Summer's Awakening

by Anne Weale

  If he were aware of being the cynosure of some of the restaurant's other patrons, he gave no sign of it. He was scanning the menu with the speed of a connoisseur who will listen to the maître d's suggestions but make his own decisions.

  He had mentioned on the way there that the restaurant had won various awards for the excellence of its Continental and American cuisine, but Summer studied the carte with a view to staying on her programme.

  She would be able to drink one glass of wine—she was allowed three a week, to be drunk on different days—and by omitting bread at lunchtime and ignoring the rolls and breadsticks this evening, she could eat a potato or some rice or a little pasta. At home, Mrs Hardy was punctilious about weighing portions for her. By now she had become a good judge, by eye, of a three-ounce serving of meat, fish or poultry or a six-ounce serving of legumes.

  Also, in addition to their programme, Weight Watchers were issued with modules which were leaflets about the management of situations—such as going out to dinner—which were hazardous for reforming food junkies.

  'How did you get on with Oz, Emily?' asked Mrs Hardy, when they had chosen what to eat.

  It had been quite late by the time she and Summer had returned from their shopping expedition and she had gone straight to her room to change.

  'He's fabulous!' said Emily rapturously. 'You wouldn't believe all the things he can do, Summer. He can sing Gentlemen Prefer Blondes in the funniest, buzzy sort of voice. He can translate anything you type on his keyboard into other languages. If you can speak his language, you can make him do almost anything you want.'

  'The computer I have is not our best-selling microcomputer,' said James. 'It's what's known as a professional work station with a much wider range of possibilities than our less expensive models. Generally speaking, children—even those much younger than Emily—find it easier to work with computers than many adults.'

  'Will you give me another lesson tomorrow?' she asked him.

  'Possibly, but you didn't come to Florida to spend too much time shut indoors with Oz. I think we'll have to make a rule that one hour a day, preferably after sundown, is long enough.'

  Thinking about his reasons for coming to Florida—to relax from the stresses of controlling a billion-dollar company plus constantly travelling and talking to audiences of students—she felt that most men in his position would have brought a girl-friend along to aid the unwinding process.

  Mrs Hardy never gossiped about their employer to her, but Summer had formed the impression that neither of the women with whom his name had been linked had ever been to Baile del Sol.

  Perhaps he confined his discreet amours to New York.

  Just as she was thinking this, a woman's voice said, 'Good evening, James. When did you arrive in Sarasota? I hadn't heard you were here.'

  He rose to his feet and shook hands with the woman standing by his chair.

  'Good evening, Anita. I arrived in the early hours of this morning. You know Mrs Hardy. This is Miss Roberts... Miss Adams.'

  With the width of the table between them, they did not shake hands but smiled and said how do you do. Miss Adams smiled with her lips but her eyes remained cool. They were brown eyes and her eyebrows were dark, suggesting that she was by nature a brunette who had chosen to be a silver-beige blonde.

  'And this is Emily, my niece.'

  Emily rose to shake hands.

  'I had no idea you had a niece... and such a pretty one, too,' said Miss Adams charmingly. 'You're very brown, Emily. You must have been in Florida longer than your uncle. Or do you come from a warm place?'

  'I came from England before Christmas.'

  'I see.' Anita Adams laid red-lacquered fingertips lightly on the child's shoulder and on James's forearm. 'Please sit down again, both of you. I only came over to say hello. I must get back to our party. I hope we'll meet again very soon, Emily. Goodbye for the moment.' This parting remark included the other two women.

  As she returned to a table in another section of the restaurant, James said, 'Miss Adams and her father have an apartment at 888, Boulevard of the Arts—those large blocks you see as you're crossing the causeway from this side of the Bay.'

  Then he changed the subject by saying, 'As you'll see in a little while, Emily, the Asolo Theater is quite unusual. It was opened in 1798.'

  'But I thought there was nothing here then but swamps and mangroves and mosquitoes?'

  'There wasn't. But in the little town of Asolo in Italy, not far from Venice, life was a lot more sophisticated. That's where the theatre was built and where it stayed till in 1930 it was dismantled to make way for a modern movie theatre. Fortunately an antique dealer bought all the parts of the old theatre and stored them for almost twenty years. Soon after the Second World War, the then director of the Ringling Museums heard about them and recommended the State of Florida to buy them. Which they did. Now, in Asolo, they'd like to have the theatre back. As they can't, they're building a replica of it.'

  The play which the Asolo company were presenting that night was a revival of The Second Mrs Tanqueray by the Victorian dramatist, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero. It was beautifully costumed, and the actors' voices carried clearly to the second floor box at the back of the horseshoe-shaped theatre where James and Summer sat behind Mrs Hardy and Emily.

  Above them was another tier of boxes; below them the orchestra stalls divided by a central aisle with a splendid chandelier hanging above it. The seating was not very comfortable and some of the people in the side boxes had to crane to get a good view, but the charm of the little theatre, with its original lamps and painted decorations, compensated for its defects.

  The night James had taken them to the theatre in London, Emily had sat between them. Here, with a curtain drawn across the entrance to the box, and little or no space around them, she was very much aware of his shoulder and arm close to hers.

  There wasn't room for his long thighs behind Mrs Hardy's seat. He had to sit with them splayed, which brought his right knee within an inch or two of Summer's knee. She found this proximity disturbing, reminding her as it did of what had occurred in the swimming pool the night before.

  The following day James said that after lunch he would take Emily shelling and Summer could again have the afternoon free for her own pursuits.

  This suited her because she had finished a needlepoint belt she had been working for her pupil, and wanted to go to Fleece & Floss to buy another canvas.

  The needlework shop was hidden away in an arcade off one of the four streets which converged on St Armand's Circle. It was a small shop, its walls bright with hanks of crewel wool in a wonderful range of colours and its ceiling covered with designs for needlepoint rugs. She spent a long time browsing through a revolving rack of designs, mainly for pillows and many of them with sea shell motifs.

  As she was leaving the shop, a woman stepped out of the clothes shop opposite. Summer recognised her instantly. But for a moment it seemed that Anita Adams had no recollection of seeing her before.

  Then she said, 'Oh, Miss... Roberts. Hello. How are you?'

  Summer smiled at her. 'Good afternoon, Miss Adams.'

  'What have you been buying in Fleece & Floss?' asked the older woman, eyeing Summer's parcel. 'Aren't their designs enchanting? I'm on my way to have coffee at The French Hearth. Will you join me?'

  For some indefinable reason Summer didn't take to Miss Adams. However, having no ready excuse to refuse the invitation, she said, 'Thank you.'

  As they left the arcade, Miss Adams said, 'Are you here on vacation?'

  'No, I'm Emily's tutor.'

  'Why doesn't she go to school?'

  'She used to have quite severe asthma, but she seems to be growing out of it.'

  'How long are you staying at her uncle's house?'

  'I'm not sure.'

  'Are Emily's parents coming over?'

  'Her parents are dead. She's in Mr Gardiner's care now.'

  They crossed the street and turned towards the shops on th
e North West Quadrant of the Circle.

  'Is she his brother's child, or his sister's?'

  'His brother's.' Summer was beginning to be irked by this catechism. She decided it was her turn to ask a question. 'Have you known Mr Gardiner long, Miss Adams?'

  'Since he bought his house from Cordelia Rathbone... Mrs Charles Rathbone. She and my mother were close friends. I expect you've heard of the Rathbones—they're one of our most prominent families. They can trace their ancestry back to before the war—the War of Independence, she added impressively. 'Mrs Rathbone was one of the great beauties of her day. Her first husband was an English aristocrat, Lord Cranmere, and she lived in England for several years. What part of England do you come from?'

  'I'm an American. I was born in Baltimore. Have you always lived in Florida?'

  'Certainly not!' said Miss Adams, as if the suggestion had something offensive about it. 'We have a winter place here, but we live in Connecticut.'

  She then added that her father was president of what Summer knew to be one of the largest corporations in the United States.

  'And what is your work?' Summer asked her.

  'Since my mother died, I've acted as my father's hostess. We do a great deal of entertaining. I have very little leisure except when we're here in Sarasota.'

  By this time they had reached the café she had mentioned. It was reached through a bakery shop where people were buying croissants and long French-style loaves. The premises were pervaded by a delicious smell of pâtisserie which, at one time, would have titillated Summer's taste-buds. Up to a point it still did, but not to the extent that she felt herself tempted to order a sugary confection to eat with her coffee; not even if she had come to the café on her own, and certainly not in the company of Anita Adams who was slender to the point of being emaciated.

  'You must have spent a long time over there to have acquired an English accent,' she remarked, when they were sitting down.

  'Twelve years. But my mother was English so I think I always had an Anglo-American accent.'

  'Were there no other relations who could have taken charge of Emily?' the other woman asked. 'The care of a girl of her age—What is she? Thirteen?—is somewhat of an onerous responsibility for a bachelor with the commitments which James has.'

  'She's almost fourteen and extremely bright. I think he enjoys her company. They've gone off together this afternoon.'

  Summer wished she had not agreed to have coffee. It was increasingly clear that Anita Adams was being sociable only in order to pump her. Summer was beginning to suspect that Miss Adams, still unmarried in her late twenties, had ambitions to put a period to James Gardiner's bachelorhood.

  'James has never talked about his English connections. We assumed there had been some estrangement between him and the rest of his family,' was her next remark.

  Summer parried this by saying, 'Perhaps if you had asked him he would have talked about his family. The English often don't volunteer information about themselves unless someone shows an interest.'

  'How long have you been Emily's tutor?'

  'About eighteen months. Her parents were killed in a car crash in France last summer.'

  'What a tragedy! Poor little thing. She has no brothers or sisters?'

  'No.'

  'Her father must have been a successful man to have her educated privately. What was his occupation?'

  'He had a farm,' Summer answered, not untruthfully.

  It was a relief when she was able to make her escape and continue shopping, alone. In spite of the much greater age gap between them, she found Mrs Hardy a more congenial companion than Miss Adams whose manner veered from patronising to ingratiating.

  She was waiting to cross the street between the South East and South West Quadrant when she noticed, farther along the street, a palm tree with yards of brilliantly coloured fabric wound round its trunk like the binding on the frame of a lampshade.

  It was outside a shop called Lilly Pulitzer, and the interior of the shop was a bower of wonderful sun-colours—lime-green, banana-yellow, shocking-pink, turquoise, azure.

  These vivid colours gave her the same inner thrill she had felt when she looked at the softer, more subtle shades of the needlepoint wools in Fleece & Floss.

  She bought a cute top for Emily to wear with her white shorts. The saleswoman packed it in a bag to which she clipped ringlets of coloured ribbon to match the colours of Summer's purchase. It was a touch which delighted her and she walked out of the shop feeling, for several reasons, on top of the world.

  In the first place she was discovering how much she liked shopping; not necessarily buying anything, but just looking, comparing, admiring, learning what she liked and didn't like. At the same time it was good to know that she could buy anything she particularly liked, unless it was wildly expensive, like the lion's paw necklace.

  Another good feeling was the freedom of having a car to run around in, by herself, while knowing that she wasn't going back to an empty house and a lonely evening.

  Yet another pleasure was the mellow warmth of the afternoon. In an hour or two there would be a spectacular sunset over the Gulf, but at present the light was still bright, the air temperature was warm as if it were June or July instead of early March.

  Best of all was her new, shapelier self. Unexpected reflections in shop windows no longer made her miserable; an outcast from the world of attractive women. And as well as being slimmer, she seemed to have more zest for life, more mental and physical energy.

  As she drove back across the causeway she was humming the principal theme from the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. She was still humming when she had to stop at the traffic lights at the junction with 41.

  An elderly man in the car in the lane next to hers leaned out of his window. 'You sound very happy, young lady.'

  She smiled at him. 'I guess I am.'

  'Got a big date tonight, huh?' He winked at her.

  The lights changed. The cars moved forward. Still smiling, Summer turned north while the other car headed downtown. Three months ago no one would have said that to her. Admittedly he had only been able to see her from the elbows up, but even that limited view would have been enough, last December, to indicate that she wasn't a girl who had dates.

  I ought to write to that woman in the shop in Miami, she thought. I should thank her for changing my life.

  Yet, deep in her heart, she knew it hadn't been the saleswoman who had done that. It had been James Gardiner's caustic indictment of her as a glutton which had jolted her out of her apathetic acceptance of her condition. The woman in Miami had pointed her in the right direction to find help. But the impetus to seek it had been the scathing male voice overheard from the Gallery at Cranmere.

  For that impetus she would stand in his debt for the rest of her life; and, at the same time, she would never forgive him. What he had said about her to Dr Dyer had been an expression of contempt as unpardonably humiliating as if he had struck her, or spat on her.

  She knew there was only one way she could purge her mind of that shaming memory, and that was by turning the tables on him, by making him fall in love with her, and rejecting him.

  Which was such a wild, crazy idea that it made her blush to have thought it. James Gardiner in love with Summer Roberts? Impossible.

  At Indian Beach Drive she turned off, wondering which beach the others had chosen for their walk. For some time Emily had wanted to see Midnight Pass, a break in the Keys farther south. Perhaps he had taken her there. If so, Summer hoped the place had lived up to its romantic name.

  Thinking about the top she had bought for Emily and about its designer, Lilly Pulitzer, and the striking originality of her colours and patterns, she found herself wondering if perhaps she herself had a vocation which she hadn't yet discovered; something to do with colour and design.

  Her aunt had decided for her that she was going to be a teacher, and she did enjoy teaching Emily. But every time she looked at her father's trompe-l'oeil paintings on the
walls of the Octagon Room, she was filled with a longing to be able to create something beautiful, as he had She knew her ability to draw was better than average, but nothing like good enough for her ever to become a professional artist. What about the fringes of the art world? Interior design... fashion designing. Might she find her métier somewhere there?

  Instead of going shelling, James had taken his niece across the Sunshine Skyway, the fifteen-mile-long bridge and causeway which spanned Tampa Bay, north of Sarasota. In St Petersburg, on the other side of the Bay, they had gone to a famous bookshop, Haslam's, to buy, among other things, an illustrated guide to shells.

  'And I thought you'd like this, Summer,' said Emily, presenting her with a large book about embroidery, 'James says the author, Erica Wilson, has a summer house in Nantucket like he has.'

  'This looks lovely, Emily. Thank you very much, darling,' she said, looking through the pages of needlework projects. 'I bought a present for you.'

  The child was delighted with the top and rushed upstairs to try it on. But when Summer would have settled down to study her present more thoroughly, James said, 'Come into the library and I'll show you how the music centre functions.'

  It turned out to be less complicated than it looked and, having shown her how it worked, he said, 'I hadn't realised that Weight Watchers included men in their classes. I thought they were only for women.'

  'No, there are several men in my class.'

  'And one who takes you for a drink after class, I hear.'

  Had Emily volunteered that information, or had he extracted it from her?

  'For a coffee, yes—sometimes,' she agreed.

  Twice she had made an excuse not to have coffee with Hal, and once she had invited another class member to join them.

  'What kind of guy is he?'

  'A very nice one. You don't object to my having some friends of the opposite sex, do you?'

  'In principle—certainly not. I'd prefer, for your own security, that you had some guarantee of their bona fides. Such as an introduction. Presumably anyone who can pay the fees can enrol for these classes. What's his name and what does he do?'