Summertime

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘I will let you know if I hear about anyone, as soon as I can,’ Michael told his daughter.

  Not long after this, Trilby bolted across the road to Aphrodite’s house.

  ‘I need a lawyer, and very quickly,’ she told the startled Aphrodite, who was lying on a Victorian chaise longue frowning at a book of poetry entitled Les Fleurs du Mal.

  ‘The French really have such a good eye on life,’ Aphrodite sighed, replacing the book on her coffee table with ill-concealed relief. ‘Now, Trilby, you want a lawyer. Of course you want a lawyer, for your contract with this newspaper man, but why quickly?’

  ‘It’s you know who. She is completely against the whole thing, the whole newspaper thing, I am sure of it. If I don’t get a contract tidied up quickly it will be hell to pay, you know? And she might discover about the luncheon, and borrowing your clothes and all that, and then my father will not let it all go ahead.’

  ‘She will not discover anything, Trilby, for the simple reason that we will not let her.’

  Aphrodite, as was her habit, stuck her thumbs in her belt, and with her strange bird-like walk went to the window to stare across the road at the Smythsons’ house, as if by doing so she might see you know who staring back at her, and outstare her.

  ‘Your stepmother is such a nuisance, Trilby.’ She turned, sighing, from the window. ‘Never mind, though. We will get Geoffrey to look over the contract for you. He is very good at small print. I will tell him to suggest it to your father when he gets back in an hour or so.’

  Trilby looked at Aphrodite for a second. Thank heavens for her. ‘Thank you so much.’

  She must have sounded unnaturally emotional because Aphrodite leaned across and hugged her suddenly, which was not at all Aphrodite, really, and Trilby crossed back to her own house, stopping at the door and waving to her, knowing that she would be watching. Aphrodite waved back, knowing that Trilby could not see her, but also knowing that, in so many ways, she could.

  Back at the Lifetime Assurance Company, after two days’ absence, Trilby could hardly believe what had just happened to her. The whole world of Lewis James, his vast house, his exquisite food, his butler, her borrowed clothes, seemed not just a lifetime away, it seemed a world away. Much as she tried to concentrate on her work she kept seeing Lewis James in his perfect suit, with his perfect tan, and remembering him watching her, and laughing at her jokes. What a different life from the one that she normally led, facing the supervisor and her gavel, watching the clock out of the corner of her eye, waiting, always waiting, to be let free.

  As a child, living with Agnes in London, she had often thought that she knew how a caged animal felt, shut up in a place that was so alien to it that there was no longer any meaning to life. When she was at the Lifetime Assurance Company she thought of herself as a single canary, bright-feathered, but quite alone, singing and singing from behind bars and yet never, ever having any hope of being released to find another of its own kind.

  Now she could look back on that hour and a half spent with Lewis James as a time when she had been released from her cage, when she had, however temporarily, found someone else with the same brightly coloured plumage, someone who found people as funny as she did, and life as amusing and diverse as she found it.

  But Lewis James was a proprietor of a newspaper, as everyone said, used to spending his time with prime ministers or governors of banks. He would, she was sure, buy her cartoon series and forget about her for ever, because for someone like him Trilby Smythson would be just one of a thousand writers or illustrators, journalists or cartoonists. It was not false modesty, it was just a fact.

  As Trilby’s days returned to their usual dreary grey normality, Michael Smythson called on all their neighbours and asked them to sign away any kind of possibility that they would, as he put it, ‘take exception’ to The Popposites. Since they were all part of the same conspiracy, they all quickly did this, while Michael agreed to let Aphrodite’s lover Geoffrey run his eyes over the agreement sent with such surprising haste by Amalgamated Newspapers.

  It was therefore only a very short time later when Michael signed Trilby’s first contract on her behalf, watched by a silently furious and inwardly raging Agnes.

  Perhaps because of her inner fury Agnes now spent a great deal of time away from the house. More than she had ever spent in all the time that Trilby had known her.

  Trilby imagined that she must be having a great many dresses made, and visiting a great many girlfriends, of whom Agnes seemed to have an endless supply. Whatever it was that was keeping her away from the house from just after Michael had left for the Foreign Office until just before he came home was of no interest to Trilby. She herself had resigned from her job, to the astonishment of the Lifetime Assurance Company. Worse than that, she had exulted in her resignation.

  ‘I have sold my work to a newspaper which is going to pay me a great deal of money,’ she told the supervisor, who looked suddenly so wan at the idea that Trilby would no longer be one of her victims that Trilby almost felt sorry for her.

  However, all was not quite as rosy as Trilby had boasted to the supervisor as she sashayed out of her life for ever. Most unfortunately, the agreement that Geoffrey had negotiated for her was soon discovered to be for much, much less than Trilby had hoped. Naturally this made Agnes very happy. So happy that she crowed about it to Michael, often, and loudly.

  It seemed that the ‘money boys’, as Geoffrey called them, had considerably altered everything after Geoffrey had agreed to it, and that Michael had gone ahead and signed it on Trilby’s behalf without reading the contract through again. Now it was all too late, and Trilby was going to have to work far too fast for far too little, and not only that, but because she was a girl she could not put her name to it, because it seemed that male readers might be offended by the idea of a female cartoonist.

  ‘I am sorry, my dear. These money boys seem to be such sharks nowadays. Geoffrey and I thought we had managed everything so well, really we did. We never thought they would alter everything that he agreed with the way they have, and to such disadvantage to you. I suppose we should have read through the contract again, really, before I signed it and sent it off?’ Her father looked sad, but not particularly surprised.

  ‘Doesn’t matter, really it doesn’t,’ Trilby told him. ‘After all, they’re still going to do it. I didn’t do it for the money. It will be great to see it in print, that’s all.’

  ‘I suppose living here with me – well, I mean you won’t ever starve, will you, Trilby? And, well, I suppose male readers would prefer a man’s name to the thing, so perhaps that will be better too, in the long run.’

  Trilby nodded her head in agreement. No, she would never starve, that was true. It was just that she had hoped to be paid more so that she could buy a small second-hand motor car, and perhaps a better drawing board, things like that. Not a great deal really, not compared with Lewis James’s wealth, but she had hoped for a little more than she now knew that she was going to receive. And as to putting ‘Jerry’ instead of ‘Trilby’, well, it only went to show something, but what, she was not, as yet, quite sure.

  ‘Oh well, no matter.’

  ‘Where are you going, Trilby?’

  Trilby turned at the entrance to the small dining room, still in her black velvet dressing gown. ‘To have breakfast with Berry, you know?’

  ‘Jolly good idea,’ said Michael, turning back to his newspaper. ‘Not seen Agnes anywhere, by the way, have you?’

  Trilby had not seen Agnes, which somehow made it easier for both of them to relax, and since it was Saturday and neither of them had to go anywhere Michael watched Trilby going down the garden in her black velvet dressing gown, carrying a breakfast tray, with some pride. She was a good girl, really, even if she did get on Agnes’s nerves. Not that getting on Agnes’s nerves was difficult; almost everyone did.

  Berry peered round the door at Trilby and her tray.

  ‘Here for brekker, that’s my girl! Oh, and
brought some pains au chocolat too!’

  ‘Bought them at the patisserie yesterday evening.’

  ‘Come on. Coffee’s brewing and bubbling, and your life the same, I hear, although I have to tell you that the postman is very unhappy that he is not in The Popposites. He just told me so in no uncertain terms.’

  Trilby followed Berry into his studio, a place where she always loved to be.

  ‘I am not telling anyone in the cartoon who anyone is any more,’ she said firmly as Berry returned with hot coffee. ‘It is just going to have to be a surprise from now on. It is, it’s going to have to be a surprise.’

  ‘Exciting, though, isn’t it, lovey?’

  ‘I know.’

  Trilby sighed suddenly with total pleasure. There was no getting away from it, even if she was being paid less than she had thought, it did not matter in the least. She was being paid to do something she really liked, and what was more she was now free of the Lifetime Assurance Company. It was unbelievable to think that she would never again have to go back to sitting in a row of girls pounding ancient machines and being stared at by a narrow-eyed supervisor.

  As Trilby finished her breakfast and her face assumed a dreamy expression of intense contentment Berry stared across their mutual breakfast table at her, his expression suddenly serious. Quickly finishing his roll and butter he stood up, at the same time reaching for his sketch pad and pencil.

  ‘I think I will just sketch you like that, Trilb, if you don’t mind. Sit still, don’t move, no, really, but don’t move. No, tell you what – you can pick up Monty and cuddle him.’

  Trilby was quite used to being told not to move, or to pick up the cat, or to stay just where you are, which was what she did for the next half an hour, in between sipping coffee and allowing Berry to tell her about his youthful, and quite hopeless, love for an older woman whose portrait, it just so happened, he had, by chance, just finished painting.

  Trilby stared at the painting. The woman was older but very beautiful. She was also staring out at the world as if she had not been pleased by it.

  ‘Molly always says never trust a woman with a Pekinese.’

  ‘I didn’t know Molly then, but Molly is quite right, but it is not trust that I wanted from her when I was a young man, dear heart, but love.’

  Trilby sighed inwardly, while remaining as still as any sitter can who is trying to hold a cat on her knee. Love! People were always talking about love, and yet what was love about, at the end of the day? She had no idea and sometimes felt that she cared less. On the other hand, when she had lunched with Lewis James she had definitely thought that she had suddenly known at least what attraction was, or thought she might.

  ‘I don’t really think I ever want someone to be in love with me,’ she said finally, after sitting through yet another half an hour of Berry’s eulogies on his long past amour.

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘Because it makes people so sad. Every time Aphrodite talks about someone who was in love with her, or whom she once loved, she becomes more and more sad, until, in the end, I think she will be taken to heaven.’

  ‘Oh, Aphrodite is yards better now than she was, whatever she might tell you. I know that she grumbles about Geoffrey, but before him she was in love with an absolute so-and-so. You never knew him, before your time, and just as well. In the end she had to go to that place in Ascot, and that was not nice. Darling Molly always thinks that she has not been quite the same since, not really.’ Berry’s dark brown eyes stared down into Trilby’s large grey ones, and the pencil in his hand momentarily ceased its activity. ‘No, that was not nice at all. Not at all, but then that is what happens when they put those electrode things on your head, you’re never quite the same, at least I don’t think so. Now, tell me about Lewis James—’

  Trilby was frowning. ‘What things? Do tell.’

  ‘They clamp things on your head and send bolts and bolts of electricity through you, and then they expect you to be quite the same afterwards. I mean to say, I mean with such insanity coming from the doctors it’s quite enough to make the rest of us mad. But you were going to tell me about Lewis James. Dull as the proverbial ditch water, is he? Like most rich men?’

  ‘No. As a matter of fact, he is not at all dull, and quite easy to talk to, really.’

  ‘If you had to draw him, how would he be?’

  Berry took the cat and handed Trilby his sketch pad and pencil. A minute went by as Trilby thought about the tall, urbane, undoubtedly handsome, dark-haired, brown-eyed, cleft-chinned Lewis James in his impeccable tailoring, his white shirt that set off his even tan, and his grey suiting and grey tie, and then she drew.

  Berry took the pad from her and stared down at it.

  ‘I say, ducks. He is quite a dish, isn’t he?’

  Just for a moment, following the signing of her contract, Trilby was suddenly afraid that the magic had quite gone from The Popposites. What with its not going to have her own name on it, and not being paid enough for it, all of a sudden it seemed to be a bit of a blinking disappointment. Sometimes she found herself wishing that she had kept it to herself. Just kept it all as a Glebe Street joke, something which made them all laugh at each other, and left it at that. And of course, not being used to the ways of newspapers, when she did not hear from anyone she began to imagine that Lewis James had lost interest in it.

  She had just begun to be quite sure that she would never ever see the strip published, and in some strange way even to be glad that she would not, when a vast floral display – it certainly could not be called a bunch of flowers – arrived at their house.

  Agnes was disgusted by its size and undoubted cost.

  ‘It does seem a little bit much, really it does,’ she protested loudly. ‘To send such a very big basket, so vulgar, really. Why, it’s as tall as you and twice as wide.’

  They stood back and stared at it, knowing at once that it must have come from Lewis James, even before Trilby opened the small white envelope and read out the message, ‘Look in the paper tomorrow! The card’s unsigned.’

  Agnes snorted lightly. ‘It’s too big, even for the sitting room. Really, far too big, for the drawing room. I don’t know where we will put it.’

  Trilby looked rueful, and felt guilty. It was true, it was really far too big for the house.

  ‘I suppose that is rich people,’ she said eventually, looking from her stepmother to the vast floral display and back again. ‘They send you things that fit into their houses but not into your house, because they think that you have a house the same size as theirs. It’s just human error, really. Nothing more and nothing less.’

  Trilby looked so droll and yet so apologetic when she repeated the story a few minutes later to Berry that Molly started to laugh.

  ‘It is just human error on the part of the rich, Trilby, you are quite right. But oh, do tell, do, what did Agnes, what did you know who, do with this human error?’

  ‘She says she is going to take all the flowers out and put them in individual smaller vases everywhere.’

  There was a brief pause.

  ‘That does seem a pity.’

  Molly said this a few times, and having, finally, persuaded herself of the pity of it all she went round to the Smythsons’ house, and persuaded Agnes to bring the flower basket to their house where they placed the vast arrangement at the back of the small garden where it looked really very pretty. After which act of floral preservation Molly asked everyone in the street to come to number eighteen for drinks to celebrate the printing of Trilby’s first cartoon in the paper.

  Berry, who was always quite happy to be a busybody, took Trilby down the garden.

  ‘Did the great man telephone?’

  ‘No.’ Trilby avoided looking at Berry and plucked a rose from the arrangement in the basket instead and placed it in his buttonhole.

  ‘In that case I should think that he is busy. But still thinking about you.’ Berry nodded at the basket. ‘Believe you me, and I know, that is a too b
usy to see you but can’t stop thinking about you floral tribute.’

  ‘Agnes says it looks more like the sort of display that you see on old newsreels behind gangsters’ funeral cars in Chicago.’

  Berry stood back and stared at the immense arrangement. ‘I am awfully sorry to say that in this instance Agnes is absolutely right.’

  They both started to laugh, but the following day it was Berry who was proved to be right. Lewis James telephoned Trilby and asked her out to a celebration dinner.

  Back in Aphrodite’s bedroom Trilby stood as still as she could while Aphrodite and Mrs Johnson Johnson held up evening dresses against her.

  ‘They are all so dated, Trilby dear, I keep telling you, so dated, really, dear, they are so dated,’ Aphrodite kept moaning. ‘I mean – this is, well, this is, this must be from 1948, would you believe? A man like that, like Lewis James, a newspaper person, he will spot it straight away, he will say Dior 1948, straight away, men like that know. I’ve been out with so many of them.’

  ‘Yes, I know, Aphrodite dear, but really they can’t be blamed, not really. When men have things about you, about women, they always love to buy us clothes, and let’s face it, a little adjustment here, and a little adjustment there, and I don’t think Lewis James is going to rock back on his heels and think less of Trilby because she is not right up to the minute, as long as she looks decorative, that is, and not tarty or anything. I mean to say, it is just a fact, they expect less of one when one is young, surely?’

  In the end they settled on a white organdie kimono blouse with a wide turnback cuff teamed with a satin evening skirt and matching coat of the same material, which fell to the floor and was distinguished by its stand-up collar.

  ‘All so old, Trilby dear. I mean, are you sure? I mean – really, these are at least – oh, I don’t know, they are so out of date, like the men who gave them to me,’ moaned Aphrodite again, but Mrs Johnson Johnson would have none of it.