Summer's Awakening (5 page)

'Dr Dyer! I heard you were here. How are you? It's good to see you.'

Watched by Emily and Summer, the two men exchanged cordial greetings. For the second time that day she saw the American, as he was now, employing the same potent charm she had seen him exert on his niece at the lunch table.

Towards her his manner had been courteous, but she had felt that he would have preferred to lunch with Emily
à
deux.
Indeed, Summer had suggested going back to the cottage for her lunch, leaving them to spend the rest of the day alone together. Then he had explained that the lawyer was arriving at two, and Emily had insisted she must eat with them.

Trying hard to be fair to the man, in spite of her intuitive conviction that he hadn't taken to her, she acknowledged that perhaps he hadn't actually 'exerted' his charm upon Emily, in the sense that a confidence trickster exuded false charm to gull his victims.

Perhaps with people
he
liked, James Gardiner always was a charming, warm personality. Unfortunately, before they had finished shaking hands, she had sensed that he was writing her off as a dowdy, uninteresting female. And she had to admit that even before she had met him, she had to some extent prejudged him—and not favourably.

Presently, after ten minutes' conversation, Dr Dyer said he had another call to make.

'I'll see you to your car,' said James Gardiner.

A few minutes after the two men had left the room, Summer noticed that the doctor had forgotten his gloves. But for Emily's disability, she would have asked her to run after him. However, running, or even hurrying, could make the child start to wheeze, so it was Summer who hastened to catch him up.

By the time she reached the end of the West Corridor where it joined the Gallery overlooking and surrounding the Great Hall, the men were on the other side, almost at the top of the Grand Staircase.

The acoustics of the Gallery were such that people on opposite sides could speak to each other across the abyss without raising their voices. She had already overheard the doctor talking about Barty, whom she took to be the local poacher referred to by James that morning.

She was about to call out 'Wait a minute' when she heard the younger man say, 'Have you had much to do with this hulking great girl who teaches Emily?'

'Summer? Yes... know her well. Her aunt was a patient of mine. A difficult, embittered woman, and not always kind to her niece. Summer has had a tough time of it since she lost her parents and came to England. She was born and brought up in America. She's a very nice girl, you'll find. A bit overweight, but that's—'

'Overweight! She's as fat as a pig,' was James Gardiner's caustic interjection. 'She never stops eating. Chocolate biscuits with her coffee this morning. Two servings of dessert at lunch. She must weigh as much as I do, and most of her weight is blubber.

They were descending the stairs now, their backs to the spot where Summer had instinctively paused when she heard his question to the doctor.

She had not intended to eavesdrop but, while Dr Dyer was replying, she had been unsure what to do. Already James Gardiner had referred to her in terms which must cause him embarrassment if he realised she had overheard.

Now, after his brutal description of her being 'as fat as a pig', she was literally frozen with shock.

Dr Dyer said, 'I seem to remember you used to be able to pack away an amazing quantity of food, James. You always made very short work of any cakes and buns my wife offered you, after I'd stitched you up—or extracted pellets from your backside,' he added, with a reminiscent guffaw.

James did not join in his laughter. His tone incisive, he said, 'I'm not sure that a girl who's an uncontrollable glutton is a suitable mentor for Emily. How serious is her asthma? I was under the impression that, with the development of inhalants, it was now as manageable as diabetes. Isn't Ian Botham an asthmatic?'

'Yes, he's had it since he was a youth, and it hasn't stopped him becoming one of England's greatest cricketers,' agreed the doctor. 'Personally, I think Emily's asthma is something she will grow out of. Meanwhile, in my opinion, Summer is an ideal person to have charge of her. They've established a bond of affection which you'd be most unwise to break. I'd go as far as to say that Emily is fonder of Summer than she ever was of her mother. You didn't know Lady Edgedale. She never struck me as having a maternal nature. She was very good-looking, and my wife thought her vain; more interested in her clothes and in going to parties in London than in spending time with her daughter.'

'Not accusations which anyone could level at Miss Roberts. She doesn't appear to give a damn what she looks like. However, if you feel she's good for Emily, at least for the present—'

Summer heard no more. The sound of their voices was fading, and she had recovered the power to move and was going back the way she had come.

Still clutching the leather gloves, but with her errand driven out of her mind by the scalding humiliation of being called that
great hulking girl... fat as a pig... an uncontrollable glutton...
she walked blindly along the corridor; her footsteps making no sound on the long row of Persian rugs laid end to end, a lane of time-mellowed colour on the wax-polished floorboards ranged with seventeenth-century chairs, antique chests and fine lacquer cabinets.

Halfway along, she realised she couldn't go back to the schoolroom. She had to have time to recover before Emily saw her. At the moment it was all she could do not to break down in tears.

Fat as a pig... fat as a pig...
the cruel words rang in her ears, making her cringe with chagrin. How could she ever face him?—knowing that he held her in contempt; that he didn't see her as a woman, only as a shapeless hulk, a great greedy lump of blubber who couldn't stop stuffing herself.

Her throat tight, her vision blurred, she stopped by the huge gilded mirror which reflected the break in the corridor where a short landing led to stairs going up to the schoolroom floor and down to a lobby between the gun room and the billiard room.

For a long time she had avoided catching sight of herself in full-length mirrors or shop windows. The only mirror she looked in was the one above her bathroom basin; a small rectangle of glass which reflected her head and neck when she brushed her teeth and washed her face, night and morning.

Now, as she forced herself to look at what other people saw—her outward and visible persona; not the real Summer Roberts, her inner self—a low groan of shame and despair burst from her quivering lips.

Because all he had said was true. She looked a fat slob... a mess.

How many times had she told herself: Tomorrow I'll start a serious diet. Tomorrow I'll cut down on sugar... stop eating chocolate... peanuts. Next week I really will start to get into shape. Starting next month, without fail, I'll begin a whole new regime; no snacks, no second helpings, no eating biscuits in bed.

Promises... secret pledges... New Year resolutions... good intentions. None of them ever fulfilled because, every time, she had lacked the willpower to starve herself. If it had been for just a week or two, she might have managed it. But not for the months and months it would take to dissolve the fat which had been slowly accumulating all through her teens.

And now, all at once, it was too late.

Today, when she wanted so badly to be slender and graceful, and turned out with casual elegance, she looked even worse than usual.

As her chest heaved with suppressed sobs and she felt her control giving way, her ears caught the sound of hurried footsteps crossing the marble floor of the Great Hall.

He was coming back! Perhaps on reaching the car Dr Dyer had noticed his gloves were missing. Guessing that, with his long legs and muscular physique, James Gardiner would mount the staircase much faster than he walked down it, for an instant she was overcome with panic. She wanted to run, to hide, to find a dark, secret place to curl up and cry as she had, long ago, under the bedclothes, when she first came to England and knew that never again was she going to be kissed goodnight.

But she had been only ten then. Now she was twenty-two. Too old to cry. Too old to show her feelings.

By the time James Gardiner came round the corner from the Gallery, she was moving slowly to meet him, her emotions under control.

'Dr Dyer has lost his gloves—ah, you've got them. Good.'

As he took them from her, he scarcely glanced at her face.

She watched him striding away, his broad upper back tapering to a lean waist and hips, his well-brushed glossy dark hair just touching the back of his shirt collar.

In that moment her usually pliant and amiable nature was swept by violent emotions quite foreign to her normal temperament. She felt anger, and fierce hostility and, above all, a burning desire to retaliate.

How, she had no idea. The desire, though strong, was vague, expressing itself in the thought: I'll show you. You wait, Mr Gardiner. I'll show you... damn you!

It was dark when she cycled back to the cottage near the village school of which, at one time, Miss Ewing had been in charge.

Summer put her bike in the shed at the end of the garden. The back yard she had called it at first, before Aunt Margaret had corrected her.

The door at the rear of the cottage led directly into the kitchen-cum-breakfast-room. There was no dining room and only a very small sitting room. (
'Not
living room, Summer. In England we say sitting room or, in a larger house, drawing room.') But as they never entertained, the lack of space hadn't mattered.

In all the years she had lived there, until Miss Ewing's first stroke, they had never had anyone to supper, or even to coffee and biscuits. To a child whose parents had delighted in impromptu parties for the friends made everywhere they went, Miss Ewing's belief in keeping herself to herself had been incomprehensible.

Since her aunt's death, Summer had made some improvements to the warmth and comfort of the cottage. The practical side of her nature, repressed by her aunt's insistence that she concentrate on her studies, had finally found expression in hanging more suitable wallpaper—small spriggy designs by Laura Ashley—over the ugly patterns chosen by Miss Ewing.

She hadn't enough money to make all the changes she would have liked, but gradually it was becoming a more welcoming place to come back to and spend her solitary evenings.

The absence of a television was no hardship to her, but lately she had been thinking it would be nice to have a cat. Until Emily's grandfather had died, she had seen herself staying at the cottage for at least the next three or four years. Marriage, or living with someone, had not been in her mind for a long time—not since that last blind date organised by well-meaning girl-friends.

Sometimes at night, before sleeping, she would let her imagination conjure romantic fantasies in which, slim and beautiful, she played the part of the mysterious Barbara dei Trechi whose love affair with the Chevalier Bayard resulted in the birth of his only known child, a daughter; or of Mary Wilemson, the Dutch girl whom Lion Gardiner had married while he was serving in the army of the Prince of Orange and whom, a year later, he took to Massachusetts with him.

Some of her father's forbears had come from Holland, and perhaps that was why, of the two passionate day-dreams she had so often replayed in her mind at night, she had always identified best with Mary, the pioneer bride unafraid of the dangers and hardships as long as she had Lion to protect her.

Now James Gardiner's coming had made it impossible for her ever again to think of Lion Gardiner without seeing, in her mind's eye, the compelling dark face of the man who had adopted his surname in preference to his own patronymic. And with the thought of him would come the wounding echo of his indictment of her as a gross, ungainly frump; someone who would never see a man's eyes light with desire when he looked at her, or surrender to real-life embraces as ardent as those she had invoked in her day-dreams.

That night, as she lay in bed after putting her light out, watching the full moon appear and disappear as a rising wind drove ragged clouds across the winter sky, her mind was full of a vengeful determination to make James Gardiner eat his words.

She had had nothing to eat since coming home, and only two cups of black coffee instead of her usual glass of milk with supper, and a mug of hot chocolate at bedtime. Knowing that she didn't need any more food that day after eating a substantial lunch at the Castle, she had been determined to begin her new regime immediately.