The End of Summer Page 4

  I continued to ignore him. “For how long?” I insisted grimly.

  “Well, as long as we do. I don’t know. For the winter maybe.”

  I said, “There isn’t room.”

  “Of course there’s room. And whose house is this anyway?” He drained the beer can, tossed it neatly across the kitchen into the trash can, and went out to bring in the next load of luggage. This time he carried the cases into his bedroom. I put down Mitzi’s dog basket and followed him. What with the bed and the suitcases and the two of us, there wasn’t much room.

  I said, “Where’s she going to sleep?”

  “Well, where do you think she’s going to sleep?” He sat on the monstrous bed, and the springs complained bitterly. “Right here.”

  I could think of nothing to say. I simply stared at him. This had never, ever happened before. I wondered if he had gone out of his mind.

  Something in my face must have got through to him then, for he suddenly looked contrite and took my hands.

  “Janey, don’t look like that. You’re not a kid any more, I don’t have to pretend to you. You like Linda, I wouldn’t have brought her back if I didn’t know you liked her. And she’ll be company for you, I won’t have to leave you alone so much. Oh, come on, take that dismal face off and go and make a pot of coffee.”

  I pulled my hands free. I said, “I haven’t got time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I … I have to go and pack.”

  I went out of his room, and into my own, and I pulled my suitcase out from under the bed, and put it on the bed and opened it, and started to pack, like people do in films, opening drawers one by one and emptying them into the suitcase.

  From the open door behind me my father spoke.

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  I turned to look at him, my hands full of shirts and belts and scarves and handkerchiefs. I said, “I’m going.”

  “Where?”

  “Back to Scotland.”

  He took a single step into the room, and jerked me round to face him. I went on quickly, not letting him say a word. “You had four letters,” I told him. “Three from my grandmother and one from the solicitors. You opened them and you read them and you never told me, because you didn’t want me to go back. You didn’t even discuss them with me.”

  His grip on my arm never loosened, but I thought his face lost a little of its colour.

  “How did you know about those letters?”

  I told him about David Stewart. “He told me everything,” I finished. “Not that I needed to be told,” I added recklessly, “because I knew it all anyway.”

  “And just what exactly did you know?”

  “That you never wanted me to stay at Elvie after Mother died. That you wouldn’t ever want me to go back.” He watched me, puzzled. “I was listening,” I shouted at him, as though he had suddenly gone deaf. “I was in the hall, listening, and I heard everything that you and my grandmother said to each other.”

  “And you never said a word?”

  “What good would it have done?”

  He sat carefully on the edge of my bed, so as not to disturb my packing. “Did you want to be left behind?”

  His obtuseness infuriated me. “No, of course I didn’t, I’ve loved being with you, I wouldn’t have had it any other way, but that was all seven years ago, and now I’m an adult, and you had no right to hide away those letters and not say anything to me.”

  “Do you want to go back so badly?”

  “Yes, I do. I love Elvie, you know how much it means to me.” I picked up a hairbrush, my photographs, jammed them down the sides of the case. “I … I wasn’t going to say anything about the letters. I thought it would make you miserable, and I couldn’t go anyway, because you hadn’t anyone to look after you. But now, it’s different.”

  “All right, so it’s different, and you’re going. I’m not going to stop you. But how are you going to get there?”

  “David Stewart’s leaving La Carmella at eleven. If I hurry I can catch him. He has a seat booked for me on the New York plane tomorrow morning.”

  “And when are you coming back?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Some time I suppose.” I pushed in a book, Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea, which I can never be without, and my Simon and Garfunkel LP. I shut down the lid of the case, and everything bulged out and it wouldn’t close, so I opened it again, and flattened things frantically, and still it wouldn’t work, and in the end it was my father who did it for me, by sheer brute force, holding down the lid of the case, and forcing the locks to snib.

  Over the closed suitcase, I met his eye. I said, “I wouldn’t be going if Linda hadn’t come…” My voice trailed away. I took my raincoat from the hook on the back of the door, and put it on over my shirt and jeans.

  My father said, “You’re still wearing your apron.”

  It was the sort of thing that once we would have laughed at. Now, in deathly silence I reached round and untied it, and tore it off, and dropped it across the bed.

  I said, “If I take the car, and leave it at the motel, could you or Linda pick it up?”

  “Sure,” said my father … and then, “Wait…” and he disappeared into his room again, only to return with a fist full of money, five dollar bills, ten dollars, one dollar, all dirty and ragged as a bundle of old newspapers. “Here,” he said, and shoved them into the pocket of my raincoat, “you’d better take this. You might need it.”

  I said, “But you…” but at that moment Linda and Mitzi chose to return from the beach, Mitzi shedding sand all over the floor, and Linda delighted with her short commune with nature.

  “Oh, those waves, I’ve never seen anything like them. They must be ten feet high.” She noticed then, my suitcase, my raincoat, my presumably miserable face. “Jane, what are you doing?”

  “I’m going away.”

  “Where, for heaven’s sakes?”

  “To Scotland.”

  “I hope not because of me.”

  “Partly. But only because it means that there’s someone to look after Father.”

  She looked a little disconcerted, as though looking after Father had been the last thing she expected to do, but she gamely covered up and made the best of it. “Well, that’s fun for you. When’re you going?”

  “Today. Now. I’m taking the Dodge over to La Carmella…” I had already started to back away, because the situation was becoming more than I could bear. My father picked up my case and came after me. “And I hope you have a good winter. And that there aren’t too many storms. And there are eggs and canned tuna fish in the icebox…”

  I went backwards down the porch steps, was out of the house, turned, and ducked under the line of washing (would Linda have the sense to bring it in?), and I got in behind the wheel of the car and my father heaved the suitcase in on to the back seat.

  “Jane—” but I was incapable of saying goodbye. I was actually moving, on my way, when I remembered Rusty. By then it was too late. He had heard me, heard the car door, heard the engine start up, and he was out of the house and after me like a shot, barking indignantly, racing alongside me, his ears flat against his head, and in imminent danger of almost certain death.

  It was the last straw. I stopped the car. My father with a great bellow of “Rusty!” came after the dog. Rusty stood on his back legs and scratched and scrabbled with his claws on the car door, and I leaned over and tried to push him off and said, “Oh, Rusty, don’t. Get down. I can’t take you. I can’t take you with me.”

  Father, actually running, had caught up with us. He swept Rusty up into his arms and stood looking down at me. Rusty’s eyes were hurt and reproachful, but my father had an expression in his face which I had never seen before and did not wholly understand. But I knew in that moment I didn’t want to say goodbye to either of them, and I burst into tears.

  “You will look after Rusty, won’t you?” I bawled, my mouth going square. “Shut him up so that h
e can’t follow the car. And don’t let him get run over. And he only likes Red Heart dog food, not the other kind. And don’t leave him alone on the beach, someone might steal him.” I groped for a handkerchief. As usual I hadn’t got one, and as usual, my father took one out of his pocket, and silently handed it to me. I blew my nose, and then I put up my arms, and pulled him down so that I could kiss him, and Rusty too, and I said goodbye and Father said, “Goodbye, my Pooch,” which he hasn’t called me since I was six, and bawling harder than ever, and hardly able to see a thing, I never looked back, but I knew that they stood there, and that they watched until I was over the ridge and out of sight.

  It was a quarter to eleven when I walked into the reception office of the motel and the man behind the desk looked at my blurred and tear-stained face without interest, as though weeping females came in and out all day long.

  I said, “Has Mr David Stewart left yet?”

  “No, he’s still around. Got a phone bill to settle up.”

  “What number’s his room?”

  He glanced at a board. “Thirty-two.” His eyes ran over my raincoat, my jeans, my stained sneakers, and his hand reached for the phone. “You want to see him?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “I’ll call him … tell him you’re coming. What’s your name?”

  “Jane Marsh.”

  He ducked his head in the direction of the door, sending me on my way. “Number thirty-two,” he said.

  I set off blindly, down a covered path which led alongside a large, very blue swimming pool. Two women lay in long chairs and their children swam and screamed and fought over a rubber ring. Before I had got halfway, David Stewart was coming to meet me. When I saw him I started to run, and much to the interest of the two women, and also to my own surprise, I ran straight into his arms, and he caught me and gave me a reassuring sort of hug, and then held me off and said, “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong.” But I had started to cry again. “I’m coming with you.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve changed my mind, that’s all.”

  “Why?”

  I hadn’t meant to tell him, but it all started spilling out. “Father’s got a friend, and she’s come from Los Angeles … and she’s … she said…”

  He took a look at the two goggling women, said, “Come along,” and led me back to the privacy of his room, pushed me inside, and shut the door behind us.

  “Now,” he said.

  I blew my nose and made a real effort to pull myself together.

  “It’s just that he has someone to look after him. So I can come with you.”

  “Did you tell him about the letters?”

  “Yes.”

  “And doesn’t he mind your coming?”

  “No. He said O.K.”

  David was quiet. I looked at him and saw that he had turned his head, was now regarding me thoughtfully from the corner of his right eye. I found out later that this was a habit picked up over the years on account of his bad eyesight and the fact that he had to wear glasses, but at the moment it was both disconcerting and uncomfortable; like being nailed to the wall.

  I said miserably, “Don’t you want me to come with you?”

  “It’s not that. It’s just that I don’t know you well enough to know if you’re telling the truth.”

  I was too unhappy to be offended. “I never lie,” I said, and then amended this. “And when I do I go all shifty and blush. And Father did say it was all right.” And to prove this I put my hand in my raincoat pocket and pulled out the dirty bundle of dollars. Some of the bills fell, like old leaves, to the carpet. “He gave me some money to spend.”

  David stooped and picked them up and handed them back to me. “I still think, Jane, I should make a point of seeing him before we fly off. We could…”

  “I couldn’t say goodbye again.”

  His face lost its severity. He touched my arm. “Stay here then. I won’t be more than fifteen minutes.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  He went, and I wandered around the room he had occupied, and read a bit of a newspaper, and looked out of the open door, and then went into the bathroom and washed my face and my hands, and combed my hair and found a rubber band and fastened it back. I went out and sat by the pool and waited for him, and when he returned and had loaded our luggage, I got into the car beside him, and we drove out and on to the highway and south to Los Angeles. We stayed the night in a motel near the airport, and the next day we flew to New York, and the next night, to London, and it was not until we were halfway out over the Atlantic that I remembered the young boy who had been coming, next Sunday, to take me surfing.

  4

  I had lived for most of my life in London, but returning was like coming to a city I had never seen before, so changed was it. The airport buildings, the approach roads, the skyline, the great towering blocks of flats, the mass of traffic … all this had happened in the last seven years. In the taxi I sat wedged in a corner with my case at my feet, and it was foggy so that the street lights still burned, and damply cold in a way that I had forgotten.

  I had not slept in the plane and was dizzy with fatigue; nauseated by unlikely meals presented to me at what was, according to my watch, which I had kept at California time, two o’clock in the morning. My body, my head, my eyes ached with travelling, my teeth felt gritty, and my clothes as though I had been wearing them forever.

  There were billboards, fly-overs, rows of houses, and London enclosed us. The taxi turned off at some traffic lights, nosed its way down a quiet crescent, lined with parked cars, and stopped in front of a terrace of tall, early Victorian houses.

  I watched them dully and wondered what I was meant to do now. David leaned across me and opened the door and said, “This is where we get out.”

  “Uh?” I looked at him and wondered how any man, who had shared the—to me—soul-destroying experience of flying, nonstop, half-way round the world, could continue to look clean, relaxed and in charge of the situation. But I fell obediently out of the taxi and stood on the pavement, blinking like an owl and yawning, while he paid the driver off, collected our suitcases, and led the way down a flight of basement steps. The railings which enclosed them were shiny black, the little paved area was clean and swept, and there was a wooden tub full of geraniums … a little sooty, but still bright and gay. He took out a key, the yellow door swung inwards, and I followed him blindly into the flat.

  It was white-painted, smelt of country houses, the floor was scattered with Persian rugs, there were chintz covers on the sofa and arm-chairs, small, old, polished pieces of furniture, a Venetian mirror over the fireplace. I saw books and a pile of magazines, a glass-fronted cabinet filled with Dresden, small patches of hand-worked tapestry … and, beyond the windows on the far side of the room, a miniature sunken patio garden, with a plane tree, ringed by a wooden seat, and a small statue set into the recess of the faded brick wall.

  I stood, yawning. He went to open a window, and I said, “Is this your flat?”

  “No, it’s my mother’s, but I use it when I come to London.”

  I looked around vaguely. “Where is your mother?” It sounded as though I expected her to be hiding under the sofa, but he didn’t smile.

  “She’s in the South of France, on holiday. Come on now, take off your coat, and get comfortable. I’ll go and make a cup of tea.”

  He disappeared through a door. I heard the sound of a tap turned on, a kettle being filled. A cup of tea. The very words were comforting and homely. A cup of tea. I thought of elocution lessons. How Now Brown Cow How Would You Like A Cup Of Tea. I fumbled with the buttons of my raincoat, and eventually got them undone, pulled the coat off and draped it across what looked like a Chippendale chair. I let myself down on to the sofa. It had leaf green velvet cushions and I took one and pulled it into position and put my head down, but I think I was asleep before I actually had time to get my feet up off the floor. I certain
ly don’t remember doing this.

  When I awoke, the light had changed. A long beam of sunshine, dancing with dust, lay like a spotlight across my line of vision. I moved, and knuckled the sleep from my eyes, and looked again, and there was a rug over me, warm and light.

  In the fireplace, a fire flickered. I looked at it for some time before I realized that it was an electric one with sham logs and coal and flames. It seemed, at that moment, infinitely cosy. I turned my head slightly and saw David, deep in an arm-chair, a-wash in papers and brief-cases. He had on different clothes—a blue shirt, a cream-coloured sweater with a V-neck. I wondered in a detached sort of way if he was one of those people who never needed to sleep. He had heard my stirrings and was watching me.

  I said, “What day is it?”

  He was amused. “Wednesday.”

  “Where are we?”

  “London.”

  “No. I mean, whereabouts?”

  “Kensington.”

  I said, “We used to live in Melbury Road. Is that far?”

  “No. Quite near.”

  After a little. “What time is it?”

  “Nearly five.”

  “When do we go to Scotland?”

  “Tonight. We’ve got sleepers booked on the Royal Highlander.”

  With an enormous effort I sat up, and yawned and tried to wipe sleep out of my system and hair out of my face. I said, “I suppose I couldn’t possibly have a bath?”

  “Of course you can,” he said.

  So I had a bath, boiling water that wouldn’t lather properly and handfuls of his mother’s bath salts which he kindly said I could use. When I had bathed I got my suitcase, and found some clean clothes and put them on, and jammed all the dirty ones back in the case, and somehow got the case shut again, and went back into the sitting-room, and found that he had made tea, and that there was hot buttered toast and a plate of chocolate biscuits—the proper kind, not chocolate flavoured cookies which you get in America, but plain biscuits covered with real chocolate.

  I said, “Are these your mother’s?”