Flowers on the Grass (19 page)

Daniel and she both felt tired when they got home, and she wished that Mr. Piggott did not have to be there and wanting to hear all about their day. But he was there and in high fettle, for he had cooked supper for them. He had been preparing it for hours, but it was still not finished, so she and Daniel had to wait in the drawing-room while he skipped in and out from the kitchen, forbidding Valerie to go in there, assuring them that in one minute everything would be ready.

When at last he came in and whispered that they must come to the table now, Daniel went away to wash. “But it will spoil!” protested Mr. Piggott in what was as near as he could get to a cry. Cradling it in a cloth like a mother taking her baby to its cot, he put the dish back in the oven until Daniel returned.

After all that, it was only spaghetti with some kind of tomato mess on top. Planning and cooking this had quite made his day. He knew a shop in Soho that was open on Sundays and he had been all the way there on a 22 bus to get the spaghetti, and the man had let him have some mushrooms and a tin of some special tomato purée. He told them this as he served it out.

“Oh, not too much, please!” said Valerie; “for a start anyway,” she amended as she saw his face fall. “Where did you say you got this?” Daniel asked, tasting it.

“Soho,” said Mr. Piggott proudly. “The home of La Spaghetti. What’s the matter?” he asked as Daniel laid down his fork. “Don’t you like it?”

“Oh yes, it’s fine, fine,” he said, cocking an eye at Valerie. “I suppose these
are
mushrooms? I mean, they wouldn’t be likely to sell toadstools-?”

Valerie made a face at him. “It’s lovely, Mr. Piggott! Simply delicious. I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed anything
more.” It did taste rather peculiar, but she conveyed to Daniel that he must eat and he picked up his fork again and played about with the spaghetti. Valerie managed to hide some of hers under a piece of bread; but when he saw that she had stopped eating, Mr. Piggott insisted that she must have some more.

“Come along do,” he said. “I’m going to. Mr. Brett, you ready?” Daniel pretended not to hear.

Valerie took a little and toyed with it, trying to hide some more under the bread. Daniel had given up the struggle and was drinking water in an alarmed way. Mr. Piggott, in honour bound to see the dish emptied, ate on, nodding and smiling encouragingly across the table, valiantly stuffing himself until his eyes popped.

In the night, Daniel met Valerie in the passage and complained that he felt queasy. She felt queasy, too, but there was no time to pay attention to her stomach or Daniel’s, for Mr. Piggott was very ill indeed.

Mr. Piggott was ill for quite a long time. At frequent intervals he said: “No, no, please don’t bother about me. I hate to give so much trouble,” which was really more trouble than if he had been demanding and captious, since it moved Valerie to give him extra attention to show him that he was no nuisance.

Apart from a sister in Swansea who sent him a book of Bright Thoughts for Dark Days, he did not seem to have any relations or friends who cared that he was ill. The responsibility fell on Valerie, and in nursing him she grew almost attached to him, as a foster mother to a weakly orphan. He was a heartbreakingly good patient. He was so long-suffering, so tractable, so ready even when he was most ill to assure her that he was doing very well, that she was ashamed of being sometimes reluctant to go into his room. In this cold weather, the electric fire had to burn all day, but he had a Victorian dread of fresh air and suffered so acutely if she opened the window that the room became as stuffy as a boothole.

Although he was so undemanding, Mr. Piggott’s illness claimed a lot of Valerie’s time. She went in to him as often as she could, and knew that when she was out, he just lay waiting for her to come back. Reading hurt his eyes, and since he did not like jazz or light music or variety comedians, the wireless was little use. He loved Valerie to read to him, and because he never asked her, she felt that she had to do it as often and as long as she could stand the atmosphere and his
favourite second-rate thrillers, whose horrors made him exclaim and chuckle softly.

It took an age to make his bed and get him-fixed up in the mornings, and an age to settle him again at night. He would not let her even wash his face; and when she brought the basin and left him, he was hours in there splashing gently and making mysterious rubbing and scrubbing sounds. He liked a good wash, he said. It freshened a person up. If Valerie opened the door too soon, he would twitter like Nausicaa surprised bathing with her nymphs. When at last he allowed her in again, the smell of soapy water and toothpaste and damp flannels made the atmosphere more than ever like a bedroom in a Sickert painting, where the slop pail is not emptied for days and the bed slept in so late that it is not worth making.

Being at the bottom of the well, the room was always dark. Mr. Piggott was painfully conscious of the price of electricity; and since the doctor had insisted on the fire, and since he would have died rather than disobey the doctor—or perhaps thought he would die if he did—he would hardly ever turn on the light. So in airless obscurity, his thin, greenish hair wetted and combed flatly to his head, Mr. Piggott lay neat and straight as a child’s corpse, not nearly reaching the end of the bed, looking more than ever like a little fish that lives far under water and does not know that there is day beyond the surface.

At Valerie’s insistence, Daniel would put his head round the door in the mornings to say: “Everything all right? Fine, fine,” and put it round again in the evenings to say: “Had a good day? So glad.”

“I hear you’re better,” he would say, whatever he had heard, for he did not want Mr. Piggott to go on being ill. He resented that Valerie had to spend so much time in there and could never go out with him to dinner or the cinema, because of leaving Mr. Piggott. When she had time to pose for him, it was with half an eye on the clock for the time of Mr. Piggott’s medicine and half an ear for the infrequent tinkle of the little brass bell which he rang half-heartedly as if he almost hoped it would not be heard.

Daniel did not like her in the white overalls she had bought to nurse Mr. Piggott. He did not like to smell Dettol about her, nor to see her making arrowroot pudding and cutting the crusts off thin bread and butter. When she said to him: “You are terribly selfish. Poor Mr. Piggott needs me. He has no
one. You don’t need me, or anyone, but you think only of yourself,” he simply answered: “Yes.”

When Mr. Piggott’s food poisoning was on the way out, it took a turn into gastric ‘flu and plunged him back into being quite seriously ill again. When Philip came home for the Christmas holidays, full of plans of what he and his mother were going to do, he found her still tied to the sickroom.

When Pip was disappointed about anything, everyone suffered. He had always been uncontrolled about parties missed, or the wrong present from an aunt, or quarantines, or a rainy day when he had planned an outing. When he found that Valerie could not spend all day with him travelling the bus routes from Ponders End to Plumstead Garage he stamped at her and gestured with his hands like a foreigner and said in a caustic, elderly voice: “I consider this has utterly spoiled my holidays.”

“Well, darling, Mr. Piggott is your responsibility, too. You brought him home,” Valerie said, reasoning with him as if he were the adult he often seemed to be.

I never would have,” he said tragically, “if I’d known he was going to ruin my life. Why did you tell me you weren’t going to be a proper mother to me these holidays? I’d have brought Edmunds Two home with me.”

“You couldn’t have,” said Valerie, knowing she should not argue with him when he was in this mood, but unwilling to let him have the inevitable last word too soon. “There’s nowhere for him to sleep,”

“Damn, damn, bloody, damn,” Philip reeled off, hoping to impress Daniel. “I wish we didn’t have to have lodgers.”

“If we didn’t, Pip, there’d be no school for you, and no Edmunds Two.”

“Neither would be any loss,” said Philip coldly, and Valerie wished that Daniel would not laugh at him.

She lived for Philip’s holidays. She, too, had planned so much that now they could not do, and his disappointment made her own more difficult to reconcile. It seemed wrong to put a stranger before one’s own child, but Mr. Piggott was ill and Pip was not; and having decided what she ought to do, she could not stop herself from doing it. She had always been like that. As a child, she had been afflicted with a morbid conscience that made her stay behind on walks to talk to unpopular governesses, miss the best cakes and the biggest strawberries
and always pick the worst side when she was captain, because she could not bear the expression of the duffer children trying to look as if they did not care.

Daniel said morosely that she was a good woman.

“And they’re the end,” added Philip. “They wear bonnets and sing in the street.”

Daniel said that she was lost, sold to her conscience like Faust to the devil. Philip agreed with him, adding, with Daniel’s approval, that charity began at home. They ranged themselves against her, and she longed to be on their side, glad that they had taken to each other, if only through the common bond of selfishness.

Daniel started a saga of advertisements for cod-liver oil, and Philip, who had a high sense of drama, posed delightedly as the Child Who Couldn’t, and the Child Who Could. “I’ll be famous,” he said. “This will make my name.”

Daniel helped himself generously to time off from the office and did with Philip all the things his mother should have been doing. They went on buses and trams and trains. They went round and round the inner circle on a penny-halfpenny ticket and explored the district line to darkest Snaresbrook. They went to the cinema and the circus and queued for an hour to see a broadcast variety show to which poor Mr. Piggott was made to listen to see if he could hear them laughing.

One night, when Philip had been telling her of What me and Daniel did and What me and Daniel think and What me and Daniel are going to do tomorrow, Valerie could not help saying, as she kissed him in bed in the dark: “Love me, Pip?”

“Oh
yes
, Mum.” His cheek was cool against hers and she sensed that his mind was away. “I love Dan, too,” he said. “He’s not like a lodger. Mum, it is nice to have a man about the house.” Valerie kissed him again and went away without speaking, glad that the light was out. She had never let Pip see her cry about Philip. She did not want him to think of his father as sad.

On Christmas day Mr. Piggott was better and allowed to sit shakily up to lunch in a dressing-gown and eat a little breast of turkey and sip, since Valerie said he might, a little wine. Half-way through the meal he was looking so wan, though bravely smiling, and agreeing with remarks he was almost past hearing, that Valerie took him back to bed.

“You’re trying to run before you can walk,” Philip said with bis mouth full of pudding, as the pitiful figure tottered from the room with its slippers flapping and the dressing-gown its sister had sent for Christmas hanging like a tent from its drooping shoulders. Shortly afterwards, Philip was found to be drunk on cider and had to be put to bed himself with tears and a headache.

Daniel had been going out that night, but he stayed at home, since Valerie was alone. She wore the stockings and the scent that he had given her and they had champagne and cold turkey and afterwards talked by the fire in the effortless intimacy that had circled them round that day they had the picnic at the cottage.

Philip, bored with his bed, came wandering in to them in his pyjamas and stood by the door, approving the scene.

“That’s nice,” he said, sensing the atmosphere. “You look like two married people. Why don’t you get married?”

Valerie looked at Daniel. He was looking into the fire, and said nothing. She laughed awkwardly. “Oh no, darling,” she said. “I’ve been married. So’s Dan. People don’t get married twice.”

“They do,” he said. “Edmunds Two’s father did, and Jefferson’s mother has been married three times,
and
had her picture in the paper for it.

“Is that why you suggested it—so I could be in the papers?” Valerie asked, wishing Daniel would say something to help her out.

“Well, that would be super, of course, but I’m afraid they wouldn’t put you in, Mum. You’re too ordinary. I just thought it would be a good thing. You like each other and I like you both. We might let Mr. Piggott get up to be best man.”

“Come on,” said Daniel, going to him. “I’ll put you back to bed.”

“With chocolate biscuits?”

“With chocolate biscuits.” He picked him up and took him away. Philip was too old to be carried. He usually hated it, but when he was in pyjamas and had been asleep he seemed several years softer and younger. Valerie went to her room before Daniel came back; and when she went in to kiss Philip and try to say something that would stop him harping on marriage, he was asleep with a chocolate biscuit melting between his hair and the pillow.

On Boxing Day he and Daniel came home from the fun fair at Olympia, penniless and exhausted. Daniel had not wanted to go. He had complained at lunch that he was tired; but when Pip wanted you to do something, it was less tiring to do it than to argue.

Valerie came out of Mr. Piggott’s room as they came into the flat.

“Have a good time?” she asked.

“Super. Mum, we spent three pounds, and Dan was nearly sick on the moonrocket.”

“I’m so glad,” Valerie said abstractedly, for she was thinking about Mr. Piggott, wondering whether she ought to send for the doctor. “I’m worried about him,” she said. “I do wish I hadn’t let him get up yesterday. He’s not nearly so well. Do you think doctors mind being rung up on Boxing Day? I don’t like to, but really, the little man-”

“Oh blast the little man,” Daniel said. “Bloody little hypochondria If he felt as ill as I do he would have something to complain about. I feel like death.” He leaned against a bit of furniture and put his hand to his forehead in what Valerie thought a rather theatrical gesture, for her benefit.