Flowers on the Grass (30 page)

Pamela, whose new cotton dresses were still in her trunk, wore an old shrunken gingham, and got Selina to cut her hair very short with Kathryn’s cutting-out shears. She worked as near as she could to Daniel, standing with him on top of the stack, raking the next row to his, or riding on top of the cart when he was leading away, so that she could watch him from above. He wore khaki shorts and a white shirt and his skin was browner than anyone else’s and his hair blue-black in the sun. She thought he looked very romantic.

When the rain came they retired to the house again and got on each other’s nerves. It soaked down for three days and no one would go to the studio because it meant a dash through the wet. Peter revised the curriculum to keep them quiet with more lectures, because he was trying to finish his novel, which was called
I and Not
/, and took place entirely in the mind of a schizophrenic postman.

Kathryn gave some talks on ballet, which she called bal-lée, and Humphrey intoned in his usual half-hearted way about
modern music, illustrated by a gramophone which he always forgot to wind until it ran down with a groan. Alice, who had once done two years’ medical training, gave some snappy little talks on the reproductive system, which Pamela could not understand, and Daniel organised a Brains Trust, which would have been quite fun if only people would stick to the point and keep off insults. Daniel was question master, which meant sitting at the middle of the table smoking and saying:

“Shut up, boy,” or: “One at a time, girl.”

“Why don’t you call us by our names?” someone asked. “You’re damn rude.”

“Can’t be bothered to learn ‘em,” he said. “I shan’t be here much longer, thank the Lord. Now shut up and let’s get on with the next question. ‘Why does a woman-’er—no, I think we’ll skip that one. Which of you scum sent that in? O.K. I know the writing. I’ll deal with
you
later. Here’s a better one: ‘If you were a Russian and came to England-’”

Pamela was sitting in a daze of shock. She had never thought about Daniel not being here any more. It had been bad enough before; it would be impossible without him. He was the sun and moon and the only thing that made the days go round at all.

“Pam.” He was speaking to her. “Pam, wake up and answer this question. What’s the matter with you?”

“You upset her,” Mervyn said calmly from across the table where he had been watching her, “with your talk of going. Can’t you see? How blind men are… .” He hummed an airy tune and studied his fingernails. Daniel appeared not to have heard him.

When the lunch bell rang he went out, and the others clattered their chairs back or onto the floor. Someone blocked Pamela’s way before she could get to the door.

She was surrounded by sniggers. “Pam’s got a Thing about Daniel!” they chanted. “Ain’t love grand?”

“I’m not surprised,” Babette said. “He’s got something. I might take an interest myself if I wasn’t elsewhere involved.” She put her arm through Brian’s.

“Good old Pam,” Mervyn said. “Sex rearing its ugly head at last. You look out, kid. He’s the kind who likes ‘em young.”

“Has he kissed you yet? Oh bliss, girls!” cried Wanda and pretended to fall into a swoon.

Pamela did not go to lunch. When she got away from the others, she ran through the rain to Lady Torrin’s summer-house and wept. It was all spoiled. No one understood. Her glad, exalted crush was turned to Rosemount smut. Babette and her Brian—as if it was anything like that!

Or was it? Was it true what Mervyn had said, and her feeling for Daniel no more than the manifestations of adolescence about which she had heard so much? She hated herself. Her body was growing a shape and she didn’t want that. She wanted to stay a skimpy child always, never to have to grow up Sid get married. Everything was spoiled, and the romance of the summer-house was spoiled, too. Pamela had vaguely imagined that what Lady Torrin felt as she waited for her captain was the same innocent delight that Pamela felt when she waited to catch Daniel coming round the corner of the house to the studio. But if love was only what those others made of it, then Lady Torrin’s romance was only the sniggering she sometimes heard behind the cubicle curtains in the dormitory. There was only one pure affection, and that was hers for Daniel. She knew what it was, but no one else did, and they had wrecked, defiled and stamped on it.

She went out of the summer-house. Pushing through the polished rhododendron leaves, she nearly died of fright, as a voice said in her ear: “Whither dost thou wander, my pretty?” It was Peter, lurking like a wolf in Red Riding Hood.

“Oh—oh, hullo,” Pam said shakily and ducked under a branch to go on, but he caught her arm and held it behind her so that she had to turn round to untwist it.

“I was just going to the wigwam for five minutes’ peace,” he said. “Come, you shall share it with me.” He drew her towards the summer-house, but Pam hung back.

“No—if you don’t mind,” she said. “I want to go back to the house.”

“But I do mind. I want to recite poetry, and it’s no fun doing it to oneself.” As she still pulled away, he put his hand on her other bare arm, not holding it, but stroking the skin, and now he was not holding the other any more but stroking that, too, while Pamela stood petrified as a rabbit before his intent look.

“Why,” he said in a funny purring voice she had not heard him use before. “My little schoolgirl’s getting quite grown up. Your flesh has the soft exciting promise of a woman’s.
Come here, my dear…. ” He bent his head and she smelled his breath and the first cold touch of his glasses galvanised her into a wild shriek as she pushed him into the bushes and fled, with his chuckle following her through the clattering wet leaves.

Her instinct was to destroy. She wanted to beat his brains out against a wall, as she had seen Brian kill a rabbit. Without thinking, she ran through the french windows into his room, swept all the papers off his desk, pulled out the drawers and scattered what was in them, like a naughty child revenging itself in its mother’s bedroom. She found the manuscript of his book and stood stock still, with the package in her sans, calmed to deliberation.

Just what she wanted. I
and Not
I, his precious novel that was to shake the world. Gleefully Pamela threw it into the grate and set light to one corner, striking match after match to make the thick pages burn. When it was only a ©harred mess with little shreds flying off it round the room she dusted off her hands and pranced out, feeling as if she had taken a dose.

Pamela Ruelle was in trouble. It was epoch-making. Just like a real school. There was no proper punishment, however; that was against the system. She was just completely set aside. She had been odd man out before; now she was a pariah.

No one spoke to her, except Daniel, who said that he personally thought it was a good thing she had burned the book, for Peter would never have the guts to write it again, and there would be that much less paper wasted, and the world would be spared that much tripe.

After a tortured lunch, when people had talked round and across her and just looked through her when she asked for bread, Daniel found her crying in the summer-house. He sat down beside her and patted her shoulder awkwardly.

“I hate this place,” she sobbed. “I don’t
want
to belong to it, but, oh Daniel, isn’t it awful when everyone’s against you!”

“I’m not,” he said. “I’ve got a fellow feeling. I was a misfit, too, at school. I was slung out of Eton, you know.”

Interest checked a sob. She looked up. “Lucky you,” she said through the only handkerchief that Kathryn had not pinched. “You couldn’t be slung out of here.”

“You could for what I did, I bet.”

“What did you do?”

“Something like you, only mine was real arson. I set fire to a housemaster’s car.”

“Daniel, you didn’t!”

“I did. I dropped a match in the petrol tank. It burned like all-get-out.”

“Why did you?”

“Because I hated him—and life in general. I was half crazy that term for want of someone to talk to. I wasn’t any good at anything and, being me, couldn’t bear being a nonentity. The masters, I believe, had been told to go easy on me because I was bereaved, so I didn’t even have the distinction of being cursed. I was passed over, forgotten at the back of the class, stuck in the deep field in the third cricket game which no one bothered to umpire, lost at the end of a stone corridor in one of the little cold cells which opened off it like the snuggeries in a family vault. I
had
to call attention to myself. I thought they’d send me to prison, but they didn’t. Just sacked me. First time a Brett’s ever been sacked from Eton, don’t you know. Still, it got me to Italy. That saved my life, though the family thought it was my downfall.”

“Why?”

“Oh—I went properly wrong after that, and ended up as you see me now. But anyway, I enjoyed seeing that car burn to serap metal in Founder’s Yard more than anything else at Eton. I’d like to burn another some time.”

“Let me help,” said Pamela eagerly. “Let’s burn Humphrey’s motor-bike. They might sack us both.”

“I’m going anyway,” he said, “as soon as I’ve got my money. Back to Italy. I’m going to get me a room above a café and live on aubergines and figs and Orvieto Secco and not ever do a stroke of work.”

“Let me come, too. I like figs. It’s the only part of the food I like here.”

“What would you live on?
I
couldn’t support you.” He stretched out his legs and leaned against the wall with his hands behind his head. “You haven’t got any money, have you?”

“Estelle has. She’s got a diamond bracelet worth two thousand pounds. I could steal that.”

“I say,” he said, “you are getting progressive. Quite the Rosemount spirit.”

“Don’t say that,” Pamela said fiercely, “even in fun. If I thought I was getting like them here I’d die.”

“Poor old soul.” He smiled at her. “You do hate it, don’t you?”

“I loathe it,” she said solemnly, “with my heart and soul, I swear.” She licked her finger and drew it across her throat from ear to ear. “That’s what we used to do at the High School. I wish I was back there. Daniel,” she said suddenly, and the simplicity of the idea stunned her, “let’s run away I”

“Oh, we can’t,” he said lazily.

“Why not? They always do in school books, why not in real life?”

“Where to, though?” he asked, leaning forward.

“Well, you’d be all right. You’re grown up. I could go home. To Estelle and Eric, I mean. They couldn’t send me back if once I’d run away. Peter wouldn’t have me.”

“He would. He’d call it an extravasation of the freedom syndrome and love you all the better for it.”

“I’d tell them what he did. Then they wouldn’t send me back.”

“What did he do?”

“Here, it was.” She told him about it.

“God!” he said. “You poor kid! Of course you can’t stay here. Why didn’t you tell me before? I’d have damaged more than his book for him.”

“Oh, I couldn’t. It made me feel awful. I didn’t think I’d ever tell anyone. I’d hate to tell Estelle, because she’d analyse it, but you could tell them for me. You would, wouldn’t you? Make them send me back to the High School?”

“Oh don’t, Pam,” he said. “Don’t get me involved. You’ve got me wrong. I don’t go round being a benefactor.”

“You could start now,” she said happily. She believed that he would do it. It was going to be the biggest adventure of her life, and when it was over she would write a book about it. She bounced on the plank seat, thumping his knee with her fists. “Oh, come on, Danny! Let’s make plans. It’s going to be terrific.”

“Danny …” he said. “I haven’t been called that for years.” He looked at her with his eyes half shut, as if he were trying to blur her into someone else. “When I was married,” he said, “my wife wanted us to have a son, because she thought that was what I wanted. But really I wanted a daughter. You can’t
talk to boys, because they’re as tied up as you are. And they get to despise you. Girls will put up with you when you’re senile because you bring out their maternal instincts. But whoever heard of a son feeling paternal about his father?”

Pamela wished that he would hurry and not talk about irrelevant things. There was so much to do, for they must go today, now, while the idea was still hot in their brains.

He opened his eyes again, yawned and stretched himself, looking at his watch. “Oh well,” he said, “if we’re going, we’d better step on it. There’s a train in an hour.”

They were both so tired when they got to London that they could not decide what to do. Pamela wanted Daniel to take her with him to an hotel. She was too tired to face Estelle and Eric tonight.

“They’ll know,” she said. “Peter will have rung up and told them. He may even have followed us.” She had had this prickling in her spine ever since they stole out of the coal-house door at Rosemount. She looked over her shoulder and up into the black vaults of the station roof, shivering, dizzy with fatigue, seeing things that were not there.

“Don’t be an ass,” Daniel said. “How could he?”

“In a plane or something. He’ll pounce.” She could feel his cold fingers on her arm.

“Rot,” said Daniel. “Home for you, and bed. It isn’t an hotel, anyway, where I’m going, just a lousy kind of boarding house. I couldn’t take you there.”

She was afraid he wanted to be rid of her. Often on the journey down he had said: “I need a drink.” It must be wonderful to be a grown-up and be able to have a drink and suddenly feel much better about life.

“Not home, Danny,” she begged, standing looking up at him, while people pushed and jostled round them. “There’ll be so much talk.” Oh how Estelle loved to talk about things! “Not tonight. Tomorrow.”

“Tonight,” he said, picking up her bag. “Let’s get a taxi.”

“No, a bus. It’s slower.” She trotted by him as in a dream. She had a horrible feeling, like being drawn powerless towards some suffocating terror in a nightmare, that when she got home Peter would be there, grinning like a werewolf on the brocade sofa.

Half-way across the main road outside the station they had to wait on an island for a gap in the buses and cars. Under the flat green light their faces looked as though they were dead. Still with that prickling in her spine, Pamela looked back and saw, stepping towards her off the pavement they had left, a man in a mackintosh, with grinning teeth.