“Not too much of that,” Lew said, watching her. “I don’t like too much.”
“Daniel does,” she said without thinking, and he flared up.
“So now he means more to you than your own son, is that it?” Lew’s lisp was twice as thick when he became excited. “We must all eat the way he likes. I suppose the next thing will be we mustn’t have kosher meat because Daniel is a Christian.”
“Lew, you are unkind. Don’t you see that it’s because he is not my son that I must try and make up? It’s no easy thing to be a lodger in someone else’s house. Everything is all right, until something happens which draws the family together and then he is left out. Or something happens to him, but he cannot turn to anyone, because the family have their own affairs, and no one puts him first. That’s why Daniel is like this and cannot work. He has kept some trouble inside himself and it has made him ill.”
“What trouble?” asked Lew suspiciously.
“I don’t know.”
“Guilty conscience perhaps. I wonder what he’s done.” Lew pursed his lips. Having no conscience himself, he could be quite smug about other people’s. “Perhaps his girl walked out on him. He seems to be off women.”
“We must find him another, then,” said Mumma, with homeopathic optimism. “I would have liked that he and Rosie——”
“Ro wouldn’t look at him,” Lew said. “She likes her men solvent.”
Nevertheless, it was through Rosie that Daniel found some work to do. She had a gentleman friend called Max, who had acquired a long low basement in Denman Street, which he was going to open as a club. Rosie was going to leave the Venus Club and exchange her sequinned trunks for the long dress of a hostess. Max, who was the jealous type and carried a knife which he had once used on a sailor in a brawl, would be happier to have Rosie under his eye and fully clad.
One evening after supper she announced in her clear, imperious voice: “Max wants someone to paint the decorations round the walls of the new club. I said Daniel would do it.”
“I?” Daniel, who was playing chess with Mr. Weissman, looked up in alarm. “Good Lord, girl, you must be mad.”
“Why?” Rosie shrugged her shoulders elaborately. All her gestures were excessive. If she was only pointing to a smut on your nose, she flung out an arm like stout Cortez discovering the Pacific. Now, her thin shoulders worked like steam pistons under her silk blouse. “No one in the family can paint, so you might as well be in on it.”
“Oh, fine,” Daniel said, “except that I couldn’t paint either now. I’ve taught, but I haven’t put a brush on paper since— oh, for ages.”
“Your move, boy,” said Mr. Weissman, who took half an hour over his own moves but only allowed his opponent half a minute.
“Of course you must do it,” Rosie said, flinging her body about at him resentfully. “Don’t annoy me. I’ve told Max you would. Anyway, Lew says you must do some work.”
“Not that kind,” Daniel tipped back his chair to look at Rosie. “I wouldn’t be much good.”
“That’s all right,” Rosie said candidly. “Max wouldn’t pay you very much. You can paint women surely. Girls—you know the kind of thing.”
Hymie whistled through his teeth and made rounded gestures in the air. Daniel watched, shook his head and, letting down the legs of his chair, bent to the game again. “No, Pa,” he said. “You can’t do that. A pawn can’t go there.”
“So sorry, so sorry. It’s my eyes.” Pa did not exactly cheat at chess, but he tried things on. His needle-pitted fingers hovered over the board, picking up pieces and putting them down again, not always in the same place. Daniel slapped his hand and moved a bishop back to where it had been.
“Oh, do stop playing chess!” Rosie almost screamed. “Daniel, you are so lazy, you make me ill. You can paint. You said you could.”
“Not girls.”
But Rosie had promised Daniel to Max. “Yes, girls. Any girl. You must have painted some girl or other some time. Goodness, I had a boy once who was an artist and we never had any fun because I was always sitting still while he drew me from a distance.”
Daniel looked up from the board, and seemed to speak to Mumma, not to Rosie. “I used to paint a girl once,” he said. “Yes… . But oh no.” He gave himself a little shake. “She wouldn’t do.”
“A girl’s a girl,” Morrie said and made a smacking noise with his lips. Esther reached a foot under the table and hacked him on the ankle.
“Let’s see,” Lew said. “Draw her now.”
“No. My move, Pa?” He moved a piece thoughtfully, then suddenly turned round and said: “Yes, all right, I will. Anyone got a pencil?” Quickly he began to sketch the rough picture of a fair, wispy girl on the white scrubbed wood of the kitchen table. Everyone crowded round to look, criticising. Pa got up to see and knocked most of the chess-men on the floor.
“There you are!” Daniel flung the pencil down and turned away from the picture.
“It’s rotten. I do better than that in school,” said Joey, who should have been in bed hours ago, but kept coming down again in his pyjamas like a boomerang every time he was shut in his room.
“It’s not,” Lew said, screwing up his lips as if he were judging it with a view to purchase. “It’s good, but-”
“She looks half starved,” Mumma said.
“She should have more-” Esther patted her own solid self proudly.
“Where’s her sex?” Hymie said. “You forget to put that in.”
“No,” Rosie said, “she wouldn’t do for Max’s place. Do another. Who else can you do?”
“I could paint you,” Daniel said, running his eye up and down her.
“No, Max wouldn’t like it. He wouldn’t like to think you thought of me like that. Try another.”
“There was a girl in Italy——” Daniel picked up the pencil.
“Not on my table,” Mumma said. “Someone get some paper.”
Hymie went upstairs and returned with a sample of “export only” wallpaper. Daniel leaned his elbow over the picture of the girl on the table, and on the back of the wallpaper he drew a sultry-looking girl with a lock of black hair over one eye and an impertinent figure.
“Ah!” they all cried. “That’s more like it. Now you’ve got the idea.” They pushed at each other, leaning over the table to judge the masterpiece seriously.
“Max will go for that,” Rosie announced.
“You can do her all round the walls,” said Morrie, “in different posi—sorry, Esther—ways. Now we must have a man looking at her. Like this.” He put on a look that made Esther kick him again.
“There was a wing-commander I used to sketch in the prison camp,” Daniel said. “I could do him as he looked once when he found something in an American Red Cross parcel wrapped up in a page of Esquire” He drew the wing commander, with a lopsided black moustache and eyes like prawns. Everyone was delighted, pleased for Daniel as if he were a child. He on his side humoured their enthusiasm without sharing it, as if they were children. He allowed himself to be dragged off by Rosie to the Venus Club to see Max, who was always there to watch her number, in case anyone else was watching her the wrong way.
“Don’t you want to play any more chess?” Pa asked, rising from the floor where he had been picking up the pieces. Daniel had gone.
“I’ll play, Gramp,” said Joey. “Bet you I win. What odds will you give?”
“None,” said his grandfather, “because you always do.” He would have preferred to read his book, but if Joey said he wanted to play chess he had to play.
Daniel bought paints and brushes and started to work on the walls of Max’s basement. He seemed much happier now that he had something better to do than moon about the house wondering whether or not he felt ill. As the paintings progressed, he became more interested and developed quite a temperament about them, coming home to supper with the air of Michelangelo having just put in a hard day’s work on the Sistine Chapel.
He could not take the s
leeping powders any more, because Max, who was paying him by the day, was angry if he did not turn up on time. When Max was angry, he took it out on Rosie, who took it out on Daniel. Mumma knew that he was not sleeping well. Sometimes, worrying about him in the night, for she did not have to worry about her family, who could be heard snoring in different keys all over the house, she would get up and go half-way up the stairs to see the line of light under Daniel’s door. Once she had heard him go downstairs, and following after, amorphous in her dressing-gown, had found him trying to wash the remains of his drawing off the kitchen table. Mumma thought he was sleep-walking. He looked at her in a bemused, hurt way, and she turned him gently round and propelled him upstairs again.
The whole family went to the opening night of the club. Daniel behaved as if it was opening solely to exhibit his pictures. At the last minute he refused to go. But they gave him some drinks and pushed him into a hired dinner-jacket and took him along. Mumma stayed at home to mind the children and to open the door to a man wanting to see Lew about a radiogram and another who had brought a fur to show Hymie, and to answer the telephone to Morrie’s racing friends and a chilly-voiced woman who wanted Daniel.
She was sitting wrapped in an eiderdown by the kitchen fire, waiting for them with coffee when they got home with the sky already light.
“Hell,” said Daniel, when she told him about the telephone.
“How on earth-? I didn’t think anyone knew I was here.”
“And why not?” shouted Esther, who was tired and not very sober and spoiling for a fight. But Daniel would not fight. He sat muttering about God-damn interfering families and how they couldn’t keep their hands off a person, until Mumma began to think that perhaps Lew had been right and he had embezzled something. She could think of no other reason why anyone should not want to see their family. She got someone to push the eiderdown in the small of her back to help her upstairs, and climbed into the vast double bed where Pa, from habit, lay neatly on the extreme edge, although he had lain there four hours without her.
Max got other jobs for Daniel, and he paid his rent. He called it prostituting his art, which Mumma interpreted as a reference to the kind of places in which he worked, and began to worry about Rosie. She was a good girl. She had been brought up right, but her very innocence might lead her into trouble. If only she would cast off this fat, cocksure Max who spoiled her with presents, and give up these clubs, and this dancing every night with goodness knows who, and settle down with someone that Mumma could love more as a son than a son-in-law. In August perhaps they could all go away for a holiday. Lew knew a man who had a hotel at Bournemouth. They could go away without Max, and Rosie and Daniel would walk on the beach under the moon, just as Mumma and Pa had walked at Southsea forty-five years ago.
Sitting in her kitchen, which in this heat-wave was getting more like an oven lit full speed for a buffeten kuchen, Mumma saw it all, down to the last blossom in Rosie’s hair and the last whirl of icing on the cake that she would make.
In the evening when the sun was off the street, Mumma took a chair to the top of the area steps and sat there looking Italian, talking to friends and greeting the family as each one came home. Joey from school, jostling another boy in and out of the gutter; Esther red-faced from shopping, with the baby submerged under parcels and tins in the pram; Rosie from the cinema. “It’s cooler inside,” said the posters and she had believed them until she paid her three-and-six and found that they lied. Daniel came sweltering from some work he had been doing on the new bar of Max’s club.
“It’s like Hades down there,” he sighed, draping himself over the railings while he talked to Mumma. “Imagine— people go there for pleasure.”
“It’s cooler at night, remember.”
“It’s not. It’s like an inferno down there with that mass of sweating, pawing bodies.”
“Oh dear,” Mumma did not like to think of Rosie down there among all that. Yet what other job could she do? She called this “being an actress” and would contemplate nothing else.
“I’ll have to get some thinner clothes,” Daniel said, trying to cool his cheek against the spear-shaped top of the railing and finding it burning hot. Pa was making him a summer suit, but it would be winter long before it was finished. “I think I’ll go to the cottage this evening and get some things.”
Mumma had quite forgotten about his house in the country. He never talked about it. She hoped that when he saw it he would not want to start living there again, for how anyone who had a house in the country could bear to live in Walworth in this weather baffled her. She never liked losing her lodgers. She hated break-ups of any kind, but when Daniel went it would be like one of the boys leaving home.
“I can’t face that train,” he said. “D’you think Hymie would mind if I took his car?” Hymie, who had begun to dabble a little in the car market, had brought home only last night an elegant blue Jaguar, which was now in a disused builder’s yard at the back of the house.
“It’s not for me to say.” Mumma did not think Hymie would like it. He was funny sometimes about his things. “I’ll ask Pa. Pa!” she called, but he had the window of the front room shut and could not hear. He smiled and nodded and waved to her.
“I’ll risk it,” said Daniel. “He won’t mind. It’s too hot to mind anything.”
When Hymie came home he did mind. He said that he had planned to drive out in the car to a roadhouse on the Brighton Road, although Mumma thought that had only occurred to him when he heard that Daniel bad taken the Jaguar.
“After all,” he grumbled, “it’s not as if it was mine for good. It’s a saleable article. In fact, it’s going to be sold next week, with a satisfactory profit for little Hymie Weissman, thanks very much. But how do I know what Daniel will do to it? You shouldn’t, Mumma.”
“I’m sorry, Hymie. I didn’t tell him he could-”
“You didn’t tell him he couldn’t.”
Everyone was feeling sultry and cross in the kitchen, toying with their food, disinclined for rich, greasy cooking. Hymie would not let the subject drop. “I mean,” he groused, “it’s just as bad as if Rosie took one of the minks up there and wore it to go out. She’d be sure to tear it.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“You would.”
“Children, children!” But no one paid any heed to Pa, so he picked up his coffee-cup and his plate of cherry tart and went away to his workroom.
“I wouldn’t,” said Rosie. “I often have worn them, and you’ve never known—so there!”
This started a first-class dispute, in which everyone was involved. Whether Rosie ever had worn any of Hymie’s fur coats, or had just said that to goad him, Mumma was not sure, but at least it took his mind off the car. They were still arguing, when there was a quick clatter of feet on the area steps and Max came in by the open back door. Rosie got up and went to meet him in the passage, but he pushed her aside and came straight into the kitchen. He looked round at the family sitting in various attitudes of heat and fatigue round a tableful of dirty plates, laughed in a self-conscious way, and said casually: “Any of you boys got a hot car?”
Hymie jumped to his feet, his face yellow, his skimpy moustache twitching. “W hat are you talking about?” he croaked. “I’ve got a car. Yes. But it’s strictly on the level.”
The atmosphere was cold suddenly with fear, in spite of the airless heat. Mumma, at the sink, went on making the motions of washing up, not daring to look round.
“How d’you know?” asked Max in his clipped, nasal voice. “Who did you get it from?”
“Hymie,” said Lew in a low voice. “You fool. Who was it?”
“It was all right. You know Harry Speed-”
“Harry Speed! Oh, my God!” Lew covered his face with his hands and laid the whole lot on the table.
“Harry Speed!” said Max. “This young boy wants a keeper. What in heaven made you think that Harry would come by any car that didn’t either have something wrong with it or the pri
ce of a king’s ransom on its head?”
“Max,” said Rosie, who was still standing in the doorway. “What are you trying to say? Get on with it, for God’s sake.”
“It’s only—” he flashed his gold tooth at her, “it’s only that your beloved brother, whom the gods preserve, has come tonight within a split hair of the cooler. Saved”—he held up his hand for silence, as they all broke into a babble—“saved, I blush to tell you, by the presence of mind of yours truly. I thank you one and all.” He bowed round the room as if receiving applause. “Is that a chair? May I sit down? Is that a bottle of whiskey by any chance? May I? Ta very much.” He helped himself, and leaned back, enjoying the excitement he had caused.
“But Daniel,” Mumma kept saying, from the sink. “What about Daniel?” But nobody heard her. They were too busy reviling Hymie. She came up to the table, drying her hands on her black flowered apron. “Max,” she said. “Tell me what has happened to Daniel. He was in the car.”
“You’re telling me,” he said.
“Yes, and if he hadn’t taken it, this would never have happened-” began Hymie heatedly; but his mother said:
“Hush, son, we don’t know yet what has happened. Tell us, Max.”
Max finished his drink deliberately, and reached for the bottle again. “O.K.,” he said. “Here’s your bedtime story.” Rosie came to stand by his chair. While he was talking, he put his hand on her arm and ran his fingers up and down it.
“So this Daniel friend of yours,” he said, “comes round to the club, see, about—what would it be?—about an hour and a half ago. Left his jacket at my place, with his wallet in it. Trusting kind of guy. I always thought he had an honest face. Who’d have thought he’d get mixed up in this kind of thing?”
“Max, please.” Mumma leaned forward, gripping the table. “I beg of you, tell us what has happened. You talk as if you were enjoying yourself.”
Flowers on the Grass Page 9