Snow and Roses

by Lettice Cooper

  Sickened by contrast, Flora felt her throat close up. She emptied the rest of the coffee onto the grass, and drove on at a much faster speed, totally unaware that the sun had disappeared behind a heavy cloud, and that rain was drumming on the car roof.

  “Have you been working too hard this term, Flora?”

  “No, not really. The summer term is always quite hard work because of Schools, but this hasn’t been any more so than usual.”

  “You’ve got so thin.”

  “That’s a good thing surely. Everybody goes on about it all the time.”

  “I don’t think it’s always a good thing if it happens too quickly. It’s not so long since you were down here at Easter.”

  “I suppose it isn’t.”

  “And you’ve lost your colour, too. You don’t look at all well, does she Dad?”

  Dr James put down his coffee cup, lowered the gardening catalogue that he was studying and glanced at Flora over his spectacles. It was the look, dispassionate and slightly distasteful, with which he had always greeted any attempt by his wife to invite his concern about his children’s health, as if children were children and patients were patients, and he did not want any connection between the two.

  “Been dieting, Flora?”

  “Yes.” She hadn’t except by not wanting to eat.

  “Don’t overdo it.”

  Honour being satisfied Dr James held out his coffee cup to be refilled and raised the catalogue again.

  “Have you come across this new way of growing herbs? You buy these strips of seeds, each seed is enclosed in a capsule. You just cut off a length of the strip, as much as you want, and you lay it on loose soil, and cover it lightly. Do you grow herbs in your garden at the cottage?”

  “I’ve got mint and parsley and chives.”

  “When you go back next term I’ll give you some of these strips. There is far more in each of them than I shall want.”

  “That will be splendid.”

  Flora had not yet made up her mind if she was going to keep on the cottage.

  Her father retired into his catalogue.

  “Hubert, do you want to read that all the time on Flora’s first evening?”

  “I can hear anything Flora wants to say.”

  “It’s the most extraordinary thing that when we had that much bigger garden at the hospital I very often couldn’t get you to take enough interest in it, and now we’ve got this pocket handkerchief I very often can’t get you to take an interest in anything else.”

  “A small garden that you look after yourself is so much more interesting than a big one. It’s amusing to see what you can get into it. It’s a challenge.”

  Mrs James gave him up for the moment and returned to her daughter.

  “I suppose you won’t have been able to spend much time at your cottage this term as you’ve been so busy?”

  “I went out there every week-end.”

  Flora was pierced by the rod of pain that always lay in waiting for her.

  “You haven’t told me exactly when Isobel’s baby is due.”

  “About August 6th, so Isobel says. The hospital think it will be about a fortnight later, but Isobel is certain about the 6th. I daresay she is right, she was about both William and Mary. It’s strange when she’s so casual about most things.”

  “She isn’t about anything that really matters.”

  “I wish she felt that a little more order in her house really mattered. Those children never put anything away. I don’t see how they can learn to when Isobel doesn’t. I sometimes feel sorry for Guy coming home to that confusion at night. I’m sure he wasn’t brought up in a hugger-mugger. It always seems to get worse when Isobel is pregnant. I am afraid you may find it rather trying, but of course you can come back here as soon as you like. I often feel sorry for your friend Lalage because she has no home to go to in the vacs. You know you can always invite her here if you want to.”

  “Yes I do know, thank you.”

  Lalage had tried it once at the old house and had made it clear that she was not going to try it again. “They’re very kind but I can’t stand seeing you so different.” “Am I different?” “Good God, yes, back in the nursery.” True partly perhaps but not altogether. Lalage envied Flora a lot of things that she claimed to despise.

  “I was asking you where Lalage had gone for the vac … or is she still in Oxford?”

  “Sorry. No, she’s gone to coach this girl who failed in nearly all her O Levels at school. She’s the daughter of a tycoon; they’ve taken a castle in the Scottish highlands near Oban for six months. The parents adore this child, and have always been able to give her anything she wanted: now they’ve come up against something they can’t buy for her, and they’re furious: they blame the school and everybody who taught their Jennifer. At least they’ve had the sense to get a really good coach for her, Lalage will be glad of the money, and she thought it might be fun, a change anyhow …”

  Flora heard herself babbling and stopped.

  “News.”

  Dr James switched on the television. A cloud of smoke rising from a battered street, people running, a house falling, a young soldier with his rifle at the ready, a tank with more soldiers on board grinding round the corner … Belfast, once a shock, but now the sad expected.

  Flora watched the faces of her parents intent on the screen.

  Her father since he had retired from the life of a busy doctor had been careful not to put on weight, but his sharp features were a little padded, his movements less restless. He had never been an easy man to live with. Patient and understanding with the sick he had often released his tensions on his family in gusts of irritable temper. It was only as she grew older that Flora had realized that her mother bore the brunt of these, on purpose; she answered back to protect her children far more often than for herself. Humphrey, Isobel and Flora, milling about together, were not too much distressed. Three vigorous children as they grew up could often outnumber two parents. Flora had always come off best because she was the youngest and had for some time the baby’s privileges. Also she had known very early how to look at her father with her large blue eyes and make him smile, how to cheek him back in a way that made him laugh. The other two teased her about this to keep her in her place but they found it useful: “You ask Dad if we can go, if we can have it.”

  He was never a man for congratulations or for displayed enthusiasm, but Flora knew that he was proud of her scholarships, and pleased when she got her job at St Frideswide’s. Isobel’s life was naturally more interesting to their mother; she could and did relate every detail about William and Mary since their birth. She did not remember the names of the girls at St Frid’s about whom Flora sometimes talked to her, they were not part of the family, and so remote.

  Mrs James with the pillow case that she was mending in her lap was watching the News as if it was a daily dose of medicine that she had to swallow and would then do her best to forget. “When I was young,” she once said to Flora, “I often didn’t look at the newspaper for days together. Now you don’t dare not to know what’s happening for fear something jumps on you from round the corner.”

  The News ended, Mrs James thankfully picked up her sewing.

  “Switch it off, Hubert, there’s nothing you specially want to see, is there? I expect Flora would rather talk on her first evening. Tell us what you’ve been doing this term.”

  “I never can answer that kind of question.” Ashamed to hear herself so irritable Flora hastily chose the one of her activities most likely to be interesting.

  “Did I tell you in my letter that Walter was in Oxford and took me out to dinner?”

  “No, you didn’t. How nice. Poor Walter.”

  “He seemed all right.”

  “Isobel says he has taken the divorce very philosophically. But after all they had been married for over twenty-five years. We sent them that cake dish that the Struthers gave us for their silver wedding. I never liked it. And now there’s this complete break
-up of family life for Walter, just when he’s settling down to work in London after being out of the country so much. That was the trouble I suppose, Karen was bored and lonely when he was away and the children were at school. It’s a great upset for them, though Shirley now has her own flat, and Walter will have Tom with him … but Tom is a very peculiar boy.”

  “Is he? Walter seemed to be as much devoted to him as ever. He talked a lot about Tom. I thought he sounded interesting.”

  “He has a good many of these odd ideas they have nowadays.”

  Dr James, who had put up a small table and was playing patience, interjected:

  “Better than having no ideas at all like the girl.”

  “Karen has always spoilt Shirley.”

  “Don’t be absurd, Catherine. What has that to do with ideas?”

  “I didn’t say it had, dear. I was only thinking that Shirley might have been quite a nice ordinary girl if her mother hadn’t spoilt her. I hope Walter will marry again. Isobel thinks there is someone. Flora, you do look tired, I expect you had a lot of things to see to before you left St Frideswide’s and you’ve had a long drive today. Would you like to go to bed early?”

  “I would if you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not. We shall have plenty of time to talk tomorrow, and for a week or two after that I hope.”

  15 Cliff Top,

  Swanscombe on Sea,

  July 4th/71

  Dearest Lal,

  Two things that I must say at once. The first which I can’t say enough, is thank you. I know I couldn’t have managed the end of term without you. I think probably it wouldn’t be true to say that I couldn’t have gone on living without you, but that’s what it felt like. I only hope I shall have the chance, but not the same kind of chance, to do as much for you some day.

  The other thing I want to say because I know you will be worrying about me is “Don’t”. I’m all right. I’m getting by. I’m not going to have a breakdown, nor take an overdose of sleeping pills nor lose my memory and wander off. I know none of those would be any good, and there’s nothing to do but stick it out. It’s all a game of chess and we have to play it with the pieces left on the board.

  I have realized since I came here that if you are happily in love, and fully occupied with a job you enjoy and can really put your heart into, you live in blinkers about a lot of other things. Not so much I think if you are married because you have all the time in the world for love—not just snatched moments that keep you on tenterhooks for the next one. If you are married you have long stretches of ordinary life in which you have time to look about you. I wanted all that with Hugh of course. It was only after he was dead and I lost a skin of my feelings that I knew how jealous of Cecily I must have been underneath. I hate her now. When I first found I did I told myself that it was a shock reaction, but it wasn’t. I expect I’m still in shock, but it isn’t that. I kept myself from knowing it because that was what Hugh wanted. He couldn’t have borne to know that I was jealous. Lal, I could never say this except to you, but sometimes now I feel a sudden gust of anger with him for wanting it like that. This is awful, it tears me apart, but it’s true. We think about those girls we teach and try to advise them or suggest to them how they should try to live but we don’t know a thing about ourselves, do we? Or I didn’t. Perhaps I’m beginning to now.

  I’m certainly beginning to know more about my relationship with my parents. One thing I realize is that whenever I’ve come home to them, in the last five years specially, I’ve thought of it as a treat for them, bloody smug young woman that I must have been. I’ve come every vac even if only for a night or two with a kind of condescension, because I didn’t want them to miss their treat. I suspect that Humphrey, who is very fully occupied with his own life, has something of the same feeling. I don’t know about Isobel, she’s the best of us. I don’t think she’s capable of complacency. I know she bores you. I know when you’re bored, by this time. Isobel is not intellectually clever at all, but she has so much sweetness, real unsentimental sweetness, and very perceptive feelings.

  About my father and mother—this time it’s different. I didn’t come back to give. I came to get. And I can’t. I want them to comfort me, but they can’t. They haven’t had a chance because I can’t manage to tell them anything about it.

  I don’t know whether it’s because I got so much into the habit of keeping it to myself. Even now I feel that Hugh wouldn’t like anyone to know. But it isn’t only that; it’s that my mother wouldn’t like it. I have an awful feeling that she would be glad that Hugh is dead, because the whole thing is over. It’s not that she’s religious, she only goes to church when anyone is married or christened, but she doesn’t like anything disturbing or anything that she considers odd. If I had been in love with Hugh without him knowing it, and then he had died, she would accept that and be sorry for me. But she wouldn’t be sorry about the end of an affair. She would see that as a waste of time, she wants me to get married so that she can have some more grand-children. No, that’s not fair, she wants it for me because she thinks it’s the only life.

  If I could tell her about that last quarrel with Hugh, which I couldn’t, she wouldn’t blame him for applying to Fordwick, she would think that was right, but she couldn’t understand his telling me about the Garrowby first. Nor the frenzy we both got into about nothing because feeling was running so high between us.

  I do wish I had understood about the Garrowby then as I do now. Of course it meant so much to him, we all want to do our own thing successfully and make our mark, we have to, it’s part of wanting to survive. How I do wish that Hugh had lived to give that lecture and to enjoy the admiration he would have won by it … because it would have been first rate. He never got the appreciation he deserved, and I realize now how much he must have wanted it. I think I had the feeling that our love made everything all right for him. He never kept on about other things he wanted; perhaps he even didn’t acknowledge them.

  Of course my mother saw that something was wrong with me, and thought I must be ill, and sent me to their doctor, who found nothing organically wrong and gave me a lot of vitamins, and some sleeping pills which I shall try not to take; then he had a dab at psychology and asked me if I really liked my work. I could truthfully say I did, but I said I had been worried about something else lately, so he told me to get as much fresh air and rest as possible. There is plenty of fresh air, since I arrived a gale has been blowing off the sea all the time, and though I tried to bathe once it wasn’t any fun. I do a lot of housework to help mother, which is a change of occupation anyhow, and I try to eat to avoid fuss, and of course as with so many things trying makes it possible if not enjoyable. So you see I’m all right in so many of the ways you used to worry about.

  But I don’t know how to stick it here. For one thing they don’t want me. They think they do. Mother does anyhow. It was always more difficult to tell what Dad was thinking and since he has retired he has withdrawn even more into himself. I think he is both more withdrawn from Mother and more dependent on her. They’ve evolved a routine and I interrupt it. Dad does a part-time job three days a week at the hospital where they are very short-staffed, he gardens, walks to the library to read the papers, and watches TV. Mother shops, does all the house except that a woman comes once a week, and they’ve made a few friends here and that’s all they want except to see Isobel and the children sometimes.

  They’ve enjoyed my visits before because I’ve been happy and looked pretty and told them amusing things about the girls and the college life, and Mother and I have gone shopping and talked about clothes. Now I look ill and I have to make a most awful effort to tell them about anything. When I start it sounds so dull by the middle that I can’t go on. I’m really screaming out all the time underneath, Comfort me, comfort me, and they can’t, because I can’t tell them why I want to be comforted.

  That’s enough of this egotistical outpouring. I promised Mother that I would cut up and casserole the meat f
or a steak pie. I wish I didn’t feel that the only point of cooking for me was to make something Hugh would like.

  Write to me when you have time. Tell me all about it. I hope the girl is teachable; I hope her parents appreciate the fact that they’ve got a first-class teacher for her. I hope the country round is lovely. Jacobite country, Kidnapped country, it ought to be. Shall I ever finish my book? I seem to have begun it in another world. Perhaps it will seem real again some day.

  Meanwhile all my renewed thanks and love,

  FLORA

  “It’s dull for you here, Flora,” Mrs James said as they walked along the sea front with a strong wind whipping the rain into their faces. “This weather is so disappointing. I did hope you’d have a lot of bathing and sitting in the sun. There’s not much else to do here. You see, we’ve only just settled really. Do you remember when you came down at Easter we still had the workmen in over that bother with the roof? We haven’t had time to get to know many people yet. There are a very nice couple, a retired civil servant and his wife living in one of the residential Hotels. We play bridge with them one evening every week. I know you don’t play but I should have asked them in to meet you only they’re away on holiday in the North. I like her very much and your father quite likes him which is lucky, he doesn’t make friends easily. So many people bore him. I often have.”