Summer Season

by Alan Clark

  But what did it matter? Right was on my side. I was crusading for Westerlea. ‘I’m a true Westerlea-er,’ I said. ‘Where’s Mrs. du Chair? She said I’m a true Westerlea-er. Come on, everyone, let’s get down to it and—this town needs cleaning up.’

  Nobody responded. If anything they seemed to become more absorbed in their own conversation. In the background I could even see that some of them were beginning to take their leave. I was in that position familiar to leaders of reform down the ages. If only I could find the little old lady who had first congratulated me, the fairy godmother. Turning, gyrating one might almost have said, in my efforts to locate her, I became suddenly aware of some awful figure of doom that was bearing down on me in a bluey-green tweed suit.

  ‘I say, wasn’t it you who was driving Max’s car in the High Street yesterday?’

  ‘You’re a figure of doom,’ I replied facetiously.

  ‘I’d have you know,’ he said grimly, ‘that I’m Major Riddle-Brede, and I happen to be on the Board of Magistrates of this borough, as well as the owner of the car that you so negligently collided with outside Flowers’ yesterday morning.’

  My nerves were getting badly frayed, in spite of the insulating properties of all that South African sherry. Here, it seemed, was one more instance of the local establishment ganging up and distorting the truth to their own purposes. This pompous ass, so imposingly self-styled, was to me nothing more than a red-faced man in late middle-age. I looked at him for a long time before replying.

  ‘To me you’re nothing more than a red-faced man in late middle-age.’

  6 * Mrs. Roydon

  The following morning I awoke with an unpleasant liverish headache. I had no very exact recollection of the events of the previous evening, but as I lay there, in some discomfort, with the sound of Gevaert’s bath running and, latterly, overflowing and splashing into the yard below, there came over me the plain realization that I had now irrevocably alienated not only my employers but every person of any importance in the district.

  Gevaert himself might already, in the light of recent events, be questioning seriously my fitness for the purpose of preparing his son for Common Entrance. And it was clear that in the eyes of his wife I was both a social and a domestic failure. As far as Mrs. Roydon was concerned it was plain that I was, at best, an uncommunicative oaf without even the guts to take sides in the harvest festival dispute; and Mrs. du Chair, a potential ally, I had needlessly antagonized by my loutish bad manners. As for the local Tammany group—Pick, Riddle-Brede, and their cronies—I was already a marked man. They needed only an excuse to ‘get’ me.

  How right had been those ominous forebodings that I had suffered on first being shown to this very room by Mrs. Gevaert last week! And yet it was only Monday—black Monday perhaps—and there were still three days until I got my first instalment of pay.

  In something approaching panic, I sprang from by bed and began to dress rapidly, but without much care. I was late now. Gevaert liked people to be punctual for breakfast (a preference which he expounded regularly at that meal) and I had to decide whether to shave now, and be later, or not shave. I decided not to shave.

  Nobody said anything when I entered the dining-room, except little Paul, of course, who said:

  ‘Good morning, Mr. Crane. I hope that you slept well.’

  ‘Very well,’ I lied. In addition to the customary hangover symptoms I thought that I could detect the beginnings of the heavy head cold which, I had noticed with relish, had been afflicting the Reverend Pick the previous evening. That sneeze of his had been well aimed.

  As I was at the sideboard pouring out black coffee, Gevaert said something.

  ‘Er—Crane; we shan’t be requiring your services.’ He started to clear his throat and I stood terribly still as the axe came whistling down: ‘… this morning, as Paul has to go to the dentist.’

  Light-headed with relief and reaction, I said almost jauntily:

  ‘Oh well, sir, as a matter of fact I have got a good deal of revision and preparatory work to do for the next stage, it would suit me very well to have a few hours alone.’

  Gevaert gave a surly grunt of disbelief, and little Paul asked, ‘What next stage?’

  Mrs. Gevaert said: ‘It would be such a relief if a scholarship was in the offing; isn’t it the case that particularly brilliant Common Entrance papers are sent up to some committee of other and considered for scholarship awards? I believe it is.’

  ‘I believe it is,’ I said reassuringly. Let bygones be bygones, I felt, and smiled at her.

  She did not actually return the smile, but it seemed that neither she nor her husband was going to make any formal complaint about the events of the previous evening, and I decided that these had probably not been as horrific as, in some of the darker of the small hours, they had seemed.

  After breakfast I decided that defeat of this head cold must have first priority and I slipped out of the house and strolled down towards the shopping centre, I had hopes of finding some friendly chemist who would let me have some of those really big ‘Redoxon’ tablets on credit or, alternatively, supply me with however many could be bought for tenpence at the prescription counter.

  Outside Woolworth’s I was hailed by Kitty du Chair, who detached herself from the company of an enormous, muscular youth with three-inch, or four-inch, long sideboards and fell into step beside me.

  ‘Well. Get you,’ she said.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Mobbing up old Pickums and crashing around and things.’

  ‘Oh, that.’

  ‘Ma said you could of been heard in Hastings at one stage. Where are you going to now? Where’s Paulie?’

  I explained that he and I had separated on errands of a medical nature. ‘Come and help me find a chemist,’ I continued, ‘and tell me your mother’s version of what happened at the party.’

  ‘Oh, come on, then, we’ll go to Jenkins’s. He’ll let you have some if I tell him to, because he knows I know that he sells ergot. Not that I’ve ever had to buy any,’ she added hurriedly, putting her thumb against her nose again.

  ‘I should hope not,’ I said, rather shocked.

  Mr. Jenkins’s premises were small and insalubrious, but he greeted Kitty with considerable warmth of a rather Dickensian kind, and after a good deal of rummaging produced some ‘Redoxon’, though of a lower strength than I had hoped.

  ‘Well, what now? How about a walk?’

  ‘I don’t know if I really ought to,’ I wavered. I knew that Gevaert would be nosing about at Pyedums, waiting to see if I got down to the ‘preparatory work’ I had spoken about at breakfast.

  ‘Oh, come on. Look what a gorgeous day it is. Let’s go down on the Flats.’

  The result was a foregone conclusion, of course, and in the pleasure of Kitty’s company and the beauty of the day I began to forget the troubles that were stored up for me in Scattercrumb Street.

  The old town had, in the seventeenth century, been for most of the year a tidal island protruding on its rocky outcrop from the great desolate mass of sea-washed marshland that surrounded it, and the river at whose outlet the town stood. Then, in 1730, dikes and sea-walls had been built. The marsh had been drained and the countryside became pasture. Only along the banks of the river did the grey tidal mud, with its grey-blue cock grass, survive.

  We were walking along one of the dikes, planted with beech trees a century before; on our left was the river with the tide hissing and crackling over the mud-banks, on our right a cool swathe of grass—the Flats—that fronted on the humpy cluster of buildings—Flemish? Italianate?—that was Westerlea.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’ she said.

  ‘A number of things; chiefly my responsibilities towards, and relations with, my employer Mr. Gevaert.’

  ‘Max.’ She giggled. ‘Any trouble with Max let me know, I can fix him.’

  ‘How useful.’

  She made one of those same balletic twirls that I had noticed in her m
other, only more gracefully and resulting in an exposure altogether more appetizing. ‘It may surprise you to know that Max has professed his love for me. Often.’

  ‘No, it wouldn’t much. You used to go and look at churches, didn’t you?’

  ‘Not half we didn’t.’ She sat down on a hummock of grass and leaned back against the trunk of one of the beeches. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘He told me.’ Gingerly, but in a spirit of pleasurable anticipation none the less, I sat down beside her.

  ‘Did he just? Guilt, I suppose. Max gets terrible guilt, that’s how I have such a hold on him.’

  ‘I’m not sure that the hold you have would quite extend to being able to save my skin.’

  ‘Oh, sure it would. Look how I helped Ma when she was moaning about that bloody parade.’

  ‘Ah, that’s why he changed sides so suddenly.’

  ‘Yes, of course. Ma doesn’t know the whole truth—not that there’s anything to know, like that I mean—she just thinks he’s very fond of me, but, of course, Max, when she says, “Kitty had so set her heart on accompanying us”, with his guilt and all, he gets into a panic and thinks if I’m annoyed I may split.’ She stretched out her legs and pulled her skirt back an impossibly long way, revealing on her smooth and exceptionally shapely thighs two neat vaccination marks which served effectively to emphasize the surrounding purity and consistency of texture.

  ‘Isn’t this sun fabulous? I do wish I could get properly brown. Of course, he’s got his head screwed on too, mind, and I bet he’s thinking maybe there’s a chance of a scuffle in the changing-room or something.’

  ‘Oh, you’re on that level, are you?’

  ‘Well, you see, Max and I don’t see as much of each other as we used to—“in the interests of p-hrudence”’—she mimicked Gevaert’s phlegmy pronunciation of Rs—‘so I suppose he’s trying to make the most of things. Not that he is as bad as Pickums, of course.’

  ‘Pick!’ I almost screamed, in rage, jealousy, exultance, and so on.

  ‘My dear, yes. At choir practice; really, I had to stop going in the end. Mind you, he’s cleverer than Max, no sentimental stuff, pretends it’s all a mistake. You know, busting in to the vestry when I’m getting out of my frock, and “Let’s see if this surplice fits”, “Not too tight there?”—as if a surplice could be tight anywhere—and “My, aren’t we growing up nicely”, and so on.’

  ‘I wish you could turn the heat on there a bit; from an immediately personal point of view I regard him as being a greater menace than Max.” I explained about the bumper-hooking episode.

  She wriggled about and laughed a lot. ‘What an absolute shriek! You’re certainly quite an addition to the life down here.’ She gave me both barrels with those huge, violet eyes. There was original sin there, all right.

  ‘It’s very nice for me to find you here,’ I said, conscious of the absurdity of the remark and of the general strained, clumsy agony of those moments before the first kiss. But it had to be done now, my head seemed to be right over her and I remember feeling irritated at how relaxed she looked. Then I kissed and embraced her briefly, following it almost immediately with a longer, firmer, and altogether more interesting one.

  When this was over I said: ‘Look here, I simply must get back to Pyedums. They didn’t know I’d even left the house and things are in a pretty state at the moment.’

  She pouted. ‘Oh well, if you must you must. I’ll come with you and hang about in the street outside and if Max cuts up rough you can wave something out of Paul’s window and I’ll work out some plan or other.’

  ‘O.K.,’ I said doubtfully, ‘what shall I wave?’

  We had started walking back across the Flats. She took off her blue chiffon scarf and gave it to me. ‘This, she said; ‘and if you don’t need to it will be an excuse to see me again.’ She took my arm.

  It took us about twelve minutes to get back to Scattercrumb Street. I left Kitty halfway down the street in the porch of the Roman Catholic church, which was just visible from little Paul’s window, and furtively entered the hall of Pyedums.

  I am very good at moving soundlessly in a real crisis and I managed to make the staircase undetected, although I could hear someone moving about in the lounge, the door of which was ajar. It was then an easy matter for me to go to Paul’s room and make an appropriate signal to Kitty, and she turned back, up the street to disappear round the corner into Church Square.

  Lunch passed in much the same atmosphere as had breakfast: one, that is to say, of latent suspicion rather than specific recrimination. They didn’t squabble about the harvest festival, thank God, and Mrs. Roydon seemed a bit more friendly—doubtless in order to annoy Gevaert, who was still sullen. After the coffee I said:

  ‘I think I’ll just take a breath of air before Paul and I tackle the Reform Bill,’ and moved out through the french window.

  ‘Don’t be too long,’ called Gevaert. ‘You know how easy it is for children to get drowsy after a meal unless their interest is excited straight away.’

  Pompous fool, I thought. How could anyone ‘take long’ in a garden the size yours is? ‘No, no, of course not,’ I answered, stepping briskly across the brown, tindery lawn. It was the twenty-second day of the drought and the sun beat brassily down on to my neck.

  Fine weather usually puts me in a good mood, but on that afternoon I was peevish and irritable, for at the back of my throat I could feel the painful, itchy feeling that heralded, I was now convinced, the arrival of the Reverend Pick’s cold. How hellish to be ill during glorious weather like this. If only it could be stopped before it came to a head. I took out the tube of 500 mg. ‘Redoxon’ from my pocket and slipped a tablet under my tongue. The thought occurred to me that I might go into the greenhouse and baste myself for half an hour or so; such treatment—‘heat shock treatment’, I called it—had often proved efficacious in the past.

  I opened the door and found the somewhat neglected interior to be desperately hot, though agreeably scented with vegetation and subsoil. I hoisted myself up on to a low, slatted shelf that ran the full length of the glass and leaned back against a pile of old sacks. From the house, some forty yards away across the lawn, I could hear intermittent yells and screams of the usual kind, but I just thought the hell with you all and basked agreeably in the warmth.

  ‘Aren’t you rather neglecting your duties?’ It was Mrs. Roydon’s voice. She woke me from my doze.

  ‘Oh Lord, yes. I fell asleep, how awful.’ I smiled puffily, the perspiration streaming down my face.

  ‘Actually, it doesn’t matter; Max and Elizabeth have gone over to Hastings to a furniture sale. I expect Paul would just as soon do without half an hour, and I won’t split.’ She smiled with unexpected fulness.

  ‘I was trying to kill a cold,’ I said fatuously. ‘If this won’t do it nothing will.’ I took out a handkerchief and mopped my face.

  She stepped a good deal closer and put on a gaze inquiring, quasi-sympathetic, and, to my mind, highly disconcerting. ‘You’re a funny sort of boy, really, aren’t you?’ she said.

  I didn’t answer, feigning preoccupation with the execution of some complex manœuvre that involved the handkerchief, my eye, both hands, and a sort of contortionist swivelling of the head.

  ‘You remind me of some of the young subalterns I used to know in Ceylon. In the summer we women used to be sent up into the hills—to get away from the heat, you know. Roydon would never come up, of course—too devoted to his beastly machinery—but some of the young subalterns used to come up for weekends …’ Her expression seemed both wistful and lecherous, if it is possible to conceive of these two emotions in combination.

  ‘I’m afraid I’m a bit old for a subaltern,’ I said, not really even managing a smile. ‘Most of my contemporaries are captains, at least, by now.’ The heat of the place was walling me in.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she went on, ‘I’ve had young men at my feet, you know.’

  ‘I’m sure you have,’ I answered, swa
llowing. It hurt to swallow, so I knew the Reverend Pick’s germs had made it. ‘I mean I can see——’

  ‘I wonder if you do, if you really do,’ she said intensely.

  Coming on top of Gevaert’s leive-in-bed soliloquy this was almost too much. I am not much of a man for ‘the indefinable charm of the older woman’, and with Kitty du Chair’s vaccination mark still fresh in my memory I found the three or four inches of pale, blue-veined knee which Mrs. Roydon exposed as she hitched herself up on to the platform beside me, highly an-aphrodisiac.

  ‘My God, it’s hot in here!’ I said, and, as her face stiffened, ‘Isn’t it?’ in a pleading effort to transfer the focus of attention to the heat, to build up a fiction that this was our joint problem. ‘Of course, you’re used to the heat, you must be, I mean your experiences in India …’ I gripped my hands tightly together. In a second I would, I knew, be babbling. ‘Let’s go back to the house, get out of here, have a drink back there.’

  I framed a sickly leer, hoping thereby to convey that I was all for it, whatever ‘it’ was, but first let’s have a long, cool, sexy drink.

  She made what was for her as near to being a pout as possible. ‘I rather like it here; it’s like being in the tropics.’

  She had edged sufficiently close to me for her arm and thigh to be in contact with my own along their full length. In a few seconds we would, I felt, both be too heavily committed; a halt had to be called.

  ‘Whouf,’ I went, and began re-dabbing my face with the handkerchief.

  ‘M’mm,’ she said, in a thoughtful tone, and stretched out her hand, touching my neck under the jawbone. ‘Yes, you are hot, aren’t you?’

  Her hand did feel cool, I must admit. I turned and looked at her: those deep intense eyes seemed to draw me forward. I moistened my lips, but as I swayed towards her a tack, or some analogous small, sharp object, dug into my rump, and the brief second of pain that it caused had the effect of pulling me round.