A Wreath Of Roses Read Online Free

is never interested in what he has. Only in what he may be going to get next week. So all the shaking and excitement stopped. Nothing took its place. And I am left with a rather cold and greedy man sitting at his desk writing notes to other women – casual-seeming little notes which take him hours and hours to scribble off – he balances the paper-knife on his fingers while he weighs the words in his mind. And I sit darning his socks and watching him.’
    ‘You go about asking for trouble. I have always said so.’
    They passed under a railway-arch and that seemed to be the end of the little town. On one side a street, on the other a hot gravelly lane, bordered with dusty willow trees.
    ‘You seem in a very tart and condemning mood,’ Liz said, walking with bowed head, her arms folded across her chest.
    ‘I’m sorry. Could you now take this Hotchkiss?’
    Camilla examined her hands and wiped them against herskirt. ‘An awful thing happened where I was waiting to change trains, some poor little man threw himself in front of the express, or rather bungled it and fell on the lines at the side; died when they picked him up. I wonder why?’ she suddenly asked herself aloud. ‘Anyhow, made me shake more than I would for any clergyman. Upsetting!’
    ‘Something more than upsetting, I should say,’ Liz observed. But then there was a complicated business of climbing a stile and getting Hotchkiss underneath. When they talked again, it was about other things.

CHAPTER TWO
     
    The cottage was of flint, the date 1897 done in bottle-ends between the bedroom windows. On Sunday evenings the villagers walked past on the other side of the privet hedge and their voices came clearly into the parlour, or else Frances played her piano so loudly that they looked over the gate in wonder. Along the window-sills were cactus-plants in earthenware pots, bluish green, striped ones; some rosetted or jointed; others all cobwebbed over with faint greyish strands. These plants, together or singly, came into most of her paintings, like a signature.
    As Camilla put her hand on the gate, she saw a line of napkins above the fruit bushes and, for a reason she had no time to explore, she felt an impulse of fear, which amounted to a cold unwillingness to see her friend’s baby, to have to exclaim over it and admire. She would never, she decided, accustom herself to the strangeness of Liz married and a mother. It appeared also that Liz could not accustom her to it, but would try to do so, with absurd tact and understanding, so that already gulfs began to yawn between them.
    From under the canopy of a pram a little braceleted armdipped in the sun. Liz unleashed the dog and ran forward. Camilla followed, slowly, but not as slowly as she wished. She had no experience of babies and no knowledge of what to say. Making an effort, she put out her fingers for the baby to fasten upon. He rolled over, arching his back, and tried to draw her hand to his mouth. His face reddened and the fat-creases in his tanned legs showed white as he stretched.
    ‘What does Frances think of him?’
    ‘It is only a question of whether he cries or not. We have to keep him quiet at all costs.’
    ‘We?’
    ‘Or I go home.’
    Camilla moved away from the pram, bored. ‘He is a nice little baby,’ she said.
    ‘Oh, these damned women!’ Liz thought going across the lawn towards the house. But the baby now made desperate hooking movements with his arms, turning his wrists in an agony of rage and impotence, and, his face suddenly crumpling and darkening, began to cry. Liz picked him up and stood rocking to and fro with him under a tree. His sobs were a long time dying down and did so in an exhausted way as if he had been crying for hours. ‘He will get spoilt,’ Liz thought. ‘I shouldn’t have come.’
    Camilla went through the kitchen. On the cool flags the dog was sleeping, lying on his side. And in the stuffy parlour, Frances was sleeping, too. She sat very upright in a