by May Sarton
A Shower of Summer Days
A Novel
May Sarton
At long last in early June the Gordons were expected home at Dene’s Court, the house in Ireland which Violet Dene Gordon had inherited. In twenty years she and her husband had come back twice from Burma on short leaves, but there had been no time to settle in, or to take the estate in hand. They seemed to the village people as restless as migratory birds, welcome enough visitors, but still only visitors. Would Miss Violet ever come home to stay, they wondered walking through the demesne on Sundays, pausing to look up at the blank windows shuttered from inside, at the tennis court overgrown with weeds, or to talk with the always despairing Cammaert, the one man left in charge of the gardens. He did not think of himself as a hero (that boy with his hand in the hole in the dyke), but as a matter of fact it had been a long lonely struggle to keep even a semblance of order against the rising tide of weeds. It had made him angrily taciturn, permanently at bay, so instead of giving the children flowers he shouted at them,
“Go ahead, take the roses, damn you. Who cares?” And stamped off, not looking back, not looking to see what they took, so more often than not they were too overcome with the possibilities to pick at all. The rose petals fell in the rain; the sweet peas withered on their stalks.
But finally the news percolated through that Burma was withdrawing from the British orbit, from Charles Gordon’s orbit, this meant to the village consciousness. The postmaster saw in an old issue of the Times an editorial about the nationalizing of teak, and about the pity it was that all the British engineers and experts were being shown the door. There would be no one to train new men.
“Teak, that’s Mr. Gordon’s business surely,” the postmaster announced in the pub. “So we can expect them home any day now,” he said, like an oracle, hardly believing his own words, so that he was more astonished than anyone when rumors and conjectures gave way to letters from the Gordons and finally cables. “Didn’t I tell you so?” the postmaster said, awed by his own prescience. “It’s a strange thing how I felt it in my bones,” he said, forgetting all about the evidence in the paper.
Annie Ryan, pensioned off and living in the village, made her way over to Mrs. O’Connell’s in triumph with the letter announcing the Gordons’ definite intentions, and Mrs. O’Connell opened a bottle of port to celebrate the news. Finally three months later, out of the blue, came a phone call through the post office so the whole village knew that Annie had been asked back, at least till the Gordons were settled in.
“All I could say was ‘Yes, Miss Violet,’ as if they’d never been away…” Annie told the group who had converged on the post office as the news spread that Annie was talking to London. “And how I’ll ever manage, what with the rheumatism, the dear Lord only knows.” She was overcome now with the enormity of what she had undertaken, the huge house, empty all these years, damp everywhere. Yet the house was a friend; she had been cook there for almost half a century, all told. More even than Miss Violet, the house and her feeling for the house had made her answer as she did without hesitating. She couldn’t bear even to imagine a stranger in her kitchen, someone who would not know how things had always been done, someone who would not see the glory of it for the mildew, someone who could not people it with the children now grown-up, with the parents and grandparents, now dead. “No one at all would do but myself,” Annie said, rubbing ointment into her stiff knee as if preparing for a race.
Now lists of things to be done flew over from the English houses where Charles and Violet were staying: remind Cammaert to have lettuces started in good time; air the linen and blankets; clean the silver; get in coal; keep fires burning in all the rooms, the lists said in Violet’s decisive hand—as if Annie needed to be told these things.
Every day Annie went over from the village and into the icy house, forgetting her rheumatism by the time she was halfway in a fury of satisfaction, and reminding Maire constantly of what they would have to do next. She had imported Maire, a distant cousin’s daughter, to do the upstairs and perhaps wait on table. She ordered Maire around as if she were a commanding general and Maire in her sixteen-year-old person an entire army with banners.
Down at the farm, chicks were started for the table. Mr. Pennyfeather, the estate manager, trembled as he tried to get the accounts straightened out, and wondered if Mr. Gordon would have a sharp eye for the rather ruthless cutting in the far plantations. But even Pennyfeather was caught up in the burst of activity in the last days: he brought over his men and had the windows washed.
“Glory be to God,” said Annie as she came round the curve of the lower drive and saw the windows shining bright gold in the morning sun, the limestone face of the house like a sleeping beauty touched alive. “It’s a great sight to be seeing in the morning, a grand house surely.”
Sheltered by the frieze of trees, the ancient elephant hills behind it, Dene’s Court relied on proportion alone: a high Italianate façade; of the twenty windows, those on the first floor were long, those on the upper two floors almost square. This façade without ornament, hardly broken by terrace steps and the high central door, was constantly changing in the changing light, a surface made to take the sun, to turn pale gold or dark slate under the influence of cloud or rain, making its only compromises with the weather. It was a grand house, grand in a plain enlightened way that spoke of the age in which it had been built. But it was in no sense charming, and to some eyes might even appear forbidding, rather too aloof, or even too exposed. It boasted of no gentle view of river or carefully planned opening perspective of trees or artificial lake. It faced the east and looked no further than the rough rolling Irish lawn which rose around it to form a bowl, enclosed in the trees at the edge of the demesne.
But for Annie it was too steeped in memories ever to be seen in this detached way. The drawing room furniture, the grand piano Violet’s mother had played, and the great Aubusson carpet had been sold long ago: this part of the house was kept closed. Yet in spite of these attritions, and perhaps because it had not been lived in for so long, the house still held intact the atmosphere of all those summers when two sisters in white dresses had grown up, danced, run up and down the stairs, burst into tears, shouted with laughter. The high-ceilinged many-windowed rooms enclosed intense distilled life, and even grief now seemed as clear as drops of rain. So Annie felt, busily flinging windows open, leaning out of the master’s bedroom to look down for a moment at Cammaert, bent over the lawn mower, giving the one piece of clipped English lawn to the right of the house a last grooming. Cammaert looked up on hearing the grinding of the window above him, and gave Annie a slow melancholy nod.
“It looks lovely!” Annie called down.
But he did not answer, only slowly shook his head and plodded on. “What with the slugs,” he muttered to himself, “what with the rainy spring and the blight on the roses,” and he sighed. “Miss Violet has no idea—twenty years with no one but that rascal to look out for things. They’ll have a shock. Neglect…” Cammaert sighed again. “I’m too old to do the work of four gardeners. What do they expect?”
Annie was too busy and happy to think such thoughts. She and Maire scoured and polished, sent for chimney sweepers, exhausted themselves dusting the books one by one, flapped blankets out of windows, shook out sheets to dry by the fires, and stopped every hour or so to drink innumerable cups of strong tea while Annie poured out stories of the Denes, and Maire listened, silent, her eyes wide. (“A deep one,” Annie thought, “but teachable, tractable, and in fact,” she decided with relief, “she’ll do.”)
As Annie talked on, processions of summers rose up and faded away; carriages gave way to motor cars; the tennis court was laid out; croquet parties came and went; J
onas Oliver Dene and his wife Elisabeth (Violet’s grandparents) seemed always to be alighting from a drive and standing on the terrace steps waving at someone. Maire listened and later nodded to herself in the tarnished mirrors in the empty drawing room, trying to imagine the great beauty of Miss Violet, and the wildness of Miss Barbie. She passed the stables, overgrown with nettles and murmured, “Sixteen horses, Annie said, the carriage, the phaeton, the dogcart, the wagonette.” Maire murmured as if she could conjure them up by naming them, for whatever did a phaeton look like? But that was in the grandparents’ day, she remembered. It was hard to keep it all straight in her head. “What was the footman’s name?” she would ask, for she was fascinated by the idea of this man who wore a blue coat with silver buttons and whose only function was to get down and open and close the gates for the coachman to drive through. “Patrick, of course, was his name,” Annie would say impatiently, as if she had forgotten one of the Kings of England.
And Maire imagined the servants’ meals in the servants’ hall when eight sat down to tea and the butler, a Protestant, Annie said, but a good sort, sat at the head. Maire’s imagination was so full of all this that she felt she was walking about in a dream, and she half expected Miss Violet to drive up in a phaeton with a liveried footman and step out onto the terrace in a gauzy dress like a heroine in a musical. And what would Mr. Charles Gordon be like? Handsome, Annie said. But she didn’t talk much of Mr. Gordon. She talked about the earlier past, about the long summers, about the two little girls, one beautiful, one mischievous.
On the last day Annie made a careful tour of the rooms, and was dismayed to realize for the first time how shabby everything was, how worn the carpets, how faded the curtains and walls; the bright light pouring in through the washed windows seemed a dangerous light. “For all we’ve done, it’s going to be a sad homecoming.” She sat down on a straight chair in the great front hall, now used as a dining room. She was suddenly exhausted to the marrow of her bones. For the first time the house bore down on her as a great empty weight, a shell. “We’ve done all we can,” she said, feeling bitterly that it was not enough.
But just then Maire emerged from the back stairs and stood in the doorway, her arms full of flowers, roses and sweet peas and marigolds and bachelors’ buttons. She stood there panting a little as if she were bringing an offering to a god.
“I’ve got them,” she said as if the flowers were wild animals she had hunted down.
“Newspapers, you silly girl,” Annie said crossly. “You’ll make an awful mess otherwise. The jars are upstairs in the cupboard on the landing—you know where, don’t you?—underneath.”
But somehow the vision of Maire with her armful of flowers had brought back like a musical phrase the rich aura of all the summers. Annie got up, gave the long Sheraton table a final gloss, and began to sing as she worked. The great shell hummed faintly with the sound of distant seas, the rumor of the past that filled the silence and enclosed them in its spell. Annie looked up for a moment at the portraits of the Denes. They filled the high wall before her, their heavy gold frames gone dull against the faded apricot of the wallpaper (it had once been crimson). She could name them all from Cornelius Dene, the Colonel who had come over with Cromwell’s armies, to Jonas Oliver Dene and his wife Elisabeth, Violet’s grandparents. “The Denes,” she said to herself, straightening up as if to receive an order for a dinner for twenty, “will be pleased.”
But that night Violet Dene Gordon, surrounded by the safe Victorian comfort of a bedroom in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin, lay beside her husband and could not sleep. All through the last months she had felt the tug of Dene’s Court like an obsession, had gone upstairs in the midst of a conversation to add an item to a list for Annie, and then sat forgetting why she had come, only wanting to think and remember, playing the past like a game of solitaire which must “come out,” for if it did, all would be well with the future too. She set the small concrete details, names of flowers in the garden, children’s books they had read with their father, Barbie’s collections of insects and butterflies, set these out and looked at them with passionate attention as if they held the answer to huge questions and doubts. Would Charles really take hold and be happy there? Or would he be bored?
It was no joke for any man to be on the loose in his early fifties, cut off from the job for which he had been trained, to come back then to an England so changed that even in Lady Somerset’s house, where there was still a butler, the guests helped wash the dishes. Their English friends teased them about the luck of being Anglo-Irish in these times. “You can get servants, I’m told,” Lady Somerset said, “I’m mad with envy,” and her husband added “meat” Cooking rather like a cannibal, Violet thought). It was queer to feel oneself so naked, so orphaned, so cut off and yet in the eyes of one’s friends to appear as the inheritors of a stability which hardly seemed possible any more. So it had always been with Dene’s Court which had escaped burning when other houses of its kind were burned, which had stood since its building in a kind of aloofness which now appeared to be strength, some secret power of reserve, but was more likely luck, Violet thought—a matter of location, far from the centers of revolution and passion. For Violet suspected that the Denes had been neither better nor worse than other landlords.
Landlord. The word frightened her. It was as if she and Charles were asked to be fully grown-up for the first time in their lives. It suggested masses of children and servants. Children they did not have; Violet had never ceased to feel sorrow and guilt because of her miscarriage and the subsequent operation which destroyed all their hopes. Now in relation to the house, she felt the loss again and in a new way. She was not only fading Charles but all the Denes, coming back, barren, middle-aged, coming back as to a refuge to a house which had been designed not as a refuge at all, but as a perhaps arrogant statement of faith in a way of life, in a tradition. Beside this their life in Burma had been improvised—that indeed was its charm. Now they would enter a more severe frame. Charles would sit at the head of the long table—so much too long for two—under the eyes of all the Denes.
So Violet had held back, persuaded him that they must have a few months of real holiday before taking on their new responsibilities. She had held back as one holds back from meeting an old love, because she was afraid, because too much was at stake.
Now on this last night the house rose before her closed eyes like a fortress, its twenty dark windows gleaming in the moonlight; behind it, the sheltering outlines of the mountains, milky above the intensely black trees. Moved passionately by this evocation, Violet turned toward her husband and laid her cheek against his back. She breathed in the steady pulse of his sleep and wondered what it would be like after this in the great fourposter bed where her parents and grandparents had slept in the peaceful summer nights. He did not move.
And suddenly Violet felt a longing for her sister, Barbie, for someone who would remember and share. She thought of their mother playing Chopin while they lay under the piano, rather frightened, for the reverberations suggested some great animal imprisoned there; she thought of Miss Goddard, their governess, taking them out to pick bluebells in the woods; of the long fierce games of croquet that lasted for days; of the rainy afternoons cutting out paper dolls. But she could not rest in these memories and turned over as if to ward off nightmare. For the peaceful summers had finally mounted in a crescendo through Barbie’s violence, her escapes, her tantrums, her ambivalent feelings about this older sister who by her very presence had made Barbie feel deprived—till the final breaking off of everything and Barbie’s departure for America with her husband. It was all so very long ago, yet the wounds had never been healed. The final memories of the house had been cruel, violent and were perhaps another unacknowledged reason for Violet’s reluctance to go back.
There had been, after all, no reconciliation with Barbie, only the occasional letters at Christmas, the snapshots of Sally, Violet’s niece whom she had never seen. Now that we are grown-up and gettin
g old, Violet thought, if only we could talk—but Barbie had become efficient, was busy on all sort of committees with queer names (Americans organized everything so!). Violet suspected that if they did meet again Barbie would judge her severely, a beautiful woman who needed above all to be admired. Barbie would judge her marriage, would judge Charles (Americans never understood the British). It might in fact be quite unbearable and Violet, who had a moment before longed for her sister, quietly closed her mind. One can’t go back, she thought—and then lay, rigid with apprehension, realizing that going back was just what she would have to do tomorrow.
“Charles!” She said sharply aloud, as if someone had knocked.
Charles turned in his sleep, groaned, and then sat straight up in bed, wide awake, cross. “What is it, Violet? What’s the matter?”
“I’m sorry, darling—a bad dream, I guess. Go back to sleep.” She folded her hand into his, as if she could lock away her anxiety there. And indeed she felt drowsy at last, as if their enfolded hands became an entity. “I could never do it alone,” she thought.
At noon the next day in the steady fine rain, Cammaert puttered about transplanting petunias to the borders near the house, but stopped so often to listen for the gate at the upper drive, and relit his pipe so many times that he did not get much work done. “Damn the rain,” he muttered. His feet were wet through, and he felt so angry with impatience he would have liked to kill something and stamped with satisfaction on a slug. Poor Maire down in the kitchen was near to tears, the butt of Annie’s nerves. First there was the rain—and a flare-up of Annie’s rheumatism so she felt clumsy and angry too: the cream wouldn’t whip; she burned her fingers on oven as she put the roast in. Nothing could go right that morning cruel with suspense.
“Run along now and see if they’re not coming,” Annie said to Maire for the fifth time, “and this time don’t come back till you hear the gate click—though how you’ll hear it in this rain God only knows. Give a callout,” she followed Maire to the foot of the stairs and reminded her.
