The Summer House Party

by Caro Fraser

  ‘But you’re not, are you? History has shown us that much.’

  ‘That’s because we’re too busy darning socks and making beds,’ yawned Diana.

  ‘I don’t ever see you doing very much of either,’ replied her brother.

  ‘True, and I don’t intend to. I’m all for the rights of women, but quite frankly, I shall be content to marry someone with a great deal of money. A very great deal. Then the question of whether to work or not simply won’t arise.’

  ‘Quite right, my dear,’ said Elizabeth Cunliffe. ‘The best thing any sensible young woman can do is find some decent man to marry, and leave it at that.’

  ‘There will come a time,’ observed Charles Asher, ‘when all women will be obliged to work, and the business of rearing children will be handed over to the state.’

  ‘Poppycock! Only in your Marxist utopia,’ said Diana scornfully. She sat up and shaded her eyes as she gazed across the field. ‘Here’s Madeleine – without Avril.’

  ‘Madeleine, where’s Avril?’ asked Sonia in mild alarm, as Madeleine approached, her skirt held out before her, filled with daisies.

  ‘She’s with her father,’ replied Madeleine. ‘She saw him sketching at the top of the hill and went to see him. Then she wanted to stay with him.’

  ‘And he didn’t mind?’

  ‘No.’ Madeleine sank down on the grass and let her cargo of limp daisies spill out on to the grass. She looked like some beautiful, bewitching child, and was the unwitting focus of attention as she bent her lovely head over the flowers. Charles Asher watched her with something approaching fascination. Constance picked up a handful of the daisies and began to weave them together.

  Diana, who had been dispensing gin and French from the cocktail shakers to those who wanted it, poured some into a tumbler and handed it to Madeleine. ‘Refreshment for the daisy picker.’ Madeleine, thirsty and bored from looking after Avril, drained the glass. ‘I say, easy!’ laughed Diana. She glanced at Paul, who frowned in reproof.

  ‘My goodness,’ said Daphne Davenport, laying down her knitting and fanning herself, ‘the weather just seems to get warmer and warmer!’

  ‘I think it may break soon,’ said Meg, pointing to a darkening mass of cloud in the sky to the west. A distant rumble of thunder seemed to echo her words.

  A hush fell upon the group. Constance and Madeleine wove their daisy chain. Eve lit another cigarette, and Diana sipped reflectively at the remnants of her gin. Elizabeth Cunliffe closed her Agatha Christie novel and dozed. Meg sat with her knees drawn up, her chin resting on them, staring thoughtfully at the grass. Charles pulled a small volume from his jacket pocket and lay on his stomach to read. Paul turned the pages of the newspaper and sucked on his pipe.

  After a while Eve asked, ‘Who fancies a walk in the woods?’

  Charles Asher closed his book and returned it to his pocket. ‘I’ll come.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Diana. ‘Come on, Meg.’

  Meg hesitated. She had been hoping that there might be some way of going for a walk with Dan, just the two of them. But he hadn’t made the slightest effort. Perhaps it was just too difficult, with so many people around. Dan was aware of Meg glancing at him, but some mischief made him turn to Madeleine.

  ‘Madeleine?’

  Madeleine looked up at Dan, and was about to shake her head, when Charles added, ‘Please do.’

  Surprised, Madeleine hesitated, then brushed the daisy chain from her lap and got up.

  ‘Come on, Constance,’ said Diana.

  ‘No thanks,’ replied Constance with a smile. ‘It was bad enough trying to keep up with you and Paul when I was eleven. I’ll stay here.’

  ‘Please yourself,’ replied Diana. ‘We shan’t be long.’

  The group set off through the woods, Paul taking the lead and choosing the route, pointing out various species of bird in an authoritative fashion as he strode along. A brief argument sprang up between Paul and Charles as to the markings of what Paul maintained was a nuthatch. Dan took Charles’s side in a light-hearted fashion, but Paul refused to be corrected. Indeed, his manner grew so dogmatic that Dan was relieved when Charles shrugged and let the matter drop.

  After a while the dense woodland opened up to a clearing beneath some oak trees, with paths leading off in various directions. The girls were by now lagging behind the men, and Paul, who had already reached the clearing, called to them to get a move on. While Meg and Diana hurried to catch up, Madeleine stopped and took off her shoe. Charles Asher saw Madeleine kneeling down, examining her foot, and went back to help her.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  Madeleine pushed her hair back from her face. ‘I’ve got a thorn in my foot. And I can’t pull it out,’ she gave a half-embarrassed laugh, ‘because I bite my nails.’

  ‘Let’s have a look. Come on. Sit down here.’ He led her to a fallen tree and knelt down to inspect her foot, thrilled at this chance of intimacy. Although he liked to present himself to the world as a cynical intellectual, Charles was in fact a romantic idealist with little experience of women. The easy forthrightness of girls like Meg and Diana made him shy, but from the first moment he had met Madeleine he had been enchanted not only by her beauty, but by her reserve. He was aware of her indeterminate place in the household, hovering somewhere between guest and servant, and his sense of his own inferiority made him feel there was a bond between them. The fact that she so rarely spoke gave her a depth and soulfulness. He felt that in her company he could be eloquent – as eloquent as in all his writings – but so far the chance to be alone with her had eluded him. Now he was sitting in the quiet woodland, cradling her foot.

  ‘There.’ He gripped the tiny spur of thorn between his fingernails. ‘It’s out.’

  Madeleine pulled up her foot to examine it. Asher caught a tantalising glimpse of curving white thigh.

  ‘How does it feel?’

  Madeleine stood up and put on her sandal. ‘Much better, thanks. My mother’s always telling me not to bite my nails. She’s right. I shouldn’t.’

  ‘I don’t think of you as a nervous type,’ said Charles awkwardly, with a sense that he was failing to capitalise on his moment.

  ‘I’m not. It’s just absent-mindedness. I don’t even know I’m doing it. We should catch the others up.’

  Asher looked round, trying to work out which was the most likely path for them to have taken. ‘I think they probably went this way,’ he said, and set off on the right-hand path, Madeleine following.

  As they walked, Charles began to talk. At first he spoke about the woods, and about his own love of walking, then about a hiking holiday he had taken with some friends earlier that year. He expanded this to social and political themes, he told her of his work, how hard it was to make a living, of his ambitions and his beliefs. Madeleine only half-listened, a little bored, but the polite smiles and glances she gave warmed his heart. Some ten minutes after they had left the clearing, they still hadn’t found the rest of the group, and Charles suggested that they stop and rest for a bit.

  They sat down on the grassiest part of a small copse a few yards from the path. Charles watched as she gathered a handful of early acorns. She held one up.

  ‘There’s a superstition that if you carry an acorn, you’ll never grow old.’ She tipped open the breast pocket of his jacket with one finger, and dropped the acorn in. ‘There,’ she smiled, ‘now maybe you’ll live to be a hundred and see your dream of a socialist world come true.’

  The diffidence of her movements, the casual way she accepted his proximity, letting her hair fall across her face and near to his hand, suggested desires and expectations which made Charles both nervous and excited. He picked up an acorn, felt for the pocket in the side of her skirt, feeling his fingers graze her thigh as he did so, and dropped it in. ‘Now you’ll never grow old, and you’ll stay as beautiful as you are today.’

  Madeleine smiled awkwardly and looked away, then glanced back at him. She liked his face, his soulful dark eyes,
his unruly dark hair. He laid his hand upon hers, then put his other hand around her waist and drew her towards him. Madeleine resisted for a second, then let him kiss her. She had never been kissed in her life, and the experience was intensely delightful. His mouth was soft and full, and delicious sensations flooded her body. She let him lift the hair back from her face with clumsy fingers. He kissed her again. She found herself thinking of Henry Haddon, and pretended it was he who was kissing her. The thought was overwhelming. Charles slipped the strap of her sundress down from her shoulder and touched her breast, and although she pulled his fingers away, she let them wander back there a few seconds later. The sensation was too intensely pleasurable to resist, and her Haddon fantasy had taken intense hold. She lay back on the dusty, pine-needle softness of the forest floor. He kissed her breast, and then her mouth, harder this time, and pushed her skirt towards her thighs, giddy with lust.

  It was at this moment that Paul came striding through the undergrowth some yards away. He stopped abruptly when he saw them. Startled, Charles pulled down Madeleine’s dress and rolled away from her. He got awkwardly to his feet, Madeleine quickly adjusted the straps of her dress and brushed pine needles from her hair.

  Paul said nothing, but his face was grim. ‘We thought you two had got lost.’

  One by one the others appeared, each taking in the scene in their own way. By now Madeleine was on her feet.

  ‘Far from it,’ said Charles coolly. ‘We’ve been perfectly fine.’

  There was a silence, one in which the embarrassment of all was palpable.

  ‘Just as well we met up with you,’ said Diana. ‘Time we were all getting back.’

  They headed back to the picnic place.

  *

  That night Madeleine lay in her bed. She pulled up the hem of her nightdress, feeling the cool sheets against her skin. She touched her breasts, she caressed her body with fingers which she pretended were not her own, her thoughts wandering to the studio in the barn, and her appointment for ten thirty the next morning.

  5

  ‘BLOODY LITTLE OIK!’ muttered Paul.

  Dan, stretched out on the window seat in the library, gave up trying to read the morning paper and let it flop across his chest.

  Paul continued to pace the room. ‘I’ve a good mind to have a word with him.’

  Dan stared through the window at the mass of thunderclouds blackening the sky. The air was sultry, the light in the library strangely yellow. ‘What business is it of yours?’

  ‘Damn it, Dan, when a man takes advantage of someone who’s scarcely more than a kid, we have to make it our business. In Sonia’s house, too.’

  ‘She’s sixteen. Old enough to let someone kiss her if she wants to.’

  ‘You saw what was going on! It was damn well indecent. She’s Sonia’s responsibility. Someone ought to tell her.’

  Dan sighed and got up. ‘You do what you like. Just leave me out of it.’ He left the library, taking the paper with him.

  *

  Diana, Meg and Eve were seated under the chestnut tree in the garden, having a conversation on the same subject, though of a somewhat different nature.

  ‘I can’t think of a single attractive thing about him,’ said Meg. ‘I suppose he’s intelligent, but not in a very nice way, if you ask me, and he hasn’t got much else to recommend him.’

  ‘Perhaps she was flattered by the attention,’ said Eve. ‘I mean, he’s so evidently épris. Everyone can tell.’

  ‘But still – to let him take that kind of liberty with her. I mean, her clothes were all over the place!’

  Diana stretched her arms languorously above her head. ‘Haven’t you ever let anyone make love to you?’ The air up till now had been very still, the light leaden, but a sudden breeze shivered the highest branches of the trees.

  Meg thought of Dan. ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘Ah, but you must have wanted to,’ said Eve with a smile.

  Meg said nothing, thinking of that night when Dan had come to her room. She didn’t regret what she had said to him then. She still felt that whatever she might want – and he had opened up longings in her which she hadn’t known existed – it wouldn’t have been right just to let things happen. Her heart tightened every time she thought about that night. He had kissed her in a way that had made her think, well, that she mattered to him. Yet since then he hadn’t come near her. She didn’t know what any of it meant – if it meant anything at all. To add to the confusion of her heart, she had since her schoolgirl days – the precise day being the Eton and Harrow cricket match, when Paul had scored all those runs and taken the winning wicket – been rather in love with Paul. She was utterly bewildered by her feelings.

  ‘Paul seems to think Charles is some kind of sex fiend, taking advantage of a juvenile,’ observed Diana. ‘He’s very het up about it.’

  Meg tore her thoughts away from Dan. ‘Perhaps Madeleine’s judgement isn’t very good. Maybe Aunt Sonia should speak to her.’

  ‘Darling Meg, can you imagine how distrait Sonia would be if she had to undertake anything of that kind? I think it would be a kindness not to tell her.’

  Eve yawned. ‘He was only kissing her, after all, and Paul’s been going around giving poor Charles such savage glares that he must be feeling thoroughly intimidated.’

  Fat drops of rain, slow at first and then thick and fast, began to splash upon the leaves of the chestnut tree.

  ‘Come on,’ said Diana, ‘let’s run before we get drenched!’

  The girls sprang to their feet and hurried to the house.

  *

  Charles was doing his best to persuade himself that he wasn’t bothered by the incident in the woods, or by Paul’s disapproving looks. He disliked Paul intensely, loathed his easy arrogance and his patronising manner. He tried to find comfort in telling himself that Paul was a blind reactionary who neither felt nor thought deeply, and that the days of his kind would soon be numbered. Nonetheless, Paul’s evident disdain galled him. He was aware, too, that the others thought it was rather common to be caught kissing the nanny, especially one not much more than a child, and he was savagely miserable.

  *

  Avril stood by the duck pond watching the soapflakes float down on to the surface of the water. They melted most satisfactorily. She picked up the box and emptied some more out, then looked at what was left in the box and decided to put the whole lot into the fountain. When she had finished with the soapflakes, Avril scampered off to the orchard to hide from Madeleine, who was no doubt looking for her right this minute. She saw her father in the orchard on his way to the barn, and watched as he picked up a couple of windfalls, munching on one and putting the other in his pocket. She thought of darting out from her hiding place to surprise him, but he would only hand her over to Madeleine, so she stayed where she was. She wished he would let her come to the studio while he worked. She would be quiet as a mouse, really she would, she wouldn’t play with the paints and brushes, fun though that was. But he always sent her away, even though she simply wanted to be with him. As she watched her Papa making a tour of the orchard, inspecting the crop of fruit, Avril had an idea. It was such a good idea that she put her hand over her mouth to stifle a giggle. Then she crept out from behind her tree and tiptoed to the barn, pushing open the heavy door and disappearing inside.

  A few minutes later Haddon went into his studio. He prepared his materials, then went to the easel to look with fresh eyes at his work so far. The portrait was a full-length one of Madeleine seated on the wicker chair, half-turned towards the window, one arm resting on the chair back, her slim legs entwined. It pleased him as few things did these days. He studied the brushstrokes, examining his treatment of the light. The girl looked luminous. He had caught her turn of the head so exactly, that wistful pose somewhere between hope and disappointment, and the lovely curve of her body. He felt his heart tighten with a feeling of accomplishment, a sense that he had grasped something almost beyond his own powers. He had always tho
ught of genius as something almost extraneous to the artist. This, he knew, was the nearest he had ever come to it. The marvel was that he had done so much in so short a time. Apart from some detail around her shoulders, the thing was nearly finished.

  Madeleine was on her way through the orchard when the first drops of rain began to patter on the leaves of the apple trees. She broke into a run and reached the barn just before the worst of the deluge broke. Haddon was at the trestle table mixing paints as she came in. Both looked up at the sound of the sudden tumult of rain thrashing on the roof of the barn and on the big, sloping windows. The feeling of being in a safe haven made Madeleine smile. She pulled the ribbon from her hair and spread out the slightly damp tendrils on her shoulders, in anticipation of resuming her pose for the picture. She didn’t mind the ache in her back any more. She liked being here in the turpentine and oil smell of the barn. All morning she had been looking forward to the sweet, strange moments when Haddon would set her body into the desired position, moving and touching and arranging her limbs.

  Haddon was struck by the radiance of the girl as she tossed her hair and settled herself in the wicker chair. She was still slightly breathless from her run through the orchard, her breast rising and falling, her eyes limpid but expectant.

  In that instant there came a frantic knocking on the barn door.

  ‘What the devil!’ exclaimed Haddon.

  The face of Dilys the housemaid appeared round the door. Rain had plastered her hair to her brow below her cap. She was very wet indeed, her eyes anxious. ‘If you please, sir, madam says she needs you to come at once, and Miss Madeleine. The fountain’s full of bubbles – so’s the duck pond!’

  ‘Damn it!’ roared Haddon. ‘How dare you come down here? What the devil has the duck pond to do with me? Tell your mistress I will not be interrupted in this way! Tell her—’ He broke off with an expletive and made for the door, brushing past the hapless maid. ‘Stay here!’ he commanded Madeleine.

  Haddon strode up through the wet orchard and across the courtyard to the house, where he found Sonia in agitated conversation with the gardener.