A Wreath Of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor Read Free Book Online Page B

Hotchkiss, but also because she felt she was escaping, escaping Liz and Frances, escaping the two she loved, probably, most in her life, and avoiding the long, leisurely morning she had looked forward to in other years, the endless, sunny, gossipy, holiday morning, with the apples to peel, peas to shuck, coffeeunder the mulberry tree, shopping at the post-office. What had seemed plenty in other years, now appeared threadbare. She felt a restlessness, like milk beginning to sway up to the boil, a trembling excitement, sometimes pleasurable as it had been in the Griffin last night; but often painful, as it was when she held Liz’s baby or watched Liz with him. She knew that what had charmed her in other summers could not charm her now; and felt that, because of this, the holiday must be different and had been different from the beginning, different at the railway station, at her arrival, different with Liz. The long series of these summer holidays from girlhood onwards was suddenly broken. Or had it begun to break last year, with Liz retching her heart up every morning, weeping at night, frightened, alien, yet important? Frances, too, had changed. She had aged more than twelve months. She had painted those pictures. She had added this dog to herself.
    Camilla stopped and wound the chain on to the other wrist. Hotchkiss lay down on his back in some horse-droppings and rolled his great body from side to side, while Camilla tugged and cursed at him. Cursed at Frances. At herself, for not having gone to Switzerland with the Science mistress instead of this.
    As she came into the town, the dog gave up running ahead and now lagged, nosing at gateways, standing still to bark at nothing, exploring, loitering, becoming entangled with prams and passers-by. The streets were busy. Women in cotton frocks drove in from the surrounding villages to stand in fish-queues, drink coffee in tea-shops and park their cars in the wrong places.
    The pavements were hot through her sandals, traffic flashed and glittered, the humid scent of bread-baking, so beautiful in winter, was sickening in the heat. Flies danced over the block of ice at the fishmonger’s, crawled on the great blue and silverheaps of mackerel, the orange kippers. Stale tobacco and last night’s beer-spillings was the smell at the Griffin, even in the dark, druggeted hall-way. Here the crimson walls burgeoned with antlers, with horns, with glass-eyed heads and plump and luminous fish encased among linen weeds. Camilla suddenly shivered. Hotchkiss lifted his leg at an umbrella-stand and she hit him across the back with the chain. He growled and turned his blood-tinged eyes upon her.
    No one came. The hotel seemed enfolded as a cocoon, indifferent to life, but still a little active in itself, for a clock ticked with an oily, solid sound at the foot of the stairs; far, far away there was a gentle clatter of washing-up; in the courtyard, empty barrels were trundled across cobblestones.
    Presently, a thin elderly man came out of an office, a dry shuck of a man in a neat alpaca jacket,
The Times
folded under his arm.
    ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’
    Camilla jerked Hotchkiss away from the umbrella-stand and asked to book a room: moreover, she insisted firmly, she must see the room itself before she did so. It must be quiet, quiet yet airy. Mr Beddoes, she seemed to know beforehand, would be old and faddy.
    Hotchkiss followed them upstairs, clawing the drugget. They ascended into a region of hushed darkness, uneven floors, loose boards: taps dripped behind doors, mice rattled along the wainscoting. No visitors emerged from the rows of closed and numbered doors, still less Richard Elton, but for whom Camilla would have been booking a room at the Bear, rather more carelessly.
    Frances might have been pleased with the room into which Camilla was eventually shown. It looked like one of her early paintings, with its collapsing brass bedstead, its black, scratched floor-boards and rush