A Wreath Of Roses (10 page)

She said: ‘You are the one I worry for, not Liz.’

‘I?’ Camilla put her cup down, looking surprised.

‘Because you never cry. Because you are so heavily armoured that if you get thrown, you’ll never rise to your feet again without assistance.’

‘You
shall assist me,’ Camilla said lightly. ‘I wonder what Liz is doing now.’

She gathered up the cups and took them to the sink to wash them. Frances opened the door and let Hotchkiss out into the garden.

‘I know,’ she said, standing on the step and looking at the sky. ‘When she was a child, her father was a bit heavy-handed with her. One of those dry, domineering men. There were often punishments of a formal cold-blooded kind. ‘See me in the library after tea.’ Not brutality. But talk, endless discussions about what would become of her character. She would stand there, fidgeting, while the words broke over her head. Disapproval is deadly poison, though; and she’d whiten with fatigue. And later, when I was brushing her hair, she’d begin to sob and go on and on even after she was in bed, not from remorse – heavens, no! – but from the feeling of coldness in those around her. I would go away, unable to help, and creep back a few minutes later with a warm drink. And there she’d be, her cheek turned to the pillow, beautifully asleep. And she’ll be asleep now. She’ll have quarrelled and cried and dropped off.’

She leant into the darkness and whistled for Hotchkiss. ‘Whereas you,’ she added, speaking in a low voice in the quiet air, ‘will lie awake half the night, feeling isolated and bewildered. And you won’t even know why.’

Hotchkiss did not come and she took up a torch and went into the garden to look for him.

*

Richard was sitting in his room at the Griffin, writing in his diary.

‘No mention for two days. Perhaps never again. But now these newspapers are a habit with me. I try to resist them, not to pick them up in the bar or the lounge, not to buy them, nor to go to the Reading Room at the Library. Because of the papers I see the thing differently now. What it really was, comes to me only occasionally and with sudden freshness and vividness, as a shock. And now, alone in my room, in this stale, fusty, damnable,
dead
room, I try to concentrate on it, to face it again as a real thing. But it is like trying to live over an old embrace. When I was a youth, I would attempt to do that, to go through it all again when I was alone, from the first touch. But always it evaded me. And this evades me. All feeling, excitement, flies and vanishes. So I am always alone.’

His hands felt suddenly too cold to write, although it was a warm night; he was conscious of a chill, a kind of paralysis creeping over him; his thighs froze, his wrists were ice on the edge of the dressing-table at which he wrote. He put his pen down quietly and covered his face with his hands.

Camilla sat at her mirror late that night. Candles passed light across her face, put a little flicker in her eyes, a blueish shadow in her armpit as she brushed her hair.

‘Alone!’ she said suddenly out loud, and her eyelids wavered at the unexpected sound of her voice in the quiet room.

She shook her hair back and felt the sweep of it across her bare shoulders. The caress of it against her skin disquieted her, and, when she looked into the mirror again, excitement, even beauty, had changed her face. She leant forward into the picture of the room behind her – some of Liz’s clothes lying untidily across her bed, the bed itself dinted from Liz’s flung-down body, as, distracted and frustrated, she had lain there
weeping, before she had suddenly roused herself, dried her eyes and begun to pack a few clothes, leaving a trail of disorder after her. In the picture framed by the mirror, Camilla’s bed primly awaited her, the sheet neatly turned back, and for once she thought without disgust of the great rumpled beds in Frances’s paintings which she had always looked at with fastidious, cold appraisal, but now longed for with the thought inherent in squeamish people that the sordid must always be truer to life than the agreeable.

The room was heaped with shadows and in the looking-glass was a dark background to the brilliance of her face, her throat and arms.

‘The candlelight!’ she thought, laying her brush down and leaning forward. ‘By candlelight, all women have some sort of beauty!’

Her flesh was golden as an apricot; her hair, in contrast, looked tarnished and harshly bright.

‘And there is no one to see,’ she thought. ‘In the day, I put on my tight face, my buttoned-up look. I hood my eyes, cover myself. But now, in my moment of beauty, there is no one to see me.’

She crossed her arms and slid down the ribbons of her nightgown from her shoulders. The picture in the mirror exasperated her. She remembered herself as a girl. The sharp white shoulders, the high bosom had so imperceptibly, yet so soon, assumed this heavy golden ripeness, and how much more abruptly would exchange maturity for old age. Not only the candlelight made her beauty seem precarious. In her youth, discipline, over-niceness had isolated her. Shyness, perhaps, or pride, had started her off in life with a false step, on the wrong foot. The first little mistake initiated all the others. So life gathered momentum and bore her away; she became colder, prouder, more deeply committed; and, because she had once refused, no more was
offered. Her habit now was negative. A great effort would be needed to break out of this isolation, which was her punishment from life for having been too exclusive; she must be humbled, be shamed in her own eyes, scheme and dissemble for what she wanted or it would be too late.

‘A hackneyed theme,’ she told herself, her stubborn daytime face suddenly reflected back.

She drew her nightgown up over her shoulders again and began rapidly to plait her hair.

The chalk breaking through the short turf looked like the very bones of the earth. From this distance the town seemed embowered in trees; the hot bare streets had contracted, the few factories shrunk down under the canopy of leaves.

But the Saxon earthworks, which, seen from the bedroom windows of the Griffin, had so exactly crowned the hill-top, were now, at this closer range, merely an unevenness in the chalk, a great wavering ridge of broken hillside, too large for any shape to be discerned.

Out of breath from their climb, Richard and Camilla sat down on the rim of this saucer-like hill-top, looking back towards the town. The fine grass was studded with flat round thistles, rosetted, set deep in the turf like buttons in upholstery. The tiny hovering moths were the same colour as the harebells, and of the same transparency.

‘You came here once before?’ Camilla asked, turning over to lie on her belly on the grass, half-propped up on her elbows.

He sat looking down at her. He looked so steadily that her glance faltered and she turned awkwardly away, putting up a hand to her carefully-done but loosening hair, which she
never could forget, and touched continually as if to reassure herself.

‘I was a boy then,’ he said jerkily.

‘I know.’

‘I came late one night, later than this. I sat down just about here and looked at the town.’

‘Why did you come?’

‘I was lonely,’ he said crossly.

‘But this would have made you lonelier.’ She turned to look at the great wavering line of chalk against the sky, the wide, empty landscape.

‘I don’t think so.’

The colour was drawn out of the day. They had taken a long time to walk here, had been drinking before that. She shivered now, lying against the turf which had less warmth than her body.

‘And when
you
came?’ he said, leaning a little towards her.

‘Oh, it was many times. With Liz. With books and breadand-cheese.’ She said this flatly and hurriedly as if those happy days had no meaning. She blew a strand of hair out of her eyes and he leaned closer to her and smoothed it back from her forehead. She closed her eyes. Her heart beat against the ground; it was as if the sound of it went deep into the earth. She felt thistles pressing through her dress. He took some of the pins from the top of her head and a wing of hair dropped against her cheek.

‘Please don’t!’ she said quickly, putting out her hand.

He leant right over her and loosened all her hair. She turned under him, her hands pressing his shoulders. Her hair had sprung out of its pins, as if it came down willingly. ‘Now forget it,’ he said. ‘I’ll think about it. Not you.’ He leaned back, still looking at her, and then suddenly laughed.

She felt flustered and upset, tremulous with vexation. His
behaviour toward her was intimate yet unadmiring, an easy kindness, which she had noticed in young men who are interested, not in women, but in other young men, and who imply that although the feminine secrets are laid bare to them, they will keep them and sustain them, but remain unmoved.

In the midst of her annoyance, he sighed sharply and turned his head restlessly to look at the sweep of the hillside, as if he were all at once overflowing with impatience.

‘What is it?’ she asked him.

His glance came back to her.

‘I don’t know. I suddenly feel I can’t
stand
anything any more … the boredom – hopelessness. I miss the war.’

Aghast, she said: ‘You were happier in the war?’

‘Men always are.’

‘Oh, no!’ Her denial was an entreaty, he thought.

‘My sort of men are.’

‘But you said …’

‘I said what?’ he asked quickly.

‘The first time I ever saw you, you told me that you’d had enough, that it stopped just in time, your nerve was going.’

‘My nerve has gone,’ he said quietly.

‘You need to be quiet and to rest,’ she suggested.

‘No. I need excitement, I need …’ he lifted his head, shut his eyes as if to concentrate, ‘things crashing against me, violence; the quiet will kill me.’

‘Why do you fear to be alone?’

‘The war. The war made it impossible.’

‘But even in war you were alone, in your sort of job …’

‘Oh yes,’ he agreed quickly. ‘Oh, I know.’ And then, ‘But it was somehow different.’

‘Why
have
you come here?’ she asked in a low voice, her face almost touching the grass, as she spoke. She waited, but she guessed that she would never get an honest answer from him.

He groped and hesitated and gave up. ‘To write my book,’ he said.

‘But you won’t write it.’

‘Yes, I shall. When I write, something goes out of me. It runs down my arm and out through my fingers.’ He laughed. ‘It spills over on to the page. It quietens me.’

‘What sort of book will that make?’ she asked.

He thought, not of the non-existent book, but of his diary, the way it drained the pain and frustration of the day out of him each night before he could sleep.

‘I can’t sleep,’ he said suddenly.

‘No, I can see that. You’ve the heightened excitability of people who lie awake at night.’

He was silent.

‘What is really wrong with you?’ she asked.

‘I have never known,’ he said quietly.

‘What happens?’

‘It must be the same for everyone. I think we all
are
the same, only I fail to conceal it.’

‘The same in what way?’

‘Isolated.’

‘There are other people always,’ she said. When she spoke to him, she looked into the grass, harebells brushed her forehead; but sometimes, as he was speaking, she flicked little glances at him.

‘Other people,’ he interrupted. ‘Other people began with my mother, I suppose. But she was locked away in misery. When she took me in her arms, she was staring over my shoulder at her own unhappiness. I felt alone. And I was alone. My father. Well, he beat me. While he was doing that I was utterly alone. Pain put me outside the world. “If only I were doing the thrashing!” I used to think. But nothing really quietens the heart.’

‘Heart?’ she repeated, in a puzzled voice.

‘And women. Love,’ he went on impatiently. ‘Where does it
lead
to, I wondered.’

‘Must it lead somewhere?’ She smiled.

‘For a few days it didn’t need to. Then it would all seem like a play I was acting in. Been acting in a long time. A long run, and I knew all my lines too well and was stale and boring everyone. But most of all myself. Then I tried death.’

‘Death?’

‘In the war,’ he said lightly. ‘I went up very close to it. My own and other people’s. And there it was. Unlike all the other things, it never changed. It was always real. I seem to carry the thought of it about with me.’

‘You mustn’t.’

‘Oh … I shan’t … it’s just that people are like doors. They all lead you into empty rooms. You pass through and are left with yourself. Only death goes through ahead of you.’

‘Life goes wherever you go …’

‘No. Life is left behind. Little bits break off in your hands and you drop them. The rooms lead only to death,’ he insisted.

‘They might lead to God,’ she suggested, but only to hold out some hope to him. She did not believe it herself.

A silence fell over him. For once, he did not take her up or interrupt. She tried to look at him, but could not. ‘I must see his face,’ she told herself. Her fingers tugged at and scattered the fine grass. Darkness was stealing up from the east and the earth seemed to reel over into shadow. She summoned all her willpower and sat up and looked straight at him. He was staring at her, and whatever she had expected was not there, for his face was expressionless.