A Wreath Of Roses (2 page)

A
Wreath of Roses
accepts the terribleness of life, its random cruelty and agonies of isolation. The novel’s realism belies the easy view of Elizabeth Taylor as a small-scale ironist or social comedian, of limited palette, bounded by class and gender. Taylor shows women ‘affronting their destiny’, as Henry James does in
The Portrait of a Lady
, but Camilla is no Isabel Archer, dramatised by the male gaze. Nor is she able to succumb to self-adoration, and view herself as an object of male desire, as Beryl Fairfield does in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘At The Bay’. Instead, Camilla looks into her mirror and sees naked flesh, changing and ageing: ‘She remembered herself as a girl. The sharp white shoulders, the high bosom had so imperceptibly, yet so soon, assumed this heavy golden ripeness, and how much more abruptly would exchange maturity for old age.’ Camilla views her own body objectively, because in a certain sense she has not
yet become herself, and even the beauty of her flesh only serves to mirror her emotional isolation. It will wither in hiding, she fears, as it has blossomed in hiding. By contrast, Liz’s body is used at every turn. Her baby’s regurgitated milk drips down her back, and her breasts are veined. She runs around a room like a cat, weeps and laughs, touches and is touched. Camilla, watching this, sees only the risks involved in Liz’s emotional openness, and would like to control it even as she despairs of her own rigidity.

Crime, like self-forgetfulness, is outside the reckoning that Camilla has made of her life. Both Liz and Morland Beddoes mistrust Richard Elton from the outset, and come to fear him. Morland may be pure in heart, but he is worldly. He has fought and spent years as a prisoner of war, and understands the trapped passions of his fellow creatures; Liz’s recoil is instinctive, physical, but it is also based on what she observes. After the first meeting she tells Camilla that she sees in Elton ‘a sort of tough stupidity’ as well as film-star good looks. This turns out to be close to the mark, although Camilla pays no attention. She listens to what she thinks, not to what her instincts may tell her, and she persists in believing in Richard Elton with an obstinacy that defies evidence and courts disaster. Taylor’s argument here seems to be that if physical instinct is ignored, it will revenge itself. Every warning siren is shrieking aloud before Camilla can bring herself to notice what her body knows: ‘Fear leapt through her at his touch … She could feel sweat breaking out over her body.’

This is an unflinching novel, which probes deep into the self-deceptions that grow up in order to soften life, and end up by choking it like so many weeds. Paradoxically, it is also extremely beguiling. Taylor makes the living moment present, touchable, disturbing, enchanting. The world in which Liz, Camilla, Frances, Richard and Morland move is so fully
imagined that it seems to belong to the reader’s own past. Silky, gritty rainwater pours over Camilla’s arms from a jug; a hotel ‘seemed enfolded in a cocoon, indifferent to life, but still a little active in itself, for a clock ticked with an oily, solid sound at the foot of the stairs; far, far away there was a gentle clatter of washing-up.’ We have all stood at the empty reception desk of such an hotel, and against this solidity the tension tightens, suspense mounts and fear crawls over the mind’s surface like a fly.

Helen Dunmore, 2010

Afternoons seem unending on branch-line stations in England in summer time. The spiked shelter prints an unmoving shadow on the platform, geraniums blaze, whitewashed stones assault the eye. Such trains as come only add to the air of fantasy, to the idea of the scene being symbolic, or encountered at one level while suggesting another even more alienating.

Once the train which had left them on the platform had drawn out, the man and woman trod separately up and down, read time-tables in turn, were conscious of one another in the way that strangers are, when thrown together without a reason for conversation. A word or two would have put them at ease, but there were no words to say. The heat of the afternoon was beyond comment and could not draw them together as hailstones might have done. They had nothing to do, but to walk up and down or sit for a moment on the blistering-hot, slatted seat. In any case, they would not naturally have made efforts to exchange words, since he was a man of conventional good-looks of the kind that she, Camilla, believed she despised – the empty grey eyes with their thick lashes, the waving hair, the weak, square chin, rather cleft; all of his clothes and his bearing
depicting a kind of man who could never have any part in her life, whose existence could not touch hers, which was thoughtful rather than active and counted its values in a different way. All this they knew at a glance. That they should trouble to explore one another further was explained by the empty afternoon, the feeling that time was being paid out too slowly to bring the train they awaited.

She turned back her cuff to see the time, patted her yawning mouth with her fist. Heedless of her appearance, he thought; and the little beauty she possessed could be in the eyes of only a few beholders, so much was it left to fend for itself. She made no concessions, beyond neatness, in order to arrest or distract and ordinarily he would not have glanced at her again.

At last she sat down on a seat and opened a book. This seemed to leave him alone on the platform under the blazing sun. Shut up in a little office, the station-master whistled through his teeth. The sound came out of the window, and sometimes the scraping on the wooden floor when he moved his chair. Out on the white country road, a horse and cart waited and the horse crunched the gravel, worn out with the flies, the heat. Then, with a collapsing sound, the signal dropped.

The woman looked up and then at the clock and then back at her book. When another man walked on to the platform, she sat with her finger on a word, watching him going up the steps of the footbridge and could hear the hollow sound of his boots on the wooden boards.

The train’s white plume came slowly towards them; but neither stirred, for this was a through train, against which they rather braced themselves, watching the shabby man idling his afternoon away on the bridge like a child looking at trains.

The station-master came out of his office and stood in the doorway. The three of them were quite still in the shimmering
heat, the plume of smoke nodding towards them, the noise of the train suddenly coming as it rounded a bend, suddenly sucking them up in its confusion and panic. All at once, the man on the footbridge swung himself up on the parapet and, just as Camilla was putting out her arms in a ridiculous gesture as if to stop him, he clumsily jumped, a sprawling jump, an ill-devised death, since he fell wide of the express train.

This happening broke the afternoon in two. The feeling of eternity had vanished. What had been timeless and silent became chaotic and disorganised, with feet running along the echoing boards, voices staccato, and the afternoon darkening with the vultures of disaster, who felt the presence of death and arrived from the village to savour it and to explain the happening to one another.

But before an ambulance could come, he died, quietly, his back broken. He lay in a little patch of shade outside the station-master’s office, beyond which they had not managed to carry him. The vultures gathered close, to stand between him and the afternoon. He died at their feet and the station-master covered him with an old coat so that only his boots, beautifully polished, were left to their mercy.

Camilla walked to the far end of the platform, and when her train drew in at last, she sat down in an empty compartment and closed her eyes.

And now the afternoon had taken one step towards evening. She could sense herself going towards it, the shadows drawn out across lawns and pavements, elm trees full of a blue darkness, gnats golden in the air.

To her shocked mind, it seemed that the death she had witnessed was not to be so easily left behind as the train moved forward; but that it would go along with her. She experienced a moment of fear and recoil, introduced by that happening, but related to the future as well.

Just as the train began to move, the young man who had awaited it for so long, wrenched at the door and jumped into the carriage, breathing desperately, as if he had run a long way and at great pace. Unsteadily he threw his suitcase along the seat, and sat down opposite Camilla, who at once (for such was her instinct) turned to contemplate the sweltering fields, the drowsy, wooded horizon.

‘Upsetting!’ he said suddenly, his eyes upon her as he wiped his palms on a silk handkerchief.

‘Something more than upsetting,’ she rebuked him, and turned again to the unrolling landscape, but he saw tears under her lashes as she looked away.

‘I wonder why …?’ he went on, determined now to make those tears fall if he could. As though she realised this, she made a great effort to steady herself and managed at last to answer in a callous, off-hand manner: ‘If he couldn’t manage his death better than that, the difficulties of living were obviously beyond him.’

‘A schoolmistress,’ he decided.

‘That chorus!’ she cried, shaken with rage.

‘Chorus?’

‘The ones who gathered from nowhere and stood watching and explaining.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘Their tongues flicking up and down like snakes’ tongues.’

He looked at her curiously.

‘Perhaps you can’t blame them,’ he suggested.

‘
You
blamed them. You walked away … at least, I missed you …’

She hesitated and looked up and he saw that her eyes were brilliantly blue.

‘What station is this?’ she asked, leaning to the window as the train slowed past a signal-box.

‘Broad Oak,’ he read. There were the words suddenly, very white on black, and the same deserted platform, the geraniums; as if they had completed a circle. Only the shadows were shifting and drawing themselves out.

She leant back again.

‘How far are you going?’

‘To Abingford.’

‘For a holiday?’

‘Yes.’

‘And staying at the Red Lion, I expect?’

The Red Lion?’ she asked, puzzled.

‘It is the Red Lion, isn’t it? The big one in the High Street?’

‘The High Street?’

‘The main street, the wide one,’ he said, as if with impatience.

‘You must mean Market Street.’

‘Well, isn’t the Red Lion there?’

‘No. The one with the porch and the stuccoed pillars is the Bear. The only other is in Market Square, opposite the station, a place with shutters and a cobbled yard at the side.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to remember. The Griffin,’ she said suddenly. ‘Yes, the Griffin.’

‘Oh, I’ve forgotten. A sentimental journey, this. I was a boy when I was here last. Now I’ve come back for some peace; to write a book, in fact.’

She was surprised. Her imagination refused this idea, refused the idea of him
reading
a book even. A man, she would have thought him, bound by cold, impersonal interests and dull, objective conversation – sport, and newspapers, and the price of cars.

‘What kind of book?’ she enquired.

‘About the war.’

‘Oh, I see.’ (The war and his experience in it,’ she thought. ‘Unreadable.’)

And now (the landscape opening always like a succession of fans) cows moved deep in buttercups, hedges were dense and creamy with elderflower and cow-parsley. Yet her pleasure in it all was ruined, first by the incident at the junction, and now by the interruption of this man, sitting opposite her, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes never leaving her.

‘What experiences did you have?’ she felt obliged to ask. ‘What were you? What did you do?’

‘Dropped by moonlight half-way across France. Sat between Gestapo men in trains, with my transmitter in a case on the rack above, hid in cellars while they searched for me overhead …’ he broke off, looking excited, as if he were listening to this story, not telling it … ‘Oh, the sound of those footsteps going up and down, wandering away, but always coming back, and sometimes scarcely to be heard above the noises
here …’
he tapped his fingers on the side of his head … ‘the rushing sounds that come from too much straining to hear. And it all being so much like the books I read as a boy – passwords, disguises, swallowing bits of paper, hiding others in currant buns …’

‘So
that
is the sort of man who did it!’ she thought, staring back at him.

‘You must have great nerve,’ she suggested, trying in this to find an excuse, a reason, for the emptiness in his eyes.

‘Not now,’ he replied. The end of the war came at the right time for me. The last time I was briefed, a feeling of staleness came over me, a sort of tired horror …’

‘Tired horror!’ she repeated, surprised. When he used those words, she could understand it all.

‘And won’t it all come back, if you write about it? The horror, and the reluctance.’

‘When it is done …’ he began.

‘To exorcise it, you mean? To drive it out of you, as Emily Brontë drove out Heathcliff, with her pen?’

Either he found this fanciful or distasteful to him, for he glanced out of the window as if dissociating himself from her comparisons.

She at once felt she had sacrificed Emily Brontë, throwing her in as a spur to conversation, uselessly, for the conversation fell into an awkward jog-trot and then stopped.