Read Online A Wreath Of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor - Free Book Online

would take his advantage and rub his hands with satisfaction – social advantages, the advantages of the strong fist, the ready tongue; advantages over women. Yet he is stupid, she thought. I tickled him like a trout. It was my secret pleasure. He has never had his lesson because he was always strong, sharp, and worldly-wise. No one pierced his armour, for he was much less vulnerable than anyone else. Only a subtler mind than his could find the right weapon, and the subtler minds would have left him alone.
    ‘Then what do I want with him?’ she suddenly asked herself, staring dully into her glass. ‘Why should I care? Is it to punish him? But he did no harm to me.’ He did plenty of harm to others though, she guessed. ‘Plenty of harm. It is all over his face, the harm he has done. Is it not, also, just a little to punishLiz, that I sit here, came here in the first place, avoid her? Because I feel she has shut me out.’
    ‘What about that book of yours?’ she asked him.
    ‘Book?’
    He put his hand out for her glass, as if to give himself time. He was indeed, she thought, slow-witted for a secret agent.
    ‘No, I don’t want any more to drink. I must go home.’ She put her glass on the table.
    ‘I haven’t started it yet. I find it difficult … to know how to go about it. I’m a man of action, no literary gent.’
    His conversation had many of these
passé
, slangy touches; as if he would even rather be old-fashioned than straightforward.
    She stood up and began to re-wind Hotchkiss’s chain round her hand. The cat sat washing her face, her black paw curving over and over her nose. As the dog moved, she put her four feet quietly together, brought her eyelids close and was perfectly still, like a little stone cat on a gatepost. Yet her waiting seemed to tick inside her.
    ‘I have to go out to get a paper,’ Richard said, standing up, too. ‘I’ll walk as far as the newsagent’s with you.’
    As he passed the cat on his way out, he suddenly slapped his hand down in front of her on the bar so that she blinked, was unsteadied by a different fear from the one she already had.
    ‘Why did you do that?’ Camilla asked in the street.
    ‘Do what?’
    ‘Frighten the cat.’
    ‘Like making the damn thing jump.’
    ‘You think it is manly, English, of you to hate cats.’
    ‘S’right,’ he said carelessly.
    ‘You used to tease them as a boy.’
    “‘Tease” is
one
word.’ He grinned. ‘I always liked a dog. Hada fox-terrier for years when I was a lad. How many miles we walked together, God knows. Faithful little beast. “Cats!” I’d say, and he was away like lightning after them.’
    They passed a newsagent’s shop.
    ‘My father once gave me a thrashing and all the time the dog cried outside the door, and when I came out he jumped up and licked my hands. I never forgot that. A child isn’t ever really lonely if he has a dog.’
    ‘Were you lonely?’
    ‘Yes,’ he said briefly.
    ‘Your father …’
    ‘He was a drunken swine. I wasn’t the only one he laid about. My mother got her share, too.’
    ‘There’s a boy selling papers!’
    He held up a coin and the boy came running to him. Still walking along with her, he opened the newspaper and read the front page, peeped a little inside and folded it up carefully and put it in his pocket.
    For the first time, she felt his sensibility counted after all.
    ‘Those beatings,’ she began, ‘but don’t tell me if you don’t care to … did they harm you very much? Does wielding the rod spoil the child?’
    ‘They cut me off from other children. And then, one’s mother running into the garden in her nightgown … other parents stop asking you to tea, you get left out of the birthday-parties. There is something not
quite …
in any case, they don’t ask you. When they meet you in the street, they are over-kind, solicitous, give you sixpence, but they still don’t want their children to mix with you … the ugliness you might uncover …