A Wreath Of Roses (14 page)

Oppressed by the staleness of this English Sunday evening, she felt a deadness about her and sadness in her heart so that she walked wretchedly, blindly, on past spiked railings, lace curtains, Montpelier House, Kitchener Villas, the rows of houses along which she and Liz once played their game of Aspidistra Tennis, scoring points for the plant-pots in the windows. ‘Yes, the wonder is that our friends should follow us at all,’ she thought, ‘that there is ever anything but loneliness, like my life ahead next term, the set hours, the familiar framework of days, bicycling to and fro, the autumn leaves lying in the gutter, and then another winter, the evenings by the gas-fire in the bedsitting-room, the concerts at the school, the lectures, the talks by missionaries, by elderly bird-watchers; the staff-room cups of tea; the little quarrels; the touchiness of one, the tactlessness of another; the betrothed games-mistress walking immune to it all as if bathed in a miraculous golden light; the little glances, the little edge to the voice. For women must not be left alone together. They betray one another for men. At a man’s look, they drop the work in their hands, they turn their eyes away from their companions; his telephone-call can cancel all the rest, however late it comes!’

And now the houses were gone; shops took their place and on the Market Square, the Salvation Army band began to play. The bus queues watched apathetically, waiting to go out for the evening into the ripe countryside, or taking the children back home from tea with Granny in the town.

At this early hour, the young men walked together, or leant in groups against the cemetery railings, to watch the girls going
by in couples, wearing pale frocks, net gloves, their hair pinned up elaborately at the front-room mirror and reflected now (they saw) in the blank shop-windows.

In the shops where no blinds were drawn, how static and remote the goods lay in the windows, as if touched by a wand and never to be moved again; and the pubs, too, so closed and so silent, as though deep in each beery fastness the landlord lay down on his bed to doze for ever, and opening-time would never come.

Opening-time would never come, the youths thought, lolling against the brawn-like marble or the green tiles below the scrolled and frosted windows, the sun warm on their foreheads.

The station held its spiked canopy out over the market-square and, stepping beneath it, shadow cool on her arms, Camilla fell suddenly apprehensive. For soon the train would come; it brought Mr Beddoes towards her, not any longer a disembodied joke, but flesh and blood, she thought. She tried to divest her mind of its comic picture, to be ready to make some effort, with thoughts and with words, and to prepare herself to encounter another personality to whom she would herself stand as a person.

The clock’s hand jerked round, gold ran along the railway lines, the groups of people stood motionless, waiting. Hotchkiss nosed at crates and wicker-baskets, turned his rather rheumy eyes with sly guilt as Camilla tugged him away.

‘The train will never come,’ she suddenly decided, gazing at the fixed signal and beyond it a glimpse of the Clumps rising above the valley, and the great broken crown of earth encircling them.

She sat down on a seat. Memory swerving in her forced her to shut her eyes. She could breathe the very air up there, the warm and herby smell; see the tiny starry flowers and the spongy
turf, the butterflies; and feel the close, rosetted thistles against her thighs.

The signal fell with a sickening clatter, as if sharply dividing life and death. Everyone but Camilla seemed to move on the platform, some touched their luggage in readiness.

‘That last time,’ she thought, ‘I was sure that I could never see railway-lines again without horror, watch a train approaching without associations of dread and apprehension. Yet I can. It is simply not the same thing. A different time, a different place, nothing the same. People say “I never hear that song without tears springing to my eyes,” or “My heart turns over at the scent of arum-lilies; since Albert’s funeral I couldn’t have them in the house.” But it is the truth twisted into the pattern we feel it should have; for the pattern has immortality woven into it, and our own importance in the world.’

The train came curving into sight along the gold lines, its plume of smoke pearly in the sun, decorous as court-feathers, nodding in the still evening.

At first she thought it would never stop. It would continue to rush through the station, bearing Mr Beddoes with it, thin, irritable man that he would be, petulant old-maidish, self-infatuated, fastidious. Yes, she imagined him clearly, the sort of middle-aged man who buys pictures, who collects perhaps jade, or eighteenth-century fans, or Greek epitaphs, or Siamese cats, and hopes by doing so to enhance his own personality, who skims what little luxury is left from this evened-out England, finds still a little corner in which to gourmandise; a shirt-maker tucked away here, a place for brandy there (the train miraculously changed its rhythm and began to slow in beside the platform), his film-directing, Camilla thought, the only concession he makes to nowadays; for in these times, the middle-aged men with all day in which to go up and down the Bond Street galleries are few and far between. ‘Oh, I am a farmer now,’ they say with
affected pride, at parties, or ‘I direct absurd films,’ or ‘I sell houses to people.’ Amazement and indignation lie under the words, for the old ties bind still, they will last one generation more. ‘Although we lend glamour to farming, to film-directing, to house-selling,’ they seem to say, ‘the wonder is that we are not spending the morning in Bond Street, sitting before a Vermeer in the back room, the old man awaiting our decision (which we shall not make until after luncheon); or descending into a cellar, where books are locked in safes, to turn the stained dark pages of a first edition copy of
Tristram Shandy.’
Something has moved out of focus for them. What was so right, so admirable, has become dreadfully wrong. They blame (Camilla had heard so often) those who have less, that they themselves have not more.

She was glad about the shabby room at the Griffin, and the brawn and beetroot Mr Beddoes would surely get every evening for dinner.

She sat very still on the seat. ‘I am middle-class,’ she wished to declare. ‘Middle-class women do not buy pictures; only prints of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers to hang in their bed-sitting-rooms.’

Each traveller who emerged from the train seemed to have been miraculously brought to the end of his journey, but, even so, Mr Beddoes was more than could be expected,
he
would never untangle himself from the people spilling out over the platform to come certainly and with recognition towards the sleeping Hotchkiss.

One second the crowds clot and mingle on the platform; but, in the next instant, almost, they have sorted themselves out, the stream dwindles, the carriage doors are slammed, and if the one we seek is not there, he will not come.

‘He will not come,’ Camilla thought, immensely relieved.

No foreign-labelled luggage was handed out, no commotion was caused by suddenly obsequious porters, and soon there was
left on the platform only a rather untidy, rather plump man, with a tie flying away in two ends and a rain-coat over his arm.

He came slowly but very certainly towards Camilla, his eyes upon Hotchkiss; for it was as Frances had said, and every word of all her letters he had remembered.

Morland Beddoes was not in the least self-infatuated. He loved himself only as much as self-respect required, and the reason why he saw himself so clearly was that he looked not often, but suddenly, so catching himself unawares.

A perception he had, and kindness, caused his friends to run to him when they were troubled, for they were convinced of his absorption in their lives and could be sure that he would not judge them. In this way, his private life was continually impinged upon by distracted people. His sofa was not his own. Always, some man sat gloomily upon it, staring into a whisky and soda, waiting to unburden himself; or a slip of a girl would kick her shoes off, curl round among the cushions and weep, her hair over her face as a protection. The way he attracted wretchedness disturbed him, for no one ever came to him with good news.

He offered no advice, he took no sides, his flow of sympathetic phrases had dried up long ago and was reduced to murmurings. It must have been, he thought, like unbosoming oneself to a wood-pigeon. But still he listened, he offered brandy if need be, he slept on the floor while others occupied
his bed, and often, weary from a day’s work, would be brewing tea at two in the morning.

Always, human nature was displayed before him as a dishevelled thing; even in his film work he saw that poise was something put on and taken off like a cloak, never assumed for long; the cool-tempered, the suave, came off the set wiping sweat from the palms of their hands; the camera, intent on a Palladian façade, might have strayed only a few yards and found scaffolding and two-walled rooms. To him, who would have loved the human personality to be as static as a flower on a stalk, unmarred by emotions, unclogged by frustration, the most intimate and disordered side of people was displayed. The foibles, the strange quirks, odd growths, darknesses, contradictions which novelists care so much for, he found less delightful. Though loving people, he loved stillness more, and visual beauty. He desired the woman who would never raise her voice, nor snivel into a handkerchief, nor encroach on another’s private territory. He did not marry. He collected pictures. He collected especially the pictures which would help him to forget the cracked façades, the tear-stained faces which dogged him always. Until he saw a picture Frances had painted.

It was before the war, on a late winter’s afternoon toward teatime: one of the days when Spring seems suddenly possible; nothing is different but the knowledge that it is not yet dark and yesterday would have been. The sky is translucent between the buildings, and the flowers on barrows and in shop-windows are not winter flowers any more, but hyacinths and tulips and mimosa. The scent of lilac was fanned towards him, as if to compensate for the dwarf at the kerbside and the newspaper-placards about Hitler and Austria.

As he turned into a side street it began to rain, and there was Frances’s picture in the window of an art gallery. It was a girl sitting on a sofa. It might have been his sofa: it was shabby and
sagged at one end where she sat with her feet tucked up close to her body; her mouth drooped, her face was pushed up crookedly against her hand as she stared out of the picture; she was caught in an off moment; she was a little dejected, a little dishevelled: yet the room and she in it were pink and golden. Through Frances’s eyes he saw all her life lying behind her, she was made to seem perfectly in context as he had never been able to see people before, as no writer could have shown him; only this painting had made a pattern for him which was at last intelligible.

The rain had come scattering down over the shop-window as hard as grain. He went on looking at the picture through the silvery drops, then through streams of oily rain which began to run down the glass like gin.

There are great paintings which are for everybody, and then there are lesser pictures which will reflect light only here and there, rather capriciously, to individuals. Life itself shifts round a little and what we had thought all whiteness, or all darkness, flashes suddenly, from this new angle, with violet and green and vermilion. So that old picture of Liz sitting on the sofa, seen through the rain-washed window, turned life a little under his very eyes, put beauty over the people in the streets, the dwarf, and a woman with dyed hair standing in a doorway, and even over poor Mrs Betterton crying in his room last night because her husband had left her, had propped the usual note on the usual chimney-piece and gone for ever.

He went home very much excited, perhaps exalted even. His landlady putting the supper on the table was bathed in rose colour; the cat yawned, the green stain ran into the bath under the taps, and Mrs Betterton coming again with the day’s instalment of woe – all was radiance; through Frances’s eyes could be made static and beautiful and set in a pattern.

This new excitement struck right through his personality
and infected his work. He was a cameraman in those days. The camera, he saw, might alight like a butterfly and by its very act of choosing, make beautiful and significant whatsoever object was selected.

Month by month, year after year, Frances grew very close to him, dearer than any wife. Others might have done for him what she did – Vuillard, who at once came to mind, or Bonnard – but she was the one of his choice and he cultivated her in his mind and cherished her name.

He became a director; and then millions of eyes began to see through his the faces beyond the rain-washed pane (a favourite symbol), the landlady, the stained bath, the dwarf, the cat, the cripple, and Mrs Betterton sniffing into her crumpled handkerchief.

In those wide-set, spiritual relationships there is a time when the temptation to meet in the flesh becomes irresistible, just as after years of silent contemplation, there is the need to write the first letter. It had been a one-sided relationship, for Frances was a poor letter-writer. She wrote as a maiden-lady and not often at that. Yet he felt somehow that his own long, revealing letters were not unwelcome. If they were, he still must write them, sitting in his room at night, crossing the distance, he thought, into her very mind.

The letters, the piece of lace from Italy, the box of dates from Iraq, the picture-postcard of the Parthenon, the pressed gentian; all the different conditions under which he had contrived to get news to her during the war when he was caught up in soldiering, a prisoner in Germany; all that had made up his part of the relationship suddenly seemed insufficient. At long last, he must see her and talk to her. He risked more than he had ever risked before and sat in the train this Sunday evening as if he were at the end perhaps of a very long friendship.