A Wreath Of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor Page A

sudden freshness and vividness, as a shock. And now, alone in my room, in this stale, fusty, damnable,
dead
room, I try to concentrate on it, to face it again as a real thing. But it is like trying to live over an old embrace. When I was a youth, I would attempt to do that, to go through it all again when I was alone, from the first touch. But always it evaded me. And this evades me. All feeling, excitement, flies and vanishes. So I am always alone.’
    His hands felt suddenly too cold to write, although it was a warm night; he was conscious of a chill, a kind of paralysis creeping over him; his thighs froze, his wrists were ice on the edge of the dressing-table at which he wrote. He put his pen down quietly and covered his face with his hands.
    Camilla sat at her mirror late that night. Candles passed light across her face, put a little flicker in her eyes, a blueish shadow in her armpit as she brushed her hair.
    ‘Alone!’ she said suddenly out loud, and her eyelids wavered at the unexpected sound of her voice in the quiet room.
    She shook her hair back and felt the sweep of it across her bare shoulders. The caress of it against her skin disquieted her, and, when she looked into the mirror again, excitement, even beauty, had changed her face. She leant forward into the picture of the room behind her – some of Liz’s clothes lying untidily across her bed, the bed itself dinted from Liz’s flung-down body, as, distracted and frustrated, she had lain thereweeping, before she had suddenly roused herself, dried her eyes and begun to pack a few clothes, leaving a trail of disorder after her. In the picture framed by the mirror, Camilla’s bed primly awaited her, the sheet neatly turned back, and for once she thought without disgust of the great rumpled beds in Frances’s paintings which she had always looked at with fastidious, cold appraisal, but now longed for with the thought inherent in squeamish people that the sordid must always be truer to life than the agreeable.
    The room was heaped with shadows and in the looking-glass was a dark background to the brilliance of her face, her throat and arms.
    ‘The candlelight!’ she thought, laying her brush down and leaning forward. ‘By candlelight, all women have some sort of beauty!’
    Her flesh was golden as an apricot; her hair, in contrast, looked tarnished and harshly bright.
    ‘And there is no one to see,’ she thought. ‘In the day, I put on my tight face, my buttoned-up look. I hood my eyes, cover myself. But now, in my moment of beauty, there is no one to see me.’
    She crossed her arms and slid down the ribbons of her nightgown from her shoulders. The picture in the mirror exasperated her. She remembered herself as a girl. The sharp white shoulders, the high bosom had so imperceptibly, yet so soon, assumed this heavy golden ripeness, and how much more abruptly would exchange maturity for old age. Not only the candlelight made her beauty seem precarious. In her youth, discipline, over-niceness had isolated her. Shyness, perhaps, or pride, had started her off in life with a false step, on the wrong foot. The first little mistake initiated all the others. So life gathered momentum and bore her away; she became colder, prouder, more deeply committed; and, because she had once refused, no more wasoffered. Her habit now was negative. A great effort would be needed to break out of this isolation, which was her punishment from life for having been too exclusive; she must be humbled, be shamed in her own eyes, scheme and dissemble for what she wanted or it would be too late.
    ‘A hackneyed theme,’ she told herself, her stubborn daytime face suddenly reflected back.
    She drew her nightgown up over her shoulders again and began rapidly to plait her hair.

CHAPTER SIX
     
    The chalk breaking through the short turf looked like the very bones of the earth. From this distance the town seemed embowered in trees; the hot bare streets had contracted, the few factories