Summer's Awakening (39 page)

'Let me take your coat.' She moved round behind him.

'Thanks.'

'I'm afraid we have a guest to supper. We weren't expecting you, and—'

'No need to apologise. Who is it?'

'Raoul Santerre. He took us to hear Placido Domingo at the Met last week and this is by way of a return.

Whatever comment he might have made was forestalled by the doorbell, heralding the arrival of one of the porters with his baggage. This was a sound which could be heard in the living room even though tonight the double doors were closed. As Summer was putting his coat on a hanger in the closet and he was opening the outer door, Emily appeared.

'James!' Her face lit up.

She flung herself into his arms for
a
hug. As he looked down at her, Summer saw his hard, cynical face take on the softer expression and the look of indulgent affection which was his invariable reaction to the sight, after an absence, of his niece's fiery red mop and ear-to-ear beam.

'You're just in time for a gourmet dinner cooked by Summer,' she told him.

'So I hear.' He thanked the porter for bringing up his suitcase and hanging bag, closed the outer door and said to Summer, 'Am I going to ruin the soufflé if I take a quick shower first?'

She said, 'Dinner won't be ready for half an hour yet, and there's nothing to spoil if I have to hold it back longer. Why don't you have a hot tub with a whisky sour or a daiquiri?'

She knew there was a hot tub in his bathroom because sometimes, when he was away, she and Emily used it. The first time she had seen his Manhattan bathroom, she had been amazed. It had trees growing in it; and a wall of mirror-glass which reflected the fabulous view from the huge floor-to-ceiling window; and a trapeze like the one which the butler had told her James had rigged in an attic at Cranmere.

'I'll do that,' he agreed. 'I'll be exactly twenty-five minutes.'

She went back to the kitchen where she had been making the sauce for curried eggs. She had already shelled the lightly boiled eggs and chopped the chives to sprinkle over the curry sauce. The Chicken Normandy was cooking in a casserole in the stove and she was going to steam the vegetables while they were eating the first course.

As she was piping mashed potato on to a baking tray, Emily came in followed by Raoul.

'James wants champagne. Raoul is going to open it for us.'

She showed him the special insulated and temperature-controlled cupboard in which there was always a selection of the best champagnes, including the rare still champagne known as
vin nature.

'Her uncle is a man who knows how to enjoy his fortune,' said Raoul when, after he had poured some champagne for Summer and himself, and half a glass for Emily, she had gone off to take the bottle and an empty glass to James. 'He's not, like many of our customers, a man with more money than taste.'

She was about to reply that James came from a family which had been rich for centuries when she thought better of it, and said only, 'No, he's very discriminating.'

He watched her finish piping the Duchess potatoes.

'I can see you enjoy doing that. You don't despise the domestic arts?'

'Oh, no—I like them. I'd love to have a place of my own, which I could furnish and where I could give dinner parties.'

'My friend, Louise, who decorated my apartment, wasn't domesticated. She was very good at her profession and always beautifully dressed, but she couldn't cook and she didn't want to have children,' he said, contemplating his glass with a sombre expression.

'Are you still in love with her, Raoul?' she asked gently.

Somehow she felt it was all right to ask him a question she would never have dared to put to James, had it arisen.

He looked up. 'No—no, I'm not. I was in love with her, but not any more. It was mostly sex between us, and that isn't enough for a marriage which is going to last. My attitude to marriage is French, not American. I'm not a practising Catholic, but I don't believe in divorce. Marriage should be for life. Do you agree?'

'I'd like
my
marriage to be for life.' She put the tray of potato rosettes in the oven to set for a few minutes while she beat an egg to brush over them.

'Have you ever loved a man, Summer?'

Avoiding a direct answer, she said, 'I feel there's plenty of time. I'd like to achieve something on my own account before I settle down to being Mrs John Doe—although designing should mesh with marriage better than some careers.'

As she slipped her hands into the pockets of a double oven mitt, preparatory to taking out the baking tray after another minute or two, he came round to her side of the work-island and said, 'I think you're going to make someone a very happy man.'

And then he tipped up her chin and kissed her lightly on the lips.

'Oh... sorry!'

Sweeping through the swing door, Emily saw what was happening and hurriedly backed out.

Inwardly, Summer groaned. She didn't mind Emily seeing Raoul kissing her, but she didn't want James to be told and, sooner or later, Emily always told him everything.

She said, smiling, 'You're distracting me from my duties. I think you'd better go back to the living room or dinner may wind up a burnt offering.'

An answering smile in his blue eyes, he said, 'Okay, I'll get out of your way.'

James was in the living room with the others when she summoned them to the dining table. The worn look had gone. He looked refreshed and revitalised.

The dinner was a success. The curried eggs, which she served in white bowls on green cabbage-leaf saucers, looked attractive in their orange-coloured sauce with a sprinkling of dark green chives, and the yolks were just as they should be, still slightly fluid.

The Chicken Normandy, cooked with smoked bacon, apples and New England applejack in place of Calvados, the French apple brandy specified by the recipe, was eaten with relish by everyone.

To complete the meal she had assembled an interesting cheese board, the cheeses bought at Zabar's, a West Side delicatessen recommended by Raoul, which had also supplied the French bread.

'That was a splendid meal, Summer. I must make sure I always come home on Victoria's night off,' said James, leaning back in his chair at the head of the table.

'Thank you. I'm glad you enjoyed it.'

Emily helped her to clear the table and load the dishes in the dishwasher.

While Summer was making coffee, Emily said, 'I'm sorry I barged in at the wrong moment.'

'You didn't,' Summer said lightly.

She would have liked to add,
But I'd rather you didn't mention to James that Raoul kissed me.

But then Emily would want to know why, and that was something she couldn't explain, except by saying that James might tease her, which was only one of the reasons she didn't want him to know she and Raoul were now on kissing terms.

The two men were drinking Armagnac and talking politics when they joined them.

'We haven't finished our game of backgammon, Emily,' said Raoul.

The two of them moved away to the backgammon table, leaving Summer to pour out the coffee while James went to choose some music.

The tape he selected began with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing
Sei Nicht Bos
from
Der Obersteiger.
As the lovely soprano voice began the song of an ambitious girl rejecting the courtship of a young fisherman—'Don't be cross, it can never be. God bless you and don't forget me'—he relaxed his long frame in a comfortable chair.

Taking a cup of coffee to him, she wondered what kind of relationship he had with Loretta Fox that it wasn't to her apartment that he went for relaxation at the end of a gruelling trip.

Perhaps she was like Raoul's ex-girl-friend, primarily a careerist who had no use for traditional male and female roles. Maybe she never wanted to lean on his shoulder, or sometimes to cosset him.

But what kind of woman never needed to feel taken care of by a strong, protective, dominant male? And what kind of man, however powerful in his public life, never wanted, in private, to have an adoring female waiting on him? It must be an arid relationship which excluded those elements of human nature and confined itself to sex, she reflected.

Having beaten Raoul at backgammon, Emily said, 'You haven't told James your most exciting news, Summer.' She perched on the arm of his chair. 'One of her belts is going to be featured in
Vogue.'

'Really? Congratulations, Summer.'

He sounded genuinely impressed, but she was conscious that it must seem a trifling achievement to a man who had made the name Oz a household word.

Later that night, lying awake, she wondered what, if any, significance to attach to Raoul's kiss before dinner. Had it, like James's kiss, been merely an impulse? Or a sign Raoul felt they were two of a kind who might one day become more than friends?

Another Frenchman, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, had written:
Love does not consist of gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.

With Raoul that would be possible. They had so much in common. Perhaps it had been destiny which had brought them together at the Bernier lecture. Perhaps he was the man who could cure her of her ill-advised love for James.

James's cottage on Nantucket was a spring and fall retreat rather than a summer place.

In winter not many people other than the hardy Nantucketers stayed on the flat, windswept island thirty miles south of Cape Cod. In high summer it swarmed with tourists. Only between those seasons was it at its best; and its peak of perfection were warm, cloudless days in late spring when all the fine old trees and well-kept gardens in the town surrounding the port were in fresh green leaf, and the white picket fences and the white window trims on the old grey-shingled houses built by whaling captains, and others who had prospered in the island's first heyday, were bright with fresh paint as the islanders prepared to receive the summer people.

On a sunny morning in May, before Memorial Day when the holiday season started, the quiet streets of Nantucket Town with their brick sidewalks and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century houses, ranging from the white-columned mansions of the whaling merchants to the more modest dwellings of the craftsmen who serviced the ships, were a delightful place to wander.

For a hundred years, Nantucket had been the world's premier whaling port. Because that historic time in the island's annals had been followed by disasters and depression, the town had escaped the modernisations which would have destroyed the original character of the place. Instead, it had survived its reverses to become one of the nation's architectural jewels; an unspoilt example of how a flourishing maritime community had lived and contributed an important chapter to the history of America.

In Nantucket, Summer and Emily lived in shorts and sneakers and went everywhere on foot or by bicycle. If the weather was cool they wore Nantucket Reds—brick-coloured yachtsmen's trousers which gradually faded in the wash to a soft pink—and handnitted black sheep's-wool sweaters from the Irish imports shop on Main Street. If it rained, they wore foul-weather gear.

The cottage was reached by a cat-walk from the end of one of the old wharves. It was built on pilings and, at night, they could lie in their bunks and listen to the water lapping against the heavy timbers which supported
The Fo'c'sle.
The name was a seaman's abbreviation for the forecastle or crew's quarters.

The cottage was kept in order by an energetic, cheerful widow, Hetty O'Brien. It had a double bedroom where James slept, and two smaller bedrooms with bunks, one above the other. The kitchen was tiny, like a galley on a yacht, and the living room wasn't large. However, there was also a spacious roofed balcony outside the living room and this, when the weather was fine, was where they spent most of their time, surrounded by the comings and goings of the waterfront.

There were always two or three seagulls standing on the ridge of
The Fo'c'sle's
shallow-pitched roof, and sometimes a gull would perch on the top of the flagpole from which, when they were in residence, they flew the Stars and Stripes.

Their third spring sojourn in Nantucket was the best yet. Everywhere they went they were recognised and given friendly greetings by the local people, and by now they had a wide circle of friends among other people 'from off' who loved Nantucket and had weekend and vacation houses there. Even when James was not with them, they had many invitations to brunches, barbecues and beach picnics.