Last Guests of the Season

by Sue Gee

  Above them, Jack was scowling. ‘Why can’t it just be us?’

  ‘Jack …’

  ‘That’s fair enough,’ said Oliver, looking up at them all. ‘Tom, you come down and I’ll take you back to the other side. It’s cooler over there.’

  No! No, no, no. Why did he have to say that, surely he … She flicked the humbug beetle hard, and watched it fly through the air, landing invisibly.

  ‘You realise, Oliver,’ Claire was saying, ‘that he swam all the way out here with us? Isn’t that good?’

  ‘Very good. Do you want to swim back again, Tom?’

  Tom sat on the burning rock and looked out across the water. Could he do it again? From right up here the grey sandy bank on the other side seemed such a long way away. The river sparkled, the river was dazzling him; he screwed up his eyes and saw lights behind them. Well, that often happened when you’d been looking at brightness, like a light bulb or something. It was only water, it was only sun on water.

  ‘Tom?’

  It wasn’t just swimming all that way back, it was climbing down over the rocks again, that was part of the problem. He didn’t like the way they were underneath the surface, the slippery brown stuff, and the way they went so far down, like teeth. They had long deep roots at the bottom and they stuck up like teeth. Ugh. This was a sort of a lid feeling: he waited. Nothing happened, it didn’t lift up at all, but he knew he couldn’t climb down there again. He was stuck.

  ‘Tom!’

  Robert was shaking his shoulder, gently, but he didn’t like it. He opened his eyes and all that light and water danced up and down again, flicker flicker flicker.

  ‘What on earth is the matter with you now?’

  That was Oliver, all the way down there in the dinghy, which once had up-ended and tipped them all out.

  ‘Where’s Frances?’ he whispered, and cleared his throat. ‘Where’s Frances?’

  ‘I don’t know where she is.’ All the way down there in the dinghy Oliver was reaching impatiently up to him, holding out his hand as it rocked. ‘She’ll be here soon, I expect, don’t fuss. Now are you coming across or aren’t you? Everyone’s waiting – the day doesn’t revolve just round you, you know.’

  Revolve meant going round. And round and round and round all spinning away into nothing. He stood up, and the sun went dark.

  ‘Tom …’

  He was going to fall he was going to fall –

  Somebody caught him.

  ‘He’s white as a sheet …’

  ‘Not enough breakfast –’

  ‘Too much sun –’

  ‘Too much swimming – it was too far …’

  ‘Come on, Tom, put your head between your knees, that’s it, down you go, good boy, you’re okay …’

  No lid no lid, just swimming and spinning and now he was down here he was coming back again quite quickly, going all warm, feeling better with blood in his head. He looked up, carefully, slowly.

  ‘That’s more like it …’

  ‘Colour coming back now …’

  Where had it gone?

  ‘All right?’

  ‘Better now?’

  He nodded. ‘I want a drink.’

  ‘I’m sure you do. The Thermos is over the other side, lots of ice … come on …’

  They led him down over the rocks, carefully, carefully, into the dinghy, which rocked.

  ‘Come on, Jess, out you get.’

  She scrambled out quickly, banging her knee. ‘Ouch.’ Nobody took any notice.

  Oliver and Claire ferried him back to the shore, and Claire unscrewed the flask quickly, pouring a stream of cold water into the cup. Out came the ice cubes, clink clink clink. That was a – no. The lid stayed shut and he drank and drank.

  ‘Sure you’re all right now?’ Oliver stood over him. Tom looked up, seeing his shape enormous against the sun. Almost as big as down in the cellar. He looked away again.

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  ‘Good. Well, then …’ He turned to Claire. ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘I’ll stay here with Tom,’ she said, kneeling up in the sand, still holding the flask. ‘Then I think we’d better go up to the house, it’s nearly lunchtime anyway. But if you want to stay here –’

  Oliver squatted down to Tom’s level, the sun behind him. ‘I’ll stay with you, shall I?’

  Because his back was against the sun, he couldn’t really see him properly, he was sort of in darkness, in shadow, and though he was speaking kindly, now, he still didn’t like him being so close. He looked down into the plastic cup, where the ice cubes sat at the bottom, three of them, melting a bit, getting smaller. Soon they would change into water and disappear and he would swallow the lot.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, tilting the cup from side to side, watching the cubes slide about.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like me to?’

  He ought to like him to. He ought to. He tilted the cup from side to side and the ice cubes went sliding across, going wherever he wanted.

  ‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘No, thanks.’

  Oliver got to his feet. ‘All right,’ he said, from all the way up there, so enormous and so far away. ‘I’ll go and see about the others.’ He walked over the sand to the dinghy and got into it, pushing himself off with a paddle, rowing fast.

  There was a sort of a silence.

  ‘Tom? Want another drink?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I haven’t finished this one yet.’ He picked up an ice cube and crunched it between his teeth. He found he was suddenly wanting to cry, suddenly thinking all sorts of sad things, but he wouldn’t cry now, he’d go back to the house and find Frances and tell her everything and if she wouldn’t listen he’d kill her too.

  ‘Please,’ said Jessica, on the other side of the river. ‘I don’t want to go back yet.’

  ‘Aren’t you hungry?’ Robert asked, offering a hand as they moved down over the rocks to where Oliver was waiting in the dinghy.

  ‘No,’ she said, ignoring the hand.

  ‘But you’ve just been on the river with Oliver,’ said Jack. ‘What d’you want to go again for?’

  She ignored that, too, reaching the lowest rock, standing there looking down at him as he waited for them, willing him to understand, to explain to the others, to make it easy. But he didn’t say anything helpful at all, he was looking cross and upset, and all because of Tom again. Honestly. Just because he’d been out in the sun. They’d all been out in the sun, why should Tom have to go all funny, there must be something wrong with him.

  ‘Please,’ she said to Oliver, trying to make it sound all nice between them again, as it had this morning, carrying the dinghy together through the field. ‘Please can we go?’

  He did smile. ‘Surely you’ve had enough.’

  ‘No, no honestly I haven’t. It’s almost the end of the holiday, and it’s so nice out on the water. Please.’

  He was going to say yes, he was going to.

  ‘Oh, all right then, if it’ll make you happy.’

  He’d said it!

  ‘So long as it’s okay with you and Claire,’ he went on to Robert, holding Jack’s hand, as he came down beside her.

  Of course it was okay with them, why on earth shouldn’t it be? You didn’t have to ask, just to go for a row.

  ‘Fine,’ said Robert, helping Jack in. ‘I’d better just check with Claire.’

  She raised her eyes to the heavens, she couldn’t help it. Luckily nobody saw except Jack, and she put out her tongue at him, and drew it in quickly.

  ‘Why’re you sticking your tongue out?’ he asked, in his high deliberate way.

  But she refused to answer, to be drawn into childish games, and climbed carefully into the dinghy, which really did rock now, with all of them in, and they rowed across again, and the others got out and Robert went over to Tom, who looked perfectly okay now, Oliver was right, he did make a fuss, and then they had to go through the whole rigmarole all over again with Claire, and was she sure she
wanted to, and what about lunch, and at last they left them, and rowed away.

  She leaned back on the warm blue rim and trailed her hands in the water, watched by the others, who must be jealous as they followed the steady rise and fall of the paddles, the gentle plash, until they had rounded the bend past the island of fallen branches, and were out of their sight at last.

  Oliver rowed slowly, thoughtfully, leaving the loosely piled stooks in the hayfield behind, approaching the meadow on the other side, fringed with tall, still reeds. Jack had been chattering away about wolves at this point, earlier on; now, with Jessica, leaning quietly back, not looking at him, just enjoying the scenery and the rippling water alongside the little boat, Oliver was able to reflect again on that walk. You can, he thought, make any number of decisions when you’re alone. You can say to yourself, I have learned, I have made my discovery, and tomorrow everything will be different. Tomorrow everything will be in that longed-for and elusive state: all right. He had come down the mountainside filled with hope and expectation; within days, even within hours, he had discovered that he could not, quite so easily, be this or be that, and rowing now past the tall reeds on the riverbank, with the flowery meadow beyond, he felt as far away from Frances and Tom as he had ever been.

  ‘Oliver?’

  ‘Yes?’

  She had turned away from the trees; she looked at him and then down at the rippling water.

  ‘Yes?’ he said again.

  You can make all sorts of decisions when you’re alone. You can say to yourself: I shall be this, and I shall be that, and from now on everything will be … Thus Frances, rising at last in an empty house, with the night’s dreams and events and decisions all making war within her.

  When Tom had gone she lay waiting until she could no longer hear his footsteps. She waited until the whole house had gone quiet and she knew they were all outside, that Oliver would have told the others to leave her, she must be tired. She guessed that no one, anyway, cared very much whether or not she joined them, that they were, on the whole, probably rather relieved to have her out of the way. From right on the other side of the house, down in the garden, she heard them all talking and laughing, Jack and Jessica happy again now that their parents were with them; she heard them go out through the big lower gate, taking the cobbled path down to the village, their voices retreating, fading, gone.

  Frances closed her eyes, and in the unaccustomed silence began to relax, drifting off to sleep again, sleeping well; and if she dreamed she did not, when she woke, remember her dream, but lay a little longer in the shuttered room, hearing, from down in the threshing barn, the women still beating the grains from the maize. Then she got up, and went slowly down the stairs.

  To have the whole house to herself … Airy and cool and quiet. She went past the door to the cellar and into the greenery-shaded bathroom with its black and white tiles and worn flooring, and waiting for the bath to fill wandered out again, into the sitting-room.

  Sun poured through the open terrace doors, the bare wooden floorboards were warm. She stood in the middle of the room, letting the warmth soak into her, recalling the cold and darkness of the night, the journey she had made with Tom through the moonlight, taking him back to his bed, and she thought of the miserable moments she’d given him, earlier on, upstairs. From now on she was going to be generous and kind and pleasant company, with Dora banished, torn out by the roots and cast away, those moments upstairs with Tom to be forgotten, obliterated, a veil drawn over them.

  The bath was full. She lay in the greenish cooling water, sank back beneath it and let her hair float out around her; she sat up again, gasping, and wiped the water out of her eyes. An immersion, a cleansing: I shall restore myself to myself, and I shall be – what shall I be?

  She washed her hair, climbed out, dried herself, and went upstairs to dress with the towel wrapped round her.

  The landing was warm, too, and Guida had left the ironing-board up, with the iron up-ended upon it, the frayed flex trailing: automatically she stopped to check that it wasn’t plugged in. It wasn’t, and she had no need to linger, but she lingered, looking at the thick cotton cover on the ironing-board, with its scorch marks here and there and its deep, pleasing air of ordered domesticity. Guida probably did not see it like that; it probably was not like that – ironing, after all, could be as much of a drudge as any domestic task.

  Nonetheless, to stand on this sunlit landing, to look from the ironing-board to the peach tree at the window, with its glossy leaves and ripening fruit, and back again at the smoothness of that thick cotton cover; to run her hand slowly along it; after last night to be here now, peaceful and undisturbed, felt more than pleasingly domestic, it felt still and profound.

  It is Susan in The Waves, Frances thought, recalling long-ago hours in the library in Bristol, and Claire, coming up to tap her on the shoulder and invite her for coffee, to lunch, to a party. Had she really felt so much for Claire, all those years ago? She had, she had, and then it had faded away. Could you call that love?

  She must go and get dressed, she must go down to the river and join the others. But she went on standing there, trying to hold on to this visionary moment: a vision of profound contentment, of love and fulfilment, of being so deeply in harmony with the everyday that it became more than the everyday, was transformed, shining, exalted: love at its deepest, love at its best, creating, re-creating, making whole.

  The moment faded: how could such intensity last?

  She thought, it was Susan, wasn’t it? Such a long time ago: was that, really, how she had been? Frances turned from the window at last, away from the everyday ironing-board, and walked along the corridor, bending to straighten the rucked-up rag runner, faded pink and blue and green, remembering, as she passed the other bedroom doors and reached her own, a more recent encounter with Virginia, in moments which had felt as they more usually felt, restless and distracted: everyone out on the darkening terrace and she inside, in the sitting-room, turning the pages of a Life taken down from the shelves.

  Virginia had not loved Vita, not in that way. Sitting there in the dim light from the parchment lamp, hearing the voices from the terrace, Frances had tried to summon Dora to her side, but Dora had refused to join her. And Dora had been right not to join her, as she had been right when she spoke in that terrible dream: something had happened to Frances, not to her.

  Frances went into the bedroom and dressed in a long cotton skirt, grey T-shirt and a string of yellow beads. She brushed her hair, made the bed, and opened the shutters wide, and then she went out and down the stairs again, into the kitchen for coffee.

  She stood with the door to the steps and the water tank open, fresh air filling the room, and no smell of gas, not even faintly, lingered and hung in the air. She put on the kettle, and sliced the maize bread, and when the half-starved cat appeared, creeping uneasily through the door, she gave it some scraps of potato and milk and stood on the step watching it lap them all up, feeling her hair drying, feeling pretty, as Jessica had done, down in the cellar, when they took down the shepherd’s cloak on its stand. She carried a tray through to the sitting-room, thinking: did I really come down here last night and think of the gas in the kitchen with longing? How could I have done, how could it have been possible?

  Even as she thought it, crossing the wooden floor with her tray, thinking that the room, with its tall windows and loose cotton curtains, was one of the most beautiful rooms she had ever seen anywhere, she knew exactly how it was possible. She thought of the one crucial thing about Virginia, the one thing everyone knew, that she had drowned herself; and she discovered all over again exactly how it might be possible to feel like that, because there was only one person to whom she might ever want to try to describe that moment upstairs, only one person she felt might acknowledge and understand it in quite the same way, and that was Dora.

  Dora knew about things, she knew what was what. It sounded so simple, and it went so deep. She engaged in the world; she needed moments
of stillness. For years she had been, for Frances, the heart of that vision – love at its deepest, love at its best – and she seemed, now, to be waiting for her, sitting over there on the sofa, looking gravely up from her book and then putting it aside: I’m here. Come and talk to me.

  Frances put the tray on the table. She walked slowly across the room and sank down, sitting on the floor at Dora’s feet, and said aloud: ‘But I love you, I love you, you must understand that. There’s no one who looks at the world as you do; I cannot bear to lose you.’ She began to cry, and every resolution, every decision deserted her, flying away like ash in the wind, unimportant, impossible.

  So that instead of greeting the others, when they arrived, with a warm smile and an easy manner, opening her arms to Tom and kissing him, making everything all right, she heard their footsteps and leapt to her feet, flying across the room, weeping and frantic.

  And Robert, coming in from the terrace hot and concerned, saw Tom run towards her and his broad pale face fall in dismay and disappointment, and he suddenly lost his temper and made for her, grabbing her arm and swinging her round to face him, demanding: ‘What the fuck is the matter with you?’

  ‘Stop it,’ said Frances, recoiling, trying to wrench back her arm.

  Behind them, Claire was saying in consternation: ‘Robert – for God’s sake …’

  Robert ignored her. ‘Well?’ he demanded again of Frances. ‘What is it? What’s going on in that head? Are you going to go on sitting about being sensitive for ever? Are we supposed to disappear just so that you can think your thoughts?’

  ‘Stop it!’

  Her voice was rising. Over his shoulder she saw Claire shepherding the children outside again, out to the terrace and down to the garden, her sensible competent manner belied by the way her voice shook as she said to them: ‘Come on, let’s go and let the hens out, poor things, we forgot all about them …’

  ‘Let go of me,’ said Frances to Robert. ‘Let go of me! Leave me alone!’ Her voice rose higher, she heard herself screaming – ‘Leave me alone!’