A Wreath Of Roses Read Online Free PDF Page A

in silence and then tidying up afterwards, utterly vulnerable but careful, the world cruelly foreign, and every sound a pain.’
    ‘But why should she have been so very miserable?’
    ‘She was never happy until this last part of her life.’
    ‘Then perhaps there will be that for us also,’ Liz suggested. ‘It doesn’t sound very promising.’
    ‘You’ll
have your children.’
    ‘Children?’ Liz pretended to flinch at this plural, but her expression was not dismayed. She fell into a comfortable little silence.
    ‘God knows what I shall have,’ Camilla said over her shoulder as they stepped out of the bus.
    ‘Children, too, I daresay,’ Liz said carelessly.
    ‘Your marriage is not an encouraging example to me. Besides, I have left it too late.’
    ‘You are like Dorothea Casaubon in
Middlemarch.’
    ‘Let’s go for a drink.’
    ‘I am not supposed to drink while I am feeding Harry,’ Liz said primly.
    ‘And last year you mayn’t drink because you were
expecting
Harry. How absurd! Is the whisky supposed to go direct to him, neat, and make him drunk?’
    ‘I read in a book that it is a good thing not to do.’
    ‘We have half-an-hour to wait. What do you suggest?’
    ‘If you very much want a drink, I’ll have just one beer.’
    ‘I
do
very much want one,’ Camilla said, and led the way at once into the musty darkness of the Griffin, tidying her hair with her hands as she went.
    The man from the train was there, as she had supposed he would be. He was leaning over the bar questioning the barman about the town, the district. It seemed to Camilla puzzling that his sentimental journey should have ended in a place to which he was so much a stranger.
    She stood there, shaking coins softly in her hand, waiting to be served, and when the barman turned towards her, the other did so also. In the instant before he smiled, she noticed the slightest flicker of alarm on his face. The smile at once covered it up, but it had been there; she could not deceive herself. As if to do more than cover up his first reaction, as if to trample it down and crush it, he came forward and spoke to her.
    Liz sat on a high stool, trying not to look curious, and the sight of her doing this delighted Camilla, who watched her through a great gilt-edged mirror.
    ‘Are you comfortably installed?’ she asked in a rather challenging, familiar way, which was for Liz’s benefit, and which she at once regretted.
    ‘Upstairs, it is like a fairy-story. Nothing has been touched for twenty years.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Not clean. All the pictures look as if they have been dipped into soup. It hasn’t a clean smell. The bath has a great green stain under the taps. The chest-of-drawers is full of shrunk moth-balls and rustysafety-pins.’ He spoke in a quiet but over-dramatic voice and Liz, who could not quite hear, looked away towards the open doorway and yawned.
    ‘Then I am glad to be a woman and not obliged to stay here,’ Camilla said.
    ‘It is all such a maze of stairways and passages, I feel it will be too difficult to go to bed, to find my own room again. I can’t tell you …’
    ‘This is a friend of mine,’ Camilla interrupted, feeling something was now due to Liz. ‘Mrs Nicholson …’ She paused.
    Liz gave a formal little bow and folded her hands in her lap.
    ‘Now that we have one name, we must have some more,’ he said. ‘Mine is Richard Elton.’
    ‘We met in the train,’ Camilla said to Liz, as if this explained more than it did. ‘My name is Camilla Hill.’
    ‘A very nice name.’
    Liz sipped her beer, making it last, like a child with an ice-cream. Seeing her through the great mirror, head bent over her drink, hair swinging smoothly forward, her brown legs twisted round the stool, Camilla felt as if the day had been a dream, that she would come out of it soon, lifting fold after fold of muffling web; for this could not be real – meeting Liz again after eleven months and finding herself so alienated