A Wreath Of Roses (7 page)

As she came into the town, the dog gave up running ahead and now lagged, nosing at gateways, standing still to bark at nothing, exploring, loitering, becoming entangled with prams and passers-by. The streets were busy. Women in cotton frocks drove in from the surrounding villages to stand in fish-queues, drink coffee in tea-shops and park their cars in the wrong places.

The pavements were hot through her sandals, traffic flashed and glittered, the humid scent of bread-baking, so beautiful in winter, was sickening in the heat. Flies danced over the block of ice at the fishmonger’s, crawled on the great blue and silver
heaps of mackerel, the orange kippers. Stale tobacco and last night’s beer-spillings was the smell at the Griffin, even in the dark, druggeted hall-way. Here the crimson walls burgeoned with antlers, with horns, with glass-eyed heads and plump and luminous fish encased among linen weeds. Camilla suddenly shivered. Hotchkiss lifted his leg at an umbrella-stand and she hit him across the back with the chain. He growled and turned his blood-tinged eyes upon her.

No one came. The hotel seemed enfolded as a cocoon, indifferent to life, but still a little active in itself, for a clock ticked with an oily, solid sound at the foot of the stairs; far, far away there was a gentle clatter of washing-up; in the courtyard, empty barrels were trundled across cobblestones.

Presently, a thin elderly man came out of an office, a dry shuck of a man in a neat alpaca jacket,
The Times
folded under his arm.

‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

Camilla jerked Hotchkiss away from the umbrella-stand and asked to book a room: moreover, she insisted firmly, she must see the room itself before she did so. It must be quiet, quiet yet airy. Mr Beddoes, she seemed to know beforehand, would be old and faddy.

Hotchkiss followed them upstairs, clawing the drugget. They ascended into a region of hushed darkness, uneven floors, loose boards: taps dripped behind doors, mice rattled along the wainscoting. No visitors emerged from the rows of closed and numbered doors, still less Richard Elton, but for whom Camilla would have been booking a room at the Bear, rather more carelessly.

Frances might have been pleased with the room into which Camilla was eventually shown. It looked like one of her early paintings, with its collapsing brass bedstead, its black, scratched floor-boards and rush mats. Neat grey towels, much darned,
hung from a rail; immensely long-handled pokers and tongs and shovels were laid out before the tiny fireplace with its fan of damp and sooty paper and its old cigarette-ends. A wicker-chair uncoiled in long fronds; a vast waste-paper-basket awaited a lifetime’s letters. But the room was quiet. It was quiet as the tomb. From the window, she could see whole streets of slate roofs winding away up the hill like stretched accordions, and beyond these were fields with their blueish trees and ovals of shade.

‘A splendid view of the clumps,’ the proprietor pointed out, as if he were the proprietor also of those knots of trees on the horizon, which must reflect credit on his hotel, enhance this bedroom. Indeed, it was sensible of him to direct her attention out of the window, and then on above the roof-tops.

‘Saxon earthworks,’ he continued.

‘How interesting,’ Camilla murmured.

Having thus established the desirability of age, the glory of old things, he felt able to draw back from the window and allow her to look at the room again. It was as if he had linked the crumbling, ancient furniture to the Saxon earthworks. He made her feel that in such a district newer things would be out-ofplace.

Camilla put her hand dutifully on the bed. The mattress did not give. But she now felt that Mr Beddoes must fight his own battles. He was a stranger to her, and she had only used him as it suited her; although to little purpose, she thought, following the man back along the silent corridors where the sun lay over threadbare carpets. To very little purpose, she reflected, glancing in all directions.

Downstairs in the vestibule, she lingered at the desk, spelling out Mr Beddoes’ name very slowly, she supposed correctly: but the hotel was enfolded in quiet and no one came.

‘Could I get a sherry?’ she asked suddenly, looking desperately round.

The proprietor felt warm towards her – a woman with agreeable ways, who had admired his best view, overlooked his worst bed, and now asked for sherry at eleven o’clock in the morning. Skirting Hotchkiss warily, he opened a door and she found herself once again in the saloon, but on the other side of the bar, where the barman sat reading a newspaper. He sprang up at once, lifted the flap of the counter for her and wiped it down with a damp cloth.

‘A sherry for madam,’ the proprietor ordered.

The bar was empty. She sat on a high stool and sipped her sherry. The street door stood open and the shadows of passersby crossed the wedge of sunlit linoleum. There was the sound of traffic, the constantly approaching and fading footsteps, the shuffling and the murmuring of people going by.

A newspaper-boy came in and threw a late night extra across the bar. Camilla bought a paper and glanced at the headlines. The barman turned at once to the back page.

‘I shall have to go,’ she thought, with lingering sips at her sherry. ‘It looks peculiar for me to be sitting here.’

She felt shamed and deflated at her behaviour, especially humiliated when she considered the reason for this behaviour, the rather contemptible man who began to obsess her, to engage her thoughts, to be used as a weapon against Liz and who now walked in from the street as if his steps had led him towards her all the morning.

Again, fear was the first change on his face. First, he was not glad to see her, and then, as if he recollected something, very glad. He smiled his film-star smile, waved the bunch of mint he was holding, and at once gaiety broke over them, even over the barman, who had, apparently, been awaiting him. A great drinking session had been planned between them.

‘You are just in time. In the very nick of time,’ Camilla was assured.

The barman lifted the flap again and Richard went round behind and, holding his bunch of mint under the tap, called for ice and for double whiskies. The barman gave a few anxious glances at the door, but soon surrendered to the general gaiety.

‘But no, I couldn’t!’ Camilla cried. ‘After this sherry, I couldn’t.’

‘Sherry!’ he said scornfully. ‘Discount the sherry. What a fine dog. Oh, what a beauty he is! Hello old boy!’ He set the mint-julep in front of Camilla and bent down to Hotchkiss, who slavered gratefully.

Camilla smiled. ‘He
is
rather,’ she heard herself saying. And to hide her own amusement at herself, took up her new drink so suddenly that ice rattled against her teeth.

‘Nice?’ he asked, glancing up at her.

‘Very – refreshing,’ she gasped.

The sprig of mint was wreathed and encrusted with bubbles, as if these were crystal leaves embedded in a glass paper-weight.

‘I like your hair that way.’

At once, of course, her hands went up, began to twist in loose strands.

‘It is very untidy.’

‘I like women’s hair to be untidy. Not to feel that the hair is more important than the woman.’

She flushed and turned her head and, as she did so, her throat moved.

‘Women become different people each time they change their hair style,’ he went on, seeming determined, as some men are, to enlarge the gulf between them and yet by this very measure to bring them closer together, to make her conscious of her womanhood above all else, and by heightening those differences between them, underline what seemed to him the one way of resolving them.

This underlining Camilla had hitherto despised. Now, like the mint-julep, it seemed an experiment that might be made. It could, in fact, add something to her: enhance her importance. A fear of being left out inspired her, a feeling that life was enriching everyone but herself, that education had taken the place of experience and conversation the place of action.

She knew, as she embarked on what she vaguely hoped might be a small adventure, that a girl in her ‘teens would have managed more adroitly than she, would have been better supplied with badinage and ready-made phrases. And for a girl in her ’teens, she thought, there would also have been some excuse for growing so preoccupied with a man of this kind – the excuse that he was handsome (she thought ‘handsome’ was just the word for him) and that he was assured and easy in his manner. Too assured, too easy, for Camilla at her age. But girls in their ’teens admire those who manage so much better than they can themselves. He behaved, she decided, like someone who has spent his childhood in India with those who look only at the topmost layer of life, judge by the appearance of this, are reassured, and thus harden into indifference, become calloused over by preconceptions, until finally, no shaft of truth is sharp enough or barbed enough to strike through their stupidity, their bitter platitudes, their easy divisions of mankind, their way of converting religion rather than being converted by it. All, she thought, circling the whisky about the smoothing ice, all that I most detest.

He now sat down beside her and fondled the dog who slobbered over his hand, looked trustingly up at him.

‘Were you brought up in India?’ Camilla suddenly asked him.

‘In India?’ He looked suspicious and surprised. ‘No. Why?’

‘Oh, I often amuse myself fitting people against backgrounds.’

‘No. My people were in the Philippines, but I was sent over to school when I was ten.’

‘Yes,’ she smiled to herself, ‘he would always say “people”, not “parents”. And how exactly right I was. India or the Philippines, there’s no difference. They have the same effect.’

‘I daresay you found the natives a useless lot?’ she asked dryly.

‘Bone-idle, my dear girl, bone-idle.’

The boy of ten easily dismissed the Philippines, and added: ‘Foully dirty crowd, too. There’s nothing to be done with them. Die like flies.’

‘I suppose it’s the cheap labour …’ Camilla went on, as if she were tickling a trout.

‘A fallacy. Don’t you believe it. I’ve seen it and I know. The truth is, I’ve watched twenty of them laying a piece of concrete a couple of English navvies’d do in less than half the time.’

‘You think very highly of English labourers?’ she suggested, and tipped her glass until there was only ice left in it.

‘Perhaps. In comparison,’ he said cautiously. ‘And there are plenty of exceptions. Let’s have some more drinks, George.’

The barman’s name, she suspected, was not George, but he answered to it in the cause of
bonhomie
.

A Siamese cat entered the bar from the street. Very delicately it picked its way across the linoleum, one paw before the other, swaying with unborn kittens. Hotchkiss growled and dribbled. The cat leapt clumsily to the bar and sat in a corner, licking the smell of beer from its feet. When this was done, she put all four paws together and, stretching high with arched back, opened her mouth in a yawn like a pink gladiolus.

‘Elegant even in the family way,’ Camilla observed.

‘That damned thing!’ Richard said. ‘It belongs to old Pussyfoot.’ The barman was obviously appreciative of this description of his employer. ‘My God! the noise it makes. Am I right, George, or am I not?’

‘True enough, sir.’

The difference between “sensual” and “sensuous”,’ Camilla said, and glanced from Hotchkiss to the cat, but she might have been talking to herself. ‘What is her name?’

‘Petronella,’ the barman said as if embarrassed. Then suddenly both men doubled up into unaccountable laughter.

‘Give me a dog any day,’ Richard said, sobering for a moment in order to make this patriotic remark – for such Camilla understood it to be.

The cat licked her creamy bib, blandly, contemptuous.

The sort of animal that horrible old fairy
would
have,’ Richard said.

The barman thought he had excelled himself. He wiped his eyes on a tea-cloth.

In the middle of their laughter, Camilla felt suddenly that it was all impossible. ‘I am not like that,’ she thought, ‘I don’t behave like that, and I must never behave like it.’

Under the cover of some people entering the bar, he turned suddenly to her – and it was as if he had awaited the opportunity – and in a low voice said: ‘You should learn to forget yourself, you know. How can you enjoy life if you are always to be on your dignity?’

To her astonishment, she felt curious, not insulted. The look he turned on her was one which women very different from herself might have been flattered to receive. She realised that for all his worldliness and his stupidity, which she had just been testing, he knew about her. It is pleasant to be read like a book. We can always accept what is pleasant and explain away – we hope – the reverse: and, at least, it is the beginning of a conversation. That he considered an understanding of women to be a part of his worldly-wisdom she did not know, because she had never been so close to worldly-wisdom before.

‘Why do you say I am on my dignity? Is it because I haven’t laughed at your jokes?’

He looked troubled.

‘But you’re right. I am – unbending, afraid of making a fool of myself. Haven’t your confidence.’

‘I don’t know about confidence,’ he said in agreement. ‘But the life I’ve led … no one ever sheltered me. I fought my own battles always.’