A Wreath Of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor Page A

her conversation became portentous with grandeur, the construction of her sentences so involved that they could not be rounded off, but hung in mid-air, abandoned, until Frances was confused and began to shout as if she were talking to a foreigner and presently gave it up.
    At eleven o’clock, loosened perhaps by tea, Mrs Parsons broke off and said: ‘Oh, madam dear,’ and put her handkerchief to her eyes. Her language, when she could resume, was simple again and Anglo-Saxon. For the great Latinised sentences were useless to describe or deal with emotion – or shame, as it turned out to be.
    How immediately, Frances thought, we leap to obvious conclusions, and how right we always are.
    ‘It’s Euniss again, madam.’
    At home, this daughter was sometimes affectionately nicknamed Eunicey, a pronunciation of Camilla’s which was a family joke and put them all into agonies of suppressed laughter.
    ‘Yes, I thought it would be that,’ Frances said. She was naturally not so distressed as a mother would be; but, on the other hand, did not regard the situation, though hackneyed, as either comic or shameful. Once before, Euniss had been in trouble, but there had been a miscarriage, especially Frances thought, of justice.
    Camilla got up and left the room. This act of sensibility wasat once misjudged and would not be forgiven. She made the mistake always of thinking people would like what she herself liked; she put herself too much in other people’s places, instead of allowing them to stay there themselves.
    Upstairs, feeling vaguely ruffled, she walked about her bedroom. From below, in the kitchen, came the sound of Mrs Parsons’s laughter, of her rich and Guinness-lined voice.
    Frances was busy displaying a natural and looked-for curiosity, which Camilla would have concealed. She asked all the questions which Mrs Parsons required her to ask, the practical questions such as when and who and what next. Mrs Parsons herself had brightened. In the discussion of trouble lies the comfort for it, and of this she sensibly made the most she could.
    ‘She thinks it was the man who came to read the meter.’
    ‘She
thinks!’
Frances protested.
    ‘Well, of course, it could be Ernie.’ Ernie was her fiancé, but his claims seemed less than those of a casual stranger.
    ‘It would be better if it were Ernie,’ Frances suggested.
    ‘In many ways, no doubt. But Ernie is only a labourer, the other has a profession at the back of him.’
    ‘But will he recognise his responsibility?’
    ‘It’s getting hold of him in the first place, madam.’
    ‘Poor Euniss. Yes, of course.’
    ‘We can’t afford to wait until the next half-yearly reading.’
    ‘What is his name?’
    ‘She remembers him as mentioning either Roy or Ken. Quite a short name, she says. She was to have met him the next evening, only it rained. Whether he turned up himself or not we don’t know. As things have happened, it would have been better for her to have slipped on her mac and gone, only Ernie came round after tea and that put the tin lid on it together with the rain. We had a listen to the wireless instead.’
    ‘What would Ernie say to all this?’
    ‘He wouldn’t stand for it, madam. And quite right too he
is
so touchy. Her dad won’t stand for it, either, forgetting how he carried on hisself.’
    ‘Do you mean he’ll turn her out?’ Frances asked, her knowledge of such situations based on Edwardian melodrama.
    Mrs Parsons was astonished. ‘Turn his own daughter out, madam! I’d like to see him try. Whatever do you think they’d say at the Flowers if I let him behave like that? And where, poor girl, could she go?’
    Seeming not to have heard of the streets of London, her imagination travelled no farther than the pub and her own position in the Ladies’ Darts Team. ‘No, when I said he wouldn’t stand for it, I meant he’d carry on, the same as what Ernie will.’
    ‘Poor Euniss,’ Frances said again, and with the prospect of saying it