A Wreath Of Roses (8 page)

She saw him cornered by bigger boys, his fists going quickly up, his eyes above them over-bright. Yet why should the boys have cornered him at all? He was not delicate or deformed or in any way an obvious victim. No, they had cornered him for cheek, for ‘cockiness’. They had been about to teach him a lesson. What he had defended himself against, he had first provoked. And he had never learnt his lesson. When he talked to the barman, when he spoke of the Philippines, when he made her feel so conscious of being a woman, it was obvious that he had not learnt his lesson. He would always take advantages. He had neither the pride to scorn them, nor the humility to step aside. He would take his advantage and rub his hands with satisfaction – social advantages, the advantages of the strong fist, the ready tongue; advantages over women. Yet he is stupid, she thought. I tickled him like a trout. It was my secret pleasure. He has never had his lesson because he was always strong, sharp, and worldly-wise. No one pierced his armour, for he was much less vulnerable than anyone else. Only a subtler mind than his could find the right weapon, and the subtler minds would have left him alone.

‘Then what do I want with him?’ she suddenly asked herself, staring dully into her glass. ‘Why should I care? Is it to punish him? But he did no harm to me.’ He did plenty of harm to others though, she guessed. ‘Plenty of harm. It is all over his face, the harm he has done. Is it not, also, just a little to punish
Liz, that I sit here, came here in the first place, avoid her? Because I feel she has shut me out.’

‘What about that book of yours?’ she asked him.

‘Book?’

He put his hand out for her glass, as if to give himself time. He was indeed, she thought, slow-witted for a secret agent.

‘No, I don’t want any more to drink. I must go home.’ She put her glass on the table.

‘I haven’t started it yet. I find it difficult … to know how to go about it. I’m a man of action, no literary gent.’

His conversation had many of these
passé
, slangy touches; as if he would even rather be old-fashioned than straightforward.

She stood up and began to re-wind Hotchkiss’s chain round her hand. The cat sat washing her face, her black paw curving over and over her nose. As the dog moved, she put her four feet quietly together, brought her eyelids close and was perfectly still, like a little stone cat on a gatepost. Yet her waiting seemed to tick inside her.

‘I have to go out to get a paper,’ Richard said, standing up, too. ‘I’ll walk as far as the newsagent’s with you.’

As he passed the cat on his way out, he suddenly slapped his hand down in front of her on the bar so that she blinked, was unsteadied by a different fear from the one she already had.

‘Why did you do that?’ Camilla asked in the street.

‘Do what?’

‘Frighten the cat.’

‘Like making the damn thing jump.’

‘You think it is manly, English, of you to hate cats.’

‘S’right,’ he said carelessly.

‘You used to tease them as a boy.’

“‘Tease” is
one
word.’ He grinned. ‘I always liked a dog. Had
a fox-terrier for years when I was a lad. How many miles we walked together, God knows. Faithful little beast. “Cats!” I’d say, and he was away like lightning after them.’

They passed a newsagent’s shop.

‘My father once gave me a thrashing and all the time the dog cried outside the door, and when I came out he jumped up and licked my hands. I never forgot that. A child isn’t ever really lonely if he has a dog.’

‘Were you lonely?’

‘Yes,’ he said briefly.

‘Your father …’

‘He was a drunken swine. I wasn’t the only one he laid about. My mother got her share, too.’

‘There’s a boy selling papers!’

He held up a coin and the boy came running to him. Still walking along with her, he opened the newspaper and read the front page, peeped a little inside and folded it up carefully and put it in his pocket.

For the first time, she felt his sensibility counted after all.

‘Those beatings,’ she began, ‘but don’t tell me if you don’t care to … did they harm you very much? Does wielding the rod spoil the child?’

‘They cut me off from other children. And then, one’s mother running into the garden in her nightgown … other parents stop asking you to tea, you get left out of the birthday-parties. There is something not
quite …
in any case, they don’t ask you. When they meet you in the street, they are over-kind, solicitous, give you sixpence, but they still don’t want their children to mix with you … the ugliness you might uncover … ruining all the sweetness and light. So you are left out for ever. And for ever. You are left with just the dog.’

‘He let you have the dog … your father, I mean,’ she pointed out, as if there must be something to be said for everybody.

‘The dog was a good way of punishing me,’ he said, easily disposing of her fallacy. ‘When he beat me, I’d never cry, not when I had weals down the backs of my legs and couldn’t sit in my bath. But when he thrashed the dog, I screamed with nerves and blubbered.’

‘I blamed him,’ she thought, ‘for not being humble. And all the time it was I … I was the bumptious, judging one, the sarcastic, clever and superior one.’ As we do not apologise for our thoughts, or only when they are solidified into words, she said nothing, but she felt depressed and ashamed.

‘What happened to your mother?’ she asked, and gave a quick little glance down from the corner of her eyes, not at him, but in his direction. This look – Liz knew it well – was a sign that she was deeply moved, but embarrassed.

‘She died … she just gave up living. It was as if she suddenly lay down and turned her face to the wall and stopped breathing. Heart failure they put it down to. How right they were!’

‘Yes, I see.’

They came to the railway-bridge, and the country lay on the other side.

‘Shall we meet again?’ he suggested, slowing his pace. ‘Will you come for a drink again?’

‘I expect I shall.’

‘When?’

‘Perhaps tomorrow evening.’

‘Will you bring your friend?’

She betrayed nothing, she thought: not a flicker of annoyance or disappointment. ‘If you like,’ she said evenly.

‘Well …’ he began. He shrugged. Then: ‘Don’t,’ he said. ‘Come alone. Will you come alone?’

‘I’ll see.’

They were standing quite still now, and the shadow of the bridge was cold on her arms. Suddenly, overhead, a train
thundered and pounded and was gone. When they could speak again, he said: ‘Tomorrow evening then. I’ll be in the bar.’

He turned and walked back the way he had come.

‘And now,’ thought Camilla, coming out into the sunshine again, ‘now for the lies and excuses.’

Her eyes ached in the bright sun. Even Hotchkiss glowered and slouched in the midday heat which bleached the gravelled road and sharpened the bands of shadow which fell across it from the poplar trees.

Liz sat under the mulberry tree. The fruit was scarlet and black among the dark leaves. Outside this circle of shade, the garden burned and blazed with the hot colours of the bean-flowers, of montbretia, golden-rod, geraniums.

‘My dear Arthur,’ she had written on a piece of paper; but it had blown away across the flower-border, and, too lazy to fetch it, she had begun again on another sheet.

‘My dearest Arthur’ (although, she thought, just as he has only one wife, so I have only one Arthur). ‘I am glad you enjoyed your nice evening at Lady Morrison’s, and very sorry that I forgot to give you her message before I left. Harry has settled very well and Frances is delighted with him. Camilla has arrived, and we are having a peaceful holiday – just like the old days. I wish you were here,’ she was adding, but the wind, like God Himself, wrenched away the paper from her at this lie (indeed the letter was a series of lies) and wafted it into a lavender hedge.

She gave up, lay down among all the squashed mulberries with her arms under her head and fell asleep.

Her husband wakened her. He stood over her, wearing his
best grey suit, his neat smile. She felt at once ungainly, crumpled, put the back of her hand to her mouth, as if she must have been dribbling, shook her hair from her forehead. A look of annoyance gathered in her eyes.

‘Arthur, how nice! Why are you here?’

‘You
are why I am here, of course.’

‘Does Frances know?’

She glanced at the cottage, as if friends fail unless they can stave off one’s husband.

‘No one was at home, I thought.’

(Frances was excused.)

‘You are glad to see me,’ he said.

‘Glad … why, yes. A little put out … to wake and …’

‘But you
are
glad?’ he insisted.

She picked a squashed mulberry from her leg. When she looked up, she saw that he held a piece of paper behind his back. Her letter, which he had found lying across his path, he had read. Seeing it addressed to him, he considered it already his property, forgetting that we must not be held to account for letters we have not posted – a thing he, of all men, should have remembered.

He held it up and read out in his very low and melodious voice … ‘a peaceful holiday, just like the old days. I wish you were here.’ He folded it and slipped it into his pocket. ‘You look rather dishevelled, Elizabeth. Your wish has come true, so show your pleasure.’

‘How do you do,’ said Frances coming up the path from the shed in a hideous flowered apron. ‘How kind of you to call!’ She put out her hand and then glancing apologetically at Liz, said: ‘This is a friend of mine, who is staying with me …

‘Dear Miss Rutherford, she is also my wife.’

‘Don’t you recall that wedding, Frances?’ asked Liz,
brushing her skirt busily. Did you never see those unruly curls before, nor hear that boyish chuckle? That wedding … the bride had half a glass of champagne (Frances frowned at her pronunciation) ‘to her head – yet was it the champagne, after all?’

‘Champagne,’ Frances cut in.

‘Champagne,’ Liz said mechanically, a poor imitation.

‘I remember now and I apologise. I simply was not expecting you,’ Frances reproved him.

His life was made up of dealing with old ladies. ‘You bore the shock better than my wife,’ he said lightly.

‘But where can you
sleep?’
Liz cried. ‘There is hardly room for Harry and even Mr Beddoes we must put up at the pub.’

‘And who is Mr Beddoes?’ he inquired, with a benevolence with which he hoped to cover his curiosity, a jocularity grownups often use when they ask impertinent questions of young children.

‘Mr Beddoes is a film director,’ Frances said. ‘Where are you off to, Elizabeth?’

Liz had scarcely moved her feet, but her body had seemed about to fly away.

‘Harry,’ she said hastily, thinking there are advantages in motherhood. She was wanting to run to Camilla with this astonishing piece of news, and now walked fretfully across the lawn with her husband to Harry’s pram. Arthur stood with his hands clasped loosely behind his back, watching the baby, determined to use no baby-language, to be impartial and detached. Nothing resulted. His son rolled away from him stretching and kicking, until his eyes grew calm watching the movement of leaves. It is not possible to act as man-to-man with an infant.

Frances left them and they stood on either side of the pram looking down at their child.

‘Liz, darling, I came to ask a favour of you, not to stay. I have to get back some time tonight.’

‘What is the favour?’ she asked, not looking up.

‘I want you to come home tomorrow … just for tomorrow.’

She looked up quickly. ‘Why?’

‘I want you to give the prizes at the social tomorrow night. They asked for you to do that. You can return later. Come back with me now, go to the hairdresser’s in the morning and we’ll think out a little speech between us … a very short one … something simple and amusing and informal.’ (She had better not try to stand on her dignity, he thought.)

‘A speech?’

‘I will help you.’

‘But I couldn’t make a speech. Women don’t make speeches.’

‘Oh, don’t start all those generalisations about men and women,’ he said wearily, thinking her holidays did her no good, reinforced her obstinacy.

‘Well, there must be plenty of other women who could give the prizes. Lady Davidson, for instance.’

‘Well, naturally, they approached Lady Davidson first, but it is her psychology night.’

‘Psychology night?’ Liz repeated.

‘She goes to lectures on psychology,’ he said briefly, and shut his eyes to hide his impatience.

‘It is a compliment that they should have asked you. And – more than that …’ he flushed and put a hand down to the pram and touched his son’s head … ‘it would be a way of … I am afraid that some of the parishioners feel it odd that you should have left me
just
now … with all the trouble about the dry rot in the north wall … and after that contretemps about the magazines they think … it would help me,’ he said, becoming more manly. And then, very simply and looking across at her for the first time … ‘It would help to save my pride.’