Summertime Read online

  About the Book

  When Trilby meets Lewis, the all-powerful proprietor of a newspaper group, she suspects that her life might be about to change, but not, as it transpires, forever. For not only does Lewis wish to acquire her cartoon strip, but Trilby herself. She is inevitably drawn to this handsome, older, and far more sophisticated personality, just as Lewis is, from the first, determined to marry the insouciant Trilby, despite the opposition of her friends and family. But having won her, Lewis reveals himself to be irrationally possessive.

  Becoming a virtual prisoner in her own home is not something that Trilby had ever dreamt could happen to her, a young woman in 1950s London, but it is not long before she realises that Lewis is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to keep her to himself. Quite by chance, she discovers the real reason for her husband's unforgivable behaviour. Trilby must come to terms with the truth about Lewis, and more importantly, herself, before she can experience the kind of carefree happiness she once knew before her marriage.

  Award-winning novelist Charlotte Bingham has captivated readers with a series of highly acclaimed bestsellers, including The Season, The Blue Note and The Kissing Garden. Set in post-war London, Summertime confirms the author as one of Britain's most celebrated storytellers.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Part Two

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Three

  Chapter Twelve

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by Charlotte Bingham

  Copyright

  CHARLOTTE

  BINGHAM

  SUMMERTIME

  This book is dedicated to my editor, Francesca Liversidge, in gratitude for her unswerving loyalty through many long and difficult times.

  Acknowledgements

  My grateful thanks to Dick and Betty Hunt who entertained me to a sumptuous tea while enchanting me with stories about farming in 1950s England, and tales of what were indeed the good old days.

  Also to my neighbours, Avril and Robert Jackson, for inviting me to their milking sheds and instructing me on the terminology of milking.

  Hardway, 2001

  ENGLAND IN THE NINETEEN FIFTIES

  People say never go back, not to the past, but it’s not as easy as that, is it? Certainly Trilby did not find it so. She had only to close her eyes and it seemed to her that she was back in the house in Chelsea and she was eighteen again, and she could hear the laughter, and with her eyes still closed she could feel the thick velvet of her black dressing gown and wonder at its large sleeves and ruffled cuffs as she crossed the street to have ten o’clock breakfast or midnight Ovaltine with all her friends who lived opposite.

  Never mind that the King’s Road was only down the way, everyone in Glebe Street crossed and re-crossed it as if it was not a road in London, but a communal garden. They crossed it with jugs of borrowed milk and dresses on loan for a special occasion. They crossed it with clippings from a newspaper or a rose bush, with last night’s casserole for someone else to dine from, or last night’s gossip with which someone else could be entertained.

  And no-one minded the time that anyone went to bed, or the time that the rest of the world was prone to rise. They kept their own hours in Glebe Street, priding themselves on going to bed with the owls that still haunted the trees in their small gardens and getting up long after the rest of the richer, smarter world only a few streets away had left for their offices.

  It was to all of them that Trilby found herself looking back, closing her eyes and allowing the colours and the music, but most of all the voices, to return, echoes of what seemed to her now, in her isolation, to be a warmer, kinder world.

  PART ONE

  Inside the doll’s house everything was quite, quite perfect, but it was awfully quiet; so quiet that you could have heard a pin drop.

  Chapter One

  There was a place where Trilby could go where her stepmother could not find her. It was a beautiful place and full of colour, not magical but real and funny. In this place her stepmother’s dissonant tones, her endless carping, could not be heard.

  Here too Trilby could not be touched by her father’s unhappiness, his aura of loneliness and loss.

  It was to this imaginary place that Trilby would look forward to retreating when she returned from typing at the Lifetime Assurance Company, just a few streets away from Glebe Street where they all lived.

  Trilby’s daytime occupation was always decorously referred to by her stepmother, Agnes, as ‘Trilby’s pin money job’. Since none of the wages that she dutifully surrendered to her stepmother each week seemed to be spent on anything remotely resembling pins, this way of referring to her earnings puzzled and, occasionally, irritated Trilby.

  ‘You must pay your way, Trilby, the same as the rest of us,’ her stepmother was in the habit of saying. ‘We all have to put our shoulders to the wheel and contribute to the housekeeping, you know.’

  Trilby could see the reasoning behind this, but she could not see the fairness, since Agnes herself contributed nothing at all to the house. As it was, from the first week that Trilby started earning, her stepmother seemed all too eager to take her wages, leaving Trilby with only enough to buy herself small items and to pay for her hair to be cut by a fashionable stylist at a nearby salon.

  ‘Girls like you do not need to have their hair styled, Trilby,’ her stepmother insisted. ‘You are best left au naturel. No amount of cutting and styling can alter what nature has given you, believe me. So much better to have left it alone instead of wasting money on it.’

  This was a point that always seemed to come up when Trilby was about to leave the house for what she secretly thought of as her monthly appointment with glamour. There was no denying that she loved to go to the hairdresser, loved to enter the palely painted salon with its French proprietor, and its lady clients discreetly hidden behind cubicle curtains, all with their own facilities.

  In this discreet haven women could enter the salon a certain shade of grey and leave it a rather uncertain shade of blue. Here too perming and cutting were a way of life, and while Trilby was determined never to have her hair permed, hating even the smell of the lotion, cutting was a must for anyone determined, as she was, to at least try to be fashionable. Besides, the new shorter cut suited her heart-shaped face, the lightly feathered fringe making a little curtain above her large dark eyes.

  ‘I have no idea why Trilby should have had her hair cut off. When I married you she had such nice long hair, Michael, really she did. It would not be so bad if she had it permed, but she will insist on this feathering or whatever it is that she is so fascinated by, and really, it does nothing for her.’

  This speech of Agnes’s was inevitably made as Trilby was preparing to leave the house for the salon, and it always seemed to follow Trilby, halfway down the road, sometimes even round the corner into the King’s Road where finally, and thankfully, it was drowned out by the sound of the traffic. And even as Trilby quietly closed the front door behind her, she knew, although she could not hear, her father would be saying in his gentle tones, ‘As a matter of fact I think short hair suits Trilby.’

  ‘She is just not right for short hair—’

  ‘She has beautiful eyes, and the short hair does show that up.’

  ‘If she had your looks it would be different,
Michael.’

  Michael looked across at his second wife. He was well aware that Agnes must feel jealous of her stepdaughter, and that a pretty, younger woman in the house posed a threat to her, but he was also aware that, whatever happened, he had to stay on Agnes’s side, because after all she was younger by some years than himself, and although he was tall and handsome it was a recurring nightmare that he might lose her to a more youthful, perhaps more virile man. The truth was that he was grateful to Agnes for marrying him when she had, and, most unfortunately, she knew it.

  ‘I think you will find that Trilby just wants to follow fashion, just her age, you know, darling? I expect we were all like Trilby at her age, but we have just forgotten.’

  Often as Trilby had heard this conversation, often as she knew it would be carrying on even as she swung through the doors of André’s salon, at the same time she could not help feeling depressed by it.

  Despite her father’s defence of her hairstyle, his insistence on the fact that she had beautiful eyes, though loyal, finally made her feel as if she only had eyes, and nothing else. So when she stationed herself in front of the hairdressing mirror preparatory to submitting herself to the undoubted art of André’s cutting scissors, it seemed to Trilby that her nose, mouth and chin must be a complete waste of time, with the result that when she stared into the mirror at herself she looked only at her eyes, ignoring the rest of her face, even hoping that it would go away.

  ‘I shouldn’t take much notice of Agnes. Women always cling to the fashions of their own eras,’ Michael would sometimes murmur to Trilby when they were alone in the house, and out of reach of Agnes and her opinions. ‘The most important thing about you, Trilby, is that you are an original. That is as important, believe me, as being pretty. Be yourself, like Shakespeare says, that’s the ticket. Be yourself, whatever happens.’

  It was kind of her father to say so, but Trilby certainly did not feel very original. She felt most particularly unoriginal when she was at the insurance company. Working in a typing pool, even if you lived at home in genteel circumstances, was a soul-destroying business. The supervisor, who sat at the top of the room at a raised desk, was a beady-eyed high priestess of time and motion. Once seated, and having hit her wooden gavel on the desk in front of her as a signal for the luckless girls in the typing pool to start work, she would sit motionless, staring, always staring.

  The sound that the old-fashioned typewriters made was almost insupportable, but the supervisor appeared to be untouched by it. Instead, as the din began, her eyes would start to move down the rows of girls, and she would examine them one by one with sadistic interest, searching for the slightest pause in production, the slightest indication that someone’s fingers had ceased to operate in the interests of the Lifetime Assurance Company.

  Even a small pause to sneeze or unwrap a cough sweet would secure the immediate and overt interest of the supervisor, and she would stare at the lozenge or the offending handkerchief as if they were the evil instruments of the work-shy. With narrowed eyes she would wait, hoping to witness something untoward, something that she could report, or, worse, note in her records.

  Sometimes Trilby fantasised about what the supervisor would do if she, say, blew her nose twice or sucked a cough sweet for five minutes, which would mean, horror of horrors, that she would have left the Lifetime Assurance Company short of a page of its endless, and sometimes, it seemed to her, quite pointless reports.

  The small wooden gavel was also used to point to any individual who was due to take her fifteen-minute coffee break. The moment it was pointed at Trilby she would spring up, and hurry off, not to the refreshment room, but to the outside world where, if it was a fine day, for a blissful fifteen minutes she would take out her drawing pad and pencil and sit on a pavement bench in a side street furnishing the secret world she was so anxious to create. What she drew was meant for her own amusement, longing only as she did to create a world where lives were not grey and brown, where there were no supervisors with wooden gavels but only fascinating and colourful people who were tolerant and kind and never died, as her own mother had done.

  Trilby called her cartoon strip The Popposites, because ever since her father and stepmother and herself had come to live in Glebe Street it had seemed to Trilby that the people opposite them, and on either side of them, lived far more glamorous lives than the Smythsons, who pursued regularity of meals and appointments with a near-religious fervour. These people were quite different, always arriving back at odd moments of the day and night. They seemed to Trilby to openly despise any regularity of existence, any kind of security.

  Yet it soon became clear to Trilby that her father and stepmother, while tolerating their neighbours, did not in fact like them as much as Trilby did. In fact they seemed to pride themselves on not being ‘that kind of person’. The Smythsons were respectable. The people opposite and on either side lived in brightly painted houses, and were anything but respectable. Indeed, they were, and did not mind being, complicated and glamorous.

  They lived for the day, which was probably why they were always out at night. They cooked strange French dishes whose smells tantalised the senses on a hot summer London evening, and they did up their gardens with fountains and mirrors and planted their flower pots with colourful flowers. They were not tasteful like the Smythsons, who had old furniture and nineteenth-century flower paintings, and only liked pale pink roses and lavender. But even if their chairs and wallpapers, their curtaining and furnishings were bought from Liberty and Heal’s, and not inherited from an aunt or a great-uncle, it always seemed to Trilby that their neighbours smiled more, and laughed more, and that music came from their houses at odd times of day, and there were no routines or supervisors, and ‘pin money’ was certainly not a phrase that you would ever hear them use.

  The worst thing about living with her father and stepmother was the food. The food at the Smythsons’ house was not influenced by Paris or Rome, it was stolidly post-war British. It did not smell tantalising, or look colourful. It knew nothing of bright peppers, or Spanish oil. Rather, it looked grey and sometimes deep brown, and, worse than that, it always had to be ‘finished’.

  The Smythsons’ ‘cook’ was Mrs Bartlett, Agnes’s daily maid, who came in and cleaned and cooked for them every day except Saturday, when she only came in for the morning. It sometimes seemed to Trilby that while she worked at the insurance company a few streets away, and her father worked at the Foreign Office a taxi ride away, her father and herself were working long hours so that Agnes need not work at all.

  Of course Agnes would not clean – she often said that she would not know how to – and she certainly did not know how to cook, but she did insist that Trilby ‘finished up’. From the moment that she had married Michael Smythson, and brought him back from the country to London, from the moment she had taken on Trilby’s upbringing, the one thing that Agnes had insisted on was a clean plate. Not from her – she herself hardly ate at all – but from Trilby.

  Sometimes it was possible, when, thank God, the telephone rang for Agnes, for Trilby to smuggle Mrs Bartlett’s utterly inedible cooking into a handkerchief and conceal it in her handbag. At other times, when her father and stepmother were out, the food was left for her on the mahogany sideboard and she was able to throw it into a shopping bag and, her heart in her mouth at the idea that she might be discovered, smuggle it out to a dustbin by the back door.

  Once she was nearly caught by Agnes as the latter returned home early from a party.

  ‘What’s in that bag, Trilby?’

  ‘Nothing that you would want to find, Agnes,’ Trilby answered truthfully, and she eyed her stepmother, who was a great deal taller than herself, with as much humour as she could muster, considering the situation.

  ‘What do you mean by that, Trilby?’

  ‘We-ell, put it this way, Agnes. What is in this bag is for you, but not now, later. It’s a surprise.’

  It was always easy to flatter Agnes. She stared do
wn into Trilby’s large, dark eyes preparing to be moderately flattered, although for a second Trilby could see that she did not believe her.

  ‘Surprise, for me? When?’

  ‘Guess.’ Trilby’s expression was now droll, and she rolled her eyes.

  ‘Oh, I see. Yes, of course.’ Happily Agnes had a birthday coming up. ‘But in that case why are you going out?’

  ‘Put it this way, Agnes. Aphrodite has a sewing machine, remember?’

  At that moment Agnes’s best friend the telephone rang, and she hurried away from Trilby, who then fairly sprang out of the door and ran across the road to Aphrodite Billington’s house, where Aphrodite, already a staunch ally of long standing, opened the door to her. Trilby hurried in and down to her dustbin, into which she thankfully flung her wretched shopping bag, leaving the wondrously exotic Aphrodite to gaze after her and sigh, ‘Not more of Mrs Bartlett’s stodge, you poor love?’

  For the fact was that everyone in Glebe Street was on Trilby’s side in her war against Agnes, and not least of these was tall, raven-haired Aphrodite, who, with her svelte figure and artistic leanings, wanted nothing more than that Trilby should stay as slender as Aphrodite herself.

  Aphrodite loved clothes, and clothes, as both she and Trilby were well aware, never looked so good as on a slender silhouette. Sometimes Aphrodite would lend Trilby dresses to try on, but only in her house. Trilby always had to change back into her own dowdy office clothes to go back home.

  It was both glamorous and exciting to waft about Aphrodite’s house in borrowed clothes, pretending to be someone else. Trilby would look forward to such moments with an almost passionate intensity, an intensity made more piquant by the fact that she knew that both her father and Agnes would not approve. They would not only disapprove, they would be appalled.