“Nice-looking child,” he said. “Girl-friend of yours?”
“She loves me,” Dickie said. “She woke up to ask me to marry her, only she went to sleep in the middle.”
“What is she—about eight? And you’re what—thirty? Queer to think that in ten years’ time at a pinch you could.”
It was queer. Ten years would change this little girl so much, but Dickie, with luck, would not be so different at forty. He might even still be here, although he would be on the wane, not in his zenith, as he was now. “God,” he said, “I don’t want to be forty. Getting older is horrible.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Brett said. “It helps, I think. You expect less, so you seem to get more.”
When Dickie had left the child and made his way to B.39, he found that Brett had got a bottle of whiskey and was pouring some into two celluloid tooth mugs. “Oh, come on, smug,” he said, when Dickie began to refuse. “I pinched one of these mugs for you from an old gentleman’s cabin. He’ll have to put his teeth in his handkerchief. Don’t let him make that sacrifice for nothing.”
Dickie giggled and someone in the next cabin thumped on the thin partition. Brett stuck his tongue out at the wall.
The sketches were good, though slapdash. They were lively and true, but Brett had drawn peculiar, derogatory things. Gaping faces turned to the sky with Dickie rolled up in a ball half-way between the diving-board and the water. The vastness of the woman in the next-door cabin half obliterating her husband beside her. A hungry camper shovelling in food. A chinless youth vacant-eyed over a straw in a bottle of Coco-Cola. A child crying at the Punch-and-Judy show. The back view of a skinny, bow-legged man with a plump, knock-kneed girl, both in shorts.
“That one looks like a dirty postcard, doesn’t it?” Brett said with some pride.
“It does a bit. I say,” Dickie said uncomfortably, “these are awfully good and all that, but surely your firm can’t use them for advertising?”
“That’s their worry. They told me to draw what I saw. This is it.”
The whiskey tasted good, even out of celluloid. Brett filled up the mugs again and Dickie looked in vain round the untidy cabin for somewhere to sit.
“Get up on the top bunk,” Brett said, and Dickie climbed up and stretched out on the blanket, cuddling his whiskey to his chest.
“I’m tired,” he said in surprise.
“I don’t wonder.” Brett was sitting on the edge of the lower bunk, leaning forward with his arms on his knees. “I’d be dead. Nevermind. Sunday tomorrow. You can have a lie in.”
“Not me. I have to drive the Papists to church.”
“For crying out loud,” said Brett, peering up at him. “What kind of a job is this? Don’t you ever stop?”
“Not till the winter,” Dickie said. “Don’t want to either. I like it. I told you. I like all of it.” The whiskey was beginning to glow through him, making him feel expansive. Lying up here where Brett could not see him, he felt that he could tell him things. “It’s the winter I don’t like,” he said. “That’s the worst part of this job.”
“Why?” The lower bunk creaked as Brett lay down among the litter of his clothes and sketches. “WTiat do you do then?”
“Nothing much. Nothing I can do, except this. Didn’t learn a thing at school, and nothing since. I thought I was going on the stage, so it wouldn’t matter. I could dance and sing a bit, and I got a few chorus jobs on tour. Then it was the war, you know. My first real break, the chance to get into a London show, came at the same time as my call-up papers. So there I was. Lots of people the same—chaps who’ve never learned a thing except that they don’t ever want to be a soldier again. You meet us around the studios getting our guinea a day—thirty bob if you’ve got a suit of tails. We sell you things rather inefficiently at Christmas—can’t wrap parcels, you know. There are thousands of us at exhibitions demonstrating things we care sweet damn all about. Last year I sold patent sink traps. Year before I was on Nocurl Lino. That was more fun.”
“Doesn’t sound it.” Brett reached up a hand. “Here, give us your mug. This bottle’s got a long way to go yet.”
Dickie had been right about himself. Once he started on whiskey there seemed to be no reason why he should ever stop. He was not worrying, though. He felt delightful. He would go to sleep up here in his clothes maybe.
“What happens,” Brett asked, “when you sell a sink trap to someone who’s seen you here?”
“Oh, they never recognise you. Different clothes, and hair grease, and you have to put on a treacly kind of voice you’d be slung into the pool for using here. There was a woman once—a bit awkward. I’d sold her a roll of lino, and she turned up here next summer and said in front of a whole crowd of people: ‘Didn’t I see you selling at the Ideal Home?’ I had to pass it off as a joke. I said something like: ‘Any home’s ideal when I’m around.’ You know.”
“Yes, I know,” sighed Brett settling back on the bottom bunk again.
“People laugh when I make jokes here,” Dickie said sadly. “Nobody laughs in the winter. I wish this place was open all the year round. It’s a patchwork life—I say, this whiskey’s good—that’s what it is, a patchwork life. Sometimes I wonder whether I’d be better off with a steady office job, like you.”
“Steady!” From below, Brett thumped the springs which supported Dickie. “Don’t make me laugh. I’ve never stuck much more than a year at any job yet, except the Army, and that was only because they shut me up in a prison camp. I couldn’t desert.”
“But this advertising agency-”
“I’m chucking it after this job. Time I had a change of scene. If you stay in one place too long it begins to own you, instead of you it. Life traps you. You’ve got to watch it.”
Dickie’s trouble had always been that he could never stay as long as he wanted in one place. He felt sorry for Brett. It must be awful to be so restless. “What’ll you do then?” he asked, comfortable in the thought that he was only at the beginning of his summer.
“Not sure. I don’t think I’ll go back to London. I’ll send the sketches down and they can use them or do the other thing. I’ll go abroad, I think. You can’t do what you like in this country any more. I might go back to Italy; I was more or less brought up there. I could scrape up a living. There’s the fare though. I haven’t saved a bean. I’ll get a job for a bit up here, teaching or something.”
“Can you teach?”
“No, but they don’t find that out for quite a while, and the kids certainly aren’t going to let on. They’re delighted to find someone who knows less than they do.”
“Takes some nerve, though,” said Dickie. “I’d never even get the job, let alone keep it. I couldn’t bluff like that.”
“What else do you think you do here all day long?”
“This isn’t bluff.”
“Oh no? The whole place is one vast, successful spoof.”
“It’s not, I tell you. It’s real!”
“Real my foot.” The springs of the lower bunk creaked as Brett shifted irritably. “You talk about your winter life as if that was unreal and this was reality, when really it’s the other way round.”
“What do you mean? Look at all these people.” He flung out an arm, although Brett could not see him. “They’re real enough.”
“In ordinary life, yes. Not here. Why do you think they come? Because it’s everything their lives are not. Food and drink and cleanness and good temper all laid on without them having to lift a finger. And they can be everything they’re not, too. Why did those terrible girls sing and that man make a fool of himself with the ping-pong ball? No, I wasn’t asleep all the time. This is their escape dream, and you’re part of it, my chick. Their real life goes in for the other fifty-one weeks of the year. You’re living in a dream world and calling it reality. God, if this is what life is really like give me death. Whiskey?”
“No thanks. Haven’t finished this yet,” said Dickie abstractedly. He was worried. “What’s w
rong with it here?” he argued. “People like it. They’re happy here.” He raised himself on his elbow and looked over the edge to emphasise what he knew to be true.
“Well naturally.” Brett was over by the basin, trickling a little water into his mug. “Anyone can be happy in heaven. Cheers.” He raised his mug, then sank on the bed again. “Happy, happy camper,” he murmured drowsily.
“It’s not your idea of heaven, obviously,” Dickie said huffily.
“Never mind. Everyone’s heaven is different. That’s what the place is—the favourite idea in each person’s mind. A kid I knew once said to me—nice boy; I was nearly his stepfather— he said: ‘I think heaven is a big kind of stableyard with everyone in loose boxes all round, doing just what they like.’ You ought to get out of your box, Dickie. You’re anticipating. There’s plenty of time for heaven when you’re dead.”
“Who knows? There’s the other place,” said Dickie, seeing it as something like a coloured documentary film of a steel foundry.
“Not for you,” Brett said. “Hell’s only an idea in the mind, too. You make it yourself. There’s none in yours.”
“Oh, rot,” said Dickie, embarrassed’. “I’m no ruddy saint.”
“I never said you were. The saints had plenty of hell in their minds. They wouldn’t have been saints otherwise, because it would all have been too easy.”
Dickie was not feeling so happy now. He took another gulp of whiskey, but his swallow rejected it, like peppery soup. It was bitter in his mouth and he could taste the celluloid mug now that the first sting of the spirit had worn off. “What do you want me to do?” he asked flatly.
“Lord,” said Brett. “I don’t want you to do anything. I’m only talking, not giving advice. I never do that. Everyone’s got to run their lives as they want. No good ever came of meddling. People ought to leave each other alone. You want to watch out who you marry, Dickie. They don’t grow on every bush—wives who’ll leave you alone.”
“Oh, I shan’t marry. I could never cope with living up to what girls expect of you.”
“There you are! That’s what I meant. They’re always trying to change you, to trap you within the limits of their minds, just as this Belsen has trapped you and narrowed your horizons. God, it’s worse than working in films.”
“Oh no!” cried Dickie, horrified at the comparison. “Because everyone in films is half out of his mind with worry or jealousy. Everyone here is happy and friendly. It’s the Gaydays atmosphere.”
“Don’t be wet.”
“But it is!” Dickie sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bunk.
“I daresay, but one doesn’t say such things.”
“You do here.” Dickie put his mug on the shelf. He wished he had not had the whiskey. He had a taste in the mouth and he felt bleak and cold. “I think I’ll go to bed.” He dropped to the floor, stumbled, and turned to look at Brett stretched contentedly on the bed with his mug on his chest and a pipe in his mouth.
“Good night, dream boy,” Brett said.
“You’re not allowed to smoke in the cabins,” said Dickie and thumped the notice on the wall. The woman next door banged again and shouted something. Brett laughed, and Dickie went out.
The cold starry air made him feel better. The wind had dropped, the main lights were out, and only here and there a cabin window laid a panel of yellow across the concrete path. The camp was sleeping and quiet, black and white under the moon. Dickie loved to walk round like this when no one else was about. It made him feel like a night nurse, glad with the responsibility of being the only one awake. He warmed with tenderness towards the people behind the cabin walls, tired out after a day that he had helped to make happy. A woman in an overcoat and metal curlers stole from under a porch and made for the doors marked Girls and Boys, and Dickie drew back into the shadow between two cabins until she had passed. Farther on, the watchman going round in gym shoes walked with him for a block, talking of the night, but after that he walked alone.
He went right round the camp that was dearer to him than home, trying to reassure himself with the familiar things: all the places of pleasure, purposeless in the night, waiting for life to flow back into them and the pleasure to go on.
The tennis courts with each net neatly furled—Pete was strict with the groundsmen about these things. The playing field, full on the edge of the sea; the putting course, smooth as baize, the concrete of the roller-skating rink white as ice. The slides and ladders in the children’s playground threw skeleton shadows on the pale grass, and in the swimming pool the moon lay on the water like a mirrored face. He sat down on the cold parapet and trailed his fingers in the water. It was warmer now than when he had bowled down to it between the gaping faces, as he would do next week and the week after and the week after that, right through the days of warm water until the autumn chill again.
Unreal? All this an escape dream? If so, what was there real for him?
“…is half-past seven and it’s Easter Sunday. Good morning, campers, and a very happy Easter to you! The sun is shining, so don’t delay, get up and enjoy this lovely fine day!” Dimly through sleep came Ada’s voice, breaking the day through the loudspeakers.
Fully awake, Dickie was immediately conscious that something was wrong. Why didn’t he feel the happiness that always flowed into him as Ada’s voice brought him the promise of another day? Then he remembered. Not real.
He paused while he was shaving to stare at himself in the glass and wonder if it was the face of a fool. He thought of the day before him and wondered whether the things to which he had looked forward yesterday were worthwhile today. If Brett was right and the whole job was not worthwhile after all, what was there to be proud of in having got it and kept it for three years? It was all a second-rater like himself was fit for.
Usually, while the Catholics were in church, he waited outside in the station wagon. Today he sneaked in behind them and slid into a back pew, not following the service, but standing and kneeling and sitting when everyone else did; not knowing how to pray, but putting two shillings in the plate and hoping that miraculously the little bell would tinkle away his troubled thoughts.
He went out before the end in case one of the Catholics should see him there and track him down to convert him, although he had nothing to be converted from, for he had no religion beyond knowing that God existed. His mother had taught him: “Your religion is in the life you lead,” and “I would rather say my prayers in an open field,” which saved her the trouble of going to church or saying prayers at all, since there were no fields at Hammersmith except Brook Green, and you would probably be arrested if you knelt down there.
Breakfast had started when they returned, and when he went into the roar and clatter of the dining-room and saw the women in their bright dresses and the men with their shirts open-necked, the collar thrown over the jacket, sure enough, he was happy again. Dickie wished he had put five shillings into the plate instead of two.
The people who greeted him as he passed among the tables were real enough. They were eating bacon and eggs and they were happy. Everything was all right, as it had always been. He wished that it was his turn to announce, so that he could hear the affectionate roar of “Hey, hey, Dickie!” and be completely reassured.
Kenny, in the middle of the room, waited for the cry of “Hiya, Kenny!” to subside, and then with the slight American accent that he affected over the microphone read out the list of birthdays and wedding anniversaries and made the people stand up, chewing, to be cheered red in the face and have their hands shaken by everyone within reach. Most popular of all was the announcement: “And now, campers, I want you to meet a very lovely little lady and a handsome young man, who are, yes, a little bird told me they are—wait for it—on their honeymoon!”
It seemed that the ceiling and floor must fly apart at the shriek of delighted voices and the stamping of feet. “Stand up, Mr. and Mrs. Davies—Peggy and Stan to you, folks. Stand up and let’s give you a big hullo!”
They had to obey, looking anywhere but at each other, a shining boy with crimpy hair and a girl with the wrong colour lipstick, biting most of it off in her embarrassment. Kenny went along to kiss her, putting up his hands in pretence that the young man was going to attack him. Whistles and catcalls came from all over the room, and the children cheered as if they knew what it was all about. It was quite indecent really, yet somehow perfectly proper.
Dickie was enjoying it, until Brett, who was sitting at the next table, tipped back his chair to talk over his shoulder. “You see. Just what I said. Not true. That kind of thing can’t really happen at breakfast. It’s all just a dream. Pinch yourself and everything will be all right.”
“Oh shut up,” said Dickie. “They love it. Can’t you see?”
“You make them love doing what’s unnatural. It’s genius, but is it right? It reminds me too much of youth rallies in the dictator states. Hitler would have been quite capable of holding a Jugend Verzammlung at breakfast-time.”
Dickie went about his morning’s duties uncertainly, with his grin assumed like a false moustache and dropped again when no one was looking, trying not to see everything he did through Brett’s eyes. He despised himself for being influenced by him, yet he could not help it. The man had shaken him. He wasn’t right, of course, but he had seen more of the world than Dickie. Could he be right, and was Dickie only daydreaming here, wasting his time on a thing that, in the phrase the camp had used last year, long after London had finished with it, couldn’t matter less?
He had signed his yearly contract. He must stay now for the full season, but if he could not shake off these misgivings how on earth could he get through the summer? And if he decided that it was not worth coming back next year, what could he do? It was unthinkable. He had nothing in the winter. If his summers were to be taken from him, too, there would be no purpose in his life at all. He could not remember whether anyone had ever thrown himself under a train at Earl’s Court. If one could make one’s mark on the world no other way, it would be something to make station history with the last act of one’s life.
Flowers on the Grass Page 20