Summer Will Show

by Sylvia Townsend Warner

  “Why can’t you come on Monday, Sophia?” he asked. “I always consider Monday one of our favourable days, and for this Monday I was working out ... ”

  She shook her head, firmly binding up her plaits, her mouth full of hairpins.

  “Why don’t you take Minna for a change?”

  “No! Minna is a collector’s piece now. She’s lost any knack she may have had for street-work. In another ten years, yes. Then she would be magnificent as a crone, as a destitute grandmother reduced to hawking improper albums. But for the moment Minna is decidedly between-tides.”

  “How old is Minna?” she said.

  “God knows! — the old Medusa!”

  How odd, she thought, walking homeward, that I felt no impulse to knock him down and dance on him. It is unlike me to be so reasonable. Nor was there any baseness in my question, however loudly my upbringing must shout to me that such questions are base. It was a practical question. For if Minna is — is old, then I ought to know it. Towards the old, the ageing, one observes a certain line of conduct. One respects them, defers to them, spares them. Translated into action, this entails not contradicting them, concealing from them one’s private opinions and seeing to it that they sit in the easiest chairs. On this last count, at any rate, she had nothing to reproach herself with. Suavely as any cat Minna always planted herself in the best chair — unless she reposed on the floor; and though dividing the food with scrupulous equity, if there happened to be any unclaimed bonne bouche she would crunch it up with the greatest goodwill, mop up the sauce with bread, with thoughtful greed lick out the dish.

  Suavely as any cat. Even cats age, though so imperceptibly that no one agrees on the natural span of a cat’s life, some saying ten, some twelve, some a score of years. But age and die they do, dying of heart-failure, dying in their sleep before the kitchen embers as a ripe apple falls on a windless afternoon, or throwing themselves down exhausted, after a rat-hunt through the barton, never to rise up and hunt again. For all their nine lives, their guardian cunning and their whiskers, the wariest, the sleekest cats grow old and die. Or of a sudden, in their practised prime, a sore on the neck will make them peevish with life, they will turn from their food, exploit their wholesome talent of vomiting, spew up in the end nothing but froth and slime, sit gasping for breath with their blackened gaze fixed on some familiar piece of furniture as though, at long last, they recognised in it the furtive enemy of a lifetime, the unmasked foe.

  “I can be sick whenever I please,” was Minna’s boast. “Like a cat, Sophia.”

  After all, one need not wait for age — how long was it since she, turning from the imitation Watteau, had spoken so seriously with Minna about death, speaking as though under its shadow? But they had spoken together, with every admission re-establishing their liveliness, their power to speak, hear, communicate. It is one thing to speak of death with those one loves; but to think of it alone, walking through the streets, one does that at a different temperature.

  Speaking of death had led them to speak about Martin and the Communists. Now she was thinking again of death, and every step of her thought went with a step leading her towards the Alpine Laundry. She had left Minna at her most exasperating: plunged into a martyrdom of domesticity, counting and darning Caspar’s underclothes, washing his handkerchiefs, gloomily bruising her fingers in an attempt to hammer the heel more firmly on his boot. Over her shoulders, despite the heat of the day, she had pinned a little shawl, unbecomingly too skimpy for them. From her ears dangled a pair of disgustingly meagre and lack-lustre jet ear-rings, ear-rings which, since they had never appeared there before, it was tempting to suppose had been borrowed from Madame Coton — that soul of sour domestic virtues — for dressing this particular part.

  And all this, as Sophia knew quite well, was because not Minna but she had been bidden so mysteriously to visit the Alpine Laundry. Thither she could go, flourishing her heels, the child of good fortune, destiny’s pet. Whereas Minna, the daylong labourer in the vineyard, Minna the nursing-mother of revolutions, must stay at home, devoting her slighted talents to Caspar’s socks. In this mood Frederick would find her. Then God help Frederick!

  She was immoderately early for her appointment, Minna’s grand renunciation had begun with the smarting punctuality of any attack at dawn, and despite the muddle which her efficiency bred on every hand it had been impossible not to leave the rue de la Carabine at least half an hour too soon. She leaned her elbows on the parapet of the bridge, staring at the barges below her, watching with approval a man who came out of a cabin with a little mat, and shook out its dust into the river. It was obvious that such a man kept house alone.

  A hundred times she had injured Minna intentionally, dealt shamelessly blows below the belt, cuffed her vanity, trapped her into the wrong, trampled over her wishes and her principles — and all without a pang. Now, when really for no fault of hers, Minna was thrusting her breast against the thorns of wounded vanity, and caterwauling beyond the powers of any impassioned nightingale, she must feel her heart, wrung with sympathy and a conviction of guilt, cry out, “The poor angel!” But long, long ago, she had thrown her reason into this river flowing beneath her — perhaps even on that winter’s afternoon when crossing from the other bank to visit great-aunt Léocadie she had wished that she could hold Madame Lemuel beneath the cold flood until she came up gasping, and having revised her metaphors.

  Meanwhile, whatever might or might not comfort Minna, to turn back from the Alpine Laundry certainly would not do so.

  Thanks to Minna, who knew her way through Paris very much as a mongrel might, she had her directions. But now, staring at the decrepit fortress of the Marais, it seemed to her that she would never disentangle her way thither. But why did the word fortress come to mind? Rat’s Castle rather — a quarter even more entangled, tattered, secretive of everything except stinks, than that which lay behind her. They did not even look historical, those tall jostling house-blocks, with their stooping gables and crooked roofs. They were past mark of mouth.

  “If I stay here much longer,” she said to herself,” I shall begin to feel courageous.”

  This she had determined not to feel. And with a last glance at the river’s clear highway she set forward for the Alpine Laundry.

  Before she found it she had grown sufficiently accustomed to the Rat’s Castle to be observing the prices of the food on the open shop-counters, and thinking that this would be an even more advantageous place to shop than the rue Mouffetard. The language of the country too was extraordinarily grand, never had she read such lofty sentences in cookshop windows nor seen such flowery recommendations of wine and butter. It was as though they had picked their phrases from the second-hand shops, she thought, running her eye over a dusty interior where chairs and gilded bedposts in the grandest manner struggled pell-mell with broken mangles, gaping concertinas, old mattresses and odd coffee-cups. It was from shops like these that Minna liked a fairing. But it would be better to take her something clean; and from a shoemaker’s window she selected a pair of magnificent slippers, made of spotted crimson plush and trimmed with sparkling tinfoil Cupids. Each slipper cost rather more than the result of a morning of song, and she was, as she agreed with the woman who sold them, highly favoured to buy such slippers so cheap.

  This transaction emptied her of time as well as of money. Reaching the Alpine Laundry, a hasty glance told her no more of the exterior than that it was painted blue and white, that the paint was thin but well-scrubbed, that in the window two highly gauffered infant’s long petticoats flanked a man’s shirt, whose starched arms extended towards the baby-clothes as though in a gesture of family affection.

  Inside also the little office was all that honest poverty should be — well-scrubbed, orderly, a chastened sentimentality manifesting itself in a vase of marguerites on the counter. The air had the bitter-sweet almond tang of starch, and behind a glass-panelled door the top part of some piece of machinery rose slowly, and dropped, and rose and dropped a
gain, and with every rise and fall there was a sighing whistle and a gush of water released.

  The woman sitting behind the counter was making-up accounts. Her thick red fingers held the pen clumsily, her right hand was ink-stained. As Sophia entered the shop she glanced up with a look at once placid and earnest, and it was obvious that she was holding a thread of addition in her mind.

  “Vous désirez, Madame —— ?”

  Sophia spoke her wish. The woman made a little tick on the column of her addition, noted a sum on the blotting-paper, rose and opened the door, calling for Mademoiselle Martin.

  “This lady wishes to inspect the laundry.”

  Mademoiselle Martin was lame, she threw out her hip as she walked, and with each halting step a cordlike muscle stood out in her neck. Her eyes were dark and beady, her face was pinched, dutiful, and industrious. Her arms below her rolled-up sleeves were extraordinarily full and muscular.

  Behind the glass-panelled door there was only whitewash and scabby iron for the blue and white paint of the office. There was a great deal of steam, the squelch of wet clothes, the hissing of irons. Four women were at work, their faces shining with sweat, their skirts bunched round their hips. Moving on pattens over the wet floor they seemed in their bunched white pinafores like the creatures of some queer aviary. They looked at Sophia no more mysteriously than any other washerwomen might, good-dayed her in affable voices.

  Limping beside her, glancing up sometimes with her beady mouse’s eyes, Mademoiselle Martin showed off to Sophia the washing tubs, the mechanical pump, the mangles, the stove where the irons stood heating, the racks of clean linen. Sophia asked questions, examined, approved; and in the moist heat of the workroom her ears sang, her heart pounded.

  “One moment, Victoire.”

  The woman at the heavy ironing-block stood aside. Thrusting with her strong arms, Mademoiselle Martin swung back the ironing-block; and there was a hole in the floor, a dark square, the tips of two iron uprights just showing.

  “If you will go down the ladder — ” she said. “It is quite easy. Nine rungs. No one will observe you from below.”

  I am glad it is so decent, thought Sophia, holding on to the uprights, feeling the well-oiled darkness overhead move back into place again. Still, I should like to have some idea of what to expect next.

  Rats, said reason promptly.

  Standing in the darkness at the foot of the ladder, snuffing up the natural mouldy smell of cellar and with it a queer, a Spanish-Inquisition-like tang of red-hot pokers, waiting for her senses to reassemble themselves, her eyes to gather patches of dusk from patches of darkness, her ears to disentangle the rats below from the clatter of the laundry, the far-off continuing whine and gush of water overhead, it was extraordinary to remember that in this position she was wearing a bonnet, a still quite ladylike bonnet.

  “Though really,” she said to the rats, “there is nothing extraordinary about it. Considering the matter rationally, it would be more remarkable if I were not wearing a bonnet.”

  “True,” said a voice, the same voice which had cried Bread or Lead. And at the same moment she heard a door open and close behind her.

  “I am sorry to have kept you waiting. I was delayed for a moment. But there was no wish to be dramatic, we are not freemasons.”

  “I don’t like drama either.”

  “If you will step this way? Can you see better now? There is nothing to trip over, no steps.”

  His voice was brittle and businesslike. In the darkness she remembered those bright adder-coloured eyes.

  “You do trust me?”

  For answer he pulled open a door, stood back for her to enter.

  The cellar was lit by a couple of oil lanterns. It was an old wine-cellar, its walls were arcaded for casks, but in the niches where the casks had been were heaps of scrap-metal, old fire-irons, pots and kettles, a bird-cage, chains and bolts, broken tools, lengths of piping, clock-weights and trivets. Against one wall where a gas-pipe ran there was a roughly set-up bench, and on this, tapping the gas-supply, were half a dozen little tubed stands, each with its gas-jet hissing and flaring. Over these they were melting down the lead, like so many intent toffee-makers. The table was strewn with moulds, tools, neat little heaps of bullets and ball. For all that it was crowded and makeshift, it was orderly. And the look of a busy kitchen was enforced by the bottles of cheap wine, the assemblages of food, which stood here and there on the bench.

  Other workers were squatting on the floor, sorting the scrap, sawing it up for melting. They were of all ages, as many women as men, and their intent and weary expressions gave her the impression that they were all of the same cast of features, that, however long she stayed and looked at them, she would not be able to distinguish between one and another, carry away with her the recollection of any face that was not a composite face.

  The gas-jets flared against this general colouring of drab and dusky with the imperious hue of another element; and over all the room hovered the taint of metal smoke. In this lighting, pale faces, red hands, seemed alike livid and unreal. Glancing back at Martin she saw that his face wore the stamp of all the other faces, was intent and weary, and insignificant.

  Catching her eye, “Our bakery,” he said, with a little bow. “I hope you will give us your custom.”

  The quip sounded hollow and conscientious. It was clear that he had thought of it some time before, had decided to say it, had forgotten it till this moment when it bolted from his lips. No one laughed. The moulders, the men squatting on the floor, went on with their work, still cutting her dead.

  How awful for him, she thought. He has got me here, God knows why, and now he doesn’t know how to get rid of me.

  And she felt a profound uneasiness, a painful sense of guilt. It seemed terrible to her that this man, so resilient and peremptory, should stand there looking awkward, making jokes that fell flat. For the first time in her life she found no comfort in her sense of the ridiculous. For nearly a week she had been thinking, on and off, of Martin, and always thinking highly of him, more and more highly. Now the bubble was to be pricked; and it was as though she awaited the end of a world.

  Well, there was no use in hanging about, waiting to be assured that he was a weakling, just like all the other people in this revolution. She must say something tactful, tactful and feminine, and get away as soon as possible.

  “I understand why your young friend goes round with a rag-and-bone barrow.”

  “Yes. But it is not a perfect method. The scrap has to be paid for — and we have other things to buy, things that must be bought. Besides, he has to accept a lot of other rubbish, that is inconvenient too.”

  “I know. Whatever one wants, one always has to accept a great deal of rubbish along with it.”

  “How strong are you?” he asked. “Could you carry that basket there?”

  It was astonishingly weighty. As she lifted it she saw a woman turn from her work and watch her superciliously. Mettled, she gave herself more carefully to balancing the basket, walked across the cellar with it, and had the pleasure of seeing the woman’s expression change to surprise.

  “In your quarter,” he continued, “there must be a great deal of scrap lying about. A bit picked up here, a bit there — between the two of you in a week you could collect a passable deal.”

  He watched her silence.

  “I don’t see why you shouldn’t change your laundry. The Alpine Laundry does excellent work.

  “Don’t carry too much to begin with,” he recommended. “And don’t let Madame Lemuel accompany you. She would probably wish to tie a handkerchief over her head and walk barefoot. That sort of thing would estrange the other clients of the laundry.”

  Meanwhile she was still holding the basket of scrap, and on her hand the veins were standing out blue and swollen. The set indifference of her countenance, too, was rapidly turning into a glare. Now he took the basket from her, saying, “Don’t attempt to carry as much as that. You don’t want chivalrou
s strangers offering to help you.”

  “When shall I come?” she said.

  “As soon as you please. But come regularly. And wrap up the stuff so that it doesn’t clatter. And call for the clean clothes four days later. We will leave you to supply your own basket.”

  “Thank you,” she said, already with the sourness of the conscript.

  “Thank you. I assure you, you will be doing us a considerable service. We are abominably short of helpers, or it would not have occurred to me to ask you.”

  “I understand. Now I think I had better go. I don’t want to waste your time.”

  “I will see you up the ladder.”

  His tone was bland, he was working like a well-oiled machine, smoothly, swiftly, powerfully.

  As long as you never make another joke — she said to herself. At the foot of the ladder, “What shall I do at the top?” she enquired childishly.

  “They’re waiting for you,” he said. “Nine rungs.”

  And he was politely removing himself from her ankles when she demanded,

  “Do you all come up and down this ladder?”

  “Good Lord, no!”

  The trap swung open, the smell of steam, the whistle and gush of the pump, came about her once more. Mademoiselle Martin brushed her skirts down, looked over them attentively for any cobwebs or filings.

  “I have decided to bring my linen to your laundry. Will you please tell the proprietress?”

  “I am so glad,” answered Mademoiselle Martin. “If you will leave the linen with Madame Goulet in the shop she will see to it.”

  In the office she looked at the clock (her watch had been pawned some while since). It was eleven — there was time to get back to the rue de la Carabine before Frederick should arrive. But instead she went and sat in the church of St. Paul, trying, among the shuffling Masses, the in-and-out of worshippers, to settle her thoughts. Instead, she fell asleep, and did not get to the rue de la Carabine until well after midday.

  But though her thoughts were unsettled still, sleep had perfectly tidied up her sensations. And there was no affectation, only a genuine tactlessness, in the calm with which she walked in and said,