A Wreath Of Roses Read Online Free PDF Page B

came arching out of cans on to the dry flower-beds where calceolarias, lobelias wilted. Old women sat on chairs at doors and men carried their beer outside to the pavement. Little girls with thin arms threw balls against the side of the railway-arch, chanting old rhymes. And then, through the arch, it was the country again, and lovers were walking slowly on the gravelly road; the town, the old people and the children left behind, and the quiet fields and their strangeness to one another lying ahead.
    ‘I hope that Harry hasn’t cried,’ Liz said. ‘If Frances plays the piano, she will wake him.’
    ‘What are these paintings she has done?’
    Liz said nothing for a moment, then she brought her fists down on her knees and seemed to be trying to find words. ‘Frightening! Great black and grey and purple and sulphurous pictures. All nonsense. So
different
. When you think … all those flowers she used to paint, those lovely cobwebby blossoms, skeleton leaves, the gauziness of them. And now these awful rocky pictures – and how she comes in and plays the piano as if the pictures had got into her, instead of the other way about. At
her
time of life. And that dog, too. It is all part of the general ferocity – the sun wheeling round, violent cliffs and rocks, figures with black lines round them. And all amounting to – just nothing at all.’
    ‘The one she painted last summer was the best she ever did. The one of the room with the lace curtains. A very tender light flowing through them.’
    ‘Yes, that was what I
call
a picture. Perhaps we always want paintings to be like novels.’
    ‘What happened to that picture?’
    ‘A man bought it for a great deal of money, though I don’t know how much. You know how she is. She is utterly determinednever to behave like an artist, and that refusal to discuss money is part of it.’
    ‘Who was the man?’
    ‘I don’t know. I only know that he writes to her and that she seldom answers his letters. And once he sent her a piece of lace as a present from somewhere abroad. How suddenly the sun goes.’
    ‘I think it goes gradually,’ Camilla said, looking at the lines of colour across the sky and all the little gold-reflecting clouds.
    The warmth goes,’ Liz said, chafing her bare arms. ‘Do you always fall into friendships with men you meet on trains? It seems a new thing in you.’
    ‘We were rather thrown together by circumstance, as anything out of the ordinary does tend to throw people together – wars and thunder-storms or a procession or an accident.’
    ‘You mean the man killing himself?’
    ‘Yes.’
    She had talked of it until it had become unreal. Now it was vividly itself again, the sunset, the late hour, bringing it back to her in its first light. Although her train had taken her away from it, the thing was not done with for other people, she suddenly thought. Doubtless, someone wept somewhere, and the man’s lonely despair was not less painful because it was over.
    ‘How did you and that man come into it?’ Liz was asking. ‘I forget his name.’
    ‘Richard Elton,’ Camilla said distinctly.
    ‘I can’t think how you remember. I never remember names when I have only heard them once.’
    ‘It struck me, because it seemed so much the sort of name people don’t have. The sort a woman writer might choose for a nom-de-plume, perhaps … or for the name of her hero.’
    ‘Yes, I see what you mean.’
    ‘He and I didn’t come into it anyway,’ Camilla said, answering Liz’s question. ‘But it meant that it was natural for us to speak about it afterwards. How strangely things happen. The peaceful, sunny afternoon, and
that
dropping into it without warning; except perhaps that all peaceful, sunny things should be a warning in themselves. When you were a child did you ever hunt for a lost ball among ferns and leaves and parting them quickly to look …’ she made a gesture of doing this … ‘come suddenly upon a great toad, sitting there, very ugly