Flowers on the Grass (21 page)

Going in at the front door, she thought that she must go and see Mr. Piggott and be nice to him. Oh, the relief it would be not to have paying guests; the relief of not being responsible for earning your living!

She went in to Daniel first. He was lying moodily with his knees drawn up. “You’ve been a bloody long time,” he said. “I’ve had no tea.”

“I’ve been getting Pip’s blazer,” she said. “He had to have another. The old one was simply bursting at the seams and———”

“All right, all right,” he said, turning his face to the wall. “Spare me the domestic details. Get us some tea, there’s a good girl.”

Valerie went to the kitchen. Now was not the moment, but it would keep. The young man with the prickly forehead and the girl with the false teeth had probably waited years before they came to their understanding. She could wait, too.

When Daniel was better and Mr. Piggott was better, and Philip had gone back to school—taking his temperature unsuccessfully for a week beforehand—Daniel took Valerie out to celebrate.

“I haven’t worn an evening dress for ages,” she had said one day when she had been looking through her clothes. “Come to think of it, I haven’t been out in the evening for ages.”

“You shall go tonight,” said Daniel, grabbed the telephone and bullied the Savoy into keeping him a table.

At the Savoy there were girls who reminded Valerie of herself many years ago. Harmless, amiable girls, conscientiously vivacious to dull men who were paying. Girls who thought this was all of life until they were one day shocked
into love and found that this was a part of life you did not need to have. There was a woman friend of Valerie’s who said about Daniel in a meaning way, for everyone was always trying to remarry her: “My dear,
who
is that man?”

Daniel heard, and they laughed quite a lot about that, keeping the joke going, thinking themselves funnier than they were, for they had a lot to drink. Afterwards they went on to a night club and had quite a lot more to drink and Daniel kept telling Valerie she was beautiful. Although he said it in a rather remote, technical way as if he were painting her, she was pleased. There was no room on the floor to do more than dance in a shifting dream. Valerie, leaning against Daniel, half asleep on her feet in an uncaring haze, imagined that if they were married this was how she would feel about him. When one is rather drunk one cannot imagine what it will feel like to be sober. WTien one is quite sober, one can remember the emotions of drink; well enough at least to drink oneself back into them if necessary.

Then they went home together. Of course, she remembered in the taxi, this was why she was going to marry him, so as to be able to go home with your head on somebody’s chest, instead of propped upright on a corner of the taxi, with yawns flooding your eyes and stiffening your jaw, warding off middle-aged men, or making bright conversation to people you hoped you need never see again.

“I think,” Daniel said, and she could feel it in his chest as he said it, “you’d better marry me, Val.”

“All right,” she agreed. They said no more until they were home. Daniel was asleep. Valerie was not even thinking. She was not going to have to think for herself any more.

As he pat his key in the lock, Daniel said: “If Mr. Piggott is waiting up with cocoa, I’ll slay him.” But Mr. Piggott had gone to bed hours ago, leaving a note on the hall table. “Cocoa in saucepan in kitchen. Mrs. Pegg phoned. No message. Will phone you at the office.” Mrs. Pegg was a persistent woman who called Daniel Danny Boy, because she said that she had Irish blood.

“That’s one person you can cut out of your life from now on,” Valerie said. She stood in the drawing-room by the embers of the fire that Mr. Piggott had optimistically made up to be burning for their return, and waited for Daniel to come to her.

When he kissed her, she stood stock still and the world went cold and dead. She was suddenly in despair for Philip.

“Dan!” She pushed him away and looked at him in horror. “What’s happened?”

“I don’t know.” They were sober. “It’s all right, darling.” He kissed her again, but her lips and body were frozen. He dropped his arms, and she began to cry, carelessly, like a child, without putting up her hands, not thinking how she looked.

The next day, Daniel said that he was going to find somewhere else to live. “If I stay here,” he said, “I’ll only start thinking we ought to get married next time I get ill or tight.”

“Yes,” Valerie said. “I suppose you’d better go.”

“One day, perhaps when we’re—what was that Noel Coward line?—‘When we’re old and tired and the colour has gone out of everything a bit,’ I might come back.”

“Yes, Dan. Come back one day.”

When he had gone, Valerie began to look for another paying guest. She could not be in the flat alone with Mr. Piggott. He had said to her, the day that Daniel had left: “I say, don’t think it cheek, but I do wish you’d call me Alec.”

“Ah Well,” said George, making no move to get up from the café table, “this won’t buy the baby new clothes.”

“Not if she likes mink, it won’t,” said Uncle, who was always one for a joke at any hour of the night. He never seemed to sleep, didn’t Uncle. Couldn’t afford to with the trade he had, for the Dew Drop Inn was just a nice distance from London for the first cup of tea on the way north, or the last coming south, to keep you going till you had clocked in with the lorry and gone home to breakfast.

“What time you due in then, George?” he asked, catching onto his underlip with his long black front teeth as he reached up to fill the urn from a gallon jug.

“Eightish.”

“You’ve got a hope in that old crate,” said Fred, sopping a bit of hard pastry in his tea. “Better get going, mate.”

“Yes, I did,” agreed George. He sat a moment longer to prove he had a will of his own, then got up and went to the counter to pay, yawning and scratching his chest as if he had just got out of bed, which was where he felt he would like to be.

“Better not sleep on the job tonight, son. Might wake up dead,” Uncle said, raking in the coppers. “See where it says about the Tatto Slayer?” He swivelled the evening paper across the counter, stabbing at a column with his cigarette finger, which was like a stump of charred stick.

George read:
“Austin Clay Maverick, who was questioned by the police in connection with the headless, limbless torso tattooed with the words ‘Happy Easter’, which was left in a basket outside the back door of the Home Secretary’s house, has since disappeared. He is believed to have been seen in a café in the Hatfield district. Maverick is thirty-five, thin, medium height, with black hair, brown skin and very white teeth. ‘Like fangs’ said Mrs. Nora Stringfellow, the proprietress of the café
,
who served a man answering his description with tea and Swiss roll.”

“Coming out this way, you see,” Uncle said. “I got me bullet-proof waistcoat on.” He slapped his chest, then pretended to double up in a fit of coughing, which was one of his favourite jokes.

“Fangs, eh?” George murmured, finishing the column. The things they had in the papers nowadays! It was like reading about another world, where things happened to people all the time. Nothing ever happened to George in his world.

“Ta-ta, Fred. Good night, Nob. ‘Night, Bill.” He called out to people he knew as he left the shack. When you had been doing the Great North Road as long as George, there was always someone you knew at all the stops.

“Ruddy awful night,” answered Bill Nix, who was picking his teeth by the door. “Inverness, for crying out loud. Mean driving half through Sunday. Good Friday, they call this. Muckin’ Bad Friday to me.” He screwed up the side of his nose in a tremendous sniff.

George had started up his lorry and was a good quarter of a mile away from the Dew Drop before he realised that his face was still set in a disapproving expression to match his thoughts. He had not liked Bill making that crack about Good Friday. It wasn’t right. That was one of the things that got him about Edie, that she laughed at him about going to church. She wouldn’t go herself or make the kids go to Sunday-school, and with George away so much the little blighters hadn’t got a chance. One day he’d chuck this lark and start in being a good father to his kids.

As he slowed down for the lights at Bignelf s Corner, a man stepped into the road and stood jerking his thumb in the headlights. The firm forbade their drivers to give lifts, but the lights were red, so George had to stop. The chap came to the near side of the cab and had the neck to open the door and start climbing in.

“Hey!” George began, and then he thought, Oh, what the hell. It must be pretty lousy hanging about on the road, seeing car after car go by. “O.K.,” he said. “Hop in quick. The lights are turning.”

“Thanks a lot,” said the chap, who was already in. He sat down with a thankful sigh, putting his case on the floor.

“Thumbing it north?” George asked, as he got into top gear again and settled down to his cruising thirty-five, which he could keep exactly without looking at the clock.

“Got to,” said the other. “Missed the last train, and I must be there first thing tomorrow. I got a lift to that corner, but the blighter turned off. How far do you go? Anywhere near Northport?”

“Middlesbrough,” George said. “You could get a train from there.” He did not mind taking him all the way. It kept you awake to have a bit of company, though the chap didn’t seem very chatty. After a few trial remarks, George dropped it and drove in silence until, soon after one, he pulled in to the muddy park of Paddy’s place, just outside Grantham.

“On me,” he said, as they sat down with tea and cakes, for chaps didn’t hitch-hike for pleasure. He never believed those stories about missing trains.”

The chap began to protest, but then agreed. Nice smile he had. Quite a nice young fellow all round, but George couldn’t think of anything to say to him, so he picked up a morning paper and read some more about the Home Secretary’s Easter present.

“Miss Ivy Adcock, domestic servant, who opened the basket thinking it was the laundry, is now in hospital suffering from shock. She is twenty-two, and when on holiday last year won the title of Miss Budleigh Salterton”

“Better be shoving,” George said. While he was buying cigarettes at the counter he looked round to see that the chap was reading the bit about Miss Ivy Adock and laughing. George suddenly noticed that his teeth were very white.

“What’s biting you, George?” Paddy asked. “That old ulcer again?” All the Great North Road knew about George’s duodenal.

“No thanks to them cakes of yours if it isn’t,” George retorted, pleased at being able to pull himself together quickly. For a moment he had almost told Paddy, but a look at his shiny, cocky face stopped him. Paddy would not believe him. No one would expect someone like George to have found what every policeman in England was looking for. If he was wrong, what a fool he’d look; and if he was right, why should he let that crumby little Irishman into the glory of ringing Whitehall 1212?

“Come on, fella.” He touched his passenger on the shoulder as he went out.

When George’s lorry was in low gear, you couldn’t hear yourself speak. When they were out on the road in top, the chap said: “What do you think of the murder? Rather fun. Brightens up the paper, a thing like that.”

There. They always harked back to it. They loved to see themselves in the papers. As the lights of an oncoming car brightened the cab of the lorry, George gave him a sideways look, but there he sat, looking as innocent as you please. He couldn’t have done a thing like that and sat there looking like this. George was glad now that he hadn’t said anything to Paddy. After all, it stood to reason, not everybody wanting a lift on the Great North Road was a murderer on the run.

The chap began to whistle softly. “Mighty Like a Rose”, it was. George’s spine crept, because he remembered a film where Emlyn Williams had whistled that tune in a sinister way when he was going to kill someone. He glanced sideways again. The chap had his lips parted, whistling through his teeth, and in the faint glow from the dashboard they were very white. Not really like fangs, but perhaps this Mrs. Stringfellow had been a bit the hysterical type, like Edie. Black hair, brown skin—almost foreign-looking, something like those Wop prisoners. Travelled abroad, no doubt. Sailor perhaps; that would be where he’d learned his tattooing.

“Sweetest little fellah …” the chap sang softly. Ah, but of course, the radio in Paddy’s place had been playing that. That was why he was singing it. He was O.K.

From Newark, on through Doncaster and Knottingley and Tadcaster, George veered between thinking the chap was It and thinking he wasn’t. When he thought he was, he felt a thrill of excitement, not fear. Odd that. The chap did not seem frightening, but when you
thought
what he’d
done
… jointing that corpse as neat as a butcher parcelling out the rations. George was glad to find himself so brave. Each time he decided that the chap was not he felt almost more disappointed than relieved.

Seeing a church clock in Doncaster, his passenger fidgeted and said: “Doesn’t this bucket go any faster? What time do you get to Middlesbrough?”

Ah, in a hurry. You would be, cock, with the C.I.D. on your trail and a tattooed torso on your conscience. He was
quite the gent, though. He seemed too well-spoken, too well-dressed for a murder. But then, what about Buck Ruxton, Neville George Clevely Heath, whom George had seen in Madame Tussauds, that Haigh and the gallstones? Weren’t they all well-dressed and nicely-spoken?

But how could a man have done that, not two days ago, and not carry something of it in his face?

“Look out,” the chap said, wincing. “That was a near one. Why do you look at me instead of the road? Afraid I’m going to bash you over the head? “His laugh sounded natural, but George was not deceived. Not he, not old George Bolton, who was smarter than people gave him credit for. Everyone from Edie down—her brother, the boss, the chaps at the depot, even his kids thought they could put things over on old George, but this time he was going to put one over on them and bring off something that would make them sing a different tune from now on, and put Edie’s brother and his two-hundred-pound win on the Pools properly in the shade.