Summertime

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘Yes, madame. Evening gloves, dark evening gloves is what goes with this dress.’

  Mrs Woo’s tone was quite firm. Trilby looked at her in the dressing mirror. She seemed so awfully sure of what was needed this evening that Trilby thought she must have seen a picture of this particular dress in a magazine; Vogue, or something like that. And as it happened Trilby herself felt she had seen such a picture, so she was quite sure that Lewis must have had Marion Holton buy it for him from one of the latest collections.

  Because she was feeling so much happier Trilby twirled suddenly in front of the mirror. The white silk tulle of the dress floated upwards and, seconds later, floated downwards again. It was a happy moment, but Mrs Woo did not even smile as she watched Trilby, her face quite serious. It was not so much a beautiful as a stunning dress, which was possibly why the maid was looking so serious. It was strapless but it had a high front bodice, beautifully sculptured and outlined all the way round with hand-made dark silk flowers. The bodice was very tight, and the skirt fell from a shallow vee at the front and back.

  With it, Trilby, her dark hair styled in a more formal manner, wore simple black pearl earrings and a single string of black pearls around her neck.

  ‘Mrs James looks velly, velly beautiful.’

  Trilby pulled on the dark evening gloves that matched the flowers around the dress, and smiled back at Mrs Woo. Once Mrs Woo had all but won the battle to dress her they had reached an uneasy truce, and now might even be considered to be friends.

  ‘Wish me luck, Mrs Woo!’

  Mrs Woo waved her tiny hands expressively as if to say ‘Be gone with you and on with the dance’, but when she turned away, long after Trilby had left the room and was walking carefully down the stairs towards the hall, she sighed.

  Lewis was waiting for her in the hall. He stood watching her coming down the stairs, step by step, her face wreathed in that particular sort of happiness that young girls emanate when they know that they are looking at their beautiful best, or, perhaps, have never looked better.

  ‘I knew that dress would suit you, darling. I just knew it.’

  Trilby smiled. She had never thought to look as she did tonight. She had never, ever thought of herself as being more than pretty, but tonight she most definitely was. It was only as she went ahead of Lewis into the drawing room that something came back to her. It was only fleeting, but if it had not been Lewis’s birthday she felt she would have been able to give her memory, however vague, some precise identification.

  ‘You are a very brave young woman, to have married Lewis.’

  Lola de Ribes was standing with Trilby, looking out onto the dance floor that now covered the back garden, at the fairy lights, at the marquee, at the servants in their white jackets and black ties, at the maids in their long black dresses, at the moon above them.

  ‘I hardly needed courage to marry someone as wonderful as Lewis,’ Trilby told her, quietly.

  ‘Not now, perhaps, not tonight.’ Lola’s expression was not one that Trilby could read. It was neither kind nor cruel.

  The older woman moved off, and, the other guests having arrived, Lewis and Trilby started to greet all their mutual friends. Lola and Trilby did not see each other again all evening, which was just as well since Trilby felt that, despite being an old friend of Lewis, and obviously in possession of greater knowledge of him than she herself, Madame de Ribes had gone too far. But why had she gone out of her way to say something so sinister to Trilby, and why had the look in her eyes been one of such real pity? Trilby wondered briefly if the older woman was jealous, if she had perhaps had an affair with Lewis? But minutes later, as photographer after photographer of a sudden seemed to be focused on Trilby, she forgot all about Lola and laughed, unable to believe such attention.

  ‘Did you invite them all?’ she asked, turning to Lewis, but he only shook his head.

  ‘I did give the nod to one of my editors, and I think they must all have taken it to be carte blanche for all of them. It has opened the flood gates, I am afraid, but you’re looking so beautiful tonight, my darling, can you blame them? Can you blame them for wanting to photograph you as you are, young and lovely, and at the height of your beauty?’

  Trilby would have had to have been made of stone not to have enjoyed the attention she was receiving. She smiled and waved, and they snapped away. She went out of rooms and came back into them, and still the photographers seemed somehow obsessed with her.

  ‘I feel like a trail of aniseed with hounds coming after me!’ she said to one of the many young men who, it seemed, could not wait to escort her onto the dance floor. ‘What have I done to deserve this?’

  ‘That’s easy, looked more beautiful than anyone else.’

  They danced, he came too close, Lewis cut in. He danced with her, smiling and proud, the flash bulbs popped yet again. Lewis allowed someone else to cut in, and then he ordered the photographers away into the night.

  ‘What a wonderful evening, darling. You looked ravishing, everyone did nothing but talk about you. I could not have been happier with you, in every way.’

  Trilby floated up to bed, and for many reasons she allowed Mrs Woo to undress her. The next morning Mrs Woo brought her a breakfast tray and on it was a note from Lewis.

  I was so proud of you last night, my darling. I would be with you today, but I have to fly to Paris, can’t put it off any longer. Will be back with you tomorrow. L. PS The car is at your disposal all the time.

  Trilby stared across at the windows. Berry was away, Lewis was away, and she was quite alone. Since it was raining it was obvious what she must do. She must explore. Up until now she had only really been in their part of the house, the part that Lewis and herself and the servants used, and since everything in the house was so well appointed there had really been no reason to go anywhere else.

  ‘Mrs Woo? Mrs Woo!’

  The maid appeared from Trilby’s dressing room in her small, neat, dark dress. ‘Yes, madame?’

  ‘Mr Lewis is away in Paris. Take the day off! Go and see your mother and your sisters. Oh, and here. Buy yourself something nice.’

  Trilby reached into her handbag and gave her a ten pound note. Mrs Woo stared at it. She knew it was a bribe, and so did Trilby, which was probably why they both fell to silence. The expression on Mrs Woo’s face became very, very serious the more she stared at the large note in her hand, until eventually she bowed. As she did so Trilby remembered Berry saying long ago that in his experience the Chinese only laughed when they were embarrassed, and that when they were happy and at ease they became immensely serious.

  Soon the maid was gone and Trilby was able to hop out of bed and run round the room opening cupboards and pulling at drawers as a child might, ending up this curious expression of freedom by standing on her head. As she viewed the world from upside down she exulted in the thought that she was free for a whole day to do as she wished.

  She pulled her suitcase from under the bed, at the same time reaching for the familiar packages that were also hidden there – among them her newest drawings, done in secret in the bathroom, behind locked doors, after her visit to Berry. But search as she might to find them, with more and more desperation, in the end she had to come to the conclusion that they were gone.

  And when she went to the cupboard and reached up for the old crocodile suitcase her father had given her long ago, that too had gone. As had her beloved black velvet dressing gown, which she had so often had cause to wear to cross the street to have breakfast with Aphrodite.

  Frantically she sorted through all the other cupboards, and in the bathroom too, but there was nothing of her old life left. For some reason that she did not understand, everything that she had been used to wearing at home had been removed.

  She stared around her room. It did not seem possible. She looked about her as if the beloved old items would suddenly reappear. But everything was gone.

  More than that – the crazy outfit that she had bought with Berry, that too had go
ne. Trilby sat down on her bed, suddenly realising that it must be on Lewis’s orders. He must have told the servants to take away everything from her cupboards that had anything to do with Glebe Street, or Berry, or anyone really, other than, probably, himself.

  Over the previous weeks she had grown used to having no say in anything that happened in the house. The food, the flower arrangements, the running of the house, were all done for her, and only Lewis was consulted by Paine or Cook. She had even become accustomed to being followed everywhere, either by the car or by Lewis’s telephone calls, to his returning at times when he had said he would not, to his ordering her to change for the theatre at a moment’s notice, only to change his mind and decide to stay in after all. All that she had decided to accept, but having favourite clothes taken from her cupboard was quite different. It meant that Lewis, and it had to be Lewis, would not allow her to put on anything, at any time, that he had not bought for her.

  As soon as she was dressed Trilby decided to carry through her plan to explore the rest of the house. Now she was quite determined to go where she had not been before, to rifle through dusty cupboards looking for her beloved old clothes. They must have been put somewhere. Lewis could not have burned them, surely? The idea made her feel more distressed than she would have thought possible. Old clothes after all were old clothes, when all was said and done, but not those clothes – she had made those clothes herself, carefully chosen the patterns and found old materials in junk shops. Those clothes were her – they were ‘Trilby’.

  ‘I may be married, but I am not a mouse,’ she told her own reflection in the mirror and then, quite determined on her course, she walked out of her bedroom and stood in the corridor outside.

  The house was very quiet, as it would be at that time of day. Downstairs, far away, behind the green baize door she could hear laughter and talk from the kitchen and pantries. There was the occasional sound of a car passing outside but she could hear nothing else. She should have been able to tell herself that it was her house, but that was so palpably untrue that she could not even begin to try to think such a lie. The place in which she now found herself living, the square, three-floored house filled with art treasures and every accoutrement of the rich, was no more hers than her father and stepmother’s house in Glebe Street. Nevertheless she determined on trying to explore. She would start with Lewis’s bedroom and dressing room. Paine, who acted as both valet and butler, would be having coffee and buns by now, so she had time.

  She pushed open the door. Although she had been in the room before, she had never really taken it in, probably because Lewis had such a huge personality. Now, standing alone, she sensed that particular aura of masculinity that is sometimes so clearly defined in a man’s rooms. A sense of apartness that made nonsense of the coming together of the sexes, a sense of dark brown masculinity, of attitudes so different from the sex to which she belonged that she found herself catching her breath. She knew now that she was more than somewhat afraid of Lewis, not in a day to day way, but in the sense that she had gradually had to come to terms with the fact that she did not really know him, that she had fallen in love with his bright white shirts, his immaculate tan, his overt charm, and good looks, all pretty perfect effects, but effects behind which Lewis himself was hiding.

  She inched quietly across the dark green Victorian carpet, passing the silver brushes on the Georgian military chest, passing the green silk curtains run up from what looked like acres of material, caught up at different points and let loose at others, and opened Lewis’s cupboards. Here were folded shirts made of cotton imported especially for Lewis, here were cashmere sweaters and cardigans, dinner jackets, morning dress, top hats, squashy hats, golfing caps, ties and bow ties, boxes and boxes made of leather inside which were Lewis’s beautiful cufflinks and immaculate pins and collar stiffeners; everything that could possibly be required to make up the exterior of a gentleman was here.

  But there were also other boxes, almost out of reach, boxes that had to be reached on a pair of library steps, boxes that cried out to Trilby Do not touch, do not open.

  Trilby stared up at them, her heart beating faster. It would be, she somehow knew, like climbing to the top of her stepmother’s cupboard and finding her own Christmas present long before the day. She would regret looking, she knew it, and yet, helpless, she could not stop herself from doing just that, opening up not one Pandora’s box, but dozens of them.

  And, having done so, all at once she knew that her life was never ever going to be the same again.

  They were beautiful boxes, carefully preserved, tied neatly together with expensive gold-threaded string, and as she carefully undid the neat bows of the gold-threaded string and looked through them Trilby realised at once why the photograph of the beautiful woman in the white dress had disappeared so suddenly from the table that day. Indeed as she opened box after box it seemed to her that she now understood everything that she had in the recent past so utterly misunderstood, and dread filled her heart, and it became like a stone set in her body, and her body just water, and the stone sinking slowly to the bottom of it.

  Chapter Five

  Now every day when she awoke Trilby felt sick, dreading the advent of morning, and worst of all, Lewis. And every day that she awoke and found Lewis had gone to the office early she felt less sick, almost jubilant, only to feel more sick when he returned to lunch with her and make love before returning to his office.

  The truth was that she had started to dread his knock at the door and his request, ‘May I come in and see you, darling?’ Everything about him, up to and including his knocking so politely at her bedroom door, made her stomach turn over. She hoped that he did not notice, because a part of her still loved Lewis – it was just that she was no longer terribly sure which part. Perhaps because of this terrible uncertainty, she had started to lose weight. Mrs Woo had to send off quantities of her clothes to have the hems put up.

  Sometimes Trilby stared at her reflection in the mirror and wondered at the change in herself. Her eyes had become lacklustre, and there were dark lines underneath them where there had never been any before, lines that she secretly called her ‘dread lines’, lines from dreading Lewis’s return. And it was not just his return; the whole of him now filled her with dread. She dreaded hearing his footfall on the stairs, she dreaded the sound of his breathing, most especially when he was in bed making love to her.

  For some reason too, just lately, she had even started to dread seeing his hair on her pillows, so that now it seemed to her that she did not just dread him, but a part of her must hate him, not just his body, his demands, but the very essence of him; not just his unkindness, his power over her, but everything to do with him.

  His insistence on her only eating the food that he liked. His inability to see worth in any of his rivals. His meagre, narrow attitudes to life. His blind support of everything conventional, his self-esteem. But most of all, and most terribly, she hated his indestructible wealth. The newspapers and magazines that were read all over the world by millions, that influenced governments; an empire that could not, it seemed to Trilby, ever be destroyed.

  ‘People must have their news.’

  Lewis often said that to her in a complacent voice, standing before the library chimneypiece, very often in a pair of tartan evening trousers and a black velvet smoking jacket that, to Trilby, made him seem even more Victorian and unyielding than ever. ‘Yes, darling, people must have their news, so we will always be here, thank God, us newspapers, until the end of time. Nothing can destroy print, not now, not ever. No wonder they were so frightened of Caxton when he invented his printing press.’

  Sometimes Trilby awoke in the night and in a state of sweating, nightmare-ridden half sleep she saw the whole world spread about with newspapers. In the lonely darkness of her room, it seemed to her that everywhere from the Arctic to the Sahara was covered in Lewis’s newspapers, so it followed that everywhere was, in some way, covered in Lewis’s thoughts, his narrow attitud
es, his xenophobia, his belief in keeping women tied to the home. His worship of everything from the Family Christmas to the Empire, from the Atom Bomb to the Sanctity of Marriage. They all covered the world. Sometimes she actually found herself hurrying down to the library of a late afternoon in order to delight in the sight of one of the maids setting light to one of Lewis’s newspapers under the kindling and the coals.

  But despite his publicly unwavering belief in the sanctity of marriage and the family, his worship of traditional values, Lewis seemed to be the only person who did not notice the change in his young wife, until he started to ask her every now and then, and a little edgily, ‘Nothing to report?’

  Or he would say, ‘Something should have happened by now, surely?’ Pretty soon it was brought home even to Trilby that he was hoping that she was pregnant, that there would be some sort of result from his afternoon visits to her bedroom.

  Of course it was normal for a man to expect to impregnate a woman, even Trilby realised that. If you married you were expected to have a man’s babies. But what was terrifying to her was that she was so appalled by the thought of having a child by him. At least when he made love to her he went away afterwards and she could shower herself and forget him, put him out of her mind, pretend that she had just been through something unpleasant which could now be forgotten. But if she had his baby, it would be there – it, the baby. And there would be no possible way out; nor any forgetting.

  The fact was that Trilby wanted to have Lewis’s baby now as much as she wanted to have her head shaved and become a nun, but naturally she could not tell him that. Instead she smiled and looked as vague as was perfectly possible in the circumstances. For weeks now she had come to realise that there was no escape from her marriage. Day after day she contemplated trying to run away from this stranger who watched her so avidly; who, when he was not watching her himself, was happy in the thought that he had set someone else to watch her.