A Wreath Of Roses (22 page)

‘I could pick her some flowers,’ she suddenly thought, an idea, not new, but linked with her childhood, with the great bunches of varnished buttercups she had gathered for Frances
in the park, the long wilting sheaves of sorrel and moon-daisies, the warm handfuls of primroses. ‘But flowers in August are so dull,’ she thought, wandering listlessly downstairs and standing in the porch, surveying the parched garden.

‘There she is!’ Morland thought, opening the gate, catching her unawares. ‘Poor Liz, with all her thoughts upon her face.’

‘You look dejected.’

‘Flowers in August are so dull,’ she repeated aloud.

‘I like the rose-coloured zinnias,’ was the most he could say. ‘Where is Frances?’

‘Still working. I was thinking I should do a great flower-piece for the parlour, for a surprise.’

‘Let us do it together,’ he suggested.

‘If you like. There is a nice large tureen we could arrange them in …’

‘Where are some secateurs?’

‘Secateurs? Oh, I just
pick
flowers.’ She thought him a bit old-maidish. ‘Sometimes I pull so hard the roots come up but I just tread them back,’ she said, to shock him.

‘What colours shall we eliminate?’ he asked, after he had been shocked.

‘I think red and orange,’ she said, for these were the only colours she could see.

‘Here are some secateurs!’ he said, rummaging in the porch. ‘I think we’ll have yellows and white and some straw-coloured grasses.’

‘I mustn’t go out of the garden,’ she said, feeling that the flower-piece wasn’t going to be hers any more. ‘I have to listen for Harry.’

‘Just a little way along the lane, I saw some Queen Anne’s Lace.’

‘What’s that?’ Although she knew.

‘I shall show you, sweet Cockney.’

She laughed, because she was never cross for long.

‘What is Frances painting? Do you know?’ he asked in a low voice, stooping to snip off some white sweetpeas.

‘I don’t know. She might have a stark-naked Hottentot down there as a model, the way she shuts me out.’

She sat down on the doorstep and watched him picking the flowers. ‘Arthur wouldn’t fuss about with that,’ she thought.

‘I feel I have known you many years,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘I’ve looked at you so much. Hanging above my fireplace.’

‘Oh, I don’t think
that
looks in the least like me,’ she said aloofly.

‘What were you thinking? I have often wondered.’

She picked a leaf and began to strip it down to the veins. ‘You see, I go for long stretches without thinking anything. Mooning, Arthur calls it. What did you think of Arthur?’

This question did not appear to shock him.

‘He would always do good to his fellow-men,’ he said cautiously, cutting a flower he didn’t want.

‘Camilla would say he does too much good to his fellow-women,’ Liz said, laughing.

‘Why should Camilla say that?’ he asked gravely.

‘She dislikes him.’

‘That must be a grief to you.’

‘I don’t have griefs, only impatiences,’ she said modestly.

‘Come along the lane and gather some grasses.’

‘No. I’ll wait here,’ she said, laziness, not mother-love, prompting her. Yet when he had disappeared, she found that she was waiting for him to return, and was glad to see him coming in at the gate again. He seemed to have left her to collect not only wild-flowers and grasses, but resolution as well, for he came straight up to the porch and sat down beside her on the door-step, crumpled, worried, kindly.

‘Where is Camilla this evening?’

‘Gone out,’ she said flatly.

Not in the least baulked, he asked: ‘Have you any idea where she goes?’

‘Yes.’

‘And whom she meets?’

‘Yes.’

‘The man you saw at the Fair last night.’

‘How do you know I saw him?’

‘You pretended too hard that you did not.’

‘I didn’t want Camilla to see him. Under the circumstances.’

‘What sort of a delusion is it she has?’

‘I don’t understand,’ she said untruthfully; and then: ‘He is very handsome, you know.’

‘How long has she known him?’

‘A week. She met him on the train coming here.’

‘He is not to be trusted, you know.’

‘No men are,’ she said blandly.

Quite simply, he said: ‘I am to be trusted,’ and she knew at once that it was so. ‘I haven’t much character, and so my temptations to betray others are not like most people’s. I’m a spectator. Nothing much comes my way but other people’s confidences, and now I am used to listening and being quiet about what I hear.’

‘Nothing much comes Camilla’s way either.’

‘I have a sense of fear for her, an idea that I should not let her out of my sight.’

‘What do you know about that man, then?’

‘I think he has delusions of grandeur. For one thing he’s not and never was a Group-Captain as he signed the hotel-register. Then … he’s a menace to women,’ he added.

Liz laughed uncomfortably. ‘Oh, Camilla’s not a young girl, you know.’

‘She’s more at his mercy than most young girls would be.’

She shifted uneasily. ‘I can’t do anything,’ she said. ‘We are somehow estranged.’ She stood up and put her hand down to pull him to his feet. ‘Are you fond of her?’ she asked shyly.

‘Fond? I don’t know.’

‘I wish you were,’ she said.

‘I haven’t a clean shirt even,’ Richard said pettishly, looking at his cuffs with disgust.

‘I could wash some for you,’ Camilla offered.

‘Could you, sweetheart? And what would those women say to that?’

‘I no longer care. In three days I suppose you’ll be gone, and I shan’t see you again.’

‘Come with me.’

‘I have my own life.’ Very boldly she took his hand and examined the great scar across the palm. ‘And you don’t really want me,’ she whispered.

‘Your scruples might be a liability,’ he agreed.

‘In that house … why did you say I was your fiancée?’

‘A game I was playing. I liked pretending it.’

‘But why?’

‘I do like pretending things.’

‘Yes, I know. In the end, you won’t know what’s real …’

‘That may be as well.’

‘Why are you so frightened?’

‘I’ll tell you another day. Tomorrow.’

‘Tomorrow? You won’t see me tomorrow.’

‘I must.’

‘You see, we have a picnic up here in the Clumps. Every year they have it, Frances and Liz, perhaps Liz’s husband. I couldn’t not go to it. They wouldn’t forgive it.’

‘Wait till I’ve gone!’

‘I can’t ask them that. They don’t know about you.’

‘I must see you tomorrow.’

‘Why?’

She put his hand to her cheek and shut her eyes, feeling that she talked at random. The little breeze there had been all the evening lifted her hair, turned the white leaves of the wayfaring-trees which grew about the chalky hill.

‘Why must you see me tomorrow?’ she insisted.

‘Something I have to tell you.’

‘Tell me now.’

‘I can’t tonight. I started off wrong.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘All that about the house, and my mother, got in the way.’

He lay flat down on the turf, his forehead resting on his arm, and his mouth drooped like a sulky child’s.

‘Now you’re unhappy!’ she cried in despair. ‘You weren’t so unhappy at the time.’

‘If my mother had seen …’

‘I know, but she didn’t. It doesn’t touch her. And nothing’s changed.’

‘I can’t tell what is real any longer.’

She took his head in her lap and tried to comfort him, although she felt that he was indulging a fantastic grief.

At last: ‘I am real,’ she said diffidently. It had taken all her courage, and he did not seem to hear.

The flower-piece looked very fine in the lamplight. Each petal lay alongside the next according to plan. It was a great work of art, Frances told them; and they felt like praised children as they drank their coffee. But their pleasure was overlaid by anxiety for her. She had come up to the cottage, looking tired and ill, and now sat nursing her elbow, while her coffee grew cold beside her.

Moths blundered about the lampshade, and she watched them, not stirring in her chair. Morland did everything for her, hung up her overall, put a shawl round her shoulders.

‘Where is Camilla?’ she asked, groping for her coffee-cup. Morland leant over and put it into her left hand.

‘I am here,’ Camilla said at the door.

‘Coffee, Cam dear?’ Liz began, jumping up and scuttling about, as if there was some awkwardness to cover.

No work tomorrow,’ Morland reminded Frances. ‘There is our picnic, don’t forget.’

‘I’ve no energy left for picnics.’

‘I’ve set my heart on this.’

‘I think it will rain tomorrow,’ Camilla said, sitting down in the lamplight. They were all silent, until Morland said: ‘The swifts were flying too high for rain.’

He and Camilla looked at one another. Then she shrugged her shoulders.

‘They are all watching me,’ she thought.

‘Darling, let me see you to bed,’ Liz said. She knelt down at Frances’s feet and clasped her hands over her knees. ‘I’ll brush your hair for you. And bring you some warm milk. It will be round that way for once. Please!’

For the first time that she could ever remember, Frances wanted to lean on someone else. If she consented, she felt that it would mean the end of independence: once she let Liz do for her anything more than that which respect for an older woman dictated – and which was meet and proper, she believed – she saw a danger of slipping too easily into utter helplessness. She struggled for a moment, then she said quietly: ‘Very well, my dear. Thank you,’ and let Liz draw her to her feet.

But once upstairs, she found her about as helpful as a little girl playing at nurses; enthusiastic, but quite incompetent. She fetched so many things which were not wanted, blundering
about the room in an excess of willingness, and while she was brushing her hair, suddenly conceived such a brilliant idea that she knocked Frances’s head quite hard with the side of the hairbrush.

‘Oh, hell! Oh, dear, forgive me. I did have such a wonderful idea about the future. You know how I worry about you being here alone. But why should you any more, winter after winter, when you could live quite safe and sound with me? It isn’t so bad there, and Arthur adores you. You
should
come. It would help me. I could deal with Mrs Taylor better if you were there, and her sadness, and I should behave better, so that Arthur would love me more. Then we should all be happier, and you wouldn’t be so lonely.’

Frances looked steadily down into her lap. ‘I’m not lonely,’ she said. ‘But you’re a good girl, my dear.’

Downstairs, Morland and Camilla faced one another awkwardly across the flowers.

‘You’re tired,’ he said briefly, hoping to begin the conversation.

She knocked a great furry-legged moth away from her cheek, with a look of unutterable disgust.

‘My feet ache,’ she agreed, as unemotional as she could sound.

‘When this holiday of yours is over, will you one day have lunch with me in London?’

‘Yes please,’ she said dully.

‘We could go to the Ballet perhaps,’ he suggested.

‘That would be very nice.’ (‘Nice and remote,’ she thought.)

She put out her hand to the flowers they had so carefully arranged and pulled off one or two leaves. He looked away.

‘Unless there is anything you prefer,’ he said.

Her nervous fingers stripped and twisted the flowers, shredded the petals. He had not the heart to stop her.

‘Prefer to what?’ she asked, looking blankly at him through the foliage.

‘To the Ballet.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. No. Nothing.’

She snapped a twig precisely in half, and with a tremendous effort pulled herself to and said: ‘I am very fond of Ballet … As a matter of fact,’ she added.

Liz came in quickly and her mouth opened when she saw their flower-piece, their evening’s work, their praise-earner, so scattered and unkempt, but the briefest look from Morland kept her silent, and she shut her mouth again. Camilla picked up her coffee-cup and began to drink without lifting her head.

‘I must start my long walk home,’ said Morland.

‘Yes, Arthur has come!’ Liz shouted back into the room. ‘So we can go in the car after all. Oh, I am so pleased that you came!’ she cried, running across the lawn to meet him. ‘Now we can all go in the car. It will be so much better than the bus.’

‘I am glad to be so useful.’