A Wreath of Roses

 Having spent too long reading little but non-fiction (much of it for review), I turned back to fiction recently, reading A Wreath of Roses by Elizabeth Taylor, recommended and lent to me by my cousin. I had read a few Taylors, including what is surely her masterpiece, Angel, and was happy to discover more. 
  Published in 1949 as Taylor's fourth novel, A Wreath of Roses opens promisingly, with a shocking event (no spoilers) at a sleepy provincial railway station, witnessed by Camilla, a woman on the brink of middle age who has led a quiet, even prim life and is on her way to her annual holiday. All is about to change for Camilla when she meets a conventionally handsome, self-assured man who calls himself Richard Elton. He is exactly the kind of man she is not usually attracted to, and it is soon clear that he is a liar and a fraud – and yet, even when she knows this, she cannot help being drawn into an affair that she sees as her last chance of romance before life closes over her. Gradually, she discovers that Richard has far worse things  to hide than a bogus war record...
  At the beginning of the story, Camilla is on her way to stay, as she has done every summer for years, with her best friend Liz, in the cottage of their older friend, Frances, a painter. These summers have always been idyllic, at least in retrospect, but this year everything has changed: Liz is now married to a rather tiresome vicar and her time is taken up with her baby, Harry, while the aging Frances is facing a crisis in her art and her life. At first I found these characters and their situation rather cold and uninvolving – and it has to be said that the baby Harry and Frances's dog, Hotchkiss, are two of the least attractive of their kind in fiction. However, the Camilla-Richard storyline was enough to keep me reading – and I'm glad I did, as everything comes to life at the halfway point with the arrival of Morland Beddoes, the man who has been buying Frances's paintings (and loving her at a distance) for years. This fascinating, deeply sympathetic character brings warmth and heart to the milieu, and is central to driving the action to its dramatic climax. Described as 'Elizabeth Taylor's darkest novel', A Wreath of Roses lives up to the billing, but is crafted with such quiet, elegant expertise that one hardly notices how clever – and how dark – it is.