A Wreath Of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor Read Free Book Online

had come into her pictures of littered chimney-pieces, rooms reflected in mirrors, the crumpled, tumbled beds, the naked girl holding her silk stocking to the light, her skin cream and apricot against the brilliant, the shocking crimsons, pinks, vermilions of the wall. Then sometimes pale satin-striped or faintly wreathed papers in rooms running with gilt and sunlight, so drenched in glitter that even carpets seemed to reflect molten gold. The insides of houses, glimpses out of windows or through windows, the hand she had put out to try to arrest the passing scene. She closed her eyes and bunches of roses were printed for an instant, startlingly white upon the darkness, then faded, as the darkness itself paled, the sun from the window coming brilliantly through her lids. Trying to check life itself, she thought, to make some of the hurrying everyday things immortal, to paint the everyday things with tenderness and intimacy – the dirty café with its pockmarked mirrors as if they had been shot at, its curly hat-stands, its stained marble under the yellow light; wet pavements; an old woman yawning. With tenderness and intimacy. With sentimentality, too, she wondered. For was I not guilty of making ugliness charming? An English sadness like a veil over all I painted, until it became ladylike and nostalgic, governessy, utterly lacking in ferocity, brutality, violence. Whereas in the centre of the earth, in the heart of life, in the core of even everyday things is there not violence, with flames wheeling, turmoil, pain, chaos?
    Her paintings this year, she knew, were four utter failures to express her new feelings, her rejection of prettiness, her tearing-down of the veils of sadness, of charm. She had become abstract, incoherent, lost. ‘I am too old,’ she thought, and then: “It wasn’t
me,”
as women say, when they find the hat they are trying on is beyond their purse.’
    Just then, Camilla came in, still wearing her nightgown, and carrying a cup of tea in one hand, a letter in the other.
    ‘It is time to wake up,’ she said.
    ‘Have you no dressing-gown, Camilla?’
    ‘No.’
    She put her face into a great bowl of pink and red sweetpeas on the bedside table.
    ‘There is a macintosh of mine you can borrow.’
    ‘A macintosh? But it isn’t raining. And if it were I shouldn’t go out in my nightgown.’
    ‘I don’t like to see you walking about the house like that.’
    Frances sat bolt upright in bed and re-tied a ribbon at her wrist, using one hand and her teeth.
    ‘I’ll go and dress. You look like a little girl in bed, Frances. Liz has a letter, too. From her husband. A very, very long letter and she is still reading it. It started off “My dearest wife,” she said. Just as if he had several.’
    ‘No man stands a chance against you two. All that running to one another and giggling. You make fun of all the things you fear.’
    ‘That’s very clever of you,’ Camilla agreed, and hid her face once more in the sweetpeas. ‘We are not smiling
through
our tears, but at them.’
    ‘Cowardice,’ Frances murmured, slitting open the envelope, which had a French stamp, and drawing out several sheets of thin paper. Camilla, her face still among the flowers, lifted her eyes for a second and then lowered them.
    ‘Well, I must dress myself,’ she said, straightening her back.
    ‘I wish you would. Don’t be slovenly, dear.’
    ‘No, Miss Rutherford. You weren’t my governess, you know. By the way, why did you never marry any of your employers?’
    ‘Their wives wouldn’t have liked it,’ Frances said, smiling at her letter.
    ‘Surely they knew better than to survive childbirth?’
    ‘No, they seemed not to know.’
    ‘You would think literature would have taught them as much.’
    ‘Literature
would not.’
    ‘Before you begin all that about novel-reading, I will dress myself.’
    ‘You keep saying you are going to. But, one moment!’
    She held up her hand to stay Camilla as she read her letter. At