A Wreath Of Roses

Book 7: Virago Modern Classics

by Elizabeth Taylor, Helen Dunmore

Genres: General Fiction; Classics; Literary Fiction; Women's Fiction; Romance

Synopsis

INTRODUCED BY HELEN DUNMORE Elizabeth Taylor's darkest novel . . . She writes with a sensuous richness of language that draws the reader down the most shadowy paths . . . Extremely beguiling. Taylor makes the living moment present, touchable, disturbing, enchanting - Helen Dunmore Spending the holiday with friends, as she has for many years, Camilla finds that their private absorptions - Frances with her painting and Liz with her baby - seem to exclude her from the gossipy intimacies of previous summers. Anxious that she will remain encased in her solitary life as a school secretary, and perhaps to spite of her friends, Camilla steps into an unlikely liaison with Richard Elton, a handsome, assured - and dangerous - liar. Elizabeth Taylor's darkest novel is a skillful exploration of the danger we'll go to to avoid loneliness. Taylor is increasingly recognised as one of the best writers of the twentieth century, and this little-known novel displays her range admirably.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Virago

Print pages: 224

Sample

A Wreath of Roses has been called Elizabeth Taylor’s darkest novel, dealing as it does with murder, loneliness, terror and suicide. The aftertaste
of the Second World War is still on everyone’s tongue. Young men who have been formed by the extremes of violence must find
a way of adjusting to civilian life, and out of the chaos discover a coherent story to tell themselves about their futures.
Taylor prefaces the novel with a quote from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves: ‘So terrible was life that I held up shade after shade. Look at life through this, look at life through that; let there be
rose leaves, let there be vine leaves – I covered the whole street, Oxford Street, Piccadilly Circus, with the blaze and ripples
of my mind, with vine leaves and rose leaves.’ Like Woolf, Taylor is fearless in her handling of tragedy and mental suffering.
Like Woolf again, she writes with a sensuous richness of language that draws the reader down the most shadowy paths.


The action of A Wreath of Roses takes place in an English village in the blazing heart of an English summer; it is hypnotically beautiful, but never idyllic.
Landscape is always a character in Taylor’s novels, and in A Wreath of Roses ancient earthworks known as the Clumps brood over the sharply observed present tense of village life. The Clumps are fortifications,
and have defined the valley for ever. They retain their power, although people picnic there now and leave behind ‘broken bottles
and the remains of bonfires’. They are a place of holiday and of menace, and throughout the novel these two states remain
intertwined.


A Wreath of Roses opens on a railway platform in the heat of the afternoon. A man and a woman wait separately for a train. The woman yawns
behind her fist while the man observes that ‘the little beauty she possessed could be in the eyes of only a few beholders,
so much was it left to fend for itself.’ There is no connection between the two, and it seems as if there never can be. The
train will come, and the human grouping on the platform will dissolve as if it had never been. Meanwhile the stationmaster’s
chair scrapes, a waiting horse shifts its feet and it seems as if station, creatures and human beings have fallen into a cleft
of time. Suddenly, though, the signal drops ‘with a collapsing sound’, and muddle, anguish and death rip through the fabric
of the scene.


Elizabeth Taylor has a way of seeming to be one kind of writer, and then revealing herself to be quite another, or, perhaps,
to be a writer who is capable of inhabiting many selves at the same time. Her scenes are painterly: two women share a bedroom
full of ‘green darkness’ from an overshadowing pear tree; a breast-fed baby ‘flung out an arm, his eyes wandering, milky dribble
running from a corner of his mouth.’ She is intensely aware of interior and exterior realities, and the ways in which the
imagination shifts from one to the other. Rooms are seen from outside, lit up and strangely emphatic, like stage-sets. Minds
curl over their secrets, in hiding.


The woman at the railway station is Camilla Hill, a school secretary who holidays every summer with her dearest friend, Liz, and Liz’s former governess Frances, who has become a well-known painter. For years their summers have been contained
within a rhythm of confidences, convoluted literary jokes, apple-peeling, pea-podding, painting and rambling. But this year
everything is different, even before Camilla witnesses death at the railway station, and is changed utterly. Liz has married
a clergyman and become a mother. Frances has grown suddenly old, and has begun to paint dark, terrifying landscapes: ‘She
felt ashamed of her preoccupation with stillness, with her aerial flowers, her delicate colours, her femininity. She was tempted
outside her range as an artist, and for the first time painted from an inner darkness, groping and undisciplined, as if in
an act of relief from her own turmoil.’


Camilla interprets these changes as losses, and becomes painfully aware of her own loneliness. The sight of Liz feeding or
changing her child stirs violent emotion. She has lost Liz, but has not gained an equal intimacy with any other creature.
She is in a mood to lunge ‘outside her range’ just as Frances has done, but more dangerously. The man on the railway platform,
Richard Elton, seizes her sexual imagination. Her desire for him is corrupted by a form of pity, a wish to make him happy
which is as lacking in self-knowledge as it is in realism about male behaviour.


Taylor reveals far more to the reader about Richard Elton than Camilla observes. We see him alone in his room, writing a diary
‘as if he were controlled by the pen itself.’ This is the polar opposite of Liz and Camilla’s complex play with language;
it is more like automatic writing, without a coherent author or narrative. What he writes is frightening enough: ‘And because
she is the last thing that will ever happen to me, it shall be different from all that went before. More important. I shall
make it different and perfect. And I shall never touch her or harm her or lay hands upon her …’ Instantly, the reader understands
that ideas of harm are never far from Richard’s mind. Reality, for him, is what he wills it to be – at the time. The terrifying
possibilities of what might happen if his mood were to switch are embedded in the novel even when a scene between Richard
and Camilla appears harmless or even benign. Camilla, for all her intelligence, completely fails to see the threat.


Camilla’s intellect and Frances’s gifts as a painter are facts, not solutions. Frances is in the middle of the sudden, startling
transition from self-sufficiency to the weakness of old age. Her right arm is failing; soon she will not be able to paint.
She wrestles with a vision, but cannot make the first stroke, while pain ‘spread out its clinging fingers like ivy on a tree.’
Frances, like Lily Briscoe in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, remains anguished but fundamentally unshaken. She has had her vision, and besides that she possesses a wisdom which Camilla
lacks. Frances understands that the vulnerable are, in the end, safer than the armoured: ‘Life persists in the vulnerable,
the sensitive,’ she said, ‘They carry it on.’


A Wreath of Roses accepts the terribleness of life, its random cruelty and agonies of isolation. The novel’s realism belies the easy view of
Elizabeth Taylor as a small-scale ironist or social comedian, of limited palette, bounded by class and gender. Taylor shows
women ‘affronting their destiny’, as Henry James does in The Portrait of a Lady, but Camilla is no Isabel Archer, dramatised by the male gaze. Nor is she able to succumb to self-adoration, and view herself
as an object of male desire, as Beryl Fairfield does in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘At The Bay’. Instead, Camilla looks into her
mirror and sees naked flesh, changing and ageing: ‘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.’ Camilla views her own body objectively, because in a certain sense she has not yet become herself, and even the beauty of her flesh only serves to mirror her emotional isolation. It will wither in hiding,
she fears, as it has blossomed in hiding. By contrast, Liz’s body is used at every turn. Her baby’s regurgitated milk drips
down her back, and her breasts are veined. She runs around a room like a cat, weeps and laughs, touches and is touched. Camilla,
watching this, sees only the risks involved in Liz’s emotional openness, and would like to control it even as she despairs
of her own rigidity.


Crime, like self-forgetfulness, is outside the reckoning that Camilla has made of her life. Both Liz and Morland Beddoes mistrust
Richard Elton from the outset, and come to fear him. Morland may be pure in heart, but he is worldly. He has fought and spent
years as a prisoner of war, and understands the trapped passions of his fellow creatures; Liz’s recoil is instinctive, physical,
but it is also based on what she observes. After the first meeting she tells Camilla that she sees in Elton ‘a sort of tough
stupidity’ as well as film-star good looks. This turns out to be close to the mark, although Camilla pays no attention. She
listens to what she thinks, not to what her instincts may tell her, and she persists in believing in Richard Elton with an
obstinacy that defies evidence and courts disaster. Taylor’s argument here seems to be that if physical instinct is ignored,
it will revenge itself. Every warning siren is shrieking aloud before Camilla can bring herself to notice what her body knows:
‘Fear leapt through her at his touch … She could feel sweat breaking out over her body.’


This is an unflinching novel, which probes deep into the self-deceptions that grow up in order to soften life, and end up
by choking it like so many weeds. Paradoxically, it is also extremely beguiling. Taylor makes the living moment present, touchable,
disturbing, enchanting. The world in which Liz, Camilla, Frances, Richard and Morland move is so fully imagined that it seems to belong to the reader’s own past. Silky, gritty rainwater pours over Camilla’s arms from a jug; a
hotel ‘seemed enfolded in 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.’ We have all stood at the empty
reception desk of such an hotel, and against this solidity the tension tightens, suspense mounts and fear crawls over the
mind’s surface like a fly.


Helen Dunmore, 2010

Afternoons seem unending on branch-line stations in England in summer time. The spiked shelter prints an unmoving shadow on
the platform, geraniums blaze, whitewashed stones assault the eye. Such trains as come only add to the air of fantasy, to
the idea of the scene being symbolic, or encountered at one level while suggesting another even more alienating.


Once the train which had left them on the platform had drawn out, the man and woman trod separately up and down, read time-tables
in turn, were conscious of one another in the way that strangers are, when thrown together without a reason for conversation.
A word or two would have put them at ease, but there were no words to say. The heat of the afternoon was beyond comment and
could not draw them together as hailstones might have done. They had nothing to do, but to walk up and down or sit for a moment
on the blistering-hot, slatted seat. In any case, they would not naturally have made efforts to exchange words, since he was
a man of conventional good-looks of the kind that she, Camilla, believed she despised – the empty grey eyes with their thick
lashes, the waving hair, the weak, square chin, rather cleft; all of his clothes and his bearing depicting a kind of man who could never have any part in her life, whose existence could not touch hers, which was thoughtful
rather than active and counted its values in a different way. All this they knew at a glance. That they should trouble to
explore one another further was explained by the empty afternoon, the feeling that time was being paid out too slowly to bring
the train they awaited.


She turned back her cuff to see the time, patted her yawning mouth with her fist. Heedless of her appearance, he thought;
and the little beauty she possessed could be in the eyes of only a few beholders, so much was it left to fend for itself.
She made no concessions, beyond neatness, in order to arrest or distract and ordinarily he would not have glanced at her again.


At last she sat down on a seat and opened a book. This seemed to leave him alone on the platform under the blazing sun. Shut
up in a little office, the station-master whistled through his teeth. The sound came out of the window, and sometimes the
scraping on the wooden floor when he moved his chair. Out on the white country road, a horse and cart waited and the horse
crunched the gravel, worn out with the flies, the heat. Then, with a collapsing sound, the signal dropped.


The woman looked up and then at the clock and then back at her book. When another man walked on to the platform, she sat with
her finger on a word, watching him going up the steps of the footbridge and could hear the hollow sound of his boots on the
wooden boards.


The train’s white plume came slowly towards them; but neither stirred, for this was a through train, against which they rather
braced themselves, watching the shabby man idling his afternoon away on the bridge like a child looking at trains.


The station-master came out of his office and stood in the doorway. The three of them were quite still in the shimmering heat, the plume of smoke nodding towards them, the noise of the train suddenly coming as it rounded a bend, suddenly sucking
them up in its confusion and panic. All at once, the man on the footbridge swung himself up on the parapet and, just as Camilla
was putting out her arms in a ridiculous gesture as if to stop him, he clumsily jumped, a sprawling jump, an ill-devised death,
since he fell wide of the express train.


This happening broke the afternoon in two. The feeling of eternity had vanished. What had been timeless and silent became
chaotic and disorganised, with feet running along the echoing boards, voices staccato, and the afternoon darkening with the
vultures of disaster, who felt the presence of death and arrived from the village to savour it and to explain the happening
to one another.


But before an ambulance could come, he died, quietly, his back broken. He lay in a little patch of shade outside the station-master’s
office, beyond which they had not managed to carry him. The vultures gathered close, to stand between him and the afternoon.
He died at their feet and the station-master covered him with an old coat so that only his boots, beautifully polished, were
left to their mercy.


Camilla walked to the far end of the platform, and when her train drew in at last, she sat down in an empty compartment and
closed her eyes.


And now the afternoon had taken one step towards evening. She could sense herself going towards it, the shadows drawn out
across lawns and pavements, elm trees full of a blue darkness, gnats golden in the air.


To her shocked mind, it seemed that the death she had witnessed was not to be so easily left behind as the train moved forward;
but that it would go along with her. She experienced a moment of fear and recoil, introduced by that happening, but related
to the future as well.


Just as the train began to move, the young man who had awaited it for so long, wrenched at the door and jumped into the carriage,
breathing desperately, as if he had run a long way and at great pace. Unsteadily he threw his suitcase along the seat, and
sat down opposite Camilla, who at once (for such was her instinct) turned to contemplate the sweltering fields, the drowsy,
wooded horizon.


‘Upsetting!’ he said suddenly, his eyes upon her as he wiped his palms on a silk handkerchief.

‘Something more than upsetting,’ she rebuked him, and turned again to the unrolling landscape, but he saw tears under her
lashes as she looked away.


‘I wonder why …?’ he went on, determined now to make those tears fall if he could. As though she realised this, she made a
great effort to steady herself and managed at last to answer in a callous, off-hand manner: ‘If he couldn’t manage his death
better than that, the difficulties of living were obviously beyond him.’


‘A schoolmistress,’ he decided.

‘That chorus!’ she cried, shaken with rage.

‘Chorus?’

‘The ones who gathered from nowhere and stood watching and explaining.’

‘Oh, I see.’

‘Their tongues flicking up and down like snakes’ tongues.’

He looked at her curiously.

‘Perhaps you can’t blame them,’ he suggested.

‘You blamed them. You walked away … at least, I missed you …’


She hesitated and looked up and he saw that her eyes were brilliantly blue.

‘What station is this?’ she asked, leaning to the window as the train slowed past a signal-box.

‘Broad Oak,’ he read. There were the words suddenly, very white on black, and the same deserted platform, the geraniums; as
if they had completed a circle. Only the shadows were shifting and drawing themselves out.


She leant back again.

‘How far are you going?’

‘To Abingford.’

‘For a holiday?’

‘Yes.’

‘And staying at the Red Lion, I expect?’

The Red Lion?’ she asked, puzzled.

‘It is the Red Lion, isn’t it? The big one in the High Street?’

‘The High Street?’

‘The main street, the wide one,’ he said, as if with impatience.

‘You must mean Market Street.’

‘Well, isn’t the Red . . .