A Wreath Of Roses (11 page)

The strangeness of her situation came over her with her realisation of approaching darkness, the knowledge that she sat on this hillside, her hair down to her shoulders, quite out of the context of all the rest of her life. Ecstasy, she thought. She took
the word to pieces and saw its true meaning. The first meanings of words go deeper, she understood, than any of their later meanings, which are fleshed-over and softened by convention and repetition. To go back to the beginnings of words is like imagining the skeletons of our friends.

‘The same thing happened to us both,’ she thought, ‘but there’s no logic about human beings. Both of us starved as children, but he (perhaps because he is a man) reacting to violence, inviting danger, attempting everything and everyone. While I am stiffening into an old maid, recoiling fastidiously from life. Closed, exclusive, self-contained, sarcastic.’

She found his steady gaze unendurable and wished that he would either talk or take her in his arms.

‘We are the same,’ she said, and she looked down at the grass, embarrassed. ‘The same sort of childhood. Beaten and frustrated. Perhaps that sets us on one side.’

‘Beaten?’ he repeated quickly.

‘Not I. No. But frustrated.’

‘Tell me.’

She shut her eyes and smiled, bringing it back.

‘A dark Victorian house, muffled rooms, too many books. My brothers walking up and down
discussing
. Any subject, so long as it came nowhere near their hearts, or emotion or reality. Their dry voices, their pale faces; a man’s world. They were all older than me. None of them married. I sat there as a child, reading a book, conforming exactly to their idea of what a little girl should be; precocious, sedate, trying to look like Alice in Wonderland. I accepted it all, their voices, the cerebral atmosphere; though I was being choked by it. My mother was proud of their intelligence, she catered to that masculine world, and upheld it, tiptoeing about, being a housekeeper. My father was only another son to her. Cambridge. Oh, God, the dryness of it, the superiority, the falseness. Right outside life as it is for most
people. The visitors who called were only my brothers over again. Donnish, remote. Silly jokes, irritating mannerisms, respected eccentricities, no spontaneity. But worst of all, for
me
, nothing feminine. It was all exclusively male. No one talked about hats.’

She turned to him and laughed. ‘So I grew up
unable
to talk about hats, thinking fashion unimportant and absurd and even shameful. Not abstract enough, you see. Then I met Liz. We went to a school in Switzerland together. She alone broke through the coldness I had gathered about me. She was impulsive and warm, went out after friends, could humble herself, never anticipated rebuffs as I did, didn’t mind looking a fool. For the first time in my life I gossiped, I giggled, I confided, I talked about clothes, I threw away what my brothers would have called “my personal code”, which was only a rigid and preconceived set of rules to take the place of loving-kindness. I owe all that to Liz. She’s capricious and not very wise. She laughs about men, and then loves them too easily. I had been brought up to respect them, but never to seek them. Why am I telling you all this?’

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘No, I must go home. It isn’t that Liz was particularly happy as a child, but she was allowed to be loving. Her father was a pompous creature, her mother, whom she adored, died when she was twelve. She was overwhelmed by grief, but not distracted by it. You see, her mother had taught her to be loving, had kissed her and tucked her in for the night, leaving her secure in warmth. She left her like that when she died. I think children must be encouraged to love or they will close up. Or hate.’

‘Or love themselves too much,’ he said.

She agreed quickly. Had he, she wondered, spent his life studying his own reflection in a pool? Absorbed in himself, until
no one else was any good? No longer seen, even; but crowded out by his own image.

When he stood up suddenly, she was piqued that she had not done so first. He stretched out his hand to her and, as she clasped it, drew her to her feet. She shivered, and he pulled her closer to him and into his arms and kissed her. His mouth was colder than her own. Then, very calmly, he put her away from him and looked at her.

‘He stares at me so,’ she thought, faltering and discouraged. As they began to walk down the hill she lifted her eyes to the sky, which was bruised all over with darkness. The harebells were colourless and pale at their feet; and the earthworks behind them, a great broken and menacing outline. Lights pricked the valley and seemed to lie like blossoms on the branches of the trees.

As she walked, she tried to control the deep, shaken breaths which unsteadied her. Her body felt dragged and hollowed with her longing for him to resume their embrace and to complete it. Suddenly she was confounded by the realisation that all her self-protection meant nothing to her; her pride, her over-niceness, her front to the world, she had abandoned so easily and to a stranger. Her motive at first – but she had forgotten it already – had been to show-off to Liz, to deny her own virginity, to punish her for the baby and all the physical experience it symbolised.

She felt over-wrought, tired and ready to weep, as she stumbled down the uneven hillside with him. Neither of them spoke.

A stile led into a lane with high hedges. As he lifted her down, she could faintly discern his face in the darkness. His lips parted, as if he were about to speak, his eyes slanted thoughtfully, and then he shrugged and said nothing. They walked down the lane, and here they were sheltered and the warmth of the day still lingered between the hedgerows.

Presently he said: ‘I must of course see you again.’

She said nothing, but she thought: ‘I shall get over this night somehow, for there will be others.’

‘When shall I?’ he was asking.

‘Oh, my hair!’ she cried. ‘I can never go home with my hair like this.’

‘It’s quite dark.’

‘But Frances will see me.’

‘Who is Frances?’

She explained Frances hastily, for she had no part in this. He listened, but as soon as she had stopped he said:
‘When
shall I see you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Think!’

‘It depends on other people, on Liz and Frances. I’m not on my own. But I shall see you somehow. I will leave a message for you in the bar.’

Mr Beddoes she suddenly remembered, and how on Sunday he would be at the Griffin, too. And in the morning Liz would come back. Her steps quickened, and the sad confusion left her: thoughts of the outside world drove it from her, as she had forced them to for years.

‘You do promise?’ he asked, looking straight ahead.

They passed under the railway-arch and, her voice suddenly echoing and metallic: ‘Yes, I promise,’ she said.

Richard went back to his room at the hotel and unlocked his diary from his suitcase. For a while, he sat staring at it and thinking, and then, as if he were controlled by the pen itself, he began to write, the words pouring out and slanting across the page. His face was quite set. He wrote until his whole body was stiff and cramped …

‘… I am closer to her with words than I ever was with loving
anybody, or hurting them, because her mind unlocks my mind. She takes away my loneliness and comforts me. She keeps me company, which is all I need now. She does not expect me to make love to her, as other women do. If I have only days left, or weeks, or nothing, I will never do anything to her, I will never again kiss her or lay a hand upon her. For I think God has sent her to me to help me to die, to give me a chance. It was never that I didn’t believe in Him, but He didn’t believe in me. When she said that at the end there is God I felt that what she said was right. She steadies me and listens to me and I will never harm her or lay a hand upon her. This is real closeness. When people touch one another, they are most of all alone. We are all like icebergs; underneath where the greater parts are hidden it is dark and unreachable. That hidden part is our secret thoughts and our childhood, our dreams and our fears. She shall accompany me there. And because she is the last thing that will ever happen to me, it shall be different from all that went before. More important. I will make it different and perfect. And I shall never touch her or harm her or lay hands upon her …’

His face was tired. He fell into endless repetitions, his pen travelling fast, from left to right across the page, and the light rained down over him, harsh and bright from under the torn silk shade.

It was Mrs Parsons’s day. She came up from the village on Saturdays to do the rough, her white hair bound in a mauve turban, her eyes all the time narrowed against her cigarette smoke. She loved praise and constantly invited it, taking Frances to inspect her work, the polished furniture, the turned-out bedroom.

‘Now, madam dear,’ she would say, halting in the doorway, linking her arm with Frances’s as no one else would dare to do, ‘just tell me please if you can find a cobweb. Look anywhere you like, dear; I defy you to find one.’ Frances could not. ‘I like to see everything neat and clean,’ she would say. This was true. She abhorred untidiness or Bohemianism.

Mrs Parsons disliked Camilla, although Camilla was at great pains to be pleasant. ‘Each to their own walk of life,’ she would say, meaning she mistrusted Camilla’s, which she had summed up (from the books on the bedside-table) as a sterile London life – politics, meetings, interference with other people’s affairs. Then, too, people in London seemed not to marry as they did in the country. The village girls married in their early twenties, Mrs Parsons herself at the age of eighteen. In London, women
in their thirties unconcernedly set up house on their own, as if they had all their lives before them in which to find husbands and bear children.

Frances was accepted in the village. She held a place in the community, or rather on the fringe of it, which would have distressed and puzzled her if she had known. Living there, alone in her cottage, just outside the village, they thought of her as an eccentric, as one of those local characters which all such rural societies encompass – the village idiot, the gossiping postmistress, the absent-minded vicar and, thus – Frances herself —the slightly cracked old maid with her bee-keeping and her sketching. Two hundred years earlier she might have been the local witch.

So intent was she on being a normal elderly woman, so much trouble did she take, that she would always rather be praised for her crab-apple jelly than her painting, for the first was a marvel in her, the other natural to her and inevitable. Detesting the artists she had met and the milieu in which they usually worked she painted at set hours and did the washing-up first, remembering always Flaubert’s advice to artists – Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you can be violent and original in your works.’ She would have been distressed beyond measure and bewildered if she had known how extraordinary the villagers thought her, or how Mrs Parsons on Saturday nights at the pub, spoke of her as ‘my poor dear lady’, pitying her, or told stories of her little mad kindnesses, her presents of money, of dried herbs, of cowslip wine, of jars of honey, of advice: how she had searched the snowy fields one winter’s night, hearing a rabbit crying in a trap, and had given her dinner to the dog when she was short of meat and eaten bread and marmalade herself. These actions, so natural to Frances that she would never have believed that ordinary people could behave otherwise, were enough to set the stories circulating,
but she remained quite ignorant of them, and when Mrs Parsons took her arm, she thought it a gesture of simple kindness, not protection.

This morning, Mrs Parsons had brought something in with her as well as her basket with its rolled-up pinafore. Tragedy, Frances thought it was. Camilla said she was sullen, that she would give her notice before the day was out. Yet it was grief that made Mrs Parsons carry herself so stiffly, behave so impeccably. Usually loose in her speech, this morning she discriminated with her words; her conversation became portentous with grandeur, the construction of her sentences so involved that they could not be rounded off, but hung in mid-air, abandoned, until Frances was confused and began to shout as if she were talking to a foreigner and presently gave it up.

At eleven o’clock, loosened perhaps by tea, Mrs Parsons broke off and said: ‘Oh, madam dear,’ and put her handkerchief to her eyes. Her language, when she could resume, was simple again and Anglo-Saxon. For the great Latinised sentences were useless to describe or deal with emotion – or shame, as it turned out to be.

How immediately, Frances thought, we leap to obvious conclusions, and how right we always are.

‘It’s Euniss again, madam.’

At home, this daughter was sometimes affectionately nicknamed Eunicey, a pronunciation of Camilla’s which was a family joke and put them all into agonies of suppressed laughter.

‘Yes, I thought it would be that,’ Frances said. She was naturally not so distressed as a mother would be; but, on the other hand, did not regard the situation, though hackneyed, as either comic or shameful. Once before, Euniss had been in trouble, but there had been a miscarriage, especially Frances thought, of justice.

Camilla got up and left the room. This act of sensibility was
at once misjudged and would not be forgiven. She made the mistake always of thinking people would like what she herself liked; she put herself too much in other people’s places, instead of allowing them to stay there themselves.