Flowers on the Grass (15 page)

It was quite a relief when Aunt Florence came charging into the room from the kitchen where she had been putting the wind up cook, who was trying to dish up. She and Mr. Mew exchanged noisy greetings, for she always talked at the top of her voice, and he had to explain: “Home is the wanderer!” many times before he would let go her hand. She brought with her Daniel, whom she had roped in on the way to carry her mending, and introduced him as Mr. Blatt. She had been calling him that for so many days now that no one felt equal to correcting her. It seemed a little late.

Aunt Florence, whose mind was still in the kitchen, said to her sister-in-law: “What have you been doing while I’ve been away? I’ve just been round the cupboards checking the stores and we’re low on nearly everything.”

Mrs. Marple glanced at Mr. Mew. This was not the time to say that she had been taking the opportunity of reducing the grocery bills while Florence was away. “As it was so hot,” she said at random, “I was afraid of things going off.”

“I’ve never heard of dried herbs going off, nor yet Oxo,” retorted Florence, appealing to Mr. Mew, with a toss of her lichen-coloured head, to join her in a scornful laugh.

“Lunch is served,” remarked Nellie in an off-hand Cornish way from the door. She spoke to Mrs. Marple, but Aunt Florence answered.

“Very well, Nellie, we will have lunch,” she said as if making a decision, although the soup was on the table and as far as Nellie was concerned they’d have it now or have it cold.

Lunch was wonderful. Roast chicken with crackling skin and white flesh that fell apart in your teeth almost before you could bite it. Cauliflower in a sauce like velvet, a purée of potatoes, of which Geoffrey, suspecting that Aunt Florence had palmed into it some of his extra eggs, took more than anyone else, as his due.

Aunt Florence, who was apt to speak to him as if he were a backward child, said: “Piggy, piggy 1 There are others to come after you.”

Mr. Mew held the table with an ornamental account of a meeting at a literary lunch with an author of whom no one had ever heard. At least, he held Aunt Florence, who was “a great reader”, and tore bits out of the book pages of the Sunday papers before other people had read them.

She told Mr. Mew that she envied him his interesting life among the great and that she had always said that she would write a book herself if only she could find time. The others got on with their food, and Daniel, who had the gift of detaching himself, seemed to be somewhere miles away beyond the window.

When they were ready for the next course, Aunt Florence, putting out a foot to press the bell under the table, pressed Mr. Mew’s toe instead, and he let out a yell and swallowed a small splinter of chicken-bone that he had just succeeded in dislodging from behind his teeth. Debonair to the last, he managed to convey, even while he was coughing and spluttering out shreds of potato on to his chin, that it was worth it, indeed an honour to have his foot trodden on by so charming a lady. Aunt Florence looked at him quizzically over her bust while
he said that he could, yes indeed he could be so naughty as to wish she had done it on purpose.

While all this was going on, Geoffrey took the opportunity of helping himself to both kinds of pudding when Nellie offered them for his choice.

His mother leaned across the table to whisper: “Only one, dear. You know what Doctor Mount said about not too many sweet things.”

Geoffrey, who had been working up an increasing irritation and had been looking all through lunch for something to make a scene about, now pushed his plate away, spilling custard on the table, slumped in his chair and prepared to make life hideous for everyone in the room.

“Nellie,” said Aunt Florence, “fetch a cloth. Mr. Geoffrey has made a mess.” She sounded as if he were a child allowed in to dining-room lunch as a treat, but not to be trusted after all without his square of mackintosh. “Take your plate back, dear, and get on with your pudding,” she said.

“I don’t want it,” growled Geoffrey, although his mouth was watering for the whipped-cream trifle and blackcurrant fool.

Mr. Mew, having finally settled the chicken-bone, was free now to make the best of this. “I say, I say,” he said loudly, “this won’t do. Do you know what my nurse used to say to me when I refused my food?” No one asked, but he told them. “‘There’s many little boys in slumland,’ she used to say, ‘who would be glad of that’; and do you know what I used to answer?” Still no one asked, but still he told them. “‘All right,’ I’d say, ‘they can have it!’ I’m afraid I was always sharp to repartee.”

“Has there ever been any child, I wonder,” said Geoffrey, manufacturing a yawn, “who wasn’t supposed to have said that?”

“Well!” Mr. Mew was nonplussed for a second, but quickly recovered as Nellie came at him with the trifle. “My gracious,” he said, “this looks ambrosial. I’m afraid I can’t resist it, even if you can.”

Geoffrey gave him a sick look. “I’m trying the starvation cure for epilepsy,” he said sourly.

His mother drew in her breath and shook her head at him. She did not like to have that word said before outsiders. Even Mr. Mew, the ever-jolly, did not like it, especially in that tone
of voice. He drew back his head like a tortoise and retired into himself, taking tiny bits of trifle on the end of a fork, sitting very narrow on his chair with cramped shoulders, like a passenger with a first-class ticket in a crowded third-class-only train.

Geoffrey pursued him with words. “Remember the epileptic boy in the Bible—the one that had a devil brought out of him? The Lord said: ‘This kind can come forth by nothing but prayer and abstinence.’ Mine may come out any minute now. Look out you don’t catch it.”

“Geoff, behave yourself,” said his father, and his mother looked distressed. It was nice that he knew his Bible, but not quite like this.

Mr. Mew rallied. “No, my dear boy! ‘By prayer and
fasting’”
He looked round the table complacently. A misquotation was right up his street.

“Teach your grandmother,” said Geoffrey rudely. “It’s my devil, not yours. I ought to know what brings it out.”

“And I ought to know my Bible, dear boy. As a student of both the Authorized and the Revised version, not to mention the Scofield edition, with its new system of connected topical references to all the greater themes of Scripture, with annotations, revised marginal renderings, summaries-”

“Geoffrey was only joking, Mr. Mew,” put in Mrs. Marple hastily, seeing that her son was becoming excited. “He always likes to have a bit of fun, don’t you, dear …” Her voice trailed away like a run-down gramophone as Florence broke in crisply: “Just ignore it, Mr. Mew. It’s so boring. Do please go on telling us what Walter Scholes said about the stream of consciousness.”

As Mr. Mew opened his mouth to comply, Geoffrey cried out and clutched at the air as if a dragonfly had flown past him. “There it goes! I told you it would come out. Look out!” He made a swipe that knocked Mr. Mew’s spoon from his hand half-way from plate to mouth. “Damn, it got away. Duck, everybody!” Sometimes, when he had worked himself up to embarrass people by pretending to be a little crazy, he could almost believe that he was. His brain was hilarious now, his thoughts spinning about in the top of his head. He did not care what he did.

It had been impressed on Geoffrey’s family that he must never be crossed. If he behaved like a tiresome
child, they could not treat him like one and haul him off to bed. A psychologist had once told the Marples that violent opposition might bring on a convulsion, and that in the dining-room would be worse than anything he was doing now.

He was peering forward, studying Mr. Mew’s bow-tie, which indeed was worthy of study, having been made by his sister from an odd piece left over after making the loose covers.

“Keep still!” hissed Geoffrey, poising his hand, and paralysing Mr. Mew like a rabbit. “I’ll get it now. There it is— just under your chin.”

“Ha, ha,” said Mr. Mew with bleak bravery. “Some family joke-?”

But the family were not laughing. Mr. Marple’s eyelids and moustache were twitching. Aunt Florence was saying: “Geoffree!” and knocking on the table with one of the spoons she had so often polished with her naplin. Mrs. Marple had begun a quick conversation about nothing at all to Eileen, who was too nervous to listen. Nellie stood transfixed with a dish in each hand, drinking it all in to tell cook.

Daniel was scowling at Geoffrey across the table. He opened his mouth to say something, but his stammer blocked him and he gripped the edge of the table, his face intense with the effort of trying to get the words out.

Mr. Mew, with his head back before Geoffrey’s pin-point gaze, half rose from his chair. “I’m afraid I ought to be running along,” he said in a cracked voice. “So delightful, but I have several early appointments.”

“No you don’t.” Geoffrey took him by his alpaca jacket and sat him down again with a bump. “You’ve got my devil on you. You can’t take that away—or do you want to have the falling sickness, too?”

Mr. Mew gave a ghastly smile, raised a hand towards his neck and then jerked it away, as if Geoffrey’s epilepsy really were sitting on his Picasso print bow-tie. He glanced sadly down at his plate of trifle, made an indecisive gesture towards his spoon, but lacked the
sang-froid
to eat.

What would happen? It was like a film when the projector breaks down. Geoffrey was quite prepared to go on sitting there all afternoon staring at Mr. Mew’s tie. He was becoming almost hypnotised himself by its whirligig patterns.

“Look!” Daniel suddenly jumped up and rushed to the window, knocking his chair over onto the nylons which Nellie kept to wear when there was company. “Look, Geoff —your bike! I’ve just seen a man go out of the gate with it. Come on—we’ll catch him with the car!” He ran out of the room without looking back to see if Geoffrey was following.

Geoffrey’s bicycle was his fondest possession. It was the only machine he was allowed to have, his only means of swift escape when the urge came over him to fly from everybody and everything, pedalling like a madman down the hill as if he could flee from life itself.

The spell was broken. He dashed after Daniel, stumbled up the stairs and out of the front door into the blinding sunlight, skidded round the corner of the house to the garage and stopped short like a curbed horse. Daniel was sitting on the mounting block with his hands in his pockets, drawing circles in the gravel with his foot.

“My bike!” yelled Geoffrey. “Quick, you fool, get the car out. My bike!”

Daniel jerked his head. “In the garage.”

“What the devil-? But you said——”

“Oh, that was only to get you out of the dining-room,” said Daniel in a bored voice. “What on earth were you playing at?”

Geoffrey was furious. The old grievance of trickery that always nagged within him came surging up and pounded in his head. He shouted obscene things at Daniel. He did not have to think what he said. His voice did it for him.

“Pipe down,” said Daniel, “or you’ll shout yourself into a fit.”

Geoffrey would like to. That would show them. Fits were his weapon. He would have a fit and show Daniel and all of them who was king of this place. But although he screamed and threw himself about, nothing happened. He had always been told that over-excitement might bring on a fit, but now here he was positively hysterical and it was producing nothing. Blast those doctors. They didn’t know their job.

He rushed at Daniel and began to pummel him. Daniel fended him off without
getting
up, and Geoffrey stood breathing heavily on the gravel drive, waiting for the aura of warning that he was sure would come. It must come.

Daniel gave a yell of laughter. “You can’t imagine how
funny you look,” he gasped, “standing there solemnly trying to have a fit.”

Geoffrey went on waiting. It was a let down. It was like taking your temperature when you feel ill and finding you are normal. What could you do then?

“I’m going back to the house,” he grunted, “to plague some more hell out of that man.”

“Over my dead body.” Daniel got up. “Don’t you know why I dragged you out, or were you doing it deliberately to spoil things? You’re mean enough for that.”

“Spoil what?” asked Geoffrey blankly. “I was only relieving my nerves. Why can’t you leave me alone? You don’t know what it’s like-”

Daniel cut into bis whine. “Don’t you know that your mother thinks there’s a chance old Mew might be going to want to marry your aunt? She’s pinning all her hopes on that. It’s the only kind way she can think of to get the woman out of the house, that having been her dearest wish for seven years.”

“God!” said Geoffrey. “I never knew that. How do you know all this?”

“Your mother told me.”

“Why not me? They treat me like a child. I mustn’t know things. Why should they tell you things and not me? My mother likes you better than me because you were in a prison camp, too, like
him
. It isn’t fair.”

“Where are you going?” Daniel asked, as he turned back towards the house.

“To take an overdose of luminal. I say——” he paused before he went round the corner. “We shan’t get such good meals, though, if old Flo goes.”

When Geoffrey went into the drawing-room, although he was looking quite normal, Mr. Mew got up at once and took his leave. Mr. Marple could not reproach his son then, for he had been praying for the last quarter of an hour that Mr. Mew would go, because there was a Test Match being broadcast.

All afternoon the drawing-room was uninhabitable, because Mr. Marple knew only two ways with the volume control— off and full strength, but the next day, although it was a three-day match, the wireless was silent.

It was the anniversary of Reggie’s death. At breakfast, Mr. Marple, who was wearing a black tie, opened
The Times
,
cleared his throat, then lowered the paper and blinked across the table at his wife.

“It’s in,” he said. “Do you want to see it, dear?”

“Please, dear.” They called each other Dear all day on Reggie’s anniversary.

He walked round the table with the paper and stood behind her chair while she looked at the front page.