The Land of Summer

by Charlotte Bingham

  Still Julius did not return. Even when the clock in the hall struck midnight there was no sign of the errant bridegroom. Half an hour later, in spite of her best efforts to stay awake, Emmaline was finally fast asleep, only to be woken almost at once by the sound of what appeared to be someone falling upstairs, if such a thing were possible. Sitting bolt upright in bed and grabbing the bedclothes around her, Emmaline waited, her whole being turned to gooseflesh as the person making all the noise proceeded to do so along the landing outside the bedroom. Finally the door opened and an extremely dishevelled Julius appeared.

  Although Emmaline had only read about people being drunk before, she recognised her husband’s state at once, even before she became aware of the fumes of alcohol overpowering the scent of the flowers. She knew it from his unsteadiness as he leaned against the doorpost but most of all from the tragi-comic expression on his face.

  ‘What have I done?’ he muttered, before throwing back his head and shouting aloud. ‘What have I done? What have I done!’

  ‘Julius?’ Emmaline asked anxiously, not knowing whether to stay in bed and see out the nightmare of the scene in front of her, to go and try to help him, or to get out of bed and for her own safety’s sake try to shut him out of the room. ‘Julius – what’s happened? What is the matter?’

  Julius focused on her and to her horror she saw his eyes slowly filling with tears.

  ‘How could I do this?’ he mumbled, swaying dangerously as he stood away from the doorpost. ‘How could I do such a thing? A terrible thing.’

  ‘I don’t understand, Julius,’ Emmaline said, keeping her voice as calm as she could while deciding it was safer to stay where she was. ‘What have you done? What is this terrible thing—’

  ‘How could I do it?’ he interrupted, shaking his fuddled head slowly from side to side, the tears now running down his face. ‘How could I do such a thing?’

  ‘Julius—’

  ‘How could I? How could I!’

  ‘Julius, hush! You’ll wake the whole household.’

  ‘So what?’ Julius replied, switching moods suddenly. ‘So what! It’s my damned house and I’ll damned well wake who I damned well like!’

  ‘Julius—’

  ‘I’ll wake who I like, I tell you! And then everyone can hear what a terrible thing I have done! What a terrible, terrible thing.’

  ‘I think you ought to go to bed, Julius,’ Emmaline told him feebly, all too aware that she was quite unable to think of anything else to say. ‘I don’t think you’re very … well.’

  ‘I think I shall go to hell, that’s where I think I shall go,’ Julius muttered darkly. ‘I shall go to hell, that’s where I shall go. For doing such a terrible, terrible thing.’

  ‘I really think you ought to go to bed rather than to Hades,’ Emmaline repeated fearfully, frightened now and preparing to grab the gown that was lying on the chair near her side of the bed and to do a bolt into the sanctuary of her dressing room.

  ‘May God forgive me,’ Julius whispered. ‘May God forgive me because you never will.’

  And with that, he slowly slipped down the doorway to collapse in an unconscious heap on the floor.

  For a moment Emmaline stared down at him, horrified, while a feeling of utter helplessness filled her. Then she jumped out of bed, grabbed her dressing gown and threw it on. Just as she was tying the cord round her slender waist another figure appeared at the door: Wilkinson in a tartan wool dressing gown, flannel pyjamas and a pair of beige felt slippers.

  ‘Wilkinson? Is that you?’ Emmaline said in amazement, although it clearly was.

  ‘It is indeed, Mrs Aubrey. Now, if you will, please leave this to me, madam, if you would,’ Wilkinson replied, bending down and beginning to try to sort out the crumpled form at his feet. ‘I think this will be much the best left to me.’

  ‘How, Wilkinson?’ Emmaline enquired. ‘I can’t see how you can possibly cope with this by yourself.’

  ‘I am not by myself, madam,’ Wilkinson replied quietly, indicating with one hand for someone to come out of the shadows behind him. ‘I was waiting up, you see, madam, for the master,’ he continued as the sturdy figure of George appeared by his side. ‘I had to wait up because he had gone out without his keys and we couldn’t have the house left open all night, do you see.’

  Emmaline stepped back. ‘Of course.’

  ‘And so then when I saw the master returning, I thought it best to get George here up as well,’ Wilkinson continued. ‘Just in case, do you see.’

  ‘Of course,’ Emmaline said again. ‘Very thoughtful of you.’

  ‘So if you take yourself back to bed, madam,’ Wilkinson suggested, ‘young George and I will make sure the master here gets safely to his dressing room. A man in his state ought to be in his bed. A man in his state is heavy too, madam, very heavy.’

  By now they had the comatose Julius back on his feet, holding him up under his arms on both sides, and were beginning the unenviable task of guiding their dead weight along the corridor.

  ‘Thank you, Wilkinson, and thank you, George,’ Emmaline said, preparing to shut herself back in the bedroom, this time making sure to lock the door.

  ‘That’s perfectly all right, madam,’ George said.

  ‘Goodnight, madam,’ Wilkinson added. ‘You just leave this to us.’

  ‘Oh – and Wilkinson?’ Emmaline added, as a seeming afterthought. ‘If it is all the same to you, Wilkinson …’

  ‘Rest assured, madam,’ Wilkinson called back over his shoulder, ‘this shall go no further. Goodnight, now.’

  Emmaline climbed quickly back into bed, pulling the covers over her head and trying to make some sense of the mayhem that had been her wedding day before falling into a deep and tear-filled sleep.

  Nothing was said the next morning, and when Julius finally reappeared at midday he looked and acted as though he had witnessed some sort of dreadful accident.

  Emmaline, having risen and breakfasted alone, was waiting in the drawing room when Julius walked in, very slowly and carefully, as if every bone and sinew in his body was hurting him severely.

  ‘Good morning, Julius,’ she called from where she was sitting by the fireside.

  ‘What?’ Julius started, the sudden movement making him clutch at his head as he stared round at Emmaline. ‘Oh, yes. Right. Yes. Good morning.’

  They eyed each other before Julius continued on his way, a short slow walk that was leading him inexorably to where the drink decanters stood.

  ‘Do you think that is wise, Julius?’ Emmaline wondered as he poured himself a drink. ‘I would not have said that that was at all advisable.’

  ‘No, you are right, it is most unwise, Mrs Aubrey,’ Julius muttered, obviously determined to get straight back to his traditional irritable form. ‘But I very much fear that it is being unwise after the event.’

  There was a short silence.

  ‘What happened to you yesterday evening, Julius?’ Emmaline finally continued. ‘But perhaps it is too much to ask, since I have only been married to you for a day.’

  ‘It is a little too much to ask, at present,’ Julius admitted. ‘But, if you must know, I went for a walk, I became lost, and then I found my way back here, but I was too late for dinner.’

  ‘We are not just talking about your missing dinner, Julius. If you remember, and, if you don’t, let me remind you, you left the lunch table while I was upstairs, disappeared for a so-called constitutional and did not return until well after midnight.’

  ‘Is that so?’ Julius muttered, looking mortified. ‘I am afraid I was not aware of the time.’

  ‘You were out for over ten hours, Julius, and you say you were not aware of the time?’

  ‘I was … preoccupied.’

  ‘I would suggest that in future, when you intend to be preoccupied, Julius,’ Emmaline told him quietly, ‘I would suggest that you at least tell me where exactly you are going to be while you are preoccupied, and exactly how long you are going to be preocc
upied for.’

  ‘I do not think that will be necessary, Emma. That is not—’ Julius stopped to draw breath, wishing the terrible throbbing in his head would ease. ‘That will not be necessary, truly it won’t. You will find that is not how things are done here.’

  ‘I have to tell you that as far as matters such as this are concerned, Julius, I am not particularly interested in how things are done or not done,’ Emmaline informed him. ‘I think that now we are man and wife I have the right to know where you are going, if only in case something should happen to you.’

  ‘And that would matter to you, would it?’

  ‘Of course it would. What else would you imagine?’

  ‘I really don’t know, Emma. I would perhaps have imagined that you would not care.’

  ‘Then you would be wrong, Julius,’ Emmaline replied. ‘Quite, quite wrong.’

  Julius turned and looked at her. Emmaline matched his look and held it.

  ‘I was at my club, if you’re still interested.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And I was not aware of the time.’

  ‘I understand,’ Emmaline replied, not wishing to push her advantage.

  ‘I – I don’t really remember very much, as it happens,’ Julius added, staring up at the ceiling, as if he was no longer able to meet his wife’s steady gaze. ‘I think I must have mixed my drinks. I must have. Because I simply do not remember one thing about – about most of yesterday.’

  ‘I see,’ Emmaline said, giving a little sigh. ‘Since about what time yesterday is your mind a blank, Julius?’

  ‘The last thing I remember with any accuracy was arriving at my club,’ Julius replied. ‘It really is most extraordinary. I must definitely have mixed my drinks because after that my mind is a blank.’

  ‘You remember nothing at all?’ Emmaline was puzzled. ‘Are you not entirely well, Julius?’

  Julius frowned at her, realising that she might be supposing something was wrong with his mental health.

  ‘I am perfectly well, thank you, Emma,’ he replied firmly. ‘As I say, I just perhaps mixed my drinks somewhat indiscriminately, that is all.’

  ‘And that is what happens if someone mixes their drinks?’ Emmaline asked with genuine interest, such things being beyond her experience. ‘They lose their memory?’

  ‘There can be no other explanation for my behaviour,’ Julius assured her, relieved to have escaped any accusation of deliberate drunkenness. ‘Such a thing has never happened to me before.’

  ‘Then in case you are still unwell,’ Emmaline said, going over to him and confiscating his glass, ‘I think it only sensible not to have anything more to drink. My father always takes a stomach powder when drink has disagreed with him. So perhaps I could ask Wilkinson to bring you something similar?’

  ‘I have already taken a powder,’ Julius returned a little too readily, suggesting to Emmaline that this was not the first time he had supposedly mixed his drinks. ‘Thank you. All the same, thank you.’

  The gong sounded for luncheon, saving Julius from any further embarrassment. He showed little appetite for his food, and after they had eaten he retired to his study on the pretext of catching up on some important business, leaving Emmaline to spend the rest of what was now a rainy and windy afternoon sitting reading by the fire.

  When Julius failed to appear at tea time, Emmaline suggested to Wilkinson that he might go and summon her husband from his study. Julius emerged with every appearance of a man who had been dead to the world, suggesting to his new wife that far from catching up on business Julius had yet again been indulging in liquid refreshment, or at the very least endeavouring to sleep off the effect of too many so-called mixed drinks.

  Emmaline stared at him, her feelings going from inner rage to total despair. Later, when Agnes came to help her dress for dinner, Emmaline sent her back downstairs to tell Mr Aubrey that Mrs Aubrey had a sick headache and would not be down that evening. Then she sat propped up on the bed in her dressing room staring ahead of her and wondering if it was time to leave Park House, England, and most of all Julius Aubrey.

  Chapter Six

  AFTER MUCH SOUL-SEARCHING Emmaline finally decided to give herself and her marriage a little more time. It was not just that she could not face the idea of returning home to be humiliated by her family. The daunting length of the frightening sea journey, and the fact that she still cared for Julius, combined to delay any precipitous decision. But despite adopting this sensibly cautious approach to her bewildering situation, she found that time passed ever more slowly – so slowly, in fact, that she began to feel that she was frozen in time, that the clocks about the house were moving on while Emmaline Aubrey née Nesbitt had turned to stone.

  Julius might have given up his disappearing acts, but it seemed to Emmaline that now that the actual marriage had been celebrated – for want of a better word – Julius had returned to exactly the same sort of routine that he had enjoyed before their fateful wedding day. He breakfasted early after taking a short walk on rising, departed for his office as soon as he had finished his meal, and remained there all day, returning in time to change for dinner, which they ate alone. After dinner he always had a nightcap and a smoke, while Emmaline read or played the piano until it was time for bed.

  When Julius’s behaviour on his wedding night was not repeated, Emmaline began to look forward to bedtime, believing that now that their life had become regularised, whatever it was that was meant to happen between a new husband and his bride would surely happen sooner or later.

  She hoped so much for this that she would be first into the double bed, with her hair beautifully brushed and in her most attractive nightdress. She would sit in bed in the exact pose she had observed in an illustration in a novel she had recently finished, her hands folded demurely in front of her and her beautiful brown hair lying loose but carefully arranged on the pillow behind her head. Julius would then enter the bedroom in his quilted dressing gown, carrying his book. He would stand by the door looking appreciatively at his wife.

  ‘I have come to say goodnight, Emma, and to wish you a good night’s rest in your new home.’

  After which he would lean forward and kiss her on the forehead, as if she was his daughter, and with a kind smile leave the room, quietly closing the door behind him.

  And because she was too shy to voice her thoughts, he was always gone before Emmaline could even begin to pluck up the courage to ask him why he was not staying.

  As if Julius’s bedtime behaviour was not enough, his strange words on the night he had so infamously mixed his drinks began to haunt Emmaline.

  What have I done, what have I done?

  What had he done, Emmaline could not help asking herself. What sort of terrible thing could it have possibly been – and how could he do any terrible thing without her being aware of it? He had certainly been thoughtless, heartless even. He could even have been said to have been deliberately cruel to her in the earliest part of their relationship with his many unexplained absences. Yet Emmaline had been able to ascribe everything to shyness, or to his emotional immaturity. After all, maturity of years did not necessarily mean maturity of mind, and while she did not doubt that he cared for her, the precipitate way in which he had courted and proposed marriage to her did not argue that he was in any way an experienced suitor.

  So day after day, as she walked or read, or played the piano, with only the occasional servant to whom she could talk, Emmaline’s thoughts were necessarily preoccupied with the terrible thing to which Julius had kept referring on their wedding night.

  It had to be something of which she was as yet unaware, some unnoticed slight perhaps, or even some indiscretion on his part too trivial to have come to her notice, and if that were the case she was quite certain she would readily forgive him for whatever it was. In fact, were Julius to seek her forgiveness she knew that she would not only forgive him, but do so without demanding that he tell her what it was that he was meant to have done.


  On the other hand, she could not but take the fact that he had not yet shared their marriage bed as an unspoken insult. Day after day, night after night, she had to face the embarrassment in the servants’ eyes as they pretended that they had not noticed that the newly-weds occupied different bedrooms. She longed with all her heart for someone in whom she could confide, but thanks to Julius’s aversion to visitors she had not had the opportunity to make friends with anyone of her own standing. This was something else that was beginning to worry her, since she knew from what she had read that when someone new arrived in an English town there were certain procedures to be followed, certain protocols to do with the placing of calling cards. She had understood, and Mrs Graham had confirmed, that it was the custom for the ladies in society to call upon any newcomer and leave their cards by way of introduction.

  Emmaline had received no such cards, although on several occasions she had thought she heard various comings and goings at the front door. However, since no cards were left Emmaline assumed that whoever it was had not come to call on her, or was merely one of the many postmen who came, sometimes hourly, with letters for her husband. Occasionally there would be a letter from one of Emmaline’s own family, telling her of the parties and dances they were all enjoying, or how they were all looking forward to going to Newport for August, how Ambrosia and Charity both had adoring beaux, and how pleased their father was with the men of their choice, who were wealthy and of good families, all of which news only increased Emmaline’s homesickness.

  And even what she understood to be the newly installed telephone never rang, either for her or for Julius. It sat in solitary splendour asking to be used, and Emmaline longed to telephone to someone, but to whom?

  Then one morning, although the telephone remained resolutely silent, and the doorbell seemed to be as uncommunicative as her husband at mealtimes, Emmaline happened to enter the hall just after someone had actually called. She saw Wilkinson closing the door on a well-dressed young woman whose carriage was waiting for her in the driveway, a visiting card in his hand. Emmaline remained where she was by the foot of the stairs as Wilkinson placed the card on a tray.