Summertime Read online

  ‘Ah, here we are.’ Aunt Laura leaned forward and knocked on the taxi window with the curved ivory handle of her silk umbrella. ‘Cabbie! We are here,’ she trilled. ‘Just there.’ The umbrella pointed vaguely towards a side entrance approached by a small flight of steps. ‘You may get out before me, Piers, and hand me out.’

  Piers did so, and so it was that, with all the grace of a young woman who had never wanted for a dancing partner in her life, Aunt Laura alighted from the taxi, and stood while Piers paid it off.

  It was a pleasant custom between them that Piers paid for everything, and a few weeks later Aunt Laura sent him a cheque for ‘something needed on the farm’. Needless to say the cheque was always for the precise amount that Piers had spent on them both during his London visit, never less and never more. Of course Piers always wrote and thanked Aunt Laura, protesting that she was ‘far too generous’, and so the little charade ended. It did however have its charm, for it meant that Aunt Laura was made to feel feminine by her much younger nephew, and Piers was prevented from feeling patronised.

  Aunt Laura stared up at the house. ‘Yes, yes, this is it.’ She smiled excitedly and the tone of her voice was almost girlish. ‘Such an excitement I always think, going to a painter’s studio, lovely smells of oil paint and canvases stacked against walls, coffee and drinks at all hours. If I had remarried I should have loved to have married a painter, except I hear tell that they are always running off with their models, so perhaps I should not have liked it at all!’

  She climbed up the steps towards the smartly painted plum-coloured door and knocked on it with the black-painted door knocker. For a few seconds they both found themselves staring at that door knocker. It was a strange confection for such a serviceable object, a smiling dolphin, obviously hand made and something of an objet d’art, as Aunt Laura remarked while they waited for the door to open. For some reason, too, it made both the visitors realise at once that the person inside the studio was, like the door knocker, going to be out of the ordinary. It was a curtain raiser, as it were, to whoever opened the door. Certainly, of a sudden, it sharpened Piers’s awareness of the day, the street, the clear springtime light, and long before the door opened and their hostess stood before them, Piers found himself feeling oddly excited.

  It was as if the door’s opening was more than just a physical act of great ordinariness; it was as if it might be beckoning him into something dangerous and exciting, something that he had not experienced before. In the split second between the door’s opening and his looking up he found himself willing this to be so, and at the same time preparing himself not to be too cast down if it were not to be the case.

  Trilby opened the door to her visitors wearing a mustard-coloured shirt and purple velvet pageboy trousers that ended halfway down her slim legs in a row of small, black silk bobbles. With this what Aunt Laura subsequently referred to as ‘very outré’ outfit she wore black velvet slippers, and her hair was once more cut in the elfin style that she thought suited her best.

  Aunt Laura, probably because she had met Trilby before, seemed quite accepting of this slightly outrageous-looking elf. Smiling happily and calling ‘Hallo, hallo’ she promptly stepped over the threshold into the small hall that led to the second door.

  ‘This is my nephew Piers, Trilby dear, I do not think you have met.’ Aunt Laura waved a vague hand towards Piers who smiled, and shook Trilby’s hand.

  ‘How do you do?’

  Trilby too smiled and shook the slim, slightly roughened male hand held out to her. ‘Hallo. Come in, come in.’

  But it was too late. Ever eager to join bohemia Aunt Laura had already pushed open the second door, and so the younger people followed her and her inimitable umbrella – a brolly that Piers always thought had a quite separate personality of its own – into the wider, instantly cooler interior of the studio.

  It was such a bright early summer day that at that moment the studio’s interior seemed lighter and more spring-like than anywhere else that either of the Montagues had yet been in London. The light also had the effect of making Trilby’s appearance seem more outrageous and dashing than it might have done in a darker room. To Piers she seemed to have stepped out of some seventeenth-century painting, and he half expected to see her turn and rest a slim, white hand on the top of the head of a large dog, while the other hand rested on a dark oak table as in some painting by Van Dyck.

  It was her very boyishness, Piers realised in an instant, that made her seem so feminine, probably because she was so slender. Almost too thin – as if she had been very ill, which perhaps she must have been if she had, as Aunt Laura had asserted, suffered some kind of mental breakdown.

  ‘I expect you would like some coffee?’

  She took a tray of coffee from the top of an old oak chest of drawers, and then hurried to a small side kitchen from where she eventually emerged with a very plain French-style coffee pot, which she expertly tipped from top to bottom to allow the hot water to filter through the coffee grounds.

  ‘You are kind to come,’ she said conversationally to Aunt Laura, as she set out small Parisian-style coffee cups, poured coffee and offered sugar and milk, knowing of course, as she must, that Aunt Laura was actually quite flattered to be asked to sit to her.

  ‘Not kind at all, love this sort of thing, always have, always will.’

  Aunt Laura smiled conspiratorially from Trilby to Piers and back again. Her look, of a sudden, said, ‘This is our secret,’ and without realising it Trilby and Piers smiled in the same way, but at each other, and Piers found that instead of wandering off in search of some new shirts, or the fountain pen that he so badly needed, he took a chair, and stayed for the rest of the morning.

  His aunt Laura sat impressively still while Trilby first quickly sketched and then started to paint. Piers found himself resting, tranquilly, like some great tropical fish in a pool of sunshine by the French windows which looked out onto the back courtyard. The conversation between sitter and painter was desultory, but sporadically interesting, and he listened in to them as if they were a programme on the wireless, himself feeling more relaxed than he had for years.

  After a few hours Trilby, to no-one’s surprise, refused to let them leave, but instead made them all a light lunch of salad Niçoise, hot French bread and, eventually, a perfectly ripe French cheese followed by large, sweet white grapes.

  As soon as he saw her choice of food Piers knew exactly what sort of person Aunt Laura was sitting to. He had always, quite privately, maintained that you could tell everything about women from the kind of food they liked. Whatever their choices on a menu Piers always knew at once exactly the kind of person they were. Now it seemed to him that Trilby was as exciting as her clothes.

  In the days that followed so swiftly, one after the other, as if they were cards being played far too quickly on a table that was his holiday, Piers found that it became more and more difficult, indeed impossible, to keep away from Trilby’s small studio. Instead of inventing some excuse to accompany Aunt Laura, he merely went along with her, as if it was part of their accepted routine, and perhaps as a consequence of this Aunt Laura accepted it as such, and neither his aunt nor Trilby seemed to expect him not to accompany her for her daily sittings.

  Of course Trilby would not let them see the work in progress, because, she joked, if she did, neither of them would ever come back, least of all, in all probability, Aunt Laura. Her sitter, who had been painted many times before, expressed no interest in how she was being depicted in the painting, but plenty of interest in the painter.

  ‘She married this Lewis James man, you know the one I mean? The one with all the newspapers? And not long after it seems she had this nervous breakdown, which was very painful to all concerned, because mental illness is always taken so badly by families. I mean, her family have not come near her since, I heard from Lola de Ribes. Of course they feel she is just indulging herself in this depression thing, which must be very painful for her. After all, the poor litt
le girl, she has surely enough to contend with without feeling that she has let them down in some terrible way. Lola says that all Agnes, her stepmother, keeps saying is “It’s not hereditary”, which really does not help. Anyway, the painting, and the studio, it’s all part of what the doctors have ordered, to keep her mind off her sadness, and I really rather agree with it myself. Although why she should wish to paint old ladies like me, heaven only knows, and only heaven! But there you are, if it makes her feel better we must go along with it, wouldn’t you say?’

  Piers could only agree. He found himself, day after day, not going to a film or theatre matinee as had been his wont when he was in London, not shopping for much needed luxuries never found in the wilds of Somerset, but waiting with mounting impatience for the taxi to arrive, for Aunt Laura to climb in ahead of him; always waiting, it seemed to him, for that moment, which sometimes seemed to him to take more than a million minutes, when the door would open to the dolphin’s knock, and Trilby would be standing there.

  Every day that she opened the door, to his secret delight, she appeared before them in yet another outrageous outfit, her strange elusive personality somehow always evading him, disappearing at moments when he expected it to appear, and reappearing again from nowhere when he quite thought it had disappeared.

  ‘Oh, Trilby is a typical artistic type,’ Aunt Laura said once or twice when they discussed her over dinner at night. ‘Very defined, and yet as elusive as smoke. That is the artistic temperament, Piers dear. But how she came to marry this Lewis James man the Lord alone knows, and only He does know. Because it must be oil and water at home, really it must. Lewis James is not a man to cross, men like that truly never are. They cannot be what we would call soulmates.’

  Lewis still came home for lunch, as he now called it, but instead of staying in his suit, as had been his habit, in an effort to please Trilby should she, as he hoped, come home for lunch he now went upstairs and changed into more informal clothes.

  Every day, day after day, after day, he waited in his carefully chosen informal clothes, hoping that Trilby would appear. But despite this, to him, great concession to her youth, day after day, after day, she did not come home for lunch with him, but chose to stay, as he thought alone, in her studio.

  He could see that Paine, his butler, and the maids, in fact his whole staff, thought that he had taken leave of his senses, as week after week he insisted that they lay a place opposite him for Trilby, that they cook a three-course lunch for two, only to find that they had no-one to serve, and half the food had to be set aside to feed whoever in the kitchen quarters did not mind its being reheated.

  Sometimes he imagined Trilby sitting opposite him, and looked up from his first or second course to smile at her. Sometimes he hoped that he heard her footfall on the polished floor outside the dining room and the door opening to reveal her smiling mischievously, but when he turned it would always be Paine or one of the maids coming in, never Trilby.

  Dinner was different, of course. At dinner she would join him, looking, day by day, increasingly happier and healthier, and artlessly confiding in him news from her studio, news of people who were sitting to her, news of everything that she must realise that he knew nothing about, and quite frankly, had less interest in. Compared to his world hers was such a little place, with no great decisions, no powerful people, nothing but ordinariness, an ordinariness which, for some reason he could not understand, fascinated Trilby.

  That was what, among many things, Lewis found so difficult.

  But he found that his irritation at her preoccupation with light, or some other nonsense, was nothing compared to his growing frustration at not knowing where she was at any time of the day. He had to accept that from the moment she left the house and stepped into either her Morris or his Rolls-Royce, he knew nothing of what she was doing. He had to trust her not to be doing anything he might not want, and although he knew he must do so, on Dr Mellon’s orders, it was still an agony for him.

  Worse, he felt a growing resentment that she should want to be away painting some old woman here, someone’s child there, when she could be waiting at home for him. Waiting for him where he wanted her. At home. In his house. It was intolerable, and yet the proof of the efficacy of Dr Mellon’s prescription for Trilby’s mental recovery was that, gradually, bit by bit, she was beginning to look as she had when he had first married her, and he had imagined that they were happy.

  Although she still would not kiss him on the lips.

  She smiled, she laughed, she entertained him, she looked beautiful, but her pretty lips, at times pink, at others red with freshly applied lipstick, would not meet his – any more than any other part of her seemed willing to do.

  But Lewis was very much a man. He needed a woman, regularly. Married though he was he had already started to take other women, but for no reason that he could name, other women, however beautiful, now seemed of a sudden boring and dull compared to Trilby, perhaps because they represented no challenge to him. He had liked to make love to Trilby, and he had made love to her, in every way, and he had got her pregnant, full of his baby, something he certainly could not do to another woman, however willing. He wanted to make Trilby pregnant again, but not if it meant her returning to her former, terrible state. He did not want to have to hire nurses again, go through all that humiliation, everyone, including the servants, knowing that his young wife, despite everything that he had given her, and continued to give her, was quite out of control, a semi-lunatic, a mental case.

  So he had to wait. And it was that waiting, symbolised by the waiting for her to return at lunch, that ate into him, made him feel morose and sorry for himself, emotions to which he was not at all accustomed.

  And, too, his inability to control his life in this small area now seemed to him to be spilling over into every aspect of his life, so that each time he summoned Micklethwaite, or some other minion, to his presence, it seemed to Lewis that he could see mockery in their eyes, and that everything they said to him had some other meaning.

  They might say ‘Yes, sir’ or they might say ‘Of course, Mr James’ but nowadays it seemed to Lewis that they did not mean it. They meant it about as much as Trilby meant to come home for lunch. Or perhaps as much as she meant, ever, to let Lewis touch her again.

  He longed to say that one word ‘When?’ but he could not. He longed to feel her body against his again, to hear her sigh and whisper as he made love to her, or watch her run off to the bathroom, her slim figure disappearing as soon as he had finished with her, and perhaps it was this very longing that led him to make new plans to re-establish himself in her life.

  Following on a particularly intense feeling of hopelessness, he began to call for her, every now and then, at her studio, telling himself all the time that he was not reverting to his old pattern, but making sure that she was all right. That was all; he just wanted to know that she was all right. After all, she had been very ill. She was, most likely, not quite better yet. He would just call, unexpectedly, not suspiciously, of course not, just as a surprise, just every now and then, without warning. She would probably be grateful. She would probably be quite happy that he was still taking an interest.

  What he soon realised was that she would never let him actually go in no matter how unexpected his arrival. She would never let him inside. It was always, ‘Oh Lewis, there you are. Just wait, would you?’

  And then the door would close and Lewis would stand looking and feeling embarrassed, half smiling down at his chauffeur standing by the car, sometimes shrugging his shoulders at him as if to say, ‘Well, you know women!’ Until, eventually, Trilby would reappear wearing her coat, firmly shutting the outer door behind her and pocketing the key.

  But calling for her every now and then soon turned into offering to drop her off at the studio in the morning, and then ringing her once or twice during the day, just to make sure that she was all right, until finally she said, putting a friendly hand on his arm, ‘Lewis, I am at the studio all day.
I don’t go anywhere else. Except to the shops to buy coffee or something for lunch. You really must stop telephoning. I mean if I trust you are at the office, you must trust that I am painting at the studio, otherwise there is no point in being married.’

  ‘That is just it—’ Lewis began, the When? once more raising its unhappy question mark in his mind, but then he stopped. ‘That is just it. I am married to you, so every now and then I like to hear your voice,’ he ended, quietly.

  ‘I understand.’ Trilby put her hand over his and he kissed it quickly, and in return she touched the top of his head lightly, looking for a second just the way Piers had seen her that first morning.

  That lightest of touches was fatal, of course, for it once more gave Lewis hope. It took only those few seconds and he was once again alight with the hope that Trilby would come back to him, be with him in the same way that she had been with him before, never realising that it would never be possible, that now – fatally – she felt sorry for him.

  He did not know either that she could not bring herself to tell him that with her unexpected discovery of those carefully wrapped boxes in the cupboards of his bedroom all memories of any happiness they had enjoyed together had quite disappeared, as if they had been chalked on a board and were now wiped off, leaving no trace whatsoever.

  Nor could she tell him that she had fallen in love with Piers Montague.

  Of course Trilby had not meant to fall in love, very few people do. They might have some vague idea when they wake up in the morning that today could be different, or that they might meet someone who will change their lives for ever, but generally speaking most people just get up and get on with their day. Trilby knew this, because that was what had happened to her. The day that she had met Piers for the first time, she had just got up as usual, dressed herself – poor Mrs Woo having long ago left for a more conventional post – and insisted on driving herself to the studio, saying, jokingly, ‘Lewis, if you don’t let me use the Morris, it really is going to rust up, you know! And what is more, if I keep being driven everywhere I will forget how to drive it at all.’