A Wreath Of Roses (21 page)

And he was frightened of Mr Beddoes. He felt him to be more than a match for him, with his quiet waiting game. But he would escape him. In two days, three days, he would slip away. And tonight the thought of meeting Camilla offered a temporary safety.

‘I won’t take her to that house,’ he suddenly decided. ‘But somewhere quiet, where we can talk. I’ll drop all that game and tell her the truth instead. I’ll shut my eyes fast and go on through the whole story, unhurried and monotonous, the flat, undaunted and intolerable truth. As if she were my diary. It will be a great burden to lay down. A wonderful relief. In all the world, who else would listen to me; who else would hear me to the end?’

‘I want to show you a house. The house I lived in as a boy. Drink that up and come with me.’

‘Why this evening?’ Camilla asked, putting down her empty glass.

‘It’s a special day. My mother’s birthday. Goodnight, George.’

‘Good-evening, sir. Good-evening, madam.’

‘I’m not sure that I approve of all this harking back,’ Camilla said, out on the pavement. ‘Which way?’

‘Along here.’

They set off with the sun in their eyes.

‘My book stirs it all up,’ he said.

‘You are making a myth out of your childhood, a kind of legend out of your mother.’

‘
Your
mother’s still alive.’

‘Yes, she’s certainly alive. And ah so busy. Domineering other women on committees, but being submissive in the home. I’ve failed, of course, because I have no man to devote my life to. But my brothers, she implies, have done well to escape that devotion.’

‘You should marry me,’ he said.

If this were not irrelevant, it was insulting, she decided.

‘Why don’t you?’

‘I’ve told you. I’m not in love with you, and I don’t approve of the way you live.’

‘I learnt it in the war.’

‘The war’s over now.’

‘I’ve promised you, I’ll stop. I’m going to … I’m going up North, to Edinburgh. To please you, I would even grovel to my father for money to see me through.’

‘It is absurd not to borrow it from me.’

He made no answer.

‘How are you going to get your luggage out?’ she asked. She had begun to wonder this in the middle of the night.

‘You must leave it to me. It’s the sort of thing I can do – the spice of life.’

‘I shan’t ever know what happens to you.’ She looked away, her slanting, embarrassed glance. Because he said nothing, she was obliged to go on. ‘Shall you write to me?’

‘I’m not very good at putting pen to paper,’ he said cruelly.

‘A fine thing for a writer to say.’

‘Of course I shall write to you.’

‘Next term!’ she thought. She would read the letters by the gas-fire in the bed-sitting room.

‘How far is this house?’

‘Not very far.’

‘It is true,’ she thought. ‘I hate him and desire him. I mock
him, I chide him, I despise him, but all my body shakes at his touch, and when he goes away I shall despair.’

A little breeze swirled dust along at their feet. The street was quiet.

‘Here it is!’ he said.

He knew at once that he had been clever in choosing his house; for she stopped, her face grew intent, her eyes narrowed dreamily. He took her arm and drew her closer to him. They stood together on the pavement, and looked up at the dusty windows.

‘Yes,’ she said softly. ‘I can imagine it all going on inside such a house.’

‘It was a different house then.’

‘Of course.’

He seemed dreadfully struck with animation, as if only the past vivified him.

‘Let us knock on the door and ask the way somewhere,’ she suggested. ‘It would give us a peep into the hall.’

‘If someone came to your house and asked to look inside it because they once lived there, would you refuse?’ he asked her.

‘No. Of course, I shouldn’t.’

‘Then let us ask it.’

‘Good heavens no! They might be most put out.’

‘Why think so much worse of other people, than of yourself?’ he asked.

‘
You
go!’

‘I want you to see.’

‘Very well. But if he – she – is cross, I shall take to my heels and run.’

The gate was tipped with cast-iron fleur-de-lys; it groaned as they pushed it open. Brown and yellow broken tiles led to the front door.

‘Hollybank,’ she murmured, her eyes on the fan-light.

He drew out a rusty bell which jangled through the house.

‘I’m afraid,’ she whispered. There was goose-flesh on her arms, although it was a warm evening. ‘There’s no one in.’

But footsteps echoed along a tiled hall, a profile appeared against the dark blue and garnet glass panel.

What most dismayed Camilla, appeared to give Richard confidence.

The woman’s face looked grey against her brassy hair which was mole-coloured near her scalp. Her neck-line went diving down in a vain attempt to reveal her bosom; a gold cross hung above. Just as Camilla was preparing for flight, Richard launched into his story.

‘Why not?’ the woman said kindly. ‘Step inside and excuse the mess, won’t you?’

Richard clasped Camilla’s hand firmly.

‘I wanted to bring my fiancée,’ he was saying, having discarded the explanation about writing his autobiography.

The smell was suffocating. Cats had wetted the carpets for centuries, Camilla decided. Bushels of onions had been fried. No one had washed, or opened a window. A perambulator stood on one side of the hall-stand, a bicycle on the other.

‘Where d’you want to start?’ the woman asked, throwing open doors hospitably. ‘We haven’t been here very long ourselves. Only the twelve-month.’

Impossible, in a year, to heap so much litter into a house, Camilla thought, trying not to have any expression on her face.

‘Grandma, here’s a gentleman who used to live here.’

An old woman, who had seemed to be a mound of rusty clothes, stirred and lifted her head. Her hands lay on her lap as if they were separate from her body, two little sleeping animals. Behind her, french windows opened on to a verandah. The frail beauty of the room, with its fine proportions, its round-topped windows, was no longer to be seen, so much distracted the eye, so many ornaments, so much odd and disintegrating furniture,
so many photographs of children with teddy-bears and white socks.

‘My mother used to sit there just as you are,’ Richard said to the old lady. He went across the room and looked into the garden. One or two laurel bushes did indeed grow in the beaten earth, but nothing else. For the rest, the garden was decorated with buckled-up bed-ends and a row of napkins.

‘It must break his heart,’ Camilla thought.

The old woman said nothing. She stared before her, propped up in her chair, inanimate. ‘It is what is called the evening of her life,’ Camilla decided in disgust.

‘You must take a peep upstairs,’ the younger woman was saying.

‘Oh, no, we have troubled you too much …’ Camilla protested.

‘No trouble. So long as you excuse the muddle. We’re a bit upside-down today.’

‘And tomorrow and tomorrow …’ Camilla thought, and Richard took her hand again and led her from the room.

On the half-landing they met a girl on her way down. So polished, so clean was she, so dazzling-white in her linen frock, that it was difficult to imagine her emerging from a room in that house, or even going down the staircase without getting soiled. She smelt sweet, she tinkled softly with bracelets, a fine gold chain was clasped round her bare brown ankle above her white shoe.

‘Going out, Margie?’ the other woman asked her.

‘I’m late.’

She looked without curiosity at Richard and Camilla and disappeared downstairs.

‘My sister,’ the woman said. As she went on upstairs in front of them, yellowed heels were lifted out of her feathered slippers. ‘This is her room. She won’t mind.’

The same litter. Clothes cascaded out of drawers, powder was white over the furniture and the mirrors, shoes across the floor.

‘And this is mine and Grannie’s. Oh, pardon, I’ve forgot to make the bed.’

Camilla stood in the passage, but caught a glimpse in the wardrobe-mirror of a large orange cat asleep on some rumpled bedclothes. ‘His mother’s room, I daresay,’ she thought.

Stair-carpet changed to linoleum on the next flight of stairs. Outside the landing window were two cowls turning slowly.

‘Oh, I remember!’ he cried. ‘They frightened me so when I was little. I was scared to come past this window as it grew dark. I thought they were two nuns.’

‘My kiddies say the same,’ the woman agreed.

In the room Richard decided to claim as once his own, three children lay asleep. ‘Doreen, Joycie, Ivor,’ their mother introduced them.

‘We shall disturb them,’ Camilla whispered, drawing back on to the landing.

‘I like to pop up to see if they’re all right. I’m always up and downstairs to them. I love children.’

‘They are all yours?’

‘Doreen’s my sister’s really.’

Camilla murmured.

‘Yes, I love children. Sometimes I come up at night and take a look at them, and I think to myself “I wonder what I should do, if I came in one morning and found them lying there dead”.’

‘You mustn’t think things like that,’ Camilla said robustly.

‘There’s no stopping me, I’m afraid,’ she said with pride. ‘But I don’t want any more. I said to Grandma, “Grandma I’ve had my whack. If I fall again, I throw myself in the river.” I mustn’t depress you though, just engaged. I was three days in labour with Ivor. I’m small, of course. Yes, ever so small.’

Richard came out of the bedroom and joined them.

‘The doctor I had to Ivor said to me “You’re exceptionally small, Mrs Mortimer. Really made more like a girl of twelve. You’ll never have an easy time.” Margie’s different. Seen all you want to.” she asked pleasantly. ‘I won’t ask you down in the basement, if you’ll excuse me. We’re in rather a pickle down there.’

‘It’s been very kind of you.’

‘Not at all. I like a chat. I don’t see much company. Not like Margie. Come and have a drink with Grandma, won’t you?’

‘We must go …’ Richard began, but he stopped by the landing window and stared out. ‘It’s queer and disturbing … those nuns. And the virginia-creeper on the wall. I used to unstick it from this sill. It all seems so far away, like another world.’

He felt the two women watching him. Camilla looked away first. The other had tears in her eyes. He suddenly wished that Camilla was not there. And because he knew she wanted to escape, he allowed himself to be urged into the room where Grandma sat, and watched while crême-de-menthe was poured out into some fancy tumblers. Grandma drank hers calmly as if it were milk, and put the glass aside.

‘Yes, it’s a lovely colour,’ her grand-daughter agreed, sipping and holding the smeared glass against the light.

Camilla put her lips to it reluctantly – the dirty tumbler, the sticky scalding sweetness.

Richard’s manner, she could not help observing, was slightly tinged with flirtation toward this frightening woman. The evening was like a nightmare to her, in every way, and she stood nervously beside him, full of impatience and distress.

When at last they were waved away, she took the outside air into her lungs greedily, as if it would cleanse them. He walked away from the house without speaking, and once looked back.

‘That was dreadful for you,’ she said at last.

‘Dreadful?’

‘To see your mother’s house, her room …’

‘It was so different – only bits reminded me …’

‘It was silly to go. It is always silly to do that sort of thing. Painful and depressing.’

‘I couldn’t resist it.’

‘That dreadful woman too,’ she said wearily.

‘I’m sorry about it. Forgive me.’

‘Let us go somewhere and forget it. Somewhere quiet. And clean.’

Liz was bored with the evening before it started. ‘Why does it seem so dull?’ she wondered, ‘so different from other years?’ What had most checked her happiness or altered her viewpoint; marriage, or child-birth, or her broken friendship?

‘People change,’ she thought, looking out of the window above the sink where she was doing Harry’s washing. ‘They change from year to year, and from place to place, and it always is a great blow in the breast to find one’s friends have altered as much as one has oneself; especially if it is not along the same lines.’

She rinsed out the napkins and carried them to the clothesline. Camilla had gone out; Frances was still painting. The evening yawned at her, timeless, empty. Hotchkiss lay outside the kitchen-door asleep. Each time his side went down, his ribs stuck out like a hay-rake.

She wandered back through the house, peeped at Harry, tidied the bedroom. ‘Thomas Aquinas,’ she read aloud, picking up a new book from beside Camilla’s bed. She looked inside it, but it was all about nothing, like Arthur’s books. Very sketchily, she brushed her hair and put on the ring Frances had given her.