A Wreath Of Roses (6 page)

‘I think you do. But you blame me, then, for disloyalty?’

Camilla said nothing. She lay very still in bed.

‘I am
loyal to him, except to you.’

‘And to Frances.’

‘To you and Frances, then.’

‘So loyalty is a question of numbers? Two is all right.’

‘I have to be up at six,’ Liz said. ‘For Harry. So I shall go to sleep, I think.’

‘Goodnight, then.’

‘Goodnight.’

They both appeared to fall into a deep and steady sleep at once; and then suddenly Liz laughed and said in a changed, a warmer voice: ‘Goodnight, Cam.’

‘Goodnight, Liz dear.’ And as Camilla laughed too, Frances, in the next room, rapped angrily upon the wall.

‘Here is a beautiful book!’ said Camilla, following Liz across the landing.

‘Where did you find it?’

‘It was wedging the mirror.’

She began to read from it, standing in her nightgown in the early sunshine. Liz put the baby back in his cot and began to go downstairs to make tea.

‘It is called
Exemplary Women,’
Camilla continued, and followed Liz downstairs.

Hotchkiss lay under the table and the kitchen smelt of him. He opened a bloodshot eye sulkily and kept it open, seemed to follow Liz round the kitchen with it.

When Camilla opened the door to let him out, birds burst up out of bushes, flurrying the leaves, plunged into the dense creeper over the walls. The garden was still, soaked with dew, veiled with a pearly light as if sponged with milk. A little tree of morello cherries seemed painted upon the sky, its fruit luminously red like cherries on a hat.

‘After the town …!’ Camilla began, breathing in the sweetness of the garden, ‘after the soiledness of everything,
all you touched greased over, contaminated by other people’s hands!’ She glanced at the dusty book she was holding and her interest was at once diverted from the beauties of nature.

‘Listen, Liz! Here is one for you. “The Solemnity of Wedlock”. For seldom, we fear, does the bride, half-smiling, half-weeping beneath her crown of orange-blossoms, appreciate the character of the sacrifice she has made. Too often does she wake up with a sudden surprise to the awful breadth and depth of the chasm that lies between her wifehood and her maidenhood, the
now
and the
then
. She misses the mother, the sister, the tender felicities of home, the cherished places, the favourite pursuits, the old singleness of heart, the old serenity of mind, the delightful yet sober freedom of her blissful girlish days. She looks around, and unless she loves – loves long and deeply and worthily – she sees a blank and dreary void, and her heart aches with a dumb, dull pain …”’

‘You are making it up,’ said Liz, coming to the door and looking over Camilla’s shoulder. ‘It sounds like Sappho. Quick! The milkman is coming!’

Camilla, in her nightgown, stepped behind the opened door and continued to read Liz made the tea.

‘And here is something for me. “Surely a cheerful and happy old maid is less to be pitied than a loveless or neglected wife.” And, now, Jeremy Taylor on celibacy.’

The milk was left on the doorstep, the footsteps retreated, and Camilla came back into the sunshine.

‘Where did Frances get these books?’

‘They were her mother’s.’

They sat on the table and sipped their tea. As the kitchen grew warmer, flies began to circulate or went up and down the windows with a drowsy sound.

*

Frances awoke to her moss-roses. Each morning they annoyed her more, so endlessly repeated on a thick black trellis over the wall-paper, peeling away near the ceiling in places, leaving a powdery-looking but still flowered pattern exposed beneath. Violets, the one before last, Frances decided. Unless periwinkles. She thought about wall-papers, closing her eyes. She had painted many in her time, the great blown roses in the bedrooms of small French hotels: they had come into her pictures of littered chimney-pieces, rooms reflected in mirrors, the crumpled, tumbled beds, the naked girl holding her silk stocking to the light, her skin cream and apricot against the brilliant, the shocking crimsons, pinks, vermilions of the wall. Then sometimes pale satin-striped or faintly wreathed papers in rooms running with gilt and sunlight, so drenched in glitter that even carpets seemed to reflect molten gold. The insides of houses, glimpses out of windows or through windows, the hand she had put out to try to arrest the passing scene. She closed her eyes and bunches of roses were printed for an instant, startlingly white upon the darkness, then faded, as the darkness itself paled, the sun from the window coming brilliantly through her lids. Trying to check life itself, she thought, to make some of the hurrying everyday things immortal, to paint the everyday things with tenderness and intimacy – the dirty café with its pockmarked mirrors as if they had been shot at, its curly hat-stands, its stained marble under the yellow light; wet pavements; an old woman yawning. With tenderness and intimacy. With sentimentality, too, she wondered. For was I not guilty of making ugliness charming? An English sadness like a veil over all I painted, until it became ladylike and nostalgic, governessy, utterly lacking in ferocity, brutality, violence. Whereas in the centre of the earth, in the heart of life, in the core of even everyday things is there not violence, with flames wheeling, turmoil, pain, chaos?

Her paintings this year, she knew, were four utter failures to express her new feelings, her rejection of prettiness, her tearing-down of the veils of sadness, of charm. She had become abstract, incoherent, lost. ‘I am too old,’ she thought, and then: “It wasn’t
me,”
as women say, when they find the hat they are trying on is beyond their purse.’

Just then, Camilla came in, still wearing her nightgown, and carrying a cup of tea in one hand, a letter in the other.

‘It is time to wake up,’ she said.

‘Have you no dressing-gown, Camilla?’

‘No.’

She put her face into a great bowl of pink and red sweetpeas on the bedside table.

‘There is a macintosh of mine you can borrow.’

‘A macintosh? But it isn’t raining. And if it were I shouldn’t go out in my nightgown.’

‘I don’t like to see you walking about the house like that.’

Frances sat bolt upright in bed and re-tied a ribbon at her wrist, using one hand and her teeth.

‘I’ll go and dress. You look like a little girl in bed, Frances. Liz has a letter, too. From her husband. A very, very long letter and she is still reading it. It started off “My dearest wife,” she said. Just as if he had several.’

‘No man stands a chance against you two. All that running to one another and giggling. You make fun of all the things you fear.’

‘That’s very clever of you,’ Camilla agreed, and hid her face once more in the sweetpeas. ‘We are not smiling
through
our tears, but at them.’

‘Cowardice,’ Frances murmured, slitting open the envelope, which had a French stamp, and drawing out several sheets of thin paper. Camilla, her face still among the flowers, lifted her eyes for a second and then lowered them.

‘Well, I must dress myself,’ she said, straightening her back.

‘I wish you would. Don’t be slovenly, dear.’

‘No, Miss Rutherford. You weren’t my governess, you know. By the way, why did you never marry any of your employers?’

‘Their wives wouldn’t have liked it,’ Frances said, smiling at her letter.

‘Surely they knew better than to survive childbirth?’

‘No, they seemed not to know.’

‘You would think literature would have taught them as much.’

‘Literature
would not.’

‘Before you begin all that about novel-reading, I will dress myself.’

‘You keep saying you are going to. But, one moment!’

She held up her hand to stay Camilla as she read her letter. At last, she laid it down on the quilt and said: ‘Do you think there might be an hotel in the town where I could book a room for someone?’

A curious wary, yet excited look flickered over Camilla’s face.

‘I’ll enquire for you,’ she said.

‘The Bear?’

‘Or the Griffin.’

‘The Bear is reckoned to be the better, I believe.’

‘All right,’ Camilla said cautiously. ‘And who is this who must have the best of everything? Not one of your late employers? At last widowed?’

‘No. A Mr Beddoes.’

‘A Mr Beddoes. I see.’ She did not see, and was nettled by curiosity. ‘And when? And for how long?’

‘On this Sunday. Tell them for a week to begin with.’

‘A week to
begin
with,’ Camilla murmured. ‘It’s going to be a hot day. A long, hot day.’ She stretched her arms up and
suddenly dropped them to her sides and went out, leaving Frances to finish her tea and read her letter through again.

In the bedroom, she took off her nightgown and poured cold water out of a painted jug into a cracked bowl. It was soft water, but grit sank through it to the bottom. Standing barefooted on the rush mat, she soaped her arms, leaning over the washhand stand, rinsed in the beautiful, silken rain water and dried herself on a very old fluffy towel.

The morning promised well, she decided, fastening her cotton frock. With a little arranging, the morning promised very well.

She took up a book to wedge the mirror and began to brush her long light-brown hair. She knotted it back as usual and then unknotted it and rolled it all up on the top of her head, at once becoming a different woman and ready to behave differently to match.

As soon as Liz had settled down to bathing the baby, Camilla came into the kitchen swinging a basket and looking casual.

Liz unwrapped the steaming napkins from the child’s thighs and glanced up suspiciously.

‘Where are you off to?’

‘Frances gave me a job to do in the town.’

‘What sort of a job.?’

‘To book a room at the Bear for a Mr Beddoes.’

‘Or the Griffin?’ Liz suggested. She crooked her arm under the child’s back and lowered him into the bath of water. ‘Surely the Bear will be full?’

‘I shall have to find out,’ Camilla said, lightly, thinking that now there would have to be another, subtler excuse.

‘Or you thought Frances
said
the Griffin,’ Liz continued, laving the baby’s limbs, and her hair trailing over and touching the water. ‘You muddled the two names.’ She thought she
would punish Camilla for a little while. ‘What a lot one gives up in motherhood,’ she sighed. ‘One mayn’t even go and help to book a room for Mr Beddoes. Mr Beddoes! I have heard the name somewhere. I wonder where.’

‘We shall find out. It cannot be kept from us much longer, for he is to arrive this very Sunday.’

Frances came into the room, affecting not to have heard, but Camilla blushed. She looked awkwardly into her basket for a moment and then said she must be off.

Frances stood looking down at the baby lifting his legs and splashing them into the water, his eyes brightening at such power. Just as Camilla got to the door, she said casually, without lifting her head: ‘Oh, take Hotchkiss with you, my dear. It will do him good.’

‘But will it do
me
any good? As a matter of fact, he is beyond my control.’

‘I should like him to go,’ Frances said quietly, and Liz smiled to herself and lifted her baby out of his bath, holding him high in the air in a movement of triumph; he screamed with excitement and ecstasy, and the water ran down Liz’s arms and over the floor.

Camilla wound the dog’s chain round and round her hand and set off down the lane behind him. He nosed the ground, as if he were a bloodhound. He broke into a lumbering sort of trot and Camilla came hastening along behind him, jerked at the end of the chain, hot, unsteady, and her hair, she felt, all ready to collapse.

She went along quickly, and not entirely because of Hotchkiss, but also because she felt she was escaping, escaping Liz and Frances, escaping the two she loved, probably, most in her life, and avoiding the long, leisurely morning she had looked forward to in other years, the endless, sunny, gossipy, holiday morning, with the apples to peel, peas to shuck, coffee
under the mulberry tree, shopping at the post-office. What had seemed plenty in other years, now appeared threadbare. She felt a restlessness, like milk beginning to sway up to the boil, a trembling excitement, sometimes pleasurable as it had been in the Griffin last night; but often painful, as it was when she held Liz’s baby or watched Liz with him. She knew that what had charmed her in other summers could not charm her now; and felt that, because of this, the holiday must be different and had been different from the beginning, different at the railway station, at her arrival, different with Liz. The long series of these summer holidays from girlhood onwards was suddenly broken. Or had it begun to break last year, with Liz retching her heart up every morning, weeping at night, frightened, alien, yet important? Frances, too, had changed. She had aged more than twelve months. She had painted those pictures. She had added this dog to herself.

Camilla stopped and wound the chain on to the other wrist. Hotchkiss lay down on his back in some horse-droppings and rolled his great body from side to side, while Camilla tugged and cursed at him. Cursed at Frances. At herself, for not having gone to Switzerland with the Science mistress instead of this.