Flowers on the Grass

by Monica Dickens

  “Nearly all the great men were. Julius Caesar, Mohammed, St. Paul, Marlborough, Duke of Wellington. … So you see, you shouldn’t be ashamed of me. You should be proud,” he went on, ignoring his father’s hurt protest. “Epilepsy breeds greatness. It might in me, you never know. Something to do with abnormal brain energy. Lom—what’s his name?—Lombardo—Lombroso said that all genius was epilep—epileptoid.” He saw the way his father and Daniel were looking at him and realised that he was slurring his words. Damn. This often happened after a fit.

  “You read too many books, Geoff,” his father said. “How about going back to bed now?”

  Geoffrey fought off the drowsiness that was clouding his thoughts and speech. “I couldn’t sleep now,” he protested.

  “Have some whiskey,” suggested Daniel.

  Mr. Marple leaned forward and took the decanter from him. “No, no. He’s never allowed alcohol.”

  “Never?” Daniel looked at Geoffrey with concern.

  “Never in my life,” he said proudly. “I don’t even know what it tastes like.”

  “Heavens,” said Daniel. “You don’t know what you miss. May I?” He picked up the decanter again and helped himself. Geoffrey did not know whether his father was frowning at that, or because Daniel had not reassured him that abstention was no hardship.

  He sat down. “I’ll have some Ovaltine and sandwiches,” he said, as if he were ordering in a restaurant. “I’m hungry.”

  “The maids have gone to bed,” said his father, “and Eileen and your mother have gone to the Women’s Institute dress rehearsal. She didn’t at all want to go and leave you, but I packed her off. It’s good for her to get out and about a bit. Brett—I wonder if you’d get Geoff something to eat? He mustn’t go wandering round the draughty kitchen in that outfit.”

  “Ought he to eat last thing at night?” asked Daniel, who did not want to stir himself.

  “Oh yes,” said Geoffrey happily, settling back in his chair. “I’m supposed to have snacks between meals, so as not to get too hungry.”

  “O.K.” Daniel went off and Geoffrey laughed to himself because he could see that he did not like having to run about after a boy of twenty-two. He did not behave as if he had ever been a professional companion before.

  Geoffrey drowsed a little and opened his eyes to see his father sitting watching him, his white hair like teased cotton wool, rabbit teeth showing under the colourless moustache that would never go properly grey.

  “Dad,” he continued his drowsing thoughts. “When Daniel answered your advertisement, did he send references from other people he’d been with?”

  “Of course. Never take anyone in my house without a reference. Excellent ones they were, too. Why? You like him, don’t you? Think he’s going to be satisfactory?” He made a face, because the door was opening.

  “Yes,” said Geoffrey, and: “Oh yes” he repeated as he saw the bursting sandwiches that Daniel had made for him with a complete disregard for butter and cheese rationing.

  Although he was not usually interested in the details of other people’s lives, Geoffrey was intrigued by Daniel. He wondered why he had taken this job, since he seemed to know so little about teaching anything except drawing, and why he behaved like a recluse, never wanting to go outside the grounds of Mara Rocks. Once, when he had to go to Penzance to take Geoffrey to the dentist, he had worn dark glasses all the time, even in the dentist’s waiting-room. Geoffrey, who had no respect for anyone’s secrets, often asked Daniel what, if anything, he was hiding from, but Daniel only laughed and said: “Blackmailers”, or “A Sicilian vendetta”, or anything that came into his head.

  One afternoon, when the bay was glass and the heat haze shimmered like oil vapour above the dusty flowerbeds, Geoffrey was pestering Daniel unsuccessfully to take him in the car to Penzance. He was lying under a tree on the lawn, with a rather effeminate straw hat on the back of his head, while Daniel, who could stand as much sun as a lizard, was perched on the wall above him, sketching the jutting corner of the house and the bay beyond.

  It was a novel experience to be thwarted. Geoffrey did not mind as much as he had expected. It was refreshing to have someone who would argue with him instead of always giving in, although annoying if it interfered with what he wanted to do. At the moment he wanted to go into Penzance and eat cream cakes and ices at the Rosebud Café. He had a passion for rich, sweet food. He agreed with his medical books when they said that this was typical of his disease, but he disagreed when they said it should not be indulged. Like a pregnant woman, he ought to be allowed to satisfy a pathological craving.

  Daniel went on sketching and saying: “No,” while Geoffrey grumbled away on the grass. “All right,” he said, “if you won’t take me, I’ll drive the car myself.”

  “You don’t know how.”

  “It’s easy. I could do it. I’ll take that old bit of mistletoe I picked last autumn at just the right phase of the moon.”

  “What for?”

  “Don’t you know anything? The point is that as it’s rooted on the tops of trees, it can’t fall to the ground, so an epileptic who carries it can’t either.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Well, it’s easier than going to that church in Wales where you have to take a cockerel with you and lie all night on the altar, and if the cock dies it’s got your epilepsy and you’re cured.”

  He spoke as if he half believed this, and Daniel said: “What a funny mixture of superstition and precociousness you are, Geoff.”

  “Aren’t I?” said Geoffrey with interest, but would not be sidetracked into talking about himself. He nagged on about Penzance.

  “I thought you were supposed to stay quiet for at least a week after a fit,” Daniel said. What a relief it was to hear someone say that word here. When reference to it was unavoidable, it was usually “a go” or “one of your little attacks.”

  Geoffrey’s stomach, his gullet, his mouth were aching and wet for chocolate cake with a ball of ice-cream on top. He tried flattery. “That sketch was pretty good yesterday. You’ll only spoil it if you go on messing about.”

  “Why don’t you do some sketching yourself?” Daniel asked. “It’s one of the things I’m supposed to teach you. God knows there’s nothing else I can tell you that you don’t know more about than me.”

  “I know all about sketching, too,” Geoffrey said, “but that won’t cure my hunger, or my colossal ennui with this dreary hot summer which just goes on and on and will only end with the even drearier return of Woodie. It always rains when he’s about. His sponge-like personality attracts water. Daniel”— Geoffrey turned on his face and chewed grass because he did not want to sound intense—“I wish you wouldn’t go at the end of the month. I’ll get Woodie pensioned off and you can stay.”

  “Why?” asked Daniel, through a pencil held in his teeth while he rubbed something out.

  “Oh—I don’t know. I like you because you make me laugh. Everyone else here makes such heavy weather of life. You don’t care a hang. Maybe it’s because you’ve never had anything to care about. They have. Oh, I don’t mean me. I’m a back number as far as tragedy goes. I mean, five years ago, when the string that holds the sword of Damocles broke above Mara Rocks. No one has ever recovered from the crash. They never will. Sometimes I think they don’t want to. You wait till Reggie’s anniversary. This place is like the wailing wall. Don’t put on that face, Daniel. I know I sound callous, but honestly, it gets on my nerves. I can’t imagine Reggie likes it either.”

  “You would,” Daniel said. “You’d be furious if you thought people had forgotten you even for a minute.”

  “True,” agreed Geoffrey, “but that’s different. I’m an epileptoid genius, don’t forget.”

  Presently, saying that he was going indoors to rest on his bed, he went through the house, out of the front door and up the lane to the main road where he caught the bus to Penzance.

  When this was discovered, Daniel was very unpopular. Geoffrey�
��s father was too much of a gentleman to say: “What do you think I’m paying you for?” and his mother was too kind to say such things, or even think them, but Aunt Florence was not. She arrived back that evening from Cousin John’s at Teignmouth, and almost before she was over the doorstep gathered the household reins into her large ugly hands again, summed up this Mr. Blatt as she insisted on calling Daniel, and told him where he got off. Geoffrey, who found his Aunt Florence even more aggravating than most people, was glad to see that Daniel did not mind at all. He must be used to it.

  Florence Marple had come to live with her brother after his eldest son was shot escaping from a German prison camp. Mrs. Marple had disintegrated utterly and was quite incapable of running the house, and by the time she might have been capable again Florence was established in the best guest room with her sewing machine and the rackety old typewriter on which she typed noisy, newsy letters to friends and relations all over the world.

  She had a firm hold on all the domestic strings, and no intention of letting go, so Mrs. Marple, who used to enjoy running the house by inefficient methods which got her there in the end, was now relegated to small pottery jobs which she spun out as long as possible, to fill her day.

  Her days were long, for she had no pleasure in them. After five years, her life was still dominated by sorrow. She had no unconnected interests, must be careful what she read in case something upset her, could not listen to war plays on the wireless, or hear “Jerusalem” played without remembering speech day at Rugby in Reggie’s last glorious year.

  She and her husband, who thought her rather a fool, had nothing in common except their elder son’s death. Sometimes Geoffrey wondered how they had ever got along at all before that. When he was a child, he could not remember them ever doing anything together, or any conversations between them, although there must have been some. In family photographs of Mr. Marple in a Norfolk jacket and a cap like a cushion and Mrs. Marple with a buckled waist, they were always standing well apart, not in deliberate pique, but as if they were unaware of each other’s presence. How they had ever produced Reggie and Geoffrey and Eileen was a mystery as unfathomable as the night sky.

  After Reggie was killed, there had been a period when they had come closer than ever in their lives, but soon Mrs. Marple had driven her husband away again by talking too much about what had happened to them. However, it was still there between them to harmonise moments which before would have been discordant. When Mrs. Marple said something particularly foolish, Geoffrey could sometimes see his father reminding himself, making allowances, and giving his wife one of the smiles to which she leaped like a beggar to a coin.

  Aunt Florence had loved Reggie, too, but losing a nephew is not the same as losing a son, and although a doubtful advantage, this was the only one Mrs. Marple had over her sister-in-law, who had pegged out for herself a prior claim to everything else in the house.

  The only reason Geoffrey was glad to see Aunt Florence back was that the meals improved. She had a way of getting more out of the butcher and grocer and making more out of what she got. The cook hated her, although—or because— she had taught her many things. Nellie, the house-parlourmaid, hated her because she kept one forefinger permanently extended for running along shelves, and whatever breath she could spare from laying down the law for breathing on the spoons and rubbing them up in a pointed way at meals.

  She would not rub them up today, however, for a guest was coming to lunch, so any censure of Nellie would take place by private appointment later.

  Arthur Mew, who, by dint of saying that he wished to welcome Aunt Florence home, had got himself asked to a good lunch, came into the drawing-room in a blue alpaca jacket, oversized bow-tie and narrow flannel trousers, which his sister had dyed from grey to an interesting shade of cinnamon. He was known in the district as “our local archaeologist”, because he dabbled a little in old churches and made humiliating remarks to people about their beams and plaster-work. He was much in demand to open fetes and book weeks and village meetings that aimed gently at culture. Several years ago he had written a book on Cornish folk customs and had been trading on it ever since as his passport to the world of letters. He was the only visible author for miles round. There were a few real ones who typed doggedly away in cottages and kept their lights burning far into the night, but they were never seen at public gatherings, so Mr. Mew felt himself unchallenged as the “Q” of Mara Bay.

  He bent low over Mrs. Marple’s hand. “Dear lady,” he breathed, as he always did, thus proving that it is not only people in books who say that. She was in the black which she would wear now for the rest of her life; and with the deference of a funeral mute, he led her towards the group by the window as if he were showing her to the first closed carriage. When he saw Mr. Marple, he grasped his right hand and put his left on the other’s shoulder. “Splendid! Splendid!” he repeated in time to his pumping handshake, though Mr. Marple had not yet said a word, favourable or otherwise.

  He was as courtly to Eileen as if she were a raving beauty, instead of a plain, short girl with a big nose and flat hair, and he admired her dress, which had nothing to recommend it except a clean collar and cuffs. Geoffrey sometimes wondered if he would marry her in the end. She had broken off her engagement to the only man who had ever looked at her twice, to be a comfort to her parents after Reggie was killed. The archaeologist was her last chance, but she would not marry while her parents were alive, and old Mew would probably be dead long before them.

  Geoffrey was sulking. He did not want to have lunch with Mr. Mew. He had said that he would have a tray in his room, but his mother had begged him to come and be polite, and Aunt Florence, who had discovered that mice had invaded the house while she was away, was vetoing trays in rooms because of the crumbs.

  “Geoff!” hooted Arthur Mew. “Delightful!” Resignedly, Geoffrey half rose from the window seat to shake his hand, sat down again at once and went on looking out of the window.

  Mr. Mew could turn anything, even rudeness, to conversational purpose. “Those wonderful windows over the sea,” he said. “I always say looking out of this room is like looking from the deck of a frigate.”

  “Oh, do you?” said Mrs. Marple as politely surprised as if he did not say that every time he came. “I like windows,” she said. “They make such a difference to a house.”

  Mr. Mew drank sherry with tittuping sips, to show he was a connoisseur of wine. No one could think of anything to say, but Mr. Mew said: “Yes indeed,” and: “Well, well,” which gave the illusion of conversation.

  It was quite a relief when Aunt Florence came charging into the room from the kitchen where she had been putting the wind up cook, who was trying to dish up. She and Mr. Mew exchanged noisy greetings, for she always talked at the top of her voice, and he had to explain: “Home is the wanderer!” many times before he would let go her hand. She brought with her Daniel, whom she had roped in on the way to carry her mending, and introduced him as Mr. Blatt. She had been calling him that for so many days now that no one felt equal to correcting her. It seemed a little late.

  Aunt Florence, whose mind was still in the kitchen, said to her sister-in-law: “What have you been doing while I’ve been away? I’ve just been round the cupboards checking the stores and we’re low on nearly everything.”

  Mrs. Marple glanced at Mr. Mew. This was not the time to say that she had been taking the opportunity of reducing the grocery bills while Florence was away. “As it was so hot,” she said at random, “I was afraid of things going off.”

  “I’ve never heard of dried herbs going off, nor yet Oxo,” retorted Florence, appealing to Mr. Mew, with a toss of her lichen-coloured head, to join her in a scornful laugh.

  “Lunch is served,” remarked Nellie in an off-hand Cornish way from the door. She spoke to Mrs. Marple, but Aunt Florence answered.

  “Very well, Nellie, we will have lunch,” she said as if making a decision, although the soup was on the table and as far as Nellie was concerne
d they’d have it now or have it cold.

  Lunch was wonderful. Roast chicken with crackling skin and white flesh that fell apart in your teeth almost before you could bite it. Cauliflower in a sauce like velvet, a purée of potatoes, of which Geoffrey, suspecting that Aunt Florence had palmed into it some of his extra eggs, took more than anyone else, as his due.

  Aunt Florence, who was apt to speak to him as if he were a backward child, said: “Piggy, piggy 1 There are others to come after you.”

  Mr. Mew held the table with an ornamental account of a meeting at a literary lunch with an author of whom no one had ever heard. At least, he held Aunt Florence, who was “a great reader”, and tore bits out of the book pages of the Sunday papers before other people had read them.

  She told Mr. Mew that she envied him his interesting life among the great and that she had always said that she would write a book herself if only she could find time. The others got on with their food, and Daniel, who had the gift of detaching himself, seemed to be somewhere miles away beyond the window.

  When they were ready for the next course, Aunt Florence, putting out a foot to press the bell under the table, pressed Mr. Mew’s toe instead, and he let out a yell and swallowed a small splinter of chicken-bone that he had just succeeded in dislodging from behind his teeth. Debonair to the last, he managed to convey, even while he was coughing and spluttering out shreds of potato on to his chin, that it was worth it, indeed an honour to have his foot trodden on by so charming a lady. Aunt Florence looked at him quizzically over her bust while he said that he could, yes indeed he could be so naughty as to wish she had done it on purpose.

  While all this was going on, Geoffrey took the opportunity of helping himself to both kinds of pudding when Nellie offered them for his choice.

  His mother leaned across the table to whisper: “Only one, dear. You know what Doctor Mount said about not too many sweet things.”

  Geoffrey, who had been working up an increasing irritation and had been looking all through lunch for something to make a scene about, now pushed his plate away, spilling custard on the table, slumped in his chair and prepared to make life hideous for everyone in the room.