Flowers on the Grass (3 page)

That evening, after the people had gone, Daniel was in one of his moods when he hardly knew how to be loving enough to make up for the times when he was casual to her. When he felt like talking, he would talk all night to her if she could keep awake, and she would tell him of thoughts she scarcely knew she had until she wanted to put them into words for him. They would talk themselves into oneness until the birds stirred and tried a few notes and the sky crept into light and colour over the wide Cambridge fields.

That night, they talked about what Jane would do if Daniel died. He had found Robert Bridges’s poem:

“If death to either should come,
I pray it be first to me.
Be happy as ever at home
If so, as I wish, it be.

Possess thy heart, mine own,
And sing to the child at thy knee,
Or read to thyself alone
The songs that I made for thee.”

“That’s how I’d like it,” he said.

“That’s a selfish outlook, Danny,” Jane said. “‘I pray it be first to me.… It’s all right for the one who dies first, but what about me here without you?”

“But I am selfish. You knew that, I thought.” Daniel was sitting on a stool, jabbing at the fire with the bellows. “But what would you do, Janie?” he persisted. “You’d give me a village funeral, I hope, with people saying, “E was a lovely gentleman,’ and children throwing posies of wilting wild flowers?”

He niggled on at the subject, morbidly attracted by the thought of himself lying dead in his grave. “What would you
do? Would you be brave and statuesque, and people would say you were ‘wonderful’? Or would you weep until they feared for your reason? How long would you weep for me?”

“How long? Forever. No, I wouldn’t, because I’d die.”

“You’re not an Indian wife. You don’t have to die because I do,” said Danny, talking as if he were already moribund. “‘Possess thy heart,’ the poem says. You’d have to go on being yourself, the same as you did before we knew each other four years ago.”

“I knew you long before that. I’ve loved you since I was nine.”

“Oh shucks!” he said, pleased. “Look, Janie, one day I’ll write you a poem, then you can sing it to the child at your knee when I’m gone. Would you go on living here? ‘Be happy as ever at home… Perhaps you could be. People would say: ‘She lives on there with her memories of him, like a shrine. His chair, his desk, his empty napkin ring…..’”

He drooled happily on, but Jane wished afterwards that they had not talked like this. She dreamed of him without a head and woke screaming. He was quite cross then, although it had been his fault for harrowing her before she went to sleep.

He was inconsistent like that, and in other ways. Although he was growing more domesticated, he would still wander off at times into detachment. He would suddenly choose to sleep in the spare room, or to go out walking all Sunday when people were coming for lunch. He would stay late in town for no reason. Once or twice he didn’t come home all night, but would arrive the next day with no excuses, quite serenely.

Jane tried not to worry. When she was not pregnant any more it would be easier. Today, for instance, she expected him home at half-past seven after the meeting, but he might easily stop for a drink on the way to the train, miss it and not come home until nearly nine. For an hour she would have to pretend that she was not worrying. He would not ring up again. He never had enough small change to ring the country from a call-box. He only telephoned her from the college.

When he did come home he might want tea, and supper round about midnight, or he might want to have supper first, in which case they would probably have tea and scones in bed at midnight. There was no planning meals beforehand with Danny. He had cured Jane of any hidebound niceties
she had inherited from her mother. She had to be prepared for anything, and was expert now at managing without fuss. He hated her to be in the kitchen all the time when he was at home.

She made the scones and put them to keep warm, cooked some potatoes and put out eggs and a tin of beans. She prepared everything they would need for whatever meal he might want, then made up the fires, did her face and hair and fed her yellow collie, who went straight out again after eating to watch for Daniel. He had not transferred his devotion; he had simply picked up some of hers, growing like her in soul as Danny said he grew like her in face.

When it was nearly half-past seven she went into the kitchen to put on the kettle. It gave a little “phut!” and sparked as she switched it on. She was wary of electricity. Daniel terrified her by carrying lit lamps about and changing wall plugs without switching them off. Jane turned off the kettle and pushed the plug in more firmly before switching it on again.

She thought she heard the car, far away at the turning off the main road. Sound carried a long way over the broad flat fields. He had not stopped for a drink, so he would be dying for his tea. She listened again, but the kettle interrupted by beginning to hum. Vaguely, with her mind far away, she did what she was always telling Daniel not to do. She lifted the lid. Then it happened.

She could not lift the lid. Her hand was on it, but she could neither pull the lid free nor let go. She put her other hand on the kettle to push herself off, and that was held too in an iron grip that clutched vibrating right up her arm and through her body, and the roar of the kettle was inside her, splitting her head.

She opened her mouth and shouted, but could hear no noises. She could hear nothing but the battering and banging inside her head. Her baby kicked in his prison as if fighting to get out. She was shaking all over now, losing sight, sense, sound—the world, the world was going, spinning away above her as she dropped into the sucking blackness with the last very sad thought: “Who will give Danny his tea?”

It was bad luck on any boy to be called Merlin. Especially a chubby, unmysterious boy with cheeks like rosy ping-pong balls, a mouth like a pink buttonhole for the button nose above it and a cowlick of chocolate-coloured hair that would never do anything but stand up in a butcher-boy quiff. When he grew up looking like one of those dolls that won’t knock over, no one but Mr. and Mrs. Meekes would have continued to call him Merlin; but having christened him that, they were capable of anything. Mr. Meekes had been reading the
Idylls of the King
during his wife’s confinement, and it was touch and go that the jolly round baby was not called Gawain.

At school, he was always called Wizard, and the name stuck to him through college and into the Army, until a girl in the Naafi canteen started to call him the Wizard of Oz. After that, he was Oz, or Ozzie to everyone. Daniel called him Ossie, believing that his name was Oswald, so Merlin kept his real name dark, for Daniel and everyone else laughed at him enough already. He did not mind. He had been laughed at all his life, and it was better to be a buffoon than a nobody. He had discovered that at school, and exploited it. Although technically a mere dreg, a day boy, with no ability at anything, he had become a kind of court jester, acceptable to both masters and boys as a foil who could never be a rival.

When he was eighteen and disposed to
Weltschmerz
, he would have liked to be serious, at least for just a short wallow in the sumps of puberty, but boys from his school went with him to college, and so did his reputation. He had only to raise his voice in class for it to be drowned in a roar of laughter, even if he was going to be right. People did not like him when he was serious. He bored them and they walked away. Like a jolly mongrel, he liked all humanity and craved their approval, so he gave up being serious about anything, ever.

It had advantages. He loved his food, and could get away with untold excesses, because his greed was a stock joke. He never had to strive, because the more inept, the funnier and more popular he was. Before he could discover that it was not so funny to be unable to get a job, the war came and he fell happily into the position of regimental buffoon.

No one expected him to be able to drill or handle a rifle or look anything but ludicrous in battledress. He was Hitler’s Secret Weapon. Before he was faced with the serious business of fighting, he developed varicose veins, which was a scream in itself, and was put to a desk job, where he could provide comic relief without danger of killing his own side.

He did not have to make many jokes. He just had to be Ozzie, uttering foolish exaggerations in that chirruping voice coming so inadequately out of the cushions of flesh wherein his mouth was bedded. Men in the mass will laugh at anything, and many was the wife who feared that the Army had deranged her husband’s sense of humour when he tried to tell her of the absurdity of Ozzie.

“But what does he
do
, darling, that’s so funny? Growing mustard and cress on flannel on the window-sill doesn’t sound very witty to me.”

“Oh, but you don’t know Ozzie. It’s not what he does, it’s the way he does it, you know. And that voice—and those double chins—if you could see him shaving!”

“Yes, well, look, darling, you’ve only got thirty-six hours, so don’t let’s talk about Ozzie any more. …”

How, after the war, he had ever chirped his way into a job at a college in Chelsea was the subject of a whole mythology of conjecture and fable. Some said that he was the illegitimate son of the Principal. Others that he was a spy from the Kremlin. There were those who maintained that he had wandered into the library one day to shelter from the rain and never found the way out. Anyway, there he was, in charge of the reference library and museum of specimens, and if he or anyone else suspected that he was quite efficient they kept it dark. One did not only go to the library for information. One went to have a laugh with Ozzie Meekes.

For two weeks now Daniel had not laughed either with or at Ossie. He came in and out of the library without seeming to notice that he was there. This was disturbing, since Ossie imagined that he was Daniel’s friend, which was more than
most people at the college could say. Ossie valued this. He himself was everybody’s friend, of course, but the others were easy. Daniel had that tantalising detachment of self-sufficiency that made you want to make him notice you, to need you, if only for the occasional laugh. He had asked Ossie down to his cottage one Sunday not long ago, when he had wanted light relief from his father-in-law. Ossie had earned his lunch. Daniel and his wife had been able to go off for a walk while Ossie entertained the father-in-law by telling him naughty stories into his little deaf-aid box, like a radio comedian going on the air.

Ossie, like the conscientious professional humorist he was, kept a notebook to fall back on when his own native drollery failed. In this book he copied out rude stories in the peaky hand which was so like his voice and so unlike his figure. He also collected newspaper cuttings—advertisements from Continental papers, printers’ errors or naively-phrased remarks from public speeches. People saved them for him as if he were a small boy with a stamp album.

“Poor old Ossie doesn’t have a sex life,” they said, “so he has to get it this way.” But Ossie kept the notebook more for others’ amusement than his own. He did not aspire to a sex life. It did not enter into his design for living. Pierrot has Pierrette, Harlequin has Columbine, but there is no girlfriend for Pantaloon.

When, after two weeks, even the sight of Ossie’s bottom going up the ladder to the top shelf brought no response from Daniel, Ossie tried him with his prize new one from the notebook, a real collector’s piece. Daniel listened gravely, grunted at him and went out. Ossie’s smile drooped. The story had never flopped yet, except with Macintyre, who never saw the point of any joke until it was explained, and then saw it wrong.

“What’s the matter with
him?”
Ossie asked Peter Clay, who was sketching a bone of the skeleton that hung from a gibbet in the corner. “Looks like a corpse.” He rattled the skeleton’s ribs merrily with a ruler, as if they were railings.

“Good God, you ass.” Peter looked up. “Don’t you know?”

“How should I? Nobody ever tells me anything.”

“Didn’t you know his wife died?”

Ossie floundered and mumbled. He had no words for this
sort of thing. “But Peter—but I say—I knew her. It can’t— chap’s not wearing mourning——”

“I only found out by chance.” Peter bent over his sketch again. “He never told anyone. Queer fish. Just like him not even to wear a black tie.”

Yes … yes, Ossie thought. Just like him. Didn’t want to distress people. Ossie judged everybody’s motives by his own.

Ossie lived in a little shoebox modern flat near Sloane Square. Once into the bathroom, he had to back out, because he could not turn round. He had many friends; but even though you go out every night, or have people round, friends must go home, or you must go home, and Ossie knew what loneliness was. He could not bear to think of Daniel alone at the cottage. When Ossie’s parents had been killed in the Blitz he had needed to be with people all the time. When his room-mate went on leave, he had moved his army cot in with the men next door.

It was bad to be alone. It made you think—futile, distorted, unbearable thoughts. Images of horror that seared into the brain like a branding iron. Memories in the cheating guise of nostalgia. Remorse where none was needed; false regrets. …

A lifetime of having to keep to himself all the serious thoughts he could not express had taught him that you could think yourself into any emotion about anything, good, or bad, as Hamlet had discovered. He wanted to tell Daniel that this was why he should not be alone, but it was not in his rôle to say such things. He was not even supposed to know about Hamlet.

So he spun out his tea half-hour and waited in the canteen until Daniel wandered in. He nearly always went about with his hands in his pockets. Ossie thought this must be because he had lost his parents young, remembering how his own mother had been for ever slapping and pulling at his fat wrists. Daniel sat down at a table in the corner and opened a paper, but Ossie, like a missionary, tracked him down through the jungle of silly spidery tables, and sat down opposite him with a bump that slopped over Daniel’s tea and sent a plastic salt-cellar bouncing to the floor.