Flowers on the Grass (13 page)

“‘Sright,” said Lew, picking his teeth. “He can get along without us.”

“But Lew—he has no one!” Mumma’s voice rose, and in the room upstairs the baby gave a single aggrieved cry.

“Can the noise!” Esther yelled. “Morrie and I want to sleep.” Her voice woke Mr. Weissman, although the voices in
the same room had not roused him. He sat up, looked fuzzily round, rubbed his eyes and lay tidily down on his edge of the bed.

Although Mumma would not let his room to anyone else, and Pa finished his suit, Daniel did not come back. Even after he wrote from somewhere in Cornwall to say goodbye and ask her to send his things, Mumma still seemed to see him running down a shadowy mews, running home to her. And although there were so many others to fill her days and her heart—Pa, Lew, Hymie, Esther, Morrie, the children, Rosie, and now this Max—whenever Mumma baked cinnamon
schnecken
, she always thought that perhaps today he would stroll in with his hands in his pockets just in time to eat them as they came hot from the oven.

If They told him, when he woke, that he had had a fit, Geoffrey would never believe it. Groping vainly in memory, muddled with sleep and headache, he thought it maddening of them to come and tell him these things, omniscient from their pinnacle of health. But when they had gone forgivingly away, and his temper was cooling into reason, he would begin to notice things.

Why was there no hot-water bottle in the bed? Why this extra blanket over the eiderdown? What, above all, was he doing in bed, with the sun at his window showing that it was afternoon? Wearily, he would get up and go to the mirror to see a fresh bruise or a cut added to the scars and scabs he always carried, the hall-marks of the epileptic.

Oh well, that would give him about three weeks of peace before the queer dreamlike warning came upon him again, that illusion of having experienced everything before. The
déjà vu phenomenon
, he knew it was called. Geoffrey was deeply interested in his disease and liked to read about it, but he could not discuss it with anyone. Although his family coddled and sheltered and restricted him and found a hundred ways to emphasise his infirmity, they shrank from it verbally, as if it were slightly improper. Outsiders tried to change the subject if he broached it, watching him nervously, as if they feared he might talk himself into a fit. Geoffrey’s companion-tutor Woodie believed that since he was taking Mr. Marple’s money, he must take his opinion as well, and Mr. Marple’s opinion was that if talking could not affect a situation, then why talk? Wliat can’t be cured must be endured, he thought, but he did not say that. He left it to his wife to make the fatuous remarks.

Now that Woodie was on holiday, therefore, his stand-in, this man Brett—Geoffrey at twenty-two looked on everyone of
any age or sex as equals or inferiors—this man must be trained from the start to talk to Geoffrey about Geoffrey.

Geoffrey liked to talk, but although he needed an audience, he quickly became irritated by people and had to go a vay by himself. By himself! He could never be that for long. He was not allowed to do anything alone. He could not swim or fish or sail or bicycle to Marazion or lock the bathroom door. He had never been allowed to drive a car or have a gun. Although he never saw her, because the luminal he took gave him deep sleep, he suspected that his mother came into his room in the night to see if he were suffocating himself, in spite of these hard hair pillows on which they insisted. If he managed to elude Woodie, and sneaked off alone in the bus to Penzance, or took the outboard dinghy round the point to Praa Sands, his family would raise a hue and cry as if he were an escaped convict.

They were surprised that he himself had no sense of danger. They could not understand that he just knew he could do these things. A star watched over him. He could do anything. He could conquer the world if only they would let him. He had read in a book that this was “morbid optimism”, a symptom of his disease. All right, then he had morbid optimism. He was a good case, qualifying on all points like a champion show dog.

For two days of grilling weather since Woodie left, Geoffrey had not been able to swim. His father and mother could not go in after him in an emergency, for they had not swum out of their depth for years. Aunt Florence was away on the round of visits known as “distributing my favours” to resigned friends and relations. The maids were not allowed to chaperon Geoffrey, especially after that incident with Ruby last year. His sister Eileen, a dull, faint-hearted girl who should have been born a hundred years earlier, was afraid of being alone in the sea with him.

“If anything happened, it would be
my
fault. I’d never get over it.” She had scarcely the hardihood to survive her trifling mistakes, let alone a monstrous one like a drowning epileptic.

As soon as the man Brett arrived, Geoffrey dragged him down to the sea. The house at Mara Rocks was built as if it were part of the rocks itself, dropping down with them sideways towards the sea, so that the ground floor at the road end was the first floor at the other. The front door opened among the bedrooms, and the stairs from it went not up but down to
the living-room and down again to the old playroom and the door that led to the terraced garden, and below that to the sea. Above the thumbnail of beach, there was a little harbour, said to have been blasted out of the rocks by a smuggler called the Duke of Mara, although how he could have done it without bringing every coastguard for miles on the scene no one knew. It made a perfect natural swimming pool, and here Geoffrey and Daniel Britt, who had desired at lunch to be called Daniel, were sitting on the edge of the baking rocks with their feet in the clear green water.

Geoffrey was telling Daniel about his
déjà vu phenomenon
. “One of the classic forms of aura. Napoleon was supposed to have it. That’s why he lost the Battle of Waterloo. Towards the end, when things were going badly, he was going to give an order: ‘Fight on.
On ne se rend jamais!
’” Geoffrey liked his French and aired it whenever possible. “But he was working up for a fit, and when he opened his mouth to say that, he imagined he’d already said it, so he closed his mouth, had his fit, and when he came out of it it was too late to say: ‘
On ne se rend jamais!’
One had already more or less
rendu”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” Daniel said.

“I’m not surprised. I made it up just now,” said Geoffrey cheerfully, liking Daniel for that. His family would have received the story with: “Fancy, dear. How interesting,” not wishing to excite him by contradiction.

“Let’s swim,” he said. “I can’t stand this sun much longer.”

“Bit soon after lunch, isn’t it? Your mother said-”

Oh hell, thought Geoffrey. Was he going to turn out smug like Woodie? He looked at Daniel, sitting there in a pair of trunks, basking his tipped-up face, his body not burned golden with this summer’s sun like Geoffrey’s, but brown with the maturer tan that does not wear off in winter; the product of years of sun, or of natural colouring. He did not look the smug type, but you never knew with people who were no good for anything except to be tutors or companions. They were apt to be soapy.

“Don’t fuss,” he said fretfully. “You needn’t worry about me. I probably shan’t have an attack all the time you’re here, if that’s what you’re scared of. I always know, anyway. I get this unearthly sort of disembodied feeling, this knowing that everything has happened-” Even as he spoke, he felt that
he had said all this before to Daniel, sitting on the rocks with the sun exactly there and the same gull riding that very wave. He had seen him open his eyes to find out why Geoffrey had stopped speaking, had heard him say: “What?” in that identical tone, like a gramophone.

Geoffrey got to his feet. His body began to float away from his mind. This was going to be a quick one. He had time to yell: “Look out! Get me back on to the sand before I——” He just had a moment to hope to God that Daniel knew what to do, and then everything in the world was nothing.

He woke in his bed, in darkness. Strange. He did not usually wake in the middle of the night. He lay for a while trying to remember what time he had gone to bed, then switched on the light to see his watch. Darned thing had stopped. The glass was broken. He had not done that. His mother must have knocked it off the table when she tucked him in and picked it up without noticing. Why must she always go bumbling about without her glasses?

He was annoyed. Now he would not be able to go to sleep again. It had not mattered much about the time before, but now it began to be imperative for him to know it. His bed was a comfortable world, secure. His limbs felt heavy and his head was thick. He did not want to get up, but he must know the time, it was getting on his nerves. With a petulant exclamation, he flung off the bedclothes and got up into his dressing-gown and slippers.

The corridor light was on, which was not unusual, since his mother frequently forgot to turn it off. It was unusual, however, for the downstairs light to be on, for his father, who came last to bed, would as soon leave a light burning as forget to clean his teeth. As Geoffrey went down the stairs, he heard voices in the drawing-room: his father and the man Brett. What on earth were they doing up at this time of night when he had been in bed and asleep*—long asleep, by the leaden feeling to which he had woken? Talking about him, no doubt; Daniel getting his orders. Orders …? Vaguely Geoffrey remembered a recent story about Napoleon giving orders. What was it? Who had told it him and where? He must try to remember, because there had been French in it, and he might want to tell it himself.

Yes, they were talking about him. He laid his head to the drawing-room door and listened.

“Poor boy,” his father was saying, and Geoffrey could imagine his diluted blue eyes winking and blinking as they did when he was venturing on a delicate subject. “It’s hard luck, hard luck indeed. All the things I’d planned for him. … Put him down for Rugby, of course, when he was born, but we had to take him away after a year there. And then no varsity—what chance has the boy got?”

Geoffrey could not hear Daniel’s answer. He hoped he would have the sense not to say he had not been to Oxford or Cambridge himself.

He could hear his father’s sigh, right through the closed door. “Sad for him, and a great blow for us. Especially now that …” A pause. Mr. Marple cleared his throat and tried to speak briskly. “My wife told you, eh?”

Daniel murmured something. There was the sound of Geoffrey’s father getting up, shrilling the castors of his chair. The lid of the china tobacco jar clattered with a familiar clop. There was quite a long pause now while he filled his pipe, then he spoke jerkily, between the laboured puffs with which he bellowed it as if it were a sluggish fire.

“Oh well… I suppose … lesson to one … start a family with too high hopes.” The castors of the chair cried out again as he sat down. The pipe was going now. “Just bad luck. What? Oh yes, but three generations back, we never contemplated … But these things don’t die out, it seems.”

Geoffrey put his hand on the doorknob, but paused as he turned it, hearing his father say: “Sorry about today, Brett. Distressing to have it happen your first day.”

So that was it! Geoffrey burst into the room. His father and Daniel were sitting in the bay of the window, with the whiskey decanter on a table between them, Smug as you please, talking about him. Geoffrey was prepared to resent this now, although he had enjoyed listening to the talk.

“Here,” he said, as they turned surprised faces, and Daniel pushed himself more upright to see round his chair, “is that why I was in bed? What’s the time? Don’t tell me I’ve had a fit.”

His father hated that word. “Well yes, old boy, I’m afraid you did have a little attack.”

“Where?” snapped Geoffrey. It was exasperating not to be able to remember it.

“By the sea,” Daniel said.

“On the rocks?” Geoffrey put a hand up to his face. He should have looked in the mirror before he came down.

“No,” said Daniel, “you got yourself on to the beach with the cunning of an old hand. Very proud of you, I was.”

Mr. Marple began to blink, but Geoffrey liked this. No one had ever treated the thing as a joke before.

“Two minutes later,” Daniel said, “and you might have folded up while we were swimming. Then God help you, because I failed the life-saving test six times at Eton.”

Mr. Marple blinked faster. That was no way to talk to Geoffrey. He should be reassured that he was safe with Daniel. That was what he was there for.

By casual, indirect questions, Geoffrey tried to make Daniel tell him what had happened. He liked to know, but he hated to admit that he could remember nothing, so when Daniel told him, he listened carefully, but said: “Yes, yes, I know. I remember. You were telling me a story about Napoleon.”

“No,” said Daniel. “You were.”

“No. I remember quite well.” Geoffrey became heated, and felt himself begin to sweat under his pyjamas. “You were telling me-”

Daniel shook his head; then seeing Mr. Marple frown a warning to him not to contradict, laughed and said: “Oh, all right.”

“There, you see!” triumphed Geoffrey, who would never let a subject drop until he had been proved or faked right. It did not matter which, as long as he got his own way.

“What was the story—good one, old boy?” asked his father in the chummy voice he used with Geoffrey, as if trying to deceive himself that his son was anything but a dead loss as a chum.

“It was about Napoleon being epileptic. Did you know he was, Dad?” Geoffrey asked, to distract from the fact that he had forgotten the story.

“No. They didn’t teach us that when I was at school.”

“Nearly all the great men were. Julius Caesar, Mohammed, St. Paul, Marlborough, Duke of Wellington. … So you see, you shouldn’t be ashamed of me. You should be proud,” he went on, ignoring his father’s hurt protest. “Epilepsy
breeds greatness. It might in me, you never know. Something to do with abnormal brain energy. Lom—what’s his name?—Lombardo—Lombroso said that all genius was epilep—epileptoid.” He saw the way his father and Daniel were looking at him and realised that he was slurring his words. Damn. This often happened after a fit.