The Summer House Read online

  The Summer House: A Trilogy

  The Summer House: A Trilogy

  Alice Thomas Ellis

  Paul Dry Books

  Philadelphia 2013

  First Paul Dry Books Edition, 2013

  Paul Dry Books, Inc.

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  www.pauldrybooks.com

  Copyright (c) Alice Thomas Ellis 1987, 1988, 1989

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ellis, Alice Thomas.

  [Summerhouse trilogy]

  The summer house : a trilogy / Alice Thomas Ellis. -- First Paul Dry Books edition.

  pages cm

  First published under the title: The summerhouse trilogy.

  ISBN 978-1-58988-086-3 (alk. paper)

  1. Man-woman relationships--Fiction. 2. Friendship--Fiction. 3. England--Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6055.L4856S86 2013

  823'.914--dc23

  2013003226

  ISBN: 978-1-58988-086-3 (paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-58988-291-1 (e-book)

  Contents

  The Clothes in the Wardrobe

  The Skeleton in the Cupboard

  The Fly in the Ointment

  About the author

  THE CLOTHES IN THE WARDROBE

  I remembered her all my life. For years the image of her had hung in my mind like a portrait in a high room, seldom observed but unchanging. Sometimes, unawares, I would see her again suddenly revealed in the vaulting halls of my head. She was sitting on a grassy bank, leaning forward a little, a cigarette between her fingers, and she was speaking. I could not remember what she was saying, nor even if I had understood her, but I knew that what she was saying must be, in some sense, significant. She wore a cream-coloured cotton frock with large puffed sleeves, sprigged with tiny brown flowers; her stockings were cream-coloured too and on her feet were white, barred shoes. Her hair grew in dry red curls, dark red like rust or winter bracken. She was not at all beautiful, but even with her likeness before me I had always assumed that she must be, since she carried such conviction in her forgotten words and her enduring appearance. Her name was Lili.

  ‘Margaret,’ called my mother, and ‘Margaret’ again, her voice taking on the faint exasperation that had flavoured her tone as she used my name for many years now. I sometimes wondered whether she had been angry with the infant Margaret and whether I had feared her always.

  ‘The guest list,’ she said, standing in the hall before the looking-glass, removing her hat and jabbing stiff-fingered at her hair. ‘Have you thought about the guest list?’

  I stood in the doorway of the sitting-room and said that I had.

  ‘Invitations,’ said my mother. ‘I must send out the invitations.’

  She came into the sitting-room and sniffed. ‘I wish you’d eat in the kitchen or the dining-room,’ she complained

  I had eaten an orange and thrown the peel on the fire just as I lit it, and the smell of orange zest and smoke embittered the air while the peel lay, mock flame, amid the cold coals.

  ‘If you’d chosen to be married in June,’ remarked my mother, doubtless moved by the aroma to an association of ideas, ‘the mock orange blossom would have been out.’

  I thought that I hadn’t chosen to get married at all but that Syl had chosen to marry me, since it was time for him to marry and I offered no threat to the way and integrity of his life and character, and that my mother had chosen to see me wed because I was good for little else.

  ‘On the other hand,’ added my mother hastily, as though she feared that I might take the chance to postpone the ceremony in order to accommodate the philadelphus, ‘chrysanthemums are more reliable. They don’t wilt so quickly, and those dark red ones are really very attractive against the grey stone.’

  I told my mother with timid spite, hidden terror and a certain mad braggadocio that in some countries chrysanthemums were considered appropriate only for funerals.

  ‘This is not some countries,’ retorted my mother, perhaps wondering again whether the money she had spent so that I might learn French and a little grace had been utterly wasted, for I had learned only superstition and discontent.

  ‘For goodness sake go and put some lipstick on,’ she said. ‘If Syl comes he’ll think you’re dying.’

  I was too meek to tell her that I wished I was. Nor would it have been true, for I greatly feared death, suspecting myself to be damned.

  My mother glanced at the clock before looking at the window to ascertain that the garden was already retreating into night, and drew the curtains.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve written down the guests you want to ask?’ she remarked.

  ‘I’ve got a list somewhere,’ I said.

  My mother, quite properly, did not believe me, but as I was now clearly an adult, even if an unsatisfactory one, she could not directly accuse me of lying. Frustrated, she went towards the kitchen and I pulled the curtains apart to watch night fall.

  ‘It doesn’t fit,’ I said with satisfaction.

  My mother couldn’t deny it. The wedding dress hung loosely on me and I appeared to myself; reflected in the cheval mirror, gratifyingly ridiculous.

  ‘It looks silly,’ I said more positively.

  My mother irritatedly seized two handfuls of the old brocade and dragged them behind my back.

  ‘You’ve lost weight,’ she observed in a tone which indicated that she could have expected nothing else of me. ‘It’ll have to be taken in at the seams.’

  Already the tiny triumph had withered in me. I thought the dead whiteness of the dress made me more of a corpse than a bride but hadn’t enough energy to infuriate my mother by telling her so.

  ‘For goodness sake liven up,’ she said. ‘Syl will think he’s going to a funeral not a wedding.’

  This was not percipience in my mother, but a belated riposte to my revelation, the day before, of the role of the chrysanthemum in foreign culture.

  ‘I’ve never known such a miserable bride,’ she went on, standing back and looking at me with some affection, but more disapproval. ‘What’s the matter with you?

  This was the first time she had admitted openly that all was not well; and I was forced to reassure her, for otherwise she might find herself in sympathy with me, size might come to my side, and this was unthinkable, for to be understood by her was a prospect beyond endurance.

  ‘I am only cold,’ I said. ‘It is cold after Egypt.’ And dark, I thought. Dark, dark.

  My mother wasn’t one for silences. As she pulled the dress over my head she said that she thought it would still fit her, that she could see the hole at the neckline where my grandmother had pinned a pearl brooch as something old, that the classic line never dated. Moved by an ancient sentiment as she cradled the dress, so that it lolled in her arms like someone drowned, she said that she was glad she had a daughter to wear it; and I said, politely, that I could see it must be a pleasing economy.

  My mother couldn’t refute this without venturing further into sentiment, and this she would not do.

  ‘I had a letter from Lili this morning,’ she said. ‘They’re back in England.’

  I was silent, for the news meant nothing to me.

  ‘She saw the announcement in The Times,’ continued my mother.

  As I was still silent she went on, ‘You must remember Lili. She was my bridesmaid.’

  ‘I don’t remember her,’ I said, but I lied. I remembered her now. It was a small shock to know that the neglected image in my mind was real, that she lived and breathed, read The Times and wrote letters to her old friends.

  ‘I shall ask her to stay for the wedding,’ said my m
other. ‘Her and Robert.’

  Suddenly I remembered Robert too. A man behind Lili. A bearded, shapeless man in brown and purple woollens. A painter.

  ‘He’s an artist,’ said my mother. ‘It’s years since I’ve seen them. They stayed in Egypt. Lili’s father was tremendously rich until the government sequestered all his property. If I’d thought, you could have stayed with them, but I don’t suppose you’d have learned much French.’

  I hadn’t. I had learned very little, but my mother had no means of testing me. I had learned other things.

  ***

  In those days I slept a great deal, and sometimes I dreamed: not of what had happened but of emptiness and occasionally of chaos when the tenuous mosaic that was life shattered into its constituent parts and whirled away into unknown infinities. I would wake sleep-logged and weary, and every new day was dull. After a while it seemed to me amusing that such preparations as a wedding involve should surround the plain, pale husk that was me and that no one had commented on this incongruity. Even my mother had closed her eyes and ceased to speak of bridal nerves, and my groom, who meant as little to me as his mother’s dog, was just as he had always been.

  I was trapped, not only by the ordering of the caterers, the priest and my mother’s new hat, but by an impotence of spirit. Sometimes in the evenings I would hear myself laughing, and the sound was like wind passing over an empty vessel. One day I overheard my mother speaking to a friend, or rather to an acquaintance, since she was clearly deemed worthy only of instant or cliché speech. My mother said casually, ‘Oh, the honeymoon will soon put the roses back in her cheeks.’ And for a moment despair was overwhelmed by something more lively: by a sensation of such disgust that for just that one moment I was almost galvanized into rebellion. My mother had intended no lewdness, but the connotations of her remark had made me feel a greater, more immediate sense of defilement than that which I already experienced. Then I shut my mind to the picture that her words had conjured, for after all—what did it matter? My mother had lived my life until half a year ago when I had so briefly lived my own and in the process destroyed it. Now I was to be given to Syl. I had nothing to lose. For Syl I felt no sympathy, since if he was fool enough to want me he deserved none. In the course of time I would die and then it would all be over.

  We went to the theatre and to dinner and I believe I must have talked and, as I have said, I know I sometimes laughed and I think no one ever knew that I was empty of everything except perhaps madness.

  I spent as little time with Syl as I possibly could. He didn’t seem to mind. He had few friends but many acquaintances. He played tennis and golf and sometimes went swimming, determined to give no appearance of succumbing to time, to age. I saw that he could not marry a woman of his own generation, for that would double his chances of seeming old. It was sad for me, I thought, that I was the only girl in the world sufficiently stupid to permit herself to be sacrificed to his vanity. I had few friends, just one or two left over from school, but on the infrequent occasions when we met I could see from their faces that they pitied me, finding me foolish and Syl a bore. He somehow seemed familiar with the jokes that the young were making and used their slang. He embarrassed my friends, and I saw them less and less. He even behaved to my mother, his exact contemporary, as though she were much older than he, deferring to her opinions with an air of youthful naïveté. She colluded with him. I had seen her ruffle his hair as though he were a little boy. I knew myself to be stupid, but I sometimes felt that I wasn’t alone, and that stupidity was a condition which age did not ease. This was against all that was implicit in the way I had been taught—people increased in wisdom as they grew older, so that they were able to guide the young in the paths they should follow. But my mother had no learning, no wide experience: merely the prejudices, the powerfully surviving clichés, of her own upbringing. Knowing this, I was still impotent, for I had nothing to put in its stead, no one to turn to for advice or support, and I had learned for myself nothing of life except that I was bad at living, and that where I loved I met only rejection and disaster. My father feared my mother as much as I did and wished me to please and agree with her always, for when I did not she would complain to him of my behaviour and I suspected that when this happened his new wife would complain in her turn that he paid too much attention to us and too little to her and her own children. I didn’t like to cause trouble. Troublemakers were visible by reason of their demeanour and I wished to be observed as little as possible. I wished to get through life along the lanes and side roads, unseen.

  One weekend I went with Syl to stay with some people in the country. I don’t remember much about it, only dim rooms and firelight, a dinner of steak-and-kidney pudding and broccoli, which I recall because I disliked it—the smell of urine in the meat, laughter at conversation I did not understand.

  There was a boy there of my own age and we got drunk together at the far end of a room with a bottle of Martini. He put his head on my shoulder and undid the buttons of my blouse. As fast as he undid them I did them up again, so that when he got to my waist and sighed he recoiled with indignation and astonishment to find that his labour had been in vain. I was too drunk to wonder whether we had been observed and too remote to care. I had no fear of him and was pleased with my own ingenuity.

  My head spun that night, and all next day I felt weak and disordered. The boy in the daylight reminded me of a bird, a bold curious bird. He asked me questions about Syl and about myself without any pretence at politeness. I felt even more fearful than usual faced with this clever inquisitive boy who showed no further desire to undo my blouse and who was only interested in the incongruity of my relationship with Syl. I wanted to tell him calmly that I knew perfectly well that it was absurd and quite understood the point of his questions. Clever as he was, he wasn’t sufficiently clever to see this, and his assumption that I was halfwitted made me stubbornly worse.

  Syl was away all day with our host, shooting something, and I was too shy to say I was tired and would like to go and sleep in my room. I spent hours with that wretched boy evading his questions and seeming more stupid by the minute. I never did discover who he was, the son of the house or just another guest, and my own obtuseness and incuriosity now appear to me more revealing than anything else of my state at the time. Healthy creatures do not behave so in strange surroundings.

  Our hostess scarcely showed herself at all. I suppose she was in the kitchen, perhaps avoiding me, and perhaps the boy had been instructed to entertain me. I didn’t wonder about it then. I was no more alert to my environment than a sick animal and I must have somehow been aware of that, because it was then that I remembered the starveling cat.

  When we got home my mother asked if we had had a good time and Syl said with great enthusiasm that we had.

  Perhaps he had. I never knew him.

  When Lili came to stay the emphasis shifted slightly, away from me and on to the strange woman.

  She hadn’t altered. Her clothes were different—foreign, and smart—but her hair was red, and although I could see she wasn’t beautiful I thought she was. She had such colour, such brightness, that sometimes she reminded me of the whirling mosaics, except that she wasn’t fragmented but unusually complete. She seemed, if anything, younger than I remembered her. Only one thing surprised me—I didn’t recognize her voice and I had thought I would.

  She said as she entered, ‘My dears ...’ in a very English fashion, and she said all the usual phrases, and then to me, ‘I hope you’re doing the right thing.’

  ‘Now then, Lili,’ said my mother.

  ‘You must just forget I’m here,’ said Lili. ‘You must go on with the preparations as though you were alone. I promise I won’t even offer to help. I shan’t get in the way for a moment.’

  ‘Where’s Robert?’ inquired my mother accusingly. ‘I thought Robert was coming with you.’

  ‘Oh, he is,’ said Lili. ‘Robert always comes with me. He had to see a man about a gallery.’
>
  ‘Will he be here for dinner?’ asked my mother, the cook briefly taking precedence over the hostess.

  ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Lili. ‘I shouldn’t think so for a moment.’ She moved to the foot of the stairs. ‘Am I in the same room?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, Lili,’ said my mother.

  I thought she sounded rather as though she too had forgotten the essence of Lili, was now reminded and was regretting her invitation.

  ‘Margaret will help you up with your bags.’

  Lili glanced at me. ‘You look quite strong,’ she said, picking up the largest of the suitcases and dragging it up the stairs. ‘I remember the smell of this house. I remember you when you were little.’

  In the bedroom she turned to me, ‘You look tired,’ she observed. ‘Aren’t you sleeping?’

  ‘I sleep too much,’ I said, startled into the truth.

  ‘It sometimes takes one that way,’ she said obscurely, hunting through her handbag for her cigarettes and lighter.

  My stomach tightened. My mother took a firm line on smoking in bedrooms.

  Lili lit her cigarette and looked in the mirror.

  ‘Hag,’ she addressed herself.

  ‘I’d forgotten how loud and exhausting she could be,’ remarked my mother later as I peeled the potatoes.

  I looked nervously at her face, but it wore a smile, a reminiscent smile that I hadn’t seen before.

  ‘She was expelled from school,’ said my mother. ‘But I never thought she was really bad—just mischievous and high- spirited.’

  It came to me that my mother was proud of her friendship with this high-spirited outcast, and I felt resentment as I thought of my own upbringing, of the fuss when my school reports weren’t all that my mother would have wished, of the scene when once I had sworn. My mother is a hypocrite, I thought incredulously. Then I forgot about it as the carrots boiled over. But already Lili had added a new dimension to my view.