woman in the next-door cabin half obliterating her husband beside her. A hungry camper shovelling in food. A chinless youth vacant-eyed over a straw in a bottle of Coco-Cola. A child crying at the Punch-and-Judy show. The back view of a skinny, bow-legged man with a plump, knock-kneed girl, both in shorts.

“That one looks like a dirty postcard, doesn’t it?” Brett said with some pride.

“It does a bit. I say,” Dickie said uncomfortably, “these are awfully good and all that, but surely your firm can’t use them for advertising?”

“That’s their worry. They told me to draw what I saw. This is it.”

The whiskey tasted good, even out of celluloid. Brett filled up the mugs again and Dickie looked in vain round the untidy cabin for somewhere to sit.

“Get up on the top bunk,” Brett said, and Dickie climbed up and stretched out on the blanket, cuddling his whiskey to his chest.

“I’m tired,” he said in surprise.

“I don’t wonder.” Brett was sitting on the edge of the lower bunk, leaning forward with his arms on his knees. “I’d be dead. Nevermind. Sunday tomorrow. You can have a lie in.”

“Not me. I have to drive the Papists to church.”

“For crying out loud,” said Brett, peering up at him. “What kind of a job is this? Don’t you ever stop?”

“Not till the winter,” Dickie said. “Don’t want to either. I like it. I told you. I like all of it.” The whiskey was beginning to glow through him, making him feel expansive. Lying up here where Brett could not see him, he felt that he could tell him things. “It’s the winter I don’t like,” he said. “That’s the worst part of this job.”

“Why?” The lower bunk creaked as Brett lay down among the litter of his clothes and sketches. “WTiat do you do then?”

“Nothing much. Nothing I can do, except this. Didn’t learn a thing at school, and nothing since. I thought I was going on the stage, so it wouldn’t matter. I could dance and sing a bit, and I got a few chorus jobs on tour. Then it was the war, you know. My first real break, the chance to get
into a London show, came at the same time as my call-up papers. So there I was. Lots of people the same—chaps who’ve never learned a thing except that they don’t ever want to be a soldier again. You meet us around the studios getting our guinea a day—thirty bob if you’ve got a suit of tails. We sell you things rather inefficiently at Christmas—can’t wrap parcels, you know. There are thousands of us at exhibitions demonstrating things we care sweet damn all about. Last year I sold patent sink traps. Year before I was on Nocurl Lino. That was more fun.”

“Doesn’t sound it.” Brett reached up a hand. “Here, give us your mug. This bottle’s got a long way to go yet.”

Dickie had been right about himself. Once he started on whiskey there seemed to be no reason why he should ever stop. He was not worrying, though. He felt delightful. He would go to sleep up here in his clothes maybe.

“What happens,” Brett asked, “when you sell a sink trap to someone who’s seen you here?”

“Oh, they never recognise you. Different clothes, and hair grease, and you have to put on a treacly kind of voice you’d be slung into the pool for using here. There was a woman once—a bit awkward. I’d sold her a roll of lino, and she turned up here next summer and said in front of a whole crowd of people: ‘Didn’t I see you selling at the Ideal Home?’ I had to pass it off as a joke. I said something like: ‘Any home’s ideal when I’m around.’ You know.”

“Yes, I know,” sighed Brett settling back on the bottom bunk again.

“People laugh when I make jokes here,” Dickie said sadly. “Nobody laughs in the winter. I wish this place was open all the year round. It’s a patchwork life—I say, this whiskey’s good—that’s what it is, a patchwork life. Sometimes I wonder whether I’d be better off with a steady office job, like you.”

“Steady!” From below, Brett thumped the springs which supported Dickie. “Don’t make me laugh. I’ve never stuck much more than a year at any job yet, except the Army, and that was only because they shut me up in a prison camp. I couldn’t desert.”

“But this advertising agency-”

“I’m chucking it after this job. Time I had a change of scene. If you stay in one place too long it begins to own
you, instead of you it. Life traps you. You’ve got to watch it.”

Dickie’s trouble had always been that he could never stay as long as he wanted in one place. He felt sorry for Brett. It must be awful to be so restless. “What’ll you do then?” he asked, comfortable in the thought that he was only at the beginning of his summer.

“Not sure. I don’t think I’ll go back to London. I’ll send the sketches down and they can use them or do the other thing. I’ll go abroad, I think. You can’t do what you like in this country any more. I might go back to Italy; I was more or less brought up there. I could scrape up a living. There’s the fare though. I haven’t saved a bean. I’ll get a job for a bit up here, teaching or something.”

“Can you teach?”

“No, but they don’t find that out for quite a while, and the kids certainly aren’t going to let on. They’re delighted to find someone who knows less than they do.”

“Takes some nerve, though,” said Dickie. “I’d never even get the job, let alone keep it. I couldn’t bluff like that.”

“What else do you think you do here all day long?”

“This isn’t bluff.”

“Oh no? The whole place is one vast, successful spoof.”

“It’s not, I tell you. It’s real!”

“Real my foot.” The springs of the lower bunk creaked as Brett shifted irritably. “You talk about your winter life as if that was unreal and this was reality, when really it’s the other way round.”

“What do you mean? Look at all these people.” He flung out an arm, although Brett could not see him. “They’re real enough.”

“In ordinary life, yes. Not here. Why do you think they come? Because it’s everything their lives are not. Food and drink and cleanness and good temper all laid on without them having to lift a finger. And they can
be
everything they’re not, too. Why did those terrible girls sing and that man make a fool of himself with the ping-pong ball? No, I wasn’t asleep all the time. This is their escape dream, and you’re part of it, my chick. Their real life goes in for the other fifty-one weeks of the year. You’re living in a dream world and calling it reality. God, if this is what life is really like give me death. Whiskey?”

“No thanks. Haven’t finished this yet,” said Dickie abstractedly. He was worried. “What’s wrong with it here?” he argued. “People like it. They’re happy here.” He raised himself on his elbow and looked over the edge to emphasise what he knew to be true.

“Well naturally.” Brett was over by the basin, trickling a little water into his mug. “Anyone can be happy in heaven. Cheers.” He raised his mug, then sank on the bed again. “Happy, happy camper,” he murmured drowsily.