Summertime

by Charlotte Bingham

  Obligingly the taxi driver increased his speed, and then doubled back down the street up which he had just driven, able to turn far more easily and swiftly than the Rolls-Royce. Once again nearing Kensington High Street he turned left and drawing away from the first set of traffic lights sped on towards Knightsbridge.

  Trilby sat back and stared ahead at her own mirrored image reflected in the glass behind the driver’s back, satisfied at last that there was no-one of interest to her following on behind, and yet that feeling that she was in the middle of a bad dream came to her once again.

  Surely Lewis could not wish the chauffeur to follow her everywhere she went? That surely could not be true? Was Lewis so frightened for her safety that he would not even let her go for a walk in the afternoon, or take a taxi to a cinema while he was out, without making sure that she was protected by one of his staff ? And if so were his feelings of protection born out of the best motives?

  She gazed out of the window at the familiar sights. Sloane Street, Sloane Square, the Royal Court Theatre, all places that she knew and had enjoyed since she was a tiny child, but in the knowledge that she was being followed by her husband’s chauffeur they seemed to be tawdry, dull, even garish, for the truth was that there was nowhere now that she could go to be free, except perhaps Glebe Street.

  And so, once again, Trilby found herself knocking on Berry’s studio door, waiting to be let in, but this time she gazed first up the street and then down it, and then again down the street and then up it, for she was becoming convinced that any minute now she would see the dreaded sight of the famous silver flying lady belonging to Lewis’s Rolls-Royce nosing her leisurely way down the side road that led past the back of their gardens and Berry’s studio door.

  What seemed like a clutch of minutes passed, when in fact it was probably hardly more than one before Berry stood framed in his doorway once more, hair sticking up and out, paintbrush in his mouth, paint all over his smock and his hands, one of which he now stretched out, pulling Trilby into the house and kick-shutting the door behind her.

  ‘Trilby! Just the person I was hoping to see. Such good news. Actually, your butler just rang through to say that he thought you would be coming round here to see me, which is just as well because – wait till you hear, just wait.’

  Trilby stared at Berry and as she did so she could feel her throat tightening to such a degree that she could hardly swallow, let alone speak.

  ‘My butler . . .’

  ‘Yes, you know, Paine, or whatever his name is. Your butler, he rang. I say, you are a grand old thing getting your butler to ring, talk about get you. Coffee?’ Berry waggled the familiar old coffee pot at Trilby. ‘As a matter of fact it could not have been more opportune, because I have been given a bloody great commission to paint a family group in Northumberland, so by the time I get back you will probably have six children.’

  ‘Please, please don’t go to Northumberland, please, Berry, please!’

  Berry stared round his kitchen door at Trilby. She stared back at him and for a second kept a straight face, before bursting into peals of laughter.

  ‘Oh, you horror.’ Berry sighed with relief. ‘You really had me for a minute, and for a second or three I thought you were being trés trés serious, and that you did not want the Wiz to go northers. Oh, lud. Do not whatever happens ever give the Wiz such a fright again, please.’

  Trilby kicked off her shoes and threw her hat on one side and sighed. ‘Oh, you know me, Berry, I am without any doubt the happiest person in England. I have to be,’ she continued, ‘after all, if you think about it, now I am married to Lewis I can have anything I want, can’t I?’

  Berry looked at her. He knew her so well that he even knew when she was lying. He put down the coffee pot. ‘Tell me all, Trilb, concealing nothing. You have something on your chest.’

  Trilby lay down on the bench and gazed at the ceiling above her. ‘Very well. I will tell you a story. Once upon a time a very stupid young girl married a great emperor, and for a while she was very happy, and then he took her up to a high tower and showed her all the kingdoms of the world, and he said I have given you all this in return for you granting me one wish.’

  There was a long silence.

  Berry said nothing. He poured them both a coffee and topped up the coffee with cream and waited.

  ‘And that wish was?’ he asked at last, quite unable to bear the suspense.

  ‘That wish was that—’ Trilby sat up again. ‘The emperor’s wish was that she would never ever leave the tower again. She could look at the view. She could see all the people below. She could see them waving to her. She could throw flowers down to them, but she could never ever climb down to be with them again.’

  ‘But this is terrible. Is that why you looked ghostly when I made mention of the butler ringing on the blower? Is the man in your life of unreasoning possession, Trilb?’

  Trilby put down her cup of coffee. ‘Look outside, Berry,’ she asked him, her voice, for no reason that she could think of, now lowered. ‘Just step outside and look, and tell me what you see in Tankridge Street?’

  ‘All right, but don’t scream or faint, will you? I am not up to a great deal before I hear Big Ben chime midnight.’

  Trilby watched Berry’s tall, lean figure striding towards the window, sliding to an abrupt halt as he obviously decided that it might be necessary to keep himself concealed, and then sliding up towards the long velvet curtains, and twitching one.

  ‘It’s all right, Trilb, there’s no butler concealed anywhere with a fedora pulled down over his nose, or anything of that nature. Just the usual. Molly’s bicycle against the back, that lunatic next door’s motor bike, and your hubby’s Rolls-Royce and the chauffeur waiting for you.’ He sauntered back to Trilby. ‘So, there you are, all’s well that end’s well of a coffee o’clock.’

  ‘But that’s just it, Berry, that’s just it!’ Trilby clung to his hand. ‘All is far from well, don’t you see? I took a taxi, I did everything to lose them, to lose him, but they’re back, he’s back.’

  ‘Who are back, Trilb?’

  ‘The people who keep following me. It’s either the maid, or the chauffeur, or the butler guarding the front door, or he’s ringing ahead of me to find out if I am actually going where I said I was going. It’s a nightmare.’

  Berry stared at Trilby. She had always been highly strung, but now he was quite worried about her. She looked pale and drawn and she kept clasping and unclasping her hands.

  ‘What is this about, Trilb? Thinking people are following one is halfway to the funny farm, voyez vous? As in not funny at all, at all, as they never say in Ireland. Surely no-one is following you? Outside is only your motor car and the very nice driver who keeps polishing it with a very clean duster. Why would one think he is following you, when it is perfectly normal for a person of one’s new station to take a motor car and the chauffeur if on a visit to a friend, however humble?’

  Trilby took hold of Berry’s hand between her two tense ones and clung to it, her large, dark eyes making him feel intensely protective of her. Her hands told him that he was her best friend, the one person in whom she could truly confide.

  ‘You think I am mad, don’t you? You think I am going to start seeing pins in everything, and I don’t blame you. But it’s true, I am being followed, and all the time, he will not let me out of his sight, even if he’s not there, he still makes sure that someone else is. If he is not in the house, he has to know where I am, all the time. He rings up people to find out where I am, who I am with, why I am with them, and – oh, it’s no good, I can’t explain. But he’s not just the handsome sweet person everyone thinks he is, he is someone else too. Someone I am beginning to think I really don’t like very much.’

  Berry sat down, and patted the seat beside him. ‘Everyone is someone else too, Trilb, they really are. There is always a smile, or a large piece of charm, or just the will to entertain which being with other people brings out. But then . . .’ Berry sh
rugged his shoulders. ‘Then, once home, well, a truly vast area of human display is, as they say, left at the gate, and not just the proverbial jolly old smile. It is all too normal. And of course, since you are young, and only just a married person, it can come as a bit of a shock to discover this other person.’

  But Trilby only shook her head and turned away from Berry, as if to say, ‘You don’t understand.’

  What she finally said out loud in a resigned voice was, ‘I am so glad you got a commission, Berry, and that you are going to the country. I should just so love to be going with you.’

  ‘Well, then, come with me, as you did when you were a tiny person! Come with me, and trip the light fantastic in the northern clime. Why ever not? Molly can’t come because of too few pennies at the bank and taking in lodgers, but you could, old thing, you really could.’

  Trilby stared into Berry’s bespectacled face and for a second she imagined herself as she would have been in the old days. Probably saying ‘Yes, yes, yes! What a good idea! I have two weeks left of the school holidays’ or ‘I have two weeks’ leave owed to me from the typing pool, I can come.’

  And then she would have flown back to her house, informed her completely indifferent stepmother, and quickly thrown some clothes into one of their heavy old crocodile suitcases: old corduroys, climbing socks, gumboots and such like, and shortly after they would have been off to the station, leaving Molly saying, as she always did, ‘Don’t forget to air the bed, my dear, hired cottages can be the devil when it comes to airing.’

  Once there of course she would have left Berry alone to go off and paint whoever had commissioned him, and herself wandered off each day with a packet of sandwiches and a bottle of ginger beer to climb the hillsides, or sit by the water and sketch, before going back to tea in front of some cottage fireside, and a host of anecdotes from Berry about the person or house that he was painting.

  Trilby had accompanied him many times on such trips and their innocent days together had always had that sort of laissez-faire rhythm.

  ‘Dear days, weren’t they, Berry? The good days of going off with you in my school hols or whatever?’

  ‘Come, please come with me, I’ll ask your hubby for you. I mean old family friend, middle-aged and respectable, he won’t mind, not for a few days. He will let you go, surely? Old friend of the family and all that, I shall stress that. Molly never minded, and still wouldn’t, Molly loves her Trilby.’

  Trilby shook her head, a lump coming into her throat as it always did when people were kind to her. She cast dolefully around for her hat and gloves, and the shoes with the high heels, the grown-up clothes that made you walk tall and act mature, that insisted on your being a woman, and acting like a woman, not as she would be if she was going to Northumberland with Berry – a person.

  ‘No, Lewis would never let me, Berry. That was what I was trying to tell you. He would never, ever let me, especially not now.’

  ‘I’ll ask him, it’s worth asking him.’

  Trilby, once more hatted and shod, once more the perfect young lady about town, pulled on her leather gloves and said sadly, ‘No, Berry, please don’t, I beg of you. He would only make me pay for it in some way. It just would not be worth it. So please, as we love each other, please don’t even ask him.’

  Berry did not like the look of his young friend at all, but he could not say as much. He would have liked to have called Molly down, but she was out having lunch somewhere with someone or other, which she very nearly always was, for the fact was that it worried him a lot. The way Trilby had said He would only make me pay for it had not been at all comforting.

  And then too she was looking more than usually pale. Berry always found that one of the advantages of being a professional painter was that you noticed all the small things in a person’s face, particularly once you were close to them, as he was now close to Trilby. You noticed the tension in the eyes, the dryness around the lips, above all the pallor.

  ‘I tell you what, Trilby,’ he said, slowly, making time, although he could not have said why. ‘I will go northers on my own, but when I return to the Holy Capital and my very own Tower of Babel I shall call you up and ask you round to Berry Towers where we will talk more on this topic, namely of Mrs Lewis James being followed. By the way, wherefore to – I meant to ask you before – wherefore to your cartoon strip? Molly says you have come to a shuddering halt. Of course Molly does not think it matters because you are now married and settled. I, on the other hand, as you know, would wish to see the Muse return and you to be resolutely unsettled, which is the only way to be, is it not? Filled with the divine restlessness that only Spring and Art, and sometimes Love, can bring.’

  Berry paused, waiting for a reaction, but finding there was none he fell silent as Trilby stared past him, her eyes sad. ‘It’s all gone at the moment, Berry. I am afraid I am quite dried up, as they say. My talent has lost its freshness. It has to be faced. I was just a flash in the pan, and now I am afraid there is only the pan left, no flash.’

  They both laughed, and Berry looked relieved. ‘Oh, the Muse is such a tart! But she will return at any minute, you’ll see. Any minute now she will come popping up. I am sure she’s just gone away only until you have become used to the wall to wall carpeting and the servants and the butler and so on; all that – well, it’s just put you on the wrong creative foot. Money can often have such a very adverse effect on the old artistic juices. At least that is what I have always told my Moll, the dear old darling. And that, I am afraid, is why we have remained so resolutely poor. Any other way and I would freeze up. If we became rich, the paint would dry, but will she understand? Not a bit. She will understand one day, of course, when my duchesses and actresses are hanging in the National Portrait Gallery.’

  The ongoing battles about artistic integrity and lack of funds at Berry Towers, as Berry occasionally referred to their house, had once been of great amusement to Trilby, but now they just seemed sad to her, and of a sudden she could hardly see why she had once found it all so humorous.

  In fact, as she kissed her hand goodbye to Berry before she bent to climb into the back of Lewis’s wretched limousine, Trilby found herself wondering why she had ever found anything humorous about Berry and Molly quarrelling as they did sometimes, or Aphrodite grumbling about Geoffrey, or Mrs Johnson Johnson coming out with one of her classic remarks about life. Now, well, now they did not seem in the least bit funny, but then, at the moment, very little did.

  ‘Mrs James?’

  Trilby turned and looked at the chauffeur. ‘Yes?’

  The chauffeur pointed to the car. ‘Wouldn’t you like to step in, Mrs James?’

  Trilby shook her head. ‘No, thank you. I want to walk, and walk I will.’

  It would have been nice to have held out and walked all the way from Glebe Street to Kensington High Street and from there up to the upper reaches, towards Holland Park. To see the Rolls threading its way, perhaps haplessly, through the traffic behind her; but after a while, due to the height of her heels, and the tightness of her skirt, and the fact that it was beginning to rain, Trilby could no longer be bothered with her pride, and she flagged the car down and climbed in.

  ‘That could have cost me my job, Mrs James.’ The chauffeur did not smile but eyed her in the driver’s mirror. ‘When I am sent to fetch you I must fetch you, on Mr James’s orders, it is just how it is I am afraid, Mrs James. Or else, as I say, it would cost me my job, and I have a wife and two children, Mrs James. You would not know what that is like, to have dependants, but believe me, this job, with all its perks, it means everything to me.’

  ‘Of course it does,’ Trilby agreed. ‘I am sorry, Lyons.’

  Her eyes fell on the seat beside her. A large box, very smartly wrapped and addressed to Mrs James, occupied the far side of the passenger seating.

  ‘That is for you, Mrs James.’

  Without much enthusiasm Trilby opened the dress box. Lewis had given her so many clothes of late she had almost begun
to dread seeing anything new, but now that she gazed into this box she realised that she was looking at something very, very special, something so special that even she would not be able to resist wearing it.

  ‘You are so kind. The dress is beautiful.’

  The dress was more than beautiful, and thank heavens Trilby did not have to act out her gratitude as she felt she had been forced to do a little too often of late.

  ‘Will you wear it for my birthday dinner dance next week? I know everyone will adore to see you in it.’

  ‘“Everyone” being you!’

  ‘Certainly “everyone” is undoubtedly me, your devoted husband.’

  Trilby laughed. It was at these moments that she was able to forget that other side of Lewis, the side that Berry had told her was present in everyone, even people you loved, and begin once more to think that she was mistaken in him.

  Or, perhaps, she told herself, because she was young and inexperienced, she was simply not able to take in her stride ways of being and thinking that the rest of the world had long ago accepted as being a normal part of marriage, as being entirely natural. She had no friends of her own age to whom she could turn, and certainly no-one that she could trust – besides Berry. And then too, Lewis was so used to being an emperor.

  Lewis was king of his particular part of the jungle. He could do anything he wanted, and what was more he could have done for him whatever he might think he wished, so no wonder he had a rather unusual way of going on. It was only to be expected. Without a doubt he would change. People changed all the time. Trilby knew this from listening to Aphrodite and Mrs Johnson Johnson. They were always talking about people changing after marriage, or marriage changing people, or people trying to change people they had married when they should really have just minded their own business and not bothered. Change had been a constant topic while she was growing up.

  ‘Do you think I should wear evening gloves with this?’