SNOW AND ROSES
A Novel
by
LETTICE COOPER
Contents
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
A Note on the Author
For
Brigid and Maureen
with affectionate gratitude
for the time, energy and skill
that they have devoted to the service
of their fellow authors.
Part I
Flora arrived first at the cottage; she always liked to have time to prepare a welcome.
After a day of bullying wind and rain the evening was suddenly quiet; the clouds had rolled away towards the west; the sky above the beech trees was luminous as a shell lifted up against the light. Weighted branches of lilac slashed the roof of Flora’s car as she drove in from the lane: while she turned her key in the lock tassels of the wistaria that she had trained over the door spattered cold drops on her face and hair. She scooped up the bottle of milk from the step, and carried it into the kitchen.
The smell of apples from the larder shelf was overlaid by the smell of soap from the freshly scrubbed stone floor. A parcel of meat on the table held down a pencilled note.
“Butter and cream in fridge. The lettus is washed. I will try to look in before the week-end, but Mr Whittaker is bad with his chest again.”
Poor Mr Whittaker! But I doubt if I shall get here next week-end.
The week-end, whoever came that was not Hugh, was always an anti-climax.
Flora ran upstairs to her bedroom, tossed her coat over a chair, and slung Nan’s deplorable essay onto the bed-table. Young monkey! What had possessed her not only to cut a coaching without any excuse, but to turn in work that would have disgraced a candidate for O Levels? Suppose she let a mood like that sway her when she was doing her final Schools! But she had another year before that to grow up in, and the boy at Merton was going down at the end of this term. That, of course, was more than half the trouble.
Shivering in her thin suit Flora changed into slacks and a jersey, hugging the grateful warmth of wool round her. The cottage was sparsely furnished with a few pieces looted from home, or picked up at local sales. Flora looked briefly at herself in the long glass of the mirror which reflected so far as its flaws would allow a firm, lissom but not very slender figure, large deep blue eyes in a face undrained by a hard day’s work, and a skilfully cut mop of lively brown hair. She combed this into shape; the damp air made it curl readily round her fingers. She touched up her face and ran downstairs again.
She sang to herself as she poured beans into the coffee grinder and switched it on. As she was mixing salad dressing she heard Hugh’s car coming down the lane. It passed the window, and she sprang to open the front door for him. His face, fresh from the rainy air, was cold against hers, his arms hard round her.
“Darling! Here I am at last. Am I very late? The traffic on the Woodstock Road was even more devilish than usual.”
“You’re not late but anyhow you don’t have to worry. I just know you come when you can. What a day it’s been. But it’s a lovely sky now. Come along in.”
He had to stoop under the lintel of the kitchen door which just allowed her to stand upright.
“Let’s have a drink first, shall we? Scotch?”
“Please.”
He put a wrapped bottle down on the table.
“That’s some red plonk to drink with our dinner. We tried it at home on Sunday. It’s not bad. Well, my love. How are you?”
“Fine.” She was seldom anything else. “But you look a bit ragged, Hugh. Has it been a tiresome week?”
“It has rather. There’ve been one or two things. Never mind; they drop off me here.”
He looked round happily.
“I’m always so glad that this is a genuine cottage, not one of those little jobs that are tarted up for London weekenders. I really do feel shut off from the world behind these solid stone walls.”
“It was a stroke of luck finding it. Just before you and I met, too, do you remember? There we were, Lal and I, drifting round in my car one evening, and I saw a handwritten ‘To let’ notice fastened to the gate post. Lal thought I was crazy to go on to the farm then and ask for the key: by the time we got inside the place it was almost too dark to see anything. There were two dead birds in the front bedroom, and a shower of plaster came down on our heads in the kitchen. When we did manage to open the back door and stepped out of it, we were stung by nettles up to our knees. But I was certain that I wanted this cottage and was going to have it. It was almost as if I knew that you were coming towards me, and we should need it.”
“Perhaps you did. We tune in sometimes I think.”
“When I come at the week-end or the vac with Lal or somebody else it isn’t the same place. It’s nice but not our cottage. This is its real life. I must say that much as I love it it seems like a well at the moment. I’ve switched on the fire in the bedroom.”
When they had finished making love on the bed upstairs Hugh, as he often did, fell into a light sleep, one arm flung against her knees, his head resting against her side. She lay still only turning a little so that she could see his face. Now that he was relaxed the lines looked shallower; the ruffled lock of brown hair, generally brushed back, covered some of the deepest that scored his forehead. She had noticed those lines, unusual for a man of his age, when she first saw him across the room at a sherry party at a house in Holywell. An odd, charming, vivid face.… She thought that he looked clever without arrogance, sensitive but robust: for her at that moment in what had so far been rather a dull party, a bell rang. She knew the people he was talking to and moved across to them as inevitably as water runs down a hill. When they introduced Hugh Challen to her, and he first smiled at her, she was surprised to feel a tremor in the hand holding her glass.
Since then five years of this limited but intense happiness. “I can’t do anything to hurt Cecily,” Hugh said when it first opened before them. Flora agreed. “Of course you can’t. I should never want you to. You couldn’t live with yourself if you did.”
Except when either of them was away on holiday they hardly ever missed their one evening a week; a different evening each next time, arranged as they parted. No one knew except Lalage, the friend Flora trusted as she trusted herself.
Very gently she inched her body away from his, and slipped off the bed. She looked down at him with profound tenderness as she pulled on her clothes. By now she knew the steep wooden staircase so well that she could avoid its worst creaks. Downstairs in the front room she put a match to the fire and knelt in front of it, joyfully watching the clear flames leap from the dry wood. Springing up she lit the two candles on the table, and spread the pretty, coloured straw mats she had brought from Italy. Each one of these occasions was a party for her, and she liked to make it one for Hugh. Lalage sometimes laughed at her for the care with which she polished chairs and forks at the week-end, but it was all she had of making a home for him.
As she carried in the salad bowl she heard Hugh coming downstairs. She never saw him again after even a few minutes’ separation without a fresh shock of pleasure.
“If you’ll watch the toast I’ll get the paté, and we’ll grill the steak when we are ready for it.”
When she came through from the kitchen he was lighting a cigarette, a thing he rarely did just before eating. She noticed a deeper stain on the fingers holding it.
“What’s been bothering you, Hugh?”
“Never mind now. I’ll tell you after we’ve had dinner. What’s your news? Did you enjoy Kendrick’s play?”
“Yes, I did. His dialogue has a nice edge to it, and both Julia Barret and Anto
ny Crane acted beautifully. The play was full of surprises because the theme was really inconsequence, that anybody may do anything, which often seems to be true, especially nowadays, but I don’t believe it is.”
“Nor do I. I think it’s that we don’t know enough about what makes people act in certain ways. I’d go as far with Kendrick as to say that anything may be done by somebody, but not that anything may be done by anybody.”
“Yes I agree. I went to the play with Lal and Martin Croft and a friend of his from Cambridge. They were all more enthusiastic about it than I was. But it’s an interesting play. I should like to know how it strikes you. It’s on for another week; will you get a chance to see it?”
“I doubt it. I should like to, but I’ve got a very full week coming.”
“If you want to go on our night …”
“I don’t. I never want to do anything else on our night.”
They smiled deeply at one another with their eyes.
“I love the way your hair grows, Flora. It’s got such a spring in it … it almost seems to be laughing.”
“It does when you’re here …”
“What else have you been doing? How is your budding poet getting on?”
“Nan? Oh, the little devil, her work has gone to pieces for the moment. She’s right out of my reach. I can’t get at her. She goes off like that sometimes.”
“Summer term; too many distractions? I always wonder how they manage to get any work done at all.”
“It’s this boy at Merton, Ralph Destrick. He’s going down this summer. His father is a diplomat, stationed in the Embassy at Washington. Ralph is going out to have three months’ holiday with his parents before he starts at the Foreign Office. Of course he’s delighted at the prospect; he’s going into a very different world from Nan’s; he isn’t likely to come back to her and she knows it, poor child. I think it’s rather surprising that he has fallen for her here instead of for one of the pretty sisters of his fellow Etonians. I only hope she won’t brood over him all through the long vac. It isn’t very easy for her to work at home at any time.”
“She belongs to a Yorkshire mining family, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, but she’s adopted. It’s an odd set-up. Nan’s mother is really her aunt. Mrs Coates’s brother, Rufus, was married with three children; he had a fling with a young schoolmistress just come to the district; she produced a daughter and it all came out. Rufus’s wife threatened to leave him. The school-mistress’s parents were furious and insisted that she must have the child adopted. Mrs Coates had three sons and longed for a daughter, but she was forty, and the youngest boy was six years old.… She couldn’t bear the idea of any child of her brother’s going to strangers, so it ended by her taking Annie Mary.”
“It must have been a confusing life for the child with her uncle-father and aunt-mother. I don’t envy whoever had to explain it to her.”
“I think she just got to know. Rufus moved away and went to work in another colliery fifteen miles off. Probably it would all have worked out quite well, but when Annie Mary was three, Mrs Coates had a still-born daughter. She was very ill, and a bit dotty for several years after that. She got it firmly fixed in her mind that her daughter wouldn’t have been born dead if she hadn’t taken Annie Mary.”
“The little spirit saw its cradle filled and took flight?”
“Something like that, I suppose. Coates had never been as keen on the adoption as his wife was. Probably he thought Rufus ought to look after his own by-blow. Nan may not have been the most lovable of infants. She sometimes tells me with great satisfaction that everybody says she was a difficult child. I think although Coates was probably too reasonable to blame her for the other baby’s death, he may unconsciously have held it against her because his wife was ailing for several years and his home was so much less comfortable.”
“So poor little Annie Mary was persona non grata for a time?”
“Yes, and she knew it. She must have been a sharp little thing and she heard Coates say to the doctor that ‘the whole thing had been a right mess’. She thought he meant her being there. She remembers that Mrs Coates often pushed her away when she ran up to her. She always talks about ‘that other baby’ as if there had been a choice between them. Of course she makes the most of all this, it’s her temperament to make the most of everything; naturally at present she’s a self-absorbed young egotist. She was quite startled when I suggested that Mrs Coates had had a bad time too.”
“Are the Coates family surprised at what they’ve hatched out?”
“They’re very proud of her. The brothers are all fond of her, especially Ben, the youngest, who isn’t married yet and still lives at home. He used to figure a good deal in her verse until she fell for Ralph. She writes much her best so far about the mining background and her early life.”
“She’s damned lucky to have you for her tutor.”
Flora smiled, pleased. She knew that she had helped Nan and hoped to help her more, but it was to Hugh that she longed to give all the encouragement and comfort at her command. She wanted to fill him up where she saw that his wife drained him.
“How is Cecily?”
“It’s been a bad week. We dined with the Master on Saturday.”
“Didn’t she enjoy it?”
“No. They put her next to Brinsley Shaw.”
“Didn’t she like him? Everybody admires him so much, he’s the Wonder-Boy. He’s got a bit spoilt, of course, but he can be quite fun.”
“He wasn’t on this occasion. He didn’t even attempt to be civil. He sat half slewed round in his chair all the time talking to his other neighbour. When Cecily tried to speak to him, he barely troubled himself to answer. He said ‘Yes’, or ‘No’, and let it drop. I was just too far down the other side to be able to talk to her across the table. She’d started out in rather good shape, she had a pretty new dress and was pleased with it, but before we got to the sweet she looked as if she was going to cry.”
“What a bloody shame!”
“I kept on smiling at her. She tried to smile back, but her mouth was trembling. I scowled at Shaw, but he just didn’t see. As soon as the coffee came people began to move about, and I went round the table and said to him, ‘I want to sit next to my wife if you don’t mind’. He made it perfectly clear that he didn’t mind. You know how terribly vulnerable Cecily is to that kind of thing. She cried half the night.”
“Poor Cecily! Has she got over it?”
Flora’s concern was genuine. She had managed to identify herself with Hugh as Cecily’s protector.
“She has to some extent.” He stubbed out his cigarette, and at once twitched another one out of the packet and lit it. He said abruptly,
“She wants me to try for the Chair at Fordwick.”
“Oh, Hugh! Right up there, all that way off.”
“I know.”
“But … your book?”
He smiled faintly.
“Professors have been known to write books.”
“You wouldn’t find it easy in the first year or two in a new Chair at a new university. And you promised it to the Press for January.”
“They’d have to wait for it. It’s not as important to them as all that.”
“It is to you.”
“Not as important as Cecily’s happiness, almost I think, though I couldn’t say this to anyone but you, as her sanity.”
“But would she really like it, right up there, north of Newcastle? Think of the winters; she hates the cold. And she’d be so lonely. She wouldn’t know anyone.”
“It’s the people she does know here who seem to get her down. She says she hates Oxford, she has for a long time, but she didn’t want me to know it. She feels everybody here is too clever for her. She can’t talk to them, she doesn’t understand the things they are laughing about. She knows they all despise her. I tried to explain to her that it’s this feeling she has about them that holds them away from her. She says that nobody ever wants to talk to her at a
party.”
Flora knew that this was true. She had seen Cecily Challen standing about alone at those parties where the hostess was not alert, and had herself gone to talk to her.
“And what about Daisy? You’d have to take her away from the High School and start her off in a fresh place just when she seemed to be getting on so much better.”
“Daisy might board with somebody here and stay on at the High School. She will have to go to boarding school anyhow, I’d made up my mind about that. She’s suffering from being at home, she takes her mother’s troubles too much to heart. She’s getting nervous and plaintive, and complaining of imaginary ailments.”
There was a silence. Flora, kneeling in front of the fire, threw a handful of fresh logs onto the glowing ashes. As the flames shot up the light flickered over Hugh’s troubled face.
“Of course I’m thinking about myself really. I don’t want you to go.”
“God knows I don’t want to go. I may easily not get the Chair if I put in for it.”
“You would,” she said with sad conviction.
She cried out in sudden anguish, “Hugh! It wouldn’t be the end for us? It couldn’t?”
“Darling, no, of course not. I should come back to Oxford whenever I got the chance. And there would be lots of chances, examining, staying with friends, all that. And we could meet in London sometimes. And we would try for a few days somewhere together in the vacs. But you know Flora, my treasure, my very precious Flora, it might be better for you if this was the end.”
“Of course it wouldn’t.”
“I’ve been thinking about this lately. What we have is wonderful for me, but it’s not good enough for you.” “It’s all I want. It’s perfect.”
“No, my dear, it isn’t. A few hours a week, and those uncertain.”
“But you’re with me all the week. You warm all my days. I’m never without you …”
“My darling! But you’re too much alive, too much a whole woman to be satisfied with that always. You ought to have somebody who can put you first, and give you a home and children; all out in the daylight, not this furtive …”
Snow and Roses Page 1