Flowers on the Grass (5 page)

Ossie had some cider and sat with them for a while. He showed the man in the check suit his notebook and had quite a success with some of his stories, although Theo’s wife maintained that she had heard them all before. The gentleman farmer began to tell a long and detailed story about how he and some other merry lads had assisted a cow’s difficult accouchement by roping the feet of the calf to a lorry and driving away.

When Ossie went to bed they seemed to be settled in for the night, but when he woke later to a moonlit room and the dree of an owl the house was quiet. He could not get to sleep again. The moonlight made the room look cold, but he was too hot. He flung off the clothes and then was too cold. He would go down and get himself a biscuit. It was always a help to chew a biscuit in bed, or even two or three, if you could not get to sleep.

Going into the sitting-room, he nearly died of fright. Daniel’s chair was empty, but there were feet on the hearthrug. Daniel was slumped asleep in the other armchair, the one that had been Jane’s, his face green and puffy in the moonlight.

He cursed when Ossie woke him, and cursed all the time he was getting him upstairs and undressing him on his bed. Ossie found that he quite enjoyed doing all this, and could understand why women liked to be nurses. In bed himself, rolling over in a kindly glow, he fell asleep without remembering his biscuit.

Next morning, Daniel would not get up. When Ossie tried to rouse him, he said: “For Christ’s sake, don’t nanny me!” and turned over, so Ossie got the car out and went to work alone.

He hurried back that night, driving much too fast from the station so that he went off the road going round a corner and had a sudden vision of what Daniel would say if he found him and the car in a ditch.

Daniel was mowing the lawn, looking surprisingly healthy in a terrible plaid shirt that Ossie did not allow him to wear.

“You’re late,” he greeted him.

“I’m not. I’m early.”

“Well, it seems late. I’ve got company in there.” Daniel jerked his head at the house. “Been there for hours. Jane’s mother and her sister, collecting her things.”

“Oh,” said Ossie, “how awful. You shouldn’t be there.”

“Well, I’m not. I’m out here.” Daniel stuck in his pipe again and went on mowing.

Jane’s mother—Daniel’s Aunt Dilys—was a tall, swaying woman with a general lavender-coloured effect about her clothes, hair, lips and skin. She had long narrow feet and legs whose thinness she tried to disguise with thick grey cotton stockings. Either sorrow or natural causes had made her droopy. Her back curved, shoulders sagged, her hair looped downwards and her hands when idle hung with fingers pointing to the ground, the edges of their long nails like drops of water about to fall. Her clothes looked too big for her and she trailed at arm’s length a squashy bag into which she was sadly putting knick-knacks from the sitting-room.

Her daughter Lydia was still more colourless; not even lavender, but a fawnish no-colour which had spread from her personality to her clothes and hair. She was short and flat, and went about neatly, like a robot maid, doing the things that were necessary: folding clothes, sorting letters, packing books. When her mother, who was given to nervous repetition, asked her for the third time to do something she had already done,
Lydia answered: “Yes, Mummy,” with a natural patience that required no effort. Decorous and undemanding, they moved about the house like wraiths, and Daniel, coming in sweating from work, seemed by contrast excessively alive. It was clear why Jane, reared in the hushed and pallid atmosphere which swathed her mother and sister like a mist, had needed to marry someone like Daniel, nourished to full vitality on freedom and the sun.

His powers of recovery were astonishing. Looking at him, no one could have guessed that he had been dead drunk last night and incapable of speech or movement this morning.

“I must say, you look very
well
, Daniel,” his aunt said uncertainly.

“Me? I’m fine. I need a drink though. What are you going to have?”

“Well, you know I don’t take anything usually, but I think today I would like a small glass of sherry, if you’ve got it, dear.”

“Good for you. Lydia doesn’t, does she?”

“No, Lydia doesn’t.”

When he brought her drink, Aunt Dilys half put out a hand as if to touch his sleeve. “You’re so—so very good and brave, Daniel,” she said wonderingly. Though relieved to find him so normal, for it made their sad task easier, it seemed that in a way she would almost have preferred him to look peaky and mopy, so that she could have mourned with him, and they could all have loosed together the tears with which her throat was dry and her breast aching. In her, gladness that he could master his suffering fought with an involuntary resentment that he was not showing more suffering for her daughter.

She got Ossie by himself in the bathroom. “How
is
he? ” she whispered, although Daniel was out in the garden again and could not possibly hear.

“He’s not too bad. He has his bad times, of course,” said Ossie importantly.

“Oh dear. I do wish I could do something for him. But no one has ever been able to do anything for Daniel, even when he was a child. When his mother died we all tried to help him, but he was so—so obstructive and remote. Not like other children. Oh dear …” She had found Jane’s sponge and stood looking helplessly at the hard, dry lump. Ossie went gently away.

It was time to cook the supper. “Do we,” he asked Daniel, “feed them before they start back?”

“If you like. If you’ve got anything to give them,” Daniel said, as if it was Ossie’s house, not his.

Aunt Dilys offered to help with the supper, but Ossie wanted to show off his cooking. She stayed in the kitchen for a moment, looking round about the electric stove, as if seeking for something that was not there, and then went out to lay the table.

“Napkins… . Where are the napkins? Lydia, ask Daniel where the napkins are.”

“Daniel, where are the napkins?” relayed Lydia.

“What napkins? I’ve never seen any.”

“They haven’t got any napkins, Mummy,” Lydia relayed back into the dining-room.

“Oh dear.” Aunt Dilys drifted round the table straightening cutlery and murmuring: “It’s all wrong, you know, these two men living here together in this way with no one to look after them. That village woman doesn’t seem to do much. Look, Lydia, at this glass.” She breathed a sad little mist on to it and rubbed it on her sleeve. “I do wish Daniel would-”

“Pom—tiddy-pom-pim-
pom
!” trumpeted Ossie. “Soup’s up!” He did not want Daniel to hear her fussing.

They had a quiet, polite meal. Aunt Dilys ate little, dabbing her mouth with a mauve handkerchief. Lydia ate whatever was put on her plate and would not help herself to anything, even salt, unless it was passed to her. When they had had coffee and the cases were in the car and it was time to go, and everyone was suddenly stimulated by relief that the awkward visit was safely over, there was a thud on the front door. It was not like someone knocking; it was like someone smaller than a person bumping against the door.

Ossie saw Daniel’s face frozen into unbelief. He saw him look at the others, finding their gloves and being helped into coats by Ossie, but the sound meant nothing to them, until Daniel opened the door and Jane’s collie dog slid in, gaunt and mangy, with one torn ear raggedly healed and half his tail gone.

Aunt Dilys gave a cry and burst into tears. Lydia clung to her and wept without noise. Daniel dropped on his knees and laid his cheek on the scarred yellow head. The dog, after greeting him no more effusively than if he had just returned from a day’s hunting instead of two months’ wandering,
slipped away, down the step into the dining-room, over the cross-bar under the table and up the step into the kitchen, with the movements of old habit.

Nobody said anything. It was as if Jane’s ghost, which had never troubled the house, had suddenly come back, with her dog.

“We must go … must go.” Aunt Dilys groped to the door.

“Yes, Mummy.” Lydia straightened her hat. Her short figure steered her mother’s tall one up the path in the dusk, while Daniel and Ossie followed.

The box-like family car jerked to a start and wavered away up the lane, for Lydia was still crying. Daniel stood by the gate with his hands in his pockets and watched them go, then turned back to the house to find something for the dog to eat.

Gradually Daniel was less and less at the cottage. Ossie did not mind so much sleeping there alone now that he had a dog. The collie became quite attached to him, which was gratifying, being the reverse of Ossie’s usual relationships with people; but when his master came home, the dog forgot Ossie, who had fed and petted him while Daniel was away.

Ossie did not have so much time to worry about Daniel now, for shortly after the visit of Aunt Dilys and Lydia the most extraordinary thing happened. Ossie got himself a girl-friend. It was more that she acquired him than he her, for although they had chatted often in the library, for she was a student at the college, it would never have occurred to Ossie to make the first move that would lead to better things.

Even now, when she had made it quite clear that she liked him, Ossie still could hardly believe that he had a girl-friend. A regular girl-friend, belonging to no one else. A girl who kept evenings free for him. A girl he could nuzzle in cinemas, and kiss in the dark doorway of her block of flats. A girl who let him say: “I love you,” and did not laugh. He said it often, once he had overcome the first difficulty of getting it past his untutored lips. “I love you, Doreen,” he said, and although she had not yet said “I love
you”
in return, she appeared to like him saying it, and Ossie sat and dreamed about her in the late train going home, with a fatuous smile among his chins.

Sometimes in the mornings, when romance was null, Ossie would look at himself in the long mirror and realise dejectedly
that she was kidding him, or he kidding himself. A man who looked like that—what could he mean to a red-haired Aphrodite like Doreen? But then there she was, popping into the library half-way through the morning to say: “There’s a new film at the Empire tonight. Shall we go?”

Sometimes in the late train, which wandered out of London stopping at every little station and picking no one up, Ossie dreamily wondered if one day he and Doreen would get married. It was an idea almost too revolutionary to be entertained, let alone voiced. It was an exhilarating thought, yet a disturbing one, too, because marriage had never entered into any of Ossie’s plans for life. Not that he had many plans for life. He was young yet; he had always thought he would just drift on and see what turned up. He had never thought of marriage turning up. When he looked at his middle age, he saw himself as a jolly bachelor uncle taking someone’s children—his sister’s if she ever married—to the circus, the pantomime, the fair on Hampstead Heath.

Ossie did not tell Daniel about Doreen. He thought that it might hurt him. The idea of a man and a girl… Once when he had been with Daniel at a theatre, they had been talking in the interval and Daniel had suddenly stopped in mid-sentence and stiffened like a pointer, staring at the back of a pale blonde head two rows in front. When the girl turned to her companion so that they saw her profile, Daniel had relaxed, let out his breath and gone on talking.

When Ossie stayed late in town he always told Daniel that he was going out with his sister or “with the boys”.

“But where do you go?” Daniel asked. “Where does one go ‘with the boys’ if one doesn’t go to pubs?”

“But I do.”

“God,” said Daniel, “they’re dreary enough if you drink. Must be hell if you don’t.”

Sometimes Daniel came home by the late train, too. Sometimes he didn’t come home at all. In September he had some kind of quarrel with Benita, the old Neapolitan woman in Battersea, and began to come home to the cottage again every night. Ossie felt bad then about going out so much with Doreen. If he was Daniel’s friend, living with him for company, then he must do the thing properly, not leave him there to lonely darkening autumn evenings with no one to cook his supper.

He explained this to Doreen, but she did not understand. She was interested in Daniel and often asked Ossie things about him. Like most girls, she was attracted to him, yet peeved by the fact that girls did not seem to attract him. Not the ones at the college, anyway. He was polite with those he taught, or sarcastic if they were foolish, for all the world as if he were some sexless old professor who viewed them only as brains, not bodies. A girl might save herself the discomfort of an uplift brassiere for all the effect it had on Daniel Brett.

One day Daniel was caustic to her about the perspective of her middle distances. It was that evening that she and Ossie had their first real quarrel.

“Gigli’s at the Albert Hall next Wednesday,” Doreen said, in Lyon’s. “I’ve got no late class. You could sneak out early and we’ll queue like mad. We might get into the gallery.”

“Not a hope.”

“Why not? Don’t be so defeatist. Someone’s got to get in. Other people do.” “Not us,” Ossie said.

“What’s the matter? Don’t you
want
to go? I thought you said you liked Italian music, or were you only pretending?”

“I—pretending? You know me, Doreen; George Washington’s my middle name. It’s me arches, though. I can’t stand in queues.”

“You did for the Crazy Gang.”

“Ah …” Ossie snatched gratefully at the joke, like a dog at a bone. “That was
‘underneath
the arches’. This is on them.”

“Oh shut up,” she frowned. “I’m serious.” That was one of the privileges Doreen had brought him, serious discussion for the first time in his life, “
I
—want—to go,” she said, biting off her words like thread.

“Well, I’ll see.” Ossie shifted his chair uneasily and a waitress knocked into him with a tray of tomato soups.

“I know.” Doreen leaned forward, her pale-lashed eyes narrowed. “You don’t want to abandon your beloved Daniel, that’s it.”

“No—but well, in a way it does seem a bit mean. After all, we’re going to the Palladium on Tuesday, and there’s that film on Thursday. I don’t feel I ought to go on the tiles every night. He’s pulling down an old shed, and I have to help him.”