Flowers on the Grass Read Online Free

him, like a shrine. His chair, his desk, his empty napkin ring…..’”
    He drooled happily on, but Jane wished afterwards that they had not talked like this. She dreamed of him without a head and woke screaming. He was quite cross then, although it had been his fault for harrowing her before she went to sleep.
    He was inconsistent like that, and in other ways. Although he was growing more domesticated, he would still wander off at times into detachment. He would suddenly choose to sleep in the spare room, or to go out walking all Sunday when people were coming for lunch. He would stay late in town for no reason. Once or twice he didn’t come home all night, but would arrive the next day with no excuses, quite serenely.
    Jane tried not to worry. When she was not pregnant any more it would be easier. Today, for instance, she expected him home at half-past seven after the meeting, but he might easily stop for a drink on the way to the train, miss it and not come home until nearly nine. For an hour she would have to pretend that she was not worrying. He would not ring up again. He never had enough small change to ring the country from a call-box. He only telephoned her from the college.
    When he did come home he might want tea, and supper round about midnight, or he might want to have supper first, in which case they would probably have tea and scones in bed at midnight. There was no planning meals beforehand with Danny. He had cured Jane of any hidebound nicetiesshe had inherited from her mother. She had to be prepared for anything, and was expert now at managing without fuss. He hated her to be in the kitchen all the time when he was at home.
    She made the scones and put them to keep warm, cooked some potatoes and put out eggs and a tin of beans. She prepared everything they would need for whatever meal he might want, then made up the fires, did her face and hair and fed her yellow collie, who went straight out again after eating to watch for Daniel. He had not transferred his devotion; he had simply picked up some of hers, growing like her in soul as Danny said he grew like her in face.
    When it was nearly half-past seven she went into the kitchen to put on the kettle. It gave a little “phut!” and sparked as she switched it on. She was wary of electricity. Daniel terrified her by carrying lit lamps about and changing wall plugs without switching them off. Jane turned off the kettle and pushed the plug in more firmly before switching it on again.
    She thought she heard the car, far away at the turning off the main road. Sound carried a long way over the broad flat fields. He had not stopped for a drink, so he would be dying for his tea. She listened again, but the kettle interrupted by beginning to hum. Vaguely, with her mind far away, she did what she was always telling Daniel not to do. She lifted the lid. Then it happened.
    She could not lift the lid. Her hand was on it, but she could neither pull the lid free nor let go. She put her other hand on the kettle to push herself off, and that was held too in an iron grip that clutched vibrating right up her arm and through her body, and the roar of the kettle was inside her, splitting her head.
    She opened her mouth and shouted, but could hear no noises. She could hear nothing but the battering and banging inside her head. Her baby kicked in his prison as if fighting to get out. She was shaking all over now, losing sight, sense, sound—the world, the world was going, spinning away above her as she dropped into the sucking blackness with the last very sad thought: “Who will give Danny his tea?”

Chapter Two
Ossie
    It was bad luck on any boy to be called Merlin. Especially a chubby, unmysterious boy with cheeks like rosy ping-pong balls, a mouth like a pink buttonhole for the button nose above it and a cowlick of chocolate-coloured hair that would never do anything but stand up in a butcher-boy quiff. When he grew up looking like one of those dolls that won’t knock