A Shower of Summer Days Read online

  And now where were they? she asked herself, relieved that at least they were not here, and she could quietly build her bouquet, transitory as it would be. Yet it gave her a feeling of stability, of continuity—

  “Mrs. Gordon?” The voice came from the back door of the library and she turned, startled.

  “Oh good morning, Ian. Did you sleep well?” He looked absurdly young, she thought, in a white turtle neck sweater.

  “Very well, thank you, though I found the stillness a bit nerve-wracking at first. There was some peculiar cry that came back several times—”

  “Oh, the owl, I expect.” She went back to her flowers with deliberation.

  “I thought it was a ghost,” he smiled. “I hoped it was.”

  “Where’s Sally?” Violet asked. This was to prevent him from doing what he did, which was to settle on the arm of the sofa, leaning over the back of it where he could look up at her face. She didn’t want to be looked at.

  “She’s gone off somewhere,” he said indifferently. And then, “I want to talk to you, Mrs. Gordon.”

  “Do you?” Violet asked and the tone said, Whatever for? “Well,” she said lightly but definitely, “the trouble is that I can’t do this and talk at the same time. And as I have to do this…” Already she was ruining her plan out of nervousness. The larkspur was too tall—she needed more body. Deliberately she shut out the insistence of his look. She would not see him.

  But as Ian was perfectly silent and just sat there, watching her, it became more difficult to go on than if they had been chatting about indifferent things. The silence was too much like intimacy.

  “You’re amazing,” Ian said quietly, “I’ve never seen anyone like you before.”

  Violet couldn’t help smiling. It was so clumsy and so indiscreet.

  “What’s funny?” he asked, his face aflame with insecurity.

  “You make me sound like a specimen,” she said, bending her head first to one side and then to another, as she began to stick the stiff zinnias into the gaps in the bunch. “As a matter of fact you look at us all rather like specimens, don’t you, Ian?” she said wickedly. “You have been looking us over—that’s only natural.”

  He got up, half angrily, his hands shoved into his pockets. “I don’t know how to talk to you,” he said, “you baffle me.”

  “You must be very easily baffled then. Besides,” she added, very busy with the flowers, “I thought you came here to talk to Sally.”

  “That’s just it,” Ian broke in, “that’s what I want to talk to you about.”

  “Oh.” Violet stood behind the table and faced him, for the first time looking him full in the face. “Well, Ian, I am listening,” she said.

  “Don’t look so severe, Mrs. Gordon.” He was standing now back to the fireplace. “I’m not a criminal.”

  “Have I said you were?”

  “Oh dear, this is awful.” Ian ran a hand through his hair and seemed genuinely upset. But Violet did not feel sorry for him. She suspected that he was out for sympathy and understanding, a special kind of sympathy and understanding which could only be had from a woman about another woman. She was not prepared to give this.

  “You see,” Ian began, lighting a cigarette and smoking nervously without inhaling, little puffs of smoke flowing out of his mouth between the words, “Sally’s such a child.” He looked at Violet for confirmation of this.

  “She’s twenty-one,” Violet said, without committing herself.

  “That’s not what I mean. She takes things so hard. She thinks everything’s black and white, one thing or another.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

  “I can’t marry Sally,” Ian said almost angrily.

  “Why not?” Violet pressed him, and as he didn’t answer, but stood there frowning, a frown so handsome and voulu that Violet, who recognized some of her own bad habits, knew at once that he was not thinking at all, but only being something, being a handsome frowning young man who hoped she found him attractive in this guise.

  “Are you in love with Sally, or not?” Violet’s voice was like ice.

  “I thought I was.” There was this about Ian, Violet had to admit. He surprised one sometimes by being a little more honest than one expected.

  “What happened, Ian?” and this time her tone was kind.

  “I don’t know. When I saw her at the airport and later here in this house—I don’t know—it was as if something snapped. Oh, I don’t know what I feel,” he said harshly. “I shouldn’t have come.”

  “Oh no, that’s not true. You should have come,” Violet said gravely.

  “You know what it is,” he pleaded now, “you’re loved. You know what it is, how sometimes you just can’t stand it any longer, as if you couldn’t breathe—that’s how I feel, Mrs. Gordon.”

  She had never said it to herself like that, no, perhaps she had never felt it.

  “I think I do know,” Violet said, coming round and sitting down in one of the armchairs. “When it comes to the real thing, one can’t take it.”

  Ian smiled. “You’re being rather cruel, Mrs. Gordon.”

  “Only to myself,” she said quickly.

  “How is she being cruel, Ian?” Sally’s light harsh voice interrupted them. She stood in the big doorway, Ian at the fireplace on her left and Violet opposite her.

  “Ian and I are telling each other a few unpleasant truths,” Violet said quickly.

  “She hates to be interrupted while she’s doing the flowers,” Sally said and turned and went out.

  The impact of this sudden entrance and exit was such that there was no way of going on. Violet went back to the flowers, re-arranging them now with almost vicious efficiency. She rolled up the wet newspapers, flung a bunch of broken stems into the wastebasket, and said with every gesture, Go away. But Ian did not go away. He just stood there, looking at her, his eyes narrowed, like an animal, she thought, like a cat with its ears back, about to spring.

  “You will have to say all this to Sally,” Violet said finally. “You must say it to her, not to me.”

  “Don’t shut me out,” he pleaded.

  But Violet was already moving deliberately toward the door.

  “You’re not quite honest, you know,” she said with her back to him.

  “How did you know?” He looked so relieved that it was almost like happiness. He was, she felt, ready and willing to confide. It was what he had really come down here to do. But she would not have it. She would not be his ally, know his truth too well, whatever it might be. She was a little afraid of him because he showed her at every moment the worst of herself. She would not be led any further down the mirrored corridors to whatever monster or Minotaur she would be forced to kill if she found him.

  “Never mind,” she said, not unkindly. “I’ve lived a long time.” And then she closed the door behind her and went upstairs, annoyed to discover that she was shaking as if she had escaped some peril. Sally was sitting on the window seat on the landing, also like a little tense animal. We are all animals, Violet thought with something like disgust.

  “Go down to Ian. It’s you he wants to see,” she said quietly.

  “Yes.” Sally ran down the stairs, the violence of her feeling forcing her on like an arrow that has left the bow. She flung open the door and then stood quite still just inside. “Why did you come here, Ian?” she asked, as if she were facing a burglar or a criminal.

  “What’s the matter with you, Sally? Why are you so angry all of a sudden?” He stood there, looking down, evading her eyes, immaculate and untouched in his white sweater, as if she were the incomprehensible one.

  “You know what I mean,” Sally said in the same relentless tone. “Why did you? Because you thought it would be amusing to see a house like this? Because you were curious? Or just for the hell of it?” She came a few steps towards him. “You’ve got to answer,” she said. Her face was quite frightening.

  Then all of a sudden she collapsed into the chair beside her, c
overed her face with her hands and said very quietly, “You know what you’ve been doing, I suppose—the suspense—”

  “Oh Sally…” She heard the evasion in the tone, apologetic, faintly exasperated.

  “You’ve got to tell me,” Sally said, her hands in fists held against her eyes. “I can’t stand it any longer.”

  It was clear that she was reaching the ultimate tautness of a thread that has been pulled out as far as it will go and now at any second must break. It was approaching a scream, hysteria, or (this is what she thought herself) death.

  “I can’t help it, Sally. It’s not my f-f-fault.” He was stammering with nerves himself.

  “If you could just try to tell me,” she pleaded, “if I could just know…”

  “I didn’t mean it to be like this,” he faltered. “Actually,” he said (as if he were discussing a dinner engagement, she thought), “I had a wild idea we might get married—here—away from your father and mother and—everything—but, oh, Sally, try to understand. Don’t hate me.” He had turned away from her. He would always meet a difficult situation obliquely, Sally thought, as she examined him coldly, his weakness. He looked much older as if the sheen had rubbed off. He’s thirty, she thought. He should be something by now.

  “What if I do hate you?” She was not going to pity him. It was indecent of him to expect her pity. “That would be better than this. I hate myself now,” she added in a low voice, as if to herself, “I’m becoming a monster.” When someone doesn’t love you, you become a monster, she was thinking. It takes yourself away, like a dreadful disease. It seemed incredible that she could have become in a few days this dry screaming harpy, unable even to cry.

  “No, Sally darling, but…” Still he hesitates, she thought. Still he can’t come towards me.

  “But you don’t love me any more. What is it then? I’m the same person. You did love me”—her voice trembled as the wave of doubt rose in her—“didn’t you?”

  Ian, driven finally into a corner, sat down, his hands clasped between his knees. “I guess,” he said with a look of fear, of blank evasion in his eyes, like a goat, or some animal who cannot bear the straight human glance. “I guess I just can’t take love. It scares me.”

  “Oh,” Sally caught her breath. “You’re the monster, then,” she said harshly. “Why do you begin things you can’t finish?”

  “I didn’t know,” he said irritably, “I didn’t know this would happen.”

  For the moment Sally was saved from suffering by anger. Also anger made her seize on the first weapon that came to mind, the way Ian behaved with her aunt, the mixture of deference when he was with her and irony when he spoke of her—she seized on this. “It’s Aunt Violet,” she said amazed at the poison welling up inside her. “You can never see a woman like that, a real woman who knows all the things you don’t know without wanting to attack her, call her fossil or extinct or something, but at the same time you want to capture her. You can’t resist, can you, Ian?” He lifted his head, shocked by her tone, the violence of her imagining and the core of truth in it. “Oh, you’ll never admit it,” she went on, “and nothing will come of it, of course,” she added, “but that’s the truth. It’s always been the truth.”

  “No.” Ian got up, for the first time forceful. “You’re mad, Sally, and mean too. I never would have expected that of you.”

  They were both relieved to be angry. It distracted them from the real pain that lay under this false anger.

  “I’m so tired of being myself,” she said in a suddenly normal tone of voice.

  This plea not directed to him, not asking anything of him at last made it possible for Ian to go over and sit on the arm of her chair. He put an arm round her, gently, with real tenderness. “You’re so young, Sally dear, this can’t be fatal.”

  “But how does one learn? How am I ever to get to be like Aunt Violet if nobody loves me whom I can love? It’s hopeless. Damn,” she said as she felt she would cry, and instead got up, running into Charles at the door. Luckily he was too concentrated on departure to notice her state.

  “Tell Violet I’ll be back with the car in ten minutes. Half the morning’s gone and we really must be off.”

  Ian was left alone in the library. He went over and stood by the flowers on the table, looking at them with curiosity and great attention. It would have been hard to tell from his expression whether the scene he had just lived through had touched him deeply or disturbed him, or whether he had already put it out of his mind as something finished. At any rate, his attitude, hands in pockets, suggested relief.

  They gathered on the terrace, Ian carrying Violet’s coat on his arm, Violet, nervous, tying and retying a violet scarf round her neck, and Sally expressionless, keeping rather obviously in the background. The drive had taken on the atmosphere of an expedition. They were all glad to be getting out, to be forced to look at something other than themselves, to be immunized by flowing landscapes and unknown places from the concentrated feelings of the last twenty-four hours. For Sally, at least, the suspense at its worst was over. She was so relieved that she hardly knew or cared what she would feel later—now it was the passive calm one rests in after a violent fit of seasickness. She slipped gladly into the back seat with Violet.

  “Charles will want to explain everything to Ian, you know, and it’s so frightening when he has to turn round to do it.” Then, as Charles slammed the door and got into the driver’s seat, affairé, efficient, as if the little car were a plane, and some danger to be met and dealt with just ahead, Violet said in her teasing voice, “Darling, if you see some rare sort of nuthatch in a hedge behind you, please resist the irresistible and don’t turn round. Bird-lovers should not be allowed licenses,” she said, settling back, with a sigh.

  Sally was not listening. She felt as if she were being lifted out of and away from everything familiar, as if in fact they were leaving the whole past behind them, and this were the beginning of a wholly new, strange life.

  “All right?” Violet asked, slipping an arm through hers.

  “Yes, thank you, Aunt Violet,” she smiled stiffly. She did not know if it was the truth. But she was grateful for Aunt Violet’s arm. It is awfully important, she thought, that I be loved by someone, right now.

  Ian got out to open and close the gate and then they were really off. The sky was overcast, broken big clouds with radiant edges, and pools of sunlight on the far-off hills, a sky like changeable silk which bore watching every moment. Always coming out of the demesne there was this feeling of the world opening out, of adventure as the tarred road flowed sinuously off up and down hills as far as one could see.

  “It’s beautiful,” Sally cried. “How beautiful it all is!” She knew that her eyes were opened, that she would never never forget a single thing they saw on this day. It all had such reality suddenly, such brilliance because—here she withdrew her arm from her aunt’s—she had broken out of a shell. She had come alive. Such brilliance, she guessed, was part of suffering, of being aware—would she feel it if Ian were not still there in the front seat?

  Here the fields were divided by rough stone walls; up on a hill silhouetted against the sky was the ruin of a castle covered with ivy, and then already it was past and they were running along beside a small still river with rushes in its bed.

  “Not navigable,” Charles pronounced, and Sally caught Violet’s amused smile.

  The voices of the two men rose and fell; Violet and Sally in the back were glad not to have to talk.

  “We’ll go right up to the hills, Violet, eh? Never mind the town. We can swing round there later. I want to catch this light.”

  Indeed it seemed as if they were in the middle of an iridescent bubble and every color of meadow, of deeper green hillside and far-off the purple mountains seemed touched with a peculiar and transitory brilliance. Each little flower by the road, a buttercup or a lacy head of Queen Anne’s lace, seemed outlined carefully like flowers in the medieval paintings at the feet of the saints, Sall
y thought.

  “I know what it is,” she said, “it’s that all the common things become magic here, that pig for instance, so very pink,” she giggled, “and the grass really too green to be real. I wish I were a cow,” she added, as they passed a herd, knee-deep in buttercups, lifting heavy heads, flowers dripping from their mouths.

  Just then the sun fell on their necks as the road took a turn to the west, fell so warmly that it was like a caress. The hills which had been a dark deep blue changed to mauve and purple and seemed to shine.

  Was it the sun on her neck, that warmth stealing through her so beneficently, or what was it? Sally felt as elated as if she were full of good news, bursting with some great tidings. She felt free to say all sorts of mad things.

  “I love you all extremely,” she announced, “I’m in love with three people. It’s rather odd.”

  Charles turned half-round to see her and winked. It was his idea that she and Ian must have come to some understanding and he was so pleased for her that he forgot to be jealous.

  “Charles!” Violet admonished. “Try to resist the birds and the beauties!”

  “I just wanted to say hello to my niece. There’s nothing on the road.”

  “Except two carts—Charles!” Violet shouted, as he just missed a cart, swerving out dangerously to the left and just not falling into a ditch.

  “Violet doesn’t drive,” Charles explained to Ian, “and unfortunately she is very imaginative.”

  “Charles, unfortunately drives, and is very unimaginative,” Violet countered, quite cross because she had been frightened. They were off on one of their games of crossness, and while they enjoyed themselves, Ian turned to smile tentatively at Sally. As long as he is here, she thought, I shall not know what has happened. Despair, she understood now, for a while is as exhilarating as joy. One is sustained by it.

  Violet was puzzled, puzzled by Sally’s air of exaltation, wondering what Ian had finally told her, or if he had told her. She thought that it would be nice when she and Charles were alone again, and she could sit in the front seat, and they could talk about nothing in peace.