A Wreath Of Roses (23 page)

‘How nice you look,’ she said soothingly.

In the kitchen Mrs Parsons was cutting sandwiches. Camilla was feeding the trimmings to Hotchkiss, who let them drop out of his mouth on to the kitchen floor. She did not know how much this was annoying Mrs Parsons.

‘Good-morning, Camilla!’ Arthur said, as he came in at the back door.

‘Good-morning, Arthur!’ She bowed, sitting on a corner of the table, swinging her legs.

The heighth of bad manners!’ Mrs Parsons thought. ‘She can’t even get to her feet when a gentleman comes into the room.’

Frances slit open a long thin loaf and into it slipped a folded omelette, beautifully billowy at the edges and flecked with green.

The kitchen was very warm already, at not yet eleven o’clock, and smelt of chives and coffee and methylated spirit.

‘Why they must all congregate in here,’ Mrs Parsons thought – for there they were: Arthur leaning against the dresser, Camilla perched on the table, Frances at the stove, Liz at the sink. Under the table, Hotchkiss lay among the crusts of bread and bits of lettuce. ‘Especially,’ Mrs Parsons was thinking, ‘on a morning when I have such a lot to say to madam.’ Coming up the lane, she had walked quickly, overflowing with all she had to impart – Ernie docile at last and the wedding fixed; Euniss intent on hiring a bridal-gown from one of the film-studios; refusing to be married at the chapel, saying she must go all the way to Torquay for her honeymoon although her sickness in the mornings would make any travelling a hazard; setting her heart on a dusty-pink two-piece for going away; insisting on a new navy suit for Ernie, and gloves, and for her father too although all he would run to was a good tanning of her backside, he had said.

‘And where are you to live after this fine wedding, miss?’ her mother had enquired.

‘I couldn’t care less,’ she had said, plucking her eyebrows at the mirror over the sink.

‘And what about the baby-clothes?’

‘And what about them?’ she had yawned.

All this Mrs Parsons wanted to unburden upon Frances, otherwise it would be another week, and so much happening between one Saturday and the next. But they all perched about gossiping, and now Camilla began to pour out coffee, moving Arthur so that she could reach the cups on the hooks behind him.

‘Who is reading St Thomas Aquinas?’ he asked, picking up a book from the window-sill.

Camilla flushed.

‘I didn’t know you were a Thomist,’ he said, seeming to weigh the book in his hand. His voice was dry and mocking.

‘How could you?’ she asked lightly. ‘How could you, indeed, know anything about me?’

‘Sarky!’ Mrs Parsons thought.

‘What’s this on Harry’s neck?’ Liz asked, coming in with the baby. She handed him to Arthur and a long string of dribble attached itself to his jacket.

She fluffed up the fine hair at the back of his neck, and the skin underneath was faintly mottled.

‘What is it?’

‘That’s a teething-rash, madam,’ Mrs Parsons said, drawn irresistibly away from her sandwich-cutting. ‘Acidulation,’ she added certainly.

Camilla drew in her cheeks, glancing at Arthur.

‘There’s one cure for that,’ Mrs Parsons said. ‘That’s fasting-spittle.’

‘What’s fasting-spittle?’ asked Liz.

‘In the morning, madam, as soon as you wake up, just give your hand a good lick and put it to the baby’s neck. The poison that’s collected in your mouth all night will kill the rash. Mr Parsons will tell you he cured his chilblains for good that way and that alone. But first thing in the morning, remember. There’s not the same poison in the spit during the day.’

‘Then I must wait until tomorrow,’ Liz said politely.

Arthur was interested to see a new side of his wife, and admired her nice gravity. Camilla choked over her cup of coffee.

At this moment, Morland arrived, looking very hot in a navy-blue suit. Arthur, in alpaca, was most cordial to him. He made several clergymen’s jokes about having been one man among so many ladies, he feigned relief, was both gallant and manly. Mrs Parsons at once went over to the side of Lady
Davidson and other ladies of his parish, in admiration of how he always struck the right note. Liz looked doubtfully at Morland above the baby’s head. Camilla coughed still, her hand on her bosom, her face pink.

Frances seemed wrapped up this morning in a cocoon of silence, of preoccupation. She had wanted to go on with her painting, so the day was a day slipped out of the rest and thrown away. ‘My work is my love,’ she thought. ‘My consolation, and refuge. In the midst of other people, against the thought of death, of war, I turn the secret page in my own mind, knowing that though I seem to have less than others, in reality I have more than ever I bargained for.’

She went out into the garden to pick tomatoes, a paper bag in her hand. Hotchkiss lumbered after. The tomatoes were warm in the sun. She turned each one carefully, almost unscrewing it from its plant, and as she picked them freed their lovely sharp fragrance.

It was a pearly morning; the sky, which had been cloudless for days, had flocks of little clouds across it, like a sky painted on a ceiling; but still the sun dazzled, the red ants like garnets ran in the parched grass.

‘It
has
been a nice life,’ she reassured herself, as she filled the paper bag. She pinched up some lemon-balm and held her scented hand to her face. ‘I
did
always do what seemed right to me at the moment. I
was
happy. I never consciously spared myself or kept anything meanly back, and when I die, I’ll know I spent it all, the life I was given. And the great happiness I have over Liz, bringing her up and loving her, could not have been more intense if I had been her own mother. Yet I was too self-sufficient, as if I evaded the pain and the delight of human-relationships, which I never did knowingly. But if I was ever gravely at fault, I was at fault over that. For even Liz’s marriage is better than no marriage at all.’

‘Are you better this morning?’ Morland asked. He had come down the path and she had not noticed him. ‘Are you rested?’ He took the bag of tomatoes from her, as if he must relieve her of the intolerable burden.

‘Yes, I am quite rested,’ she said, and she twisted a yellow rose off an archway and put it in his buttonhole. She had never done such a thing in her life, and felt so reckless that she smiled at herself.

‘When can I see your painting?’ he asked.

‘Oh, later, later,’ she assured him. ‘When it is done.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘I let the devil tempt me after all.’ She walked a little ahead of him down the path.

‘You came out of that tulgy wood?’

‘You shall see.’

Liz and Arthur came out of the kitchen door carrying baskets to the car. Camilla followed with the baby, trying to seem unconcerned. Arthur’s car was not large, and Morland at once offered to go by bus.

No,
I
shall go by bus,’ Camilla insisted. ‘I know a short cut up the hill.’

‘We’ll go by bus together then,’ Morland suggested.

‘That leaves only three of us in the car, which is rather absurd,’ said Arthur, who did not like having such a small car, nor being reminded of it.

‘I can easily go alone,’ Camilla insisted.

‘Cam and I could go together,’ Liz suggested. ‘It will be like the old days.’ Arthur looked stonily ahead. ‘Frances can take Harry on her lap.’

‘There is no question of it,’ Morland said. ‘I am going to go by bus, and I am going alone, and I shall really enjoy it quite well and shall be there almost as soon as you.’

‘Because I am a clergyman, he thinks I drive like an old
woman,’ Arthur thought. ‘Perhaps Elizabeth should drive,’ he said aloud, ‘and I will walk with Beddoes.’

‘He was Morland a few moments ago,’ thought Liz.

Mrs Parsons came running out with a thermos-flask which had been left on the dresser.

‘Gentry take their pleasures sadly,’ she thought, remembering the crates of beer loaded on to the chara before the Darts Team Outing set off for Southend, or Hindhead, or Bognor Regis.

‘We haven’t settled much,’ Arthur said sharply, standing with one hand on the car-door. For all this, he had given up a tennis-party at Lady Davidson’s.

‘We have settled everything,’ said Morland.

Frances climbed into the back of the shaky little car and sat down.

‘There is room for all of us,’ she said. ‘Morland, will you go in front, please, and take the baskets on your knee? The three of us will be very comfortable in the back with the baby.’

They did as they were told.

‘It wants the self-starter not to work now,’ Arthur said in a slipshod English which betrayed his irritability. But the car, at least, behaved well, and soon they were going smoothly along the hedged lanes, each wrapped away in private thoughts, in secret daydreams.

Arthur drove fast, but very well; and, as he drove, his spirits lifted. He began to sing to himself and once said over his shoulder to Morland: ‘An absurd car this. Like a little tin-bath.’ He felt mellow with happiness.

‘I haven’t a car,’ said Morland. ‘And if I had I wouldn’t know how to drive it.’

The sun was very high now and streamed down upon the valley as if into the calyx of a flower. The leather of the car seats burnt through their thin clothes. Liz and Cam lay back on
either side of Frances; once they glanced at one another and smiled. But Frances and the baby were fast asleep.

The sun seemed to touch their bones, poured into them as if they were hollow like cups. Even the trees below in the valley looked dazed. Nothing moved, but the heat shimmering until the view was like a bad photograph.

‘Here we loll, full of food,’ Camilla said. ‘Like old seals sunning themselves on a ledge.’

A little train plodded along the valley, its smoke at a rakish angle. ‘It will never get anywhere,’ Liz said, leaning hack on her elbows.

Morland had caught the sun across his forehead and cheekbones. He had made himself a hat out of his knotted handkerchief and Arthur blamed him silently for looking so absurd, so tripperish.

The stunted wayfaring-trees gave little shade, and Frances had put up a faded grey silk parasol. She sat upright under it and fanned herself with a paper hag.

‘Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe,’ Morland suddenly thought. He took his hat off and wiped his mouth with it, to hide his smile.

‘We should have climbed higher to the Clumps,’ Liz said. ‘It would be cooler there.’

‘But it is so full of broken bottles and the remains of bonfires,’ Camilla said.

‘Shift Harry again,’ said Arthur.

Round the tree went Harry, his rug pursuing the moving patch of shade. He looked up into the silvery, dusty leaves and turned his hands ecstatically.

Morland gazed down at the little town. He felt it all at his fingertips, began to see it as the scene for a film – the High Street; the Market Square; the little railway-station with its few moments of confusion and its long lulls; the faded tea-shops and
drowsing back-streets; the old gravestones in the churchyard; the Public Gardens.

‘It has a life of its own,’ he said, and he swept his hand across the scene. ‘It is a corporate thing, with its own atmosphere, its own set of characters. It breeds its own set of characters, as Rouen bred Madame Bovary. I can imagine tragedy down there, and drama. I can imagine an English Madame Bovary and the old ladies in the tea-shops watching her, the men in the pubs lifting their mouths from their mugs as she passes in the street …’

‘It is what they call a slice of life,’ Arthur agreed. ‘A town like that runs across England from the highest to the lowest …’

‘I can imagine,’ Morland persisted, ‘someone on the run from the police fretting his time away in one of those pubs – in the pub where I am staying, perhaps.’

‘Life is good. Life is simple,’ Frances quoted him mockingly.

‘If it were a film, that hotel wouldn’t be lying there idle,’ he said. ‘If it is.’

He built it up in his mind, selecting and rejecting. The camera nosed along corridors, went like a ghost through closed doors, looked down over the banisters, and out of windows at the cobbled square, glanced over a shoulder at a pen scratching a name in the register, picked up a mirror here, an envelope there.

Then he suddenly pushed it all aside and turned to Frances and smiled.

‘Only in your paintings would it be just itself, stay where it is and seem sufficient. In life, in literature, in films, it must move on and change and contain other things.’

‘Why do you read St Thomas Aquinas?’ Arthur asked Camilla in a low voice.

‘I try to discover why people believe in God.’

‘Is it important to you to discover that?’

‘No, not very,’ she said carelessly.

She and Liz were making a flower-chain, their laps full of daisies and scabious and lady’s slipper and harebells. It grew between their hands.

‘I can’t think why you said it was going to rain,’ Morland remarked. ‘It is a perfect day.’

‘Yes, it’s a lovely day,’ she agreed. ‘It’s the sort of day people remember as the
end
of something – the last day before the war, the last day of peace, the day the Old Queen died, the end of an era. They look back and say: “It was perfect weather that summer. There never was weather like it, before or after. We didn’t know it was the last day of our happiness, and that it would never be the same again”.’