A Shower of Summer Days Read online

  Lying in bed, listening to the rain, she imagined them playing chess and pretending to be cross, enclosed in their love. Much later she heard footsteps on the stairs, a low laugh more secret than any words, and thought, “They’re going to bed.”

  The next morning what had looked like a mere thunderstorm had turned into a steady fine drizzle. “Here to stay,” Annie said, rubbing her rheumatic knee. The clouds were caught in this pocket back of the hills and it would take a strong wind from the sea to blow them back again. Sally felt more like a prisoner than ever; the rain kept Charles in and she was lucky if she had ten minutes alone with Violet. Even then there was nothing to say or do. We’re like ships caught in a lock, Sally thought. There was no escaping the house now. They were shut up together in the damp rooms, huddled round the fire in the library, muffled in sweaters and scarves, taking hot water bottles up to bed. Violet spent long hours at her petit point, remote, rather nervous if spoken to, perhaps depressed. Charles fidgeted, did accounts, went out covered in a heavy raincoat, came back, damp and irritable, paced the floors, insisted that Sally play checkers with him (a game she hated), and swore at the rain.

  “At least,” Violet consoled, “we’re not swelteringly hot, Charles. It’s much better than the rainy season in Burma.”

  “Is freezing to death in midsummer better than sweltering?” He turned to her, exasperated. “Listen to the wind!”

  A shutter banged. The situation was deteriorating every minute. Sally decided that soon something would happen, anything, and that anything would be better than this.

  Instead of drawing them together, this period of suspension threw them back each into his own obsessions and fantasies. Sally had the feeling sometimes that her aunt was engaged in some secret painful battle with herself. This was actually true. Violet was going through a period of self-hatred and self-abuse, what she called “one of my depressions.” She felt that Sally wanted something of her which she was not prepared to give to anyone except her husband. Charles had withdrawn. Ever since the day of the Desmonds’ call, Charles had been going through some phase, turning towards her only the dark side of his moon. Beside this withdrawal there was the weight of Sally’s silent love. Violet felt exhausted by the intensity of these personal relations. She who had all her life moved among them as her special element, wanting to be loved, enjoying the magnetic currents set up between people, now realized that she was getting old. Or—was it the house? She had a curious feeling that all this bother was irrelevant. Possibly she had even loved Charles all these years in the wrong way. Such thoughts, which attacked the very roots of her life, frightened her.

  Charles, not understanding what was going on, blamed everything on the weather, for the last thing he wished was to analyse or examine himself. It was he now who sensed an intangible intimacy when he came into a room where Sally wandered around like a ghost and Violet sat, too still, reading or sewing. He could not imagine why he was so irritated with Violet, and Sally bewildered him. She flirted with him quite obviously when Violet was present, but avoided ever being alone with him and refused his invitations to come out. All this made him feel like a bear, some clumsy animal blundering about among women and women’s inexplicable moods. He took to going out in spite of the rain. He felt queerly lonely.

  Sally, speechless where her aunt was concerned, became so tense that the smallest gesture, lighting a cigarette for Violet, passing her a cup of coffee, took on passionate significance; her hand trembled; the coffee spilled into the saucer, She did not even know what she wanted from Violet—some absolute naked recognition? What? She was like a poet in the state of high excitement which precedes the work of writing, but Sally had no such outlet nor discipline. The intensity took her nowhere, but was reflected back all the time and she felt as if she were forced to live under a powerful electric bulb night and day. The idea of tidying her room, of doing this one definite thing to please Aunt Violet, came to her as an inspiration. In some senses it was a ridiculously small act as a receptacle for so much feeling. But Sally knew that its symbolic significance was not small. Destroying the harmony of the room which had been Violet’s as a child, had been quite deliberate. She did everything not to feel its atmosphere, used the dressing table as a desk, putting the candlesticks and mirror carelessly on the floor, left her clothes on the chairs, unmade the bed by lying down on it and pulling the pillows out of their cases, let books lie on the floor among odd shoes. This untidiness had become a habit. After a while she hardly noticed the mess. Now she went upstairs and worked furiously to recreate the room as it had been. Maire was astonished when she came up to find it immaculately neat and Sally sitting in the armchair by the window in a tailored suit as if she were going out.

  “You’re not leaving, Miss Sally?” she said, alarmed by these radical changes.

  Sally laughed, “On the contrary, I’m staying,” she said. “Maire, be an angel and ask Aunt Violet to come up, will you?” Sally asked, as Maire prepared to leave with the slop pail. Sending a messenger was the only possible way she would have dared invite Aunt Violet here. Now she looked around with dismay. The room had become a stage, but what would she say? How would she behave? All the last days had been building up to this moment She envied Ian who would act out what was going to happen like a scene (she had seen him do it). But I have to be myself, she thought, it’s much harder.

  “Why darling child, what a transformation,” Violet said amused, delighted, a little touched. For Sally was standing by the window, apparently overcome with shyness, like a person who has planned an enormous surprise and now pretends it is nothing, nothing at all—but Sally was frowning, did not look up. “I must say, it’s lovely to see it all neat. Now if it would only stop raining I could go out and pick you a marvelous bunch of flowers—”

  “Yes,” Sally said looking around the room, as if the lack of flowers was a mistake she had made. “Flowers—I didn’t think of that. You always do, don’t you? You treat flowers like people, miss them when they’re not there.”

  “I don’t know…” Violet came over to where Sally was standing and they both looked out at the rain. “Summer—the house—flowers are part of it. My mother loved them.” She was standing quite close to Sally and Sally stood there waiting, waiting, wondering if her aunt could hear the awful deep thud of her heart, the thudding blows of it as if she were being beaten from inside.

  “What does it mean?” Violet asked gently. “That you’ve decided to ‘live’ here after all?”

  This was her chance to say all that had been pent up for so long. Sally knew it, saw it come and go, but could say nothing. “I don’t know—I—” and she turned away quickly, because she could not bear to stand so close to Violet any longer, because she could do nothing, could not take her hand and kiss it as she so longed to do, could not cry out some desperate loud cry which would be heard across the implacable fact of separation, the fact that they were two people, that they could never be one.

  “I guess I was just bored by the rain,” Sally lied. She could hardly wait for Violet to leave, so that she could rehearse in her mind over and over again this scene she had not been able to play, invent all the words she had not been able to say, do the marvelous impossible act which telling the whole truth had become. If only she knew, Sally thought, if only she did, that’s all I ask.

  But of course Violet knew, would have liked to say something consoling, to do something kind and gentle to ease things for Sally, and knew also that anything she might do would hurt. But Violet had a profound instinctive dislike of probing into other peoples’ feeling, analysing, dissecting. She had too much respect for Sally to be condescending. She picked up the photograph of Ian in its silver frame and looked at it thoughtfully,

  “He’s a handsome boy,” she said, and then as if this had some relevance, “It will be all right, Sally. You’ll see.”

  “Maybe.” Sally was glad of a subject on which to fasten. “He acts all the time. I wish I could. You do too, of course. You’re alw
ays acting. It’s from self-protection, I expect.” Sally’s tone was dry and detached. She did not look at her aunt.

  “I expect so.”

  “But what are you really like inside?”

  Violet was at the door. Her instinct was to withdraw, but something in Sally’s look made her stay in spite of herself, made her try to answer in spite of her distaste for this kind of self-revelation.

  “Full of self-doubt like everyone else. I’m not honest as you are, as your mother was—”

  “Yes, Mother’s honest, but she’s awfully simple,” Sally spoke with authority. She seemed quite sure of this, and it made Violet smile.

  “Not as simple as all that. She was a pretty complicated difficult little girl, you know. Intense, like you.”

  “Is it bad to be intense? I can’t help it Things matter.”

  “Of course they do, but…” Violet hesitated. How not to hurt?

  “But what?” Sally asked, almost belligerently. She felt miserable. We are getting further and further away from each other, she thought. Aunt Violet is withdrawing into her wisdom.

  “Well”—Violet looked towards the windows and the grey misty sky—“it’s hard to keep a sense of proportion for one thing.”

  “I know,” Sally said, blushing now. These words went right to her heart. “It makes one feel like a mad person. Do you think I’m mad, Aunt Violet?” she asked anxiously.

  “Darling, of course not. I think you’re wonderfully young and imaginative and so maybe you see things that just aren’t there.” It was a most unsatisfactory answer.

  “To me they are there,” said Sally shortly.

  “Yes,” Violet said slowly, “I know.” Should she try now to speak? She was still in the door, still on the way out, but now she turned and walked over to the window where Sally still stood, her hands clenched. Violet put a hand on the tense shoulder and looked at Sally gravely. “It’s not easy for you, darling. I can’t help you there. But do you know, would it be any comfort to know that it has meant a great deal to Charles and me to have you here? Have you any idea how you have lighted up the house? What a delight it is to see you beginning to be part of the family—we have no children. We were feeling a little lonely, I think—and old—”

  “You have each other,” Sally said out of her misery.

  “Yes.” Violet took Sally’s hand as cold as ice in hers and looked at it for a moment before letting it fall. “We have each other, but having each other isn’t a static affair, Sally. If there’s real feeling, it never stays the same for very long. It’s nourished or starved by all sorts of atmospheres and things. How shall I say it?” Violet paused and again looked out. “You nourish us. Any real exchange between the young and the old is nourishing. And no love is wasted, Sally, believe me.”

  This was more than Violet had meant to say and now she fled before Sally could answer, fled downstairs and into her bedroom. She felt as if she had been holding a torrent at bay, and now with the effort of this, the effort to do it gently, not brutally, she was trembling. She guessed that she herself had never felt for anyone what Sally felt for her and almost she envied the capacity for such obsessive concentration. Does Ian have any idea of the treasure he holds in his hands, she wondered? Violet was astonished to find that she felt quite miserable, in some way deprived because she was depriving, in some way starved because she could not feed Sally’s passionate hunger. For the first time in her life she faced the fact that a woman might long to give passionate love to another woman. It did not shock her.

  But the next morning Violet decided she would withdraw, give Sally time, give herself time. She would stay in bed. A batch of books had arrived from London. She would forget Charles and Sally; she would try to recapture the equilibrium which these last days had all but upset.

  Charles was delighted. “We’ll go to town,” he announced to Sally. “You’ll see the gathering of donkeys and donkey-carts. It’s quite a sight.”

  Sally felt caught up in his elation, glad of the relief trom tension, glad that Violet would not see her face for she had cried half the night, that intensity having found the rock against which it could break and release itself in a surf of tears. As she stood on the terrace and waited for Charles and the car, she looked up at the house and felt really like a prisoner making his escape. And once outside the gates, purring along up and down the green hills and past the rivers, the ruined castles, the tinkers’ carts pulled up by the wayside, once away from the demesne, she could breathe freely again. Everything seemed normal and she could even wonder what had made her get into such a state. Her feeling for Violet unknotted itself and was diffused by the open spaces, and seemed quite unreal like a dream.

  Later in the pub, where they drank lager, Sally tested out this change in herself by talking quite condescendingly about Violet, quite from above as if she were grown-up and Violet a mere child. They relaxed, she and Charles, into the sense of power that indulgent love may bring.

  “Violet is bored, I expect,” Charles said, rather smugly.

  “She’s never bored.” Sally was on the defensive at once. “But she goes off on some spiral of her own, some inner spiral. She’s just not there.”

  “Quite,” said Charles. “What you can’t know is that she’s always been surrounded, rather, I mean by people who admired her, young men and so forth. She lights up for people.”

  “It’s her reason for existing—yes—”

  “Do you think so? Is that it, eh?” Charles lit a cigarette, expansive. It was quite extraordinary how this young girl understood things. In some way it seemed that Sally was inside his feeling, not outside it—in some way he felt she had a right to speak.

  “And yet the queer thing is, Charles, that she feels so much guilt about it—is always struggling against what she needs, despising herself for needing it. She talks so much about feeling old. It’s ridiculous,” said Sally with the authority of a lover.

  “Of course you never saw her as she was,” Charles said thoughtfully.

  “She’s more beautiful now,” Sally said almost crossly. She could not bear to think she had not seen Violet then.

  Charles was amused by this vehemence. “It’s fun to have someone in the family to talk to. I don’t often talk about Violet, you know.”

  “I know”—Sally smiled back at him quietly—“I’m glad too.”

  “When you first came, you seemed rather at bay. It was disconcerting.”

  Sally frowned. This came too close.

  “I wanted to be loyal to Ian. He’s all I’ve got.”

  “But I don’t see why the two things are incompatible,” Charles said gently, feeling her alarm. “Are they?”

  “I can’t explain. It’s too complicated.” This conversation which had begun so well was becoming too difficult. Sally looked at her watch. “Heavens, Charles, we’ll be late for lunch!”

  Charles sang silly songs all the way back. Once he slipped an arm across Sally’s shoulders and gave her a hug, but it all seemed part of the song he was singing and she rather liked it. She felt safe with Charles. In some way they had become allies against Violet and Violet’s moods, the enormous amount of atmosphere Violet displaced. When she was with him, Sally could think of Ian. It was a long time since this had been possible at all.

  But Charles felt a pang of jealousy when he saw a letter from Ian on the hall table when they got back. He watched Sally tear it open and then run off upstairs, wondered what her look of surprise, of shock could mean.

  It meant that Ian was asking if he could fly over for a weekend, and hardly said more than that. He asked Sally to cable if possible so that he could make plans—he would have a few days free in a little over a week. But Sally found that she could not answer this offhand without some thought—she was not quite sure that she wanted Ian to come, just now, just when things seemed to be smoothing out to a kind of happiness and peace. She found she dreaded having to feel so much, having to face the reality of what she had dreamed and set apart in a world of fa
ntasy. At lunch she was absentminded and Charles, guessing part of the reason, minded.

  “I am sick and tired of this bloody weather,” he said to Violet, bursting in on her just as she was about to take a nap.

  “Didn’t you have a good morning with Sally?” Violet asked.

  “Yes, I suppose so. Now she’s had a letter from Ian. It’s upset her,” Charles said crossly.

  “Oh.” Violet considered this and considered him, smoking moodily in the straight chair by her bed. “Sally’s got her own life, you know, darling. She’s not our possession.”

  “I never said she was.”

  “No, that’s true, you didn’t—but”—Violet smiled carefully—“you’re behaving rather as if she was. Is that quite wise?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “All right then, let me read in peace.”

  Sally, Violet thought, is at the place in her life where without being aware of it, she is like lightning that may strike anywhere. She’s a bolt of life. In the last five minutes it had become crystal clear to Violet that her queer vision of Charles and Sally in each other’s arms had had a partial truth in it. Then she looked around the high spacious room, and at the rain outside. They were all three losing their sense of proportion in the rain, and she for one would hold on to hers. So she forced herself to read, until she could lie down and sleep for an hour. Tomorrow, she told herself, I shall think all this out. Tomorrow the sun may be out and we shall all be different.

  But the minute Charles came in that night, Violet sensed that something had happened. What? She had not been a witness to the evening, but she sensed its atmosphere at once.

  Sally and Charles had had a long talk about Sarah St. Leger. Sally, unable to come to a decision about Ian, had thrown herself with relief into Charles’s expansive flattering mood. She plied him with questions and he foraged around in the desk happily to bring out a photograph of another painting of Sarah, dressed in black, her hair pulled back tight from the round full forehead, an air of implacable authority and willed kindness in the large eyes which Sally found repulsive. There was also an engraving, rather crude, of Sarah dispensing soup to an emaciated group of sufferers from the Famine.