“Nellie,” said Aunt Florence, “fetch a cloth. Mr. Geoffrey has made a mess.” She sounded as if he were a child allowed in to dining-room lunch as a treat, but not to be trusted after all without his square of mackintosh. “Take your plate back, dear, and get on with your pudding,” she said.
“I don’t want it,” growled Geoffrey, although his mouth was watering for the whipped-cream trifle and blackcurrant fool.
Mr. Mew, having finally settled the chicken-bone, was free now to make the best of this. “I say, I say,” he said loudly, “this won’t do. Do you know what my nurse used to say to me when I refused my food?” No one asked, but he told them. “‘There’s many little boys in slumland,’ she used to say, ‘who would be glad of that’; and do you know what I used to answer?” Still no one asked, but still he told them. “‘All right,’ I’d say, ‘they can have it!’ I’m afraid I was always sharp to repartee.”
“Has there ever been any child, I wonder,” said Geoffrey, manufacturing a yawn, “who wasn’t supposed to have said that?”
“Well!” Mr. Mew was nonplussed for a second, but quickly recovered as Nellie came at him with the trifle. “My gracious,” he said, “this looks ambrosial. I’m afraid I can’t resist it, even if you can.”
Geoffrey gave him a sick look. “I’m trying the starvation cure for epilepsy,” he said sourly.
His mother drew in her breath and shook her head at him. She did not like to have that word said before outsiders. Even Mr. Mew, the ever-jolly, did not like it, especially in that tone of voice. He drew back his head like a tortoise and retired into himself, taking tiny bits of trifle on the end of a fork, sitting very narrow on his chair with cramped shoulders, like a passenger with a first-class ticket in a crowded third-class-only train.
Geoffrey pursued him with words. “Remember the epileptic boy in the Bible—the one that had a devil brought out of him? The Lord said: ‘This kind can come forth by nothing but prayer and abstinence.’ Mine may come out any minute now. Look out you don’t catch it.”
“Geoff, behave yourself,” said his father, and his mother looked distressed. It was nice that he knew his Bible, but not quite like this.
Mr. Mew rallied. “No, my dear boy! ‘By prayer and fasting’” He looked round the table complacently. A misquotation was right up his street.
“Teach your grandmother,” said Geoffrey rudely. “It’s my devil, not yours. I ought to know what brings it out.”
“And I ought to know my Bible, dear boy. As a student of both the Authorized and the Revised version, not to mention the Scofield edition, with its new system of connected topical references to all the greater themes of Scripture, with annotations, revised marginal renderings, summaries-”
“Geoffrey was only joking, Mr. Mew,” put in Mrs. Marple hastily, seeing that her son was becoming excited. “He always likes to have a bit of fun, don’t you, dear …” Her voice trailed away like a run-down gramophone as Florence broke in crisply: “Just ignore it, Mr. Mew. It’s so boring. Do please go on telling us what Walter Scholes said about the stream of consciousness.”
As Mr. Mew opened his mouth to comply, Geoffrey cried out and clutched at the air as if a dragonfly had flown past him. “There it goes! I told you it would come out. Look out!” He made a swipe that knocked Mr. Mew’s spoon from his hand half-way from plate to mouth. “Damn, it got away. Duck, everybody!” Sometimes, when he had worked himself up to embarrass people by pretending to be a little crazy, he could almost believe that he was. His brain was hilarious now, his thoughts spinning about in the top of his head. He did not care what he did.
It had been impressed on Geoffrey’s family that he must never be crossed. If he behaved like a tiresome child, they could not treat him like one and haul him off to bed. A psychologist had once told the Marples that violent opposition might bring on a convulsion, and that in the dining-room would be worse than anything he was doing now.
He was peering forward, studying Mr. Mew’s bow-tie, which indeed was worthy of study, having been made by his sister from an odd piece left over after making the loose covers.
“Keep still!” hissed Geoffrey, poising his hand, and paralysing Mr. Mew like a rabbit. “I’ll get it now. There it is— just under your chin.”
“Ha, ha,” said Mr. Mew with bleak bravery. “Some family joke-?”
But the family were not laughing. Mr. Marple’s eyelids and moustache were twitching. Aunt Florence was saying: “Geoffree!” and knocking on the table with one of the spoons she had so often polished with her naplin. Mrs. Marple had begun a quick conversation about nothing at all to Eileen, who was too nervous to listen. Nellie stood transfixed with a dish in each hand, drinking it all in to tell cook.
Daniel was scowling at Geoffrey across the table. He opened his mouth to say something, but his stammer blocked him and he gripped the edge of the table, his face intense with the effort of trying to get the words out.
Mr. Mew, with his head back before Geoffrey’s pin-point gaze, half rose from his chair. “I’m afraid I ought to be running along,” he said in a cracked voice. “So delightful, but I have several early appointments.”
“No you don’t.” Geoffrey took him by his alpaca jacket and sat him down again with a bump. “You’ve got my devil on you. You can’t take that away—or do you want to have the falling sickness, too?”
Mr. Mew gave a ghastly smile, raised a hand towards his neck and then jerked it away, as if Geoffrey’s epilepsy really were sitting on his Picasso print bow-tie. He glanced sadly down at his plate of trifle, made an indecisive gesture towards his spoon, but lacked the sang-froid to eat.
What would happen? It was like a film when the projector breaks down. Geoffrey was quite prepared to go on sitting there all afternoon staring at Mr. Mew’s tie. He was becoming almost hypnotised himself by its whirligig patterns.
“Look!” Daniel suddenly jumped up and rushed to the window, knocking his chair over onto the nylons which Nellie kept to wear when there was company. “Look, Geoff —your bike! I’ve just seen a man go out of the gate with it. Come on—we’ll catch him with the car!” He ran out of the room without looking back to see if Geoffrey was following.
Geoffrey’s bicycle was his fondest possession. It was the only machine he was allowed to have, his only means of swift escape when the urge came over him to fly from everybody and everything, pedalling like a madman down the hill as if he could flee from life itself.
The spell was broken. He dashed after Daniel, stumbled up the stairs and out of the front door into the blinding sunlight, skidded round the corner of the house to the garage and stopped short like a curbed horse. Daniel was sitting on the mounting block with his hands in his pockets, drawing circles in the gravel with his foot.
“My bike!” yelled Geoffrey. “Quick, you fool, get the car out. My bike!”
Daniel jerked his head. “In the garage.”
“What the devil-? But you said——”
“Oh, that was only to get you out of the dining-room,” said Daniel in a bored voice. “What on earth were you playing at?”
Geoffrey was furious. The old grievance of trickery that always nagged within him came surging up and pounded in his head. He shouted obscene things at Daniel. He did not have to think what he said. His voice did it for him.
“Pipe down,” said Daniel, “or you’ll shout yourself into a fit.”
Geoffrey would like to. That would show them. Fits were his weapon. He would have a fit and show Daniel and all of them who was king of this place. But although he screamed and threw himself about, nothing happened. He had always been told that over-excitement might bring on a fit, but now here he was positively hysterical and it was producing nothing. Blast those doctors. They didn’t know their job.
He rushed at Daniel and began to pummel him. Daniel fended him off without getting up, and Geoffrey stood breathing heavily on the gravel drive, waiting for the aura of warning that he was sure would come. It must come.
Daniel g
ave a yell of laughter. “You can’t imagine how funny you look,” he gasped, “standing there solemnly trying to have a fit.”
Geoffrey went on waiting. It was a let down. It was like taking your temperature when you feel ill and finding you are normal. What could you do then?
“I’m going back to the house,” he grunted, “to plague some more hell out of that man.”
“Over my dead body.” Daniel got up. “Don’t you know why I dragged you out, or were you doing it deliberately to spoil things? You’re mean enough for that.”
“Spoil what?” asked Geoffrey blankly. “I was only relieving my nerves. Why can’t you leave me alone? You don’t know what it’s like-”
Daniel cut into bis whine. “Don’t you know that your mother thinks there’s a chance old Mew might be going to want to marry your aunt? She’s pinning all her hopes on that. It’s the only kind way she can think of to get the woman out of the house, that having been her dearest wish for seven years.”
“God!” said Geoffrey. “I never knew that. How do you know all this?”
“Your mother told me.”
“Why not me? They treat me like a child. I mustn’t know things. Why should they tell you things and not me? My mother likes you better than me because you were in a prison camp, too, like him. It isn’t fair.”
“Where are you going?” Daniel asked, as he turned back towards the house.
“To take an overdose of luminal. I say——” he paused before he went round the corner. “We shan’t get such good meals, though, if old Flo goes.”
When Geoffrey went into the drawing-room, although he was looking quite normal, Mr. Mew got up at once and took his leave. Mr. Marple could not reproach his son then, for he had been praying for the last quarter of an hour that Mr. Mew would go, because there was a Test Match being broadcast.
All afternoon the drawing-room was uninhabitable, because Mr. Marple knew only two ways with the volume control— off and full strength, but the next day, although it was a three-day match, the wireless was silent.
It was the anniversary of Reggie’s death. At breakfast, Mr. Marple, who was wearing a black tie, opened The Times, cleared his throat, then lowered the paper and blinked across the table at his wife.
“It’s in,” he said. “Do you want to see it, dear?”
“Please, dear.” They called each other Dear all day on Reggie’s anniversary.
He walked round the table with the paper and stood behind her chair while she looked at the front page.
“Let’s see.” Geoffrey stretched out a hand for the paper. His mother gave it to him, then got up and went out of the room, weeping.
Reggie’s In Memoriam notice covered twice as much space as anyone else’s and included the last two lines of a poem that would make you weep even if you had never known Reggie, or lost anyone in the war.
Mr. Marple stood dangling his napkin, looking after his wife. This was the one day in the year when he behaved like a husband. “Should I go after her?”
“I’ll go, Daddy,” said Eileen, who was wearing a black dress in which she already looked hot although the sun was not yet high. “You stay and finish your breakfast.”
Mr. Marple did not want his breakfast. It was a waste to cook eggs on Reggie’s death day. It was a waste to cook for any meal, for no one but Geoffrey felt like eating. Nobody spoke much, and when they did it was in a cautious, considerate way, as if they were strangers. Meals were quickly over. Nellie removed the dishes less noisily, out of deference to the day, and the family wandered out of the dining-room and went about the house as if they were wearing carpet slippers.
Daniel stayed away for lunch, saying he wanted to finish a sketch, so Geoffrey had no one to talk to. He wanted to swim, but neither Eileen nor Aunt Florence would swim with him. No one would do anything. It was as if Reggie had died yesterday instead of five years ago.
All his photographs had flowers before them, or ivy twined round the frames, and the framed telegram from the War Office, announcing his death, was propped on the drawing-room mantelpiece. When Geoffrey went into the study his father was taking out of the desk drawer the German revolver that Reggie had brought on his last visit home. For a moment Geoffrey thought he was contemplating suicide, but it was just that he wanted to sit and handle it with a faraway face.
He wanted to talk to Geoffrey about his brother, but Geoffrey would not stay. He had seen his father cry once, and he did not want that embarrassment again.
In the afternoon he went down to the beach. Even the voice of the sea seemed to be turned into sighs for Reggie, and above the smuggler’s pool where he had loved to swim water dripped from a rock as if it wept for him. The gulls were not screaming round the little island. They were settled on it, disconsolate as penguins, hunched in the heat, piping thin echoes of their usual turbulent cry.
The oars had been removed from the dinghy and the plug from its outboard motor. Geoffrey had read a book about an asylum where even quite rational patients were not allowed to have knives or forks or matches, and he knew how they felt, impotent and belittled. He sat down on the pearly sand with his feet drawn up and his arms round his knees, too depressed to make himself more comfortable.
“Where the hell have you been?” he asked, when Daniel came round the Point, looking objectionably healthy and cheerful, with his hair wet and a rucksack on his back.
“In the cove. The boats are all in, and I think I’ve done quite a good one this time. Want to see?”
Geoffrey shook his head. “I’ve had the hell of a day,” he said, without being asked.
“Sorry, old boy.” Daniel took off the rucksack and sat down by him. “I knew it was a bad day for all of you. That’s why I kept away.”
“Sensible chap,” gloomed Geoffrey. “I wish/had. I told you how it would be, didn’t I? They’ve been positively wallowing.” He unwrapped his long body from its hunched position and lay face down on the sand, digging vehement little holes with his hands. “It’s always been like this,” he said. “It was always Reggie, Reggie, Reggie while he was alive, and it still is now he’s dead. You know. I heard Aunt Flo telling you last night: Reggie was so brilliant, so handsome, so gay—oh yes, I’ve heard it often enough—so loving and popular, so everything, in fact, that I’m not. Do you believe all that, Daniel?”
Daniel did not answer. He sat looking down at Geoffrey, waiting to see what he was going to say.
“Because he wasn’t.” Geoffrey began to speak rapidly, almost gabbling. “He was mean. You’ve seen his photographs. Look at that head, how narrow it was, and his eyes were much closer together than mine. You know that I had to leave Rugby after a year because the boys jeered about my fits and made them worse? Well, Reggie was one of the ones who jeered. He did! No one believes it, but he did, because he was afraid people would class him with his lunatic brother.”
“Rot,” Daniel said.
“It’s true, 1 tell you. All my life, ever since I can remember, he made it harder for me by being better at everything. People compared us. I was the runt. I still am. The prize boy is taken and the runt is left—that’s supposed to be always the way in war, isn’t it? They wouldn’t say it, of course, but I know what they think. They wish it had been me in the prison camp instead of him. But I wouldn’t have got myself shot. I wouldn’t have been ass enough to try and escape. Trust Reggie to do the spectacular thing.”
“There’s nothing very spectacular about escaping from camp,” Daniel said. “I had a shot at it once.”
Geoffrey shrugged this away as being irrelevant to the theme he was developing with increasing enthusiasm. He never had a chance to voice all these thoughts that rankled within him. No one let him talk like this. They hushed him or walked reproachfully away, but Daniel sat quiet, looking at the sea.
“Reggie had a car,” Geoffrey went on. “He had a horse, a gun, a sailing dinghy of his own, everything he wanted. You should have seen this house when he was alive! People and parties all the time. I used to go
away. I couldn’t stand Reggie’s gang. Then they used to talk about me, I know. Reggie was always laughing about me to his friends. He was, I tell you! Don’t contradict me, Daniel. What do you know about it? You don’t know what it was like when Reggie went to war and the maids left and we had to get rid of the car. 1 was in the way, a disgrace to the family because I couldn’t go and die for my country, even when I was old enough.”
He ruminated, remembering his father sticking pins into maps and listening to every reiterated news bulletin, his mother harrying Geoffrey about the blackout, as if he were a German spy, and Eileen eternally knitting things for other people, never for him. He remembered the gang of soldiers who had passed him in a lorry, jeering as he pushed his bicycle up the hill, and the grocer’s wife, who had said: “Never mind, Mr. Geoffrey. We can’t all be heroes.”
“As if it were my fault!” he burst out, sitting up to gesticulate. “I didn’t ask to get this plague. That was Reggie’s christening gift to me, his chef-d’æuvre you might say, of brotherly love. He never equalled that afterwards with anything he did.”
“Oh, come off it,” said Daniel. “You can’t blame him for what you inherited from your great-grandmother.”
“But I didn’t! That’s just the point. Listen, I’ll tell you something.” Geoffrey lowered his voice and gabbled like an incanting witch. “At my christening party Reggie picked me up and dropped me on my head. Oh, they say, of course, that there wasn’t enough injury to make me epileptic, and they got the doctors to say so, too. They’re all in league against me; but I know. I’ve read books. I’ve got more insight than they think.”
“You’ve got a more bizarre imagination, certainly.”
“But it’s true! I don’t imagine things. My memory may slip for a moment here and there, but I don’t get big blackouts. Some people, you know, sleep-walk after fits and do all sorts of things, even murders, without knowing it. I daresay they’d like me to be as bad as that, so they could shut me up like the man in the iron mask and not have me hanging about embarrassing people.”
Flowers on the Grass Page 12