A Wreath Of Roses Read Online Free Page 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.
    ‘I don’t want to go anywhere, but I want to be left in peace.’
    ‘Why should you be? No one else is.’
    ‘Because I wasted so many years teaching instead of painting. Teaching little girls like Liz, who do nothing better with their learning than read novels.’
    ‘Perhaps you taught her badly,’ Camilla suggested, leaning back in her chair.
    ‘I wasted my time.’
    ‘You had the money for it. And you had to live somehow.’
    ‘I wasted my time.’
    ‘I want to say two things before Liz comes in. Firstly, don’t bully her about the baby. If it cries, it cries and you put up with it. She must have a holiday from that man.’
    ‘She has married him.’
    ‘The other thing is this dog of yours. We don’t want to take it for walks.’
    ‘You want to be guests and do nothing?’ Frances suggested.
    ‘We would rather pay six-and-a-half guineas a week than take him when we go walking,’ Camilla said untruthfully.
    From the kitchen came the sounds of Liz making tea. When Camilla went out to her, she found her working in an impeded way, with the baby over one shoulder.
    They drank the tea under a large mulberry tree where the grass was worn, and they plaited their past year together from the tight knot of last summer’s holiday. Into this plait they wove Liz’s failure at being married, the birth of her son (Camilla looked down at her lap), little tiffs with parishioners, not amounting to much, but threatening greater things of the same kind for the future; then Camilla (and the man in the train had guessed wrongly, for she did not teach but was the secretary at a girls’ school) threaded in her strand, bright with amusement – little gaffes at Speech Day (the Bishop’s wife trying to drink tea through her veil) or Staff Meetings; the Old Girls’ Reunion and how changed they returned to it, for the first were last and the last were first and Lady Lisbourne, who at school had been nothing, condescended to the erstwhile Captain of Hockey, a rough-voiced woman in tweeds. Liz’s laughter rang out across the still garden and was echoed by her son who lay on the grass at her side.
    And Frances? But she had nothing to contribute, shedeclared. Only four pictures. All of them the same and none any good. The year had gone in a way which seemed unbearable to the other two, but was not to her. Week succeeded week, no one called; if they wrote she rarely replied; she