A Wreath Of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor

cumbersome,impersonal. Dinosaurs and men in tanks. But the stream of life flows differently, through the unarmed, the emotional, the highly personal …’
    ‘You turn my anxiety about Liz into a disarmament conference,’ Camilla said.
    ‘She has committed herself to that man. You were wrong at tea-time when you said she married Arthur, not the vicar. A man’s work is twisted into the roots of his existence. His conscience is involved. He can’t divide himself.’
    ‘On the contrary, Arthur seems to have a genius for cutting himself up into little pieces. He hands himself round among the ladies as if he were a plate of scones.’
    Frances made the tea and put cups on the table. She sat down and patted her thigh until Hotchkiss lumbered to his feet and padded over to her. Camilla poured out. ‘Oh, I’m tired!’ she yawned.
    ‘You see,’ Frances went on, ‘I know Liz so well. When she was a little girl, she was warm-hearted and impulsive, but quick to blame herself, quick to feel disappointment. She must absorb this disappointment into her life like all the others. And you must let her.’
    ‘We only have
one
life.’
    ‘But there is room in it for everything. Like light, it contains all the colours. You are too fastidious.’
    ‘Too fastidious,’ Camilla repeated. She frowned as she drank her tea. ‘I don’t any longer know what I am.’ She thought about her morning at the Griffin, her promise to return, the passion which had driven her out walking with Hotchkiss in the dark.
    ‘We go on for years at a jog-trot,’ Frances said, ‘and then suddenly we are beset with doubts, the landscape darkens, we feel lost and alone, conscious all at once that we must grope our way forward for we cannot retrace our footsteps.’ She thought of her painting out in the shed, finished, awaiting Mr Beddoes.
    She said: ‘You are the one I worry for, not Liz.’
    ‘I?’ Camilla put her cup down, looking surprised.
    ‘Because you never cry. Because you are so heavily armoured that if you get thrown, you’ll never rise to your feet again without assistance.’
    ‘You
shall assist me,’ Camilla said lightly. ‘I wonder what Liz is doing now.’
    She gathered up the cups and took them to the sink to wash them. Frances opened the door and let Hotchkiss out into the garden.
    ‘I know,’ she said, standing on the step and looking at the sky. ‘When she was a child, her father was a bit heavy-handed with her. One of those dry, domineering men. There were often punishments of a formal cold-blooded kind. ‘See me in the library after tea.’ Not brutality. But talk, endless discussions about what would become of her character. She would stand there, fidgeting, while the words broke over her head. Disapproval is deadly poison, though; and she’d whiten with fatigue. And later, when I was brushing her hair, she’d begin to sob and go on and on even after she was in bed, not from remorse – heavens, no! – but from the feeling of coldness in those around her. I would go away, unable to help, and creep back a few minutes later with a warm drink. And there she’d be, her cheek turned to the pillow, beautifully asleep. And she’ll be asleep now. She’ll have quarrelled and cried and dropped off.’
    She leant into the darkness and whistled for Hotchkiss. ‘Whereas you,’ she added, speaking in a low voice in the quiet air, ‘will lie awake half the night, feeling isolated and bewildered. And you won’t even know why.’
    Hotchkiss did not come and she took up a torch and went into the garden to look for him.
    *
     
    Richard was sitting in his room at the Griffin, writing in his diary.
    ‘No mention for two days. Perhaps never again. But now these newspapers are a habit with me. I try to resist them, not to pick them up in the bar or the lounge, not to buy them, nor to go to the Reading Room at the Library. Because of the papers I see the thing differently now. What it really was, comes to me only occasionally and with