A Shower of Summer Days

by May Sarton

  Maire, silent with emotion, went slowly up the stairs, through the hall and put her head out onto the terrace and listened. But all she could hear was the water in the gutters, a steady trickle from leaves, and somewhere near-by some little bird chirping. She was filled with foreboding, had visions of the car turned over in a ditch on some faraway road and Miss Violet and Mr. Charles Gordon bloody and quite dead. And whatever would we do then, she thought—indulging herself in this imaginary woe so that the tears she had held back all morning stood in her eyes, for the sheer pity of all she could imagine, and the relief of something definite and final after the weeks, the days and now the morning of intolerable suspense.

  But in the midst of this the grind and clang came through the air as sharp as a dog’s bark. It must be they—but what if it weren’t and she called Annie for nothing? She waited for what seemed an eternity and heard the sound again and then ran, shouting at the top of her voice which had not made a sound all that day, “Annie, Annie, it’s them!” terrified by her own cry and the panic in it.

  Annie charged past, pulling a coat over her head. “Don’t stand there gaping, you silly girl. Put more coal on the fire in the library and then come out and help bring in the bags.”

  Violet and Charles saw the odd flapping figure emerge onto the terrace as they came out from under the trees in the little black Austin. “Thank God, it’s Annie,” Violet murmured. “She’s here.” They had no time to look up, to take in the bleak rainy face of the house. Violet was being hugged like a child. “Welcome home, Miss Violet, doatie—God be praised.”

  “Well, Annie, do you remember me?” Charles shook her hand warmly. “It’s been a long time.”

  “And this must be Maire,” Violet was saying, quick to take in the poor girl’s scared face, her half-curtsy. “Be a good girl and help Mr. Gordon with the bags…” and she pulled Annie up the steps and into the great hall, for now she couldn’t wait another second to go in, to take possession. “Wouldn’t it be a day like this, Annie? Wouldn’t it just?” she said flinging her tweed coat down, tearing off her rubbers with one quick gesture.

  “Have we ever arrived when it didn’t rain?” she asked, moving around, flying from this to that as if her agitation made an aura of wings around her and she was beating them, trying to settle, glancing up at the wall of portraits, taking in the polished surface of the dear beautiful table with a quick affectionate gesture of one hand, then turning to Annie, coming to rest at last as she looked at Annie, gaunt, fierce as ever with the same wisps of white hair escaping the tight knot at the top of her head, the same deep-set penetrating blue eyes, while all the rest of her, petticoat showing as always, was never quite set aright, as if she lived in a perpetual gale.

  “Dear Annie, you haven’t changed—not a bit,” Violet said. “You’re not a day older.”

  Annie tossed her head. “A scarecrow like me never grows old,” and suddenly she laughed aloud at her own joke, “except for my rheumatic knee, a devil of a thing…” she added and then stopped as she looked for the first time at Violet.

  Violet read in those honest eyes all Annie didn’t say. “I’ve changed, Annie—isn’t it awful? But you know it’s been a long time, and I feel old—”

  “Nonsense,” Annie said shortly. “Yourself will always be a beauty, that’s sure.”

  But Violet felt it suddenly unbearable to have Annie see the twenty years on her face, as if she had been found out. She ran into the library to look for Charles, calling.

  “Oh Charles, leave the bags. Come and sit down. We’re home!” But there was no answer. She went to the immensely high window to look out and saw Charles, oblivious of the rain, talking to Cammaert, their two heads close together, nodding. Cammaert lifted his hat, as if he were saying good morning and she had never been away at all.

  She struggled to open the window, then gave it up and instead ran out bareheaded in the rain, for she must know what they were discussing so earnestly, she must be part of it all.

  “It’s the slugs,” Cammaert explained, “as I’m telling Mr. Gordon, the garden is a ruin. It’s the damp—” the old voice repeated as it had done in just the same words when she and Barbie used to burst into giggles at this unchanging litany of woe.

  “There must be a blight on the roses,” Violet murmured mischievously.

  “Aye,” Cammaert launched happily into the blight. But he was not allowed to finish. Charles, slipping an arm through his wife’s, pulled her away. “Darling, you can’t stand here in this wet without a coat. I’ll have to see if the gin’s arrived all right. We must have a drink before lunch.”

  But before moving they turned and looked up together at the façade above them. From here at the foot of the terrace steps, it towered. The stone had turned a dark grey in the rain. There was no softness here, no yielding to softness.

  “Does the house welcome us, I wonder?” Violet asked, holding Charles’s arm very tightly.

  “It had better or we’ll have to take it by storm.” He gave the dark windows a bold look, but did not smile; Violet broke away from him and ran in. She stood just inside the glass door at the threshold of the great hall. Annie and Maire had disappeared. Her eyes went from the rows of Dene faces on the high wall to her left, to the long shining empty table, and then up the wide flight of stairs at the far end of this room into which all the other rooms of the house poured, the center of movement, of all currents. One would have to be strong indeed not to feel unbearably exposed here.

  Do we have enough life in us, she wondered, to fill these spaces? To withstand all this? Would their voices ever sound natural and not as if they were breaking a willed silence? Violet stood still and took a deep breath.

  But even when they were sitting by the fire a half hour later, she kept having the sensation that they were talking above something, not a noise exactly, but a very loud silence, and she laughed more than she meant to as if she must underline her presence, not to be swallowed up by this other presence. The drink helped. Charles helped, quietly active, already opening the glass-doored Victorian bookcases to take out bound copies of Dickens and exclaim with pleasure. He could move freely about because he was not stopped at every step by memory. He could stand as he was doing now at her grandfather’s desk without having to displace first the shadow of that monumental man who at any moment (so Violet felt) would turn and give a loud roar. Her grandfather’s chief way of communicating with his little granddaughters had been to pretend to be a giant and give strange howls, and when they ran away to Miss Goddard screaming ostentatiously, he felt that he was a success as a grandfather, but to them he appeared not as a person at all, only some violent force of nature like a volcano which they could make erupt by tiptoeing into the library on Sunday morning. He died when Violet was six or seven so he had remained a blundering bogeyman to whom the little girl felt slightly superior.

  But there was Charles, real, unaware, standing in the window, and Violet got up impulsively and drew him out to explore the house. “I can’t wait another minute!” she cried. “We’ll take our drinks and go exploring—”

  “Lunch will be served,” Charles protested. “There isn’t time—”

  “But I can’t wait another minute,” Violet repeated, feeling as his slightly irritated, amused glance rested on hers a second, that she was released into the real present again, drinking in his love so that it actually coursed through her like blood itself, reviving. She led him up the wide stairs where they sat for a moment on the window seat on the landing and peered out through the rain and the swaying tops of the trees and the grey mists which eclipsed the mountains. But Charles, to whom this view meant nothing since it was not there, was more interested in the portrait of Cromwell at the top of the last flight to the second floor.

  “It’s quite a good painting,” she said, “isn’t it, Charles? You know I never really looked at it before. It was just there…”

  After the two landings, each as big as a room, the stairs simply disappeared, vanished.
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  “The money gave out,” Violet explained. “There was supposed to be another flight to the ballroom,” and she pulled Charles through a narrow door into perfect darkness. “How strange,” she said, “I can’t remember where the light is.” So it was Charles’s lighter which showed them the way, past the one toilet in the house, and up a narrow dark stairway into the rather surprising long low room, extending the full width of the house, windowed at each end, which had been designed as a ballroom but never finished.

  “This is where we played on rainy days—that trunk used to be filled with ‘grandeurs’ (that’s what we called them) for dressing up,” she explained. “We used to slide too and make an awful noise…”

  But she could not wait, though Charles was anxious to look more closely at the plaster ceiling where someone had sketched in a design, but given up. She was pulling him to the bedroom at the right, which she explained had been her room, with Barbie across the hall, running over in her bare feet when there was a thunderstorm and flinging herself into Violet’s bed like a small thunderbolt herself.

  “What a formal room for a child,” Charles exclaimed. “Didn’t you feel lonely?”

  “Oh no—” Violet had gone to the windows as one must always do first in this house. “Come here, Charles…” They stood for a moment looking up at the long rolling lawn that was not a lawn but just rough grass which the sheep kept down, at the carefully placed grove of oaks in the hollow to the left and then the slow rise to a frieze of trees, very green, very still, very self-enclosed. “Isn’t it beautiful, Charles—even in the rain?”

  And then they turned together and looked back into the room, suddenly warm, the crimson puff on the bed glowing, the little roses on the Victorian dresser with its jug and washbasin and slop basin, gleaming.

  “When you first came, I looked down from here and saw you. Do you remember, Charles? You rode over from the Olivers’—poor dears, they’re dead now…”

  But Charles was not listening. He had gone back to the ballroom which fascinated him, and besides he was feeling hungry. Sensing this, Violet took him rapidly through the other rooms, Miss Goddard’s at the back and one of the guest rooms. She didn’t take him into Barbie’s room—she hesitated just yet to go in there, to disturb the passionate ghost, to bring back even for a moment, those wild tears—not just yet, she thought, in the rain. It’s too sad.

  “I’m hungry,” Charles announced. “Whatever is Annie doing?”

  “Nothing’s on time, here, darling—or rather it all has a time of its own. Come and see our room. I’ve saved it for last.”

  Their room was on the floor below, just under Violet’s. At the door, Violet turned and hesitated. “I’m scared,” she said, “are you?”

  “Why?”

  “Well,” Violet suddenly felt shy of this husband she had lived with for thirty years, “this is the room we do have to take by storm,” and quickly she flung open the door before these words should have an echo from the past.

  There it stood, the great bed, so high that Violet as a little girl remembered sliding off when she tried to climb up on it. The faded yellow brocade of the canopy and spread had turned now a beautiful dull gold. On the dressing table Maire had put a bunch of syringa and yellow roses in the Venetian glass flecked with gold which Violet’s mother had loved. The room seemed very high and airy and cool. Objects here kept their distance from each other, the dressing table across one corner, the chaise longue lying against the window that faced the formal lawn. There was no crowding possible. Their trunks, the pile of coats on the bed, the open suitcase on a stand, were absorbed in its spaciousness, and now its spaciousness seemed inhabited by the rain. It was a corner room so that the weather could not be shut out—involuntarily Violet shivered, and crossed the room to explore Charles’s dressing room behind it, with the queerest sensation that her father must be there, and would fleck soap with his shaving brush at her. Instead it looked empty. The Victorian armoire gave a loud creak as she opened the door to peer inside.

  For the first time Charles was troubled by the intangible presences here. For this was the heart of the house, the place where its secret life had been lived for generations. He felt its exposure: from within, the freight of memories; from without, the inescapable invading light or dark, sun or rain through the big naked windows. He waited for Violet to come back, with something like anxiety as if she might from moment to moment change, be wholly absorbed by these presences he could not see but felt through her. She had stayed in the dressing room only a second but as she came back Charles was waiting for her at the door and took her almost roughly into his arms, as if he were taking her from a rival.

  Violet, unprepared for this, coming back to him from under the wave of the past, met the change of focus in his eyes, the self-enclosed obsessive look which did not see her at all. Never would she yield to it without a moment of tremor, of fear, of almost withdrawal, for it meant yielding up her private self. As if to hold back this impersonal force in him, she laid a hand on his cheek very gently and felt the shape of the bone there. But to Charles this light, so personal touch came as an electric shock. He broke away and said gruffly, “We really must go down.”

  “Yes, darling,” she said, letting her hand absent-mindedly slip along the bed as they passed. Then she closed the door gently upon all the lovers. It was an immense relief to know that they would come back here now to find themselves, would come back already to their own past.

  “She seems awfully old,” Maire said tactlessly when she and Annie sat down to a cup of tea before doing the dishes.

  “Old indeed?” Annie looked at this baby with withering scorn. “To you maybe, who’s barely out of the cradle—she’s not more than fifty,” Annie sniffed. “Twenty or more years younger than me, you’ll be driving me to my grave, Maire, if you call the likes of her old.”

  “I just meant…” Maire was overwhelmed by Annie’s capacity for speech, being herself a slow thinker with her tongue. She could go no further.

  “And what did you mean?” Annie said crisply, loyalty bristling in her.

  “Well—I thought you said she was beautiful…” Maire said, hanging her head for she well knew she was raising a storm.

  But Annie was apt to do the unexpected. She was too strong a nature to have taken on the rigid mannerisms of what we like to call “a character.” She did not fly out at Maire. She drank her tea and only after quite a time, she spoke softly, “It’s a hard thing for her.”

  “But Mr. Gordon—he’s handsome,” Maire said anxious to make amends.

  Annie sniffed. “Handsome is as handsome does,” she said shortly. Annie would never admit that anyone who married a Dene was quite worthy, and she resented the fact that Charles did not show his age. She washed the dishes in silence, handing them over to Maire mechanically and thinking that it was queer to feel so weak in the knees, and that perhaps she should have a little nap before tea. After all she had hardly slept a wink with all the excitement.

  Maire kept her thoughts to herself and was not perhaps aware of how quickly they changed, how quickly she forgot that first impression, which had been caused no doubt by the shock of a real person’s coming between her and Annie’s legends and her own dreams. Violet was not of course beautiful with the changeless white and gold beauty of a princess in a fairy tale as she had become in Maire’s imagination. But she was still beautiful in more human terms.

  This Maire felt when she brought in the breakfast tray the next morning and met for the first time, straight on, Violet’s clear blue gaze. Had anyone ever not been melted by it?

  “Good morning, Maire,” Violet said, smiling a welcome to the shy girl whose hands always seemed to tremble when she was carrying anything. “What a lovely day after the rain!”

  There was something about this voice too which troubled Maire though she did not know what it was, as if very simple things sounded like poetry. She did not dare raise her eyes again—they rested on the slim nervous ringed hands, and Maire
thought without resentment, “What it is to be a lady and have such smooth hands.”

  There was something about the atmosphere of this room, the bottles of perfume on the dresser, the soft blue velvet wrapper flung down on the chaise longue, which filled Maire with excitement and devotion. So many impressions crowded in on her all at once that she was dismayed to find she hadn’t heard Violet’s question. It came to her after a second of silence. “Did Mr. Gordon have a good breakfast?”

  “Oh yes,” Maire said blushing, “very good.”

  “And he’s gone out, has he?” Violet asked.

  But when Maire had answered that Mr. Gordon had gone over to the farm to see Mr. Pennyfeather, she did not know how to get out of the room, and stood there, her hands at her sides, mortally embarrassed. Only when Violet noticed this and suggested that she might go now, did she run out, as if she had been released from a spell.

  Violet would have liked to lie there for half the morning, not do anything except feel, soak in the peace—the wonderful peace of having arrived with Charles, of having really reached home. It was strange to think that even after thirty years of marriage such tensions could build up around the hours of passionate love and acceptance of each other. The months in England had been such a period of tension when Violet was forced to face the fact that she and Charles were not good friends; at such times they rubbed each other the wrong way and concealed their mutual irritation under a façade of extreme politeness, concern about health.

  “You must have a good long rest after lunch, Violet,” Charles would say, knowing or not knowing (Violet could never make up her mind which) that this meant that she was looking tired, knowing or not knowing that it had a concealed barb in it. And feeling diminished, looking at herself too much, too often in the mirror, she had to find a more flattering reflection in someone’s eyes—and despised herself for it. At such times she envied plain acquaintances whose marriages had lapsed into nothing more than a steady taking-for-granted kind of companionship. No, her marriage had never ceased to be perilous, demanding, disappointing, ecstatic. It ebbed and flowed on its own secret tides and she wondered now sometimes what would happen when the tide ebbed for good. Like a poet who thinks in each dry period that he will never again be visited by the angels, Violet during each of these periods suffered a kind of terror and despair. It was necessary to maintain, to create the physical tension between them—without it, the meaning would go out of their mode of communication which was to be almost deliberately casual, flat. Charles could never express himself in words; and she did not wish to. Their flirtations with people outside this magnetic circle had never been serious and had perhaps been necessary.