Free A Wreath Of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor Page B

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 herdestructive 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.

CHAPTER FIVE
     
    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 thepiano. 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,