Snow and Roses

by Lettice Cooper

  “I don’t want to see anybody.”

  “Oh, well. Let’s sit down for a bit.”

  “What are you doing here, Isobel? I thought nobody knew where I was. I didn’t want people to come bothering me. How did you find me?”

  “Walter found out somehow through the police and the hotel registers. We’d tried anyone we could think of that you might be in touch with.”

  “How absurd. Well now that you have come here intruding on my privacy you can go away again, and tell Walter to mind his own business.”

  “No, I can’t do that. Guy asked him to help. He always knows what to do about things. And I don’t want to go away from here until I’ve had some tea. I’m thirsty. I suppose they will give us tea here, won’t they?”

  When she had really looked at herself in the mirror in the hospital to which they took her that evening, Flora realized that if Isobel had shown even a part of the shock and distress she must be feeling she herself would have walked out into the street again. It was Isobel’s matter-of-fact calmness that prevented it. She went over to the desk where the girl stopped adjusting her eyelashes, smiled naturally at the baby, and slipped one silver frosted nail between his tiny scrabbling hands. Tea came; Isobel ate two sandwiches, and a cake which looked as if it was made of plastic. She did not ask Flora any questions about herself, she talked in her clear gentle voice about William and Mary and what Guy planned to do in the house and garden in the rest of his holiday. “He won’t get it all done, of course, but he enjoys planning it and some of it can wait, it doesn’t matter. It’s such a nice feeling that we’ve had a foreign holiday this year, everybody seems to think you ought to sometimes, but now we don’t need to bother any more, and Guy can potter about at home which is what he really likes. He couldn’t be more different from Walter, could he? But then of course they’re only half-brothers.”

  When she had drunk her second cup of tea she gave Flora a doubtful glance, the first sign of hesitation she had shown, and then asked her to hold the baby while she went to the cloakroom. Flora did not grasp that she must really have gone to telephone, for not long after she had come back to their table and taken the baby into her own arms again, wiping a bubble from his mouth and tenderly smoothing his almost invisible fringe of fair hair, Guy arrived with a car and with the placid assumption, which Isobel must have conveyed to him, that they were going to take Flora to a hospital where she would have a short rest.

  “And then, of course, you’ll come to us,” Isobel said as, kneeling on the floor in Flora’s bedroom, she pressed down the clothes in her suitcase and leant on the lid.

  Flora, who felt that she had been taken over and was really relieved as well as angry, sat on the bed and leaned against the wall with her eyes half closed. Once she said,

  “It doesn’t matter if you can’t get everything in.”

  “I should hope,” the elder sister said, “that I can get everything in if you could. Though clothes do always seem to swell with wearing them.”

  Once Flora asked vaguely,

  “What have you done with the baby?”

  “Guy’s got him. I shall have to bring him up here to feed him before we go.”

  Later on when she was visiting Flora in hospital Isobel said,

  “I knew how really ill you were because you never even looked at Henry.”

  “Henry—Henry who?”

  “My Henry. My baby. You see you didn’t even remember what we called him. You just didn’t notice him.”

  For ten days in the psychological ward of the hospital Flora lay under sedation, sleeping or drowsy and half awake. There no longer seemed to be any clear line between dreaming and waking. Sometimes one of the doctors came and tried to talk to her; she turned her head away; the only thing she was conscious of wanting was that everyone should leave her alone.

  Her bed was at the end of the ward, and this gave her a blank white wall to turn to whenever she opened her eyes. She knew by the light on it whether it was day or night, whether the day was sunny or overcast. The woman in the bed next to hers either slept or when awake cried noiselessly often with her eyes shut, the tears rolling down from under her eyelids. She made no attempt to speak to her husband who came every evening and sat by the bed holding her hand. He said things like, “You’ll soon be better old girl,” “We’ll soon have you home again,” but his eyes showed how little he believed himself. Whenever a nurse went past he looked at her like a dog begging. Flora from a remote distance was sorry for both of them, but chiefly glad that the woman made none of those demands on her attention which might have been so oppressive from the next bed.

  Waking up from a short sleep one afternoon with her face turned to the end wall she was aware of presences behind her. She moved and saw her father and mother; she recognized that they had to come but she did not want them. Her mother was wearing the dark blue mackintosh hat. Flora asked, “Oh, is it raining?”

  “Not much now, not here. It was raining quite heavily when we started. There was the kind of high sea yesterday that you always like.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Her mother’s chin quivered, but she controlled herself resolutely.

  “I can’t think why you didn’t come straight to us when you felt ill. You’re not alone in the world you know, dear. There’s always your family. When you are ready to leave hospital we’ll come and fetch you, won’t we, Dad?”

  “Of course.”

  Her father, Flora vaguely perceived, found the whole thing embarrassing, as if his daughter had strayed into the other half of his life where he did not want her.

  “Has Lalage been up? I expect you would want her to come and see you.”

  “No. No I don’t want her.”

  “Not yet perhaps.”

  “Not at all. Not ever.”

  Mrs James’s glance at her husband conveyed that Flora was still very far from being herself.

  “Don’t miss your train,” Flora urged them.

  “It’s all right, dear, there’s plenty of time.”

  “You never know how long you may have to wait for a bus and it can take such a time to get to the station in the rush hour.”

  Mrs James smiled with pleasure. It was a good sign that Flora could think about their convenience and remember the rush hour.

  “She’s right, Catherine.” Dr James looked at his watch. “We mustn’t cut it too fine. You know what the traffic’s like.”

  When they had gone Flora felt forlorn and missed them. They had left on her locker a box of what used to be her favourite sweets, and a big bunch of flowers. Flora had her most disturbed night after they left. In the semibasement of her mind where she spent most of her time, she was deeply conscious of loss. When she sank down through it into the potholes of sleep she was in the garden at Le Rondini but looking for the cottage, desperate because she could not find it. Later, just before waking, she seemed to be in the house where she had lived as a child, walking towards her father and mother but they both turned away from her. She woke with a jerk to a subdued light on the wall and to the small noises of a hospital ward at night. She found that she was crying.

  After ten days of this half underground life she pushed up to the surface. She woke after a night of sound sleep and realized that the prospect of the hospital day bored her. Through the upper half of one high window she could see a branch of a plane tree moving gently against a pale blue sky. A pigeon alighted on the branch, grey, almost lilac-coloured among the green leaves. It pecked at something and then flew on, its spread wings catching the light. Flora wanted to go out of doors; she was glad that the woman in the next bed was crying less and beginning to talk to the nurses. Flora was hungry and wanted to get up and cook herself a meal that wouldn’t taste institutional. She decided that she would get up later on and have a proper bath, and help the nurses to take the supper round.

  That day the visiting hour was in the afternoon. Flora supposed that there could be no one to come and see her. Isobel and her parents had only
just been, Guy could not come except in the evening. She would now have liked somebody to talk to.

  In her reviving mood she was pleased that when the big doors of the ward were fastened back and the stream of visitors poured in Walter appeared among them carrying two half bottles of champagne, and a couple of books. He spotted her bed from the door. Down the long room full of becalmed invalids and tentative relations and friends looking for theirs, he moved with brisk certainty.

  “Well, Flora. How are you?”

  “Much better, thanks.”

  “They told me you were when I rang up this morning. I thought you might be ready for one or the other of these now.”

  He tipped the two novels in their bright jackets onto her counterpane, and looked round, clasping the bottles.

  “Where do I find the fridge?”

  “Outside that door.”

  He came back empty-handed and pulled up a chair.

  “They’ll bring you one of those to have with your supper tonight, won’t they?”

  “I’ll fetch it. I’m going to get up later on. I’ve had quite enough of this.”

  “You just needed a good rest really.”

  “I think I needed to let something work out at the bottom of my mind but I don’t know quite what it was.”

  “Well never mind so long as it did work out.”

  “I’m going to get out of this place.”

  “Where to?”

  “That’s it. I don’t know. I don’t want to go my parents. I worry them. I suppose to Isobel, but I only want to go there for a few days. She’s got enough on her hands already, and the house is full of children, I don’t feel equal to it yet. I want to be somewhere quiet where I can get hold of myself again; but not my cottage.”

  “No, not the cottage.”

  She saw that he knew what had happened, but it did not seem to matter now.

  “Would you like me to find somewhere for you? I should think somewhere not too lonely but with undemanding company at hand when you want it: is that right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And in easy reach of London so that we can all come and see you sometimes.”

  “That’s just what I should like. I do hope it won’t be a lot of trouble to find it.”

  “No trouble. I have got an idea. Two friends of mine who have taken over a pub on the borders of Kent and Surrey. Tom and I went down there to see them in the spring. It’s a lovely place. By the way Tom sent you his love.”

  “Thank you. Give him mine please. I suppose he’s getting ready for Fordwick?”

  “Not yet. All the getting ready he would think of doing would be stuffing a few pairs of trousers and one or two pullovers into a case, which, except for books, is probably about all he’ll want up there. At the moment he’s got a temporary job working in a home for maladjusted children in Clapham. He does cooking and cleaning. He goes off at seven every morning, and gets back to the flat about six. It seems to make him happy. He is slightly troubled by guilt because all his life so far has been so comfortable. When I said to him that mine had too and that I probably ought to feel guilty but don’t, and would rather it went on being comfortable, he said, ‘Oh but it hasn’t always been. You had the war.’ I told him that except for one or two stretches of boredom and for a few days after a painful wound I had enjoyed the war. He said, ‘Oh Dad, that can’t be true. If it is it fills me with despair, for a good man like you who wouldn’t hurt anyone to enjoy four years of trying to kill people!’ I knew I’d given him a shock, but he will have to realize what a good many ordinary men are like. He’s a much finer creature than I am.”

  “Well, different. And very young.”

  “Of course he’s right. Nobody will be able to enjoy a nuclear war. But this is not the kind of conversation for an invalid.”

  “Any conversation is better than the kind of conversation people think suitable for an invalid.”

  “You won’t be one much longer. I’ll fix up something for you and let you know.”

  On the afternoon that Lalage came, Flora had been walking back to the Bird in the Bush from Windlehythe. During her first ten days at the pub it had been a frightening effort to go there even if Janet or George Crayden took her in the car. Now she found herself wanting to go every few days, not only because she enjoyed the three-mile walk there and back, but because she wanted to see shops, people, traffic, the movement of life again.

  It was the third week of November, and a winter rather than autumn cold. Delicate bare branches made intricate patterns against a sky the colour of a gull’s wing. Here and there a fiery leaf still clung to a twig, but most of them, dried by a night of frost and by the day’s bleak wind, rustled under Flora’s boots. The air stung her nose and cheeks, and made her forehead feel stiff. On the downward path from the wood she broke into a run and arrived at the stile with her body glowing under its warm covering of wool. As she swung herself lightly over the stile and tramped along the lane her growing conviction that she was now perfectly all right and ought to go back to work was strengthened. But she still shrank from it all, from Lalage, the cottage, St Frideswide’s, Oxford, Martin, from the whole of that life that had been saturated with Hugh and happiness.

  As she recovered her grief for Hugh, her distress at being turned out by Miranda had resumed a truer proportion. Miranda had been a way of escape, a substitute happiness; she had already almost become an episode. But as if that episode and the weeks of recovery had cleared something from her mind, Flora no longer brooded all the time over her last quarrel with Hugh; he was nearer to her again as the tender lover, the sympathetic and congenial companion whom she had enjoyed for five years. The loss was greater, but better to live with, and this made her more free to look forward. She had written twice to Nan, and was disturbed because she had had no answer to her letters. She had made notes for the next chapter of her book, so far as she could without a library at hand. She had in the same way done some work on her two unfinished lectures. Her warm affection for Isobel and her children revived. When her mother came to see her by a tedious series of cross-country buses Flora was pleased and touched, but the visits she looked forward to most were Walter’s.

  He came nearly every Sunday. Once he brought Tom, once Isobel and Henry, whom Flora was now glad to welcome and admire. After that he came alone. If he arrived early enough he took her to lunch at Folkestone or Hythe. If he arrived later in the afternoon they sat in the bar and had supper by the wood fire in the parlour, which had been given up to Flora since her hosts were too busy to use it.

  The Craydens were very fond of Walter. They looked after Flora well, but were too preoccupied with their own venture to inquire into her concerns. She never felt lonely, but she could keep herself to herself. It was exactly what she had needed.

  But now as she walked up the village street she decided that it was time it came to an end. She had been allowed a term’s sick leave. Her work was being done by a retired tutor of St Frideswide’s, an elderly woman who lived in Oxford and had been persuaded to come back for one term. Charlotte Stacey, Flora knew, was a good English scholar, and had been a good coach. But there were pupils with whom she herself had worked for two years who now had to be handed over in the year of their finals and among them was Nan. How was she getting on with Charlotte? Was she working hard? Was she still looking forward to seeing Ralph Destrick at Christmas, or had that finished, and if so how was she taking it? Was her work suffering?

  It was like a concrete image of her thoughts when Flora turned the bend in the road, and saw in front of the Bird in the Bush a small red car which reminded her of Lalage’s. As she came nearer Lalage herself got out of it, and walked to meet Flora. She looked above all familiar, wearing the short leather coat which had weathered several winters; a treasured red scarf that Martin had once given her covered her dark hair. As she came forward Flora saw that her face was nearly as white and stiff as it had been on that early morning when she had come to the cottage with the news of Hugh’s
death.

  “Flora. I don’t suppose you want to see me—I didn’t come on my own account—nor on yours.”

  “I’m very glad to see you,” sprang spontaneously from Flora’s lips.

  “I came to tell you something that I think you ought to know. I thought perhaps nobody else would tell you. It’s about Nan Coates.”

  “I’ve been wondering about her—and about you.”

  Lalage made a brusque gesture putting herself aside.

  “Nan’s going completely to pieces.”

  “Oh God! What’s happened?”

  “Her young man in America ditched her. So far as I can gather he didn’t write for weeks and then wrote and said he thought they’d made a mistake.” Lalage paused for a second and then delivered the thrust.

  “She feels that you have abandoned her too.”

  “I have, haven’t I?”

  “You couldn’t help it.”

  “Lal, we can’t stand out here talking in the cold. You look frozen. Come inside. I have the parlour to myself, there’s always a lovely fire there, and Janet will bring us some tea. We can talk there. Come on.”

  Lalage followed her through the pub and into the parlour, still keeping her leather coat on as if she expected to take off again at any minute. She ignored the chair that Flora pushed up to the fire for her. She stood with her back to it chafing her cold hands.

  “I do care you know, Lal. Sit down. Tell me all about Nan.”

  “She isn’t working at all. She’s picked up a young man doing a post-graduate year in some kind of science. He’s an activist of the most obsessional kind. She’s gone very political, she spends her time helping him on a small magazine he’s editing. Nan, when she is at St Frid’s, is rude, aggressive and intolerable. She’s often not in the college at all for a day or two. Nobody wants to send her down; you know it would be the last thing they would want with a girl of her gifts. But she seems to be trying to force them to do it. I don’t like the Singleton as you know, but I think she’s been very patient and has done all she could. Nobody can get near Nan. It seemed to me the only chance was if you could. I didn’t know if you’d want to try. I didn’t even know if you would be well enough to try. But I had to come and see even if it made you angry with me. It might be Nan’s last chance.”