Summertime

by Charlotte Bingham

  By the time morning came the snow around the cottage was so thick she could not even open the door to let Topsie out, and the sky was black, as skies so often seem to be in the early hours of the morning; as black and dark as the night that had just passed. And all she could hear was Berry breathing, short little breaths that came in painful spasms and made her stand by his bedside to watch and listen, thinking that he must already be dying, so short were the breaths, so painful their passage. She knew she had to get help, but there was no telephone in the cottage, and it would surely take a tractor, not a car, to get into the village.

  That was when the feeling of unreality had become so acute. Upstairs Berry as ill as she had ever seen anyone, downstairs only herself and the dog.

  She switched on the wireless, softly, afraid that it might wake Berry, and listened to the news. It confirmed that the whole country was blanketed with snow and that there was nothing anyone could do, but said that if it went on for days more there were government plans to drop food parcels to outlying areas.

  ‘If we’re not an outlying area, who is?’ she asked Topsie.

  She switched the wireless off again, unable to bear the cheery tones of Music While You Work, or Housewife’s Choice. They would sound so inappropriate at that moment, like raised voices in a sick room.

  She rinsed out yet another bowl of cold water and yet another flannel and went up the steep wooden stairs of the cottage again, Topsie at her heels.

  ‘Sorry, Trilb, such a nuisance.’ Berry’s gentle voice, thick in tone, coughing, but reassuringly still alive, came from the bed.

  Trilby smiled, and inwardly sighed with huge relief. It must, after all, just be some sort of fever, a fever brought on by running after Topsie perhaps? Or caught in London and now, as bad luck would have it, come to horrible fruition just when Berry was out of reach of a doctor and medicine.

  ‘It’s just a fever, you’ll be better soon.’ She rinsed out the flannel and laid it on his burning hot forehead. ‘I could keep warm just standing by you,’ she joked. ‘No need of a fire.’ Nevertheless, she stoked up the logs in the bedroom grate, and heaped yet more of her own blankets onto his bed.

  She wished that she had learned first aid or something similarly practical. Why had she not asked Berry if he was all right when he first arrived? If his cough was hurting him? Why had she just taken him for granted, good old Berry, the bringer of laughter and happiness? Everyone always took him for granted.

  Molly leaving him like that, perhaps that had brought on the fever? People became ill after a shock, their system depleted, Mrs Johnson Johnson had often told Trilby. Heartbreak too could bring on illness. Sometimes people died of a broken heart, it was not unknown. Molly leaving him like that could have broken his heart. He was being so brave. From the moment he arrived he had been at pains to appear so nonchalant. Whatever it was that was wrong with him, she knew from the shortness of his breath and the heat of his forehead that it must be serious, but having no medicine, no antibiotics, not even an aspirin in the cottage, she could only sit by helplessly.

  If it went on, when the light became better she would have to try to go to the village on foot, struggle through the snow. Struggle through the snow. Yes, she told herself, that was what she would do, she would struggle through the snow, and somehow she would get to the village. She would get to a doctor and come back with medicines, everything that Berry needed.

  It took her hours. Hours and days in her own mind, but how long it had actually been in cold reality did not seem to matter, because when she eventually reached the village again, this time on foot, and flung herself against the door of the doctor’s house, the doctor was out, and Fred whose house she ran to next seemed to know more about where he was than his own housekeeper or secretary, or whatever she was.

  ‘Delivering a baby somewhere, my missus Hilda says. Twins ’pparently. Or something like.’

  For a second Trilby found herself looking up at Fred and wondering what something like twins could be, if not twins, and imagined herself telling Berry what Fred had said, and how Berry would laugh.

  ‘I best be getting back now, Fred. If you could tell the doctor, tell him to please come out, it will have to be on skis or a tractor or something if he’s to get through, but he must come out, because poor Berry is very, very ill.’

  ‘Soon as doctor comes, I’ll tell him, Trilby.’

  Fred looked momentarily worried, but then turned back to his own life and concerns. He had a post office to run, things to see to. Besides, if someone could tell him the good that worry did he would worry, but as it was they could not, so he would not, he would just keep a sharp eye out for the doctor.

  ‘You take care going back now, and don’t forget to dose him up with my Hilda’s aspirin,’ he called after Trilby.

  Aspirin would do nothing for Berry, and they knew it, but somehow, like so much that is useless when someone you love is in danger, it was nevertheless a comfort.

  When Trilby eventually reached the cottage once more she could only inch her way through the front door, but inch her way she did, and then quietly up the stairs, followed by the ever faithful Topsie. Pushing open the door her eyes concentrated at once on the figure in the bed with the heaped-up blankets.

  His hand was hanging down by the side of the bed, and she somehow knew at once from that oddly artistic, dear, familiar hand that if he had any fight left in him it was now going, and that the disease, the pneumonia or whatever it was from which Berry was suffering, was winning hands down.

  She moved quickly to his bedside and slid her arm under his head, sitting up beside him by his pillows.

  ‘Come on, Berry,’ she said softly, ‘you’ve got to make it for me, you know. After all, I can’t do without you, you’ve got to make it, there’ll be no-one to laugh with if you go, you can’t go.’

  His lips, now blue at the edges and cracked, moved slightly, and Trilby bent her head to listen.

  At first she could not hear. ‘What did you say?’

  Eventually, after seconds of effort, his words became as clear to her as her own.

  ‘Could be going to be one of your weepy moments I’m afraid, Trilb.’

  Trilby had always thought that if she shouted hard enough at the future, at the fates, if she willed something hard and long enough, it would happen; that she could actually prevent something terrible happening by this huge effort of her will. Now she found that she could not.

  She saw that no matter how hard she willed now, life was ebbing out of Berry as surely as the stream at the bottom of the garden was starting to trickle once more in the afternoon sunshine.

  The doctor finally came out, but as soon as he saw Berry’s condition he shook his head. He intimated quietly that there was nothing he could do, and within a few minutes he was proved to be right. He closed Berry’s eyes to the sound of Trilby’s sobbing.

  Berry had been her best friend, the first person to whom she could talk, the person she ran round the back to see, always greeted with the same kind of words: ‘Ah, my favourite person. Lud, but you look in need of something, ducks, sit down.’

  Now, kneeling down beside him, Trilby called to him in her head. ‘Why did you have to leave me so suddenly?’

  But even as she did she knew that she could hear Berry’s voice, laughing at her.

  ‘Good a time as any I should have thought, Trilb. You know, Trilb, take your leave after a cracking day out. Lovely times, short weepy moment, and then off to Paradise, to paint the heavens with brushes made from moonbeams dipped in clouds of magic. Looking forward to God coming visiting of an evening, you know, “Well done, kid, good stuff”, that’s what it’s all about, wouldn’t you say, Trilb? Painting a little bit of Paradise. Not just the tiny bits we see here, but the whole shoot. Something to look forward to, ducks, really, something to which to look forward.’

  Epilogue

  Finally, after a great deal of persuasion from everyone, most of all David Micklethwaite, who by now was completely
bored with the subject, Lewis had come to and realised that Trilby was not coming back to him. As a consequence he divorced her in Mexico, and to put the icing on the ex-marital cake, as is the way with the rich, managed to annul the marriage in America.

  As it happened this actually seemed to bring him luck, and proved to be a great relief not just to Trilby but to him too, for within a short space of time he remarried for the second time, yet another young girl, but one who was obviously more temperamentally suited to him, for within months of this event she bore him not one son and heir but two, and became a popular subject for all his newspapers and magazines, opining on the glories of motherhood, the Empire, and the joy that her twin boys had brought her husband, and being pictured busy at her tapestry seated beside the fire into which Trilby had once thrown her drawings with such a sense of despairing futility.

  Molly too had remarried, Aphrodite’s old lover Geoffrey, but only after a graceful period of mourning. Whether or not she felt guilty at what she had done to Berry no-one but Molly herself would ever know, and as Berry himself would have said, ‘Well, if that’s not where angels fear to tread, Trilb, where is?’

  Far from having a traumatic effect upon Trilby herself, the discovery that Glebe Street was quite as fallible as Lewis’s world meant that Trilby no longer looked back to those dear days of crossing the street for breakfast with the same sense of romantic longing. As far as she was concerned Glebe Street was now closed, never to open again, and although the people who had lived around her father and stepmother were no longer ‘grownups’, with that particular sense of mystery that older people seem to hold, but just human beings, they did not become less in her memory for all that.

  As if in recognition of a chapter’s having closed, Michael and Agnes had sold their house and moved to Marbella, where, in the warmth of the Spanish sun, and the absence of a stepdaughter to irritate Agnes, their marriage seemed not just to revive, but to thrive. About this too Trilby knew that Berry would say, paint on his fingers, his hair sticking up, coffee pot in one hand, cigarette in the other, ‘Ours not to reason why, thank heavens, Trilby love!’

  Now that everyone and everything seemed more settled, Trilby and Piers had finally plucked up the courage to send out invitations to their July wedding. It would be a small affair, with the reception to be held at Charlton. Nothing too grand, but nothing too dull either. For the reception Trilby was to wear a three-quarter-length tulle dress and simple flowers in her hair, as far from the kind of bride she had been to Lewis as was perfectly possible. Piers was to wear knee breeches and his favourite old jacket with a silk flowered waistcoat, but old-fashioned evening pumps, not tennis shoes, as on the night of their first party together.

  Lindsey was to be Piers’s best man, and the rest of their young either bridesmaids or attendants according to their sex, but all dressed in festive rural style, and set about with wild flowers as behoved the bucolic theme.

  For the great day, the cow byres, having been re-tarmacked by Harold especially for the occasion, were washed down by the boys with extra zest and Piers’s favourite cows scrubbed and garlanded, before the children turned their attention to the hen house and every other place that could be found.

  Mabel had made Topsie and Steve – still known as ‘the new puppy’ for all that he was now over two years old – special white satin collars, and herself a new floral dress, not to mention a floral waistcoat for Harold.

  On the morning of the wedding Charlie and Mary Louise were to be found busy in the kitchen making a wine cup that they kept reassuring everyone would have them all ending up with the hens and the dogs, under the trestle tables that were already being dressed and laid on the front lawns.

  But Berry was not forgotten, because his van was cleaned out and lined with rugs and Trilby driven to the church in it by Mrs Johnson Johnson. Happily for both the bride and Mrs J.J. the chapel was only half a mile away, because any more would have asked too much of the old jalopy.

  By the time the wedding party returned, the summer sun was high in the sky, the cows grazing peacefully, most of them having eaten their garlands, and the hens as always running about under the tables and chairs. With a good harvest forecast, all boded beautifully well under an English sky in a small part of what was still an English heaven.

  Only Aphrodite, looking stunning in a pink hat and dress, was, as usual, filled with that sense of melancholy which is so particular to certain personalities, owing to their insistence on trying to see into the future, instead of leaving it to take care of itself.

  ‘Too much on my mind, Trilby dear, you know. Just too much on my mind. Have you read this – about the end of the world? Very good, Trilby, really very good. You see the thing is, Trilby, tomorrow might never happen, that’s my point. And you will see what I mean when you read it. Tomorrow might never happen.’

  ‘Exactly Aphrodite, tomorrow may never happen.’

  ‘No, Trilby, no. Please, you must understand.’ Aphrodite tapped the paperback book she had taken from her handbag. ‘What I mean is, it might never come. Very good pâté, though!’

  Trilby smiled and looked around her at the happy guests gathered down the length of the table, or walking about under the apple trees with glasses in hand, surrounded by laughter, talk, sunshine, blue sky, colour.

  All that mattered to her was that yesterday had finally been defeated. Living with Piers at Charlton she had found that she no longer looked back, and although she did sometimes catch herself of an early summer morning imagining that she could hear her mother’s voice coming across the years to her, singing ‘I’ll Gather Lilacs in the Spring Again’, or the joyful bark of the dog that she had so loved as a child, she recognised that this was because, with Piers at Charlton, she had returned to the very life that she had once so enjoyed as a child.

  For the most part, though, all she actually heard in the early morning, besides the dawn chorus, was the sound of the pony’s hooves on the country road, and the milkman’s whistle borne on the clear air, piping out a song from his youth – except of course on Sundays – when in a perfectly fitting manner, the clear sound of that exquisite whistle turned to that of a hymn giving praise for all that lay around them.

  THE END

  About the Author

  Charlotte Bingham comes from a literary family – her father sold a story to H.G. Wells when he was only seventeen – and Charlotte wrote her autobiography, Coronet among the Weeds, at the age of nineteen. Since then she has written comedy and drama series, films and plays for both England and America with her husband, the actor and playwright Terence Brady. Her most recent novels include Goodnight Sweetheart, The Enchanted, The Land of Summer and The Daisy Club.

  Also by the Author

  CORONET AMONG THE WEEDS

  LUCINDA

  CORONET AMONG THE GRASS

  THE BUSINESS

  IN SUNSHINE OR IN SHADOW

  STARDUST

  NANNY

  CHANGE OF HEART

  GRAND AFFAIR

  LOVE SONG

  THE KISSING GARDEN

  THE BLUE NOTE

  SUMMERTIME

  DISTANT MUSIC

  THE MAGIC HOUR

  FRIDAY'S GIRL

  OUT OF THE BLUE

  IN DISTANT FIELDS

  THE WHITE MARRIAGE

  GOODNIGHT SWEETHEART

  THE ENCHANTED

  THE LAND OF SUMMER

  THE DAISY CLUB

  The Belgravia series

  BELGRAVIA

  COUNTRY LIFE

  AT HOME

  BY INVITATION

  The Nightingale series

  TO HEAR A NIGHTINGALE

  THE NIGHTINGALE SINGS

  The Debutantes series

  DEBUTANTES

  THE SEASON

  The Eden series

  DAUGHTERS OF EDEN

  THE HOUSE OF FLOWERS

  The Bexham trilogy

  THE CHESTNUT TREE

  THE WIND OFF THE SEA

  THE MO
ON AT MIDNIGHT

  Novels with Terence Brady

  VICTORIA

  VICTORIA AND COMPANY

  ROSE'S STORY

  YES HONESTLY

  Television Drama Series with Terence Brady

  TAKE THREE GIRLS

  UPSTAIRS DOWNSTAIRS

  THOMAS AND SARAH

  NANNY

  FOREVER GREEN

  Television Comedy Series with Terence Brady

  NO HONESTLY

  YES HONESTLY

  PIG IN THE MIDDLE

  OH MADELINE! (USA)

  FATHER MATTHEW'S DAUGHTER

  Television Plays with Terence Brady

  MAKING THE PLAY

  SUCH A SMALL WORLD

  ONE OF THE FAMILY

  Films with Terence Brady

  LOVE WITH A PERFECT STRANGER

  MAGIC MOMENT

  Stage Plays with Terence Brady

  I WISH I WISH

  THE SHELL SEEKERS

  (adaptation from the novel by Rosamunde Pilcher)

  BELOW STAIRS

  For more information on Charlotte Bingham and her books,

  see her website at www.charlottebingham.com

  TRANSWORLD PUBLISHERS

  61–63 Uxbridge Road, London W5 5SA

  www.transworldbooks.co.uk

  Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2001 by Doubleday

  an imprint of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © Charlotte Bingham 2001

  Charlotte Bingham has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.