A Wreath Of Roses Read Free

see.’
    ‘Their tongues flicking up and down like snakes’ tongues.’
    He looked at her curiously.
    ‘Perhaps you can’t blame them,’ he suggested.
    ‘
You
blamed them. You walked away … at least, I missed you …’
    She hesitated and looked up and he saw that her eyes were brilliantly blue.
    ‘What station is this?’ she asked, leaning to the window as the train slowed past a signal-box.
    ‘Broad Oak,’ he read. There were the words suddenly, very white on black, and the same deserted platform, the geraniums; as if they had completed a circle. Only the shadows were shifting and drawing themselves out.
    She leant back again.
    ‘How far are you going?’
    ‘To Abingford.’
    ‘For a holiday?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘And staying at the Red Lion, I expect?’
    The Red Lion?’ she asked, puzzled.
    ‘It is the Red Lion, isn’t it? The big one in the High Street?’
    ‘The High Street?’
    ‘The main street, the wide one,’ he said, as if with impatience.
    ‘You must mean Market Street.’
    ‘Well, isn’t the Red Lion there?’
    ‘No. The one with the porch and the stuccoed pillars is the Bear. The only other is in Market Square, opposite the station, a place with shutters and a cobbled yard at the side.’ She closed her eyes for a moment, trying to remember. The Griffin,’ she said suddenly. ‘Yes, the Griffin.’
    ‘Oh, I’ve forgotten. A sentimental journey, this. I was a boy when I was here last. Now I’ve come back for some peace; to write a book, in fact.’
    She was surprised. Her imagination refused this idea, refused the idea of him
reading
a book even. A man, she would have thought him, bound by cold, impersonal interests and dull, objective conversation – sport, and newspapers, and the price of cars.
    ‘What kind of book?’ she enquired.
    ‘About the war.’
    ‘Oh, I see.’ (The war and his experience in it,’ she thought. ‘Unreadable.’)
    And now (the landscape opening always like a succession of fans) cows moved deep in buttercups, hedges were dense and creamy with elderflower and cow-parsley. Yet her pleasure in it all was ruined, first by the incident at the junction, and now by the interruption of this man, sitting opposite her, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes never leaving her.
    ‘What experiences did you have?’ she felt obliged to ask. ‘What were you? What did you do?’
    ‘Dropped by moonlight half-way across France. Sat between Gestapo men in trains, with my transmitter in a case on the rack above, hid in cellars while they searched for me overhead …’ he broke off, looking excited, as if he were listening to this story, not telling it … ‘Oh, the sound of those footsteps going up and down, wandering away, but always coming back, and sometimes scarcely to be heard above the noises
here …’
he tapped his fingers on the side of his head … ‘the rushing sounds that come from too much straining to hear. And it all being so much like the books I read as a boy – passwords, disguises, swallowing bits of paper, hiding others in currant buns …’
    ‘So
that
is the sort of man who did it!’ she thought, staring back at him.
    ‘You must have great nerve,’ she suggested, trying in this to find an excuse, a reason, for the emptiness in his eyes.
    ‘Not now,’ he replied. The end of the war came at the right time for me. The last time I was briefed, a feeling of staleness came over me, a sort of tired horror …’
    ‘Tired horror!’ she repeated, surprised. When he used those words, she could understand it all.
    ‘And won’t it all come back, if you write about it? The horror, and the reluctance.’
    ‘When it is done …’ he began.
    ‘To exorcise it, you mean? To drive it out of you, as Emily Brontë drove out Heathcliff, with her pen?’
    Either he found this fanciful or distasteful to him, for he glanced out of the window as if dissociating himself from her comparisons.
    She at once felt she had sacrificed Emily Brontë, throwing her in