A Wreath Of Roses (5 page)

‘To what? One has to be adjusted
to
something.’

She saw the two faces again, set in the mirror as if they were in a frame, the two pairs of eyes, steady,
met
, just for that second. The bus came and they climbed up the steps and sat down in the front and while Liz talked, Camilla looked out of the window at the rooftops, the old tiles golden and uneven under the late sun.

‘It is so peaceful,’ Liz said suddenly. ‘I know he is thinking – Arthur, I mean – of other women, not me. Oh, in the nicest way, you can’t imagine. But because I don’t have to watch him doing it, I feel at peace. I am lulled by my ignorance.’

‘He will poison your life.’

‘He is about the house so much,’ Liz said restlessly. ‘I had never realised how he would always be there. From high up like this I can see into people’s bedrooms. But they are gone so quickly.’

A little girl stood close to a window, nightgowned, eyes half-hooded, thumb in her mouth. She stood there very still, almost asleep on her feet, too hot to lie in bed. Men in shirt-sleeves trimmed hedges, their wives leaning from upstairs windows conducting shouted conversations with neighbours in front
gardens or up at windows also. The snipped privet lay under the railings. Water came arching out of cans on to the dry flower-beds where calceolarias, lobelias wilted. Old women sat on chairs at doors and men carried their beer outside to the pavement. Little girls with thin arms threw balls against the side of the railway-arch, chanting old rhymes. And then, through the arch, it was the country again, and lovers were walking slowly on the gravelly road; the town, the old people and the children left behind, and the quiet fields and their strangeness to one another lying ahead.

‘I hope that Harry hasn’t cried,’ Liz said. ‘If Frances plays the piano, she will wake him.’

‘What are these paintings she has done?’

Liz said nothing for a moment, then she brought her fists down on her knees and seemed to be trying to find words. ‘Frightening! Great black and grey and purple and sulphurous pictures. All nonsense. So
different
. When you think … all those flowers she used to paint, those lovely cobwebby blossoms, skeleton leaves, the gauziness of them. And now these awful rocky pictures – and how she comes in and plays the piano as if the pictures had got into her, instead of the other way about. At
her
time of life. And that dog, too. It is all part of the general ferocity – the sun wheeling round, violent cliffs and rocks, figures with black lines round them. And all amounting to – just nothing at all.’

‘The one she painted last summer was the best she ever did. The one of the room with the lace curtains. A very tender light flowing through them.’

‘Yes, that was what I
call
a picture. Perhaps we always want paintings to be like novels.’

‘What happened to that picture?’

‘A man bought it for a great deal of money, though I don’t know how much. You know how she is. She is utterly determined
never to behave like an artist, and that refusal to discuss money is part of it.’

‘Who was the man?’

‘I don’t know. I only know that he writes to her and that she seldom answers his letters. And once he sent her a piece of lace as a present from somewhere abroad. How suddenly the sun goes.’

‘I think it goes gradually,’ Camilla said, looking at the lines of colour across the sky and all the little gold-reflecting clouds.

The warmth goes,’ Liz said, chafing her bare arms. ‘Do you always fall into friendships with men you meet on trains? It seems a new thing in you.’

‘We were rather thrown together by circumstance, as anything out of the ordinary does tend to throw people together – wars and thunder-storms or a procession or an accident.’

‘You mean the man killing himself?’

‘Yes.’

She had talked of it until it had become unreal. Now it was vividly itself again, the sunset, the late hour, bringing it back to her in its first light. Although her train had taken her away from it, the thing was not done with for other people, she suddenly thought. Doubtless, someone wept somewhere, and the man’s lonely despair was not less painful because it was over.

‘How did you and that man come into it?’ Liz was asking. ‘I forget his name.’

‘Richard Elton,’ Camilla said distinctly.

‘I can’t think how you remember. I never remember names when I have only heard them once.’

‘It struck me, because it seemed so much the sort of name people don’t have. The sort a woman writer might choose for a nom-de-plume, perhaps … or for the name of her hero.’

‘Yes, I see what you mean.’

‘He and I didn’t come into it anyway,’ Camilla said, answering Liz’s question. ‘But it meant that it was natural for us to speak about it afterwards. How strangely things happen. The peaceful, sunny afternoon, and
that
dropping into it without warning; except perhaps that all peaceful, sunny things should be a warning in themselves. When you were a child did you ever hunt for a lost ball among ferns and leaves and parting them quickly to look …’ she made a gesture of doing this … ‘come suddenly upon a great toad, sitting there, very ugly and watchful. All the time there, though you didn’t know it, under the leaves. The shock, the recoil!’

‘Did this ever actually happen?’ Liz asked with interest.

‘I imagine it must have. I have the sensation of it, the quick tinkling of fear in my wrists, when I describe it.’

‘I think toads are beautiful, anyhow,’ Liz said, and she stood up, steadying herself until the bus stopped.

In the lane, the cool air flowed between the hedges, almost as if it were a visible thing, like smoke, or water.

‘There! She is at it!’ Liz said as they came near the cottage. ‘The loud pedal down and simply hammering. She is getting fierce in her old age, and she will wake Harry and frighten him.’

She hastened up the path and Camilla followed her slowly, breathing very deeply the hay-scented air and feeling moths brush by her towards the lamplit window.

‘I see you have made yourself at home,’ Camilla said, pushing all Liz’s spread-out jars and brushes to one side of the dressing-table and laying about some of her own.

The windows opened into the branches of a pear tree, a beautiful thing, they supposed, in the spring when they never saw it; but now darkly-leaved and throwing a green darkness into the bedroom. Birds burst in and out of its boughs and small crowned pears dropped into the grass below.

Camilla, having asserted herself over the dressing-table, now turned her attention to the darkening garden. Behind her, back in the shadows of the room, Liz sat on a low chair and fed the baby, who, full and contented, turned from her breast and flung out an arm, his eyes wandering, milky dribble running from a corner of his mouth.

When Camilla faced the room again, as she must sooner or later, she thought (since the strangeness with Liz was binding her into intolerable confines), Liz put the baby up against her shoulder and smoothed his back, her other shoulder, her veined bosom half-bare in her opened frock, her hair hanging loose against her cheek. The baby’s head bobbed weakly, he belched twice softly and once more the milk ran from his mouth, down Liz’s back.

‘Surely he has had too much,’ Camilla suggested, and she came across the room and dabbed at Liz’s blouse with a handkerchief.

‘Take him!’ said Liz, jerking her shoulder back into her clothes, casting round for pins and napkins.

Camilla had taken the baby and held him awkwardly against her. This awkwardness, this hesitation, he at once sensed, and began to stiffen himself and to arch his back. In his struggles, he pressed his wet and opened mouth to her face, and she recoiled a little.

‘He is the first baby I have ever held,’ she said, ‘I do it badly.’

Liz reached forward and took him. When he was pinned into his napkins she carried him away to his cot.

Camilla was in bed when Liz came back, lying with her arms crossed under her head, looking reflective. ‘You will have to leave that man,’ she said so suddenly that Liz was arrested with her petticoat half over her head. When she was clear, she said in a flustered way: ‘He isn’t bad enough for that. He doesn’t do anything wrong, you know.’

‘He will turn you into someone like himself.’

‘It must always give a woman a queer feeling when her husband is called “that man”.’

‘He is that to me,’ Camilla said simply. ‘I cannot call clergymen by their Christian names.’

‘It should seem an easy thing to do.’

‘I wonder why he became one?’ Camilla yawned.

The beauty of his voice,’ Liz said coldly, pottering about at the dressing-table.

‘I have been feeling we were poles apart.’

‘I know. It was nothing I could avoid.’

‘I was jealous of the baby.’ She exposed the truth, feeling so much depended on making this effort, but at once clouded her words with a laugh. The idea was not illuminated for long enough to show itself to Liz, who got into bed, still thinking of her husband.

‘He will write to me, I suppose,’ she said as she tucked herself in. ‘But
long
letters, that take no time to write, about engagements and arrangements, and where he ate his meals, dull letters, none of the famous notes, so gay and so teasing, so hastily scribbled off in about three hours of steady concentration and the help of the
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
. No, none of those ever again to me. But how can he help himself? He has to be like that, always passing on to someone new, and no harm done, he believes. Nothing done. And nothing ever lasting. No one in his life goes back very far, nor has any likelihood of going any distance into the future. But we won’t talk about him any more. What I mean is, he hasn’t anyone to say “do you remember” to. I never have heard him say those words. Not as we do. And when he thinks of the future, he thinks of
next week always
. Not tomorrow, nor next year, never of when he will be old, or of Harry growing up; but just next week, when things should at last be coming round the way he wants them.
He also loves titled women,’ she said suddenly and turned off the light.

She had propped the door open with two books, so that she could hear the baby if he should cry. Everywhere about the room, books supported or balanced the furniture, compensated for the uneven floor, wedging mirrors, steadying the dressing-table. Sometimes, Liz and Camilla eased them out of their places and read them – old memoirs, guide-books, poor, faded novels. Through the open door they heard Frances come up to bed.

‘In the old days, she used to knock on the wall, to make us stop talking,’ Liz said.

‘Why did we talk so long? What was it all about?’

‘We used to give those tea-parties for English literary ladies.’

‘Yes, of course. And very disintegrating they were! Everything went wrong.’

‘We planned them so far ahead, in so much detail, and then talked of them for so long afterwards.’

‘I think it was Charlotte who wrecked them, with her inverted snobbery. The time she told Ivy how much she gave for her lace shawl in Bradford.’

‘And said it was her best.’

‘Anne looked down into her lap. I saw her hands tremble.’

‘Virginia saw, too.’

‘Charlotte came too early, anyhow. Before we had time to put a match to the parlour fire.’

‘Emily wouldn’t corne in at all. She stood up the road and eyed the gate.’

‘Jane and Ivy came on time. They arrived at the door together and waited there, looking at one anothers’ shoes.’

‘And Virginia was late, and little Katie never came at all.’

‘She got lost. Who fetched her in the end? Emily, I mean.’

‘I think we sent George Eliot out for her.’

‘But she wouldn’t co-operate. She wouldn’t sit down. She ruined the party with her standing up.’

‘I felt Virginia was thinking: “They only give me such cakes as these because they are women, and I am a woman.”‘

And Elizabeth Barrett taking up all the room on the sofa!’

‘Her hand going up all the time to her curls reminded me of Captain Hook. I was always surprised to see it
was
a hand.’

‘Virginia was right to feel wounded about the food. Women are not good enough to themselves. And the indifferent food is the beginning of all the other indifferent things they take for granted,’ Liz said. And the literary party was dissolved and forgotten and she was back again with her husband.

‘That man in the Griffin,’ Camilla said presently. ‘I thought he described the place amusingly.’

‘I thought he seemed to be acting. He was as if he had learnt the words by heart first. They seemed not to belong to him, nor to match the look in his eyes.’

‘This flair you have for recognising the spurious, it is a pity you never put it to use in your own case.’

Liz said wistfully: ‘I thought for a few seconds that it was going to be like other years.’

‘It won’t be again.’

‘My opinions about that wretched man – why should they annoy you? How could you care? And if you did, why, you say far worse than that about my
husband.’

‘I
say no worse than you say yourself.’