A Wreath Of Roses (26 page)

They sat down to rest. The sky was a mulberry colour now and the trees were strangely lucid against it.

‘I can’t stay there any longer,’ Richard said, looking down at the town in the valley.

‘What has happened?’

‘I shall tell you later.’

His hand shook as he lit his cigarette.

‘I have always lost other people through telling lies,’ he said. ‘I am afraid to lose you through telling the truth.’

‘You are going to lose me anyhow if you go away.’

He smoothed her hair back from her forehead. ‘You know, when I first saw you, I thought you rather plain. I wonder why?’

‘It seems so long ago. That horrible afternoon. Such strange things cut across one’s tracks.’

‘Forget it.’

‘I try to.’

‘What will you do when I’ve gone away?’

‘For the rest of the holiday I shall sit and read in the garden and take the dog for walks and go down to the Hand and Flowers for a drink in the evenings …’ She picked up a large flint and seemed to weigh it as she considered the future. Then she threw it away impatiently. ‘And after that I’ll go home and get ready for next term; distemper my room, perhaps; have other women in for coffee; go to lectures … wait for your letters,’ she added. ‘At half-term, I shall go to Cambridge for the weekend, to see my mother, and she’ll be apologetic about me to all her friends because I have never managed to get married. And I’ll become cussed and off-hand, and they’ll all say I’m soured and difficult. And so I am.’

A large drop of rain splashed on her face and another on her hand.

‘It’s going to pour,’ she said, glancing up at the sky.

‘Those are heat spots.’

They could see the storm gathering over the valley. The discoloured sky was veined suddenly with lightning. The gulls had vanished and the rooks were silent.

‘Are you afraid of thunder?’ he asked her.

She only laughed.

‘No, she would have no womanish fears,’ he thought. ‘Women who live alone grow out of those things. Or they never grow into them.’

The rain came sharply on the leaves above them and they drew back into shelter. They stood, hand in hand, leaning against a tree, looking down over the valley, which seemed to be boiling, with great clouds of vapour rising.

‘What time are you going? Shall I come to see you off?’ she asked.

‘No.’

He frowned: with impatience, she thought.

Now you’re angry again. I never know …’

‘Shall we go?’ he asked roughly.

She looked helplessly out at the rain, and then, without speaking, she knelt down and fastened her sandals and followed him, stumbling over the rough-edged stones and the roots of the trees.

‘This is a short cut down the hillside,’ she said curtly, leading the way along a winding path between the wayfaring trees.

‘It’s easing up,’ he observed.

It was doing nothing of the kind. Her sleeves began to cling to her arms, her hair darkened with rain. They walked downhill without speaking. Brown water plaited its way along the sides of the gravelly lane.

‘There was a house where we used to get tea,’ Camilla began. ‘The Old Vicarage.’

‘You will scarcely get tea now,’ he said.

‘They might let us shelter.’

He said nothing.

‘Before we are soaked to the skin,’ she added.

“‘Soured and difficult”,’ he repeated quietly. ‘Yes, I can see what you meant.’

‘Oh Lord, now we are quarrelling,’ she told herself. ‘We are going to quarrel away the rest of our time together.’

‘There are no weapons you disdain,’ she observed.

‘None.’

‘And you disarm other people first with your self-pity.’

‘Here is your old vicarage, I should think.’

Iron railings had lurched into nettles, ivy covered the walls and fringed the narrow pointed windows.

‘The woman may remember me. I shall ask if we can wait until the rain has stopped.’

They walked down the rough path with their heads bent against the warm driving rain. In the porch, broken glass on the ground checked them. Yellow frogs leapt away into the ferns.

‘It’s empty!’ Camilla said. ‘There’s no one here.’ She wiped the rain from her eyelashes and looked up at the front of the house. Some of the dirty windows had great stars of broken glass. By the hedge she could see now the ‘To Let’ notice, leaning among the mauve-flowered brambles. Cabbages seeded among the weeds, lettuces had bolted, standing high, like pagodas; convolvulus climbed over a bush of moss roses.

Richard tried the door, but it was locked. They looked through the windows into bare rooms, stained wallpapers with the pale oblongs where large pictures had hung. Cobwebs draped each corner, fireplaces were strewn with the ashes of some long-ago fires.

They walked round to the back, keeping close to the sides of the walls. Moss grew in the drains, groundsel in the brick path. The kitchen door was unlocked and they went in.

‘I wonder what happened,’ Camilla said, and her voice ran round the walls.

A calendar of the year before hung on the back of the door, but the house might have been empty for generations. A great spider sat in the sink, the tracks of slugs silvered the stone floor.

In the hall, he said: ‘Let us pretend we are married to one another and coming to live here in this house.’

She put her hand on the newel of the banisters and looked up the winding stairs.

‘It would invite disaster to live in a house like this. I never came inside it before. We used to have tea under a walnut tree in the garden – rustic work table and chairs, tablecloth flapping, little spiders coming down on long threads out of the branches …’

He was not listening. He was walking from one room to
another, leaving wet footprints over the floorboards; each room echoed to the ceiling as he trod about. He came back into the dark hall.

‘What is wrong?’ she asked him.

‘Let us see upstairs.’ With his foot on the bottom step, he turned suddenly and took her in his arms. ‘I am sorry about this,’ he said, smoothing her wet hair. ‘And I am sorry for all the hurtful things I ever said to you.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘I love you.’

‘I don’t think so. But that doesn’t matter either.’

‘Why did you ask me what was wrong? In what way? What did you mean?’

‘I thought you seemed restless and unhappy again.’

‘But
you
quieten me, cover my nerves. Let’s go upstairs.’

‘What was that noise?’ she whispered.

‘Only thunder.’

‘It sounded like someone moving furniture about on the bare floors. What would happen if anyone came?’

She went slowly upstairs in front of him, a little afraid. Rain swept across the landing window. The banisters were coated with dust.

At the turn of the stairs, he came close behind her, and put his hands round her waist. Fear leapt through her at his touch. She stopped and turned round, her hand clutching the banisters. She could feel sweat breaking out over her body.

‘I don’t want to go any farther,’ she whispered. Her lips stiffened so that she could scarcely speak. ‘I can’t bear this house a moment longer.’ He only stared at her. ‘Richard!’ she said pleadingly, afraid of the silence.

‘But I want to stay.’ He caught her wrist and held it very tightly. ‘I have something to say to you.’

‘Say it outside. You know I will listen to you.’

‘This place is better. No one can hear us. We are out of the rain, and alone.’

‘Are you ill?’

‘No, I’m not ill.’

‘What is it that you want to say? You are hurting my arm.’

‘How can I tell you when you are angry?’ He loosened his grip of her wrist, stared at the marks he had made there, tried to stroke them away.

‘I killed a girl,’ he said casually.

She began to walk down the stairs again, a little in front of him, her legs heavy as if she were walking in a nightmare, loud seas pounding in her ears.

‘Why are you afraid?’ he asked.

Looking down into the dark hall, she said: ‘I’m not afraid.’

He took her by the shoulders. ‘I wouldn’t hurt you.’

‘Of course not.’

‘All you have to do is listen.’

‘Tell me then.’

‘From the beginning cruelty always frightened me but I liked frightening myself, and other people. If dogs cowered when I hit them, I hit them all the more. When I was a child, I had to take a much younger child to school. I used to set off from the house, very mealy-mouthed to his mother, and then one day I began to run on ahead. I knew it was wrong. I knew I should always remember it with disgust. It sickened me at the time to look back and see his terror, his fat little legs trying to run, his face red, his mouth open, blubbering. But I couldn’t stop. The more I was disgusted, the faster I ran, on and on, only slowing down so that I could keep him in sight and enjoy his terror. It gave me a strange feeling of excitement and tension. I was always bored as a child and lonely. A dull home, a dull provincial town, Sunday walks in my best clothes, stuffed and uncomfortable, watching my reflection going along in shop blinds; Chapel,
Sunday-school. I used to sit on the edge of my bed and feel a dreadful kind of power rushing up through my body. Only bouts of cruelty quietened me. I liked frightening people, liked frightening myself. But nothing went deep enough to quieten me for long. There seemed to be hours and hours of sitting there on my bed, wondering what to do next.’

He put his hand on her throat, touched the throbbing pulse with his fingers. She tried to speak, but the words seemed too heavy to utter.

‘Love was nothing,’ he said, and kissed her mouth. They stared at one another. ‘Nothing touched me. Making love exasperated me. Every depravity angered me. I was cruel to that girl. She had frightened little ways, and I frightened her till she died.’

‘You couldn’t have done that,’ she whispered.

‘No. I strangled her.’

‘What had she done to you?’

‘Nothing. But she bored me, irritated me. I thought death would be more interesting perhaps than love. I thought it might finish something that love never finished. And the excitement of outwitting other people …’

‘Are you sorry now?’

‘It isn’t real. She wasn’t real to me and now I’ve forgotten. I didn’t even remember her name until I read it afterwards in newspapers.’ He touched his pocket, hesitated, and then put his hand back on the banisters, very close to hers.

‘At first when I came here, I was in high spirits. I felt excited and tense. Then the loneliness began again. That frowsty hotel bedroom. The time dragged. And then I started to lose my nerve. I began to know that I hadn’t been so clever, that the police know things sometimes and keep quiet about them. For a long time. No, don’t interrupt me. You didn’t guess all this about me, did you?’

She shut her eyes. ‘No, not all this.’ She thought: ‘But cruelty goes from strength to strength. I ought to have feared him more than I did.’

‘You don’t know anything about me.’

‘No.’

‘People like me don’t come into your life.’

She moved her head.

‘But you thought it might be interesting to have a change …’

‘There was no choice. There were no others …’ She moved angrily, as if she would wrest herself away from him, but he caught her arm again.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

‘I told you that I’m going away.’

‘Another hotel bedroom. And so on for the rest of your life.’

‘I have a dislike of being watched. There are probably others with that man. When he is ready, at a glance from him, they’ll close in, without any warning. At present it is all a dream. But suppose it suddenly became real, suppose I woke up in a cell one morning and heard a voice in my mind saying: “This is real. At last it is real.” Would you wish that for me?’

‘Not for anyone.’

‘Some women like to be treated cruelly …’

Stepping after him from one irrelevancy to another, she tried to follow the direction of his thoughts, to make out his intention. ‘So I have heard,’ she said.

‘But I wouldn’t harm you. I wrote in my diary that I would never touch you in any way but kindness …’

She tried not to glance down at her wrist, so tightly screwed in his fingers that she felt it was on fire. ‘If ever I get out of here,’ she thought, ‘I am entangled in this horror for the rest of my life.’

‘You are thinking I am hurting you
now
,’ he said slyly.

‘He
is the sort of person,’ she thought again and again. The
other world, the world of violence, of people in newspapers, crept round about her, a world she had scarcely believed in. Parting the leaves to look for treasure, love, adventure, she inadvertently disclosed evil, and recoiled. ‘He is like this empty, cobwebbed house,’ she thought. ‘Room after room is full of echoes, there’s nothing there.’