A Wreath Of Roses (20 page)

Liz sat on a golden horse, which was scrolled and gilded like all the rest, with outstretched legs and flowing tail, its buttocks painted with acanthus leaves. Each time she came round to them, she smiled. Arthur and Camilla standing stiffly by,
smiled too; but primly, as if at a child. They could not speak to one another above the infernal forced-out music, and were tired of acknowledging Liz, and staring at the pivot of mirrors and panels of roses, a scene of chariot-racing and, unaccountably, polar-bears.

Mrs Parsons sat firm beside her husband, a trim little man wearing white plimsolls. She grasped the twisted brass rod with both hands and looked ahead, her American-cloth bag hanging from her arm.

Above the roundabout, the darkening sky was florid. All round, the dry feathery grass was strewn with litter. Every pole, each wheel and ladder or piece of wood, was painted with a coloured pattern; all the little misspelt notices were decorated.

Camilla and Arthur smiled hopelessly at one another, shuddered affectedly at the music. The noise roared in their ears. Liz, with her whipped-back hair, her bare feet in sandals, recurred now without their noticing. After a while, the horses slowed, so that the names painted below their manes could now be read – Flance, Eirene, Luna, Gilda, Florence. Arthur went forward and handed Liz down.

‘I am so happy,’ she said. ‘It is so nice to see you in ordinary clothes.’

Yes, he looked handsome in his flannels and his striped blazer which Liz called ordinary, Camilla thought, rather as if he would come down to the footlights at any moment and begin to sing. It was a pity for him that his job deprived him of the joy of wearing his school tie. But he had an oar on the wall of his study, Liz had told her, and silver cups which Mrs Taylor kept brilliantly polished.

Now Mrs Parsons was up in a swing-boat, one hand to her bosom as if it might fly away; she screamed like a peacock as she went higher. Liz watched her, but Arthur drew her away.

A girl with silver bracelets and rows of wooden rings up her dirty arms, shouting shrilly and mechanically, threw out the hoops to them, dropping their coins into her apron pockets. Ear-rings swung in her untidy hair, her face was tired, drained of vitality. Liz, trying painstakingly to encircle the undesirable objects, glanced at her with curiosity, wondered about her battered-down beauty. Each time she threw, her tongue came out between her teeth. Camilla cast her rings away casually. Arthur won a packet of soup-powder.

Mr Beddoes stood in front of a stall, eating a piece of yellow Swiss-roll. This annoyed Arthur, to whom it was enough of a concession to come to a fair without being seen eating its food.

He was easy in his mind now about Mr Beddoes, about whom he had felt a little curiosity, knowing nothing about film-directors, but wondering if the word did not indicate too much authority; a large man was suggested, with perhaps a megaphone, a man afraid of no one, calling actresses ‘silly bitches’, and expecting to be listened to, but not answered back. He disliked other men to have authority. He disliked other men. So he concluded that Morland was a tin-pot director of twopenny-halfpenny films, and indeed had never heard of any of the titles he had given in response to Arthur’s own polite questioning. The stringy ties, the diffident voice and now the piece of Swiss-roll finished Mr Beddoes off completely.

‘He is such a good man,’ Camilla was saying and she nodded at Liz and Morland sauntering on ahead.

‘Oh, a very good fellow,’ Arthur said encouragingly.

‘I don’t just mean a good fellow. I mean “good” as I imagine religious people mean it if they stop to consider.’

‘All right. Touché. And in what way does he show this?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps by thinking ahead for people. That’s
a rare kindness. It isn’t even easy always to do the helpful thing at the right time, but he anticipates it and is ready. I’ve watched him with Frances.’

‘He’s considerate and thoughtful,’ he suggested.

‘Yes, but imaginative too.’

‘Imagination is a gift. We can’t all have that,’ he said, as if she had reproved him for lacking it.

‘I wonder!’

He put a penny in a machine and drew a card out of a slot. ‘Your fortune,’ he said, handing it to her as they walked on.

‘You think imagination can be cultivated?’ he asked.

‘More than any other quality perhaps.’

‘And you value it highly?’

‘Yes. Yes, I value it very highly,’ she said, tearing the card he had given her and dropping it to the ground.

‘What was your fortune?’ he asked.

‘I don’t choose to tell you.’

He glanced at the torn pieces and then smiled at her.

‘I will imagine it instead.’

‘Well, do!’

‘I shouldn’t be sure that imagination doesn’t often cause mischief.’

‘I believe that it’s the people who are locked up in their own bodies who do harm.’

Now Mr Beddoes had bought Liz a toffee-apple, and Arthur could not listen to Camilla any more.

‘Of such is the kingdom of heaven,’ she said lightly, following his glance. She felt stimulated by her conversation with him: he was enlivened, too. Their antagonism gave them freedom and impulsiveness. They fenced with skill and pleasure.

‘She will be ill eating that,’ he said. ‘I shudder to think how
or where it was made.’ He shuddered. Indeed, Liz now seemed to wonder the same thing and she dropped the apple behind a caravan. Mr Beddoes was laughing at her.

‘Were you really worried about that?’ Camilla enquired.

At first, she thought he wouldn’t answer, then he said: ‘You detest me and suspect the worst of me. A bad thing to do, because so often people become what they are reckoned to be. You put words into my mouth that I have never said, and thoughts into my head that I could never think.’

‘Go on being gallant. Don’t be pathetic,’ she laughed. ‘I have never hidden the fact that I detest you; so why accuse me of it as if I should deny it?’

‘Ah, it is a bracing air we breathe!’

‘Don’t be affected.’

‘Why do you detest me? Why single me out?’

‘Because you singled Liz out. Otherwise I should ignore you. Naturally her husband is important to me. She is dearer to me than anyone in the world.’

He smiled the mysterious smile which meant that his adversary had betrayed herself in a way he need not underline in words.

Camilla walked unconcernedly on.

‘My comment can scarcely be put into English,’ he said.

‘Say it in Greek then,’ she said slyly.

‘Ah, you are very quick.’

‘You don’t believe it for a second, but you like to feel competitive.’

Liz and Morland had paused, were looking back, waiting for them. It was getting late. The sky was quite dark, but for its red bruise above the Fair. Women were sweeping the slippery grass with besom brooms. Dirty, ringed hands counted money under the lamplight.

Arthur noticed the anxious glance that Liz gave Camilla.

‘She can look after herself,’ he said, misinterpreting the look.

‘We should go home. Frances will be waiting up for us,’ Camilla said.

‘She’s been painting all day. She’ll be banging at the piano now,’ Liz said, and she hung back so that she could walk at Camilla’s side.

Arthur went on ahead with Morland. The contrast between the two was amusing.

‘Arthur is so
fine
!’ Camilla laughed. ‘He should wear a laurel wreath. Let us make him one when we get back!’

‘Yet it is Morland who is sure of himself.’

‘I like him. Why do you keep glancing at me in that anxious way? Do you think I have been flirting with your husband?’

Liz laughed. ‘No, as a matter of fact I don’t think that.’

‘Would you mind if I did?’

‘I should mind it dreadfully. Lady Davidson wouldn’t be in it.’

‘I only asked as a matter of interest.’

‘Have you had a nice evening?’

‘Yes, have you?’

‘It was lovely to see Arthur, although there wasn’t really any need.’

‘Any need?’

‘As soon as I saw Harry’s new tooth, I stopped worrying. A lovely tooth, as white as china. But it was kind of Arthur to come so far just for one evening. And kind of Mrs Taylor to tell him.’

‘Everything’s kind and nice.’

‘Did you see Euniss Parsons this evening?’

‘I saw Ma. On the roundabout.’

‘Not Euniss?’

‘No. Did you?’

‘I thought I did.’

‘Was she with Ernie or the gas-meter man?’

(‘She was with your horrible Richard,’ a voice said in Liz’s head.) ‘Perhaps I didn’t see her after all,’ she said.

‘A film I remember,’ Arthur was saying to Mr Beddoes, ‘although it was all tommy-rot, of course, was
Romance
. With Greta Garbo.’

First, Richard must choose the house. All the afternoon, he walked round the outskirts of the town. At last he found it – crumbling lavender stucco, an iron-work balcony. It looked a house with a past, but no future. In the little front garden, the earth was hard and sour under dusty laurels; lace curtains dyed mauve hung crookedly at the long windows. ‘Hollybank’ was in gold letters on the fanlight: but there was no holly, no bank. A house that had come down in the world, he thought.

He walked on slowly, the afternoon sun very hot on his shoulders. In his imagination, he walked about inside that house, sat his mother down in the drawing-room, stood a different, fiercer father by the fireplace. A terrified maid smashed crockery in the basement. He himself, a little boy, hid under the laurel bushes, clutching a dog, too scared to go indoors: but he could see his mother through the windows; she put up her beautiful, frail hands over her tired face and bowed her head.

He turned round and walked back. The house, which had perhaps once stood in a larger garden, was wedged in now between a garage and a little placarded newspaper-shop. He went into the shop to ask for cigarettes. A woman came
through from a room behind the shop, drying her hands on a tea-cloth. There was a smell of onions.

‘Forgive me asking,’ he began. ‘I wonder if you can help me.’

‘Turn that gas off!’ she shouted back into the little room. ‘What do you want?’ She let her dull eyes rest upon him.

‘I wonder … have you been in the district long?’

‘Two years.’

‘Do you know anything about the people in the next house?’

‘I can’t say I do.’

She put her hand on the door of the back room and looked measuringly at him.

‘Have they been there long?’

‘I couldn’t say.’

‘It was my home when I was a boy. I got a fancy to see it again.’

‘Well, that’s up to you.’

‘Are they the sort of people who’d object?’

‘Are you a detective?’

‘A detective? Good God no!’ He laughed reassuringly.

‘Well, hop it then. See.’

She opened the door of the room behind her, but stood waiting for him to leave the shop.

Outside, he lit a cigarette and strolled past the house, throwing the match through the iron railings. He felt curiosity now, above all other feelings.

‘Hollybank. Vale Terrace’, he repeated to himself and he began to walk back to his hotel, going carefully along, avoiding the cracks between the paving-stones.

Beyond the swing-door of the Griffin, he met Morland Beddoes on his way out. He would have passed him by without speaking, but Morland stopped to praise the weather.

‘And did you enjoy the Fair last night?’ he continued, as Richard moved away.

‘Oh, the Fair!’ Richard smiled condescendingly, but his heart hammered as he went upstairs.

He sat down on the edge of his bed and there was a knocking sound in his head. Each time Morland tried to start a conversation with him he felt menaced. He remembered the question the woman in the newspaper-shop had asked him. Yes, he wished he were a detective: it would be an easy excitement, like fox-hunting: the gradual narrowing down, taking one’s time, playing with the prey, in conversations about the weather, polite enquiries; making some other man sit on his bed with his head banging, his shirt cool with sweat.

He crooked his legs up and in one movement lay on his back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. His world passed before him upon the yellowing, cracked and rather cobwebbed expanse, not a continuous unfolding as before a drowning man’s eyes, but in a jerking series of pictures, clicking into place, assembled quickly like a kaleidoscope, or What The Butler Saw. He could not, when he was tired as now, differentiate between the real and the imaginary, and he did not connect the pictures in his mind, nor draw conclusions from them. So the scene of his mother and father opening his letter in the jazzy,
démodé
little sitting-room he hated so much was succeeded by a different mother and father, of a higher social standing, ensconced in the sad and faded elegance of Hollybank, watched through the window by himself as a little boy. The first picture was cheerful, highly-coloured, all orange and lemon; the other washed delicately in with violet and indigo and grey. In the first, was the father who was proud of his son for all the things the son despised – the scholarship to the secondary-school, the sergeant’s stripes; the mother who fussed over his material condition and rode roughshod over his aspirations with her cosiness: then the pale and tragic picture he had invented – the brutal and sadistic father,
the broken, lovely, haunted mother, romantic, as only the dead can be. He did not know which was real. He had always told lies, always invented sources of self-pity. If he had an audience, he was saved. When he was alone, he was afraid. He had banished reality and now it was as if he were only reflected back from the mirrors of other people’s minds.