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far worse than that about my
husband.’
    ‘I
say no worse than you say yourself.’
    ‘I think you do. But you blame me, then, for disloyalty?’
    Camilla said nothing. She lay very still in bed.
    ‘I am
loyal to him, except to you.’
    ‘And to Frances.’
    ‘To you and Frances, then.’
    ‘So loyalty is a question of numbers? Two is all right.’
    ‘I have to be up at six,’ Liz said. ‘For Harry. So I shall go to sleep, I think.’
    ‘Goodnight, then.’
    ‘Goodnight.’
    They both appeared to fall into a deep and steady sleep at once; and then suddenly Liz laughed and said in a changed, a warmer voice: ‘Goodnight, Cam.’
    ‘Goodnight, Liz dear.’ And as Camilla laughed too, Frances, in the next room, rapped angrily upon the wall.

CHAPTER THREE
     
    ‘Here is a beautiful book!’ said Camilla, following Liz across the landing.
    ‘Where did you find it?’
    ‘It was wedging the mirror.’
    She began to read from it, standing in her nightgown in the early sunshine. Liz put the baby back in his cot and began to go downstairs to make tea.
    ‘It is called
Exemplary Women,’
Camilla continued, and followed Liz downstairs.
    Hotchkiss lay under the table and the kitchen smelt of him. He opened a bloodshot eye sulkily and kept it open, seemed to follow Liz round the kitchen with it.
    When Camilla opened the door to let him out, birds burst up out of bushes, flurrying the leaves, plunged into the dense creeper over the walls. The garden was still, soaked with dew, veiled with a pearly light as if sponged with milk. A little tree of morello cherries seemed painted upon the sky, its fruit luminously red like cherries on a hat.
    ‘After the town …!’ Camilla began, breathing in the sweetness of the garden, ‘after the soiledness of everything,all you touched greased over, contaminated by other people’s hands!’ She glanced at the dusty book she was holding and her interest was at once diverted from the beauties of nature.
    ‘Listen, Liz! Here is one for you. “The Solemnity of Wedlock”. For seldom, we fear, does the bride, half-smiling, half-weeping beneath her crown of orange-blossoms, appreciate the character of the sacrifice she has made. Too often does she wake up with a sudden surprise to the awful breadth and depth of the chasm that lies between her wifehood and her maidenhood, the
now
and the
then
. She misses the mother, the sister, the tender felicities of home, the cherished places, the favourite pursuits, the old singleness of heart, the old serenity of mind, the delightful yet sober freedom of her blissful girlish days. She looks around, and unless she loves – loves long and deeply and worthily – she sees a blank and dreary void, and her heart aches with a dumb, dull pain …”’
    ‘You are making it up,’ said Liz, coming to the door and looking over Camilla’s shoulder. ‘It sounds like Sappho. Quick! The milkman is coming!’
    Camilla, in her nightgown, stepped behind the opened door and continued to read Liz made the tea.
    ‘And here is something for me. “Surely a cheerful and happy old maid is less to be pitied than a loveless or neglected wife.” And, now, Jeremy Taylor on celibacy.’
    The milk was left on the doorstep, the footsteps retreated, and Camilla came back into the sunshine.
    ‘Where did Frances get these books?’
    ‘They were her mother’s.’
    They sat on the table and sipped their tea. As the kitchen grew warmer, flies began to circulate or went up and down the windows with a drowsy sound.
    *
     
    Frances awoke to her moss-roses. Each morning they annoyed her more, so endlessly repeated on a thick black trellis over the wall-paper, peeling away near the ceiling in places, leaving a powdery-looking but still flowered pattern exposed beneath. Violets, the one before last, Frances decided. Unless periwinkles. She thought about wall-papers, closing her eyes. She had painted many in her time, the great blown roses in the bedrooms of small French hotels: they