A Wreath Of Roses (13 page)

When she had gone, Liz replaced the stopper in the decanter, and stood there, very still; the sunlight coming in diamonds through the lace curtains chequered and broke up the picture of her, flashed in the wine, spilt over the carpet and revealed the tawny wreaths lying on the pink. Gold dust drifted upwards through the imprisoned sunshine, but nothing else moved until Camilla broke the moment with a sudden gesture and harsh words.

‘That sycophantic old fool!’ she cried. ‘I wonder why she doesn’t curtsy as well.’

‘Mrs Parsons? It springs from a wish to be kind. And she doesn’t deserve to be called a fool. Not that word; which seems to me a sort of blasphemy.’

‘Your trip home seems to have given your marriage a new lease of life.’

‘It was time it had one.’

‘So you are going to settle down?’

‘I was always going to settle down.’

‘For all the rest of your life?’

‘I expect so,’ Liz said calmly. ‘Marriage is nothing if it is not
going in and slamming the door. It makes a pattern and provides a frame.’

‘And a fine array of metaphors. Why not say what you think – that you have fallen again under Arthur’s spell and mean to stay enchanted – for Harry’s sake, perhaps.’

‘That would be a metaphor, too,’ Liz suggested.

‘You still – care for Arthur?’

She closed her hand over the barbed cushion of a cactus and shut her eyes.

‘I like
him
to care for
me,’
said Liz.

‘And does he?’

Liz stirred, like a cat that is suddenly filled with uneasiness and disquiet. She looked across at Camilla, who stood with her back to the light.

‘You hope he doesn’t,’ she said slowly. Her voice was dull and quiet and did not express the enormity of this discovery, nor match her unsteady breathing, nor her frown. ‘You hate him so much, you hope he doesn’t care for me.’

The sunlight fell all over her; her face, with its frown, its fear, its pleading, even tears, laid open to Camilla. But Camilla would not look at her, even though she stood in the safety of her own shadow. The palm of her hand still pressed into the cactus-plant – for only sharp discomfort could stop her trembling – and her foot tapped out on the carpet the rhythm beating in her forehead, an insistent rhythm which swelled and dominated her, until it seemed to be the rhythm of the room itself, of all the hot summer days, and this alien world she now sensed lying about her, and into which she had stepped with her hands spread out as if she were blindfold – so suddenly, so unreadily, and so late.

Frances was working in her studio, stretching a canvas. The key was turned in its lock; and, shut in and private, she had
changed. She had put off her governessy ways. The need to snatch at those hastily-chosen platitudes about life and behaviour was gone; so she relaxed and, as she relaxed, she became mannish; she whistled, even; trod about heavily, and her hands – she wore her father’s signet-ring – were like a man’s hands as she worked.

The old-maidishness was something she assumed, but she thought it could be done artlessly and simply, like tying a velvet ribbon round her throat – she put it on and off, but never lived the part, so the insipid, flat remarks were made, conventions were tremendously respected, and Arthur, an important symbol in her fantasy, especially venerated.

Alone, with the door locked, she felt safe to paint and to be herself. To her, work was a loosening of will, a throwing down of defences. Sitting back, utterly malleable, her personality discarded like a snake’s skin, she became receptive, and so creative. Unperceived lights now struck her, and her concentration could lift each leaf from its fellows, separate and halo every flower. To be interrupted was like having a foot tread down layers of ice in her breast, painful and humiliating, but destructive above all; for the vision, or the illusion, would hasten away.

As a child, beguiled, enchanted, she had drifted from one object to another – the little treasures of childhood, the veined pebbles, raindrops lying like mercury on hairy leaves, shells, whorled fossils, waxen petals – holding them in her hands, not knowing yet what use to make of them, but pained by her inadequacy.

Painting lessons did not teach her. She drew well, with pleasure. The pictures of apples and flowers and check dusters resembled the apples and flowers and check dusters; the resemblance was like one person dressing-up in another’s clothes, an outward, visible likeness was achieved, but the inward, invisible transference was not made.

Then, one day, when she was a young woman, she suddenly, and as if by chance, related her talent to her genius. She cast away the dressing-up clothes and willed herself into what she painted. She threw away her personality and it changed. The nervous effort was extreme, for the difference was the distance between charades at parties and Sarah Bernhardt as Phèdre.

The apples, the dusters, though, seemed (her teachers thought) not so much like apples and dusters as formerly. ‘She has been praised too much,’ they decided, ‘and has stopped trying. Some talent comes early and leaves early and here is a good example. How glossy her fruit was once; how beautifully the highlights shone like little windows on every grape. You could eat them almost. And that piece of lace on the table; how painstaking she used to be.’

But their verdict did not matter. She could go on looking at things, and now knew, not frustration, but precisely what she should do with what she saw. This happiness overrode the disadvantage of her gift.

She was robust physically and mentally. She worked for her living. Her life was sparse and lonely. In the middle of a party, silence would come down in her like a shutter, the need to be alone; so she gave up going into company. She saved her money and she bided her time, and painted.

Then, when she felt near the end of her work, the world changed; or, as she herself thought, she peeped out from the briers of her imagination for the first time. The apple, the rose, were still the same, but violence swung about them. She felt ashamed of her preoccupation with stillness, with her aerial flowers, her delicate colours, her femininity. She was tempted outside her range as an artist, and for the first time painted from an inner darkness, groping and undisciplined, as if in an act of relief from her own turmoil.

These four paintings now stood against the wall, awaiting Mr
Beddoes, her early patron, her unknown correspondent. She feared the moment of turning them before his eyes; for only Liz had ever seen them, and Liz she still thought of as a child.

Now, the canvas was stretched and tacked. She lifted it to the easel and sat down and smiled. It was as if the other paintings were sent into the corner, and stood there, sulky and unsuccessful; while here she was alone with her vision again.

‘My last painting, perhaps,’ she thought. ‘The first stroke for the last time.’

But she could not make it. She sat, gently rubbing her shoulder and smiling at the canvas. Pain ran down her arm and spread out its clinging fingers like ivy on a tree.

Nursing her elbow, she felt calm and confident: for if not today, there would be tomorrow; and with that prevailing promise, she had always worked.

Painting was her dearest pleasure; she did not look for the chance of it every day. It had never been thus, and never would be now.

‘I think he looks
pinched,’
Liz said.

They bent over the baby and observed him closely. He smelt of milk. Each time he seemed about to drop into a sleep, into a steadier rhythm of breathing, his violet eyelids would fly up suddenly, and he would stir on his pillow, or draw his legs to his stomach. He whimpered a little and sometimes turned his fist at his mouth, hungrily.

‘His toes are full of fluff from the blanket,’ said Camilla.

‘Yes, he’s restless. He’s in pain.’ And Liz at once decided he would die. She put the palm of her hand on his brow. ‘I wish Arthur were here.’

The child’s teething,’ Frances said, looking in at the door.

‘But he hasn’t dropped off the whole afternoon.’

‘It’s the heat,’ Camilla said. ‘We shall have to go, Liz.’

‘You must be there in time for Morland,’ Frances said.

‘Morland!’ Camilla cried delightedly.

‘Yes, how lovely!’ Liz said vaguely, looking at her son.

‘Why did you keep the Morland part from us?’ Camilla asked Frances, leaning over the banisters to watch her go downstairs.

‘The name didn’t arise. What is so strange about it?’

‘Nothing. Many men must be called Morland Beddoes. I am only glad that he sounds so ordinary.’

‘I shan’t come,’ Liz said.

‘But you must!’

‘I can’t leave Harry.’

‘And I can’t go to meet this man all on my own.’

They would not exchange glances. They were lost to one another. A no-man’s-land lay between them now, a terrain of unshared experience. The long years of intimacy, the letters spilling over untidily from page to page, the perfect matching of mood and humour, the exactly-followed translations from deep sincerity to mockery or innuendo, now buckled up and came to a standstill. Only embarrassment stirred them.

Camilla set off alone on what would once have been a shared delight, a little adventure woven into the fabric of their common life; and Liz stayed behind, her baby laid against her shoulder while she paced the room, patting his back till his eyes goggled and the little soft belches ran up one after the other, dribble hanging from his chin.

‘If only I were at home!’ Liz thought. ‘If only Arthur were with me now.’

She stood for a moment by the window to smile good-bye to Camilla as she set out with Hotchkiss to meet Mr Beddoes. The smile was all ready, but Camilla did not turn. She latched the gate with careful attention, without raising her head. Only Hotchkiss rolled a bloodshot eye towards her, slouching off along the hot road.

Liz sighed and turned back to pace the shadowed room with its plants and its plush and its ticking clock.

The early evening approached them. With Harry still sicking up his last meal, poor Liz prepared him for his next. His little chafed behind was lifted from the steaming napkins. As
she sponged and powdered, her tears dropped all over him. Mr Beddoes was no adventure. He was unreal, was nothing. Only Arthur was real to her now, and what she took to be their dying son. She prayed as she opened her blouse. The tears rolled out of the corners of her eyes. She imagined Arthur going briskly from vicarage to church, in the scented evening, nodding to right and left, wearing his secret, his mysterious smile. The shadow of the church doorway would descend sharply like the guillotine, severing the quivering, radiant evening – and Arthur, shaking off the sunlight, would think of his sermon, ready to flay – who would it be this evening? Liz wondered.

‘Whom will he lay about this time?’ his parishioners also wondered, as they stepped along under the hubbub of the church bells, the exciting clangour and chaos of them. ‘Who will it be this evening? The lapsed communicants or the T.U.C.? The Pharisees or the Labour Party?’ Going primly up the path to the West door, prayer-books in gloved hands, they were game for anything.

Now – a very different sound – the bell above the Methodist Chapel began to tilt to and fro. Clang, clang, it nagged. No tumult in the air, no flock of sound.

Liz took the baby’s leech-like mouth from one breast and settled it to the other. The tears had dried stiffly on her face.

Upstairs, Frances put the corner of her handkerchief to a bottle of lavender-water. Her face was brown silk in the mirror. She put up her hand and smoothed her hair from the parting – an old woman’s gesture.

The bell had stopped. An elephantine wheezing from the harmonium now followed, and a little later a skein of women’s voices broke away, soaring, quivering up tremulously, but presently militantly and at last shrilly. Fight the Good Fight With All Thy Might.

Arthur would have winced, and smiled his secret, his mysterious smile.

‘He will recognise the dog,’ Frances had said.

‘Or I could wear a red carnation,’ Camilla suggested quickly.

‘No need. Hotchkiss will be better for the walk, and I once described him in a letter.’

‘We think every word we put on paper is remembered for all time,’ Camilla thought now, going along the Sunday-evening streets. ‘As if they are more permanent than the spoken word. As if people nowadays tie them up in packets instead of dropping them page by page upon the fire. But sometimes there
are
letters which are like sheet-anchors to us, whatever sheet-anchors may be; they give depth and stability … we take them out and re-read them in trains, in buses, in the fish-queue, and last of all at night so that we sleep on their words. Crumb by crumb we taste them, until they begin to mean more than they were ever intended to mean. Mr Beddoes and Frances. Were their letters like that for one another; better than meeting, because a truer intimacy, each dipping – as it were – a little jug into the flowing-away past, arresting a moment here, a moment there, for the other’s delight and understanding.’

She and Liz had always written thus, holding lighted candles to their lives, so that the other might see. ‘It is the only thing,’ she thought – but she glanced with scorn at the young people strolling the streets – ‘the only thing to make life worth living: human relationships. For our lives run into a loneliness which is like a dark grotto. Fearing to be solitary, we hold aloft a wavering light to tempt our friends into the darkness. “Look! It is thus!” we cry. The light falls not impartially, but directed by us, often unskilfully, so that cracks and fissures and grotesque shadows are inadvertently displayed. And in this clumsy
illumination “It is thus! It is thus!” we plead, and “Thus is thus,” the echoes go flying back over our shoulders. Our friends assent, but with their eyes perhaps on those uncovered cracks and fissures. They are never at our sides for long. And the wonder is that they should follow us at all.’