A Wreath Of Roses (4 page)

‘I don’t want to go anywhere, but I want to be left in peace.’

‘Why should you be? No one else is.’

‘Because I wasted so many years teaching instead of painting. Teaching little girls like Liz, who do nothing better with their learning than read novels.’

‘Perhaps you taught her badly,’ Camilla suggested, leaning back in her chair.

‘I wasted my time.’

‘You had the money for it. And you had to live somehow.’

‘I wasted my time.’

‘I want to say two things before Liz comes in. Firstly, don’t bully her about the baby. If it cries, it cries and you put up with it. She must have a holiday from that man.’

‘She has married him.’

‘The other thing is this dog of yours. We don’t want to take it for walks.’

‘You want to be guests and do nothing?’ Frances suggested.

‘We would rather pay six-and-a-half guineas a week than take him when we go walking,’ Camilla said untruthfully.

From the kitchen came the sounds of Liz making tea. When Camilla went out to her, she found her working in an impeded way, with the baby over one shoulder.

They drank the tea under a large mulberry tree where the grass was worn, and they plaited their past year together from the tight knot of last summer’s holiday. Into this plait they wove Liz’s failure at being married, the birth of her son (Camilla looked down at her lap), little tiffs with parishioners, not amounting to much, but threatening greater things of the same kind for the future; then Camilla (and the man in the train had guessed wrongly, for she did not teach but was the secretary at a girls’ school) threaded in her strand, bright with amusement – little gaffes at Speech Day (the Bishop’s wife trying to drink tea through her veil) or Staff Meetings; the Old Girls’ Reunion and how changed they returned to it, for the first were last and the last were first and Lady Lisbourne, who at school had been nothing, condescended to the erstwhile Captain of Hockey, a rough-voiced woman in tweeds. Liz’s laughter rang out across the still garden and was echoed by her son who lay on the grass at her side.

And Frances? But she had nothing to contribute, she
declared. Only four pictures. All of them the same and none any good. The year had gone in a way which seemed unbearable to the other two, but was not to her. Week succeeded week, no one called; if they wrote she rarely replied; she talked to no one; Christmas was unremarkable except for one or two cards from old pupils, a cake from Liz which she was a month eating and a book from Camilla which she had not found time to read.

‘And then tell Frances about your horrid experience this afternoon,’ said Liz, as if this would finally round off the year and bring them up to date.

‘My horrid experience?’

‘Well, the fact of it being worse for somebody else doesn’t stop it from being horrid for you.’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘What was it?’ Frances asked.

‘A suicide.’

She described it briefly, plucking up grass and scattering it as she did so.

‘Well?’ said Frances at the end.

‘That is all. I can never think of incidents as isolated. They always seem to be omens.’

‘What nonsense,’ Frances said, staring. ‘You try to enlarge yourself by everything that happens, even other people’s misfortunes. As if you had
special
feelings.’

‘You hit the nail on the head,’ Camilla agreed.

‘Oh,
there!’
cried Liz, exasperated. ‘If you are to quarrel all the holiday, I shall …’ She turned to her baby clasping his ankles in her hand.

They watched her. She was slim and brown and in her crumpled cotton frock looked like a young girl playing with a doll.

‘What?
What
will you do?’ Camilla enquired.

But Liz was absorbed now and had forgotten. ‘I shall go and feed Harry,’ she said and stooped to lift him.

‘And I shall go back to my picture,’ Frances said and wandered down the garden, snipping up a dead flower here and there as she went. At the end of the path was a wooden building which she called her shed, disliking the special names artists give to things, feeling these words contaminated by Bohemianism, by those who talk too much and strike attitudes.

When she had disappeared, Camilla leant back in her deck-chair, her hands clasped behind her head, her eyes closed. She felt forlorn and far away from Liz, but would not follow her, despite the inkling she had that the time to go was now, to sit with her while she nursed her child, to fetch and carry things for it a little, to take it in her arms, that this had to be done now, at once, or it could never be done. But shyness, obstinacy, a great dislike and a great jealousy prevented her. So she lay back and closed her eyes and wondered what attitude she would now strike to protect herself, to enlarge herself, as Frances, who did not need enlarging, had said. ‘And I,’ she thought at last, bitterly, ‘the physical life, the artistic life, all creativeness closed to me, am left to do the washing-up.’

Later in the evening, Liz and Camilla set out again to the town. They sat on the top of a bus and the evening sun poured over them through the dusty windows and great fans of chestnut leaves brushed the glass as they drove close to the hedges along the narrow roads.

‘Frances is changed,’ Camilla said. ‘Now she seems an old woman and rather frail. A strange thing happened. When I went in first of all, she was asleep. She looked as if she were dead and had been arranged in the chair. Yet when she opened her eyes, I felt for the first time since I’ve known her, that once she was a child. Before, I could never imagine that. I think her eyes gave me this feeling.’

‘A very pale clear blue,’ Liz said.

‘And her hair must have been corn-coloured, that rather harsh, frizzy hair.’

‘Yes, it was.’

‘I can imagine her sitting in a schoolroom, with her thin hand over her forehead, learning her Greek, or up in the branches of a tree, peering down. I think she had a brother whom she loved. An elder brother.’

‘Oh, no, she was an only child,’ Liz disagreed. ‘How this bus swings from side to side.’

‘Yes, perhaps after all, I see her more clearly as an only child. The sort of one who
goes
to places to weep, never bursting into tears on the spot, but buried in the long grass, in the apple-loft, the tears soaking through her sleeve, but always in silence and then tidying up afterwards, utterly vulnerable but careful, the world cruelly foreign, and every sound a pain.’

‘But why should she have been so very miserable?’

‘She was never happy until this last part of her life.’

‘Then perhaps there will be that for us also,’ Liz suggested. ‘It doesn’t sound very promising.’

‘You’ll
have your children.’

‘Children?’ Liz pretended to flinch at this plural, but her expression was not dismayed. She fell into a comfortable little silence.

‘God knows what I shall have,’ Camilla said over her shoulder as they stepped out of the bus.

‘Children, too, I daresay,’ Liz said carelessly.

‘Your marriage is not an encouraging example to me. Besides, I have left it too late.’

‘You are like Dorothea Casaubon in
Middlemarch.’

‘Let’s go for a drink.’

‘I am not supposed to drink while I am feeding Harry,’ Liz said primly.

‘And last year you mayn’t drink because you were
expecting
Harry. How absurd! Is the whisky supposed to go direct to him, neat, and make him drunk?’

‘I read in a book that it is a good thing not to do.’

‘We have half-an-hour to wait. What do you suggest?’

‘If you very much want a drink, I’ll have just one beer.’

‘I
do
very much want one,’ Camilla said, and led the way at once into the musty darkness of the Griffin, tidying her hair with her hands as she went.

The man from the train was there, as she had supposed he would be. He was leaning over the bar questioning the barman about the town, the district. It seemed to Camilla puzzling that his sentimental journey should have ended in a place to which he was so much a stranger.

She stood there, shaking coins softly in her hand, waiting to be served, and when the barman turned towards her, the other did so also. In the instant before he smiled, she noticed the slightest flicker of alarm on his face. The smile at once covered it up, but it had been there; she could not deceive herself. As if to do more than cover up his first reaction, as if to trample it down and crush it, he came forward and spoke to her.

Liz sat on a high stool, trying not to look curious, and the sight of her doing this delighted Camilla, who watched her through a great gilt-edged mirror.

‘Are you comfortably installed?’ she asked in a rather challenging, familiar way, which was for Liz’s benefit, and which she at once regretted.

‘Upstairs, it is like a fairy-story. Nothing has been touched for twenty years.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Not clean. All the pictures look as if they have been dipped into soup. It hasn’t a clean smell. The bath has a great green stain under the taps. The chest-of-drawers is full of shrunk moth-balls and rusty
safety-pins.’ He spoke in a quiet but over-dramatic voice and Liz, who could not quite hear, looked away towards the open doorway and yawned.

‘Then I am glad to be a woman and not obliged to stay here,’ Camilla said.

‘It is all such a maze of stairways and passages, I feel it will be too difficult to go to bed, to find my own room again. I can’t tell you …’

‘This is a friend of mine,’ Camilla interrupted, feeling something was now due to Liz. ‘Mrs Nicholson …’ She paused.

Liz gave a formal little bow and folded her hands in her lap.

‘Now that we have one name, we must have some more,’ he said. ‘Mine is Richard Elton.’

‘We met in the train,’ Camilla said to Liz, as if this explained more than it did. ‘My name is Camilla Hill.’

‘A very nice name.’

Liz sipped her beer, making it last, like a child with an ice-cream. Seeing her through the great mirror, head bent over her drink, hair swinging smoothly forward, her brown legs twisted round the stool, Camilla felt as if the day had been a dream, that she would come out of it soon, lifting fold after fold of muffling web; for this could not be real – meeting Liz again after eleven months and finding herself so alienated from her that she could show off to her about a man. ‘And
this
sort of man!’ she thought, glancing at him through the mirror. Their eyes met. Alone in the looking-glass they seemed. They watched, with a steady fascination, as if those two other selves would commit some action independently of them; would among the reflected bottles, the ferns, glasses, turn to one another in the closest intimacy, make some violent impact upon one another which could not be made in actuality.

Camilla lowered her eyes, stood very still, as if now the
mirror were going to crack in two. The room tipped and lurched, people’s faces ran together, their voices slipping and painful in her ears. One brush of his sleeve against her arm and the bar, she felt, would burst into flame.

Liz was refusing a drink from him, her hand a lid over her glass, as if he might not take her at her word. When Camilla accepted, she fidgeted on her stool, glancing at the clock.

‘We have ten minutes,’ Camilla pointed out.

‘But we must get your case.’

‘Oh, yes, I had forgotten what we came for.’

She drank quickly, conscious of their eyes upon her. She felt very nervous and excited without knowing why.

‘Good-bye, then.’ Her glance flashed round the bar, no more taking him in than all the rest.

‘I expect we shall meet again,’ he suggested.

Liz jumped down from the stool and smoothed her frock, which was beyond smoothing.

‘Well, that was all rather unlikely,’ she remarked, as they came out into the empty square. The sun now struck only the façades of the buildings, the leaves at the very tops of trees; windows high up, even brickwork glinted with gold. The clouds were like eggs. The bar now seemed to them to have been cold and dark and ferny, and they felt the soft air on their arms and brows with relief.

‘A very unlikely sort of man,’ Liz continued. ‘You grumble at
me.’

‘I met him on the train,’ Camilla repeated.

‘Yes. You said that before. Why didn’t you tell me you were meeting him?’

‘But I wasn’t meeting him.’

‘It was scarcely the merest chance. You knew he would be there.’

‘We had to drink somewhere.’

‘It is usually the Bear.’

‘Well no harm has been done,’ Camilla said, and gave a little laugh. ‘He seemed to me a most romantic figure,’ she added, trying to appear naïve, girlish. ‘Incredible adventures he had through the war – codes, and pass-words and false moustaches.’

‘I thought he looked like an American film-star,’ Liz said. ‘A sort of tough stupidity.’

‘He is writing a book.’

‘Well, so are most people. It would be an abnormality if he were not.’

‘I am not.’

‘You will when you become better adjusted.’