1 - Tired Horror: A Wreath of Roses

Summary

Towards the end of A Wreath of Roses (1949), the man calling himself ‘Group-Captain Richard Elton’ (he was really a Flight- Sergeant, and we never discover if Richard Elton is his real name), takes Camilla Hill to see what he claims to be the house where he grew up. He asks the woman who lives there, a Mrs Mortimer, possibly a war widow, if he and his ‘fiancee’ might look round. He then proceeds to give his most convincing performance yet in the role he has devised for himself - the emotionally-wounded homecoming soldier, hesitantly searching for fragments of his old life in places where so much has changed or been obliterated: ‘It's queer and disturbing… the virginia-creeper on the wall. I used to unstick it from this sill. It all seems so far away, like another world’ (WOR 198). Camilla, a fastidious woman in the grip of unexpected, overwhelming desire, goes along with the pretence of their being engaged, while remaining ignorant of all Richard's other pretences. She recoils from the squalor of the house, with its traces of less glamorous kinds of wartime leftover, prostitution and illegitimacy; she is distressed almost to anger by what she sees as the contamination by the ugly present of Richard's most poignant memories. But in reality Mrs Mortimer is the only one who could have poignant memories here, to be unwittingly contaminated by intruding, oblivious strangers - and she is moved to tears by the spectacle, as she takes it to be, of a young couple just starting out together, lighting up her home for a moment by their discovery of the past still mysteriously alive, continuity not entirely broken. The whole episode involves a peculiarly noir concatenation, intense and unsettling even by Taylor's standards, of real feelings and false ones, cynicism, self-deception, fantasy and loneliness, nebulous inner worlds and tiny, anchoring outer detail; the threads of irony and pathos seem woven too tightly together ever to be disentangled.

A Wreath of Roses is the last and darkest of Taylor's explorations of the mood of the second half of the 1940s, a mood most nearly captured in one of Richard's phrases, ‘a sort of tired horror’.