Summertime

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘I hate to see you like this. You lose all your appeal, all your dignity. What exactly is the matter?’

  ‘The matter if – the matter is – I have had a miscarr-idge, and I am not at all meself, myselve. Really I am not.’

  Lewis went to the drink tray and although it was far too early for such things he poured himself a double Scotch.

  Silly little girl was taking this miscarriage far too much to heart. Women! He sighed both inwardly and outwardly and then he said flatly, ‘I think you need a nurse. I will have Dr Mellon send us a nurse for you. She will pay great attention to your needs, she will be a professional. And we will move you to the top of the house where she can watch over you, all on her own, and make sure that you are cured. You need to have an effective cure from this bad phase.’

  The nurse was a large woman with heavy legs and a dark shading of hair on either side of her mouth. She must have reached some level of superiority in her profession for, as Trilby duly noted, she wore a cap with many kinds of frills, very complicated, lace-edged frills. She was a woman of few words. She was a woman who did not really like ‘spoilt girls’ as she continually told Trilby, as she tried to force food down her, girls who could not appreciate how lucky they were.

  The doors on the top floor were now always locked, and since the rooms had once been nurseries, all the windows were barred. Once, looking down from them, Trilby thought she saw Berry in the road waving up to her, and she opened the window and waved back down, making sure it was something particularly outrageous that she waved – in this case a frilly lace bra.

  Her father and stepmother had obviously been told about the miscarriage by Lewis, because shortly afterwards her father wrote to Trilby at what, for him, was some length. As she read the letter Trilby could imagine her father at his desk, cigarette in one hand, Parker pen in the other, pausing every now and then to stare out at the roses in his garden.

  My dear Trilby,

  I had hoped to be the happy recipient of good news about you, but I hear that things have gone sadly awry. Happily, unlike some, you have a wonderful husband. So caring and kind, and able to provide you with every degree of comfort, and all that you need. You are a very lucky girl, and when you are quite better you must come to lunch with me. Millie, Molly’s lodger, is proving to be a very refreshing presence in Glebe Street. Everyone likes her and she has taken over cooking for us, while Mrs Bartlett is away, which is a great relief to Agnes!

  Well, that is all for now, I hope you recover from your bad luck soon.

  Love Daddy xxxxxx

  Trilby put the letter under the pillow. Inevitably, after Lewis had visited her the following evening, when she went to reread it, the letter had disappeared. Not that Trilby was surprised. So much had disappeared. Clothes, cards, letters – not to mention her work. It was amazing to her that the laces had not been removed from her shoes, or the belts from her clothes, so much did she seem to have become a prisoner.

  Of course she was getting no better. Upstairs, incarcerated on the third floor, despite the nurse and the strict regime, despite the locked doors and the barred windows, despite everything Trilby was still not cured.

  Such a disappointment for Dr Mellon and Lewis, of course, but she was determined not to be cured, not for days and weeks, not until she had managed to work out what to do with her life. Until then she would drink the little bottles of vodka that she had managed to bribe the maids to bring her on the nurse’s day off.

  A few days later, Lewis made a special effort to leave his office early and met Dr Mellon as he came to call on his usual afternoon visit.

  ‘I was hoping to catch you when you came in, Dr Mellon.’

  ‘Mr James, good afternoon to you, sir.’

  They both smiled at each other.

  ‘Might you have time to talk to me?’

  Of course Dr Mellon had time to talk to a man like Lewis James. For a private doctor with a rich practice not to have time to talk to one of his richest patients would be insanity, to say the least.

  ‘The fact is,’ Lewis began almost as soon as the doctor had shut the library door behind him, ‘the fact is, Dr Mellon, that my wife is getting no better. The nurse reports that search the rooms though she may, and looking everywhere as she has, she cannot find where she is hiding the – the whatever she is drinking – but she must be hiding it. We know that, because she is no better.’

  ‘May I sit down?’

  ‘Of course.’ Lewis indicated that the doctor should seat himself on a Knole sofa, and he too sat down, but on a chair, with a higher seat. ‘We have no drink in the house, Dr Mellon, none at all, and yet my wife, every few days, is found – well, not to put too fine a point on it, she is found completely drunk. Yesterday she even attacked the nurse. She kicked her on the shins. I saw the bruises for myself. If I had not, I would not have believed it. It was quite frightening for the poor woman. My wife has gone from being this gentle patient creature to this wildcat. I can’t tell you what it is doing to me to see her like this. Apart from anything else I cannot be with her all the time, even should I wish to be. I have an empire to run. Last week, it seems, she threw all her clothes out of the window, and a few days before that she was seen to be waving a piece of lingerie at passers-by.’

  Dr Mellon leaned forward, his face a picture of concern. He gave a sympathetic sigh and shook his head. ‘It is so puzzling with these cases, Mr James. But, if I may tell you, sir, the fact is that people with your wife’s condition, and we find this time and time again, they develop the most extraordinary cunning. They can find places to hide alcohol, or whatever other drug they are committed to, and none of us, and I mean it, none of us can locate where it is. It is most particularly difficult at home. In an old house like this, you can look and you can look, but you will never find the place where she has hidden the drink from you. It is just a fact.’

  Lewis shook his head. It did not seem possible to marry a young girl like Trilby and the next minute to be talking to a doctor about her alcohol problems. It was a nightmare for him, and so humiliating – in every respect the sort of thing that, if it got out, if any of his rival papers got hold of the story, well, it was the sort of thing that could be very embarrassing, most particularly to him.

  ‘What do you suggest we do, Dr Mellon?’ For a second, Lewis looked and felt quite humble.

  ‘I suggest that you remove the nurse, just let your wife be. Perhaps give her a studio to use, something of her own. A bit more freedom.’

  ‘She has plenty of freedom.’ Lewis stared frostily at Dr Mellon, thinking all at once that he might quite soon be in need of a new doctor. ‘She has the run of my house, all day and every day. She is always allowed to do as she wants.’

  ‘That is just it, Mr James.’ Dr Mellon stared thoughtfully at his richest and most powerful patient.

  ‘What is just it, Dr Mellon?’

  ‘You just said “my” house. Your wife is living in your house. As I say, I think she needs somewhere of her own. A place where she can be herself, not just Mrs James.’

  ‘This is just psychological claptrap.’ Lewis sprang out of his chair and started to walk up and down, the red flush appearing as always when he was annoyed across the top of his forehead and spreading down towards his eyes.

  Dr Mellon watched him with some detachment. He had many rich clients and he always found that if he told them the truth it was such an unusual experience for them that they always came back for more. It was just a fact. Plus, of course, he could frighten them. He had only to stare at their nails, or into their eyes, and make a doubtful ‘tiss, tiss’ sound and sigh and turn away, and he would have them eating out of his hands.

  ‘A studio?’

  ‘Yes. She used to draw and so on, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, of course she did. That was how we met.’

  ‘In that case, give her a little freedom, Mr James. Send the nurse home, allow your wife some time to herself; somewhere, as it were, where she can spend the mornings dood
ling, having coffee with a girlfriend. Somewhere where she can choose the flowers, put up a sofa bed, hang her own prints, play her own music. After all, you are much older than she is.’

  This last struck home as it was meant to. Lewis stared at Dr Mellon, hating him, but also afraid of the accuracy of his diagnosis of his marriage. Even he could see the truth in what he said. It could not be denied, Trilby was much younger than himself. And she was not allowed any choice of flowers, or anything at all, in his house.

  ‘Try it. It might work. Certainly what you are doing at the moment is not working, and if you want to have a happy outcome you are going to have to do something. Locking her up with a nurse has resulted in nothing but further unhappiness.’

  Lewis nodded, but it was some days before he could submit to the truth of what Dr Mellon had said to him. Perhaps it was the sudden realisation that Trilby was so thin and pale, perhaps it was recognising that the loud voice and boorish ways of the nurse in whose charge he had put Trilby would be enough, in all truth, to make anyone take to drink, but he sent for David Micklethwaite, his only confidant in such matters, and asked him to find Trilby a studio.

  ‘Somewhere where she can regain her health and happiness. Nowhere too far, but somewhere she can drive herself and set up on her own of a morning, before coming back to lunch or dinner here with me.’

  ‘Is this wise?’

  Lewis shrugged his shoulders. ‘I have no idea. Really, I have no idea at all, but it is what the doctor ordered, what Dr Mellon advised, so what else can I do?’

  Micklethwaite nodded, the expression on his face sober and at the same time doubtful. ‘I suppose it’s worth at least a try, for a while?’

  ‘Of course it is.’ Lewis became brisk, as always when he thought someone else might be about to attempt to change his mind. ‘Find her a studio, and I will present it to her. Make sure it is habitable, though, and not near where she used to live. Somewhere near here, not near them, where she came from, they’ll only interfere.’

  As it happened David Micklethwaite had no inclination to find himself looking for studios anywhere near a woman he had boffed on the orders of the boss, so he set out to search around Holland Park, and since the area had once been famed as a bohemian quarter he very soon found exactly what Lewis had ordered.

  Large, Victorian, north facing, it had a courtyard in which Trilby could sit and enjoy herself on a sunny day, but the decorations were in a dreadful condition, so he sent for a firm who painted it a bland white, and stripped the floors and sealed them.

  The nurse’s exit from Trilby’s life could not have been more sudden. One minute it seemed she was there, eyeing Trilby at every moment, searching for any signs of alcoholic beverages – watching the nurse watching her had become one of the few amusements in Trilby’s life – the next she had packed her bag, and left.

  Trilby stared at the open doors feeling as all ex-prisoners must, frightened at the sudden largeness of her world, the sudden expansion: the whole area in front of her, the stairs, the landing, the voices from below that she could hear coming up to her now.

  ‘Trilby.’

  She stared at Lewis. He was looking handsomer than ever, she had to admit, but his eyes held the kind of wariness that she had only ever seen before in her stepmother’s eyes. The expression in them was of a person who was being asked to handle an animal that might, at any moment, be about to scratch or bite him.

  ‘Are you feeling a little better, darling?’

  ‘I think I must be, since the nurse has gone. Since Mrs Hitler went I think I must be feeling much better.’

  ‘In that case will you come downstairs with me, and have lunch?’

  Lewis normally called it ‘luncheon’. For some reason Trilby found that because he did not, because he was obviously carefully dressed in slacks and a jumper, not in his normal pin-striped suit, because he was equally obviously dressed down, for her, she wanted to giggle.

  She followed Lewis dutifully down the stairs. When they passed a mirror on one of the wide landings, even she was shocked to see herself. She was not just thin, she was scrawny, and her ribs seemed to be sticking not through her body, but through her face. The shadows under her eyes were deep black, and her hair hung down in an unacceptable schoolgirl fashion, she having long ago abandoned its chic feathered look. She did not know what effect her looks had on Lewis, but one glance at her reflection and she herself nearly fainted with shock.

  ‘Right, darling, after a sandwich lunch, after our box lunch, we’re going to go out for an hour or so, and we’re going to show you a surprise that I have prepared for you.’

  Lewis was speaking to her as if she was very far away and could not understand English very well. Again the irrepressible desire to giggle welled up in Trilby, and had to be suppressed. She remembered grown-ups talking to her just like that when she was a child and wondering why they thought they had to speak to children as if they were daft.

  ‘Goodness, how exciting.’

  She must have sounded almost too like her old self, because Lewis, having trodden carefully ahead of her into the drawing room, suddenly looked sharply back at her.

  ‘Yes, it is exciting.’ He took hold of one of her hands and slipped it under his arm. ‘I want so much for you to get better, Trilby, really I do. I want to see you back, the old you, my darling vital little Trilby. I want so much for her to come back to me.’

  ‘I am back, Lewis, really I am. I feel so much better now the nurse has gone. Really, I do.’

  Lewis stared down into her pale face. She still looked terrible, but she did actually sound a little better.

  Trilby herself, hearing such sincerity in Lewis’s voice, felt a sudden and awful guilt at what she had put the poor man through. Her hatred for him now seemed somehow a distant thing, as if it was someone else she had hated, not the man who stood holding her hand and looking so concerned.

  ‘I want nothing more of you than that you get better, Trilby, that is all I want.’

  Again the sincerity in his voice and face convinced Trilby that she had been all wrong about Lewis. He was so kind, so kind and so handsome, a hero of a man, really, someone upon whom she could metaphorically lean, as she was now physically leaning on him.

  ‘I am so sorry for what I have put you through, Lewis.’

  ‘It’s all right, darling. Dr Mellon has explained everything to me. He has explained the awful effects that a miscarriage can have on a woman, and how they can even turn a woman’s mind, so much harm do they cause. But now we are not even going to mention any of that any more. We are going to look only towards the future. And as soon as we have eaten our box lunch, you will see my surprise for you.’

  Never had food tasted so good to Trilby as it did then, not even when she had fled Mrs Bartlett’s frightful cooking and on a cold evening climbed down into Aphrodite’s kitchen to wolf a plate of casserole and parsley potatoes.

  ‘Very well, I am ready.’

  Lewis beamed. He loved giving people surprises. It was one of the few things that rich people could really enjoy. After all, it was very difficult to surprise a rich man with anything that he did not already have.

  On Dr Mellon’s orders Lewis had removed all traces of his former safeguards. So as they stepped out of the house now there was no waiting chauffeur with Rolls-Royce, only a small black Morris Minor, the passenger door of which Lewis opened for Trilby. He could see that she was at first bewildered, and then pleasantly surprised by this. He went round to the driver’s door and slipped in beside her.

  ‘It’s dinky, isn’t it?’

  Trilby nodded. The whole thing was so un-Lewis-like that she could not find any words to say what she thought it was, so she merely nodded in agreement. ‘I love Morrises. Such chunky cars.’ She sighed happily.

  ‘So do I,’ Lewis lied, and started up the engine.

  ‘And their motors always sound just like sewing machines, don’t they?’

  He happened to have found out through Micklethwaite th
at the one car after which Trilby had always hankered was a Morris Minor, which was why he had bought it for her.

  ‘Now for your next present.’

  ‘Present?’

  ‘Yes, darling. Your next present. This is yours, this car is for you. Not for me!’ Lewis laughed. ‘Yes, your next present is what you must see next, but you must close your eyes when I tell you.’

  Trilby sank back in her seat, thanking God and Berry that she had passed her driving test in Berry’s old van long ago. It was unbelievable. To be sitting beside Lewis in a Morris Minor with the winter sun shining briefly above them, and not a chauffeur in sight, did not seem possibly possible after the misery of the past weeks.

  ‘You are now going to have to shut your eyes, Trilby.’

  Lewis sprang out of the car and went round to her door. Trilby climbed out onto the pavement and dutifully shut her eyes, and Lewis took his silk neck scarf from around his neck and blindfolded them. They both started to laugh as she took teetering steps towards him on the pavement. He took hold of her hand, and carefully led her up a flight of steps.

  ‘Slowly, slowly, up we go.’

  Trilby laughed. ‘This better be good,’ she joked, ‘or else I shall have suffered for nothing.’

  Lewis held on to her as he opened the door and then one by one lifted her feet over the threshold.

  They now stood in a small hall, although Trilby would not have known it except for the sudden cessation of the sound of traffic from the street outside, and the slight musty smell.

  Again Lewis put a key in a lock, and again turned it. This time there were no steps, so he did not have to lift her feet but led her carefully through this second door into what Trilby imagined must be a large room, because it instantly felt cold despite its being a warm winter day. On the other hand it did not smell musty like the previous place. This smelt of fresh paint, and Lewis’s voice echoed slightly as he spoke.

  ‘I have bought this for you. No-one need know about it, except you. I will never come here, unless you ask me. This is your place, to do as you like, and you can come here whenever you want.’ He knew he should add ‘and with whoever you want’ but he could not bring himself to do so.