Summertime

by Charlotte Bingham

  It seemed to Berry that he had hardly unpacked all his precious paints and travelling easel from Northumberland before he found Trilby standing outside the studio door, just like the old days, looking half waif and half stray, and wholly miserable.

  Of course he had pulled her inside, shut the door and made them both some very strong coffee before setting about helping her with her transformation. Colour shampoo, change of make-up, some art student clothes from the old days that he managed to find at the back of his dressing up box, which always came in so handy for sitters, and voilà, she no longer looked twenty going on thirty, but quite twenty again.

  Trilby stared at herself in the old studio mirror. Thanks to Berry’s efforts on her behalf her hair was now quite definitely red, and what was more, with the help of the really wonderfully weird clothes that Berry had fished out of his precious studio box for her, not even her own stepmother would know her.

  ‘Now, Trilb, no messing about, I am afraid. If you are intent on running off from the great man, you should take care not to be found. So where are we going?’

  Trilby stared at Berry. They had always been so close. He must know that she would never run away to nowhere; that, in a way, she was too sensible to do that, just as she had been quite clear in her letter to Lewis that she would not be coming back to him, and wanted nothing from him.

  ‘I am going to Somerset.’

  Berry stared at her. ‘Somerset?’

  He smiled for the first time. ‘Well, not even Sherlock Holmes will find you there, old love. Somerset, the land of Doones, the faraway place of hidden depths with its Levels and its mysteries, the undiscovered, forgotten county. And who, may I ask, is “Somerset”?’

  ‘Piers Montague. I painted his aunt.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I expect he’s very nice, people with aunts generally are very nice. I always slightly suspect anyone without an aunt. Even I have an aunt or two, so, finally, I am not suspect. However, none of this is getting us anywhere at all, and you, if you are to go to Somerset, have to be got somewhere pretty damn quick. What I suggest is that having transformed you, abracadabra, we now swop cars. You take my old jalopy, because no-one will truly look for you in a van, old thing, will they? And I will take your Morris, and if anyone comes after me, I will just say you came here in a rush, and left it and la di da di da, yes?’

  Trilby nodded, her heart sinking.

  ‘I think you’re getting the better of the deal,’ she said when they hurried outside and she climbed into Berry’s battered jalopy.

  ‘So do I, and don’t I look smug? Listen, we can swop again when you’ve unmuddled yourself, but take care, and don’t talk to anyone, no-one, until you get where you’re meant to be, in the next century, if you’re lucky, in that thing.’

  He leaned forward and kissed her quickly and tenderly on her cheek. ‘Quick, quick, and no looking back. You can only be doing the right thing. We all knew you were miserable, just had to let you find out for yourself.’

  He waved briefly and went back into his studio, shutting the door quickly as if he did not want to say goodbye, but knew that it was for the best.

  It was more than late, it was the early hours of the morning when Trilby eventually arrived at the farm, Berry’s old van eventually creeping, lights dimmed, quietly up towards the house. Trilby could not see the pale stone of the old farmhouse, or take in more than a dark outline of the aged staddle stones set about the short carriage drive, or the old walnut tree that stood at the entrance by the old iron gate, but she could, nevertheless, sense the countryside all around her. There was a light smell of newly mown grass, as if someone had just given the front lawn its first cut of the summer. And distantly she could hear a cow mooing and see, by the light of the bright moon, first an owl swooping and then bats, the light fleetingly catching their strange little faces and winged bodies.

  She climbed stiffly out of the van and stood quite still. She had taken for ever to arrive at Charlton House Farm, driving by small back lanes and minor roads, criss-crossing the West Country, map in one hand, steering wheel in the other. Piers knew she was coming, because she had telephoned him and they had exchanged brief words, Trilby too emotional to say more than ‘Expect me’, but since a glance at her watch told her it was half past one in the morning she imagined that he would have been in bed hours ago, until she saw that several of the lights were still on in the house, one of them spilling onto the gravelled driveway on which she stood. She closed the van door, carefully, and stole as quietly as she could, overnight bag in hand, up to the front door, and rang the bell.

  If she had imagined that Piers might have changed from the last time she saw him Trilby knew, as soon as she saw his face coming towards the half glass of the old doors from out of the low lighting of the hall, that he had not changed at all. He was still Piers, tall, handsome, curly-haired and diffident. What she had quite forgotten, however, was that she had changed.

  ‘Trilby?’

  He stared at her. Trilby stared back up at him, and then down at herself, and then up at him again, and then she covered her mouth with her hand and exploded with laughter.

  As soon as she laughed Piers knew that it was quite safe for him to laugh too. Bent double with laughter Trilby stepped into the hall and into Piers’s arms.

  ‘You look – you look—’ Piers began again, removing one hand from around Trilby to wipe his eyes and standing back to look at her again. ‘You look like—’ He started to laugh again. ‘You look like a little red bantam! If I hadn’t known it was you, I would have put you in the hen house.’

  ‘I had to, you know, change my appearance as soon as I could, because Lewis gets back at lunchtime, and you know how it is, he will go straight to my room and demand to see me.’

  A few minutes later Piers glanced across at Trilby as he put down a cup of hot chocolate in front of her. ‘Drink up, young Trilby, and then off to bed with you. Mabel has prepared the back room, so you will not be disturbed when I creep off at four thirty in the morning.’

  Trilby glanced guiltily at the old school clock over the old, cream-coloured pre-war Aga, realising for the first time that her arrival must have deprived Piers of most of his night’s sleep.

  ‘I won’t keep you.’

  ‘We’ll talk when we meet at lunchtime.’

  She nodded, already half asleep. It was as if she had come home at last, to a real home. Not to her stepmother’s house, not to her husband’s house, where she had always felt herself to be a lodger, but to somewhere that was familiar in some strange way, somewhere she had known before, yet she could not have said when. The feeling was so new to her, and so warming, that she hardly dared to give it recognition.

  Piers went ahead of her up the shallow, polished wooden stairs, carrying her overnight bag. Pushing open a door, he led the way into a large sparsely furnished whitewashed bedroom whose near bleakness was relieved by red Irish wool curtains and tufted Swedish rugs.

  ‘Don’t look round,’ he begged her. ‘This is badly in need of the feminine touch, I’m afraid.’

  Trilby looked round nevertheless, but said nothing, waiting for him to say more, which he did not, and finding eventually that she felt a strange little frisson of both relief and disappointment when Piers went on, ‘My room is down there, your bathroom opposite.’

  He pointed vaguely down the passage, and then having kissed her in a brotherly fashion he shut the door and she listened to the sound of his retreating steps.

  Hardly able to move from the stiffness of her drive, and hardly able to keep her tired eyes open, she unpacked her few possessions, cleaned her teeth in the clean but spartan bathroom across the passage, and climbed thankfully in between the carefully darned sheets and wool blankets on her bed, settling the flowered eiderdown over her feet. Seconds later, she turned out the small bedside light with its old-fashioned lampshade set about with bobble fringes, and fell asleep.

  To wake up to the sound of a cock crowing outside your window, to hear the sound of
the dawn chorus, and smell the scent of lavender on your pillow, to feel cool, crisp old linen sheets covering your tired body and to know that somehow you were at last free, was unimaginable. Trilby lay staring at the white-painted ceiling above her head and tried to overcome the feeling of unreality. In front of her was a picture of a small boy in a Victorian costume making a cricket stroke. Beside her, across the old wooden floor was another single bed covered with an old worn patchwork quilt. On the white-painted table between was a bunch of flowers with their buds just opening, set in a painted jug. It was all so real and so beautiful after the claustrophobia of Lewis’s house, where the flowers were all hot-house blooms with large heads and too much scent, where there was always too much fruit in too many brightly polished silver bowls set out on too many tables, fruit that Trilby used to find depressing, knowing, as she did, that it was changed religiously every day, and only ever eaten by the servants.

  Here it seemed to Trilby was simplicity, and therefore purity. Every item stood out from the others, every cast of light from the brightly curtained windows picked out something clean and shining: a jug and bowl, a newly painted chest, a bright coloured rug. Nothing too much, and yet everything somehow calming and peaceful.

  ‘I am going back to sleep again, just in order to wake up once more to the bliss of knowing that I have escaped from Lewis, that I am free,’ she told herself, and turning over she did fall asleep again, and almost immediately.

  Later she drew the rough tweed curtains back and opened the bedroom windows, and, fixing the catches on them, leaned out. There were climbing roses growing directly outside, roses that had the promise of summer in every leaf, so that it seemed suddenly to Trilby as if the outdoors was pulling her by the arms, tugging at her like some overjoyed friend, urging her to come outside to join in its mad dance towards summer.

  The earth must be already good and warm, because there were cowslips in the grass by the fence and a mass of bright blue periwinkle under a neighbouring silver birch tree whose leaning branches were catching at the lush West Country grass, and although they were still bare they too seemed to be longing to compete with the buds and leaves already present on the other trees. Outside her window, Trilby could sense that May was about to burst upon them, leaping centre stage, refusing to be left waiting in the wings for one more tiny second.

  Knowing that it would be some time before Piers returned from the fields for his lunch, she crossed once more from her bedroom to the old bathroom opposite.

  It was large, and, like the rest of the farmhouse, most probably dated back to the nineteenth century. Its aura was not one of luxury but one of cleanliness next to godliness. The bath was old and iron, the taps the same, and such was the change in her circumstances after Lewis’s plush bathrooms with their American taps, shining modern tiles and countless mirrors that the filling of the old bath with steaming, vaguely russet-coloured water took on an extraordinary significance. By the time the tub was filled, and Trilby was walking up the two wooden steps built to the side of it and lowering herself into the soft water, it seemed to her that such was the intensity of her pleasure that this bath might well have been her first, which in many ways it was. It was her first bath after leaving Lewis, and with every stroke of her flannel and every bubble from the Coal Tar soap she was washing him away.

  Lewis. Just the thought of his name was awful. She imagined that he would have read her letter by now, that he would be setting out to find her, making enquiries, unleashing his hounds to chase after her. But would even Lewis be able to track her to this remote Somerset farmhouse surrounded by hundreds of acres of farmland? Here, Piers had told her during his week in London, not even the postman bothered to call, sending what letters there were up with the milkman who picked up the farm milk for the delivery rounds at five in the morning.

  ‘Hallooa! Is anyone there, my dear? My dear, is anyone there?’ a voice called, followed swiftly by the welcoming sound of a spoon rattling against china.

  Wrapping herself in an old, clean thick white towel with the faded initial M embroidered in the corner, Trilby opened the door with some caution, the steam having damped her hair so that it was more a little red cap than a style.

  ‘My dear.’ A pretty, cheerful face set above a clean cotton pinafore beamed at Trilby through the door.

  ‘Good morning.’

  ‘That’s it, my dear. And a very good one it is too. I’m Mabel Burlap and I have brought you up some breakfast, my dear, seeing that Mr Piers is out on the farm and you wouldn’t know where to put your hand to anything, I brought you up some breakfast all done and ready.’

  Trilby smiled at Mabel Burlap but her eyes strayed at once, and with some gratitude, to a heaped breakfast tray. ‘That looks delicious. Thank you so much.’

  ‘It’s a pleasure, miss. I always did like to think that Mr Piers would have more friends here when he took over the farm, that way I should have more to do, but as it is you are the first to stay since he came back from his National Service, aside from his children that is.’

  Trilby concentrated on the faded flowers on the china, on Mabel’s cheerful face, rather than allow herself to show the slightest emotion.

  Of course, there had to be a catch, there was always a catch. Piers had children. That was the catch.

  ‘I brought the tray up to you, seeing that you must be tired after your long journey, and I shall put it in your room, under the window, so that you have sight of all the lovely fields and the grass outside, sight of the cows too, if you’re lucky. Ever seen a cow before, miss?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ Trilby called as she quickly pulled on her dressing gown and reopened the bathroom door. ‘Yes, I have seen a cow before.’

  ‘More than our evacuees in the war had ever done, my dear,’ Mabel told her comfortably, preceding her into her bedroom.

  Such was the confusion of her emotions that Trilby would have dearly liked to refuse breakfast, repack her overnight case and sweep out of the farm, but she could not for many reasons, the first of which and almost the most important to her at that moment, being that she was so hungry, and it had to be said that Mabel’s breakfast, which she was placing in the window, looked too enticing for words.

  Porridge, cooked, she told Trilby proudly, overnight in the Aga, and served with dark brown sugar and thick West Country cream, made from their own cows’ milk. After that, grilled bacon, tomatoes and sausage under a covered dish, everything cooked to perfection and mouthwatering both to look at and, Trilby discovered thankfully before long, to eat.

  Mabel sat down on Trilby’s bed, facing her back, and sighed contentedly as she watched her tuck into her cooking. Obviously feeling that she must be in need of company, she went on comfortably, ‘Mr Piers is such a good cook that I am only ever allowed to do the breakfast and tea and suchlike for him. He’s that much the lord of his own kitchen. He keeps us all up to the mark, does Mr Piers. And when the children come here, of a Sunday sometimes from school, he keeps them down one end, never lets them near him, not while he’s cooking.’

  His children again! Oh well, so what if Piers had children? It would not be so very surprising, considering. After all, if Trilby had a husband, why shouldn’t Piers have a wife? But – children?

  Trilby stared out of the window at the beauty of the early summer day. Did she honestly have to care at that moment? Having finished both the porridge and the bacon and sausage, not to mention home-made bread with home-made marmalade and a couple of delicious cups of tea, Trilby decided that at that moment, and perhaps really rather unsurprisingly on such a beautiful morning, she could not bring herself to care if Piers Montague had a dozen children.

  ‘Mr Piers’s wife, does she, er, come out with the children?’

  Mabel looked flabbergasted. ‘Lord bless you, my dear, Mr Piers has no wife! Lord bless you, what would he be doing having you to stay if he had a wife?’

  Mabel’s large, innocent face coloured and she patted the back of her cottage bun hairstyle as if to make s
ure that it was still there, which it was, to her obvious relief.

  ‘No, Mr Piers has no wife. I have a husband, mind. My Harold, he is Mr Piers’s cowman, and I come in and help him in the house, and I do the chickens, and the ducks. Would you like to see the chickens? Jerseys, Suffolks, Sussex, we have a right old mix here, you know. And as for the ducks, well, Mr Piers is so fond of them he won’t rightly eat one, not one. I don’t mind eating duck, not so long as I don’t know its name, but Mr Piers, he won’t have that. They’re his friends, he says. Not to mention all the other wildlife that he likes to have around him. Just as well he’s a dairy farmer, my Harold always says.’

  With her back conveniently turned to Mabel, Trilby had now changed from her cotton dressing gown into a yellow cotton dress, one of two cheap cotton dresses she had purchased in the small suburban town where she had so effectively transformed herself into what Piers had called a little red bantam. Now she smoothed the dress down with her hands as, taking her courage into both hands and attempting to look appropriately nonchalant, she asked, ‘So if Mr Piers has no wife, um, how come he has, er, children, Mrs Burlap?’

  For the second time since their meeting Mabel Burlap blushed to the roots of her cottage loaf hairstyle.

  ‘Why, Lord bless you, miss, er, why Lord bless you, them’s never Mr Piers’s children.’ She recovered from her shock and started to laugh. ‘Why Lord bless you, no! No, the children aren’t of Mr Piers’s, no, them’s his mother’s children.’

  Mabel continued to laugh while Trilby brushed out her short, now auburn hair into its customary impish style and at the same time smiled at her laughter. ‘Oh, I see.’

  ‘Mrs Montague, senior, that is, not that there is a junior, but Mrs Montague, she lived abroad a lot when she was younger, and as a consequence – tropical heat very likely, my Harold puts it down to that more’n anythin’ – she had children by a number of husbands, and not always husbands, as I understand it. Well, their grandparents, they sent for them, once they realised they was all growin’ up as little savages, and they put them all in school over here, and Mr Piers, he takes them out on Sundays sometimes. They run about the place, and he cooks for them to beat the band, roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, mounds of roast potatoes, and any amount of puddings – I’m allowed to help with them – lemon meringue pie, fruit crumble, blackberry and apple pie with my butter pastry, that’s the kind of thing we like to give them, and then back they go to their schools, but at least we know they’ve put back enough to keep them going till the next time, poor little devils, because they don’t feed them at these boarding schools, you know.’