A Shower of Summer Days

by May Sarton

  “I don’t like it, Uncle Charles.” She frowned at the house as if she were trying to communicate her frown to its stone face, to evoke some response, so intently did she watch the open windows.

  “Why not?” Charles asked. “There aren’t so many of these houses left you know.” He watched her, still frowning at it. “It’s rather a rarity. Most of them were burned in what the Irish call The Troubles.” He wondered if she had heard, and repeated his question, “Why don’t you like it, Sally?”

  “It’s—” she searched for a word—“awkward,” she said, turning to him with the kind of defiance he supposed she called “mad.” “It’s uncomfortable. It looks like a stranger here.”

  She looked away from the stone face with relief, looked at the repose of the hills, the reconciliation of the trees with the hills behind it. And so she was not watching when Violet, who had caught sight of them from her window on the second floor, leaned out and waved.

  “There’s Violet!”

  Sally, instead of waving, turned to watch Charles wave, feeling again the connection between these two magnetic poles; she was moved now by the smallness of the fair head in the window, leaning out, by its frailty against all that stone, and by the pleasure Charles clearly took in this moment of childish communication.

  “My mother, I suppose, minded Violet being so beautiful,” she said when Violet had disappeared, leaving the window strangely empty and lonely without her.

  “I suppose so.” Charles was not going to yield up his wife’s secrets to this queer little niece.

  “But she married before Aunt Violet did?”

  “Yes, some time before, so actually, I never knew your mother…”

  That was all Charles had to say, Sally felt, so she turned down the hill again, this time towards the left to come out on the drive and spare her knee the uneven descent through the humpy grassbed.

  When they reached the drive, Charles said in a low voice as if he was very conscious of Violet somewhere near-by, “I wouldn’t say much about the house to Violet, Sally. She might be hurt. You see, the house means a great deal to her, and after all,” he added, “we have to live here. We have to make the best of it.”

  To this plea Sally made no reply. She was not going to be part of any pact with anyone here. But she made a note of it, as a weapon she might one day wish to use.

  That night, safe at last in the great bed on the second floor, Violet and Charles lay side by side in the dark. “For instance,” Violet was saying, “I thought it a bit much to come down to dinner in those slacks.”

  “At least,” Charles chuckled, “she had tucked in her shirttails.”

  “Her room looks like a pigpen. She has moved the furniture about so it has no shape or reason. She hadn’t even hung up her dresses when I went up there this afternoon. She’s a perfect savage!” They lay on their backs talking up into the dark, enjoying themselves.

  “She’s in love, Violet,” Charles said in his smug all-understanding tone of voice.

  “Rubbish. When I was in love I didn’t throw my clothes all over the place and refuse to dress for dinner.”

  “Well, you weren’t shipped off across an ocean to forget me. I was considered rather eligible, I believe.” Charles was enjoying himself. He loved to get Violet angry, to feel the electricity in her small impatient hand which withdrew itself violently three times as he tried to clasp it.

  “No, Charles, please, I won’t be pacified,” she said in a cross caressing voice. “It’s going to be a horrible summer and all I want is peace.”

  “You don’t want peace at all. You never have wanted peace,” Charles answered in his omniscient tone. “What you want is to be loved and adored, and as this hasn’t yet happened in Sally’s case, you are disgruntled.”

  “Does she love and adore you then?” Violet was on the defensive, for what he had said was unfortunately true. It was true, she did need love, praise, the aura in which she had moved since she was a small child. When she did not feel the aura, which had to be created by other people, she was miserable, diminished. She hated herself.

  “Well”—Violet was unable to see his wicked smile in the dark—“I’m a man. She’s a susceptible young girl—”

  “Charles!” Violet sat straight up and tried to see his face. Then as she heard him chuckle, she beat his hard chest with her two fists, “You monster!” They were enjoying themselves enormously.

  “She doesn’t like either of us, and she hates the house, and that, if you want it, is the truth,” Charles said finally for he was getting sleepy. He had been out with Cammaert all afternoon.

  “Oh.” Violet lay down again and thought this over. When she asked him how he knew Sally hated the house, she heard a gentle grunt and realized that he was fast asleep.

  She lay wide awake in the dark and looked up at the ceiling as if she could somehow feel her way through into the room above. How often she had lain awake like this worrying over her sister, Barbie, blaming herself for arousing a jealousy she could do nothing to assuage. Was Sally asleep she wondered? Lonely? Perhaps weeping those fierce tears one weeps at twenty and never again, because never again is love so pure, so impossible? Women, she thought, are helpless, having to accept the decisions of other people, so rarely able to act directly and for themselves. More than sons ever do, they take care of and arrange their lives round the lives of parents, and then around the lives of husbands and children. In Sally there was still the implacable wish to become herself all by herself. So she would suffer, perhaps a great deal, before she learned to accept life as it is. But why must we accept it, Violet asked the dark? Is it that in accepting it we finally accept ourselves? But I, she thought, have never accepted myself—perhaps because I have never been loved for myself as an ugly woman may be. I have only been loved for something over which I have no control and did not make. The proof is, she thought bitterly, that now this beauty is going, I am no longer loved in the same way. Even Charles feels the difference. He loves me because of his memory of what I was. But he does not see me as I am now, and he will never guess how terribly afraid I am that he someday will. We have never been friends, she thought, curling herself now against the unconscious warmth beside her, we have only been lovers. So it seemed that their whole life together had been a game played over an abyss—and only she saw the abyss, or was beginning to see it. Charles was still intent upon the game. The impact of the presence of a young girl had made this terribly clear to her, all of it. And Violet was suddenly afraid of what the summer would show.

  In the next few days, Sally, enclosed in her cocoon of determined indifference, did not find life easy. She was never quite comfortable. Every morning she shut herself up after breakfast and got every station in Europe which could provide jazz. But this was a painful kind of pleasure because she felt without perhaps quite admitting it, that the house, the room rejected the radio. She was doing something by force which could only be fun if it belonged. Jazz was the climate of her relationship with Ian, who for some reason loved to talk about very serious things like Strindberg against a loud background of jazz in some small very crowded Harlem night club. There was no way to transplant this climate, and trying only made her feel farther away and desperate. She was always outside everything now, never inside anything, except just before she went to sleep when she re-enacted every meeting with Ian and often dreamed sensuous dreams which made her wake up feeling slightly ashamed and very tired.

  She was obscurely aware that any regular rhythm of life creates a spell and ends by taming one. But everything about this house and her aunt and uncle was built on rhythm and ritual, even something as apparently casual as her walk up the hill on the first morning. Things like tea in the afternoon, dressing for dinner, the moment on the terrace before lunch, Aunt Violet arranging the great massive bouquets of flowers in the library, were all part of the spell Sally must keep breaking or be caught. So whenever she could she interrupted or broke arranged plans. She went out for a walk and did not come back for
tea, or missed the cocktail hour altogether and came down to dinner in slacks.

  She had quite deliberately avoided establishing anything like a relationship with Annie to whom Violet had of course taken her to make a solemn presentation. Sally reacted to this rather like a small hedgehog who curls up into a tight ball and presents only prickles towards an outstretched hand. She said something about being glad to meet Annie, and then stood, eyes cast down, only waiting to be allowed to escape. She had felt at once that if she did not want to be drawn into the life here, Annie was her most formidable antagonist. Just the way Annie had taken her for granted, smiled at her not as at a stranger but as an old friend, turning to Violet to say with astonished pleasure, “She’s the image of her Grannie, Miss Violet—why didn’t you tell me?”

  Violet laughed, “Dear Annie, to me Grannie always seemed so very old.” They had looked at Sally as if she were an object and Violet added, “I see what you mean, the eyes—yes…”

  “The dear stubborn look of her,” said Annie as if Sally’s deliberate ill manners were only an added proof of virtue. “When you’re settled and have time, I shall have to be hearing all about your mother,” Annie said as they made to go. But from then on Sally avoided the kitchen, though she was never unaware of the magnet below, the magnet of Annie and all she could tell Sally about her mother, the warmth and simplicity of Annie which seemed so restful after Violet’s subtleties—yet she would not go. She must resist, even when Maire in the mornings dropped hints that Annie would like to see her, that Annie was hurt.

  “I can’t do it, Maire,” Sally had said shortly. “I can’t be caught.”

  With Maire alone she had a relationship. Perhaps they recognized in each other a capacity for obsession, perhaps in this house where they alone were young they made an unconscious pact. Maire had not answered this last. The best thing about Maire was that she never talked. What Annie heard about Sally she heard from Violet. When Violet grew impatient and complained of Sally’s unco-operating attitude, Annie just poured her another cup of tea and nodded her head,

  “Bide your time,” she said. “She’ll come round. No Dene could live in this house a month and not get caught—whatever she may say, whatever she may do,” Annie said. “Besides, she’ll begin to love you, Miss Violet, she’ll not be able to resist you.”

  It was quite true that in spite of all the walls she threw up, Sally was immensely curious about the relationship between her aunt and uncle. When she came into a room where they were sitting, Charles with a book perhaps, Violet doing her interminable petit point, she had the feeling of interrupting a conversation, though they had been sitting in complete silence. They looked up at her then as if they had been startled out of a moment of physical intimacy, were even a little embarrassed, and Charles spoke rather loudly, with emphasis, as if he had been talking before in a secret voice which he feared might have been overheard.

  Sally found that she wanted to know where they were and what they were doing and if she didn’t know she felt lost. It amused her to have the power to interrupt the rituals. She went down deliberately one morning for this purpose, and found her aunt as she knew she would find her, before a jumble of roses and lupin and foxglove lying loosely on newspapers spread over the big table in the library. She stood for a moment and watched her aunt look from the flowers to the Chinese Lowestoft bowl and back again in absent-minded concentration. Then Sally sat down on the arm of one of the worn brown velvet armchairs, swinging her sore knee for practise.

  “It’s going to rain again,” Aunt Violet announced to no one in particular or perhaps to the foxglove she held in her hand, measuring it against space as if she were a painter. “A little shorter, I think,” she murmured. This business of arranging the flowers was a meditation. She hated to be interrupted in the middle, or to be watched. There was always the moment when the whole thing refused to make a whole, when for ten minutes or more she took out, cut down, shifted one flower or another—and in fact was never satisfied. She shook the dew out of a fat pink moss rose and looked thoughtfully at its face, then smelled it—or rather, Sally thought watching her, drank it.

  At this moment clouds must have swept over the sun for the room was suddenly dark, so dark that it was hard to see. Sally had never been in a house where the outside weather was so important, and as the outside weather never remained the same for more than a few hours, this too added to her feeling of suspense, of unreality. Now heavy straight rain poured down.

  “Oh dear, the roses!” Violet said with an air of such desolation that Sally felt forced to ask, “What about the roses? They’re all right, it seems to me.”

  “Not these, but the bed in the walled garden. They will all fall in the rain.”

  Sally laughed, “Sometimes, Aunt Violet, you sound like a ham actor.”

  “Do I? Whatever do you mean?” Violet took out the Canterbury bell she had just carefully placed, and put it back again, just a little more towards the center.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Sally swung her leg. It wasn’t worth explaining something rude to someone who was wholly absorbed in something else.

  But Violet was nettled, was being deliberately obtuse, and now had her revenge, “Have you heard from Ian?” she asked.

  “No.” Sally blushed to the roots of her hair with misery. For now it had been nearly a week and she had not heard. “I expect he’s got a summer theatre job and is much too busy learning lines. I’m not worried,” she said giving herself away by the very emphasis with which she said it.

  “Perhaps there’ll be a letter this morning,” Violet said, ashamed of herself for yielding to such a petty impulse to hurt. “Yes, surely there’ll be a letter, you’ll see.” She stood back to get the effect of the flowers, then swiftly took out two foxgloves. At this moment the whole bunch flopped over sideways. She was wildly irritated with Sally, impervious, self-absorbed, waiting for a letter and meanwhile discomposing, so it seemed, the whole world around her.

  “Damn,” said Violet.

  “Are you saying that to me or the flowers?” Sally asked mischievously.

  “Both. I can’t do this and talk,” Violet was crosser than seemed rational but she couldn’t help it.

  “Then give up the flowers and talk to me.” Sally fell down comfortably into the chair, her legs swung over the arm. She felt that she was dominating the moment, that it was she for once and not the implacable ritual which had won.

  “But I can’t leave the room in this mess!” Violet stooped to pick up the newspapers and was astonished to see a quick brown hand ahead of her. Sally was actually helping. “Oh, that’s a dear child,” she said and stood up with relief. Stooping made her feel a bit dizzy.

  “Now,” Sally commanded when she had righted the flowers, stuck the two foxgloves back carelessly, and rolled the newspapers up, “let me make you a very mild gin and lime, Aunt Violet, and sit down and talk to me.” This sense of power was intoxicating. “Why can’t you leave a room in a mess for half an hour?” Sally asked, handing her aunt a glass.

  Violet was standing by the fireplace, amused, pleased in spite of herself at so much attention from the implacable Sally. “I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully, “I suppose it makes me feel uncomfortable. I couldn’t live in a room like yours,” she parried.

  “I don’t live there,” Sally said, frowning.

  “Where do you live then?” Violet watched the darkening face and thought Sally looked like a fury at times, a self-contained little fury who might begin murdering or destroying things at any moment. The rain stopped as suddenly as it began, and the silence made Sally’s words sound louder than she had intended.

  “I don’t know.” The question opened up a great emptiness around and within her. For did she live at home where her family disapproved of Ian so constantly and evidently? At college which was only another prison? With Ian in their stolen meetings in night clubs, hotel lobbies, parks? “Nowhere, I guess,” she said after a moment. “It must be nice to be married.” She rais
ed her eyes to Aunt Violet’s and received the blue ray which had opened so many hearts, the transparent deep look which was no doubt some matter of the precise color of the iris and not as it always seemed—as it seemed to Sally—the removal of a wall, the opening up of a private intimacy, given to her alone.

  She was moved. She walked over to one of the long windows and looked out. Because she was moved, the curve upwards of the meadows, the grove of oaks seemed incredibly green and brilliant as if they had just been created before her eyes, dripping with rain, and now illuminated by the peculiarly radiant sunlight. All this took a few seconds, as it took Violet a second to answer,

  “That depends.”

  “You and Uncle Charles…” Sally’s back was still turned. She did not know how to say what she wanted to say. “Well—you seem to have some sort of private magic. It’s being in love, I suppose,” she said ironically. “You’re still in love, aren’t you?” And now once more, turning to face her aunt, she attacked, she dominated. She was afraid of the moment which had just passed. In it she had forgotten Ian altogether. He might never have existed as she felt herself drawn down into the depth of Violet’s glance. This frightened her. She felt that she must hang on to Ian every second, every hour, or he might disappear.

  “Are we?” The archness of Violet’s tone suggested evasion. “I don’t know. When you’ve been married nearly thirty years, you no longer ask yourself that question.”

  “What do you ask yourself?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, silly things—”

  “Like what?”

  But Violet at the moment could not think what she had meant to say. “I really must finish the flowers, now I have finished my drink. You might go and take a look—I thought I heard the gate click just now. It might be the post…”

  And so, Sally thought, I am being dismissed. Grown-up people never would tell you the things you needed most to know. Go to your Ian, her Aunt Violet was saying, and leave me alone with my flowers, with this house which you desecrate with your untidiness, with your interruptions, with your very presence perhaps. Sally stood on the terrace watching the postman bicycle very slowly down the drive. She was upset. So far she had maintained her equilibrium where Ian was concerned by leaning towards him and against all the wishes of those close to her. Now suddenly she was being pushed towards him, she felt almost as if she had fallen down again, flat on her face, at the bottom of the stairs. The first had been a real fall, and she had hurt her knee. What have I hurt now, she wondered?