A Wreath Of Roses (19 page)

‘But it wasn’t all happy. Sadness often looked out of those girls’ eyes …’

‘An English sadness. Delicious to contemplate.’

‘The picture of Liz on the sofa – she was a woman alone in a room; as only God, I should have thought, could ever possibly have seen her. It was the truth.’

‘All
little
things,’ she said impatiently, blowing out a match.

‘But
not
little. That
is
life. It’s loving-kindness and simplicity, and it lay there all the time in your pictures, implicit in every petal and every jug you ever painted.’

‘Life’s not simplicity,’ she said slowly. Not loving-kindness either. It’s darkness, and the terrible things we do to one another, and to ourselves. The sooner we are out of it the better.
And paintings don’t matter. They are like making daisy-chains in the shadow of a volcano. Pathetic and childish.’

She sat down on a kitchen-chair and looked at the lamp burning; her clenched hand beat nervously against her thigh.

‘The only thing that makes sense of it all is looking up at the sky at night and knowing that even the burden of cruelty we’ve laid upon the earth, scarcely exists: must fly away into dust, is nothing, too infinitesimal to matter. All the time, the house is falling into ruin, and I run to the walls and tack my pretty pictures to them as they collapse.’

He went over to her and took her hand.

‘You don’t want me to see these paintings.’

‘They reject all that you cared for. I don’t want you to feel too – dismissed.’

‘Who else has seen them?’

‘Only Elizabeth.’

‘And what did
she
think?’

‘What did she think? I didn’t ask her. She’s only a girl.’

He smiled.

‘What are you going to paint next?’

‘I’ve finished.’

‘Why this blank canvas then?’

‘If my rheumatism ever gets better, I may paint one more.’

‘Then it will have to be a summing-up. Which side will you come down on? Violence, or charity?’

She looked out of the window. After a moment she said: ‘Perhaps you are the devil come to tempt me.’

‘Whatever you put on this canvas, I claim. Because I love you. Whatever you choose to say, I shall hold dear. I have always cherished you and promoted you, and now I only want you to be yourself. I want you to be quiet inside and listen to yourself, as patiently as you once looked at those lemons and those leaves.’

‘Yes, I think you really are the devil.’

‘This is the first moment we have been alone.’

‘The girls are always here in August.’

‘You are three unhappy women under one roof.’

‘Unhappy?’

‘Liz is unhappy about her baby. Camilla – that’s a lovely name. It has the smoothness of ice – she’s unhappy about her life; embittered, waspish. You’re unhappy about the world.’

‘You have soon summed us up. The baby is only a passing anxiety. Elizabeth is never miserable for long. She’s just a young and inexperienced mother feeling fussed. Camilla’s at a forked road. She believes that what she doesn’t take now, she’ll never have. But will dwindle into an old maid. I am a terrible example to her. Her job shows her others.’

He wondered if he should tell her that he had seen Camilla in the Griffin that evening, and decided he should not.

‘What is she going to do?’ he asked instead.

‘She is never frank with me.’

‘Perhaps you frighten her.’

‘I think in that mood she would do anything that cropped up,’ Frances said vaguely.

‘Has she friends in the town?’

‘None that I know of. It is a poor holiday for her; she and Liz seem estranged. But I cannot worry about them now. They are grown women.’

He smiled. ‘They have suddenly shot up, as they say. It is very peaceful here. And a nice smell of turpentine and creosote, and size; and, I think, honeysuckle.’

‘Night-flowering stocks.’

‘Don’t worry, will you? Not any more.’

‘I don’t worry. I only wanted to confess my weakness before I died, as religious people do. I think I heard Elizabeth come back.’

‘Shall we never be alone like this again? Must we waste any more hours talking about Greta Garbo in front of the girls, as you call them?’

She stood up. ‘Elizabeth will wonder where we are.’

She took the blank canvas down from the easel and put in its place another picture. As he came towards it, she stood back a little, holding the lamp in her left hand. He took from a case in his pocket a pair of steel-rimmed Army spectacles. When he had put them on, he went over and stood beside her, and in the wavering light confronted the white bones of the earth and dark figures scurrying against a violet sky.

Richard took a piece of the hotel writing-paper up to his room. He sat down at the marble washstand, and very carefully tore off the address from the top of the sheet. Then, in his childish, curly hand, he began his letter.

‘D
EAR
M
OTHER
,

‘Just to let you know I am OK. I hope you and Dad are keeping fit and well.’ He paused for a long time, bit his nails, altered the full-stop into a comma and added ‘in this lovely weather.’ Once that was done, he felt defeated, for there was nothing more to write, but his request for money. No words led up to this. It would leap abruptly from the page however he wrote it. He enquired a little about his mother’s sciatica, his father’s allotment, and at last began on his own situation. He imagined them reading the letter; saw, without having to recall it, the little sitting-room, jazzy and orange, the pride of the nineteen-twenties, with its vase of cape-gooseberries, and his own photograph on the piano, an arm out of focus to display his flight-sergeant’s crown, rivers of light running over his brilliantined hair.

He thought of the unbearable evenings he had spent there
on leave, his mother always anxiously watching him, ready to interpret the lightest sigh as censure, full of suggestions for passing his time, yet at once aggrieved if he fell in with any of them.

Now he had to think of the next stage of his travels, some address where money might be sent; but this, which should have been so easy, was most difficult of all. The frightening thing was that he was free to go anywhere and could not choose. Penzance, he thought. But why Penzance? Why not Bath or Edinburgh instead? So it went on. For nothing tied him. If people, employment did not, then surely sentiment would, his own memories, something even so faint as the reason why he had chosen this little market-town – once having, as a boy, camped with the O.T.C. up on the downs beyond the earthworks.

‘Scarborough’, he suddenly wrote. The Grand Hotel, Scarborough.’ He saw the empty wind-swept asphalt where he had drilled in front of that hotel in wartime, remembered the pettish gulls, the sea crashing on the beach below, the deserted water-front, whorled and entangled with barbed wire, the pale houses, the trees scrambling inland.

He did not imagine the streets crowded, hotels full, children with buckets and spades, a band playing, different barmaids. In his mind it was all just as he had left it. The decision had excited him. ‘In three or four days,’ he promised himself. ‘They will send the money by return.’ He sealed the envelope and put it into his pocket, and a great load was off his mind, he thought.

Liz slept badly, drifting in and out of thin, sleavy dreams, lying awake for timeless stretches. Once she thought Camilla was awake too and she said her name softly but there was no answer. ‘But people don’t go to sleep with their hands clasped under their heads,’ she decided, and wished that she had not spoken.

After daybreak, the birds woke her. They burst in and out of the ivy, sang in the branches of the pear tree. A wash of new light lay over the ceiling. Harry stirred and whimpered in his little room and then cried aloud. Liz went softly across the landing and twisted him up in a shawl and took him back to her own bed. She lay on her side and looked at him and he wound his fingers in her hair, tried to catch her eyelids, her smile, all that moved on her face.

‘Suppose there is a war!’ she thought. ‘Suppose that I bring him up to be civilised and sensitive and unsuspicious, and all that changes …’

‘What’s wrong?’ Camilla asked suddenly, sitting up in bed.

‘Harry cried, and I thought he might disturb Frances.’

‘Why are
you
crying?’

‘Crying?’

‘Well, of course you are.’

‘I didn’t know.’ She brushed tears off her cheeks with her fingers. ‘I was only thinking about the war.’

‘What war?’

‘If there is one.’

‘Well, what if there is?’

‘It would finish our sort of civilisation for ever and ever.’

‘People said that last time. Anyhow, I think it is rather interesting to know something different might begin – perhaps tree-dwellers, or we might go down on all fours again and have another shot at standing up in a few thousand years’ time.’

‘You wouldn’t talk like that if you had a child.’

‘But Liz dear, don’t begin the day with all this.’

‘I had such dreams all night. I wish something nice would happen. No one in my life goes in for treats. Arthur never does. Mrs Parsons told me that every dinner-time on washing-day her husband comes in and says: “What about the pictures tonight, old girl?” to cheer her up. It must make her feel so nice – the kitchen all steamy, a smell of bubble-and-squeak, and something to look forward to in the evening, escaping into a different world – people in full evening dress,
suffering
. Very enjoyable to watch, I find it.’

‘Well, if all you want is to go to the cinema …’

‘Mrs Parsons has such a happy life – all those outings she goes on with the Darts Team, crates of stout, lots of laughter, rude stories …’

‘You don’t like rude stories.’

‘I should do if I were Mrs Parsons.’

‘You would be worried about Euniss. Perhaps Mrs Parsons wishes she were safe and secure in the Vicarage.’

‘When you were out last night, I tried to telephone Arthur, but he wasn’t there.’

‘He can’t sit at home for ever lest you should happen to telephone.’

‘No, I know. But I so needed to talk to him. Frances and Mr Beddoes were discussing Greta Garbo again. I thought they would never stop.’

‘He’s a good man.’

‘I think so. He’s so good you forget he’s there.’

‘I don’t forget it. I find myself hoping that he thinks well of me.

‘Harry looks better this morning.’

‘Liz, last night Richard asked me to marry him.’

After an appalled silence, Liz said: ‘But you won’t, will you?’

‘I didn’t say that to
you
when …’

‘But Arthur’s different. He’s … well we both know what he is, but he isn’t bad.’

‘Bad?’

‘I’m sorry, but I think that Richard man is bad. I think he does harm. I’m afraid he will do harm to you.’

‘I’m afraid Arthur will do harm to you, too.’

‘Oh, no.’

‘He won’t let you grow, or change. He will never allow you to throw out new shoots, but will contort you into something he wishes you to be, a sort of child-wife. It’s a kind of murder.’

‘Oh, don’t exaggerate. You’ve always disliked him. And you’re unjust to him.’

‘I love
you
so much. I want you to be happy.’

(‘Is it true?’ she wondered. ‘Am I damnably possessive; worse than Arthur? The first time I wrote Liz’s changed name on an envelope, I really suffered. A little thing, but I shied at the thought of it for weeks.’)

‘What did you say to him?’ Liz asked.

‘Oh, I said no.’

‘I don’t understand it. What can you want with one another?’

‘He wants security from me, I want adventure from him. Two opposite things. The dullness of my life attracts him, seems a refuge from all the adventure he has been through, the tension he suffers.’

‘Are you happy, then, when you’re with him?’

‘No, we are antagonistic to one another. But I suspect men and women always are.’

‘I hate that. If it’s true. This child’s bottom is really terribly chafed. I’ve done everything I can think of.’

‘Frances says he’s teething.’

‘How can she know? I wish Mrs Parsons came today. She could tell me. I think it’s too early to be cutting teeth.’

‘I daresay Euniss was born with hers. She has always seemed rather advanced for her age.’

‘And Arthur’s at a Conference in Oxford. I just can’t
get
him. Unless I write.’

‘What could Arthur do?’

‘You don’t understand.’

‘Is Morland Beddoes coming today?’

‘He is sure to,’ Liz said indifferently. ‘Oh, the Fair is here. It came in last night.’

‘Well, there’s your nice treat you were looking for. Mr Beddoes shall take you to the Fair.’

‘Of course, I shouldn’t go,’ Liz said.