A Wreath for the Enemy by Pamela Frankau

Author:Pamela Frankau
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: fiction, England, literature, novel, young adult
Publisher: Rare Treasure Editions
Published: 2021-11-11T00:00:00+00:00

III

THE ROAD BY THE RIVER

Told by Three Voices

I

Penelope’s Voice

I was sitting in the summer-house that perches on a hump of the garden between the hotel and the Corniche Road. My manuscript lay spread out before me on the scarred wooden table. A three-sided shell of whitewashed walls enclosed me; I stared at the view, well known and well loved. The open side of the summer-house framed the light, glistening green plumes of an umbrella-pine, with a red rock path looping below; then the stone parapet that bulges at the point where the road curves out into a buttress above the garden. The rest of the view is the sky. Since this was a clear morning, I could see upon the peacock-blue a crinkle of white mountain—the Alps far off.

Had you asked me who I would like best to be at that moment I should have answered unhesitatingly ‘Myself’. Penelope Wells, aged nineteen and writing my novel.

Or, more accurately, thinking about my novel, with the ink long dry on the last words written. I was merely drowning in warmth and peace and the scents of the garden. The lazy mood had come on me while I reflected that this was the last day but one. The summer holiday was almost ended. The day after tomorrow I should travel back to Oxford.

Because of that, I had begun to turn the scribbled pages, first to see how much I had written in these seven weeks, then, fatally, to re-read, and now to dream. In the dream there was my first novel, printed, bound and respectfully reviewed.

It would not be, in truth, my first novel. I had written my first at the age of fifteen, in two marble-boarded exercise-books bought from the papeterie at St. Raphael. It did not say much, but it was at least finished. It was severe, formal and gloomy. Half a fantasy, full of Celtic twilight, had come next. Then there was the saga of an English family, planned to run through three generations and at least six hundred pages. For this I had lost my appetite early. The novel in progress, then, was really novel number three and I hoped that it would survive.

Like its predecessors, it would be dedicated to the Duchess. The dedication took a new shape in my mind, a shape made of this peaceful mood:

‘To Violetta di Terracini

Out of the freedom that she promised me.’

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