Summer's Awakening

by Anne Weale

  She wondered if it would turn out to be a birthday party. She had better take a present, just in case. In New York choosing something for him would have been no problem. Here it was more difficult. There were some delightful shops on the island, notably Nantucket Looms which always had covetable knitted garments and beautiful hand-woven fabrics. But to buy clothing for a man was tricky without knowing his collar size and leg length. It would probably be wiser to go to Mitchell's Book Corner and find a book for him.

  It was late in the afternoon when the others returned and found her busy at her embroidery frame on the sunlit deck. She stopped work to make tea for them and to hear about their expedition which had included a ramble on foot to Gibbs Pond in the wild area known as The Commons because it had once been common pastureland shared by the island's early settlers.

  It wasn't until later, when they had changed to go to a Saturday night barbecue at one of the large summer houses on the Cliff, that she said to James, 'Would you mind if I took a Friday-to-Monday holiday later this month? I'm sure Hetty would let Emily sleep at her house, or come and sleep here.'

  'By all means,' he answered.

  'Where are you going?' asked Emily.

  'Raoul and his sister are giving a party at Old Lyme. They've asked me to spend the weekend there. She wasn't quite sure why she included his sister in the invitation. 'You won't mind my being away for a few days, will you? I shall only be gone for three nights.'

  'Of course not,' the younger girl said readily.

  But it would be the first time they had spent a night apart since arriving in America, and Summer sensed that, inwardly, Emily was disappointed at being left behind.

  'Perhaps you'll be able to come here that weekend,' she said to James.

  'Possibly—or Emily might prefer to spend the weekend at the apartment.

  The next day he took them sailing on the sheltered waters of the huge inner harbour protected from the ocean by a barrier of sand and beach grass. Summer seemed to have outgrown her childhood tendency to feel queasy if a boat even rocked at her moorings. However, although she enjoyed harbour sailing now, she wasn't sure how she would fare in a large boat in rougher conditions.

  Later, when they went ashore for a picnic lunch, she cut the sole of her foot on a broken bottle concealed in the sand. She had been running, and the sudden sharp stab of pain made her lose her balance and fall. When she didn't get back on her feet the others realised something was amiss and came over to find her looking with dismay at the bright red blood welling from a cut on the ball of her foot.

  'The first thing to do with that is to wash off the sand and see what the damage is. I'm going to pick you up and carry you to the water,' said James.

  He slid an arm under her knees and the other round her back and swung her up against his broad chest.

  'Put an arm round my neck,' he instructed.

  After the initial pain of the injury, her foot was now in the numb stage before the cut began to hurt. As he carried her down to the water's edge, she was conscious only of his strength and of the intimacy of being cradled against him, her arm round his powerful shoulders, her face close to his.

  Although she now weighed a little under the recommended weight for her height, she was a tall girl and, as a result of daily workouts, quite strong herself even though her muscles didn't show the way his did. Not many men would have carried her as easily.

  He walked into the water until it came up to his calves.

  'Stand on your good foot and hang on to me for support.'

  He lowered her legs towards the water and held her steady while he turned round and, like a blacksmith shoeing a horse, turned the sole of her injured foot upwards.

  She steadied herself with a hand on the small of his back, feeling his left hand supporting her ankle while he rinsed away the sand.

  He said, 'There should be some first aid stuff in the boat's locker, Emily. Go and check what there is, will you? We'll be there in a minute when I'm sure the cut's clean.'

  Emily splashed off to do as he told her.

  'Is it much of a cut?' Summer asked.

  'Yes, quite a deep one, but don't worry. It won't stop you going to Santerre's party.'

  He turned round and scooped her up, and carried her to the dinghy. There he gave her first aid and then made her put on her sweater and tuck his sweater round her bare legs, because although it was a hot day she had begun to feel chilly.

  By the time they got back to the cottage her foot had begun to throb. Telling Emily to hurry ahead and start making a pot of tea, James helped Summer to mount the ladder to The Fo'c'sle's deck. When she would have hobbled indoors, using the heel of her cut foot, he picked her up for the third time and carried her inside.

  'I think it's bleeding again. I don't want to get blood on the covers,' she said anxiously, when he laid her down on one of the sofas.

  'The blood isn't coming through the dressing yet. Lie still with your foot raised like this'—he lifted her ankle on to the arm of the sofa—'and I'll take another look at it.'

  So that she didn't have to prop herself up on her elbows, he took several squabs from the other sofa and made them into a backrest for her. When the arm of the sofa had been protected from seeping blood by a beach towel and a split-open plastic bag, he went off to scrub his hands.

  Presently, sipping hot tea, she watched him remove the emergency dressing from her foot. His lean brown fingers with their well-kept nails were as deft and efficient as a doctor's.

  'I think a couple of adhesive sutures should hold it together, but if it doesn't look good tomorrow we'll get some professional treatment, he told her.

  'Aren't you going back to New York tomorrow morning? I thought you'd be leaving on the seven o'clock plane.'

  'In view of this accident I'll stay over until Tuesday.'

  'I'm sorry to be a nuisance.'

  He scowled and his answer was curt, but his annoyance was not directed at her.

  'It's not your fault if some bloody fool leaves broken glass on the beach.'

  Before they had left the place he had found the bottle which had cut her and hurled it far out into deep water where it wouldn't harm anyone else.

  It was the strongest language she had ever known him to use, and the irascible comment was typically English. Several times she had heard old Lord Cranmere and his son referring to someone as a bloody fool. And yet, as she studied James's profile as he finished attending to her foot, she could see no resemblance at all between his strong, good-looking face and the features of his father and brother.

  He said, 'Have you a pair of socks? I've taped the new dressing as firmly as possible, but a couple of socks will help to keep it in place.'

  'Yes, I wear socks with my running shoes. Emily will get them when she comes back.'

  His niece had gone to take the dinghy back to the boat-house where it was kept.

  'Can't I get them?'

  'They're rolled up in the second drawer of my chest.'

  He went away for a few moments, returning with the white sports socks.

  As he drew one of them carefully over her foot, he said, 'Are your drawers always in such immaculate order?'

  'I have plenty of time to be tidy. If I were rushing off to work every morning...' She concluded the sentence with an expressive gesture.

  He pulled the second sock over the first. 'Is your foot aching?'

  'A little,' she admitted.

  'Would you like a couple of pain-killers?'

  'Not unless it gets worse—I don't like taking pills. I'd love some more tea.'

  They had been intending to eat at a restaurant that night and, later, she urged them to go without her, saying she would be perfectly happy with bread, cheese and fruit. But neither of them would hear of it, and the supper they prepared, between them, was certainly nicer than a solitary snack. Emily made the French dressing for the avocado pears, and James made the mushroom omelettes.

  Afterwards they played rummy for an hour, and he and
Summer finished the bottle of wine he had opened the night before.

  Whether his good-humoured acceptance of such a domestic evening masked inner boredom was impossible to tell. Perhaps in his high-pressured life an occasional interlude of this kind was not unacceptable.

  It was Emily who helped her to hobble to their shared bathroom and, while Summer was there, removed the cover from her bunk and took her nightie from the hook behind the door.

  She had been in bed for ten minutes, and was trying to concentrate on a book and ignore her aching foot, when there was a tap at the door and James walked in.

  'I've brought you a couple of tablets and some water in case that cut keeps you awake.'

  He put them on the shelf which served the upper bunk as a night table. Both she and Emily preferred to sleep in the upper bunks, although climbing up there tonight had not been as easy as usual.

  'Thank you. It is a bit sore now.'

  'I don't doubt it. It'll be a week before you can walk on it.'

  'Oh, surely not as long as that!'

  'Maybe not. You're in good shape so you ought to heal fast.' His glance drifted from her face to the silky skin under the ribbon-ties of her nightdress and the soft curves revealed by the thin flower-sprigged cotton voile. 'In excellent shape,' he added, the corner of his mouth lifting.

  She resisted a desire to snatch the sheet and pull it higher.

  'You're a little flushed. I wonder if you have a slight temperature.' He laid his palm against her forehead.

  He knew why her colour had risen, damn him! She felt like dashing his hand away, but a more dignified way to put an end to his teasing was to say, 'If I have, a night's sleep will cure it. I'm tired now.'

  He removed the book she was holding and put it on the lower bunk.

  'Lie down and I'll tuck you in.'

  'I don't want to be tucked in, thank you. I like the bedclothes loose... and I want to finish the chapter before I put the light out. May I have my book back, please?'

  'Okay, but don't read too late.' He returned it to her. And then, to her total confusion, he leaned over and kissed her lightly on the cheek. 'Goodnight.' He turned away and left the room.

  She didn't read any more. Nor did she sleep. It wasn't the pain in her foot which kept her awake, but the feel of his lips on her cheek. Strangely, the gentle kiss—such as he might have given Emily—had almost as disturbing an effect as his kiss on Friday evening.

  If anyone other than James had kissed her like that—Raoul, for instance—she would have accepted the gesture as an affectionate impulse. But although he seemed fond of his niece, she doubted that James felt affection for anyone else, and certainly not towards herself.

  He was in the mood to take a wife. Because she happened to be at hand, as it were, he had taken it into his head that marrying her would be easier than finding and courting some other young woman. It might even be that he thought her quite bed-worthy now. The way he had looked at her shoulders and the outlines of her breasts had suggested that he did.

  She remembered that he had once told her that all men assessed the women they met as possible bed-partners. Presumably, after she had slimmed down, he had looked at her in that light and revised his original opinion of her.

  Certainly she had often thought of him in that way. The nights when she went to sleep wondering what it wouldn't be like to be his bed-partner, hoping to dream of him, outnumbered the nights when she didn't engage in such fantasies. But one thing about him troubled her.

  Women—perhaps not all of them, but certainly her kind of woman—needed to be loved as well as desired. And James didn't seem to be capable of loving the women in his life. He had admitted that his relationship with Loretta Fox had been a physical one, and no doubt that applied to his two previous liaisons.

  There had also been that other woman—the painter of portrait miniatures—but even with her it might have been the urgent demand of his biological urges rather than calf-love, in the emotional sense, which had been the motivating force on his side.

  Perhaps something in his early relationship with his mother had made him fundamentally antipathetic towards all women. Yet if he had had a bad relationship with his father, one would have expected him to turn to his other parent for affection and approval. Perhaps she hadn't given it to him. It could be that her loyalty to her husband and her love for her first-born had made her reject her younger son.

  Lady Cranmere had died in her forties, after a long painful illness, and about five years after James's departure for America. Surely, if he had known she was dying he would have returned to see her? But perhaps they hadn't known where he was and had made no effort to trace him.

  If he had loved her, it must be a terrible grief to him that she had been ill for months and he hadn't known it. But if he had loved her, he would have written to her; and it was only in Victorian times that husbands intercepted letters to their wives and destroyed them unread.

  If he had written to her, surely no woman, least of all someone suffering from a terminal illness, would not want to be reunited with her son, no matter what his past misdemeanours. The implication was that he hadn't written to her, hadn't loved her. And there, perhaps, lay the key to the enigma; the explanation of his lack of heart.

  From this train of thought, Summer's mind turned to how she should cope with the situation if, determined to get his own way, he deliberately set out to charm her.

  She had an uneasy suspicion that James, if he chose to exert himself, might be hard to resist, especially as her position in his household made it hard for her to avoid him.

  She wished now that, when he had asked her if she were pining for Raoul, she had pretended she was. If she had led him to believe she was losing her heart to Raoul, James wouldn't have suggested she should marry him.

  At the beginning of the week of Raoul's party, James left word with Hetty O'Brien that Summer and Emily were to fly to New York in time to have dinner with Cordelia Rathbone on Thursday night.

  By the time they returned to the apartment Summer was no longer limping, but hadn't yet resumed her workouts which involved jumping jacks and jogging in place.

  From José, they learnt that Mrs Rathbone was staying at the Pierre Hotel. James, who was out when they arrived, would be back in good time to escort them there.

  Emily was looking forward to meeting her grandfather's first wife. It didn't seem to strike her as strange that Mrs Rathbone had never shown interest in her until now.

  Discussing what to wear, they decided on a Paisley-print dress for Emily and a silver-grey silk shirt and black skirt for Summer. The shirt was the colour of her eyes. With it she wore a string of amethyst beads with silver spacers which had belonged to her mother, and she made up her eyes with a new violet shadow-stick.

  They were ready to go when James arrived.

  'You both look very nice,' he said approvingly. 'How's the foot, Summer?'

  'It's fine again, thank you.'

  'I'll be ten minutes shaving and changing.'

  An early riser, he had the kind of dark beard which by mid-evening shadowed his lean, hard jaw unless he had a second shave.

  They arrived at the Pierre at five minutes to seven. As the elevator took them up to Mrs Rathbone's suite, he said to her, 'You've changed your scent.'

  How unnervingly observant he was.

  He said, 'I don't know what it was you used before, but this is Chanel No 5, isn't it?'

  'Yes.' Had it been Loretta's favourite scent?

  'Cordelia uses it. She knew Coco Chanel.'

  The door of their hostess's suite was opened by a neat little woman, dressed to go out, whom James introduced as Paulette. He had already told them that Cordelia had her French maid with her.

  'Madame is taking a call in her bedroom. She'll be with you in a moment,' said Paulette, showing them into a luxurious sitting room. 'She asks that you help yourselves to champagne. There is lemonade for mademoiselle.'

  Summer had expected the much-married Mrs Rathb
one to be like the rich women she had seen shopping at Altman's and Bergdorf Goodman and Henri Bendel who, in their terror of looking old, had had repeated face-lifts; who had their hair styled several times a week; who thought of little but their appearance and seemed to have no idea that their painted faces had become macabre masks.

  However, as soon as their hostess joined them she saw that Cordelia Rathbone was nothing like this preconception of her. In both looks and manner she bore a certain resemblance to Congresswoman Millicent Fenwick whom Summer had seen on television and thought a striking exemplar of how to age gracefully.

  Mrs Rathbone came into the room with the light, brisk step of a woman who keeps in shape by her own exertions rather than those of her masseuse and beautician. Her warm smile emphasised the lines that time and perhaps too much sunbathing had engraved on a fine, dry complexion. Her once-dark hair was now brindled to iron grey. She was wearing a dark red shirt-dress with a wide suede belt of the same colour, a single strand of large matched pearls and pearl ear-studs.

  'Miss Roberts... how do you do? I'm so sorry I was detained.' She took Summer's hand and held it while she gave her a friendly but searching look.

  'And Emily.' She turned to her first husband's grandchild. 'How do you do? James tells me you share his passion for computers. I'm determined to live at least to ninety because I want so much to see how the electronics revolution affects our lives in the next twenty years. Thank you, James'—this as he brought a glass of champagne to her.

  They had all risen as she entered. Now Mrs Rathbone seated herself on the sofa beside Emily, and went on, 'I feel I was lucky, in some ways, to be born when I was. When I was your age'—with a gesture towards Summer—'travelling was much slower but more interesting. Each country was quite different from its neighbours. I saw Dresden before it was bombed in the Second World War, and Jerusalem before it was ruined by terrible apartments, and the Costa Brava in Spain when it was still a wild coast without hundreds of holiday villas and camping grounds spoiling its beauty. But everything has its price, and the price of being privileged to see those places at their best was a very restricted set of options if you were a girl. Unless you were extremely clever and extremely strong-minded, which I wasn't, you had almost no choice but marriage. Whereas you'—patting Emily's knee—'can be anything you want.'