Last Guests of the Season

by Sue Gee

  ‘What did you and Robert talk about last night?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I can’t remember.’

  They looked at each other.

  Frances said: ‘Oliver …’ But Dora’s arm went round her again, lovingly holding her, and she turned back to her mug of cold tea and left his name hanging in the air.

  And Oliver said, ‘I’ll leave you in peace,’ and went out, closing the door with unexpected gentleness.

  Guida was downstairs, waiting to wash up the breakfast she had laid but which no one had eaten. Robert, smelling coffee, made efforts to explain, standing in the sitting-room with the doors to the terrace wide open and the sun pouring on to the floorboards, on to the yellow straw shepherd’s cloak and hat, which hung askew.

  ‘Bad … noite,’ he said, thumbing the dictionary. ‘Everyone has slept late.’ He folded his hands and laid his cheek upon them, closing his eyes, and Guida smiled.

  ‘Party,’ she said. ‘Drinking.’

  ‘Drinking, yes,’ said Robert, noticing that the brandy bottles and empty glasses had gone. ‘Party, no.’ He moved to adjust the hat. ‘Never mind. Perhaps you can …’ What could she do?

  ‘Washing,’ said Guida, and moved her arms up and down, as though she were riding a horse.

  Robert laughed. ‘Yes, washing,’ he said. ‘Well done.’

  She went into the shady bathroom, humming, gathering piles of discarded clothes from the basket, and carried them slowly down the corridor and out through the kitchen, flip-flops flapping, climbing the steps to the water tank. Robert stood for a moment, looking up at the huge heavy cloak on its stand, which looked so solid and fell so easily. They must put it down in the cellar; he and Oliver could do it after breakfast.

  He turned back into the room, which since they all arrived had been used more as a thoroughfare than anything else: a place to pass through on the way out to the terrace, or to dump swimming things, coming indoors. He recalled from last year, when it had rained and been cooler, endless afternoons in here of Monopoly and the Game of Life with the lively Hobbs boys, and evenings of bridge with their undemanding parents. This year, it seemed, the game of life was of a different order.

  But the room this morning felt restored to its original airy calm: he looked at the tall windows, hung with loosely woven curtains, at the wooden ceiling, the white walls above the panelling hung with old farm implements – a scythe, a wooden yoke, a saw – and gave an inward sigh of relief.

  However. There was still Tom. Where was he?

  Robert went out on to the hot, empty terrace; he leaned on the parapet, shading his eyes, and looked down. Cicadas scraped and sawed; Tom was standing beneath a peach tree, gesturing, murmuring, in a perpetual, unconscious river of sound, clearly lost in a game. Robert was about to call to him, to ask if he was all right, but there was something unapproachable about that air of complete and private absorption, and he found himself remembering long distant summer days from his own childhood, when he, too, had needed time to himself. Perhaps Tom should be left to find his own way through his troubles; and perhaps Oliver was right – they were less of a problem for him than for those around him. So long as they kept an eye on Jack it would all blow over. In the clear – well, dazzling – light of day, he didn’t want to think about it any more, he really didn’t.

  It was much too hot out here. He stepped back indoors and, waiting for the others to come down to breakfast, he wandered over to the library in the foot of the L, looking along the shelves where they had done much browsing last year on those rainy September afternoons, finding something for everyone: biographies, novels and journals, travel books. Holiday paperbacks, some of them no doubt left by other guests in other seasons, occupied, with worn copies of the Reader’s Digest, two or three shelves: Agatha Christie, Dick Francis, Barbara Cartland, Barbara Pym.

  ‘I adore Barbara Pym,’ he heard Linda Hobbs saying earnestly, standing there in her Laura Ashley dress, feet in the Dr Scholl sandals which had clumped across the wooden floors all fortnight.

  ‘Who is she again?’ asked Geoffrey, wrinkling his nose.

  After last night, Robert thought he could do with a bit of Geoffrey.

  On the marble-topped desk in the middle of this L lay a guest-book, and the folder of local information Robert had shown to Oliver on the evening he and Frances had arrived. That evening, he remembered now, he had stood unseen on the balcony overlooking the terrace, watching them, so formal with one another, so polite. He had speculated on them then, and on the intensity he had seen in Frances’s face, as she looked at Claire, and he continued, despite himself and his desire to let things be, to speculate, although some of his questions were now answered.

  Noises came from the terrace: he found Tom squatting down on the orange tiles, watching something. Robert shielded his eyes again. Christ, it was hot.

  ‘What’ve you found there?’

  ‘Just some ants. They’re really interesting, ants, aren’t they? Really strong.’

  ‘Yes.’ He stood looking down at scurrying legs, enormous breadcrumbs. He squatted down beside Tom, putting out a finger, and the ants, undaunted, turned to left and right. ‘You mustn’t worry about Jack,’ he said casually.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I mean teasing, being grumpy. Don’t let it bother you.’

  Tom didn’t answer. His face had a better colour now; he put out a finger of his own, and laughed. ‘Look at them, all in a muddle.’

  From behind them they could hear voices, people gathering. The smell of coffee, being brought through from the kitchen, wafted through the open doors. About time.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, patting Tom’s shoulder, getting stiffly up again. Perhaps he should start doing morning exercises. Oh, to hell with it. Life was too short for morning exercises. ‘Breakfast.’

  Tom got to his feet. ‘Can I sit next to you?’

  There were two entrances to the cellar. One was inside the house, a narrow door almost opposite the bathroom, the other a padlocked door in the house wall beneath the terrace, a place where, when unlocked, deliveries of Calor gas could be made from the lower road running down past the garden to the village. Unpacking the car on the afternoon of their arrival, Robert and Claire, as last year, had put the deflated dinghy there, in its bag, out of the way but easy to get at and blow up again. The football and cricket stuff was there too. But it was, naturally, the upstairs door through which, after breakfast, Robert and Oliver manoeuvred the heavy wooden stand, up-ended, lying on its side like a corpse. Behind them came Claire and Frances, bearing the garments themselves, and behind them the children, excited. Tom, it seemed, was quite recovered now; Jessica, after some disagreement and adult negotiation, was wearing the hat.

  The light – a single bulb, a single grimy window in the corner – was dim, the narrow stairs steep. Oliver, going first, had the head and shoulders, Robert the crosspiece of the base, a little more awkward, banging against the walls. Behind him the straw cloak and trousers rustled.

  ‘Don’t push,’ said Claire.

  ‘We’re not,’ said the children.

  Oliver reached the stone floor, and moved away from the foot of the stairs rather too quickly. Robert, bent over, carrying most of the weight at their point, was for an unnerving moment almost dragged down after him.

  ‘Steady on.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Oliver stopped, looking over his shoulder, then inched forward until Robert, step by step, had come to the bottom. They moved out into the middle of the floor; the women and children followed.

  ‘Where should it go?’

  Robert grunted. ‘Anywhere. Over in that corner.’

  They carried it across, past a table of empty wine bottles, thick with dust, and set it down beneath the window. Robert felt his arms trembling; he wiped his forehead.

  ‘Well done. Right, let’s have the cloak.’

  Claire and Frances brought it between them – like handmaidens, he thought suddenly, and as they reached up to ease it on to the w
ooden shoulders, smoothing down the layers of straw, Jessica said: ‘It’s like dressing a bride, or something.’ She stretched her arms wide. ‘I feel pretty, oh so pretty …’

  ‘Not much wrong with you this morning,’ said Robert.

  ‘And you look very nice in that hat,’ said Oliver.

  ‘That’s because you can’t see her face,’ said Jack, but halfheartedly, looking around. ‘It’s wicked down here.’

  The cellar was large, with a passage, walk-in cupboards, a pleasantly woody, musty smell. A half-filled wine rack ran from floor to low ceiling; there were large Calor gas bottles, paint tins, a paraffin stove, a couple of deck-chair frames, the accumulated bits and pieces of years of getting things out of the way. There was a box, for younger visitors, full of old toys kept from when the children of the house were small – bricks, a pushcart, a pull-along duck.

  ‘Cars!’ said Jack, digging into it. ‘I’d forgotten all about this box.’ He knelt on the floor, running a blue pick-up truck up and down. Across the room, Jessica was taking off the hat, shaking her hair. She passed it to Oliver, who took it with a bow, then carefully replaced it on the stand, barely taller than he was.

  ‘Well, that’s that done,’ said Robert. ‘Good. Now, what does the day hold in store? What does everyone feel like?’

  Sitting at the breakfast table, neither he nor Claire had, in the end, mooted the idea of a day apart. Somehow, when it came to it, it seemed rude and unfriendly – particularly looking at Frances, who came down late, and sat eating maize bread and honey in silence; particularly after Jack’s outburst upstairs.

  ‘I mean it,’ Claire had said to him, coming down. ‘One more piece of behaviour like that and there’ll be trouble.’ What sort of trouble? She couldn’t imagine, she didn’t want to have to think about threats and discipline.

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Jack, leaping the last two stairs to the bottom.

  ‘Well,’ she said now, seeing Oliver and Frances havering, not quite sure of the options, ‘we could take the dinghy out, couldn’t we?’

  ‘Yes!’ said Jessica. ‘Yes, brilliant. The dinghy’s really nice,’ she told them, and Oliver smiled at her. ‘You can drift downriver in it like a queen.’

  ‘White or black?’ he asked her gravely.

  ‘Is that all right then?’ Claire asked, pleased to have Jess so enthusiastic. ‘Jack? Happy with that?’

  He was digging around in the box again. ‘Can I pump it up?’

  ‘We’ll take it in turns. Tom? Where’ve you got to? Would you like to go for a row?’

  ‘Okay,’ he called. He had found something, too, an old wooden doll’s house, pushed to the back of one of the walk-in cupboards along the passage. He drew it forward on its shelf and ran his fingers down the dusty rooftop; it left a trail, and he blew at the dust and sneezed.

  ‘Come on, then,’ said Robert, to whom the prospect of drifting downriver in the dinghy felt all at once quite perfect, just the thing to put everyone right, but who knew very well who would be the one to pump it up properly and carry it, and wanted to get it over with. ‘Jack? Leave that stuff now, you can come down here another time.’

  ‘If it rains,’ said Claire, and they all laughed at such improbability – seizing, after the night’s events, on anything to laugh at – and began to make their way up the stairs again. Already the morning’s dense heat had begun to soak into the house.

  ‘Come on, Tom,’ said Frances, over her shoulder.

  ‘Coming.’

  The doll’s house roof had dull orange tiles, but the rest of it, the walls, were unpainted, and the windows, most of them, anyway, were staring squares, without frames or glass, though one on the upper floor had shutters on tiny hinges. Downstairs there was an entrance at the side, also unfinished and doorless, but at the front were double doors, half closed. Tom picked at the gap and got them open; he peered inside but could see nothing. Then the whole front must come off – yes, there was a catch at the side. He fumbled with it, hating little fiddly things, and as it came up, and the front swung away in a yawn, he suddenly saw, in the way you saw things in a dream, a human head, with a hinged lid lifting off it and a hollow of darkness inside. Horrible. For a moment he went blank. Then he slammed it down again in his mind.

  The double doors would lead you, if you were a doll, into what was now revealed as an enormous downstairs room, with smaller ones leading off it, and a corridor to wooden stairs with a turn in them. On the upper floor was a broad landing, another long corridor, three bedrooms. Somehow it felt as if he had seen all this before, and again he had the disturbing sensation of being in a waking dream, not quite real, until he realised that he had seen it before, that it was this house, somebody’s model of this house. Wow.

  He stood back, to check, and saw the tools he hadn’t noticed before on the shelf below: chisels and a little saw, boxes of wooden bits and pieces and screws. And realising that it was, indeed, a model, he felt better, sort of back in the world, though there remained a strange sensation: as if he, seeing a small version of the house, was also shrunken, like Alice in Wonderland, which he’d seen the cartoon of. As if one of him had gone upstairs with the others, a normal-sized boy, and another one of him had got left down here, much smaller. More than that. More as if he were both inside himself, very small, looking out, and at the same time watching himself, from a long way away.

  A rhythmical puffing sound was coming from somewhere, like a distant train. Or someone gasping for breath. He was beginning to feel peculiar now, he didn’t like it. Then he heard voices, and someone asking: ‘Where’s Tom?’ That was Frances.

  ‘I’m in here,’ he called. He shut up the front of the house, and the lid in his head went click, though he’d shut it already. The huffing and puffing continued, from quite close, he realised now, from just the other side of the door across the cellar. He went over quickly, pressing his face to the gap: he could see Robert’s back, and bits of the others. ‘Here!’ he called. ‘Let me out.’

  ‘It’s locked,’ Robert said to Frances, who came to the door, putting her eye to the gap. She and Tom looked at each other: he saw her pupil grow dark and enormous.

  ‘What are you doing in there?’ she said. ‘You’ll have to go back up the stairs, go on.’

  ‘Can’t I come out here?’

  ‘Tom, it’s locked, Robert’s just said so. Go on, off you go – you can help us with the dinghy, can’t he, Robert?’

  ‘More the merrier,’ said Robert. Frances moved away from the gap and Tom caught a glimpse of blue and yellow, Robert’s foot going up and down.

  ‘Coming!’ He turned and made for the stairs. In the far corner, in the shadows, the shepherd’s cloak stood watching: he felt himself, realising this, turn, as sharply as if a wire were pulling him, into a wide, sweeping circle away from it. He ran up the stairs, slamming the door behind him at the top, and dashed through the kitchen, where Claire was doing things.

  ‘You okay?’ she asked, as he went past.

  ‘Fine, I’m going to help Robert.’ He pushed open the door and Guida, ringing out clothes up at the water tank at the top of the steps, waved down to him.

  ‘Bom dia.’

  ‘Bom dia!’ he called. ‘Bom dia! We’re going out in a boat.’

  She smiled and nodded, uncomprehending, and he raced down the steps to the garden, disturbing the crouching cat beneath them: she leapt towards the bushes.

  ‘Hello, puss!’ Running round the side of the house, he meant to tell Frances about the model house down in the cellar, but then he saw the dinghy, the white nylon ropes round the side, its beautiful colours swelling and growing with the steady puff puff of the foot pump, coming alive, and he forgot about everything else.

  Deep reflections of the towering cliff face and the pines sank into the shining water on the far side of the river, and broke, rippling, steady and slow, over the slippery rocks as Robert rowed the dinghy down towards the bend. Out here, in the middle of the river, the water was deep, the cur
rent lazy: they were away from the rocks, away from the pebbled shallows on the near side where they had spent the other morning watching dragonflies and fishing with the nets. It was very hot, but the boys were wearing their sunhats and trailing their hands over the sides; birdsong and the gentle plash of the oars were the only sounds to break the silence.

  Claire and Frances, sitting on the shady grey sand of the bank, waved as they went past, and the boys waved back, smiling, clearly soothed.

  ‘Perfect,’ said Frances, watching them. ‘You’re very clever.’ She felt in the family beach bag for the last packet of cigarettes. ‘Do you mind…?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ said Claire. ‘It keeps the flies off.’

  Frances lit and inhaled deeply, shaking out the match. Robert and the boys were rounding the bend, the mass of cliff to their right, and on their left the gentle slope of the mountainside where she had gone walking yesterday afternoon, writing to Dora. She blew out smoke in a slow cloud, feeling this, the first cigarette of the day, make her light-headed.

  ‘Tom seems fine now, doesn’t he?’ said Claire.

  ‘Yes, yes, he does – I told you, he always is the next day. Last night was different, but I think he’s forgotten all about it now, thank God.’ She inhaled again, coming down a little as nicotine and bloodstream renewed their acquaintance. ‘I’m just sorry it gave you all such a bad night.’

  ‘It didn’t, not in the end. It was rather nice having Jess in with me again, we haven’t done it for ages. What about you – did you sleep all right afterwards?’

  ‘Oh, yes, fine, thanks.’

  I should have Fine, thanks, stamped on a badge and pinned to me, thought Frances, in whom last night’s dreams still lingered, and she shut her eyes, at once seeing herself in the office, on a stream of Monday mornings, waiting for Dora’s step on the stairs.

  In the separation of the weekends, the intensity of the inner life Frances led was sometimes overwhelming. She and Oliver had people for supper, or went out for supper. Frances smiled at everyone, and thought about Dora. Adrian and Dora had themselves been to supper with them once or twice; Frances and Oliver had been to their house, once with Tom. Oliver liked Adrian, as did most people, as, indeed, did Frances: a kindly, musical man with an administrative job in the Open University. Occasionally Oliver had suggested they saw more of them: Frances had reacted vaguely.