Summertime Read online

Following the incident of the carrier bag, however, both Trilby and Aphrodite nearly had their comeuppance, for when Agnes’s birthday did eventually arrive she opened Trilby’s present to her in puzzled silence.

  ‘I fail to see why this needed altering,’ she said at last, frowning across the breakfast table at Trilby, as she folded the silk scarf that her stepdaughter had given her.

  Trilby smiled, her expression assuming what she hoped was a mysterious air, while she did not venture to say anything. Her smile, she hoped, indicated that she had made the scarf for Agnes, when in fact she had, with Aphrodite’s assistance, merely removed the manufacturer’s label.

  Sometimes, as she was growing up, the awful ways that she contrived to deceive Agnes made Trilby feel guilty, but only for a few seconds, because, finally, she knew that whatever Agnes did for her was not for Trilby’s happiness, or even her own, but to Trilby’s detriment. And occasionally, in the middle of the night if she was feeling low, Trilby did sometimes make herself face the fact that her own unhappiness, or discomfort, could be a source of some great content to her stepmother.

  However it was, it certainly took a long time for the penny to drop, but when it did at last, Trilby realised that the reality of ‘finishing up’ was that Agnes did not want Trilby to be slender and pretty, she wanted her to be fat and plain.

  For a few years she definitely succeeded. Following her mother’s sudden and awful death in a car accident in the country, where they were then living, with Agnes’s help Trilby did actually, and perhaps inevitably, become incredibly fat and plain – so much so that Agnes felt quite able to be nice to her.

  After the death of her lovely, lively, life-loving mother, Trilby’s existence had become a matter of total despair. She had moved slowly and sadly from one day to the next, not looking forward to anything except the dullness of another day, when, of a sudden, her newly remarried father had turned to her and said, ‘I have made arrangements for you to go to Switzerland. There’s a friend of mine there you can lodge with, teach you skiing, that sort of thing.’

  Away from Agnes in the cold mountain air, Trilby did not just learn to ski and speak French, she lost weight, pounds and pounds of it, so that it felt to her as if she was leaving it on the mountain slopes as she skied by. When she returned home, she was, it seemed to her, and to the rest of the street, a different person.

  Seeing her stepdaughter, glowing and fit, Agnes simply made her hmm noise and turned away, back to the telephone and her engagement diary.

  However, when Trilby crossed the street to see Aphrodite, her reaction had been quite different.

  ‘But you’ve become beautiful!’ she said, pulling Trilby into her house. ‘Slim and grown up and beautiful. Well done you!’

  It might have been possible for Trilby to have remained beautiful if she had not had to go back to living with her father and stepmother. Gradually, as day after wretched day she had to sit opposite her stepmother at breakfast and dinner and eat up everything on her plate as if she was a girl of seven, not seventeen, it became clear to Trilby that if she did not take decided steps to protect herself from her stepmother the plainness would return.

  Sometimes she would pretend that she had already eaten, at other times she would insist that she felt sick. In fact avoiding meals at home became a hobby with her, and playing cat and mouse with Agnes a sort of long protracted game with Trilby slipping in and out of the house at determinedly odd times. Occasionally she would let herself into the basement to make sure that the house was utterly quiet, which would mean that her stepmother was out. Or she would let herself in the back door and wait until she heard Agnes leave the house for some new social engagement before zipping up to her room, and locking the door.

  To make up for all this avoidance of meals, Trilby often ate, and always with pleasure, in the houses opposite, or on either side. She ate home-made croissants, and pâtés, making deeply appreciative noises. She hung around their kitchens testing their casseroles and pronouncing on their mousses, she even, on occasions, drank wine, but she made sure that she never again put on weight as she had done after her mother’s death.

  Often when she was in the kitchen helping Aphrodite or Mrs Johnson Johnson prepare for some dinner party, Trilby would show them some new set of drawings, some new episode of The Popposites, and they would laugh, and murmur, ‘You naughty girl, you’ve got me to a T.’

  Trilby had captured Aphrodite’s next-door neighbour Mrs Johnson Johnson most particularly: her tall, angular figure, her large red lips, her habit of wearing turbans and exotic eastern garments at all times. As a widow she revelled quite overtly in her freedom to wear what she liked when she liked, unhampered by the embarrassment of a disapproving spouse. A cigarette holder always to her lips, a gin and tonic comfortingly close, Mrs Johnson Johnson had made Trilby her hobby. She liked Trilby, and Trilby knew it from the approving expression in her eyes, just as she knew from the same set of eyes that Mrs Johnson Johnson disliked Agnes Smythson.

  ‘You’re a talented little sausage,’ she would tell Trilby, fitting yet another cigarette into her holder. ‘Should go far, I would say, wouldn’t you, Aphrodite?’

  At which Aphrodite would look up from some casserole that she was cooking and nod vaguely, saying of The Popposites, ‘Don’t you love them, though, Melanie, I mean to say, don’t you just love the way she’s got us all, really?’

  It was different at home. At home, Agnes would sometimes, most unfortunately, catch sight of Trilby’s drawings, and say disapprovingly, ‘Wasting your time and energy on your silly drawings as usual, Lydia,’ and push them away from her as if they were dirty tea towels she had come across in the kitchen.

  For this was another aspect of her stepmother which had, over the years, proved most upsetting to Trilby. Agnes hated her name. She thought it was silly. Time and time again she remarked on the ugliness of Trilby’s name, most especially in the early days after she had married the besotted Michael Smythson.

  She did not like ‘Trilby’ as a name, she preferred ‘Lydia’, she said, and so, every now and then, when she was in a particularly vile mood, and despite Trilby’s having finally, as she grew older, insisted on retaining her own name, she would address Trilby as ‘Lydia’, and Trilby would take it. But however hard she tried to accept it, it always acted like a slap in the face, which was, she thought, how it was meant to act.

  ‘Your poor mother. Why on earth she should saddle you with a silly name like Treel-bee, I wouldn’t know.’

  When they moved back from the country to London, Agnes took ruthless advantage of Trilby’s new school, and on her insistence Trilby’s name was put down as ‘Lydia Smythson’. It was by this name that the teachers knew her for her remaining years at the school. Trilby was able to counter this stepmotherly manoeuvre, however, by insisting that her classmates called her ‘Trilby’, pretending to them that it was, in fact, her nickname.

  So finally, in a kind of way, Trilby did win.

  Except with Agnes you never really won, you just waited until the next time, when she tried it on again, and you never really knew when it was going to happen, when some new little sadistic ploy would come into play, when some new idea that would add to the discomfort of another might suddenly occur to her.

  Yet, despite all this, Trilby did not hate Agnes. She was too like her tall, handsome if diffident father in temperament to hate her stepmother. She always thought that to hate Agnes would be like hating a mountain for its crags, or snow because it was cold, or rain because it was wet. Agnes could not help how she was. Trilby had known that from the moment that she came into their lives. Agnes was Agnes, and there was nothing to be done about it.

  Of course, after a few years, both her father and herself had quite separately come to the realisation that Agnes had not perhaps fallen in love with Michael Smythson, despite his good looks and sweet ways, in the same way that Michael had fallen, head over heels, in love with Agnes.

  Agnes had been a divorcee, which meant that s
ocially, until she married Michael, she was far beyond the pale as far as Society was concerned. So, besides falling passionately in love with her, Michael had felt sorry for her. Not that it was difficult to fall in love with Agnes, if you were a man. She was tall, dark-haired and very beautiful, in aspect not unlike the fashionable and elegant Duchess of Fife whom Agnes always admired and liked to read about. Not only that, but she had beautiful limbs, and a fascinating manner, when she wished. What she did not have, however, was that final requisite, so seldom found in people who have always known that they are beautiful, namely – kindness.

  If Trilby had wished to hate Agnes, she would have hated her, but she did not wish to hate her. She wished simply and solely that she would be nicer to her father, but that too, she came to realise, was a silly waste of time.

  Agnes had no more wish to love anyone except herself than she had to live in the country with Michael, or to allow Trilby to have a dog or use her real name, or for any other thing that involved another human being. Agnes only wished things for herself, whatever those things happened to be.

  Michael had sold his eighteenth-century rectory and bought the house in Chelsea, for Agnes. He lived a life which, under torture, he would have had to admit he loathed, but he did it for Agnes. Just as he had taken Trilby’s dog, when they were leaving the country, to be put down, for Agnes’s sake. She did not like dogs. The dog had been taken to be put down, but not by Agnes, by Michael, because Michael loved Agnes. Besides, he was so grateful to her for marrying him, and rescuing him and Trilby from their numbed loneliness, their bewilderment and grief. That was how much Michael had fallen passionately in love with Agnes, enough to not mind hurting Trilby by having her dog put down.

  Finally too he had loved her enough to not mind hurting himself, ruining his own life, making himself miserable, if it meant that Agnes would be happy. That was all he wanted, for Agnes, this beautiful and fascinating woman, to be happy. So that was what he did. He made himself violently unhappy in order to make her happy.

  Except Agnes was never happy, not with anything or anyone. She was always restless and dissatisfied. She was always waiting for something better to happen, tomorrow. Today was always a burden, or a nuisance. If she did remember anything good for which she could be thankful, it was always in retrospect, and it had always happened some years, sometimes many years, before. Sometimes these idyllic occasions had happened before the war. Other times, strangely, during the war.

  ‘I had a really good war.’

  Agnes often said that, and it puzzled Trilby dreadfully, because she could not imagine anyone having anything called a ‘good war’. War, it seemed to her, must be terrible: people dying, buildings on fire, sadness, grief, sorrow – most of all sorrow. But none of this grief or sorrow had, apparently, affected Agnes, who had thoroughly enjoyed her war.

  Of course she blamed the war for her divorce.

  It seemed that her first husband and herself had remet as total strangers after Agnes had finished enjoying her really good war. The first husband, Trilby heard frequently, had been ‘tiresome’ to live with. He had suffered from depressions and frequently disturbed her sleep in the night with his crying and sudden yelling. The end result was that Agnes had to be shot of him. He had proved intolerable as a husband, and a disaster at his job. Finally, and, it sometimes seemed to Trilby, to her stepmother’s ill-concealed satisfaction, he had committed suicide, which meant that Agnes could once again be admitted to the Royal Enclosure at Ascot and was no longer a ‘second class citizen’, something about which she had moaned to Michael and Trilby at some length during the first years of her second marriage.

  Back in London, and with her stepdaughter and second husband safely out of the way during the day, Agnes could pursue the kind of life for which she had always longed. Of course she was not as rich as she wished, and of course they did not live in Mayfair, but they were none the less respectable, and Michael was certainly a leg-up socially, after the failure of her first marriage.

  Not that this made her feel in the least bit grateful to him. On the contrary Trilby often felt it made her resentful. For the kinder that her father was to Agnes, and the more tolerant, the less she seemed to love and respect him.

  It was to escape the frequent spectacle of his humiliation at her stepmother’s hands that Trilby bolted across the road to visit Mrs Johnson Johnson or Aphrodite, or let herself out of their back garden gate only to sidle along the path and visit Berry Nichols and his wife Molly, who were always kind enough to be, or pretend to be, amused and interested by The Popposites.

  Molly Nichols would read the latest set of drawings rocking with gentle laughter, and saying occasionally, in between taking deep, appreciative puffs of her cigarette, ‘Oh, Trilb, you are naughty, you’ve captured us all so well. Oh, look, Berry, she has put us in this week, it’s all about your exploding steak and kidney pie! And Mrs Johnson Johnson, look, Berry, do, it is so killingly funny. So funny.’

  Berry, who always did the cooking at their house, did not look up from the sauce he was preparing over a bain-marie. Molly poured them all a glass of champagne and said, with some diffidence, ‘I say, Trilb, would you mind terribly if I gave your Popposites to a friend of mine to look over? I mean, he might not like them, but he has, as they say in Fleet Street, friends at court, and really, we all, everyone in the street, we all think it is so amusing, you might get a sale, and, well – you might, you know, and that would be quite something, wouldn’t it?’

  Trilby nodded, not really listening. It was always the same when she was involved with a new set of drawings, making herself laugh deep down, but holding it back while getting it all down before the laughter burst out of her, and stood in the way of her caricatures.

  Yet she could not help delighting in seeing Berry and Molly, Aphrodite and Mrs Johnson Johnson laughing too.

  The fact was, and it could not be denied, making other people laugh was something that Trilby found not just satisfactory, but thrilling. For a few minutes, or even seconds, when people laughed she could see that they had been forced to stop worrying about the Bomb, or bills, or in Berry’s case some new portrait that was not pleasing some new client.

  ‘Yes,’ Molly continued. ‘Yes, if you thought you wouldn’t mind, Trilby, I could show your last set of drawings to this man we know, and see what he thought. I mean, it just might be that your drawings are amusing only to all of us, love, you know, because we are all in them. But, on the other hand, it might mean that if he finds them funny, he could show them to his boss, and he might buy them.’

  Trilby frowned. She could not imagine, not in a thousand years, actually selling what she had drawn. It had never occurred to her. Indeed, it had to be faced, she often drew just for the amusement of their neighbours, an amusement which, she had to admit, meant that she gained a great deal of popularity with them all, not to mention a taste of their fresh croissants and home-made pâtés and casseroles. The drawings were, in their way, her meal ticket.

  Not that amusing the neighbours was the only reason for her escape into a world of her own. It was also a relief, for it never seemed to matter to her, once she started to draw, what happened in the outside world. Nothing mattered once she took her pencil in her hand. Not the typing pool, not Agnes, not her father’s lonely, unhappy life; none of that mattered once she was busy with her pencil and drawing pad. So now that Molly mentioned the possibility of trying to sell what Trilby did, of being paid money for The Popposites, it seemed somehow almost greedy, such was the fulfilment that she gained from her observations of the little world of Glebe Street.

  Nevertheless, she gave Molly and Berry a set of the latest drawings and, having done so, put the whole matter out of her mind.

  Happily Agnes was out when Molly rang one evening the following week.

  ‘Come round, at once. You must, really. Such excitement. We are popping several corks.’

  By now, as was her habit, Trilby had changed into her black velvet dressing gown, but kno
wing that Berry and Molly would not care how she was dressed she did not bother to change but sauntered out into the back garden, let herself out of the bottom gate and into their garden and drifted up to their French windows, not really thinking very much about anything other than that it was a fine night and that despite its being a London night sky above them she could see a great many stars, which to Trilby was always and eternally magical.

  ‘Molly!’ Berry, tall, bespectacled and always, it seemed to Trilby, in an apron and gym shoes, and faded jeans, called out to his wife. ‘She’s here! Trilby’s here!’

  Molly, always elegant and still pretty, came into the room with both her hands outstretched towards Trilby.

  ‘My dear Trilby, guess what?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  Standing in her black velvet dressing gown Trilby tried to look soignée and grown up, cool and even a little off-beat all at the same time, while also trying to ignore the very real fact that she could see at once from Molly’s glowing expression that something exciting had happened.

  ‘My dear, guess what?’ she said again. ‘He loves it!’

  Trilby looked at her, straight-faced. Her habit of not being entirely present in her life sometimes caught up with her, and not just when she was in the typing pool. She knew she could not say ‘Who likes it?’, it would sound too rude, so she settled instead for something suitably vague.

  ‘Oh, so that is good, I suppose?’ She smiled and raised her eyebrows questioningly, her head on one side.

  ‘Good!’ The word burst out of Berry, and he hurried off to his kitchen. ‘Tell her, Moll, tell her. Go on, tell her how good this is.’

  ‘Sit down while I get us both some champagne,’ Molly commanded, and she opened the drink cupboard where they kept what sometimes seemed to Trilby a thousand glasses of all different shapes, and a hundred different types of wine bottles the same. ‘There.’

  Molly sat down opposite Trilby, and Trilby sipped at the champagne, while Molly stared at her, and Trilby looked around the Nichols’ sitting room, which she liked so much, being such a mixture, as it was, of the old and the new, the beautiful and the strange. African masks placed on a Chinese Chippendale sideboard, a white leather sofa beside a chintz chair. It was all endlessly interesting, and, to Trilby, somehow stimulating.