Last Guests of the Season

by Sue Gee

  Oliver raised his hand in greeting. ‘I’ve got your cigarettes. And stamps.’

  ‘Well done.’ Frances came into the shallows; she stood up, dripping, panting a little from the exertion. ‘Are the others still out in the dinghy? They must have gone for miles.’

  ‘So must you,’ said Claire.

  Frances wiped the water from her face. ‘I feel much better.’ She came out, smiling at Oliver and Jessica. ‘You two look hot. I like that swimsuit.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Jessica moved past, wrapping her arms round herself as the chill of the water rose around her knees.

  ‘We saw a kingfisher!’ A cry came from the bend downriver, and there was the dinghy, with Robert rowing much more slowly now, and the boys shouting and waving.

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘We did – it was brilliant!’

  Claire stood up to greet them, ready to help pull the dinghy ashore, but Oliver and Jess were already plunging in, swimming towards it.

  ‘Our turn!’ called Jess. ‘Our turn now.’

  Robert rested the oars and let the dinghy drift, blue and yellow reflections dancing brokenly at their approach. Claire and Frances stood next to each other, watching.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ Frances said quietly.

  Claire turned to look at her. ‘What?’

  ‘I mean I want to talk. I think. If you don’t mind. I don’t mean now, I mean sometime.’

  ‘Of course. Yes, of course. Whenever.’ Claire turned back to the river, shading her eyes. Robert was laughing, trying to fend off Jessica, scrambling in, no mean feat from the water. ‘You’ll have us over!’

  ‘Good,’ said Jessica, laughing too.

  ‘Careful!’ called Claire. ‘Don’t be silly, Jess, let them come ashore.’

  But the boys were loving it. ‘We’re being attacked! Pirates – abandon ship!’

  Oliver held on to the rocking side. They heard him say, ‘Come on, Tom, out you get,’ and Frances said suddenly:

  ‘He can’t swim that far. It’s too deep for him there.’

  Claire cupped her hands. ‘Robert!’ she shouted. ‘Robert! Stop mucking about – bring it ashore!’

  She was too late. With four people lurching about inside and a big man pulling at it, the dinghy reared up, slow but unstoppable, tipping everyone into the water with a splash that seemed to go on for ever.

  For a moment Frances and Claire just stood there, unable to move. Then, as they raced down over the sand, they saw that no one was trapped beneath it, that they all had hold of it, and that everyone was laughing still, Tom clinging on to Robert’s shoulders and Jack shrieking with excitement: ‘Wicked! Wicked! Do it again!’

  By evening the village, after the long hot afternoon, was cool again, coming to life. Carrying the dinghy, carrying bags and baskets, the two families, minus Claire, who had gone on ahead, made their way out of the maize fields. They walked along the soft earth path beneath the vines and up through the cobbled streets again, greeting familiar faces.

  ‘Bo tar’.’

  ‘Bo tar’.’ The women in their flowery overalls, the toothless old men in shirtsleeves, nodded as they passed, leaning on sticks, tearing off bits of bread as they ate out on balconies, amongst the geraniums.

  ‘There’s Guida,’ said Robert, suddenly recognising, in a group of young people ahead, the girl in jeans and broderie anglaise blouse. She was wearing lipstick, something he didn’t remember noticing before, and her hair was tied back in a ponytail.

  ‘Bo tar’, Guida,’ they chorused, as they drew near, and Guida nodded, turning from her conversation with a boy with slicked-back hair, flickering a smile at Robert and turning back again, clearly not wishing to prolong the encounter.

  ‘Seems funny, seeing her here,’ said Jack.

  ‘Yes.’ Robert eased the weight of the paddles on to the other arm and promised himself a long drink out on the terrace when they got home. Claire was up there already, doing something about supper; they had picnicked down by the river today, no one inclined to make the trek up to the house in the heat, everyone in a good mood, relaxing, falling asleep beneath the trees at select points along the riverbank. Even the boys had slept, something he’d thought impossible out of doors. But now, despite the rest, he was tired from too much fresh air, beginning to yawn.

  They were approaching the intersection with the threshing barn high on their right, where the children were playing out in the yard, and the street to their left, running downhill again, curving round to the shop. Crisps, Robert thought idly; lunch felt a long time ago, and they’d need something to go with the drink. Crisps, as usual, were disappearing out of the cupboard by the sackful. He stopped, and turned to the others.

  ‘I’m just nipping down to the shop. Anyone want anything?’

  ‘Crisps,’ said Jack. He had one end of the dinghy, and Tom the other. They looked sunburned and tousled, as if they’d sleep well tonight.

  ‘Apart from crisps.’

  ‘What else is there?’ said Tom. ‘Can I come with you?’

  ‘Sure.’ He glanced at Oliver and Frances, walking with Jess between them. They looked contained, well-matched, the kind of well-educated family of three you might see walking through an art gallery, at ease, talking companionably. A daughter did suit them, it was true.

  ‘Help Jack with the dinghy then,’ he said to Jess. ‘Go on, it’s only two steps up the hill, it won’t kill you. Right, Tom, off we go.’

  The evening sunshine mellowed the cobbles; they walked hand in hand down the hill, past dogs waking up, scratching themselves, past toddlers with pushcarts, bumping up and down. There was a sudden, extraordinary noise by their feet.

  ‘Hey!’ said Tom, laughing. ‘What was that?’

  They stopped, seeing what looked like a stable door set in the wall beneath the house beside them. Grunts and snuffles came from behind it.

  ‘It’s a pig!’

  ‘Well, well. I’d forgotten about him.’

  They approached the door, seeing, at the base, a gap of some several inches above the step; Tom crouched down, peering. Beside him, Robert saw a moist pink snout, and bristles. The grunting grew louder and more encouraging.

  ‘It’s pitch dark in there.’ Tom pressed his face to the gap.

  ‘Careful.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He might bite.’ Did pigs bite?

  ‘He’s sweet. Can we give him something?’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Just an apple or something.’

  ‘Perhaps. On the way back.’

  The shop was quite full, doing a brisk trade in tinned vegetables and washing-powder. As last year, Robert noted that he was the only English person there. They might flock down to the Algarve, but here, praise be, they had not discovered. The shopkeeper made broken pleasantries of recognition; they shook hands. Robert bought enormous red bags of crisps and, for the pig, a bag of wrinkled yellow apples no bigger than eggs. They walked back up the street through lengthening shadows.

  ‘Here we are!’ Tom called, as they approached the stable door and the grunting began again. He knelt on the step and pushed through an apple: it disappeared in a flurry of snorts. ‘Another one? Here you are.’

  ‘Not too many, he might get tummy-ache.’ Robert nodded to one or two passers-by, who smiled indulgently at the English boy, and yawned again.

  ‘Come on, Tom,’ he said. ‘We’ll see him again another day.’

  Tom got up reluctantly. ‘Do you think he’s always lived in there?’ he asked, as they climbed the hill.

  ‘Probably. I think he belongs to Guida’s uncle. I seem to remember something about pigs from last year.’ Ahead, through the fruit trees, Robert could see Oliver and Frances out on the terrace; he could hear the clink of bottle and glass. Thank God. They reached the big gates and walked past the car just inside, through the garden.

  ‘Hello.’ Frances, changed into a summery green skirt, her hair freshly washed, was leaning over the parapet, cool and relaxed.r />
  ‘Mum! Frances! There’s a pig! We found a pig!’ Tom broke away from Robert and dashed across to the steps, racing up towards her, completely happy.

  Dusk fell; the children were sent to bed. Frances, after supper, sat in the library corner of the sitting-room, deep in an armchair, deep in a book. So much swimming had left her susceptible to the sudden chill of the evening. The others were still out on the terrace, where they had lit a candle, but she, coming indoors for a sweater, had felt cold even with it on, and stopped to browse along the shelves.

  Letters and journals and biographies: for old times’ sake, she pulled out Quentin Bell on Virginia Woolf, dipping here and there into a prose as clear, direct and intimate as if he were addressing her alone, as if he had known her for years. Well, she and Virginia had known each other quite well in Bristol, they’d spent hours together in the library. She turned the pages, she sat down. She came upon a relationship she hadn’t known about at all then, concentrating as she had – as you were supposed to in those days – upon the works. Frances began to read these particular pages, their speculations on the nature of a particular friendship.

  Virginia was fond of Vita. She enjoyed her interest and admiration, she found what she could to admire in Vita’s own writing, though ‘In brain and insight she is not as highly organised as I am.’ The prospect of her coming to lunch was a great amusement and pleasure’. But more?

  ‘Her being “in love” (it must be comma’d thus) with me, excites and flatters and interests …’ That was all? So it seemed, close as the two women became. ‘What is this “love”?’ Virginia had demanded of her journal, marbled pen in febrile fingers racing across the page.

  From up on the hillside came the chime of the church clock, five wavering strokes. Frances stopped reading and looked at her watch: it was just after ten. She sat with her hand on the open pages, listening to the crickets whirr and the low voices of the others outside, engaged in conversation: they sounded at ease, interested in one another, recovered from the effects of the night before. Perhaps the very events of the night before had helped to break the ice. They were beginning to settle – into the place and each other – and England was beginning to feel an immeasurably long way away, as if their lives there were no longer of any importance, no longer, even, quite real.

  Dora, wrote Frances, uneasy with this feeling, I think of you, and wonder what you are doing now …

  There were times when the letter, the long internal conversation, brought Dora so close that Frances could spend whole hours engaged in it – making the journey home from work, collecting Tom from the child-minder, walking back with him to the house and preparing supper all in a daze. Now, she could neither continue writing nor summon Dora’s calming presence to her side. Virginia had loved Vita – had been, it seemed, in some ways devoted to her – but not as Vita loved her. Not in that way.

  Dora, wrote Frances, I am losing you, come back, come back –

  It was no use. Dora, an unwilling spirit in a seance, would not, tonight, be summoned. Frances slowly closed the book and got up to replace it on the shelves, feeling flat and bereft.

  She walked back towards the doors to the terrace; she heard the rustle of other pages, and she turned to see Jessica, falling asleep, propped up in bed with her Walkman on, her book sliding down to the floor. What was she reading? What had Frances been reading at twelve, going on thirteen? Long empty summer evenings came back to her as she crossed the wooden floor to Jessica’s doorway. She saw herself, up in her bedroom, hearing lawnmowers pushed up and down suburban gardens by men in shirtsleeves, hearing birds call, beginning to settle, and the bus on the main road changing gear, driving off and away. Tomorrow’s school uniform lay on the chair at her desk by the window; in her pyjamas, Frances sat propped up against the pillows, lost in Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island …

  Did I know then? she asked herself, entering Jessica’s room. No. Anne of Green Gables fell in love with Gilbert, in her class at school, who grew up to become a fine doctor, and marry her, and I fell in love with him, too. It was later, when Rowan came to live near us and came to the grammar school late: that’s when I knew. That’s when I tried not to know. I used to comfort myself: when you grow up, all this will be behind you, you’ll grow out of it, fall in love and get married – like Anne of Green Gables, like everyone else. And I did. And then I met Dora.

  She bent down to retrieve Jessica’s fallen paperback. Judy Blume: Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret. She smiled, and closed it, and put it on the chest of drawers by the bed.

  Music came faintly from the Walkman, slipping down. So we gotta say goodbye for the summer … I’ll send you all my love, every day in a letter … Jess wasn’t listening now, she was fast asleep, head lolling, skin flushed from the sun. Frances leaned forward and carefully slipped off the headphones: drifts of thick soft hair clung to the little foam pads. She lifted the cassette player and wires away from the sheets, and put it all down by the books on the chest of drawers, and then she leaned forward and kissed her, as she might have kissed her own daughter, surprising herself, because until now she had not really taken Jessica in at all.

  Goodnight, she said silently. Jessica did not stir, and Frances switched off the light by the bed and went out, thinking, as she walked towards the terrace doors, of Dora’s daughter, Sophie, coming into the kitchen one evening as she and Dora sat talking over their coffee. Adrian had gone to Milton Keynes for a couple of nights.

  Sophie, smiling distantly at Frances, and ignoring her mother, was looking for something in one of the cupboards, swishing back long glossy hair, different from Jessica’s mane, but in a gesture not dissimilar.

  ‘Can I help?’ asked Dora.

  ‘No, thanks, it’s all right.’ Sophie went on searching, opening each door in turn, and at last went out again – whatever could she have been looking for? – and up to her room with her silent boyfriend.

  ‘I must go,’ said Frances, wondering about Sophie and her search through the cupboards as she and her mother sat together. She spooned up crystals of brown sugar in the bowl on the table between them, watching them fall. A concert came to its end on the radio – the radio was always on in Dora’s kitchen – and the applause began, fading as the announcer returned his listeners to the studio. Getting late. Time for Frances to return to her family.

  ‘One more coffee,’ said Dora, getting up to put the kettle on. ‘Stay a bit longer, it’s so nice having you here.’

  And Frances smiled, lighting a last cigarette, watching the crystals tumble slowly down the sides of the sugar bowl, and settle there.

  She stepped out on to the terrace.

  ‘Hello.’ Claire, from the swing-seat, stretched out a hand. ‘We were wondering where you had got to.’

  ‘I switched off Jessica’s light,’ said Frances obliquely, picking up her cigarettes from the table. ‘She’s fast asleep.’ She crossed to the chair next to Oliver, and lit a cigarette. ‘So,’ she said, wanting to show an interest, to make up for so clearly having chosen solitude. ‘What have you all been talking about?’

  Robert reached for the wine jug. ‘Your husband has been trying to raise the tone.’

  ‘Not at all,’ said Oliver. ‘It had no need of raising, and I should hardly count myself qualified to do so in any case.’

  It was the kind of overcourteous, verging on the pompous, disclaiming and meaningless remark of which Oliver was master, distancing himself from any real engagement, and Frances, who had heard it too many times over too many dinner tables, said, more sharply than she intended: ‘Well, what heights did you reach, anyway?’ and felt at once his rise of irritation at her tone. She blew out smoke. ‘Sorry. I’ve interrupted everything.’

  Robert was refilling glasses. ‘We were talking,’ he said, ‘prompted by the ring of church bells, about religion.’ He sat down again, rather heavily. ‘So there.’

  ‘Were you, now?’ Frances could not think that either he or Claire had intr
oduced this one: she looked at Oliver enquiringly. ‘Has this been particularly exercising you recently, for some reason?’

  He shrugged, still irritated. ‘It interests me as a general question, as you know.’

  ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ said Robert, who seemed to have drunk rather more than usual, ‘there are only two questions when it comes down to it. Do you love me? Is there a God? What else is important, after all?’

  Frances regarded him with a hitherto unquickened curiosity. ‘That’s a rather interesting remark.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ said Oliver. ‘But I think there are other questions.’

  ‘Do you?’ she asked him. ‘Can’t things be simple for once?’

  He looked at her. ‘You are not simple, Frances.’

  ‘Nor are you. All the more reason to crave simplicity.’

  There was a silence, an exclusion of others that was impolite. It was broken by the fierce whine of a motor bike, racing up the hillside towards them. When it had passed, Claire said: ‘At least three questions, surely. Do I love you? That’s just as important.’

  ‘Well,’ Oliver said drily to Robert, ‘I should not presume to ask you about affairs of the heart, but I should like to know about God. Is there one? Jessica gave me to understand that you were a family of atheists.’

  ‘Jessica?’ Robert looked at him in astonishment. ‘Since when has Jessica gone in for discussion? About anything.’

  ‘As I recall, it was more in the nature of a passing remark. Anyway,’ he waved cigarette smoke away, ‘was she right?’

  ‘I suppose so. About me, anyway,’ said Robert. ‘I believed when I was little –’

  ‘When you’re little you’ll believe anything,’ said Claire.

  ‘Quite. Adolescence put paid to all that, as it usually does – well, either that or you go overboard about religion, don’t you? I gave it all up with a sigh of relief, as far as I can remember. More than that – there were things about it I deeply disliked.’ He stopped and drank. ‘And yet –’