Summer

by Ali Smith

  I don’t think they have that on the menu, her daughter said.

  Grace, walking through town next day, smiles. Her clever daughter.

  Her clever daughter had noticed how the stone in that corner of the old man’s room was really remarkably like the stone Arthur was carrying around with him. And when Arthur opened the bag and got the stone out to give to the old man, told him his mother had asked him to do this in her will and put it on the bed, the old man saw it and said the weird thing,

  the stone is a child –, Grace said at dinner last night. What a strange thing to –

  No, her daughter interrupted. That’s not what he said. He said you’ve brought back the child.

  The woman called Elizabeth had asked Arthur to hand her the stone. She’d placed it in the curve of the piece of sculpture the man had in his bedroom.

  It looks really good there, her daughter said.

  The piece of sculpture was a real piece, the woman told them when the old man was dozing, by the artist Barbara Hepworth. Grace had thought it unlikely. What kind of old man’s got a Barbara Hepworth sculpture just lying around?

  But when she’d gone to bed she couldn’t get the thought of that piece of stone out of her head. Well, that’s what art is, maybe. Something that impresses mysteriously on you and you don’t know why. They did look good together, the two stones, the curved one with the hole in it, the perfectly spherical one.

  Walking along a pavement now, the front of her head filled with an image.

  The image was her own mother’s face, but as if made into a mask. A death mask or a life mask? Neither. A mask of her mother’s face beyond both life and death, beyond happy and sad, alive and dead at once – no, not at all dead, nothing dead about it, not in any way. It was clean, and pure in the bone structure, the outline. It had skin the colour of life, hair scraped back off the forehead in repose, and it was made of stone. Next to it a smaller stone mask was the face of Grace’s fourteen year old self, the age she was the year her mother died and the face she was wearing the moment she set fire to an armchair in the front room of their house, her just-dead mother’s armchair. In her head as she walked along pavement the two faces sat blank-eyed next to each other.

  Grace shook her head, shook herself back into a story of herself she could take some control of.

  She was on her way to find a churchyard. She’d visited it one summer.

  She passed a building with a film poster outside it.

  Paths of Glory.

  It caught her eye because the building was an old cinema. It was the old cinema –

  and this was the point at which a memory, one she didn’t even know she had, cracked open inside her head like the green of a seed cracking through the husk around it –

  backstage in the little town cinema,

  quaint little place ain’t it quaint and dainty

  (that’s Claire Dunn singy-speaking like she’s in a Sondheim show),

  1989,

  summer of discontent,

  they’re doing a two-night run here, Shakespeare tonight, Dickens tomorrow. It’s hardly a theatre, darling, rearrange your expectations, Frank said when they arrived, and he’s right. They’re performing the play in front of a bright white cinema screen because there are no drapes or curtain of any kind, terrible lighting deck, no stage to speak of, just a narrow platform, and there isn’t any backstage as such, just a box room stuffed full of the whole cast right now, fourteen people all trying to remember their lines and no mirror to do the make-up in.

  Which is why Grace is sitting outside by herself on the concrete steps that lead down out of the back door. She’s finished her first acts. Her character’s dead and gone now till her cue, that sky up there is an early evening blue, the birds high, the ones her mother used to say the thing about when they arrived, well Grace, that’s the summer here. And when they were gone, well Grace, that’s the summer gone –

  and then someone hisses behind her,

  Grace for fuck sake, you’re on, you’re late, you’re on –

  Shit!

  and she ups and races back in, up the stairs, through the bendy corridor, and belts at speed right out on to the platform to take up her Act 5 pose as the dead queen’s statue.

  And then she sees Gerry and Nige are still on, still telling the audience all the amazing things that’ve happened offstage.

  Which makes it still scene 2.

  She’s not due on for several pages.

  Ah.

  Uh oh.

  So she just sort of stands there, middle of the platform, frozen in mid-run, doesn’t know what to do with her hands, and now the whole audience (and the place is packed out tonight for such a little out-of-the-way town) has seen, running like a girl, a queen who’s meant to be dead – which is the whole point, she has to be dead then come alive at the right moment for the play to work.

  She takes three steps back.

  She’s now standing roughly where the curtain that’s meant to hide her is meant to be.

  She straightens her back, raises her hand, takes up her statue pose.

  One or two people in the audience laugh uncertainly.

  The boys are looking at her in confusion.

  Then Gerry starts his lines again. They say their lines like she’s not on the stage. Nige goes off and Ralph and Ed come on to say theirs. Ralph stares at her in a panic. He has a hard enough time remembering lines as it is. Stalwart Ed keeps going in his reedy voice. They get through the scene, then Frank and Joy and Jen and Tim and Tony and Tom etc troop on for scene 3 and they see her there and all stand back aghast.

  Especially Joy, who’s wheeling the curtain frame on that Grace is supposed to be hidden behind, and who’s got so many lines about how they’re all going to see something amazing which is hidden from them behind this very curtain right now.

  Grace holds her pose.

  She holds her hand just so. She looks straight through Joy. Joy finally gets it, stops wheeling the curtain aimlessly up and down the platform like a hospital nurse, and positions it in front of Grace.

  Whew.

  They start the scene.

  The people in the audience who know the story already have been guffawing for the last several minutes. The people who don’t, well, God help them. Now that she’s behind the curtain she shakes her arm to get rid of the pins and needles. She’s got twenty five lines till behold and say tis well. Then the curtain gets wheeled away and she has to hold the statue pose while they all look at her, first as a statue, then as a living body, and 120 lines before her cue to speak: turn good lady our Perdita is found. She gets her lines ready in her head.

  You gods look down

  and from your sacred vials

  pour your graces

  upon my daughter’s head.

  You gods look down

  and from your sacred –

  But –

  ah.

  Frank said a West End casting agent on holiday in the area is in tonight.

  Grace behind the curtain breaks into a cold sweat.

  It was Claire Dunn who cued her.

  Was it? It was.

  She’s 99% sure.

  Claire Dunn has sabotaged Grace’s only chance so far at anything West End.

  You gods look down

  Did she do it on purpose?

  Did she know what she was doing?

  You gods look down

  —

  Next day the female members of STD (Sublime Tension Drama) (don’t bother making the jokes, everyone in STD has heard them all before) are meeting in the cinema – which is like a pot with its lid on it on a lit gas ring in this heat – to rehearse a sticky bit of The World As It Rolled. The male members (har-har), except for Ed who’s directing The World, are in the local hotel’s very nice garden having beer and a pub lunch. They
are lucky sods.

  Ed gets them all to sit round on the platform in front of the cinema screen. He says he’s got an exercise for them to do. He tells them he wants them to think about the word meander.

  Me, he says. Ander.

  They all look blank.

  In other words, make myself other, Ed says. Make yourself someone else. Take a wander through the concept of multiple selfhood. Because this is the very beating heart of the story of David Copperfield. Think of all those different names he gets called all through his life, Trot, Trotwood, Daisy, Davy. And yet he’s still the same person. Isn’t he? So I want us all to do an exercise where we literally become someone else in front of all our eyes. Yet we still remain ourselves. Let’s go anticlockwise. Joy. You start.

  Do what anticlockwise? Joy says.

  Joy is Frank’s sister who’s been drafted in at the last minute, because someone else dropped out, to play Paulina in his Winter’s Tale. She isn’t really a drama type though her Paulina is really impressive for someone who’s not a bona fide actor of serious intent; she usually works in an estate agent’s, has taken the summer off to do this because Frank is directing the Shakespeare and asked her to, so is only here on sufferance and can never be arsed to play along with what she calls all the workshop shite.

  I want you to other yourself, Ed says.

  Anticlockwise? Joy says.

  I want you to take the line: The clock began to strike, and I began to cry simultaneously, Ed says. And before you say it, I want you to go right back to the moment of birth of someone who’s in you, but is other than yourself.

  Yeah but I’ll be doing that anyway when I’m acting, Joy says. Won’t I? So why bother?

  Ed looks personally hurt.

  He is a sweet chap, gay. He’s sleeping with Nige, everybody knows, though they’re all acting like it’s a really big secret. Grace has her own couple of secrets. She’s sleeping with both Tom and Jen (Florizel and Perdita) and neither Tom nor Jen knows about the other. Nobody in the whole group knows, which takes some organizing, but so far she’s pulling it off. Jen and Tom both think she’s committed to each of them, at least for the summer. At the same time she’s made it clear to both that she’s not really available and can’t commit for longer; she’s told them about Gordon Stone, her longterm boyfriend at home.

  (In reality there’s no home and there’s no such person. Gordonstoun is the name of a posh school in Scotland that her mother used to work at before she met her father. Prince Charles went there.)

  An argument breaks out before any other inner selves have been accessed by any of the cast.

  The argument is the same one they keep having. It is getting tiresome. It’s about why Leontes in The Winter’s Tale wigs out quite soon after the start of the play.

  The argument is about feminism. Again.

  Grace sighs.

  But it’s not about gender, she says. It’s just a blight. A blight comes down on him, on his mind and on his country from nowhere. It’s irrational. It has no source. It just happens. Like things do, they just suddenly change, and it’s to teach us that everything is fragile and that what happiness we think we’ve got and imagine will be forever ours can be taken away from us in the blink of an eye. You’re bringing 1989 politics to a 1623 play.

  1611, Ed says.

  Okay, Grace says, but the point still stands. Give or take a decade in the 1600s.

  Yeah but you can’t know that, Grace, unless you’re an expert in history between 1611 and 1623, Ginette says.

  For fuck sake, Grace says.

  They bring up all the lines again about women’s utterance, women’s tongues, the jealousy Leontes is feeling because his wife is better with language than he is.

  Yeah but this is all just, like, notes in the margin, Grace says. What’s really happened is as random as, I don’t know, a plague. Like frost on flowers. A blight. It comes from absolutely nowhere. Shakespeare has Leontes say it. His brain’s infected.

  Yeah but an infection still comes from something or somewhere, Ginette says.

  And other themes in the play signal that the thing that needs to be cured is the relations between the genders, Jen says.

  Even Jen, with whom she’s secretly sleeping, is siding against her.

  Grace shakes her head.

  They know nothing about real loss. None of them.

  It’s just what happens, she says. A sad tale’s best for winter. So Shakespeare injects sadness, like a device, a playwright’s device, he infects things with winter precisely so that he can have a summer, make a merry tale come out of a sad one.

  Ed puts on his teacher voice.

  Let’s look for a moment, shall we, at the very start, he says. The very first scene. What Camillo says is it is a gallant child that physics the subject.

  Grace can’t be bothered to argue any more.

  Physics was never my subject, she says.

  No, Grace, Ed says. Physic doesn’t mean physics here.

  Give me a break, Grace says.

  It means something that makes people well, Ed says. And subject here means a citizen, the subjects, the people in the kingdom. It’s about what makes the people in the kingdom ill or well.

  And that’s whether the person in charge is a misogynistic tyrannous bad leader, a bigoted useless king or governor who tells everybody that unless they toe his line they’re traitors and betrayers, Ginette says.

  Yeah and that’s all tied in with the gender dichotomy in the play. Can’t deny it, Grace, someone else says.

  Then Claire says:

  If only Tom was here too, eh Grace? Then we could all talk openly about Shakespeare’s intentions in his use of the words infection and affection and what happens when people aren’t as transparent with other people as they should be being.

  What you on about, Clairey? Jen says.

  I’m on about which of us in the company are getting a surplus of Grace, Claire says.

  I’ve certainly had a surplus of this, Grace says. I’m off for a smoke.

  Claire winks at her.

  Come back a new Grace, yeah? Claire says.

  It’s, wow, like you know the whole play, Claire. All the places the word grace gets used. It’s amazing how much of it you know off by heart, Ed says.

  Photographic memory, Claire is saying. Come back soon, Grace. Jen and Tom’ll be waiting, we all will. Hoping for a better Grace.

  I don’t see how anyone can play Hermione properly yet be so dead to the text, someone says behind Grace as she pushes the firedoors open.

  Why d’you keep bringing Tom into it? Grace hears Jen say as the doors swing shut behind her.

  Relief.

  Blazing light after the dark.

  Hot out here in the full sun. Grace, cold to the core, shivers. She stands for a minute, lights a cigarette.

  She walks to the corner, looks out over the flat expanse of land beyond the town. There’s a heat haze off the tarmac at the edge where the houses stop.

  This summer, they’ve been saying in the papers, is the finest summer of this whole century, even better than the one in 1976. 1940. 1914.

  She drops the cigarette half smoked, grinds it into the pavement.

  Fuck them and their themes.

  She simply sets off.

  She doesn’t care where she’s going, she’s going somewhere, anywhere away from the world as it rolls, away from the envy with its own mini heat haze coming off Claire, who’s possibly after Tom or maybe Jen, but above all has clearly seen the truly amazing effect on every audience a statue that comes to life can have when the people watching don’t expect it, and so, wants Grace’s part.

  Or maybe she just likes causing trouble.

  A lot of people find that kind of thing stimulating.

  Grace shrugs as she walks along.

  The sex with Tom is
kind of what you’d expect, does the job. The sex with Jen is pretty good, Jen is unexpectedly heady and determined. There’s a bit of having to listen to Jen’s emotional turmoil about her brother who’s a drug addict. But Grace has the patience and the right facial (or facile) expression; she’s an actor. Anyway it’s worth it to give herself the space from Tom, who can’t quite believe his luck at getting to fuck someone who’s got such a main role in the show and last time they did it told her he loves her and how in love he is, which always makes Grace literally want to throw up.

  She walks past a house where some neighbours are having an altercation. A woman is standing on the pavement with her arm round the shoulder of a shamefaced boy. Her son? His mother? The woman has the boy in the grip of a loving vice and is shouting at a substantially bosomed woman in the doorway of the house, and what she’s shouting is,

  it’s a brothel, it’s nothing but a brothel you’re keeping.

  The woman in the doorway has a smile going up one side of her face while the other side is straight, which makes her face look a bit like a torturer. She says in a calm voice full of passive aggression, which, when Grace hears it, she decides to remember as a good example of someone like this should she ever have to act someone like it,

  the boy’s just enjoying himself, Mrs Mallard. He’s just having a good time.

  He’s twelve years old, the woman on the pavement shouts back.

  He’s not doing anything to hurt anyone, Mrs Mallard, the smug woman in the doorway says as Grace walks past.

  As she passes the boy casts a glance at Grace.

  She winks at him. He looks away.

  He’s got a mother.

  He doesn’t know how fucking lucky he is.

  She crosses a parched marsh with its yellow burnt grasses and its noise of insects. She takes a single track road that opens up off to her right because it looks so nice. It’s a road clearly not much used by anybody. There’s a grassline running up the centre of it, and tree branches meeting over it, bramble bush tentacles reaching out towards each other from either side.

  It’s beautiful, she thinks.

  She waves away some midges.

  A tiny bird – a wren? flies across her path. Hello, bird.

  Hedgerow.