Flowers on the Grass (11 page)

The purse, when she found it, was full of newspaper cuttings. She took them out, looked for money, shut the purse, opened it and pretended to look again. It was an awkward moment, with Esther staring and hustling her. Lew and Hymie, coming in search of coffee and cinnamon
schnecken
, grasped the situation with the speed at which they registered anything financial.

“But you should have money today, Mumma.” Lew poured himself coffee and took a warm
schnecken
slice out of the oven, where they were always to be found in the middle of the morning. “Daniel pays his rent on Fridays.”

“Or does he?” Hymie narrowed his eyes at his mother.

“Don’t inquisition me, son. Sometimes I forget to ask him.”

“He’s upstairs. I’ll go and ask him for you.”

“No, Hymie, please. The rent is my affair.”

“How much is he paying you, anyway?” Lew asked, wiping his fingers on a silk handkerchief and taking a comb out of his breast pocket. “I know what he ought to pay,” he went on, slicking his hair at the mirror, “but does he pay it? Why do you never have any money?” He turned and pointed the comb at her, like a barrister intimidating a witness with tortoiseshell spectacles.

Mrs. Weissman hedged. Daniel had not paid her anything for three weeks, and she had not dared to mention it, in case he should leave. Lew and Hymie, who could smell out the truth of anything to do with money, were shocked and disappointed in her.

“It’s not good business, Mumma,” Hymie said sadly, his big brown eyes sorrowing at her over his coffee cup.

“This is not business,” she said. “This is a friendly arrangement.”

“It’s the same thing,” Hymie said, twitching his upper lip, for he was growing a moustache, and it tickled.

“And while you stand arguing,” said Esther in a far more argumentative tone than anyone had yet used, “I’m waiting to go to the shops. I do all the work in this house and get all the kicks. Ow! You devil, Hymie!” She kicked him back and they began to tussle, with the baby gurgling and crowing round their feet. Esther’s hat came off. She bit Hymie and he released her and went out of the room whistling happily, flinging his head back in the stimulated way of one who has just taken refreshing exercise.

Mrs. Weissman performed the large-scale operation of getting to her feet. “Please go away, everybody,” she said, “and leave me to cook the dinner. Lew, give your sister some money, and get off the table. I want to chop onions where you are sitting.”

Lew gave Esther some pound notes and she went out, pushing past Daniel who was coming in. He recovered from the impact and came into the kitchen heading for the coffeepot, kissing Mrs. Weissman good morning on the way. She insisted on being kissed by everyone. She loved to be kissed.

Daniel took his coffee and three cakes from the oven and sat on the table swinging his legs on the same place from which Mrs. Weissman had removed Lew. Because she thought he looked tired, she took her onions and knife to another corner.

“A good thing you’re not in a job, Daniel,” Lew said. “You’d be late to work every morning.” He had on his shrewd face, soft grey eyes narrowed and bright as wet pebbles.

“Yes,” said Daniel, picking up the paper. “I was always late when I was a teacher. Used to miss the first class. The students didn’t care. They simply came late, too.”

“Weil, I do care,” said Lew so nastily that Mrs. Weissman said: “No, no, Lew,” and waved the knife at him.

“About my sleeping late? It’s your fault. You get me the dope.”

“On tick,” said Lew, even more nastily. “I’m not getting you any more until you find some work to do.”

“For the good of my soul?” Daniel asked with his mouth full. “Don’t give me that, for God’s sake. Why does everyone always want to save me? I didn’t think I’d get that in this house.”

“No,” said Lew, “for the good of my mother’s purse. How much longer are you going to live here on her charity?”

“Lew!” His mother banged the table with the handle of the knife. “I will not let you talk like that to Daniel. Leave him alone. My affairs are my affairs.” She sat down, the better to make this weighty pronouncement.

Daniel was not offended. He got up to get another cake from the oven. “I’m terribly sorry, Mumma,” he said. “Honestly, I’d no idea you wanted the money till the end of the month. I’ll have to get hold of some. Trouble is, I’m not getting the rent for my house any more. The tenants left.”

“You have a house?” Mumma was astonished. “Why don’t you live in it?”

Daniel shrugged his shoulders.

“Why not get another tenant?” Lew asked.

“I can’t be bothered to find anyone. The last two were all right. No trouble. But one of them went and died.”

“You must let it again or sell it,” Lew said. “I can get you a good price for it.” He was interested now and had forgotten his grievance.

“What’s the use,” said Daniel, staring at nothing, “if people are always going to die in it?”

“Nonsense.” Mrs Weissman put her hands on her knees and pushed herself to her feet. “If it’s their time, people will die wherever they are. Not sooner, not later.”

“Let me fix a let for you,” said Lew, “or a sale. Might be the right thing to auction it. There are some beautiful prices being paid for house property.”

“I can’t be bothered,” Daniel said. “All that fuss about inventories and sewers and repairs. Possessions are a curse. It’s best to forget about them.”

“But it’s such a crying waste.” Lew was really upset. He began to walk up and down in the narrow space between the table and the wall, planning what he would do with Daniel’s house.

“Do leave it alone, Lew,” his mother said. “Don’t keep on at Daniel.”

“It’s all very well, Mumma, but he’s got to make money. Why should he be the only one who doesn’t bring anything to the house?”

“Oh, all right, all right,” Daniel said sourly. “I’ll get a job.

God knows what at.” He put his cup in the sink and went to the door.

“You can paint,” Lew said eagerly. “I know a man who has a sweet little business copying antiques and old masters——”

Daniel went out, and they saw his feet going up the area steps and wandering away down the street.

Mumma took her pan of onions to the stove and stood there lifting saucepan lids and stirring. When she was at the stove she did not look so gross and unwieldy. She was a craftsman, appropriate to her environment. She even had a kind of ponderous grace as she reached to her spice shelf and shook nutmeg into a pan of dumpling soup, whose smell alone might have been enough to justify her whole existence.

“Not too much of that,” Lew said, watching her. “I don’t like too much.”

“Daniel does,” she said without thinking, and he flared up.

“So now he means more to you than your own son, is that it?” Lew’s lisp was twice as thick when he became excited. “We must all eat the way he likes. I suppose the next thing will be we mustn’t have kosher meat because Daniel is a Christian.”

“Lew, you are unkind. Don’t you see that it’s because he is not my son that I must try and make up? It’s no easy thing to be a lodger in someone else’s house. Everything is all right, until something happens which draws the family together and then he is left out. Or something happens to him, but he cannot turn to anyone, because the family have their own affairs, and no one puts him first. That’s why Daniel is like this and cannot work. He has kept some trouble inside himself and it has made him ill.”

“What trouble?” asked Lew suspiciously.

“I don’t know.”

“Guilty conscience perhaps. I wonder what he’s done.” Lew pursed his lips. Having no conscience himself, he could be quite smug about other people’s. “Perhaps his girl walked out on him. He seems to be off women.”

“We must find him another, then,” said Mumma, with homeopathic optimism. “I would have liked that he and Rosie——”

“Ro wouldn’t look at him,” Lew said. “She likes her men solvent.”

Nevertheless, it was through Rosie that Daniel found some work to do. She had a gentleman friend called Max, who had acquired a long low basement in Denman Street, which he was going to open as a club. Rosie was going to leave the Venus Club and exchange her sequinned trunks for the long dress of a hostess. Max, who was the jealous type and carried a knife which he had once used on a sailor in a brawl, would be happier to have Rosie under his eye and fully clad.

One evening after supper she announced in her clear, imperious voice: “Max wants someone to paint the decorations round the walls of the new club. I said Daniel would do it.”

“I?” Daniel, who was playing chess with Mr. Weissman, looked up in alarm. “Good Lord, girl, you must be mad.”

“Why?” Rosie shrugged her shoulders elaborately. All her gestures were excessive. If she was only pointing to a smut on your nose, she flung out an arm like stout Cortez discovering the Pacific. Now, her thin shoulders worked like steam pistons under her silk blouse. “No one in the family can paint, so you might as well be in on it.”

“Oh, fine,” Daniel said, “except that I couldn’t paint either now. I’ve taught, but I haven’t put a brush on paper since— oh, for ages.”

“Your move, boy,” said Mr. Weissman, who took half an hour over his own moves but only allowed his opponent half a minute.

“Of course you must do it,” Rosie said, flinging her body about at him resentfully. “Don’t annoy me. I’ve told Max you would. Anyway, Lew says you must do some work.”

“Not that kind,” Daniel tipped back his chair to look at Rosie. “I wouldn’t be much good.”

“That’s all right,” Rosie said candidly. “Max wouldn’t pay you very much. You can paint women surely. Girls—you know the kind of thing.”

Hymie whistled through his teeth and made rounded gestures in the air. Daniel watched, shook his head and, letting down the legs of his chair, bent to the game again. “No, Pa,” he said. “You can’t do that. A pawn can’t go there.”

“So sorry, so sorry. It’s my eyes.” Pa did not exactly cheat at chess, but he tried things on. His needle-pitted fingers hovered over the board, picking up pieces and putting them down again, not always in the same place. Daniel slapped his hand and moved a bishop back to where it had been.

“Oh, do stop playing
chess
!” Rosie almost screamed. “Daniel, you are so lazy, you make me
ill
. You can paint. You said you could.”

“Not girls.”

But Rosie had promised Daniel to Max. “Yes, girls. Any girl. You must have painted some girl or other some time. Goodness, I had a boy once who was an artist and we never had any fun because I was always sitting still while he drew me from a distance.”

Daniel looked up from the board, and seemed to speak to Mumma, not to Rosie. “I used to paint a girl once,” he said. “Yes… . But oh no.” He gave himself a little shake. “She wouldn’t do.”

“A girl’s a girl,” Morrie said and made a smacking noise with his lips. Esther reached a foot under the table and hacked him on the ankle.

“Let’s see,” Lew said. “Draw her now.”

“No. My move, Pa?” He moved a piece thoughtfully, then suddenly turned round and said: “Yes, all right, I will. Anyone got a pencil?” Quickly he began to sketch the rough picture of a fair, wispy girl on the white scrubbed wood of the kitchen table. Everyone crowded round to look, criticising. Pa got up to see and knocked most of the chess-men on the floor.

“There you are!” Daniel flung the pencil down and turned away from the picture.

“It’s rotten. I do better than that in school,” said Joey, who should have been in bed hours ago, but kept coming down again in his pyjamas like a boomerang every time he was shut in his room.

“It’s not,” Lew said, screwing up his lips as if he were judging it with a view to purchase. “It’s good, but-”

“She looks half starved,” Mumma said.

“She should have more-” Esther patted her own solid self proudly.

“Where’s her sex?” Hymie said. “You forget to put that in.”

“No,” Rosie said, “she wouldn’t do for Max’s place. Do another. Who else can you do?”

“I could paint you,” Daniel said, running his eye up and down her.

“No, Max wouldn’t like it. He wouldn’t like to think you thought of me like that. Try another.”

“There was a girl in Italy——” Daniel picked up the pencil.

“Not on my table,” Mumma said. “Someone get some paper.”

Hymie went upstairs and returned with a sample of “export only” wallpaper. Daniel leaned his elbow over the picture of the girl on the table, and on the back of the wallpaper he drew a sultry-looking girl with a lock of black hair over one eye and an impertinent figure.

“Ah!” they all cried. “That’s more like it. Now you’ve got the idea.” They pushed at each other, leaning over the table to judge the masterpiece seriously.

“Max will go for that,” Rosie announced.

“You can do her all round the walls,” said Morrie, “in different posi—sorry, Esther—ways. Now we must have a man looking at her. Like this.” He put on a look that made Esther kick him again.

“There was a wing-commander I used to sketch in the prison camp,” Daniel said. “I could do him as he looked once when he found something in an American Red Cross parcel wrapped up in a page of
Esquire”
He drew the wing commander, with a lopsided black moustache and eyes like prawns. Everyone was delighted, pleased for Daniel as if he were a child. He on his side humoured their enthusiasm without sharing it, as if they were children. He allowed himself to be dragged off by Rosie to the Venus Club to see Max, who was always there to watch her number, in case anyone else was watching her the wrong way.

“Don’t you want to play any more chess?” Pa asked, rising from the floor where he had been picking up the pieces. Daniel had gone.

“I’ll play, Gramp,” said Joey. “Bet you I win. What odds will you give?”

“None,” said his grandfather, “because you always do.” He would have preferred to read his book, but if Joey said he wanted to play chess he had to play.

Daniel bought paints and brushes and started to work on the walls of Max’s basement. He seemed much happier now that he had something better to do than moon about the house wondering whether or not he felt ill. As the paintings progressed, he became more interested and developed quite a temperament about them, coming home to supper with the air of Michelangelo having just put in a hard day’s work on the Sistine Chapel.