A Wreath Of Roses (3 page)

The skyline flew higher and higher, went up waveringly towards dark clumps of trees, a parapet of earth encircling them like a crown. This landmark, which meant the end of her journey and the beginning of her holiday, always strongly affected Camilla. She took her ticket from her handbag and sat on the edge of her seat.

‘The Clumps!’ she pointed out, trying to draw his attention away from his newspaper. ‘We are nearly there.’

He looked vaguely out of the window and at last, when the rounded hill had almost gone, said: ‘Oh, yes, I remember.’

And now that her curiosity was at last aroused, he withdrew his attention, turned again to his newspaper and appeared to be reading with complete absorption the account of a murder. Camilla could see the photograph of a dark girl, smiling, amidst the descriptions (she supposed) of violent despatch, dismemberment and ludicrous parcelling-out in luggage-office, lift-shaft or canal.

‘They seem incongruous always,’ she began, leaning a little towards him and indicating the newspaper, ‘those smiling photographs which they print alongside the horrors.’

He glanced at the paper in a puzzled way. ‘Well, people
do
smile when their photographs are taken …’

‘I know. But I think we should all have one serious one done, in case.’

He smiled politely and returned to his reading.

That such a man should rebuke her for insensibility stung her uncomfortably. She did rather like to be the one to have the
fine feelings, and was glad at last to be at the end of the journey, to see a platform running up to meet them and to be able to stand up and smooth her skirt and gather up her belongings.

‘I hope you will enjoy your sentimental journey,’ she said in a patronising voice, as the train ran into shadow and stopped.

‘But I shall be sure to see you at the Red Lion,’ he said, cramming the newspaper into his pocket, glancing round hastily.

‘I have warned you already that there
is
no Red Lion. And even if there were,’ she added, stepping out on to the cool platform, ‘women never do stay at those places on holiday.’

He looked up and down the station, uncertainly, she thought: but there seemed plenty to account for that – his loss of nerve which he had described, or simply the fact of returning after a long interval to a once familiar place. There are usually changes; and if there are not it is even stranger.

‘Where
do
women stay?’ he asked.

‘They go to friends as guests. That doesn’t cost as much.’

Then, as a young woman appeared, carried off her feet almost by a large dog tugging at its lead, Camilla lost interest in her travelling-companion, smiled quickly over her shoulder, and went towards the ticket-barrier.

‘This
beast!’
cried Liz, struggling and tugging. ‘Oh, my God, I’ll kick its teeth in in a minute. How are you, Camilla my dear? You will have to carry all of that yourself, you know. I have enough to do.’

‘What is it?’

‘I don’t know. What should you think? Perhaps a mastiff.’

They looked down at its rippling, brindled back, its straddling legs.

‘Is it yours?’

‘My God no! Whatever should I want with a thing like this?
She
made me bring it. Frances. “He wants a walk,” she said. And
now the palms of my hands are lacerated. Look, they are raw.’ They were indeed a little reddened. ‘Yes, “Hotchkiss can go with you to meet the train,” she said at lunch. As if he were a chauffeur.’

‘Do you think he would bite?’

‘I certainly do.’

They hesitated at the station entrance. Before them lay the square, glittering in the heat. On the shadowed side of it, a man carrying a case disappeared into the Griffin, whose shuttered façade seemed to suggest faded chambermaids sitting lost at the end of dark corridors, commercial-travellers sleeping off their midday drink on brass bedsteads, utter silence along all the passages, on all the little flights of stairs.

‘I can’t carry my bag all that way,’ said Camilla.

‘Neither can we go on a bus with
this.’
The great dog lay down on the blistering pavement, slobbering and panting.

‘I could leave it in the luggage-office, and we can come down after tea, when it’s cooler, on the bus.’

‘She will only say “Take Hotchkiss with you”. I know she will say that.’

‘You mustn’t be so put upon.’

‘Guests are for that. They have to do all the wretched jobs not even a paid servant will do – queue for tomatoes, look at photograph albums, read the books in their bedrooms, admire the cabbage-plants. You can’t exert that sort of tyranny over anybody but a guest. And all done so sweetly. “While you’re in the town, just pop in for some tomatoes.” I stood for three-quarters of an hour in a queue, sweltering hot, and women sweating and pushing their baskets against the back of my knees. And
talking
to me …’ Her voice rose indignantly, but Camilla had gone to the luggage-office and returned without her bag.

‘And then,’ Liz continued, as they crossed the square, ‘“If you are going for a stroll, take Hotchkiss with you. He’s so bored.”’

‘What is she doing? Frances?’

‘Playing the piano. Her painting is all going wrong. She is in troubled waters. So she plays the piano very loudly. Awful noises come out of it. A great confusion of sound. Dohnanyi. She has her vengeance on the piano. She gives it hell. She really is an absolute bitch to it. But I cannot take its part. Perhaps you will.’

‘I’ll have that Hotchkiss, if you hand him over.’

‘I was wondering when you were going to offer.’

‘She is our hostess,’ Camilla pointed out, stopping to wind the leather strap round her hand.

‘But see how we pay for it. Summer after summer.’

‘I love her,’ Camilla said, starting off again with the dog.

‘And I. I love her, too. But she seems to me insufferable, none the less.’

‘Let us not talk about her any more. Tell me about the baby.’

‘What is there to say? He is just like a little baby.’

Camilla felt that this foolish remark was Liz deliberately trying to belittle her son, as sometimes a nice child will belittle a possession before another child who has nothing.

‘It will seem funny him being there,’ she said. ‘Last year scarcely imagined, this year …’

‘He never cries,’ Liz put in quickly. ‘I promised Frances that he wouldn’t. And he hasn’t.’

‘He has two days behind him, and a whole month ahead. We shall judge him at the end of that.’

‘He sleeps …’

‘Not with us, I hope,’ Camilla said quickly.

‘In that little room at the end of the passage where she keeps her old pictures. He will probably get painter’s colic. Oh, the thought of this long peaceful month ahead!’ She half-stopped in the middle of the pavement to consider it. ‘Marriage is such a sordid, morbid relationship!’

‘Yours is, because you always will be attracted to the sort of man who is no good to you. The same man over and over again. Good-looking in an obvious sort of way …’ She suddenly remembered the man on the train and was silent.

‘Ah well, for a whole month let’s not talk about him. I
did
think, though,’ she continued, at once disregarding her own instructions, ‘that a clergyman would have something more in him than was obvious at first glance. But I discovered that there was even less.’

‘What did you expect?’

‘An inner mystery.’ She laughed. ‘And then, somehow, it was all made more exciting by his religion. A suggestion of forbidden fruits. When he touched me, it meant much
more
than other men touching me. And they were such very little touches, too. It was all cruel and exciting. When he came into the room, I shook from head to foot. And then, I thought he would be interested in my soul and discuss it endlessly and that would have been a pleasure to me. But he is never interested in what he has. Only in what he may be going to get next week. So all the shaking and excitement stopped. Nothing took its place. And I am left with a rather cold and greedy man sitting at his desk writing notes to other women – casual-seeming little notes which take him hours and hours to scribble off – he balances the paper-knife on his fingers while he weighs the words in his mind. And I sit darning his socks and watching him.’

‘You go about asking for trouble. I have always said so.’

They passed under a railway-arch and that seemed to be the end of the little town. On one side a street, on the other a hot gravelly lane, bordered with dusty willow trees.

‘You seem in a very tart and condemning mood,’ Liz said, walking with bowed head, her arms folded across her chest.

‘I’m sorry. Could you now take this Hotchkiss?’

Camilla examined her hands and wiped them against her
skirt. ‘An awful thing happened where I was waiting to change trains, some poor little man threw himself in front of the express, or rather bungled it and fell on the lines at the side; died when they picked him up. I wonder why?’ she suddenly asked herself aloud. ‘Anyhow, made me shake more than I would for any clergyman. Upsetting!’

‘Something more than upsetting, I should say,’ Liz observed. But then there was a complicated business of climbing a stile and getting Hotchkiss underneath. When they talked again, it was about other things.

The cottage was of flint, the date 1897 done in bottle-ends between the bedroom windows. On Sunday evenings the villagers walked past on the other side of the privet hedge and their voices came clearly into the parlour, or else Frances played her piano so loudly that they looked over the gate in wonder. Along the window-sills were cactus-plants in earthenware pots, bluish green, striped ones; some rosetted or jointed; others all cobwebbed over with faint greyish strands. These plants, together or singly, came into most of her paintings, like a signature.

As Camilla put her hand on the gate, she saw a line of napkins above the fruit bushes and, for a reason she had no time to explore, she felt an impulse of fear, which amounted to a cold unwillingness to see her friend’s baby, to have to exclaim over it and admire. She would never, she decided, accustom herself to the strangeness of Liz married and a mother. It appeared also that Liz could not accustom her to it, but would try to do so, with absurd tact and understanding, so that already gulfs began to yawn between them.

From under the canopy of a pram a little braceleted arm
dipped in the sun. Liz unleashed the dog and ran forward. Camilla followed, slowly, but not as slowly as she wished. She had no experience of babies and no knowledge of what to say. Making an effort, she put out her fingers for the baby to fasten upon. He rolled over, arching his back, and tried to draw her hand to his mouth. His face reddened and the fat-creases in his tanned legs showed white as he stretched.

‘What does Frances think of him?’

‘It is only a question of whether he cries or not. We have to keep him quiet at all costs.’

‘We?’

‘Or I go home.’

Camilla moved away from the pram, bored. ‘He is a nice little baby,’ she said.

‘Oh, these damned women!’ Liz thought going across the lawn towards the house. But the baby now made desperate hooking movements with his arms, turning his wrists in an agony of rage and impotence, and, his face suddenly crumpling and darkening, began to cry. Liz picked him up and stood rocking to and fro with him under a tree. His sobs were a long time dying down and did so in an exhausted way as if he had been crying for hours. ‘He will get spoilt,’ Liz thought. ‘I shouldn’t have come.’

Camilla went through the kitchen. On the cool flags the dog was sleeping, lying on his side. And in the stuffy parlour, Frances was sleeping, too. She sat very upright in a chair, her hands clasped loosely in her lap, and she looked, Camilla thought, not just one year older, but as if age had been for a long time gathering itself for a spring and had now quite overcome her. Her face in sleep seemed drawn down from the cheekbones in lines she would not have permitted if she had been awake. Camilla drew back into the dark passage and as she did so Frances stirred.

‘Elizabeth!’

‘It isn’t Liz.’ Camilla came back into the room. ‘I never know what to do when people are asleep.’

‘What you did. Go away and try to forget what you have seen.’

The room was unchanged since last year. Two vases of grasses on either side of the clock, a photograph of Liz as a child sitting sedately on a swing and Frances, then her governess, holding the ropes on either side and surrounded by leaves. The edges of the picture blurred and faded away, as if it were a spirit photograph, as indeed Frances’s haunted look perfectly suggested.

Now she put her hands with their heavy, mannish rings over her face and yawned.

‘So here you are!’ she said. ‘What are you going to do with yourselves? Giggle and gossip, mess up my best bedroom with your bits and pieces, your untidy ways? Read your everlasting novels? Call great people by their Christian names?’

‘Go for walks …’ Camilla suggested.

‘You won’t get far from a baby who has to be fed every four hours, even if I am willing to stay behind with him. Which I assuredly am not.’

‘Where do
you
want to go then?’ Camilla asked, sitting down beside all the cactus-plants.