Flowers on the Grass (18 page)

“Are you ill?” she asked. “Why are you up so early?”

“Look at the weather.” He took her to the window and stood with his arm along her shoulders, looking out at the gardens where the sun glittered on the wet uncut lawns like scattered glass.

Although his arm meant nothing to her, she was aware of it, if only because of noticing that it did mean nothing. It seemed that one was never cured of the habit of speculating about every man long after one had ceased to want any of them ever again. She wondered if men were the same, if he was at this moment idly speculating what her shoulders under the dressing-gown meant to his arm.

“I’m going to borrow Willie’s car,” he said, “and take you out to the country somewhere. Get a move on with breakfast, and then throw some kind of a picnic together while I go and get the car.” He went away and sang in the bathroom. She did not mind that, although Philip used to sing in his bathroom, for it was quite different. Daniel sang in tune and either gaily or not at all. Philip used to dirge off-key, mournful
bass themes which sounded like a tuba being played by a novice.

It was typical of Daniel to take it for granted that she was free today. She was delighted to go to the country with him, but as she went about her neat breakfast preparations misgivings began to spoil her pleasure. She usually walked in the park on Sundays with Mr. Piggott. When Daniel came back dressed, she said unwillingly, her heart sinking at the cussed kindness which made her say it: “Dan, could we possibly take Mr. Piggott? It seems unkind to leave him here alone, and he’d enjoy it so.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Daniel said, “what are you running—a lodging house or a charity home?”

“Please.”

“No. We either go without him or not at all.”

Having already struggled and lost to her conscience, Valerie had to stick to her point. “He wouldn’t be in the way.

He could sit at the back. I’d take a bit of food for him-”

She sounded as if it were a dog she was trying to insinuate into the car.

They had a small argument about Mr. Piggott. The toast caught fire and the milk boiled over, and Mr. Piggott came in in the middle of it. He always looked surprisingly miniature in the mornings. One had forgotten overnight how small he was. From his room at the bottom of the well he had not seen what the day was like, so he now exclaimed softly when he saw the sun shining on the china in the plate rack and said in the confidential whisper which sounded as if he were giving racing tips that it was a jolly day for a stroll in the park.

It was no surprise to him that Daniel would not answer, but his pale brows went up and his eyes looked blank when Valerie, glancing at Daniel and prepared to stop if he dared to look triumphant, explained over-elaborately to Mr. Piggott why she had to leave him alone for the day.

“That’s quite all right,” said Mr. Piggott. “I shall do very nicely. A pleasure really. I hope it keeps fine for you.” But his eyes were sad. Valerie wished that Daniel had not said that Mr. Piggott was in love with her. She did not believe it, but it made her anxious.

When Daniel came back for her with the car, she got in beside him feeling a little less guilty now that she had left
Mr. Piggott a tempting tray of cold food and a rice pudding in the oven, which he loved.

“Where are we going?” she asked, bringing her hand in through the window as they turned the corner out of sight of the doorway of the flats where Mr. Piggott had stood waving them God-speed like a dwarf retainer.

“Where do you want to go? I don’t care. West—south——?Want to go to the sea?”

“Dan,” she said, “let’s go and see your cottage.”

“Oh, you don’t want to go
there”

“I do. I’ve always wanted to since you told me about it.”

“There’s nothing to see.”

“I want to see it. Please. I did give in about Mr. Piggott.”

Oh, all right.” He turned the car northward and they made their way to the Great North Road and Cambridgeshire.

The first thing that Valerie noticed about the cottage was that it did not look empty, although there had been no one in it for months. The windows were shut and grubby with rain. The chimney was the only one in the village without its pennon of smoke. The garden was a tangle of coarse grass and dead leaves and vegetation blown and smashed by autumn gales, and a broken toolhouse door banged with a doleful creak, but the house did not have that obstructive, discouraging look of buildings that are going to take a long time to come round to being lived in again. You could pick up life again here at any moment.

Inside it was ghostly with dustsheets and upturned chairs, and the tiles on the floor shone with damp, but it still looked as if a few minutes of people about would make everything all right.

While Daniel collected wood from the shed and made a fire, Valerie ran about in delighted curiosity, exploring everywhere.

“There’s a forest of cobwebs under the beams upstairs, a leaking tank in the linen cupboard and a terrible mess in the kitchen where the mice have nested in a packet of cornflakes,” she reported briskly. “I’d like to put a kettle on and do some cleaning up.”

“What’s the point?” he asked. “No one’s going to live here.”

“Oh, Dan, it’s a
shame
. I thought so before, but now that I’ve seen it I don’t know how you can bear to let this place stay empty. If you don’t want to live in it yourself—which you ought—you should really do something about letting it. It’s such a waste, and bad for a house to be empty, too. Look at this!” She touched the brass kettle which hung from a spit in the fireplace. “This mildew will corrode it, and everything’s getting so damp-”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” he exclaimed, with extreme irritation. “Stop running about being housewifely.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” she said, dashed. “It just seemed such a pity. And when you think of the housing shortage——”As soon as she began to say this it sounded as silly and smug to her as it evidently did to Daniel.

One would have thought that he would have a lot of things to do, coming back to his own house after all this time, but he was sitting at the desk, staring out of the window at nothing in particular. Valerie felt bad. Of course, he was thinking about Jane. It did not matter now that he had spoiled her pleasure in coming to the house. It was her fault for expecting to get pleasure out of what could be nothing but sadness for him. She should not have made him come here. She tried to picture him and his wife here together. She did not know what Jane had looked like. He had never told her, but she could imagine how happy two people could be here. To live in this house would be good enough; to be in love in it would be almost too much.

“Look at that darn tree,” he said, as if he had not been thinking about Jane at all, “trailing all those broken branches.” He went to get a ladder and saw.

The day had spoiled, and the white, clear-running clouds had spread and massed together into a sludge of grey. Valerie, who was sitting on the doorstep with her feet on the path, saw a spot darken on one cobble, then on another, then all were freckled and in a moment the whole path was glistening wet except the place under the thatch where her feet were.

She called to Daniel. He did not come at first and she again had a picture of him here with his wife, and Jane calling him in to meals to which he would not come.

When he came in, treading wet shoes on the floor which she had surreptitiously swept while he was outside, he seemed happier. The fire was burning well and they sat by it and ate
the food Valerie had brought and drank some whiskey which Daniel found in a cupboard.

“I didn’t leave any here,” he said. “Those old girls must have been toping.”

“Perhaps it was for the one who was ill. Which one was it who died?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I never asked, because I liked them both so much. What’s the good of upsetting yourself about someone who’s nothing to do with you?”

“It must be nice,” she said, “to have your emotions so well-drilled.”

“It’s the only hope,” he said.

They sat and ate amicably. They liked each other. Daniel was the first man whose company Valerie had really enjoyed since Philip, although tbey were not alike. Philip had been kinder and more predictable.

“Aren’t you glad we didn’t bring Mr. Piggott?” he asked.

She thought of Mr. Piggott eating his rice pudding with the eager little dabs he made when he liked anything particularly. But no, he would be washing up by now, for he was sure to have lunch punctually at one-fifteen, whether he were alone or not. “Yes, I’m glad,” she answered.

“He might have wanted the rest of that chocolate,” Daniel said, taking it.

Later, when they were sitting idly and talking unwillingly about going home, Valerie thought that the friendliness of the house was working on Daniel. He liked it here. She could see that.

“Dan,” she said, taking a chance, “why don’t we come and live here in the spring?”

“Lord no,” he said. “We couldn’t. There’s too much to do to make it liveable again.”

“I’d do it. I could fix it.”

“No,” he said, and suddenly the shell of content that had enclosed them was broken and he was outside, away from her. “Besides, I don’t know where I’ll be. I might be abroad by then.”

“Oh,” she said blankly, “are you going to leave your job? Won’t you be staying on at the flat?”

“
I
don’t know. How do I know where I’ll be? Don’t try and pin me down.”

“Well,” she said huffily, for her mind had been racing ahead
to all kinds of plans—letting the flat, buying a car on credit, perhaps, country clothes, friends down at week-ends, Pip here in the holidays with his bicycle—” Well, I do like to know, that’s all. Someone might want your room.”

Soon after that they went home. She turned at the gate to look back, and wished that she had money and could buy the cottage. She wouldn’t have Daniel in it. She was annoyed with him and sat as far away as possible in the front of the car. People had no right to behave as if you were trying to trap them when you only put out a vague feeler towards the future. Daniel had no right to make a show of being so fugitive in a world where people had to share each other’s lives or die of loneliness. Who had let him get like this? She felt resentful enough to blame his wife.

Coming out of London this morning, she had been looking forward to seeing the cottage, pleased with the whole expedition and laughing and talking with Daniel. Although she had been along this road many times before, she had not been in the mood for nostalgia. Now that Daniel was driving in silence, much too fast on the wet roads considering it was not his car, she looked out of the window with pain at the landmarks of fifteen years ago.

Philip had been in his last year at Cambridge when she first knew him. She had met him at a dance to which they had both gone with different parties. On the lawn he had met her, breaking the buckle of her sandal on her way back to the marquee from the ladies’ room. This was his college and he had taken her back to his room to mend the shoe clumsily with wire. After that, they had not gone back to their own parties, and had both been unpopular, particularly Philip, who had left a hot-cheeked girl in green
broderie-Anglaise
superfluous among the yawning duennas round the walls of the marquee.

It had not mattered, because from that time Philip and Valerie were seen together everywhere in Cambridge, and he was struck off lists as a dead loss. Valerie came to Cambridge nearly every week-end. Philip, who had a little open car, often drove her home again, after a Sunday on the river punting through the warm afternoon until they could find somewhere to tie the boat up under a tree, or a winter Sunday with a lot of people having tea in his room and Valerie making the toast, and everybody going away after tea except her and Philip.

Nights when they had driven back to London with the roof down and her hair in a tangle that took half an hour to comb out. Cold nights when he drove with one hand and the other arm round her. Wet nights when the rain came through all the holes in the roof and the celluloid windows would not stay up.

Daniel swished her through Stevenage, and here, just beyond the town, was the place where they had stopped to put the roof up at last after Philip had driven on for miles saying that you didn’t get wet as long as you kept on going. She was very wet by that time and not speaking to him any more. Here was that house covered with painted wooden figures, where Philip had stopped one night and tried to wrench off one of the figures for her, but the cunning owner had nailed them on too firmly.

How many times she had driven down this long straight road between the poplars! Philip had said it was like a French road, and when they drove through France on their honeymoon she saw that he was right. Here was that shack of an all-night transport café with the teirible name of the Dew Drop Inn. It looked exactly the same and probably had behind the counter the same black-jowled man who never found the hour too small to make puns as excruciating as the name of his café. They used to stop here coming home from dances. She craned towards it as Daniel flipped her by, and on the rutted cinder lorry park in the middle of which the little café sat like an oasis in a desert, the memory of Philip and his snub-nosed car was very strong.

She sat back and sighed. “It’s funny, isn’t it,” she said, “how you can be sensible for months—years even—and then suddenly something puts you right back into the first pain.”

“Usually when you’re tight,” he said.

“Roads,” she said. “Roads you’ve been on with someone are one of the things that bring them back.” He was pulling out to pass an obstinate lorry, hooting at it, and did not hear her.

She would have liked now to talk about Philip and tell Daniel about driving back after dances in May Week. But what was there to say that would not sound silly? The feeble jokes of the man in the café, sausages, coffee made out of a bottle, the stiffness of one’s face, made up so many hours ago, how
drab a white evening dress looked in the light of dawn, its hem trodden and grass-stained. Philip’s beard pricking through his chin, hurting when he kissed her goodbye, both of them too tired to want to kiss at all, seeing the milkman—he came earlier in those days—swaying up through the ticking house, clothes on the floor, bed, meeting Philip next day looking as fresh as if she had slept for nine hours. She wouldn’t nowadays, but one could then.