Flowers on the Grass (6 page)

“I never heard anything like it in all my life,” said Doreen.

“All right, if you don’t want to go to Gigli, I’ll get someone else. Morris will take me, I know.”

“But
Doreen
!” cried Ossie desperately, stretching a hand across the table.

“Daniel obviously means more to you than I do,” went on Doreen, with a noisy passion unsuitable to the crowded brasserie of Lyon’s Corner House. “What are you two, anyway— a couple of pansies?”

“Doreen!” Ossie was shocked to the depths of his soul. If she could say a thing like that, he was not sure that he could go on loving her, but then he looked across the table and saw her fuzz of red hair, her thick creamy skin, her little sharp teeth, her shape under the green jersey.…

She began to get up. “Oh, don’t let’s go,” he begged. “Sit down. Do. Have another Horlicks.”

“No
thank
you,” said Doreen, and went, leaving him to pick up his hat, pay the bill and flounder after her.

Ossie now went through a period of great mental distress. He could not be happy at the cottage; he could not be happy with Doreen. She would not let him kiss her now. He never kissed her without first asking: “May I kiss you?” and now she said: “No,” and went quickly up the stone stairs to her flat.

Was it to be a choice between Doreen and Daniel? He could not desert Daniel now, yet Daniel would not need him all his life, and by the time he had helped him over his bad times he might have lost Doreen. He, Ossie Meekes, whose only worry in life had been that nobody needed him—his worry now was being needed by two people at once. Was this he? He hardly knew himself. He studied himself in the mirror as if he were a stranger, and fancied that one of his double chins had disappeared. Doreen had gone to hear Gigli with Morris. She would not tell Ossie what it had been like. He suspected that they had queued in vain and never got in, but thrust this base glee from his mind.

“I suppose,” said Doreen, on a Friday, “it’s no use asking you what you’re doing this Sunday? You’re building sand castles with dear Daniel, no doubt.”

“Well, I don’t know.… He talked of taking the car up to the Royston Downs and having a walk.”

“You
walk!” Doreen laughed and ran her eye up and down him.

Oh, Doreen! cried Ossie’s soul. Don’t be like this. What has happened to you? You never used to mind my being fat.

A proud girl, she was. Before he could betray her further, she said huffily: “Oh, don’t mind me. I’ve got other plans for Sunday. I only wanted to tell you not to count on me since I have an invitation to go out.”

Ossie did not believe her. He knew her so well, had studied her face in so many moods across so many teashop tables. He knew that when she slid her nut-coloured eyes away like that she was lying. She never went out on Sundays. She usually washed and ironed her underclothes and wrote letters to her family in New South Wales.

When Ossie got home that night, Daniel told him that he was going away for the week-end. “Aunt Dilys and Uncle Hugh have been at me for ages to go there,” he said. “It’s a hell of a bore, but I’ll have to go sometime, so it had better be now before it gets cold, because they don’t light fires till November the first.”

Ossie knew that Doreen would not come into the library on Saturday morning. If she was annoyed with him, she sent someone else for her books, or managed without. So he hung about in the corridor outside the ladies’ cloakroom, where he could catch her before she went home at midday.

“What are you up to, Ozzie?” someone asked. “Don’t tell me you’re setting up as a D.O.M. That’s a criminal offence, you know, loitering with intent at a place like this.”

Ossie laughed, and showed him a new joke on the same subject in his book, keeping an eye on the swing doors so as not to miss Doreen.

When she came out, he grabbed her arm, masterful because he was happy about having this week-end uncomplicated.

“Let go,” she said. “You’re pinching me. Great clumsy hand-”

Ossie took it away and looked at it. True, it was rather like a bunch of sausages, but she used not to complain of it. She had even begun to teach him how to use it in the days before they had quarrelled. It would be all right now, however. He put the hand back on her arm, more gently, and steered her down the steps as if she were Queen Elizabeth.

“Listen, dear,” he said. “Daniel’s going away for the weekend. You come down on Sunday, eh? I’d like you to see the cottage. It’s really twee. I’ll cook you lunch.” She did not object to that, because she could not do anything domesticated.
If they ever married, Ossie had thought that he could do the cooking—well, what about French chefs? Doreen might even be the one who went to work while he stayed at home with an apron over his trousers. They could both be happy like that.

She said that she would come. Although she did not care much for the country, Ossie, as almost landed gentry, with a genuine old cottage almost as good as his own, had always appealed to her. Ossie wished he could have suggested her coming on Saturday and spending the night, but she might not understand that it was only so that she could have more time there. And perhaps—who knew—if he had her there on his own he might make a beast of himself. Doreen was not that sort of girl. Or was she? How did one tell? That was the trouble of never having had a girl-friend before. One was out of touch with modern social customs. Did people—or didn’t they? He thought of what his parents had told him and remembered that no, no, of course they didn’t.

But there had been those funny things Doreen had said once or twice when they were kissing…. But no, she was not that sort of girl.

She was the sort of girl for a sofa, though, all right, after lunch on Sunday. It was terrible of Daniel to laugh himself nearly sick when he came home unexpectedly and found them there. He laughed so much that he had to sit down on a chair and slap his thighs. Doreen was annoyed, and went away to tidy herself up.

Ossie passed a handkerchief across his face, looked at it furtively and jammed it in his breast pocket with the lipstick stains concealed. All he could think of to say was: “Why are you back?”

“Couldn’t stand it any longer. The old boy started showing me photographs of Jane as a kid. They’d planned a tea party for the locals to meet me today, to gaze on exhibit A—the bereaved husband. Mean of me, I suppose, when poor Lyddie had been making scones all morning like a mad thing, but I escaped. Don’t let’s talk about me, though. I want to talk about you. Why didn’t you tell me this was going on?”

Ossie tried to explain, and Daniel, when he realised what he was hinting at, laughed more than ever. Even allowing for his upsetting week-end, with those old photographs and everything, it was unforgivably rude of him to say, with Doreen just coming back into the room: “You thought I’d be
reminded—oh God, how incongruous! Ossie, you must be even more naïve than I thought.”

Ossie would not let Doreen be offended. He took her aside and explained how sad it all was. She, infected, perhaps, with the kindliness of the cottage that toned down everyone’s acerbity, played up creditably. She began to talk to Daniel in her intellectual voice about Italian architecture. She even asked him about his book, which was thoughtful of her. Ossie was proud of her, but Daniel got up and went out to the local pub.

There was no reason now why Doreen should not stay the night, with Daniel there as chaperon. Ossie made up her bed, bade her a chaste good night and lent her his dressing-gown. When he heard her going along to the bathroom, he sat on his bed and ground his teeth. He would not let himself go out and say good night to her again, because Heaven knew what might happen if he met her in his dressing-gown, without her corsets. It was not so much Doreen’s honour as the thought that Daniel might come home and laugh at him.

Next morning Ossie got up early, left a cup of tea outside Doreen’s bedroom door and took a great deal of trouble preparing breakfast. Quite a family party they would be. But Doreen only ate the yolk of her egg and left all the white, and Daniel came down very late, gulped at a cup of coffee, said it was cold and dashed out to the garage, shouting: “Come on, you two—if you’re coming!”

They all bought newspapers and read them all the way to London.

When Ossie was washing up after supper that night, Daniel called through to him, quite casually: “I’m going to let the cottage. I saw an agent about it today.”

“You’re
what?”
Ossie came to the kitchen door with a plate in one hand, a wet mop in the other, and his mouth like a goldfish. “Let the cottage? But why? Where will you live?”

“No sense coming right out here in winter. I’ll get a room somewhere.”

“Oh, Daniel!” Ossie’s mission came over him like a hot flush. “Please don’t go back to that again.
Please”
He stood pleading earnestly to the empty dining-room, his face screwed up, persuasively, as if Daniel could see him. “What’s the good of having a home if you don’t live in it?”

“I don’t want a home.”

“But you ought to. You know you’ve been better since we came out here.”

“Have I?” asked Daniel’s unseen voice. Ossie went through to the sitting-room, still carrying the mop, to see from Daniel’s face whether he had said this sadly, or mockingly or gratefully. But Daniel’s face showed nothing. He was leaning back in the armchair with his eyes shut.

“I’ve told the agents I want to let it anyway,” he said.

“They’re sending people to see it at the week-end.”

“It’s a pity,” Ossie said. “Old boy, I think you’re wrong.” Daniel opened his eyes and grinned. “You can’t try and argue seriously with me with that dish-wiper thing tied round your waist. How on earth d’you get it to meet at the back? Turn round. Oh, I see. Pins.” He seemed more interested in the tea-towel which was wrapped round Ossie’s waist like a flag round a lucky-dip barrel than in talking about the cottage.

Saturday was a trying day. Three lots of people arrived to see the cottage, each time when Ossie was just going to put food on the table. Daniel quite liked the first ones, and was affable to them. They said the right things about the cottage and were more interested in the garden than the plumbing. Because he did not like the others, he put the rent up ludicrously, and when they asked to be shown round, wandered away saying: “Well, there you are. You can see for yourself what there is.”

On Sunday came two middle-aged spinsters, who made Ossie want to laugh, but Daniel, surprisingly, took to them at once and clinched the let without any ado. One spinster had long, untidy hair, a hand-knitted dress, pottery brooches and a great many little bags and reticules. She went round the cottage with oohs and ahs of delight and sank on her knees to a clump of chrysanthemums. The other one had short neat hair which accentuated her square jaw and bull neck, and wore a suit made of some kind of sackcloth, shoes with sporrans and plaid golf socks up to the knees over her stockings. She went round the house grunting at it, and fondled the dog in the way that he liked. Ossie was afraid they might be thinking of starting a teashop in the cottage, but no, they simply wanted to live there.

The hand-knitted one was Miss Adelaide Mallalieu, and the sackcloth one was Miss Freda. Daniel was enchanted
with them and insisted that they must stay to tea. Ossie went into the kitchen to put the kettle on. While he was waiting for it to boil, he thought for the hundredth time how silly it was not to have an electric kettle like he had in the flat. He had always been meaning to buy one for Daniel. Now, of course, it was too late.

When he carried the tea things through, Miss Adelaide was saying: “I’m afraid you’ll miss this dear little place dreadfully, Mr. Brett. How can you bear to leave it?” Ossie nearly dropped the tray when he heard Daniel say, quite easily: “Well, you see, my wife was killed here.”

Miss Adelaide’s eyes filled with tears. She looked down at her hands, twisting them in her lap. Miss Freda leaned forward with the face of a trustful mastiff and said brusquely, but without embarrassment: “I’m sorry. What happened?”

Ossie would never have dared ask Daniel a thing like that. He had never heard anyone ask it, and he had never heard Daniel talk about the way his wife had died, but now he began to tell the Mallalieus as naturally as if he were used to talking about it every day. Adelaide sat looking at her lap, and Freda sat with her knees wide apart and her knickers showing, muddy feet planted on the rug, nodding and grunting while he told them about Jane and the electric kettle, and how he had to prise her dead hands off it when he found her.

“Go on, Ossie, pour the tea out, old boy, before it gets cold,” he said, for Ossie was sitting paralysed at the thought of how he might have come gaily home with an electric kettle.

Afterwards, Daniel was rifling through his desk for some papers relating to the house. He found them among a jumble of unpaid bills, and Miss Adelaide took them over to the window, for the light was fading.

“Oh, excuse me.” She turned round. “There’s something personal got in among these.”

“What is it? ” asked Daniel from the desk, where his attention had been caught by a forgotten file of notes for his book.

“It’s a poem. By Robert Bridges.”

“Oh?” Daniel looked up, as if he were listening to something. Dusk was creeping out from the corners of the room, although it was still light outside, where the garden lay spellbound before the approach of night.

Miss Adelaide turned back to the window, her wispy head silhouetted. “She copied this out.” She said rather than asked it.

“No.” Daniel stirred, and broke the stillness which lay on the room like water. “I did. She didn’t like it. She said that Bridges and I were selfish to want it that way. So you see——” He got up and switched on a light. “Here’s what you get for being selfish. I wonder if Bridges got it, too? Ossie will know. He runs a library.”

But Ossie did not know. He did not like this conversation. He had not liked any of this afternoon since tea-time and he wished these women would soon go away. He could not understand it. After all his weeks of tact and consideration, these imprudent women had got far closer to Daniel in a few hours.