A Wreath Of Roses (17 page)

Unlocking his suitcase he swept the papers into it on top of the dirty collars, rolled-up socks. He took out his diary and laid it on the dressing-table. Putting his hand in his pocket he
brought out the head of a red rose-bud. It was warm and soft and he held it tightly in his hand, walking up and down the room, trying to still himself, irritated by the memory of the girl he had taken into the country, had kissed in the churchyard; bored, laid waste by the tedium of love-making. She had given him the rose, warm still from being pinned to her clothes, as if she expected him to find it enhanced from being there. He opened his hand and the scent escaped from the bruised petals, sweet and clovery.

He sat down, and unlocked his diary, like a man driven by habit and hopelessness, to a drink he has deferred. Turning the last few pages, he read ‘Camilla’ again and again, spelt first one way and then another. He put his head down on his arms across the opened book. He must get to her, he knew. In the morning he must find her and elude that man who waited for him on the stairs; malignant, sinister, calmly prepared to remain there for ever if need be; a little cloud which had arisen no bigger than a man’s hand over this sunny little town.

He took up his pen and then, seeing that furled rose lying there, became disturbed again, and afraid. He picked it up and went to the window. All the square lay empty before him, the cobbles shining like soapsuds under the lamplight. He imagined the rose dropping downwards in a great arc, lying there until morning; incriminating; the little slip which leads men to their death in murder-stories, in films. Frightened now, he moved back into the room with the rose crushed up in his hand.

When the baby cried in the night no one heard. Only Hotchkiss got up from under the kitchen-table and lumbered to the door. He stood there with his head bowed listening for a second, and then settled down again, but with one eye opening from time to time.

Evening light came through the dusty windows. In the long pause between the soup and the steamed turbot, Camilla pleated the tablecloth above her lap, even took up the wine-list and began to fringe its edges, until Richard took it gently from her hands.

The fish had shrunk from its blueish bones, was covered with gluey skin, and accompanied by broken potatoes and a little pool of water.

‘Even when we’ve eaten it, we shan’t be done with it,’ Richard said, shifting it about on his plate. ‘The stench is with us for the evening.’

‘We could go out.’

‘Why are you so nervous?’

‘I don’t know.’

She glanced about her, but Mr Beddoes did not appear. She dreaded a meeting between the two men. The dining-room was nearly empty. A young woman took bones out of her mouth on a fork with an air of worried refinement, darting only an anxious whisper at the man opposite; a waitress leant against a sideboard picking varnish off her nails.

‘I looked for you all day,’ Richard said.

Anything more than a whisper was heard all round the room. The waitress glanced across at them.

‘But why? Why?’ Camilla murmured.

‘I dreamt about you last night.’

‘Hush!’

‘I dreamt you were picking apples off a tree and handing them down to me. I felt so – very peaceful. And you smiled. Sometimes, things come clear in dreams, so that you are made to understand about people what you hadn’t realised before; you never see them again in the same way. So this dream showed me that you make me feel steady and peaceful. I thought it meant that you would be coming to see me as you promised. All the morning the dream hung about me. I was afraid to leave the bar.’

The waitress folded her arms across her chest and yawned and yawned until her eyes watered.

‘It was so difficult for me.’

‘They say dreams don’t have colours, but this one was so vividly green and red. The apples and the grass …’ He could imagine deep orchard grass, polished apples brilliant between the leaves; the scene was as plain to him as if he had really dreamt it. Camilla saw it very plainly too. The waitress thought it nonsense. She came to take their plates. All they had done to the food was to rearrange it.

Camilla thought: ‘We are like two people on the opposite sides of a river, and though we strain our voices they cannot carry from one bank to the other.’

The dreary food passed between them on the table. Even the stewed apple seemed to have bones in it. The girl at the other table took bits out of her mouth with her spoon.

‘You see, I am in great trouble,’ he said, and drew four lines down the tablecloth with his fork.

She tried to skim cigarette-ash off the top of her coffee, but her hand shook.

‘I need you to help me.’

‘Let us get out of here.’

She put the spoon in her saucer and dropped the napkin on the table with a gesture of weariness and finality.

He followed her out of the dining-room.

Mr Beddoes saw them as he came down the stairs, watched Richard guiding her along the drugget, a hand under her elbow. They did not see him, and he went at once to the hotel register which lay on a ledge by the office and began to turn over its pages.

Richard and Camilla pushed their way along the street, past the queues at the bus-stops and the cinemas and outside the station. Soon they came to a little park full of paper-bags and bus tickets, where children were playing in the dust under the trees, and they sat down on a wooden seat, rather apart from one another.

When she turned to look at him, he was sitting a little sideways, staring at her, his arm resting along the back of the seat. He opened his hand and she put hers rather timidly into it. People went by on the asphalt paths, looking at the calceolarias, the lobelias, the beetroot-coloured leaves of the weird municipal flowers in the crescent-shaped beds.

‘I saw you last night,’ she suddenly said, and at once his fingers were very still, twined in her own.

‘Where?’

‘Outside the Griffin.’

He waited.

‘With a girl,’ she added carelessly and then waited too.

His hand slipped up her bare arm but he said nothing.

Sparrows took dust-baths at their feet. They both watched them without seeing.

‘If you were there, why didn’t you come for me?’ he asked.

‘I’m most relieved that I didn’t.’

‘You know I hate to be left alone.’

She smiled primly.

‘You should have saved me from that girl.’

‘Oh, women are always a temptation. “Please, sir, it wasn’t me, sir.” Yes, slaves or courtesans; destruction or inspiration.’ Her hand trembled on his arm. ‘Either a shadow between man and God or a devil in the bed.’

‘You certainly don’t like men.’

A woman sauntering by on her husband’s arm turned her head curiously, as if she awaited Camilla’s answer; but some instinct drew her back again to her child, who ran before her along the path; she called him sharply away from the flowers he would have liked to have picked, smiled as he put his fingers into the jaw of a great red bloom cowering under its own leaves. It was their evening walk, Camilla thought. They would comment on what they saw, but not talk to one another, for they had said long ago all that was to be said. The wife would look disapprovingly at those who sat hand in hand on the park seats, as if they threatened her world which she had built up straw after straw from one such moment of her own. They would return to this world in silence, locked-up from another; she would put the child to bed; he would turn on the wireless. Later, they would sit over a meal which was no longer the sacrament it once had been; he would yawn; she would stare in front of her. There they were for the rest of their time, separated from one another, but also, because of one another, separated from the world.

The truth is that I know nothing about men,’ she said, looking after the woman, who had now caught up the small, wandering child and was holding him out behind a tree, her hair blowing over her flushed face, while her husband stood by
smiling. ‘You don’t understand what my life has been. No man would understand what life is like for so many women. How can we take any of the things we want, that you expect to have – freedom, adventure, experience – without being taxed intolerably, or making ourselves ridiculous in other people’s eyes, or in our own?’

‘Some women do take them.’

‘Most women don’t.’

‘In the war …’

‘But I’m talking about life, not death. Death isn’t an adventure, whatever Peter Pan may have hoped, but the end of adventure.’

With the tips of his fingers, he traced a vein down the inside of her arm. ‘Were you never in love?’

‘What my being in love amounted to would amuse you and amaze you.’

She could remember herself as a young girl, never successful at those dances where she would hover at doorways, unclaimed; or comb her hair for ten minutes at a time in the deserted cloakroom. For no young men scribbled on her programme, only the avuncular whose wives led them to her, partly from kindness, but partly, she even then suspected, to keep them from the bar. She had despised her own over-animation with these middle-aged men, as if she must stun them into remaining; and then, as the years went by, the cold distaste she displayed instead, the sarcasm.

‘Tell me!’ Richard insisted, busily smoothing the fine gold hairs on her arm, ruffling and smoothing them.

‘It would have been ignominious, but nobody saw … before that I hadn’t shared anything secret, not even a glance, with another person. The feeling was new to me and very exciting.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Thin, dark, so white-skinned that he didn’t tan in the
summer like other people, but turned a kind of mauve.’ She laughed, and then suddenly frowned and turned his hand palm upwards. ‘What a terrible scar! How did you do that?’ It ran across his hand, thick and crimson.

His face became closed and stubborn. ‘I didn’t do it.’

She stared at him beseechingly, but he gave her no comfort.

‘I don’t care to talk about it.’ He handed her a cigarette. ‘Go on telling me about that man.’

But how could she? The nineteen-forties impinged on the nineteen-twenties; such darkness lay over the nostalgia that it seemed not sweet but meaningless. Ugliness has the extra power of making beauty seem unreal, a service beauty seems rarely able to return.

‘What happened?’ he was asking.

She struggled to go back. ‘At a party … one of those big Cambridge houses, and during one of those hiding games young people play. I went into a room on my own. It was cold and quite dark. I stood there shivering in my thin frock, and suddenly a hand went over my mouth and drew me back behind a curtain.’

She could remember the plush smell of the curtains now, and the harshness of them against her bare arms. Enfolded by them, they stood close and whispering, his lips stroked her cheek, he closed her eyelids with his kiss. The moonlight came in through the window over the floorboards of the strange room, and down below footsteps ran along passages, doors banged, and all at once laughter rang out, for the game was over.

‘I was only eighteen,’ she said, as if to excuse herself.

‘What happened?’

‘They came to find us. When I went down, the lights frightened me. There was a great brilliant table, rocking with jellies and blancmanges. I couldn’t eat. I felt that what had happened was stamped all over me, that they must all know. I kept
touching my hair, smoothing my dress. Once he looked at me, and for a moment it was as if we were alone again, in silence. The next day he went back home. I cried, with the utter dreariness and desolation of life without the hope of seeing him, languishing in the attic, my only safe place, snow blowing past the windows.’

‘Didn’t you see him again?’

‘Yes. The next year he came again. There was a dance and I knew that he would be there. I felt ill with nerves. A year had passed, but I wasn’t really a year older, for nothing had happened to me but day-dreams. As soon as I went into the room I saw him. I thought that my legs would fold up if I tried to dance with him. But I needn’t have worried, because he didn’t ask me. I don’t think he remembered me. And I had dreamed of him for a whole year; he was always at the back of my thoughts and in bed at night there were all the scenes I went over and over, the things we should say to one another, our future together …’

‘Don’t laugh at it,’ he said quietly. He turned her hand and put a little kiss into it, moved by her innocence.

‘I once told Liz all this, but rather jokingly.’

‘We suffer most when we are young,’ he said sententiously.

‘I started off on the wrong foot and nothing went right after that. I felt rebuffed for years, and never loved anyone, but Liz. I know it was a fault in me. I know I ought to have recovered from something which is after all only a part of growing-up. Liz would have. She always gives herself a second chance.’

‘That isn’t always possible.’

‘Why did you say that you were in trouble?’

‘Did I say that?’

‘Why of course. Back in the hotel.’

‘It isn’t really true; or when I am with you it stops being true. I mean, I don’t think of it.’

‘I wish you would tell me.’