Flowers on the Grass (20 page)

“You’re the most unfeeling man I ever knew,” she said angrily. “Here’s this poor little man really ill and never a murmur, and you moan and groan just because you were silly enough to go on a roundabout after eating and drinking too much yesterday.”

“Mum!” cried Philip, scandalised. “It wasn’t a roundabout. It was the moonrocket. I told you.”

“Whatever it was,” she said, “your friend Dan is nothing but a mean-natured, egotistical hog, and now perhaps you see why I’m always on at you about being selfish. You’ll grow up like him.”

“Well, I’d like that,” said Philip cheerfully. “Goon. Say some more.” He liked to see grown-ups having a quarrel.

Valerie stalked away to the telephone. Daniel gave her a filthy look, pushed himself away from the furniture and went out, dragging his feet. While she was dialling, she heard him go to the bathroom and rattle about in the medicine cupboard.

“The aspirin’s not in there!” she called. “Oh—I beg your pardon. Hullo? Is that Doctor Mather’s house? Could I possibly …?”

When she went to tell Mr. Piggott that the doctor was coming, she met Daniel coming out of the bathroom with a face of doom. “Get the doctor?” he asked. “Good. He can see me, too.”

“Oh now, Dan, just because——”

He cut her short. “I’m very ill,” he announced sepulchrally. “I have a temperature of a hundred and two point one.”

She cavilled, not wanting to believe it. “It can’t be. The thermometer’s measured at two-point intervals.”

“It’s
exactly
between the two marks,” he said in a crushing tone that was spoiled by a stammer, and ended in a slight muzziness which Valerie, knowing him so well and knowing, in her maternal heart, the difference between illness and shamming, had to accept at last.

Daniel was the worst patient Valerie had ever nursed, and she had nursed her father through an illness which nearly killed her before it killed him. Daniel had Mr. Piggott’s ’flu, and although he had it less severely he made a hundred times more fuss. He took his temperature ten times a day and kept flinging off the bedclothes. He would either demand attention and keep calling to her wherever she was in the flat, or refuse to let her do anything for him and growl at her if she tried to tidy his room or straighten his bed. Between him and Mr. Piggott, Valerie was nearly demented. She became so tired that she began to think it would serve them both right if she got ’flu herself.

Poor Pip. This was no holiday for him. She tried to send him to his cousins, but he would not go. He wanted to stay and look after Daniel. The doctor had said that he must keep away, but since he went into Daniel’s room, anyway, Valerie thought she might as well take advantage of it and let him be useful. They would be in there together by the hour, playing chess like a couple of old men: Pip on a stool drawn up to the bed, fondling his right ear, just as Philip used to; Daniel with his brown face sharper-angled now at the cheeks and jaw, bis hair rumpled, his pillows in chaotic discomfort, for he was not a neat invalid like Mr. Piggott.

Philip took in his meals and posed for him when he wanted to draw, and when Daniel was allowed to have a bath, insisted on supervising, ordering him about like a male nurse.

“The boy’s been good to me, anyway,” Daniel said, rolling his eyes at Valerie when she told him one day that he would have to eat plaice or nothing.

“You know why?”

“Because he likes me. No, take that away, Val darling. It smells of railways. Give it to Mr. Piggott.”

“Because he likes you?” she snorted. She was tired, and sick of everybody’s nonsense. “Don’t flatter yourself. It’s because he’s hoping he’ll get ’flu and not have to go back to school.”

“Valerie,” said Daniel, breaking off a branch of the grapes she had brought him and holding it above his mouth like an Andalusian dancer, “you are an embittered woman.”

“Dan,” she said, smitten, “don’t say that. It’s what I’m always afraid of. Widows do get bitter. When they’re widows too young.”

“Oh darling.” He closed his mouth and dropped the grapes on the floor. “Don’t talk like that. You’ll marry again. You’ll have other children, too. Look what you’ve produced. You’ve had one success with Pip. You’ll have others.”

“I’ll never marry again,” she said, “any more than you will.”

“What he said on Christmas night—my God, children do get down to the bones of things sometimes—I know you didn’t think much of it at the time, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot since I’ve been out of circulation. It makes you think, you know, being ill. It makes you think of being old and feeble and not able to get along on your own any more.”

“I see,” she said, still holding the plate of cooling steamed plaice. “You want me to marry you to be a comfort in your old age.”

“Don’t mock me. I say things all wrong, I know. Haven’t had much practice. Even Jane had to propose to me. But you know what I mean—you and I—it could be worse. We get on fine, we laugh at the same things, enjoy the same things. We wouldn’t get in each other’s way. You know what I’m like; you wouldn’t expect me to be too connubial. You’ve always said you’d like to live abroad. We could do that.”

“Italy?”

“If you like. We could scrape up some money there somehow. I might even get on with my book.”

“I doubt it.” She paused, and they studied each other’s faces for a moment. “I don’t believe you really mean any of this, Dan,” she said, skirting decision. “It’s only because you’ve been ill and had premonitions of senility, and because you like my son.”

“Don’t you want him to have a father?” Daniel asked. “God knows he needs one. He’s terribly spoiled.”

“He’s not!”

“You said yourself you thought he was.” “That’s different.”

“He’d
be pleased, anyway, if we got married, even if no one else was. Your mother would be furious.” He laughed, enjoying that thought.

“Yes, she would.” Her mother would distrust Daniel because he did not hunt, or even ride. For a long time she had had a square, prosperous fruit farmer lined up for Valerie, who dreaded going to visit her mother, because the fruit farmer would call and they would be left alone in rooms together.

“Dan, I don’t know,” she said. “It might be right. It does seem the answer to a lot of things, but—I don’t know. Doesn’t it seem awful to be discussing marriage dispassionately like this? Like a couple of French mothers arranging a.
manage de convenance”

For that was what it would be if she married Daniel, and with her single experience she could not imagine what a marriage without love would be like. It was difficult enough sometimes with it Without, what should make two people stick together?

“Dan,” she said. “You see, I …” She wanted to say: “I don’t love you”; but if he felt the same, and had discounted that, it would be silly to bring it up. She did not think he was at all in love with her, but you never knew. Look at Mr. Piggott. She had lived with him for six months without knowing. “I’ll think about it,” she said. “Thanks for the offer.” They smiled at each other like very old friends with a lot of unspoken things understood.

Pip bounced in and said: “Hullo, you two. How’s the romance getting along?” and she left them.

That afternoon she rode on a bus to Oxford Street to buy Philip a new blazer. She had needed to get away from the
flat, away from the concentrated atmosphere of sickness and inaction and her own indecision. She had to be alone before she could think straight. Being an only child, she had never understood how anyone thought at all about anything in one of those big family houses where no one ever shuts a door, and each borrows the other’s clothes, and there is always a wireless or a gramophone or a child practising some instrument, and always an argument at meals.

It was difficult to think, because she was so tired, but she had got to think wisely. Easy when you were a girl to make your decisions. Either you were in love or you were not. But when you had been married and did not expect to be in love again your decision was complicated by reason. She must do the right thing, because this was probably her last chance. She would never like anyone as much as Daniel.

You could not pray for guidance on top of a 73 bus, with a fat woman trying to oust you off the seat with a black mackintosh shopping bag. If it had been summer she would have gone into the park and let thoughts come to her, which was her experience of the answer to prayer. As it was winter and very cold, she went into Lyons Corner House, which was warm and bright and full of unknown, disinterested people. You could even sit at the same table with them and be alone. It was not done to talk in Lyons. If you only asked for the salt, it might be taken as a liberty. You stretched out a hand and took it for yourself. That was not rude.

Valerie found a place at a table for four and asked for tea. It was only just after three, but already tea was in order. Lunch began before twelve; tea followed hot on its heels, and by half-past five people would be eating roast joint, vegetables and suet roll. Valerie knew. She had not lived in London on a small income for ten years without knowing and cherishing Lyons as the one single institution whose loss would probably mean more to the city than anything else. Let the Houses of Parliament be bombed, St. Paul’s gutted by fire, even Buckingham Palace razed to the ground and the lawns and lakes no more than a seed bed for fireweed, if you could get a cup of tea and a toasted snack at Lyons the end of the world had not come after all.

It was raining outside, and the light was already beginning to go out of the day, but in here the lights were ablaze, mackintoshes steamed, girls peeled scarves from their heads
and shook out their hair, and the band was playing “Voices of Spring”. At Valerie’s table were a young, speechless couple and a worn-out, potato-faced woman who looked as if she had always got up too soon after having her babies. She had cocoa and rolls and butter. The young couple, in a hideous embarrassment which prevented their enjoyment of the food, since they could not talk about it, had tea, baked beans on toast, and trifle with a golf ball of ice-cream. Valerie had tea and biscuits.

The others at the table took no notice of her. She was just a woman in a brown coat and a beret put on at rather a smart angle, having tea and digestive biscuits. She sat and enjoyed the warmth and heard the music with the back of her brain while the front part tried to sort out whether she was disloyal to Philip, whether it was wrong to marry someone you did not love, and why, in fact, she was toying with the idea of marriage at all. Suddenly looking over her cup between one sip and the next, the answer came to her like one of those revelations you get under gas at the dentist, when you think you have discovered the secrets of the universe, and, coming round, with the galloping in your ears slowing like a run-down machine and the voice of the dentist booming, insistent, you struggle to tell him, but he, the fool, only says: “Spit here, please.”

This time, however, she did not think she understood; she knew, and it did not escape her, as the gas dreams do with returning consciousness. Often before in Lyons she had marvelled at the shy, ill-matched couples and wondered idly how, but not why, they came to choose each other and cling. Now she saw clearly what was between the ugly young man with the catcus forehead and nicotiny forefinger, and the plain girl with hair like a loofah, who had had all her teeth drawn before she was thirty and replaced with long new ones that gave her trouble in eating. Inarticulate, unattractive, they were heading for a life where the girl would become like the beaten woman with the cocoa and rolls and the young man would grow slovenly and a little pompous perhaps with the facile philosophy of the workshop, go collarless and stubbled on a Sunday and be drawn home after work not so much by the thought of his wife and children as by a good hot meal.

They were going to be married. The girl had a small stone on her left hand, and they had too little to say to be
only mildly courting. Product of crowded families who only spoke their minds when quarrelling, they wanted each other because they had never before come first with anyone. They mattered to each other, if not by emotion, then by the circumstances of betrothal and marriage. They were not in love. There was no spark between them at all. Valerie, who had been in love, could tell that. When the boy, reaching for the pepper, touched the girl’s hand, neither of them noticed it. They needed each other more for comfort than passion. They had found, as they grew forlornly up, that human beings are not strong enough to carry their lives alone, and that neither families nor friends nor even doting mothers can give the secret, saving support that comes only from the mysterious relationship of marriage.

The woman with the cocoa and rolls knew that, she said: “My old man may give me trouble, but I wouldn’t change him,” that was what she meant.

The trifle and ice were finished and the plates scraped. “Well, what’s it to be,” the young man asked the girl. “Dottie Lamour or Bette Davis?”

“I don’t mind, Ron,” she said. “Let’s see which is the shortest queue.”

“Miss!” He snapped his fingers unsuccessfully. He flushed as the waitress turned her back. The girl looked away. She was used to their being embarrassed by waitresses. It did not matter. When they were married they would go home together and be themselves and no one to see. No waitresses to belittle. No women in smart brown berets to stare and criticise. Valerie, realising how she had been staring, pulled out of her thoughts and also tried to call the waitress.

“It always seems as if they deliberately don’t look.” She smiled at the couple opposite. “Like programme girls.”

“That’s right,” the young man mumbled, not looking at her. The girl turned with the air of being a little deaf, making finicky, chewing movements with her mouth. When they got outside, she would ask: “What she say?”

“I dunno. Something about the Nippies. I don’t know,” and they would go off together, secure, two people who had each other, independent of Valerie, not needing her or anyone else. In the cinema they would cling, not so much from a sex urge as from their fundamental need to cling.

All the time while she was buying Philip’s blazer, queueing
for the bus, fighting on to it and hanging on the strap, Valerie was warming with tides of relief. The hard-won independence that she had thought she would have to keep all her life—she could let it go. She was not breaking faith with Philip, because this would not be the same. You could marry and be happy without being in love. She needed someone of her own; so did Daniel. It was as simple as that. She smiled in the faces of the people who hung and swayed and read folded bits of the evening paper and tried not to be pushed farther along the bus.