Flowers on the Grass Read Online Free Page B

could say. Ossie valued this. He himself was everybody’s friend, of course, but the others were easy. Daniel had that tantalising detachment of self-sufficiency that made you want to make him notice you, to need you, if only for the occasional laugh. He had asked Ossie down to his cottage one Sunday not long ago, when he had wanted light relief from his father-in-law. Ossie had earned his lunch. Daniel and his wife had been able to go off for a walk while Ossie entertained the father-in-law by telling him naughty stories into his little deaf-aid box, like a radio comedian going on the air.
    Ossie, like the conscientious professional humorist he was, kept a notebook to fall back on when his own native drollery failed. In this book he copied out rude stories in the peaky hand which was so like his voice and so unlike his figure. He also collected newspaper cuttings—advertisements from Continental papers, printers’ errors or naively-phrased remarks from public speeches. People saved them for him as if he were a small boy with a stamp album.
    “Poor old Ossie doesn’t have a sex life,” they said, “so he has to get it this way.” But Ossie kept the notebook more for others’ amusement than his own. He did not aspire to a sex life. It did not enter into his design for living. Pierrot has Pierrette, Harlequin has Columbine, but there is no girlfriend for Pantaloon.
    When, after two weeks, even the sight of Ossie’s bottom going up the ladder to the top shelf brought no response from Daniel, Ossie tried him with his prize new one from the notebook, a real collector’s piece. Daniel listened gravely, grunted at him and went out. Ossie’s smile drooped. The story had never flopped yet, except with Macintyre, who never saw the point of any joke until it was explained, and then saw it wrong.
    “What’s the matter with
him?”
Ossie asked Peter Clay, who was sketching a bone of the skeleton that hung from a gibbet in the corner. “Looks like a corpse.” He rattled the skeleton’s ribs merrily with a ruler, as if they were railings.
    “Good God, you ass.” Peter looked up. “Don’t you know?”
    “How should I? Nobody ever tells me anything.”
    “Didn’t you know his wife died?”
    Ossie floundered and mumbled. He had no words for thissort of thing. “But Peter—but I say—I knew her. It can’t— chap’s not wearing mourning——”
    “I only found out by chance.” Peter bent over his sketch again. “He never told anyone. Queer fish. Just like him not even to wear a black tie.”
    Yes … yes, Ossie thought. Just like him. Didn’t want to distress people. Ossie judged everybody’s motives by his own.
    Ossie lived in a little shoebox modern flat near Sloane Square. Once into the bathroom, he had to back out, because he could not turn round. He had many friends; but even though you go out every night, or have people round, friends must go home, or you must go home, and Ossie knew what loneliness was. He could not bear to think of Daniel alone at the cottage. When Ossie’s parents had been killed in the Blitz he had needed to be with people all the time. When his room-mate went on leave, he had moved his army cot in with the men next door.
    It was bad to be alone. It made you think—futile, distorted, unbearable thoughts. Images of horror that seared into the brain like a branding iron. Memories in the cheating guise of nostalgia. Remorse where none was needed; false regrets. …
    A lifetime of having to keep to himself all the serious thoughts he could not express had taught him that you could think yourself into any emotion about anything, good, or bad, as Hamlet had discovered. He wanted to tell Daniel that this was why he should not be alone, but it was not in his rôle to say such things. He was not even supposed to know about Hamlet.
    So he spun out his tea half-hour and waited in the canteen until Daniel wandered in. He nearly always went about with his hands in his pockets. Ossie thought this