A Wreath Of Roses (25 page)

‘Something occurred to me. All of a sudden, I thought marriage
is
an institution. It is a thing we build up, not perfect, but real. I can’t express myself,’ she added lamely, ‘but it was an important thought, I thought.’

Hidden between the bean-row and the hedge, he caught her up and embraced her, his soft kisses over her face and upon her hair. ‘She talks so much nonsense,’ he thought, ‘distracts me with such banalities; but she is sweet; she is so very sweet; in a
way no other woman is, even the women whom I most admire.’

And it was as if Lady Davidson had risen, given the signal to the other ladies, and withdrawn.

Camilla was sitting at the dressing-table writing a cheque, when Liz came in to feed Harry. She folded it and put it in her pocket and took up her comb: all her movements too careless by half, Liz thought.

‘Are you going out?’

‘Yes.’

Liz put safety-pins in her mouth so that she could not be expected to answer.

Suddenly Camilla turned round and her hands parted in that gesture which means ‘I cannot keep it from you – here it is – the truth!’ and she said, with some courage: ‘Liz, do bear with me. It isn’t for long … tomorrow … or the day after … he’s going away. I shan’t see him again, I expect, but the thought of him, the idea of it all, colours my life for the moment, and the promise of having letters from him helps me to face the next term.’

Liz took the pins from her mouth and asked: ‘Are you going to marry him?’

‘You know I am not.’

‘Why are you suddenly so lonely?’

‘I feel such utter blankness, the future looks so desolate. No worse for me, I know, than many other women; but you have Harry, and Arthur.’

‘But you are always scornful of Arthur.’

‘He has the faults of his sex, but much of the excellence too. And if he is a little proud, and a little self-important, those qualities have good things attached to them. He wouldn’t fall below his idea of himself, nor fail to uphold you. He has a solid worth,
a steadying influence, and – how lucky! – the virtues that are rewarded on earth as well as in heaven. You are better off in the circle of his life, than on your own for the rest of your days.’

‘Yes, I have just been thinking that,’ Liz said. ‘It will seem strange in a day or two, with Arthur gone, your … this Richard gone, and Morland …’

‘Morland?’ Camilla asked in surprise.

‘He said he must go in a couple of days. We shall be all on our own again, like other years. And I am so afraid you’ll be unhappier than you were before.’

‘I suppose so. It’s odd, but I almost wish Morland were staying.’

She stood up and put on her jacket. Liz said: ‘I do want you to know that I care for you very much, and that I want you to be happy.’ A pain rose in her throat, then slowly subsided. She was always unsteady with tears; emotion bruised her too easily; she cried over books and in the cinema; at weddings, at processions. She could not say ‘Many happy returns of the day’, or hear the National Anthem played without her eyes brimming over.

Camilla gave her a little awkward sideways glance, standing with her hands touching the dressing-table.

‘I shall have to go,’ she said.

‘Goodbye, then.’

‘Goodbye, Liz dear.’

She shut the door very quietly after her and ran down the stairs.

Liz sat and looked at the dressing-table over her baby’s head. A clean piece of blotting-paper with a few words printed across it lay there beside Camilla’s pen and cheque-book. Each time she looked away, curiosity drew her glance back again. Presently, she carried the baby across the room and holding him on one arm, still at her breast, quickly put up the sheet of
blotting-paper against the light. She could read the name ‘Richard Elton Esq’ very plainly and having seen what she had feared she glanced over her shoulder guiltily, ashamed of her behaviour and trembling, too, with a presentiment of disaster.

Later in the evening Morland arrived. He had walked very slowly along the closed-in lanes towards the cottage. The countryside had a curious intentness as if it were listening; each flower stood still, awaiting the storm; in the fields the cows had gone down on their knees.

Under the hard light, the flint cottages were sharply grey and white, bricks brilliantly red. It looked a primitive landscape with wooden figures standing at doorways watching the sky, or taking down linen from clothes-lines.

Liz was playing the piano, the only scrap of music she could remember from her childhood –
Chanson Triste
, though it was not triste at all, only flat and dreary. He walked up the path and leant through the open window. His shadow darkened the room and she turned round, startled.

‘Ah, Morland!’

Her hands dropped into her lap.

‘You always have your tongue hanging out when you play?’ he asked.

‘It is a sign that I am trying hard.’

‘The music was a sign of that.’

She closed down the lid of the piano. ‘You shatter all my dreams,’ she said, swivelling round on the music-stool and facing him. The vast hushed audience, the orchestra fading out …’ her hands spread wide dramatically … ‘and then me, I, galloping away into my solo, white hands going up and down, reflected in the concert grand …’

‘You go to the cinema too much,’ he said, leaning on the window-sill, among the cactus plants.

‘I especially like the dreamy bits where I gaze at the ceiling and smile to myself; you can’t see my hands then, only my shoulders moving …’ Her eyes swam.

‘What are you wearing?’ he asked politely.

‘I think dark green velvet. Perhaps none of this is very real to you,’ she suggested.

‘Better than real.’

‘Did you never dream things like that?’

‘Different things. Physical danger, and I saving the school sergeant from drowning. He used to go down on his knees and thank me every night before I slept. And sometimes the Cricket Captain clapped his hand on my back, speechless with emotion and admiration. Other times, I was lying in a mortuary with the Headmaster pacing up and down beating his knuckles on his brow, full of dark regrets, but too late …’

‘And when you grew up?’

The same sort of thing … Morland saying the right word at the right time, then exit. Middle-of-the-night wit.’

He disappeared from the window and came in through the door.

‘Really famous people …’ Liz began, winding herself up and then down on the music-stool … ‘do you think they ever dream foolish scenes like that? The sort I dream – how I wrote a wonderful play and made a speech at the first-night …’

‘What did you wear?’ he asked again.

‘White crêpe … Draped.’ She draped the skirt about her with her hands. ‘Arthur was in one box, Noel Coward in another. I smiled a little smile at both.’

‘Ever been a ballerina with baskets of roses going up, and generals standing up in the boxes shouting “brava”?’

‘No. That will do for another time. I wonder if Frances … for I suppose that she is famous in a way …’

‘Where is she this evening?’

‘In the shed …’

‘And Camilla?’

‘Gone out.’ She looked blankly at him for a second, sensed a profound uneasiness in him and then went on rather lamely: ‘I wonder if Frances dreams of … I can’t really imagine what …’

‘Her work is her dream. Anything else would be a distraction.’

Both talked of one thing, were thinking of another.

‘No glamour, enchantment?’

‘The reality must be such an enchantment, that applause afterwards would be only an echo of it. Artists do indeed inherit the earth.’

‘They suffer though,’ Liz said. (In such a
nice
way,’ she thought. It was a suffering she could easily bear for them to have.)

‘We all suffer.
They
put it to good account.’

‘I call it passing the buck,’ she murmured; then made haste to agree with him. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said vaguely, ‘they work away like beavers and turn the grit into a pearl. And what is so funny about that?’ she asked, joining in his laughter.

Frances put aside her brush with a feeling of great weariness. She sat down and darkened her eyes with her hands, tired, but not as dejected as she looked. Liz had stopped playing the piano and she could hear talking and, once, a great burst of laughter. She supposed that Morland had come, and at the thought of him looked up at her unfinished picture, trying to take it unawares, as painters do, and failed, as they must always fail.

As she looked at it, panic beat about in her. She had no way to turn. There is no past: for an artist. What is done is cast away, good only for the time of its creation. Work is the present and the immediate future; but her immediate future was a blank; the present this half-finished painting.

The mistake is listening to others,’ she told herself. ‘One has little enough of one’s own, but they will strip it away, with their kindness and their good advice. It is best to turn to no one, to seek to please no one, to paint as if there were only oneself in the world. The pleasure of others is a by-product after all, and if ever the whispering voices are allowed to crowd out the one voice, the result is this …’ She took the picture roughly in her hands, the paint tacky against her palms … ‘a sort of high-pitched silliness, a terrible silliness.’ She stared down at the creamy-pink and yellow picture, half a mirror with reflected hands lifting a wreath of roses, a flash of golden hair. ‘It is like Ophelia handing out her flowers,’ she thought. The last terrible gesture but one.’

As if to rid herself of the sight of it, she took the canvas and leant it with its wet paint to the wall. She would never finish it.

‘Yes. Ophelia!’ she thought, wiping her fingers on a rag. On the bench lay the wreath of roses she had twisted together the day before. She picked it up, and the petals were soft and dead to touch, and warm from the sunlight. ‘I shan’t paint again,’ she thought. ‘It is time to finish.’

She heard footsteps along the gravel and when Morland tapped at the door she went quickly to unlock it.

‘Are you still working?’

He looked at her with love and concern as she stood in the doorway still holding the wreath of flowers. Then she smiled and shook her head.

‘Liz says your coffee will be cold.’

‘I’m coming.’ She turned the key in the lock and dropped it into her pocket.

‘What is that for?’ he asked, touching the faded garland.

‘Oh, it is dead.’

He put his arm through hers and they walked up the garden towards the cottage. A large drop of rain fell on the path before
them, and the poplar trees by the hedge clattered their leaves in a sudden gust of wind.

To walk in so curious a light was like swimming under water,’ Camilla thought.

When Richard turned and held out his hand, she took it gratefully, for the turf was slithery, the hill steep, and it was her second time of climbing it that day.

The world seemed to fall away from them as they went higher, the landscape widened. Below them, rooks made a commotion over the tops of the trees, and other birds, chalk-white, swooped in great arcs against the darkening sky.

‘Gulls,’ she said, stopping to look up at them. ‘If it is going to rain …’

‘It won’t be much.’

She stooped and unbuckled her sandals so that she could walk barefoot on the grass. He stood watching her.

‘What did you do at the picnic?’ he asked.

‘Oh … ate and talked.’

‘To whom?’

To … why, to the others, of course,’ she said, looking up in surprise.

‘Who went?’

‘Liz and her husband and Frances. And the baby, of course. And a friend of Frances’s.’

They walked along the ridge of the earthworks for a little way and then began to climb again towards the Clumps.

‘And what did you do all day?’ she asked him.

‘I was waiting for you. I knew that you would come. I was afraid to leave the bar.’

‘All day?’ She gave him a little, wry, wife’s smile.

‘In the afternoon … you will despise me for this, I’m afraid.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I went back to that house.’

She flushed.

‘I knew I shouldn’t tell you,’ he said quickly. ‘I wished everything to be perfect this evening.’

‘But why did you go?’

‘I don’t know. I felt drawn back. I took some flowers to that woman as an excuse for calling there again.’

‘I think she is a harlot,’ Camilla said in a constrained, defiant voice. ‘Isn’t she?’

He laughed. ‘Harlot’s a very grand word for anything she might be,’ he said.

‘The sister, then.’

‘You find the idea irresistible,’ he said. ‘Women always do.’

Now they had climbed to the top of the hill and the great clumps of trees threw out their darkness over them. It was, as Camilla had said before, a dismal place full of charred wood and litter. The boles of the trees erupted with bottles, with bone-white flints and rusty tins. Moss covered the ground, and patches of fine grass.