A Wreath Of Roses (9 page)

‘Why did you marry me, Arthur?’

‘She is so warm,’ he thought, ‘so impulsive, her arms went round me quickly with a child’s reckless embrace, as sweet as honey, alive, relaxed like a little cat.’ But warmth, impulsiveness, recklessness, sweetness, are advantages in a wife only if they turn inwards upon the home, the husband. And what has always flowed widely, easily, is not so suddenly canalised. Then, too, how often those qualities reflect
too
warm a nature, indicate lack of discrimination, promiscuity in its widest, if not its narrowest sense?

‘Because I loved you, my dear. Will always love you.’

‘But how will it help you for me to go against my nature, make a fool of myself?’ He glanced at her creased frock, her untidy hair. ‘Oh, I know, I know! But I like to be a fool in my own way,’ she cried. ‘Everybody does.’

‘It is an unpardonable word anyhow. A blasphemy against God.’

‘God must be brought into everything, into every conversation we ever have.’

He looked wounded, stubborn.

‘Oh, I’ll do anything, anything – scrub the Sunday-School floor, hem all those damned garments, clean the brasses, dig graves,’ she cried, her voice rising shakily, ‘but not the things I
can’t
do.’

‘Don’t be childish,’ he said sharply, condemning the quality he had first loved in her. ‘I’ve asked you to do nothing difficult or unsuitable; only to take your place beside me as a wife. There is no need to cry and wring your hands.’

‘I haven’t changed.’

‘That’s beside the point. We are all changing from one minute to the next.’

‘But the core of us remains the same.’

‘And marriage changes us quite. How can we enter marriage
and remain the same? The circles of our existences become concentric.’

Tea is ready!’ Frances called from the kitchen doorway.

Tea is ready,’ Liz repeated to her husband, as if she were the interpreter.

They moved away from the pram towards the house. Harry began to cry, but they scarcely heard him.

In the dark parlour, the best china was spread out. As there was a man to tea, the crusts were cut off the sandwiches. Honey ran out of a broken comb on to a painted plate. In the middle of the table, a cactus was in flame-coloured bloom. The flowers sprang from its finger-tips as if by accident.

Liz went up to call Camilla. She was lying on the bed asleep, a book under her cheek. When she sat up, there was the deep impression of it across her face.

‘I do feel like hell. So thirsty.’

The light hurt her eyes, and she put her hands up as Liz shifted the curtains.

‘Arthur’s downstairs.’

‘Arthur?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good God.’

‘Cam, darling, you must support me …’

Camilla went to the dressing-table and began to comb up her hair.

‘What does he want?’

‘He wants me to make an exhibition of myself. I am unable …’

‘Tell me
quickly!”
Camilla said, her mouth full of hairpins.

‘He wants me to give away prizes at a social …’

Camilla’s eyes, now more accustomed to the light, stretched wide with surprise and laughter. She looked at Liz through the mirror, but Liz looked away.

‘And make a speech,’ she added.

‘You do it, darling.’

‘No.’

‘For fun.’

‘It wouldn’t be fun. We must go downstairs now. You
are
on my side, Cam?’

‘I am on your side, if you say black’s white and night is day.’

‘And, Cam, I hope that was a nice room you booked at the Griffin.’

‘I won’t be on your side, if you start all that malicious innuendo again.’

‘But Mr Beddoes will expect the best.’

‘And why?’

‘He is a film director,’ Liz whispered, smiling sweetly back from the door of the room.

Camilla followed, still rather dazed from the morning’s whisky, rather dulled and maladjusted.

Downstairs, Frances was pouring out, and making conversation. Fifteen years of practice had perfected Arthur at going out to tea. His wife and her friend seemed only to disintegrate the peaceful game.

He had met Camilla before but not with her hair so elevated. She seemed a new person and brought into the stuffy room a faint smell of whisky, which he found most disagreeable. He thought her influence on his wife harmful, and recognised her ideas prevailing in Liz instead of his own. She sat down too demurely, he thought, as if she were up to some mischief, and he watched her warily, expecting her to begin.

The red mark, which was fading slowly from her cheek-hone, looked as if someone – but surely not Liz – had struck her and gave her, he thought, a faintly exalted look, even feverish.

‘Your husband tells me you are going home for a couple of days,’ Frances said to Liz, as she handed her tea.

‘But Liz hasn’t said “yes”,’ Arthur put in quickly. ‘It was scarcely discussed.’

‘Of course she will go,’ said Frances.

‘Do you know
why
I am to go?’ Liz asked quietly.

Frances looked up.

‘To make a speech,’ she said. She put some bread-and-butter in her mouth but seemed not to be eating it. Her face was expressionless.

Camilla, who had not spoken before, burst into what she hoped was merry laughter. To Arthur, who was much annoyed, it sounded Satanic.

‘And why cannot you make a speech?’ Frances asked, as if some doubt had been cast upon her own excellence as a governess. ‘It is only a wonder that married to a vicar for eighteen months you have not made one before.’

‘It was Arthur she married, not the vicar,’ Camilla said, too quickly.

He glanced at her in a measuring way, as if presently he would give his opinion and it would be the right one, and the only one, and well worth listening to.

‘Liz will do her duty,’ Frances said and put a knife into a sad-looking raisin cake as if this must, together with her words, finish the discussion. Arthur, who could eat tea and deal with a situation at the same time, took his slice of cake; Liz, who could not, refused.

‘But
duty!’
she cried. ‘What is my duty? And surely I have a duty to myself?’

‘Oh, no!’ Frances said. ‘That’s loose thinking, my dear. That’s a pitfall always. Anything that must be explained won’t be your duty. Duty is very simple and obvious. It is nearly always what you don’t
want
to do.’ She glanced at Arthur, as if she thought he could not have put it better himself. He smiled uneasily.

‘It will be the thin edge of the wedge,’ Liz wailed.

‘It will be the beginning of the life you chose. All this time, have you done
nothing
to help Arthur?’ Frances asked.

‘One or two things,’ Liz said in a low voice, glancing timidly in Arthur’s direction. ‘The magazines,’ she thought, ‘the times I was late, the messages I forgot.’

‘There has been Harry,’ Arthur reminded them, ‘and before he was born poor Liz so very unwell.’ (‘She is unwell now,’ he thought. ‘Tears too near the surface. And Camilla sees that and she is blaming me, and shows it simply by saying nothing.’)

He put his hand out and took his wife’s. ‘Liz darling, if it will go so much against the grain, of course you shan’t do it. I will go straight home and only be sorry that I ever worried you.’

Camilla frowned. She put a spoon into the honeycomb and honey ran out over the plate.

‘I shall go, Arthur,’ Liz said. ‘Yes, of course, I shall go. There never was any choice really.’

‘My dear, there is no choice
now
. It would seem to be forcing you against your will if I let you come, and so you mustn’t.’

‘I shall! I shall!’ She knocked over a cup of tea and ran out of the room.

‘Such an exquisite fuss about nothing,’ Frances said, slipping a saucer under the wet table-cloth. ‘All over a speech!’

‘It would comfort us, if we could think it was that,’ Camilla said.

Her manner was idle, insolent and cool, and her detachment a pretence, he knew. She had been prepared to fight him for a long time, but he had beaten her before she could begin. He saw her almost as an ambassadress of evil, and felt that he had confounded her, had triumphantly defended against her
destructive schemes his position in the world, the welfare of his flock, duty, example, respectability, and the institution of marriage.

Upstairs his wife was crying.

‘So worldliness prevails,’ Camilla thought. ‘So the weak go to the wall!’

In the garden his son was crying, too; but for that not even Camilla could blame him.

Camilla walked with Hotchkiss along the quiet lanes. Trees and the hedgerows were as dark as blackberries against the starry sky; a little owl took off from a telegraph-post, floating down noiselessly across a field of stubble. Outside the Hand and Flowers a knot of villagers said goodnight to one another. They dispersed along the lanes, singing in slurred voices. Their ‘goodnights’ rang between the hedges. The bar with its uncurtained window was blue with smoke; the landlord crossed and recrossed it, carrying tankards, behind him on the wall a great tarnished fish in a glass case.

From the cottages all along the village came blurred and muted wireless music. Some of the doors stood open to the scented night, revealing little pictures of interiors, fleeting and enchanting, those cottage rooms which Frances loved so dearly, with their ornaments, their coronation-mugs, their tabby cats. Night-scented stocks lined garden-paths, curled shells were arranged on window-sills, and on drawn blinds were printed the shadows of geraniums or a bird-cage shrouded for the night.

As she came near the cottage, she heard Frances playing the
piano. She went in through the back door, on her way gathering a row of Harry’s napkins from the clothes-line. In the kitchen, she smoothed them and folded them at the table. They were sweet with the fragrance of washing that has hung out in the night air. She put them on the rack over the stove and sat down at the table, thinking of Liz, and unwilling for the moment to face the piano-playing in the other room. Hotchkiss sniffed at his plate of biscuit, found nothing new there, and lay down in a disheartened way on the doormat. Camilla watched him, her cheek in her hand, her mouth drooping.

The piano-playing stopped without her noticing and Frances came down the passage.

‘What’s wrong? Have you toothache?’

‘No. Why do you ask?’

‘You look dejected.’

‘Toothache isn’t the only cause of dejection.’

Frances went over to the sink. ‘What is the cause, then?’ she asked, above the sound of water drumming into the kettle.

‘I’m depressed about Liz.’

‘Life is never perfect for anyone.’

‘Arthur is so callous and self-important.’

‘And yet you would change places with her.’

‘I?’

‘At any time.’

‘It wouldn’t be so bad for me. I am less vulnerable than Liz.’

‘It is a good thing she is vulnerable.’

‘Even with life so imperfect?’

Frances spread her hands over the gas-ring. She was often cold nowadays and conscious of her age. Her hands were wrinkled and shiny, skin transparent over veins, nails sunk into the flesh. She turned them slowly over the flame. ‘Life persists in the vulnerable, the sensitive,’ she said.
‘They
carry it on. The invulnerable, the too-heavily armoured perish. Fearful, ill-adapted, cumbersome,
impersonal. Dinosaurs and men in tanks. But the stream of life flows differently, through the unarmed, the emotional, the highly personal …’

‘You turn my anxiety about Liz into a disarmament conference,’ Camilla said.

‘She has committed herself to that man. You were wrong at tea-time when you said she married Arthur, not the vicar. A man’s work is twisted into the roots of his existence. His conscience is involved. He can’t divide himself.’

‘On the contrary, Arthur seems to have a genius for cutting himself up into little pieces. He hands himself round among the ladies as if he were a plate of scones.’

Frances made the tea and put cups on the table. She sat down and patted her thigh until Hotchkiss lumbered to his feet and padded over to her. Camilla poured out. ‘Oh, I’m tired!’ she yawned.

‘You see,’ Frances went on, ‘I know Liz so well. When she was a little girl, she was warm-hearted and impulsive, but quick to blame herself, quick to feel disappointment. She must absorb this disappointment into her life like all the others. And you must let her.’

‘We only have
one
life.’

‘But there is room in it for everything. Like light, it contains all the colours. You are too fastidious.’

‘Too fastidious,’ Camilla repeated. She frowned as she drank her tea. ‘I don’t any longer know what I am.’ She thought about her morning at the Griffin, her promise to return, the passion which had driven her out walking with Hotchkiss in the dark.

‘We go on for years at a jog-trot,’ Frances said, ‘and then suddenly we are beset with doubts, the landscape darkens, we feel lost and alone, conscious all at once that we must grope our way forward for we cannot retrace our footsteps.’ She thought of her painting out in the shed, finished, awaiting Mr Beddoes.