Flowers on the Grass (4 page)

“Hullo sunshine,” said Daniel gloomily, pouring the tea back from the saucer to the cup.

“Greetings,” said Ossie. “Mind if I sit here?”

“I don’t. The furniture might,” said Daniel, as Ossie shifted uncomfortably on the metal chair that had been scientifically designed, but not for shapes like his. He laughed as if this were rare wit. At least Daniel had made a joke. That was something.

Daniel read the paper. Ossie lighted a cigarette. His mouth was so small that it looked as if he were smoking in the middle of it—puff, puff—like a daring novice. He had planned just what he wanted to say, but the Heavens only knew how he was going to get round to it. If they knew, perhaps they would come to his aid.

“How’s—er, how’s ye olde cottage?” he asked, removing his cigarette and affecting to examine its tip.

“The cottage?” Daniel glanced up. His face looked grey, but it was because he needed a shave. “The cottage? It’s O.K., I suppose. I don’t know. Haven’t been there for ages.”

“Haven’t you? Where are you living then?” From the look of him, he might be sleeping on a park bench, or not sleeping at all.

“I’ve gone back to an old girl-friend of mine. Italian woman—keeps a lodging house in Battersea.”

“Oh, but look here, Brett, you can’t—I mean-” This was too tragic. Ossie knew that place. He had been there once with a student whom Daniel had sent looking for a room. They had not penetrated further than the reeking hall and the one-eyed old Neapolitan trull who had come up at them from the basement with her blouse undone and her hair like a snake’s nest.

“What do you mean, I can’t?” Daniel was not annoyed. He looked at Ossie mildly, waiting for him to make a joke.

“Well, what I mean is this, my dear fellow. I mean, you can’t live in that detestable place. That’s no kind of a home.”

“Who said I wanted one?”

“But you must. Everyone does. Of course, I can understand you not wanting to stay on at the cottage, after—after-” Ossie floundered about among earnest words like a whale on the beach.

“For God’s sake!” Daniel laughed at him without mirth. “Don’t be tactful. You of all people. Though I must say you’re the first person who’s ventured even to touch on the subject. I give you that. I seem to be an object of dread to
most. Because Jane has died, I make them uneasy. I put a jinx on things—there, you see? You don’t like me talking about her. But have no fear, Oswald dear, I shan’t embarrass you again. Let’s talk about the cottage.” He hitched his chair forward. “Nice little place. First house I ever got half-way attached to. Don’t imagine I’m staying away out of sentiment. What difference does it make? No, it just doesn’t seem worth trekking out there and back now. And then, you know, I couldn’t be bothered to buy things and cook and sweep, and whatever one does.”

The Heavens had given Ossie his chance. He pounced. The pepper-pot slid to join the salt-cellar. “Let me come and stay there with you for a bit,” he burbled. “I’d run the house for us. I can do those things. I can cook-”

“Ossie, what is this? Are you proposing to me?”

“No, do listen, my dear fellow. It’s a good idea.” Ossie’s voice was rising so high, it was nearly through the canteen ceiling. “I wouldn’t make jokes at breakfast—honest. And I wouldn’t get in your way when you wanted to work.”

“Work? Good God!” said Daniel in horror. “I never do any.”

“That book about Italian churches. You could get on with it. I could work, too. I’m writing a book myself, as a matter of fact.” He lowered his lashes modestly onto his chubby red cheeks, then raised them, opening his eyes very round at Daniel in a goggling, golliwog way he had. “It’s a funny book about dogs. The sort of thing people buy at Christmas time. A man I know promised to introduce me to a publisher. He——”

But Daniel was not listening. He suddenly shrugged his shoulders. “O.K.,” he said. “We’ll go, if you like. I wouldn’t mind having a smack at the garden, anyway.” He picked up the paper, as if he wasn’t interested any more, and Ossie could make whatever arrangements he chose.

Ossie liked being at the cottage.

“Good of you, Oz,” someone at the college said. “Lord knows it’s no joke trying to see someone through the first hell of a thing like this.”

“Tripe,” giggled Ossie. “I’m doing it for my own benefit. Free bed and board—jolly cushy billet.”

“Good old Oz,” they said. “True to form. Never a dull moment.” And, “God!” they said to each other behind his back. “How on earth does Brett stand him—now of all times?”

Although Ossie saw himself as a man with a mission, Heaven-sent to keep Daniel from despair, he sometimes thought that his joke about cushy billets was almost true, and wondered if he had a right to be so happy there, when Daniel was not.

Not that he seemed actively unhappy, but he was restless. The cottage held a genial peace within its walls, as if generations had lived there without strife or spite. Most people felt this atmosphere as soon as they came in at the door, but Daniel might have been at a railway terminus for all it affected him. He seemed to be not properly there, more like a one-night lodger than a man at home in his own house. Sometimes he did not come home at night, and Ossie had learned, after the first time, not to ask him where he had been.

Daniel never spoke of his wife, and it was impossible to tell how much she had meant to him. He had been rather casual to her that Sunday when Ossie had seen them together, except just once, when Ossie had blundered into some quip about the babies of first cousins. Daniel, who had not even seemed to be listening, had nearly blasted Ossie out of his chair. It had been embarrassing for everyone, including Daniel’s wife.

His silence about Jane was not deliberate and strained, but casual, as if her absence were no more unusual than her presence had been. It was almost as if she had only just gone upstairs to fix her hair, and although he had not spoken her name for weeks, if Daniel had suddenly called out to her to hurry up, it would sound quite natural. Her things still stood about the house in the most unnerving way. The bottom drawer in Ossie’s room was full of her winter jerseys, and he knew that her dresses still hung in the cupboard in Daniel’s room. The books she had been reading were still beside her bed. Her garden shoes were still in the kitchen. Her work basket was still on the table behind the sofa. Daniel seemed not to notice these things, and Mrs. Petter, who came from the village, simply dusted whatever there was and put it back in the same place.

Although Daniel did not talk to him a lot, except in spurts when he had had a few drinks, Ossie was not bored at the cottage. He had found a twopenny library where they had all of P. G. Wodehouse and was going through chronologically from
The Clicking of Cuthbert
onwards. Sometimes he wrote little bits of his own book. It was a slow job, because he had to keep thinking of puns. When he had made a good one, he would chuckle out loud, hoping that Daniel would ask what the joke was.

People dropped in occasionally, some because they liked Daniel, others because they knew he had some gin. He was an erratic host. Sometimes he could hardly bear to let them in over the doorstep. Sometimes he could not bear to let them go. If they stayed too late, Ossie went to bed. He felt ill if he did not get nine hours’ sleep, and hoped the visitors would not make a noise and wake him when they left. He did not like being awake in the middle of the night with the earth so still. In Chelsea there had always been a car, or a sudden bawl of song, or quarrelsome voices echoing in the empty night like a clacking telephone, or the hollow tap of heels going home. Here, the sea of Cambridgeshire lay too lonely under the stars. The fields were too big. It gave Ossie agoraphobia if he looked at them too long from his bedroom window.

These were clear summer days with glowing evenings. As soon as they were out of the knockabout car which they left all day in the station yard, Daniel would mix a drink and go straight out to work in the garden, planting his glass in a handy place. Ossie did not drink. His parents had forbidden it before he was twenty-one, and afterwards he had never felt the need. He liked everybody anyway, so he did not need anything to make him sociable.

While Daniel struggled with the rampaging garden that had got the upper hand while he had been away, Ossie expanded his Humpty-Dumpty torso in a deck-chair in the last of the sun and thought about what he was going to cook for supper. He was no use in a garden. He could not tell flowers from weeds, and his feet crushed things that mattered. When he had tried to help by mowing the lawn, he had run over an old knuckle-bone and chipped the blades. He had pretended to Daniel that it was a stone, because he did not want to remind him of Jane’s dog, which had run away the day she died and never been seen since.

Ossie tried very hard not to upset Daniel, although if he happened to say something tactless by mistake it did not seem to make much difference. He watched Daniel a lot, noticing his changes of mood, studying his brown, square, quick-smiling, swift-frowning face, trying to say the right thing when he seemed to be having what Ossie thought of as “a bad time”.

These bad times usually came on him when he drank too much. Or was it that he drank too much because they were already on him? Ossie did not know.

If Daniel and Ossie finished work at different times, they would meet at King’s Cross. If Daniel were not there, Ossie would wait for two trains and then go to the country by himself, although he hated driving the car, and did not like sleeping in the cottage alone, but he had nowhere else to go since he had lent the flat to his sister. If Daniel were going to stay away often like this, he thought he would get himself a little dog. A poodle. There was a white woolly one in the window of a dog shop, and Ossie always stopped on his way to lunch to tap and scratch on the glass and make kissing noises, although it could not hear.

One evening, when he had waited nearly an hour at the station, drinking tea in the sad buffet where the cruets were built into the table tops so that you could not steal them, Ossie got into the seven-o’clock train, feeling depressed. Something comic had happened in the library that morning and he had been saving it up all day to amuse Daniel. The carriage filled up. People began to arrive running instead of walking. Doors slammed. A liverish man in a stained grey hat wrenched open the door of Ossie’s non-smoker and began to roll a cigarette as soon as he sat down. At the last minute, when the train was already moving, came Daniel, with his hair rumpled and his jacket flapping. He spotted Ossie, and hurled himself in, panting and giggling. There was a small space on the seat opposite Ossie, and the people on either side of it moved themselves away, cramping their thighs and tucking in their clothes, for Daniel was obviously a little drunk. After he had sat and laughed at Ossie for a few minutes, he fell asleep with his head on the shoulder of a woman in a hard velour hat, whose mouth looked as if it had just been sucking lemons.

“Is he your friend?” she asked Ossie, when she had pushed away Daniel’s head and received it again on her bony shoulder for the fifth time.

“No, no,” protested Ossie, who was rehearsing the scene to tell Daniel later on. He liked to hear about things he had done when he was drunk, especially if they were impossibly exaggerated. It made him think that he had been more drunk than he was, which pleased him, because he was always complaining that these days he had to spend a fortune before he could feel any effects at all.

Daniel slept like a child, with a half-smile and lashes displayed on his cheek. Ossie caught the woman in the velour hat glancing down once at his hair, and for a moment her eyes were sad and her mouth looked as if it tasted wine, not lemons.

When they got to their station, Ossie hauled Daniel out, leaving the woman indignant, tricked: “You said you didn’t know him!” brushing the smell of Daniel off her collar as if he were scurf.

Daniel drank a lot more before and during supper. Ossie ate most of the supper, while Daniel talked. Afterwards, when they were sitting in their opposite armchairs, Ossie thought that Daniel had fallen asleep. But looking up from his book, he saw Daniel gazing at him with eyes half closed and unfocused, as if he were trying to blur the shape of him into another person sitting there.

Ossie felt uneasy. He unhitched his slippered foot from its perch on the other fat thigh and got up.

“Get us a whiskey you’re up, Oz,” said Daniel, without moving his gaze from the empty chair. For a long time afterwards he sat holding the tumbler on one arm of the chair while his fist slowly thumped the other. Ossie roved about doing little pottering jobs, not liking to sit in that chair again.

When the bronze bell outside the door clanged, he switched on the light under the thatch eave and opened the door, blocking the space so that no one could come in until he had vetted them.

“Hi there, Oswald!” It was a man from the next village, who called himself a gentleman farmer to let people know that he was supposed to be a gentleman. With him was his wife, who ran a kennels and smelt of dogs and stale beer and cigarettes smouldering in metal ashtrays, and a small man in a check suit, who looked as if at any minute he would say: “A funny thing happened to me on my way to the theatre tonight …”

“Where’s the boy-friend?” asked the gentleman farmer. “We’ve come to cheer him up.”

“I’m so sorry,” Ossie said quietly. “I’m afraid I can’t ask you in. Daniel isn’t very well—touch of ‘flu, I think. He’s just going to bed.”

“What the devil are you nattering out there for? Come on in and shut the door, whoever it is. Theo!” Daniel got up, spilling some of his drink on the floor. “Thank God you’ve come. I’ve been screaming for company all evening.”

“Your nanny said you had ‘flu,” said the gentleman farmer.

“Are you sure we don’t intrude?” asked the man in the check suit.

“’Flu my foot,” said Theo’s wife, peeling off a leather Air Force jacket; “he’s half tight.” She laughed herself into a nicotiny cough. Everybody laughed, including Ossie, who never missed the chance of a cackle.

“Why, you’re quite right,” said Daniel. “I am. It’s wonderful. Come on; what are you going to have? You’ve got a lot of catching up to do.” He went over to the drink cupboard, which was built into the thickness of the wall where the old backdoor had been when the cottage was two houses.