Summertime

by Charlotte Bingham

  Trilby skipped across the road to Aphrodite’s house. She knew that the moment she arrived on Aphrodite’s doorstep tantalising smells would be wafting up from the basement kitchen, because, like Berry, Aphrodite seemed to be able to make even the most awful ingredients, ingredients that completely defeated Mrs Bartlett, into perfectly delicious meals, meals which Aphrodite’s lover Geoffrey Hill, so artlessly referred to by Molly, had become convinced that Aphrodite had delivered from some secret address in Paris when no-one was looking.

  Aphrodite opened the door looking beautiful and depressed. Trilby was unimpressed, because this was Aphrodite’s ordinary day-to-day mien, a potent mixture of elegance and sadness. She never bothered to conceal her gloom from the world, and somehow, in view of both her elegance and her depressive aura, Trilby always found it surprising that Aphrodite was such a sensational cook, because cooking seemed to Trilby, who had never really attempted the art, such a tremendous act of optimism.

  ‘Oh, do come in, do, Trilby. I will make you a coffee. I have just made some mousses au chocolat. You like mousses au chocolat, don’t you? I hope you do, I have made far too many. Something must be done with them, really. You must take some back for Molly and Berry for their supper. Really, I have made far, far too many. Geoffrey will be furious.’

  Aphrodite’s lover, according to Aphrodite, was always going to be furious. His fury never seemed to be evident to anyone but Aphrodite. In fact in all the time that they had pursued their uneven romance no-one but Aphrodite had ever known Geoffrey to be anything except mild-mannered and vaguely defeated. Of course, it went without saying that Trilby had translated more than a little of their relationship into two of the characters in The Popposites, but this did not stop Aphrodite from pursuing the fable that Geoffrey was a man just about to explode, and at any moment, into a quite ungovernable rage.

  There were still memories of the war lurking around every English woman’s larder, and yet when Trilby obligingly sat down on the banquette under the window and Aphrodite, ignoring as she always did the general rules of mealtimes, placed a small almond-filled pastry in front of her on a blue and white plate, and Trilby saw the golden-crusted confection and her fingers closed around its still warm surface, she knew that the moment she took her first bite her whole body would have to surrender to the sensation of eating such a delightfully unexpected creation.

  And that was all before she drank Aphrodite’s proper coffee, which like Molly’s was unendingly satisfying, with the cream swirling across its dark brown surface until the brown sugar was sprinkled on top and the two sank together, at last becoming one with the coffee. For, despite Trilby’s having already eaten and drunk at the Nichols’ house, they both knew that not to eat at Aphrodite’s house too would have been an insult to her.

  ‘Molly says to tell you that I have to borrow something from you to wear tomorrow, because none of her things would fit me. I have been asked to lunch with this man who owns all these newspapers, d’you see, and she thinks that I am too dull, that my own clothes are too dull for luncheon. Although I should have thought that my pleated skirt and cardigan would do. I mean, I am no fashion model, am I?’ Trilby sighed. ‘But apparently they will not. Molly says I must not go for my luncheon with this Lewis James man looking poor. She says that would be all wrong. Which is why I am here with my best spaniel’s eyes begging to borrow from you some little piece of elegance which will stun this Lewis James person.’

  Trilby did a mock imitation of doe eyes and a pleading look and barked like a dog, but of course Aphrodite did not laugh.

  ‘Who is he exactly, pet?’

  ‘I told you, he owns all these newspapers and he thinks The Popposites is funny, so he must be warped!’

  ‘Oh, nonsense. It is very funny. Of course you will sell him your cartoony thing, Trilby. And you know, Molly was quite right to send you across.’

  Aphrodite gave a small sigh of approval and nodded, and her hair, piled on top of her head in thick curls the colour of autumn leaves, appeared to be agreeing with her quite vehemently as the curls momentarily tumbled towards her forehead, before at a small toss of her pretty head they resumed their more stately position.

  ‘Why was she quite right, Aphro?’

  Aphrodite sighed. ‘Why, because Geoffrey has just bought me a coat and skirt with a blouse in pale blue, the collar cut to make not one but two bows. The back of the suit is a sort of sling of curved folds – quite pretty, but not me at all. I so dislike Geoffrey’s taste. I think he thinks that once he has filled my wardrobe with his choice of clothes I will, for some ridiculous reason, marry him, which is absurd.’ She paused and frowned heavily as if the very thought of both Geoffrey and marriage was too awful for words. ‘Geoffrey has such old taste. But what can I do? He gets simply livid if I don’t wear the clothes he buys for me.’

  Aphrodite looked across her immaculately kept kitchen with its wooden cupboards and floors towards the back garden and sighed as if Geoffrey, like some wild beast, was concealed there ready to spring out with a mighty roar from behind the small ornamental fountain.

  ‘But you know how it can be with men, Trilby. At least you don’t, happily for you. Men always want to love women who don’t want them. Molly, I am sure, would love Geoffrey, if she didn’t already have Berry. In fact I know that she does love Geoffrey, but I don’t think Geoffrey would be interested, simply because she thinks he is such a dish, do you see?’

  Trilby, her mouth full, looked across at Aphrodite and nodded, although she did not see at all, but then she rarely was able to quite follow Aphrodite’s conversation, except at a distance. All she knew of Geoffrey was that he was in the diplomatic service, always abroad on some mission or another. Trilby looked across the road at what she could see of the Nichols’ house from where she was seated, trying to imagine Molly and Geoffrey together, and finally failing.

  ‘Molly can’t cook, Geoffrey wouldn’t like that,’ she reminded Aphrodite. ‘Berry does all the cooking at their house.’

  Aphrodite considered this for a moment, and then nodded as if it finally put the whole matter to bed.

  ‘Well, no, then that would never do, if Molly can’t cook,’ she agreed. ‘Oxtail stew tonight, I am afraid,’ she announced sadly, as if the tail she was to cook had once belonged to a dear departed friend. ‘And then of course Geoffrey would like to take me to the Arts Club, but really—’ She stopped. ‘Last time we were there it was so awful, all jolly and merry and full of men in berets. How people can be so cheerful when we live in the shadow of the Bomb I have no idea. Have you read this . . .?’

  She placed two thumbs in her belt and walking in a strangely ostrich-like way swooped towards a table placed near the French windows leading on to the garden. Trilby watched her in some dread. Aphrodite’s idea of what was interesting to read was hardly ever her own.

  ‘I haven’t read much, Aphro, you know me!’ Even to her own ears Trilby’s laugh sounded false. ‘All I do is type all day and draw all night, often well into the night. I just draw.’

  ‘Deep Into Darkness – a book of poems – you know, about being in the shadow of the Bomb.’

  Before going upstairs Trilby glanced into the book. ‘I say, Aphro, none of these poems rhyme,’ she said, once again assuming her most innocent expression as she jumped up the stairs behind Aphrodite.

  ‘Only philistines expect poems to rhyme, Trilby dear.’

  Aphrodite’s bedroom was a great grand sweep of a room and unlike Agnes’s or Molly’s furnished in a tremendously luxurious style. Thick white velvet curtains vied with modern furniture purchased from Heal’s, although the fronts of cupboards and her dressing table mirror were all vaguely pink and reminiscent of the 1930s, so that when Trilby eventually stood in the rose pom-pom printed chiffon dress that Aphrodite had taken from one of the wardrobes, it seemed to her at that moment that, along with the dress, the whole world had indeed taken on a rose-coloured tint. ‘It’s the only dress that I have with any kind of youthful feel to i
t, Trilby dear,’ Aphrodite had said sadly, ‘and yet still, it has to be faced, really quite, quite old. Geoffrey again, I am afraid, and hardly worn, just the once, because otherwise he would have been simply livid.’

  But Trilby had hardly heard her for the good reason that she had never thought, ever, to be standing in Aphrodite’s bedroom trying on dresses preparatory to going to luncheon with one of the most powerful men in London.

  She gazed at her reflection in the rose-tinted mirror. The dress had a swathed collar ending in a bow above the bust, below which were tiny pleats. A narrow belt around the waist emphasised a skirt that was gathered, but not full. Long sleeves and a coat lined with the same rose pom-pom chiffon completed the whole unmistakable couturier effect.

  ‘Dark stockings with this dress, Trilby dear, and take your pick of my shoes – what a blessing we are both so much the same size, five foot four and size five shoes – it is a blessing, most particularly if one’s figure is thirty-four, twenty-four, thirty-four. If it was not, it would not be a blessing, but a total bore. But since we are both such normal sizes, one can just walk into anything, that is, if one really wants to,’ she added gloomily.

  A ring at the bell downstairs prompted Aphrodite to call from the bedroom, ‘Just push the door, I am upstairs!’

  ‘My dear! But how glamorous! My dear! Too too!’ The visitor paused in the doorway as she took in Trilby wearing Aphrodite’s couturier clothes.

  It was Mrs Johnson Johnson, sporting as usual one of her exotic Chinese gowns, and it being evening she had placed a jewel in the turban she was wearing. She was smoking a Turkish cigarette which smelled pleasantly decadent. As soon as she saw Trilby wearing the chiffon dress with the mass of tiny pleats, she smiled at her in the full-length mirror.

  ‘My dear! I have just heard the news from Moll. Although I gather we must not tell you know who! You know that, don’t you, Aphrodite, you know we must not tell you know who? Agnes must not be told.’

  ‘Oh, tell her! For goodness’ sake tell her! Agnes is a first rate bore,’ Aphrodite announced from the depths of her shoe cupboard. ‘If I were you, Trilby dear, I would go and tell the silly woman and be done with it.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  Trilby said this so emphatically that both the older women stopped doing what they were doing, and stared at her.

  ‘She will make my father’s life hell,’ Trilby explained. ‘And supposing he – you know, this Mr Lewis James – supposing he does not buy the drawings then it will have been made hell for nothing, nothing at all.’

  Mrs Johnson Johnson lit up her cigarette and snorted lightly. ‘Of course he will buy your cartoony thing, Trilby, of course he will. If this Mr Lewis James man knows what’s good for him, he will buy it, of course he will. Do you really think that a man like that can afford to waste his time asking someone like you into his office and not—’

  ‘To his house.’

  ‘To his house. Exactly, and not be really interested? I believe he spends most of his time with the Prime Minister and the head of the Bank of England. That kind of person can’t have his time wasted, whatever you might think. If I was him, I would buy it. Newspaper proprietor, isn’t he, he owns the paper, doesn’t he? I think that is what Moll told me. It’s not as if he’s not the owner. But to ask for you, personally. Mind you, if it wasn’t for Molly knowing him during the war – but there. If he buys your strip thing you must take old Moll out to dinner, really you must, but then, that’s not up to me, is it? But Trilby . . .’ She stared ever more deeply at the unmoving Trilby, still seemingly frozen in front of the mirror. ‘I say, my dear. You’ll sweep the board in that! Really, you will.’

  She leaned towards Trilby, smiling, and caught her arm and squeezed it, and Trilby jiggled a little up and down on the spot, laughing at both their images in the mirror.

  ‘It is so exciting,’ she agreed, ‘and now Aphrodite has loaned me this dress for luncheon tomorrow, isn’t that just too too—’ She stopped, the look in her eyes half mocking, half humorous.

  ‘If not three three,’ Aphrodite put in, which from anyone else would have been a joke, but somehow even when Aphrodite managed to think of a joke she always made it sound more like a fatal diagnosis.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I must tell Molly, now I come to think of it, that I am not at all sure about Trilby having luncheon alone with this fellow,’ Mrs Johnson Johnson went on, frowning suddenly. ‘How say you, Aphrodite?’ Since Aphrodite only shrugged her shoulders and sighed a little hopelessly, she continued, ‘I mean, all alone, and only eighteen? Surely one of us should go with her – go with Trilby?’

  ‘I can take care of myself!’

  ‘No young girl can take care of herself, Trilby dear, it has never, ever been known.’

  ‘Yes, but I am not going as a girl, Mrs J.J. I am going as a cartoonist, just a pencil for hire, so that is not at all the same thing, after all, is it?’

  ‘Not to you, maybe, but to a man like Lewis James, dear, you will probably be like the mice with their parcels coming in and out of the little shop in The Tale of Ginger and Pickles – so tempting, so mouthwatering – so difficult not to make a meal of.’

  ‘Not in these clothes,’ Trilby replied blithely. ‘I look at least twenty-five in these clothes of Aphrodite’s, don’t I, Aphro?’

  Aphrodite nodded, and then sighed. ‘I should imagine that you must, I know I look at least forty in them.’ Aphrodite sighed again, the weight of the world once more settled securely around her shoulders.

  ‘I really think either Molly or myself, or someone should go with Trilby, Aphro darling, really I do. I mean no-one in Glebe Street knows much about him, do they? None of us knows anything about this Lewis James man.’

  ‘I am only having lunch with him, Mrs J.J.,’ Trilby said, seeking to reassure her. ‘Really. Only having lunch.’ She peered from under a hat that Aphrodite had just found on one of the lit shelves near her dressing table and laughed up at her. ‘Only luncheon, nothing else!’

  ‘Don’t you believe it, dear,’ Mrs Johnson Johnson assured her. ‘Luncheon is never nothing else!’

  And of course, the following day, with Agnes safely out of the way visiting a friend, dark-stockinged, high-heeled, and having rehearsed her clothes for what now seemed hours, Trilby stepped into the taxi cab ordered by Molly feeling nervous to the point of sickness.

  Despite living so very near to everything in Chelsea, as she had since the war ended, she had never before been to a proper luncheon, and certainly not with a powerful mogul in a large house just off Holland Park.

  Now it seemed to her, as the taxi pulled up the hill towards Lewis James’s mansion, that it might just as well be set in another country, so different were the houses, their exteriors so broad and impressive, from those in Glebe Street. And unlike where she lived, there were no pubs or shops to give it a feeling of being cosmopolitan and artistic. For this reason she knew that she must be dressed really rather right in Aphrodite’s couture dress and coat, and at the same time she felt quite wrong, for she failed to see how she could be herself in the clothes chosen for her by the older women in her life.

  ‘Stop!’

  The taxi driver turned round and stared at her. Trilby stared back at him, but it was too late to go back and change into her office clothes, into safe old navy blue pleats and cardigans.

  ‘No, go on.’

  The taxi driver stared at her in his mirror, and smiled. ‘Nervous, miss?’

  Trilby nodded, swallowing hard. ‘You bet. I am actually having kittens, actually.’

  ‘Just imagine them all with their clothes off.’

  Trilby paid him and waved at the change, indicating that he should keep it. ‘I’ll try.’

  She forgot the taxi driver’s advice as soon as the butler opened the door to her. It was, after all, a little impossible to imagine anyone with his clothes off when you were wearing a large black straw hat and could hardly see him from under it. She smiled up at him with some difficulty, because
both Aphrodite and Mrs Johnson Johnson had insisted that she wore the hat, straight across and sitting flatly on her dark hair, au cardinal.

  ‘Mr James is in the library waiting for you, miss.’

  Trilby thought Crikey, a library in London! but out loud she said, ‘Shall I leave my coat?’

  The butler stared at the eighteen-year-old. The anxiety on her face was so visible that he instantly felt sorry for her.

  ‘It is very much part of your ensemble, miss, if you don’t mind my saying so. I should take it in, if I was you, that is.’

  They both stared at the rose chiffon lining of the coat, which exactly matched the dress. It was indeed, quite obviously, very much part of Trilby’s ensemble.

  ‘I suppose it would be a pity to leave it in the cloakroom where no-one will see it, wouldn’t it?’ Trilby conceded.

  ‘I should drape it round your shoulders and then leave it on your chair when you go in to luncheon, miss, if I was you, that is.’

  Trilby could have kissed the butler. She saw exactly what he meant as he carefully put the coat back around her slim shoulders.

  ‘I say, thank you! I am not very good at this sort of thing, as you can imagine. As a matter of fact, all this, well, I am not used to it at all.’

  The butler smiled and leaning forward he whispered, ‘You’ll do very well indeed, miss, really you will.’

  He opened the library door and, with a reassuring smile which seemed of a sudden to Trilby to be extraordinarily warm, announced, ‘Miss Smythson, Mr James.’

  Lewis James stood in front of an ornate marble chimneypiece. Behind him was a large portrait of a gentleman with an old-fashioned look to him, not just moustached, but bearded, leaning on a book, and staring out at the painter as if he knew the truth of the world. Perhaps there might have been a resemblance to the man who stood beneath it if the sitter in the painting had not had a beard, but as it was it seemed to Trilby that Mr James was standing beneath a portrait of someone whom he might once have at least known. He himself was clean shaven, however, and his suit and styling were formal to a discreet degree, the pale grey of the suiting very much of the moment, the pattern in the cloth hardly noticeable, unlike the white of his shirt which set off his tan. His hair was dark, greying slightly at the sides, and combed back with a side parting; his features were handsome and manly, but almost too even, something which was compensated for by a small scar to the side of his mouth.