A Wreath Of Roses (18 page)

‘Then I will. I am in trouble about money.’ He laughed.

‘What sort of trouble?’

‘The usual sort. I haven’t any.’

‘Are you in debt?’

‘That
is
what happens to people who have no money.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘I think it will soon be time to make a move.’

She looked so dreadfully shocked and anxious that he laughed again; but his eyes never smiled.

‘Don’t worry. I like contriving. It gives me something to do.’

‘A job would give you that,’ she said awkwardly.

‘Would it, my sweet?’

He hid his displeasure with teasing.

‘You can’t go on for ever leaving a trail of debts behind you wherever you go.’

‘Can’t I? Perhaps in your school-teachers’ world I couldn’t.’

‘But …’

‘Have a cigarette.’

‘But …’

‘Listen, sweetheart. I loved your girlhood’s memories; they touched me and charmed me. But my life never was like that.’

‘I see now that it must have sounded pathetic beyond words to you. I thought so half-way through, but you made me go on.’

‘Not at all. I enjoyed it.’

‘Your acquaintance with brutality has brutalised you.’

He glanced at the scar on his hand, then closed his fingers over it.

‘In the end, they won, however brave you were at the time,’ she said. ‘They managed to implant the germ of their cruelty in you. As children who are bullied at school take it out on the still younger ones. You have let them cancel out your courage.’

‘You look better when you are angry.’

‘And this book you say you are writing – you will go on writing it, or not writing it, for the rest of your life. It will be your excuse, your refuge. Even the worst sort of book requires diligence. Requires a certain amount of time spent
out
of bars,
out
of the society of women.’

She saw the picture of the girl with him outside the Griffin, how they laughed together.

‘Of course, I know all this is simply green-eyed jealousy,’ he said.

To the passers-by, they were in the midst of a lovers’ quarrel, a little tiff preceding a sweet reconciliation at nightfall.

‘I should get up and walk away,’ she told herself. ‘I should go back to Liz and Frances and behave myself in future.’ But she sat very still instead and watched the sparrows, traced a pattern in the dust and the blown sycamore seeds, with her sandal.

‘Darling, let’s walk through the gardens and pretend that we are married like all these other people!’ he said, and he put out his hand and drew her up and tucked her arm into his. She walked with him along the asphalt paths, as if she were in a dream, sedate and bourgeois, like a painting by the Douanier Rousseau. Mr Beddoes would appreciate it, she thought; this domesticity among the savage leaves; the family-groups against the arid landscape.

A broken fountain dropped water unevenly over lily-leaves and floating bus-tickets, beneath which goldfish seemed suspended; pouting, debauched-looking fish with trailing veils. Pausing to look at this littered water, they both began to speak at once, she with a belated reprimand, he with an apology. The words rushed together and broke off at the impact.

They resumed their walk.

‘What have you been living on since you came out of the Air Force?’ she persisted.

When he did not answer her she glanced up at his face and
was struck, as she always was being struck, by his lack of expression, a curious emptiness, as if the broader emotions were the limits of what he could convey – laughter, fury, or self-pity.

‘Air Force,’ he said lightly, like an echo.

‘You don’t listen to me.’

He gathered himself together and squeezed her arm against his side. ‘Yes, I listen, sweetest. You asked what I live on. My gratuity, which now has come to an end.’

‘It must have been quite a lot,’ she suggested.

‘Oh, naturally, hell of a lot.’

‘How much?’

‘Never you mind. You ask too many questions, my lovely one.’

‘These endearments wouldn’t matter to most women,’ she mourned to herself. ‘They wouldn’t even hear them.’

‘What are you going to do then?’

‘I told you.’

‘And how long will you do it for?’

‘Another three weeks. Then, whether I’ve got ahead with my book or not, I’m going into a friend’s business. You look so relieved. You believe in the virtue of work, in everyone being boxed up and having pay-packets.’

‘I believe that in three weeks’ time, you’ll be in prison, not in business.’

‘Well, it can’t be helped. There’s no place for me until then.’

‘Couldn’t you borrow money to tide you over?’

‘There is no one to lend it. I wouldn’t ask my father, and my mother’s dead. All my friends are like me, or still racketing through the last of their gratuity, trying to turn the saloon-bar into the officers’ mess.’

‘Well, then, I would lend it to you,’ she said stiffly.

‘I don’t borrow money from women.’

‘I think that’s what my brothers would have called a personal
code. Once in a pub I heard a man say: “I don’t have women call my beer for me.”’

‘Neither do I.’

‘People who have personal codes do such dreadful things.’

‘Why did you offer to lend me money?’

‘I thought it would be better for you than going to prison, but it doesn’t matter.’

‘Would you do the same for anyone?’

‘Some people I should be glad to see in prison.’

‘Not me, though?’

‘You deserve better. You are still suffering from the war, and you need to recuperate, I suppose. You wouldn’t do anything really bad.’ She smiled hopefully.

Suddenly a little child ran blindly against her, pursued by other children in a game. She steadied him, and when he cried at the shock, she tilted his face up and wiped his eyes.

‘Would you marry me?’ Richard asked, above the child’s head.

Liz went quickly along the lane, her sandals slapping softly on the tarry road. All the evening Fair caravans had been passing the cottage and now, as it grew dusk, the last of them were slowly overtaking her. Children sitting on the steps looked at her incuriously; the short sturdy fathers stared ahead.

At the Green, the dusk was falling over a spangle of lights as the little temporary world was set up. But she could not pause to watch. Shut into the evil-smelling telephone kiosk, she spread out the coins which were hot from her clenched hand and took up the receiver. She thought it best to rehearse nothing, to let anxiety rush along the lines towards Arthur; it would relieve her to be incoherent, as she was bound to be.

She could imagine him sitting at his desk. He would swivel round in his chair, reach for the telephone, his voice at first
casual, non-committal, as if he were hardly there and certainly could not be at everybody’s beck and call.

She had waited until this hour for two reasons: the first, that her anxiety had grown worse as darkness began to fall; the second, that she knew what his evenings were – the recalcitrant curate called in to listen to a talk beginning: ‘To be perfectly frank …’ and ending: ‘However, I appreciate your sincerity.’ Then young people perhaps coming in about their weddings, the conversation about banns and prices, mixed up with meaningless (to Liz) phrases, full of Latin words such as ‘cohabit’ and ‘extra-marital relations’. The poor young people. He would briskly tie up their vague feelings about one another into separate packets, label and pigeon-hole them. They would leave looking bewildered, inadequate, sullen, and would, Liz always thought, smiling at them in the hall on their way out, quarrel before they could reach home.

The telephone seemed to ring and ring in the empty house, that house upon which Liz made no mark but untidiness, since it was all complete when she arrived, settled into a rhythm which she could never change. Mrs Taylor – that wretched woman: bleak, inexorable, casting sadness about her – established there as house-keeper years before with her unalterable time-table. On the first Monday in March the sweep arrived (unrequested, since he too was accustomed to the Vicarage rhythm); loose-covers were changed seasonally; linen day was Tuesday; silver day Friday; pudding followed pudding in ordered sequence; fish-days carne round as they should. And over it all fell Mrs Taylor’s sighs, her bad heads, her preoccupation with suicide – ‘Why I don’t put my head in the gas-oven and be done with it, I don’t know’ – for her life had been sad, catarrhal, colourless, her hair prematurely grey and her love for her husband only discovered alas after he had died. Although he now returned to her at night (against the vicar’s orders, for Arthur
objected to Spiritualism), his remarks, like those of most spirits, were banal and earthbound in the extreme. So disappointment dogged her and was there now in her cautious voice at the other end of the line. She was a little breathless, too, for she had been in the garden picking loganberries – ‘such as the birds had not already disposed of, or the maggots eaten away’.

‘I’m sorry to have brought you indoors, Mrs Taylor.’

‘That’s quite all right. It’s been constant all the evening, the telephone-hell …’

‘Anyone for me?’

‘No, all for the vicar.’

‘Did he say what time he’d be back?’

‘Not too late, he said.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘Shall I give a message?’

‘No.’ She felt dulled and defeated; anxiety clogged her still. ‘No, it doesn’t matter. Tell him I’ll telephone again tomorrow.’

‘Don’t forget the conference at Oxford.’

‘Oh, no. No.’

‘How is baby?’

‘He’s teething.’

‘They’re a nuisance to us from the time we get them till the time we lose them, teeth.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Well, there’s another ring at the door, if you’ll excuse me …’

‘Of course. Goodnight, Mrs Taylor.’

‘Goodnight, madam.’

Even after the little click she still held the receiver to her ear, as if she might perhaps be able to discern faintly the voices at the front door: then she carefully replaced it and tried to gather herself to go home, tried to draw herself out of that hall, from the voices she would have liked to have heard, the cards on the hall-table she would have liked to have spread out on the tray.
She wondered where Arthur had gone, who had telephoned him all the evening. But firmly, Mrs Taylor shut her away from her own home, with her dull voice, her negative manner.

‘Oh for a Mrs Parsons!’ she thought, wrenching open the swing door and taking a good breath. ‘Oh for someone warm and gossipy! The cups of tea we could dawdle over at the kitchen table; and the talk of disease and funerals, which seems so often to indicate a great zest for life!’

Now it was much darker; light shone behind the lace curtains of the caravans, and the dusk was like a sediment sinking down through the sky.

The Fair children, with their skimming and darting movements, their thin cries, were like gnats, Liz thought, standing for a moment to watch. A girl with silver bracelets up her dirty arms hung out a tea-cloth for the night air to bleach.

Tomorrow, the great roundabout would go up. Liz knew it well, the names of the horses off by heart. It was part of her holidays.

‘One day Harry …’ her thoughts began, as she turned back up the lane and then her pace suddenly quickened. She was almost running along between the hedges, as if she were afraid.

‘You see,’ said Mr Beddoes, going down the path with Frances, ‘I hate those great agonised pictures, which say “I”, “I”, all the time. “I am crucified.” “I suffer.”’

Frances walked even more slowly. She picked a sprig of mignonette and twirled it in her fingers, sauntering and delaying, like a child going up to bed.

‘That little picture of yours,’ he was saying, ‘the lemons lying on some spotted laurel leaves in a dish, it is so simply, so honourably done. As if you sat down for a long time and looked at the dish and thought about what it was and didn’t begin to paint until you knew, better than anybody else: and, although
you never said “I”,
because
you never said “I”, you shine through it like the sun.’

They were at the door of the shed, which gave off a smell of creosote in the still warmth of the late evening.

‘How can I see in this light?’ he asked, standing by her as she unlocked the door. With the key in her hand, she stood for a second on the threshold.

‘You will hate these paintings,’ she said. ‘But you must remember that people change – even at
my
time of life a woman can change. I committed a grave sin against the suffering of the world by ignoring it, by tempting others with charm and nostalgia until they ignored it too.’

‘By looking at one thing, we must always ignore another.’

‘How stuffy it is in here!’ She was busy lighting a lamp. As the blue coronet of flame reached upwards, her hands guarding it looked transparent.

‘I always felt,’ she said, ‘that life’s not worth living; that I could only contemplate little bits of it and keep my sanity; and those bits I selected carefully – the sun on a breakfast-table, girls dressing, flowers …’