A Wreath Of Roses (24 page)

‘Yes, my mother used to talk like that about the war before last,’ Liz said. ‘As if she were in a novel by Galsworthy.’

‘It
was
like that,’ Frances said.

‘I was a small child at the seaside,’ said Arthur. ‘We were hurried away from Dawlish lest the enemy should land there.’

‘You are all frightening me,’ cried Liz. ‘You make me think something horrible will happen tomorrow.’

The flower-chain broke in half.

‘This time it will be the other way round,’ Camilla said. ‘We shall look back on today and say: “Little did we know that it was the end of our anxieties, our last day of uncertainty.”’

‘People never do say that.’

‘No, things do go on getting worse,’ Frances said as placidly as if she had said the opposite.

‘Only if you take the short view,’ Arthur said.

‘I take the view of three-score years and ten. As much as I can manage. Or be interested in,’ she said. ‘Once I begin taking a longer view there is no line to draw. I find myself back among pterodactyls and forward in the time when human beings are only fossils in the rocks. Or ice,’ she added vaguely.

‘But you care about the future of mankind?’ he suggested.

‘Not in the least,’ she said calmly.

‘You care about – well, Liz, for instance.’

‘Elizabeth must look after herself. She’s not a child now.’

‘I’ve had nearly half my life,’ Liz said, sighing sharply.

‘You have still had less than any of the rest of us,’ Camilla reminded her. ‘Arthur is in the prime of life,’ she added, giving him a little sideways glance, as she mended the flower-chain.

Suddenly a shadow lay over her hands. She looked up at the sky. A little cloud had hidden the sun.

‘I was right,’ she said.

The blue was thickening into lavender as if evening were coming already.

‘This curious light,’ Frances began, and then stopped. She put her parasol away and shaded her eyes with her hand, looking to left and right along the valley. She sighed. ‘Oh, it flies away,’ she thought, striking her hands together in her lap. ‘It can’t ever be caught or described. For it is one earth one moment and another earth in a second or two. Life itself is an unfinished sentence, or a few haphazard brush-strokes. Nothing stays. Nothing is completed. I can make nothing whole from it, however small. Pinned down, like a butterfly, it ceases to be itself, just as the butterfly becomes something else; dead, unmoving, its brightness gone. The meaning of a painting is a voice crying out: “I saw it. Before it vanished, it was thus.” An honest painting would never be finished; an honest novel would stop in the middle of a sentence. There is no shutting life up in a cage, turning the key with a full-stop, with a stroke of paint.’

‘Who shall have thus flower-chain?’ Liz asked.

‘Harry,’ said Camilla.

‘He would eat it,’ Arthur said quickly.

‘We cannot give it to you,’ Camilla said to him. ‘It is flowers, not laurels.’

‘Frances should have it,’ Morland said.

Carefully, they lifted the chain over her head and dropped it on her shoulders. She sat very upright, her hands still clasped in her lap, and smiled.

‘I think we should go,’ Arthur said. ‘It does look as if the weather’s breaking.’

He would be glad to get back to the Vicarage. He had his sermon to prepare.

‘I think so, too,’ said Camilla. She got up stiffly and stood looking down at the town in the valley, and the sun and shadow alternating on the tops of the trees. The voices of the others as they packed up the baskets dropped away from her and she tried to imagine herself in this very place alone with Richard again.

She felt a hand touch her wrist and started violently.

‘A cigarette?’ Morland asked her, holding out his case.

Morland went back to his hotel. From his bedroom-window, he could see the place where they had picnicked; it was far-off, like a vignette on a title-page; had, in this strange yellowish light, exactly the look of an engraving in an old book.

He flung up the window from the bottom and leant out, his elbows on the sill. A stored warmth rose from the wall below him. Perhaps the changed weather, this withdrawal of brightness from the air, had discouraged him, but the market square, flat and shadowless, had a depressing look, presaged disaster. The drifting people suggested only dark lives spent in the back-rooms of little shops, in the coils of what is sometimes encouragingly called private enterprise; dragged down by daily worries, no vision elated them, no intimacy delighted.

‘So we trail from birth to death,’ he thought, looking down at the dejected bus queue, the people coming out of the station as if beginning to emerge from an anæsthetic. ‘From day to day, we drift along, glance at headlines, dully hope for the best, menaced chiefly by one another, all separate yet without identity.’

A sharp gust of wind lifted a man’s hat and bowled it across
the square. Pink, laughing, vexed, he left the bus queue and gave chase. His wife stood looking after him; pink, smiling, and vexed, too, at being so singled out. When he returned to her, they stood closer together and chatted in a relaxed and casual way. After a while, their colour subsided; the little ripple of animation was over; they had forgotten.

‘But they had one another; they covered their moment of confusion with one another,’ Morland thought. ‘They exchanged remarks. Just as after parties married people go back to their own privacy and laugh the evening into some sort of order, find their hearts touched by the same things, their scorn mutual, their judgments similar. But I go home alone,’ he thought, ‘and the noise of company drains slowly out of my head. The quiet overcomes me and I stretch out my hand for a book; for the party was over as I bade my hostess goodbye, just as that picnic was over for me the moment that I left the others. There is no one with whom to discuss it, no one to join me in unravelling the conversation or to guess at the meanings of mood and innuendo or, even better, to exchange drowsy banalities at bedtime, saying: “Arthur is proud of his son,” “Liz is uncertain as a mother,” “the food was good,” “the sun was hot” and “did you notice the ring she was wearing?”; then to put the room into darkness and turn away from one another, but at the very brink of sleep adding: “Frances was abstracted, I thought … and what in the world was all that about St Thomas Aquinas …?”’

He lit a cigarette and drew a chair up to the open window. Always a staleness and lassitude hangs over late summer’s afternoons; returning home at that hour in that season seems an anti-climax; time hangs heavily and a great yawn widens in one’s heart.

He spun the dead match down to the gutter. A man passing half-glanced up. ‘I left Camilla out of the bed-time dialogue,’ he thought. ‘I believe I imagined her as the listening one.’

At this moment, he saw Richard coming out of the station, watched him hesitate, buy an evening paper and stand reading it at the kerb before crossing the road.

‘I never knew a man to buy so many newspapers,’ Morland decided, and he leant forward a little to get a better view, to take this chance of being unseen to try to analyse what possible hold such a man could have over Camilla. Young men like him, spoilt by despised but doting mothers, ruined by good-looks, were always about the film studios, no panache to distract from their shabbiness, or their lack of talent. He had met them there, met them sponging in bars, half-listened to their everlasting jokes about homosexuality, their lisping innuendo, their antisemitism, their truckling, their voices raised for famous names, lowered only to decry one another. They find release in wartime, sometimes behave bravely; but, turned adrift in peace, find nothing to cover the emptiness of their hearts; not women, nor drink, nor this endless reading of newspapers, he thought; and at that moment Richard folded his paper and looked straight up from the street and into his eyes. The distance between them did nothing to diminish the flicker of fear both felt and showed, as if a match had spluttered into light upon a scene no shade less terrifying for being expected.

‘If ever we come near to seeing the truth, it is in one another’s eyes,’ Morland thought, for in that quick upward glance Richard had exposed his terror and apprehension, had underlined the uneasiness between them, the sense of which remained now after he had moved out of view under the wall of the building, the passers-by covering the pavement, as the living quickly cover the disappearance of the dead.

‘Out of all the crowd – just he and I!’

Morland moved away from the window into the shadow of the room. ‘The invisible web which drifted out, attached us to one another, so lightly that we alone knew. The web that drew
me to Frances, has also its other strands. Beauty and corruption touch us – at the same time, in the same place. Not separately, as in Frances’s pictures, but always the two going hand in hand; our days alternate between them, the truth contains them both. The search for beauty, lays bare ugliness as well.’

He walked about the room and sometimes caught a glimpse of himself in a crooked, bamboo-edged mirror. He stopped and examined this reflection, the familiar expectant face, the flying ends of tie, the rather weak, pale eyes.

The door in the mirrored room opened and over his shoulder he saw Richard standing against the strip of darkness from the corridor outside. He turned round.

Fear, corrosive, palpable, leapt between them. Driven into its last corner, the stag turns for the first time, madly, uselessly aggressive, to face the enemy.

‘What do you want?’

‘I came to ask
you
that,’ Richard said. ‘What the devil it is
you
want?’

‘I want nothing from you.’

‘I dislike being spied on. Since you came here; wherever I went, you’ve followed me …’

‘Only in your imagination.’

‘At the Fair, that time in the churchyard late at night, tracking after me, pretending to read the gravestones; you wait for me on the stairs, stop me in the hall. Now you sit watching me from the window …’

‘Perhaps you interest me as a character,’ Morland suggested as coolly as he could. ‘Perhaps I wonder why you’re here, why you must bolster yourself up before barmen, and waiters – and women – with pretence and pretension. But, as you are immediately going to say, it’s no affair of mine, and my curiosity would only be forgivable if you menaced anyone.’

In the final encounter, the trapped creature is a fearsome,
not only a fearful thing. Morland put his hand out and leant on the back of a chair. He felt suddenly defeated and exhausted.

‘I want nothing of you,’ he said.

‘Arthur, it is my turn to ask a favour of you,’ Liz said.

They moved down the bean-row together and she dropped the beans into the colander he was carrying for her.

‘There is no question of “turns”,’ he assured her.

‘I wish you could stay for supper … I wish you needn’t go … but that is not the favour,’ she added quickly.

‘My love, I wish I could, too, but I must work till midnight as it is.’

‘You could work here.’

‘I think not.’

He had a great political speech to prepare, his sermon for Sunday evening; must bring books from all sides to reinforce his argument; his study would be heaped with them before he went to bed.

‘Well, then,’ she said, relinquishing him, ‘the favour is to do with Frances.’

He liked to see her brown hands among the leaves, watched all her movements with pleasure until she tore down a great branch of leaves and beans by mistake. Even then, although he frowned, he held back his annoyance.

‘I thought it would be so nice if she could come to live with us,’ she said. (For everything was either ‘nice’ or ‘nasty’, as he knew.)

‘Frances?’

‘Yes.’

‘But she would never consider it.’

‘I think she would, you know. Things have changed for her in this last year. She won’t paint much more. She’s ill and tired,
and she’s old now. Until this summer she never seemed to me to change …’

‘Even if she would come, it would be a great responsibility to take upon ourselves …’

‘But I don’t take on any responsibility about Frances. I already have it, wherever she is. And if she were ever seriously ill … or … or anything of that kind, then I should like her to be with me, with us I mean.’

‘She is like a mother to you,’ he suggested.

He simplified all relationships.

‘Only my mother could be that,’ Liz thought, but she kept her thought to herself.

Arthur was appalled at the prospect of Frances in the house. She seemed to him eccentric, undependable. The elaborate courtesy he accorded her so willingly on these brief visits could scarcely be expected of him permanently, yet he could think of no other sort of behaviour to take its place.

Liz was looking up at him so anxiously that he put the colander down on the top of the hedge beside him and drew her close.

‘If it will make you happy,’ he said, ‘then of course I say yes.’

He clasped his hands round her neck over her hair. Women’s necks are so frail, I am always afraid their heads will break off. What are you thinking?’

She laughed and looked up and her eyes flashed with tears.