A Summer in the Country

by Marcia Willett

  CHAPTER 18

  “We’ve got a friend coming for drinks,” Jemima told Magnificat casually. “You’ll like him. This is not a subject for negotiation, so please remember to stay put in that chair and then he’ll have to sit beside me on the sofa. And don’t climb on him and get hairs all over his clothes until we know whether he likes cats. OK?”

  MagnifiCat stared at her contemptuously with half-closed eyes, yawned and gave his flank a quick lick, unimpressed with her strictures.

  “Of course,” sighed Jemima gloomily, “he’ll simply go straight out on to the balcony. Everyone does. The view gets them every time. Pity I can’t get the sofa on the balcony. I should have offered to cook for us instead of agreeing to go out to supper. The problem was, it looked a bit keen. Oh, well! He’ll have to bring me home again afterwards, won’t he?”

  MagnifiCat stood up, arching and stretching, and setded himself again with his back turned pointedly towards her. He was not fond of the male of the species and had his own inimitable ways of making his presence felt He’d had plenty of experience and had honed his performance to near perfection. He was a first-class judge of character. First there was the nervous, awkward specimen, who, anxious to ingratiate and please, put itself out to be friendly. MagnifiCat would humiliate this type with a haughty look, brisding under a deferential pat, leaping from the determined show of affection. There was the confident specimen—the most difficult of all, this type— who was unfazed by hostility and could remain cool even if hissed at, although a quick well-aimed stab with a claw could usually wipe the self-satisfied smile off its face. Then there was the type who feared cats but was too afraid of losing Brownie points to admit it This type preferred to keep its distance and Magnificat took enormous pleasure in rubbing affectionately round its trousered legs, jumping on to its lap, and generally making a nuisance of himself whilst enjoying the grim, rictus smile on his victim’s face. Finally there was the true cat-hating specimen. Nothing could be done here but to exchange that fierce, cold, inimical stare which made it quite clear to both protagonists exactly how the land lay between them. Naturally, it took Jemima—poor, simple human that she was—much longer to sum up these contenders but if only she’d followed his example her life would have been much simpler. MagnifiCat, resigned to her thick-headedness, settled himself to sleep.

  Jemima prowled to and forth: sitting down, standing up again, checking the drinks tray. It was important that the room looked casually charming; not too perfect, as if she’d been cleaning and polishing for his benefit; nor too untidy lest he should think she was a slut. Annabel, after all, was a perfectionist and, though he had said he was tired of it, yet it might be foolish to present him with too great a contrast.

  She thought: I wonder what she looks like?

  She stared at herself in the big ash-framed looking-glass which hung over the bookcase, pushing her hands up into the thick, fair hair, wondering if she should have tied it back. She wore a black, raw silk kurta-style tunic and loose trousers which flattered her rounded and not-too-tall figure and emphasised her golden tan. She glanced at her watch just as the bell was rung and she jumped nervously, standing for a moment, hands clenched into fists, before hurrying to answer the door.

  “Hi.” He looked very poised standing there, very cool, and she heard a faint stammer in her voice as she invited him in. He followed her along the passage to the sitting room but did not go immediately to the window. Instead he looked about with that same calm, unhurried glance.

  ’This is seriously nice,” he said. “What a place!”

  “It’s good, isn’t it?” She tried to sound almost indifferent. “I’m very lucky to have got it.”

  “I should think you are. How clever of you not to have covered up all this lovely wood with carpet. Goodness! That’s some view! I bet you had to pay extra for that.”

  “I had a little legacy from my papa.” She followed him out on to the balcony. “It’s rather special, isn’t it?”

  “Rather.” He smiled down at her and she looked away, trying to control her tendency to grin madly back at him. “It must be wonderful at night with all the boats lit up.”

  “Would you like a drink?” She felt so jumpy, so out of control, that she needed to be occupied.

  “Why not? A drop of whisky would go down well.” He was still leaning on the balcony, looking over the harbour. “It was a very good idea of yours that I should come across on the ferry so that I don’t have to worry about driving. It’s odd how places look so different from the water, isn’t it? What’s that ruined castle I saw?”

  “That’s Fort Charles,” she told him. “It was used by the Royalists in the Civil War. I think it was even besieged.”

  “I’d like to have a good look at it,” he said. “I suppose that’s possible?”

  “Oh yes. You could catch the South Sands Ferry. It takes you past Fort Charles and the battery and then you’re met by the sea tractor so you can get on to the beach. There’s a wonderful lifeboat station there.”

  “Sounds fun. I might do that.”

  “I don’t know if you’re interested in National Trust properties but there’s Overbecks Museum, as well, just above South Sands.”

  “That would have suited Annabel,” he said. “Not really my scene but I might have a look at it. I suppose you’ve seen all these sights so many times that it’s not worth asking you to join me on this Magical Mystery Tour?”

  “Not that many times.” She tried not to sound too keen. “Like you say, places look quite different from the water. It would be fun. I ought to get on the river more often.”

  “You should have a boat.” He looked at her in an oddly measuring way. “Are you a sailor?”

  “Not much of one,” she admitted, wondering if Annabel was. “But only because I haven’t had much opportunity, not because I don’t like it. Are you?”

  “I haven’t had the opportunity either,” he told her. “Never had much to do with the sea except childhood holidays. I think I might be tempted to try it if I lived here, though.”

  “Well,” she was suddenly shy, afraid of reading too much into his words, “let’s have a drink, shall we, and you must meet MagnifiCat.”

  “MagnifiCat?” He sounded puzzled, leaving the balcony reluctantly, but at the sight of the large, furry pile curled in the basket-chair he burst out laughing. “Oh, what a poser.”

  The hair on Magnificat’s neck lifted a little and he sighed: Type B: confident, cool, tricky. He ignored the smoothing, stroking, male hand, pretending to sleep on.

  “He’s feeling antisocial,” said Jemima apologetically. “Never mind. Here’s your drink.”

  “Thanks.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to a rather different holiday than I imagined. You know, I think I might enjoy it after all.”

  “Yes,” said Jemima, after a confused moment. “Good. I’ll drink to that.”

  MagnifiCat burrowed deeper into the cushion, eyes still firmly closed.

  He thought: Here we go again.

  As RACHMANINOV’S music brought Brief Encounter to an end Louise sat in silence, moved as usual by the film, and wondering what Frummie was thinking. She’d been unusually silent throughout—generally the soundtracks were punctuated by her pithy observations—and even now, as she rewound the video, she didn’t speak. Surreptitiously blowing her nose, Louise supposed that it was possible that the film had unlocked Frummie’s painful memories or transported her back to an unhappy period of her life. After all, in the fifties Frummie must have been a young woman, with a small child, so there were certain poignant similarities. Except, of course, that Frummie had succumbed to her own particular passion and fled with her lover, leaving her child and her husband. Perhaps she was struggling with remorse, wishing she’d resisted…

  Louise thought: I’m being silly and sentimental. I always was a sucker for a good old weepie. Still, I hope she’s not feeling too sad.

  Frummie stirred, lifted the remote control and plunged the television scr
een into blackness.

  “It’s extraordinary,” she said, “but each time I watch that film I find myself utterly unable to connect with it. I simply cannot recall anyone who behaved like that. All those stiff upper lips, fearfully wearing! The only thing that I remember are those wonderful fires in railway station waiting rooms. Now that’s certainly true to life.”

  “Oh, Frummie.” Louise began to chuckle. “And I was sitting here trying not to intrude on your memories. How prosaic you are. I think it’s a lovely film. I always want to cry buckets.”

  “Have you ever thought,” asked Frummie, “how much more romantic and splendid our own lives would be if we lived diem to music?”

  Louise looked at her, puzzled. “How do you mean?”

  “Well, think about it. When we’re watching films or plays how much of our emotional response is actually created by the music? How affected would we have been by those two somewhat anally retentive people if it hadn’t been for dear old Rachmaninov thundering away in the background?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it,” said Louise uncertainly. “But what about Shakespeare at the theatre? Or any stage play, for that matter? We don’t get background music then but we’re still moved.”

  “Ah, but in the theatre you get the atmosphere, that exciting current that flows between the actors and the audience. It’s essential for the rapport to be developed for any stage production to be really successful. The emotion has to be live and real and raw or it doesn’t work. It flops. But the cinema and television need aids to recreate that magic, so they use music. Even the old black-and-white silent films knew that they needed the pianist sitting in the pit. If you think about it, it’s the music that really rouses the emotions, whether it’s fear, compassion, grief.”

  “I wonder if that’s true.” Louise thought about some of her favourite films: Death in Venice without Mahler; The Deer Hunter without Samuel Barber. “Actually, I think you might have a point.”

  Frummie snorted. “Of course I have a point. And what I’m saying is, I think we’d all feel much nobler if we had an orchestra around when we’re living those really dramatic moments of our own lives. I’m sure it would be much less of a dreary struggle if Brahms or Mozart was accompanying our own private dramas. We watch all these plays and films and are moved by suffering and fear or great romantic passion, yet our own lives we imagine to be rather pathetic and dreary. I’ve always had a fancy to die to some great dramatic musical theme but I can’t quite decide what it should be.”

  “Wagner?” Louise began to enter into the spirit of the thing. “Beethoven’s Ninth?”

  Frummie frowned thoughtfully. “The thing is, that it needs to be long enough to see you through. One might not be able to keep nipping out of bed to keep restarting the tape.”

  “You need one of those remote controls for your radio,” Louise told her. “You just point it at it and it would keep playing.”

  Frummie looked at her, impressed. “Do they make them for radios, now?”

  “They do indeed. I’ll get you one.”

  “Of course one might not be even strong enough to do that” Frummie looked faintly irritated by these complications. “How difficult it all is.”

  “It would be frustrating if the music stopped at the wrong moment.” Louise was amused at the idea. “I suppose it would have to be something powerful and dramatic.”

  “On the other hand I might prefer something sexy and terribly evocative,” said Frummie. “Something that really invokes a memory. Nina Simone, perhaps. Someone with a gravelly voice that plucks the heartstrings right out of your chest, so that you’re way back there in that dim, shadowy cellar and you can see the little, round tables with their half-empty glasses, and ashtrays spilling over, and a velvet evening bag dumped down amongst the wet sticky rings. You can smell the grey smoke curling in the thick atmosphere, which you could cut with a knife, and you can hear the rich beat of the bass and the hush-hush of the drum. There’s a black singer in a low-cut dress who’s sitting at a piano. One of those old prim French uprights. Her eyes are closed and her head’s thrown back so that you can see the long, rippling black column of her throat. She’s singing about love and lust and betrayal and she’s singing your story because you know that the bastard sitting opposite is going to tell you, later on, that he’s leaving you for the bitch you saw him with that morning. But you’ll go back to his room with him, anyway, and cling to him and give him what he wants because you love him more than anything else in the world and you can’t see straight for lust. That’s what she’s singing about and everyone knows it.”

  There was a silence. Presently, Louise looked at her.

  “It sounds terribly poignant and real,” she said. “And I have to admit that it’s not much like Trevor Howard and Celia Johnson.”

  Frummie gave a crack of derisive laughter. “Not much. But that’s the way it was for me.”

  “I thought you were dreary, respectable and middle class,” suggested Louise, trying to disguise her own emotion with a lighter tone.

  “I was.” Frummie smiled her down-turned, derisive smile. “Oh, I was, darling. That’s why it was so bloody painful.”

  “Not Mozart then.” Louise wished that she had the courage to give the older woman a hug. “So be it. Nina Simone it is. And I’ll come and sit with you so that the music doesn’t stop.”

  “I’ll hold you to that.” Frummie was getting to her feet with the usual grimace of pain. “It might take a while, though. I don’t give up easily. I hope you’ll have the time to spare.”

  “You’ve given me the time when I needed it,” said Louise lightly. “You say the word and I’ll be there when it’s your turn.”

  “Supper,” said Frummie. “Before we get maudlin. And a drink. But we’ve got a deal.”

  “We have indeed. I’ll be there. With Nina Simone.”

  “And a botde,” added Frummie.

  “And a botde,” agreed Louise.

  CHAPTER 19

  Each morning—and often in the long, dark watches of the night—Brigid woke to the grip of fear. It twisted her gut and stampeded her heart into a choking racing beat. Twelve thousand pounds. No word had come from the Bank although she had managed, at last, to speak to Jenny.

  “I’ve been trying to raise the money myself,” she’d said, “but I don’t have any security. We put everything into the business, you see. I just didn’t imagine anything like this would happen to me. I thought of all sorts of other disasters but not this one. Bryn was so keen on it. It was his baby. It’s bad enough, him running off with another woman, but to cheat and steal…” She’d paused, as if words were beyond her.

  “And what can I do?” Brigid asked herself desperately on this particular morning, after a disturbed and unrefreshing night, as she flung back the quilt. “I want to scream at her. To say, ‘I don’t give a shit about Bryn. How the hell am I going to tell Humphrey?’ But she’s lost so much, it would be too cruel.”

  She thrust her long, narrow feet into moccasins, dragged on her dressing gown and went downstairs. Blot wagged a sleepy greeting from his basket by the Aga and she bent to pull his silky ears.

  “I know it’s early,” she told him, “but I can’t sleep.”

  Blot watched her for a moment and then setded himself again. Brigid stood at the window watching the sun rising away over Combestone Tor, remembering the evening she’d sat there. How quickly the peace and joy had faded in the face of her fear. For a brief moment she’d glimpsed something which she’d believed to be enduring, some strength that would sustain her through any crisis. Yet at the first threat to her wellbeing it had vanished, leaving her alone. Or was it simply that she lacked the courage to hold on to it; to continue to believe in it, despite the storms that buffeted her security?

  “It’s Humphrey,” she said aloud, as if she were justifying her lack of faith to someone. “It’s having to tell Humphrey that I went behind his back and agreed to something which I know he’d disapprove of because he
doesn’t like Jenny. It seemed so mean to penalise her because Humphrey finds her irritating. She’s been such a good friend and I felt I owed her my loyalty. And now Humphrey will say, ‘I told you so.’” She laughed bitterly. “God, if that were the only thing he’d say! He’s going to be so angry. And hurt, a$ if I care more about her than I do about him, which is just not true. But it might look like that. I risked his future for her. We’ll have to remortgage or pay it out of his gratuity which means, either way, that he won’t be able to retire.”

  She turned away from the window as the kettle began to boil. It was possible that Humphrey might not want to retire full time—although as a commander of fifty-three, with no likelihood of further promotion, he would certainly be leaving the Navy after this posting—but the point was that now he wouldn’t have any choices. He’d often discussed what he might do when he came out—he had several local charity projects in mind—but his idea had been to diversify. He was looking forward to being out of uniform and free of rules and regs. Brigid made coffee, her heart weighted with misery. She could not decide whether she should warn him or wait for the letter from the Bank. For some reasons—cowardly ones—it would be easier telling him whilst he was so far away, yet it seemed so unfair to give him this shock by telephone or letter. If she could only find some way through without his knowing anything at all about it… and on top of all this muddle and anxiety she had Humphrey’s father arriving in four weeks’ time.

  “His name’s Alexander,” Humphrey had said rather awkwardly. He was still feeling guilty that Brigid should be left to deal with this alone. “I don’t know if I’ve ever told you before.”

  “Probably. I don’t remember. You always refer to him as ‘Father.’” She’d been seized by a moment of panic. “He won’t expect me to call him ‘Father,’ will he?”

  “I doubt it very much.” Humphrey had sounded faintly amused by the idea. “He’s not at all conventional.”

  She’d looked at him curiously. “That sounds oddly ominous. What do you mean?”