Flowers on the Grass Read Online Free Page A

over, no one but Mr. and Mrs. Meekes would have continued to call him Merlin; but having christened him that, they were capable of anything. Mr. Meekes had been reading the
Idylls of the King
during his wife’s confinement, and it was touch and go that the jolly round baby was not called Gawain.
    At school, he was always called Wizard, and the name stuck to him through college and into the Army, until a girl in the Naafi canteen started to call him the Wizard of Oz. After that, he was Oz, or Ozzie to everyone. Daniel called him Ossie, believing that his name was Oswald, so Merlin kept his real name dark, for Daniel and everyone else laughed at him enough already. He did not mind. He had been laughed at all his life, and it was better to be a buffoon than a nobody. He had discovered that at school, and exploited it. Although technically a mere dreg, a day boy, with no ability at anything, he had become a kind of court jester, acceptable to both masters and boys as a foil who could never be a rival.
    When he was eighteen and disposed to
Weltschmerz
, he would have liked to be serious, at least for just a short wallow in the sumps of puberty, but boys from his school went with him to college, and so did his reputation. He had only to raise his voice in class for it to be drowned in a roar of laughter, even if he was going to be right. People did not like him when he was serious. He bored them and they walked away. Like a jolly mongrel, he liked all humanity and craved their approval, so he gave up being serious about anything, ever.
    It had advantages. He loved his food, and could get away with untold excesses, because his greed was a stock joke. He never had to strive, because the more inept, the funnier and more popular he was. Before he could discover that it was not so funny to be unable to get a job, the war came and he fell happily into the position of regimental buffoon.
    No one expected him to be able to drill or handle a rifle or look anything but ludicrous in battledress. He was Hitler’s Secret Weapon. Before he was faced with the serious business of fighting, he developed varicose veins, which was a scream in itself, and was put to a desk job, where he could provide comic relief without danger of killing his own side.
    He did not have to make many jokes. He just had to be Ozzie, uttering foolish exaggerations in that chirruping voice coming so inadequately out of the cushions of flesh wherein his mouth was bedded. Men in the mass will laugh at anything, and many was the wife who feared that the Army had deranged her husband’s sense of humour when he tried to tell her of the absurdity of Ozzie.
    “But what does he
do
, darling, that’s so funny? Growing mustard and cress on flannel on the window-sill doesn’t sound very witty to me.”
    “Oh, but you don’t know Ozzie. It’s not what he does, it’s the way he does it, you know. And that voice—and those double chins—if you could see him shaving!”
    “Yes, well, look, darling, you’ve only got thirty-six hours, so don’t let’s talk about Ozzie any more. …”
    How, after the war, he had ever chirped his way into a job at a college in Chelsea was the subject of a whole mythology of conjecture and fable. Some said that he was the illegitimate son of the Principal. Others that he was a spy from the Kremlin. There were those who maintained that he had wandered into the library one day to shelter from the rain and never found the way out. Anyway, there he was, in charge of the reference library and museum of specimens, and if he or anyone else suspected that he was quite efficient they kept it dark. One did not only go to the library for information. One went to have a laugh with Ozzie Meekes.
    For two weeks now Daniel had not laughed either with or at Ossie. He came in and out of the library without seeming to notice that he was there. This was disturbing, since Ossie imagined that he was Daniel’s friend, which was more thanmost people at the college