Summer's Awakening (19 page)

'What's a flub-rub?' Emily asked her.

The saleswoman grinned. 'Oh, that's
a
Weight Watchers joke. The girl who took my class, Betty, she was a natural comedienne. It was worth going to meetings for the laughs. She had us falling off our chairs. She'd been heavy herself—all the lecturers have. She weighed over two hundred pounds before she joined, but you'd never guess it to look at her. She has a great figure now. How d'you like this black and white?'

Summer felt none of the suits was going to do anything for her, or she for them. However, as Emily had to be taught to swim, it was impossible to shirk the ordeal of appearing in public with all her bulges on show.

In the fitting room there was a notice asking customers to wear their panties while fitting garments. She had sometimes looked longingly at the bright-coloured micro-briefs worn by her contemporaries, but she had always needed the control of a waist-high stretch panty.

As she struggled in and out of the suits, she could hear Emily telling the saleswoman about their flight and where they were going.

When she emerged, she had decided that the suit with the black bottom half and a white top, these colours separated by a diagonal band of deep pink, was the least conspicuous of the three.

'Do you need a wrap?' the woman asked. 'You do? These pareus are nice.' She took out a piece of fabric like an enormous scarf and showed them how it was worn, wrapped round the body with two of the corners knotted. 'Or these terry robes are useful because they can double as a beach towel.'

Summer chose an emerald-green robe, knee-length with loose sleeves and patch pockets, and Emily a shorter bright blue one.

'And how about thongs?' The saleswoman pointed out a bin of inexpensive rubber flip-flops.

While she was writing out the bill, Summer said, 'Was going to Weight Watchers classes really helpful when you were slimming?'

'Oh, sure—it made all the difference. I'd been yo-yo dieting for years. You know how it goes... up and down... up and down. Starving one week, stuffing the next. Weight Watchers was the big breakthrough for me. I've never looked back. You should try it. Don't they have classes in Britain? I thought it was world-wide now.'

'Yes, they do have classes in Britain, but not near where I lived.'

'Here there's a class almost everywhere. The little girl says you're going over to the Gulf coast. Sarasota... Bradenton... round there. Look it up in the Yellow Pages. I'm sure there'll be a class near you.'

'Yes... perhaps I will,' Summer agreed.

The saleswoman, who was about forty-five and wearing a lot of make-up which made her face look harder than it really was, said kindly, 'You do that, honey. You're young, you're pretty, and if you were to lose forty pounds you'd be really something. But dieting by yourself is too difficult. I know I needed help, and maybe you do. If you join Weight Watchers, the next time you're in Miami you'll be shopping for size eight.'

'Americans are very outspoken, aren't they?' said Emily, as they walked back to the hotel. 'I don't think an assistant in an English shop would have told you to join a slimming class, would she?'

'She might—if she'd had a weight problem and could see that I had one,' said Summer.

You're young, you're pretty...

The saleswoman's words had been balm on the still-raw wounds inflicted by James Gardiner. But forty pounds had been a tactful understatement—sixty was nearer the mark!

'You are pretty, Summer,' the child said. 'I was looking at you this morning, before you woke up. I tiptoed into your bedroom to see if you might be
nearly
awake. When you're asleep, your eyelashes are like little dark feathery fans. And your face is like petals on roses... all sort of velvety and lovely. But I don't like your hair,' she added bluntly.

'Now who's being outspoken?' Summer asked, laughing. At the same time she was deeply touched by her pupil's compliments.

'I don't mean I don't like the colour. It's your braid which isn't nice. At least not all wound round and pinned. Why don't you wear your hair loose?'

'It would be too long and untidy.'

'Then why not have some cut off. It would look nice the way the girl at the hospitality desk had her hair.'

'It costs quite a lot of money to have one's hair cut every few weeks. But perhaps now I have no household expenses I'll be able to afford it.'

There were quite a number of people round and in the pool when, wearing their new beach outfits, they approached the inviting expanse of shining blue-green water.

Mindful of James's warning, Summer had bought a tube of sun screen and applied plenty of it to Emily's shoulders and arms and to her own.

Most of the people round the pool were tanned in varying degrees. Nobody else was as pallid as they were. As, reluctantly, she shed her robe, she felt that anyone looking in their direction must be thinking: Ugh! What a horrible sight that great white whale ora girl is. She could only have felt more ashamed of her obese body if James had been there to watch her follow Emily to the pool's edge.

Sitting down on the rim and dangling her feet in the water, Emily said, 'It's beautifully warm.'

Summer lost no time in immersing as much of herself as the water in that part of the pool would cover. It came to just above her waist and she felt less noticeable with her lower half, if not hidden, at least partially camouflaged.

But presently, demonstrating the arm and leg movements of the breast stroke, and then supporting the child while she practised them, she became less self-conscious.

'If you want to go and swim in the deep part, I'll be all right. I won't go out of my depth,' Emily assured her, some time later.

'Okay, but I shan't be long.'

Using the stroke she had been teaching, Summer swam slowly towards another area of the pool. Then, drawing a deep breath and burying her face in the water, she changed to the crawl, her arms slowly rising and falling while her legs performed a rapid scissor-motion in the way her father had taught her, long ago.

She couldn't keep it up for long. Panting from the unaccustomed exertion, she rolled on to her back and lay floating, watching a seagull gliding in the sky above her, the outline of its wings gilded by the sunlight.

'Ah... lovely!' she murmured aloud, at the almost forgotten pleasure of drifting under a blue sky, in lukewarm water which flowed like silk against her skin and made her feel light and free, like the soaring gull.

They had a light raw-food lunch in the cavernlike setting of the Lagoon Saloon, one of the hotel's many restaurants, which was inside the rocks by the pool. They sipped their fruit juice cocktails looking out through one of the cascades at the island in the centre of the pool. Various kinds of seafood were set out in giant clam shells. Summer knew, from diets she had tried in the past, that seafood was high in protein and low in calories.

'When I asked James if he had stayed here,' said Emily, 'he said yes, he had, but it wasn't one of his favourite hotels although he thought it would amuse us. I wonder why he doesn't like it? I think it's super. Don't you?'

'Yes, but I expect his experience of hotels is much wider than ours is. If he's always travelling, he must be
a
connoisseur. The pool and the grounds here are lovely, but the hotel itself isn't what one would call a beautiful building; and the lobby and the public rooms are perhaps a bit flashy. Not in the cheap and nasty sense,' Summer qualified her last remark. 'All those chandeliers and statues obviously cost a small fortune. But I think they'd have more appeal to
a
sheik and his wives than to a man like your uncle.'

'I wonder what his house is like?'

'I've no idea. The only thing he told me about it was that it was built in 1929,' Summer answered.

She found herself intensely curious to see the house; not only because it was where they had to live until he chose to move them elsewhere, but also for what it might reveal about her employer's somewhat enigmatic character.

They were met at Sarasota-Bradenton airport by a small, neat, grey-haired woman in her late fifties who introduced herself as Mary Hardy, James's housekeeper.

She was driving a Cadillac with room for them both to sit beside her.

'It's just a few minutes' drive to the house,' she told them. 'You'll be glad to get settled after being in transit two days.'

They joined a stream of fast traffic on a main highway.

'We're beginning to feel sleepy,' said Summer. 'Although it's still afternoon here, we feel it's much later.'

'Yes, you'll feel that for a day or two. If you want to go to bed right away, you can. We thought you might be tuckered out so Mrs Antonio turned your beds down, all ready for you. Mrs Antonio cleans and her husband looks after the garden,' she explained. 'They live in the apartment over the garage. I have my bedroom and sitting room in the main house.'

As they stopped at traffic lights, she waved her hands towards some modern buildings on the far side of the road.

'That's the University of South Florida campus. Caples Hall, the house next door to Mr Gardiner's, belongs to the University. It was left to them by Mrs Ralph Caples who was the
grande dame
of Sarasota until she died, age ninety-eight, in 1971.'

A short distance beyond the intersection Mrs Hardy turned off the highway into a quiet side road bordered by wide stretches of grass and with a large older building visible at the far end.

'Surely that isn't Mr Gardiner's house, is it?' Summer asked.

Mrs Hardy laughed. 'No, no—that's the Ringling Museum of Art. Have you heard of John Ringling, the circus magnate?'

'No, I haven't.'

'They used to call him the Circus King of America. Way back in the 1920s, he put Sarasota on the map when he had the winter quarters of the circus moved here from Bridgeport, Connecticut. You can't see his mansion from the road—it's built right on the edge of the bay. It's called Ca'd'Zan which is Venetian dialect for House of John.'

'What is my uncle's house called?' asked Emily.

'In a minute you'll see,' said Mrs Hardy, turning left at the T-junction in front of the museum. 'This is Bay Shore Road where most of the rich people who came here in the early days built their winter houses. And here we are!'

She braked to drive under an arch capped with Roman tiles beneath which, inset in the terracotta-coloured wall, was a row of white ceramic tiles with the words
Baile del Sol
written on them in elegant dark blue script.

'What does it mean?' asked Emily.

'It's Spanish for Dance of the Sun,' the housekeeper told her. 'People who don't speak Spanish say the first word like bail, but it should be pronounced ba-ee-lay, Mr Gardiner told me.'

'Does he speak Spanish?'

'He speaks several languages. The last time he was down here, the computer was teaching him Chinese.'

The car was moving up a drive bordered by two rows of towering palm trees with smooth grey trunks and long, graceful, feathery fronds growing at the top.

'These are Royal Palms, said Mrs Hardy. 'There are all kinds of palms in the garden, including the Christmas palm which has clusters of bright red fruit at this time of year. If you're interested, Mr Antonio will tell you the names of them all.'

As she spoke,
a
curve in the drive brought the house into view.

Like the high, tile-capped wall round the garden, it was painted pale terracotta which, in the afternoon light, gave it a soft, welcoming glow. The roofs—there were many of them for the house was irregular in shape—were clad with more Roman tiles in age-speckled colours ranging from dark brown to pink. A creeper with a profusion of white flowers smothered parts of the façade between the tall downstairs windows, each topped with a group of three onion-shaped panes, giving
a
Moorish effect. All the paintwork was white, and the bedroom windows had white balconies, many with the foliage of pot plants cascading between the railings. These upper windows also had louvred shutters, all at present standing open. The shutters were painted a soft bluish-green. Either they had been faded by the sun, or the colour had been chosen to give that effect.

The instant she saw it, Summer knew that
Baile del Sol
was the kind of house her parents had loved. Whoever had built it had not done so with the object of displaying his wealth in the ostentatious grandeur of the
nouveau riche.
This house—one could see at
a
glance—had been the realisation of a different, more romantic ambition. Beauty and timeless serenity had been the inspiration here.