A Wreath Of Roses Read Free Page B

along all the passages, on all the little flights of stairs.
    ‘I can’t carry my bag all that way,’ said Camilla.
    ‘Neither can we go on a bus with
this.’
The great dog lay down on the blistering pavement, slobbering and panting.
    ‘I could leave it in the luggage-office, and we can come down after tea, when it’s cooler, on the bus.’
    ‘She will only say “Take Hotchkiss with you”. I know she will say that.’
    ‘You mustn’t be so put upon.’
    ‘Guests are for that. They have to do all the wretched jobs not even a paid servant will do – queue for tomatoes, look at photograph albums, read the books in their bedrooms, admire the cabbage-plants. You can’t exert that sort of tyranny over anybody but a guest. And all done so sweetly. “While you’re in the town, just pop in for some tomatoes.” I stood for three-quarters of an hour in a queue, sweltering hot, and women sweating and pushing their baskets against the back of my knees. And
talking
to me …’ Her voice rose indignantly, but Camilla had gone to the luggage-office and returned without her bag.
    ‘And then,’ Liz continued, as they crossed the square, ‘“If you are going for a stroll, take Hotchkiss with you. He’s so bored.”’
    ‘What is she doing? Frances?’
    ‘Playing the piano. Her painting is all going wrong. She is in troubled waters. So she plays the piano very loudly. Awful noises come out of it. A great confusion of sound. Dohnanyi. She has her vengeance on the piano. She gives it hell. She really is an absolute bitch to it. But I cannot take its part. Perhaps you will.’
    ‘I’ll have that Hotchkiss, if you hand him over.’
    ‘I was wondering when you were going to offer.’
    ‘She is our hostess,’ Camilla pointed out, stopping to wind the leather strap round her hand.
    ‘But see how we pay for it. Summer after summer.’
    ‘I love her,’ Camilla said, starting off again with the dog.
    ‘And I. I love her, too. But she seems to me insufferable, none the less.’
    ‘Let us not talk about her any more. Tell me about the baby.’
    ‘What is there to say? He is just like a little baby.’
    Camilla felt that this foolish remark was Liz deliberately trying to belittle her son, as sometimes a nice child will belittle a possession before another child who has nothing.
    ‘It will seem funny him being there,’ she said. ‘Last year scarcely imagined, this year …’
    ‘He never cries,’ Liz put in quickly. ‘I promised Frances that he wouldn’t. And he hasn’t.’
    ‘He has two days behind him, and a whole month ahead. We shall judge him at the end of that.’
    ‘He sleeps …’
    ‘Not with us, I hope,’ Camilla said quickly.
    ‘In that little room at the end of the passage where she keeps her old pictures. He will probably get painter’s colic. Oh, the thought of this long peaceful month ahead!’ She half-stopped in the middle of the pavement to consider it. ‘Marriage is such a sordid, morbid relationship!’
    ‘Yours is, because you always will be attracted to the sort of man who is no good to you. The same man over and over again. Good-looking in an obvious sort of way …’ She suddenly remembered the man on the train and was silent.
    ‘Ah well, for a whole month let’s not talk about him. I
did
think, though,’ she continued, at once disregarding her own instructions, ‘that a clergyman would have something more in him than was obvious at first glance. But I discovered that there was even less.’
    ‘What did you expect?’
    ‘An inner mystery.’ She laughed. ‘And then, somehow, it was all made more exciting by his religion. A suggestion of forbidden fruits. When he touched me, it meant much
more
than other men touching me. And they were such very little touches, too. It was all cruel and exciting. When he came into the room, I shook from head to foot. And then, I thought he would be interested in my soul and discuss it endlessly and that would have been a pleasure to me. But he