A Wreath Of Roses (16 page)

‘As if it wasn’t quite nice …’

‘… in mixed company.’

Liz smoothed back her baby’s hair. It was very fine and clung to her fingers.

‘Do you think he looks blue?’

Camilla glanced over her shoulder. She was sitting in the best of the candlelight, the stocking over her fist, darning.

‘Harry, I mean,’ Liz said. She looked down at him lying on her lap. ‘He seems so
veined.’

‘Oh, no, I don’t think so.’ Running her hand out of the stocking, she examined her work carefully. ‘It’s ruined anyhow.’

‘But don’t you think his eyelids look dreadfully mauve?’

Camilla went to the mirror and tried to look at her own eyelids.

‘I’ve got freckles on mine,’ she said, suddenly staring at herself, forgetting Harry. She could see only that moment outside the Griffin, the girl whose hair swung on her shoulders – she had put up a little silk-gloved hand to it, in an affected gesture. ‘The differences between women!’ she thought. The irreconcilement, between her sort and my sort. When she brushed her hair back, tilted her chin to him, there was a horrible calculation in her flattery, making all my movements seem artless and clumsy as a pony’s. And if I behaved like that, tried to gratify his vanity by such gestures, such affectations, I should hear my own laughter inside me. And as well as that, I am ten years too old.’

‘It seemed a pity to wake him,’ Liz said regretfully. ‘After such fitful sleep.’

‘And what do I want with him after all?’ Camilla asked herself. She scooped a froth of cream out of a pot and slapped it over her face, covering it until only her tired eyes showed, rather discoloured against the white.

‘It always makes me heave when I massage under my chin,’ Liz remarked. She pinned her baby up and kissed him. ‘Not that I do very often.’

‘Something against next term is what I want,’ Camilla thought, staring at the eyes in the mirror. ‘Something against the long winter, if only a memory. Not to have to re-enter the school with all its bleak cleanness, its smells of paint and polish, with everything in me the same as when I left it, nothing added or taken away, nothing to remember and nothing to look forward to.’

‘It was terrible when Frances tried to be polite and talk about films to him,’ Liz continued. ‘And the last film she saw was when I was a child and she took me to
Ben Hur!’

Camilla suddenly smiled at her own leprous face in the mirror. ‘I imagine it is all done with models, Mr Beddoes,’ she quoted.

‘He was so nice about it.’

‘And all those questions about Greta Garbo – as if he were bound to know.’

‘What would have happened to the evening if we had not been there?’

‘We
asked a lot of questions too.’

‘It was that sort of conversation. It didn’t go free-wheel.’

‘In spite of the dandelion wine.’

‘Rhubarb.’

Liz stood up, and the anxiety settled in her eyes again. She took Harry back to his cot and Camilla patted the cream under her chin, retching a little, her eyes watering.

Frances stood in the dark garden while Hotchkiss crashed among the creaking cabbage-leaves after some small scuttling thing, too quick for him. When he had plunged away through the gap in the hedge, there was silence. She imagined him
going over the harsh stubble of the field, his belly grazed by hollow stalks, his nostrils teased by drifting scents of fur and flesh: but he was a great blundering Caliban, unused to the traffic of the night, the maze of crossed and crossing scents, evaded always by the quick and feat.

The moonlight was enough to read by, the air humid as the inside of a flower. Orion seemed to hang and swing out across the sky like a man on a trapeze and, lifting her head, she thought: ‘One glance at the sky finishes religion for me. I know then that we and all the clutter we have made upon the face of the earth – our fantasies and our myths – count for nothing. The scum of little houses, the Parthenon itself, all of our frail properties, will fly like dust into the abyss. For all civilisations are like elaborate campings-out, a complicated picnic in the face of nature’s discomforts. And upon this impermanence we set up our easels and paint our pictures. What goes on to the canvas is the ticking of our hearts, the pulse of our lives. Yet when we die, what will happen? Other men and women will paint over our work; or those manifestos of ours against the indifference of the world will lie, face down, among old books and ornaments in junk-shops, in attics. Even if they hang in a gallery, framed and catalogued, respected and remarked upon, soon brown gravy will cover them, cracks and whorls will appear, the once radiant light will pour upon the scene like a sepia fog, the transparent petal will be dipped in glue: so that soon, only a pale face, a pale hand, will show in the darkness, and that face, that hand cracked over like mosaic. In the end, my heart-beats, my life’s work, will fade away along with the rest, the Parthenon will go down on its knees like an aged elephant, and the embalmed words of the great will count for no more than Liz and Camilla chattering up there in the lighted bedroom.’

The garden was so quiet that when an apple fell into the
flower-border she started. Then the silence seemed more intense than ever. ‘When the rottenness has begun in it, it drops,’ she told herself. ‘It is either better or worse with people. For here am I, an old woman, but still hanging on the tree. In both compassion and in cruelty we outstripped nature long ago.’

She whistled for Hotchkiss, but he did not come. Now the light went out in what she called ‘the girls’ room’, but the talk went on, and the low gusts of laughter.

‘No one ever came to me,’ she thought. ‘I never lay in bed and talked to anyone. But I felt tenderness for people, and love. Hid it, though, with my prim ways as soon Camilla will, and from the same motives, fear and pride. Pride does not come before a fall. Nothing happens after pride. It closes the way. Life does not come to us. Or comes too late. And if it does, comes because of someone-else’s humility, a little miracle, a man like Mr Beddoes who was brave enough to set his own charity, his own warmth, against my exclusiveness, and did indeed try to break through the briers and pass the sleeping sentries – but forty years too late, alas, when I am at the point of death and sit alone, hedged round by convention, and my set ways, and shyness … and those two chattering girls who denied us our peace together, so that each time a silence fell, they flew into it with their nonsense like a couple of jays.

‘It is very strange,’ she thought, ‘that the years teach us patience; that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting.’

So twisted round in her thoughts was she, that she did not hear Hotchkiss coming up the garden, or see his dark shape on the moonlit grass, was conscious of him only when he put his cold nose to her hand. She turned to go inside. ‘And so,’ she decided, shutting out the dark garden, bolting the door, ‘not tonight, but another time, I may sit down with him and say all
that I should like to say, but never have said except in my paintings. His humility must show me the way and teach me to wait, as he has waited.’

The moonlight was enough to read by and Morland Beddoes stopped to examine the gravestones in the churchyard, taking, he thought, a short cut towards the Griffin. The deep but narrowly incised letters, the dates all beginning with 17, the eighteenth-century names – Caroline, Sarah, Thomas, Anne – were all clear enough in this blanched light. ‘Great style,’ he said aloud, his finger-tips going from letter to letter across the stone as if the names were written in Braille. ‘Essentially English,’ he added. He bent and peered; he stepped on to the grass which so sparsely covered the cracked, parched earth. When he came to angels, to imported marble and black letters on granite from Aberdeen, he walked more quickly, and was conscious suddenly that his peerings and prowlings had not been unobserved, for loitering through the church from one tree to another, and laughing softly (perhaps, he thought a little self-consciously, at his strange behaviour) were a man and a woman, drifting together, entwined, and turning sometimes, between the infrequent lamps, to embrace one another more closely, their voices dropping to whispers, and from whispers to silence.

He hurried on into the street where the road ran like a great river, curving between the buildings and reflecting the repeated lights. Solitary always himself, he felt a great respect for lovers, as if, braver than he, they recklessly committed themselves to hazard.

Across the market square his footsteps rang metallically. Only here and there, on top storeys, windows blossomed into light.

One yellow light shone beyond the hall door of the hotel.
‘Welcome’ said the door-mat, but to those going out. The letter-rack was empty. A smell of gravy-soup and stale bread hung about, and at the bottom of the stairs, the little cat, its sides bulging, turned its paw delicately under its tiny tongue; then, seeing Morland, put its feet exactly together and shut its eyes, as if obliterating itself. He stooped to stroke it; incredibly silken it was, and its fur crackled to his touch.

‘I don’t have cats,’ he thought, ‘because they die, and that might hurt me. And I do not marry, lest my solitude should be invaded and my way of life violated. Not a very brave man, in fact.’

In from the street came Richard Elton. At the foot of the stairs they met.

‘Yes, he is alight from that woman,’ Morland thought, nodding a greeting, taking his hand from the cat and remembering how the other must have observed him reading the gravestones in the moonlight.

Both gave precedence to the other: at last Richard consented to go first. He ran up the staircase, going lightly like an athlete, his hands in his pockets, jingling loose coins, his trousers drawn tight across his buttocks, which, Morland decided, looked arrogant somehow, and then absurd. He disappeared among the dark passages off the first landing where the smell of gravy-soup became practically visible, as if mirrors, pictures and wallpapers were all dipped in it.

More slowly, breathing more heavily, Morland followed. It had been a momentous day for him and he was tired. Although his sense of relief was deep, it did not diminish his weariness.

He sent himself out on his adventures as if he were two people – perhaps a pearl-diver and another man who would await his return. Bringing back treasure to himself made life worth living, as it was tonight, and his years as a prisoner of war had made him miserly of this treasure which he turned
over so privately; for then it was all he had that could not be violated. He spun out the hours with it, lying on his bunk on Sundays as rain hit the windows, or on a winter’s evening as the others played cards or argued round the stove. He threw no stories into the common pool, shared no women with them in retrospect; tried to remember suitable stories but could not, and when he looked back on his life in England before the war was left with nothing to recount, had lived too mildly, chaperoned himself too closely; made little money, was never unseemly drunk, had got the better of no one; had slept, indeed, with two women but not, he must admit, at once. His love-making he saw now was too undistinguished to be acceptable to the others who, as the months, the years went by, recalled out of the void always more bizarre, more terrifying orgies. He was relieved that he had nothing he could share, and turned over his treasure quietly, trying to print on his closed eyelids the pictures he had seen, or faces he had loved. And the others left him alone, he was too good-tempered to bait; they respected him in a way, though putting upon him the most unpleasant of the work because of his education; but no offence was meant, none taken.

Sometimes Frances wrote to him, with enquiries after his health, hoping this, hoping that; with news that the study of a woman combing her hair was finished and that she was knitting him a pair of socks (which she was not allowed to send): a few remarks about the weather rounded off the rest. And it was good that she wrote thus, he felt. With painting and knitting in the same sentence.

He crossed the bedroom and drew back the curtains. The sky was like a swan’s breast, flocky in the moonlight. He saw the cobbled square dramatically, as if soon a foreshortened figure would emerge from the shadows bent on some film-adventure. The church clock struck a quarter, and an express train raved
incoherently through the station, blowing golden smoke to left and right.

‘Yes, this evening,’ he thought, leaning out into the lovely air, ‘all this evening, everything was right: her shyness, her charity, her good behaviour. If I spoke of painting it reminded her of my wine-glass. And the old-fashioned room, the parlour she called it, the lace curtains, the plants in pots, the ticking clock, were all that I had imagined from those letters of hers I had in Germany; even her appearance, her voice, her turn of phrase; and her governessy hold on those two young women; it was all as if she were saying: “I am the maiden-lady life made of me, and the painter I was born to be, and the two things are the same.’”

He drew the curtains and inspected the room, opening drawers and cupboards, took the ewer and stood it over a hole in the floor-boards to keep out mice or anything worse which might emerge in the night; then he began to undress.

The church clock struck another quarter and, overhead, footsteps went up and down at intervals, as if someone paced the room unable to sleep.

The bed was littered with newspapers. Richard had been lying down among them, staring at the ceiling, his arms crossed under his head. Now he was walking up and down smoking. He was unnerved tonight. Meeting that fat little man in the hall had upset him. He had seemed to be waiting for him, standing about at the bottom of the stairs stroking the cat, had loitered in the churchyard, pretending to read the gravestones, would not precede him up the stairs, but came slowly after, watching and observing.