Summer's Awakening (24 page)

During the morning, to Emily's delight, Skip came by. She hadn't expected to see him on Christmas Day, and certainly not to receive a present from him. It was a belt clasp in the form of two gilt turtles, nose to nose.

Grinning at her ecstatic thanks, he turned to Mary Hardy to say, 'If you need any help with anything while Mr Antonio is away, be sure to call me.'

'That's a very nice, thoughtful young man,' said the housekeeper, when he had gone.

Summer agreed. She hoped the child's other hero, her uncle, would be equally thoughtful and telephone her. In spite of what she had said to Emily at breakfast, she thought it unlikely that being a member of a house party would prevent James from telephoning. If he didn't call, it would be for selfish reasons, not Because he couldn't. He was the kind of man who would always find a way to do anything he really wanted to do.

When, at noon, the telephone rang, Emily dashed to answer it, her face alight with expectation. Almost at once her expression changed to disappointment.

'It's for you, Summer. Someone called Hal.'

Summer took the receiver. She said, perhaps a little too briskly, 'Hello, Hal. Merry Christmas.'

'Merry Christmas. Have I picked a bad time to call you?'

'No, not at all. Where are you? At your sister's house?'

'Yeah. Drinking beer with my brother-in-law. I'm darned if I'm going to diet on Christmas Day.'

'I'm going to try to. I haven't sinned up to now. But I'm further from my target than you are. I can't afford to.'

'You know something? You're a lovely girl whatever you weigh. See you.' As abruptly as James, he rang off.

'Who is Hal?' asked Emily, after Summer had replaced the receiver.

'He belongs to my Weight Watchers class.'

'I didn't know
men
went to Weight Watchers.'

'Why not? They have weight problems, too.'

'Is he the person you've been having coffee with after meetings?' Mrs Hardy asked her.

'Yes, he is.' She tried to sound casual.

At that moment the telephone rang again. Thinking it was Hal calling back, she picked up the receiver. 'Hello?'

'Merry Christmas,' said James Gardiner's voice.

'Oh... Merry Christmas to you. Thank you very much for my present. I'll put Emily on.'

'I'll speak to her in a moment. How are you liking Christmas Day in the sun?'

'Very much. We've just come in from the pool. In a little while we're going to help Mrs Hardy with the final preparations for lunch.'

'I'm dressing for dinner. Here, we've been skiing all day.'

'Well... Christmas is a moveable feast.' She didn't know why she had said that; except that it was the only answer which came to mind.

The last response she expected was to hear him say, 'If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.'

She had bought Ernest Hemingway's book
The Moveable Feast
in a second-hand bookshop in Oxford. She had an indistinct memory of her father speaking admiringly of Hemingway's contribution to American literature. The lines which James had just quoted were from a letter Hemingway had written to a friend before she was born. They had fired her with a longing to see Paris, even though she knew the city as he had described it had gone forever, the Paris of the 'Twenties.

One of her teenage pipe-dreams—more down to earth than the fantasies woven around the Chevalier Bayard and Lion Gardiner—had been of meeting someone who had read all her favourite books and with whom she could spend hours discussing them.

Before she went up to Oxford, she had day-dreamed that she would meet him in a bookshop. He would be a fellow undergraduate, or perhaps one of the younger dons. They would both reach for the same volume...

But of course it had never happened like that. Initially, even intellectual men were drawn to a girl by her appearance, not her mind.

That the first man ever to quote to her a passage which had the magic of poetry to her should turn out to be someone she actively disliked was a most disconcerting shock.

'Have you ever spent Christmas in Paris?' She was thinking of Sofia Damaskinos who, if she had worked for
Paris Match,
must have had an apartment in Paris.

'No, I haven't. I don't think any large city is an ideal place to spend Christmas. It's a small town festival.'

Summer agreed, although a sophisticated ski resort like Gstaad, where many of the chalets belonged to royalty, movie stars and other international celebrities, wasn't her idea of a small town.

However, she didn't say this. 'Emily is dying to speak to you. I'll put her on.'

She went back to where she had been sitting before Hal's call.

Only half-listening to her pupil's excited babble, she told herself that it wasn't really remarkable that James should know that piece by heart. Probably all Americans who had been to college would know it. Hal Cochran wouldn't, but Skip might.

What should bother her more than James's familiarity with Hemingway was that parting remark of Hal's. Perhaps, after a period of abstinence, a few beers had had more effect than in his pre-Weight Watchers days. Maybe that remark about her being a lovely girl had been the beer talking. She hoped so. Hal was a pleasant person, but apart from watching their weight they had little else in common.

By the end of January, Summer's Attendance Book showed a loss of twenty pounds.

She had never repeated the five pound loss after her first week on the programme. One week, not because of any backsliding, she had lost only three-quarters of a pound. But in general her weekly losses had ranged between two and four pounds. Now, with an aggregate of twenty, she was still a fat girl, a long way from being a slim one, but a shape was beginning to emerge.

As she spent so much time in a bathing-suit, instead of attempting to alter the one she had bought in Miami, she had bought another. She hoped it wouldn't be long before she was fit to be seen in a two-piece and could tan her midriff to match the rest of her.

For that was the second great change which living in Florida had wrought; she was now on the way to becoming as golden brown as Skip.

The third change in her appearance was her hair. No longer confined in the unbecoming coil of braid, it now swung loose on her shoulders, re-styled by Mrs Hardy's hairdresser. But the highlights had come about naturally. She had not had to sit with some of her hair pulled through holes in a plastic cap, in the way she had seen other women achieving their highlights. Hers had been bleached by the sun. The wonderful, warm, day after day winter sun which they continued to enjoy while most of the rest of America endured months of penetrating cold.

Early in January she had been handed details of the Pepstep Program, a choice of two exercise regimes designed to promote loss of fat. However, as she was already swimming an increasing number of laps in the pool, taking long daily walks on the beaches in search of shells and, twice a week, attending aerobic dancing classes with Mrs Hardy, she felt that it wasn't necessary for her to do Pepstep. But this was the only way in which she failed to conform to a Weight Watcher's life-style. In every other respect, she adhered to the programme rigidly.

During March she lost another thirteen pounds, making the second bathing-suit start to fit loosely. She went to Edlyn, a shop in St Armand's Circle, and bought herself some new clothes; an emerald-green wraparound skirt which would adjust as her hips deflated, and a green and white shirt. At another shop she bought some green canvas espadrilles, the rope-covered wedges equivalent to medium high heels. When she tried her new outfit on, with a new, smaller bra, the full-length mirror in her bedroom reflected a girl who seemed to be a different person from the plodding, double-chinned frump she had glimpsed in the mirrors in Harrods.

Emily had also changed, although not as visibly as Summer. She had begun to menstruate and her flat chest was starting to show some signs of feminine shape. When she wasn't in her bikini, she lived in white shorts and sun-tops, and a belt clasped by Skip's gilt turtles.

She had long weekly chats on the telephone with her uncle who called her from wherever he was—Manhattan, the west coast, Chicago. But when, at the end of their conversations, she asked when he was coming to Florida, he was always too busy.

Summer was glad that he called Emily regularly, but she doubted that he would exert himself to visit her until he felt like a vacation, which might not be till the spring, if then.

From time to time, during this period, she would dream that she had broken her diet, or that she was back in England, still 'an uncontrollable glutton' and 'as fat as a pig'. She would wake up sweating with horror, as from a nightmare.

One night she had a particularly horrible dream
in
which it was she who was partially paralysed, and her aunt who was caring for her. She was propped up in bed at the cottage and Miss Ewing was forcing her to eat a mountain of stodgy suet dumplings. She was being spoon-fed, and each mouthful of the soggy white dough made her gag. But her aunt wouldn't listen to her pleas that she wasn't hungry.

'Nonsense, Summer. You must eat to keep up your strength. Dr Dyer gave me strict instructions that you were to have at least five dumplings at every meal. Come along—open your mouth.'

'I can't eat any more, Aunt Margaret. I'll throw up.

At this point she woke up, trembling, filled with rage and despair at her helplessness and the torture of being forced to eat those horrible white lumps of glob.

Even after she had switched on the light and could see that she was thousands of miles from the cottage, and fully mobile, not a bedridden hulk of blubber, she still felt upset.

Presently she was able to see the absurdity of Dr Dyer prescribing dumplings. It was strange how the subconscious mind twisted facts into fantasies. Her aunt had liked one or two dumplings as an accompaniment to meat and gravy, and Summer had taught herself to make excellent dumplings, as light in texture and weight as those in the dream had been heavy.

It was now half past one in the morning, but she felt wide awake and disinclined to lie down again. Perhaps she would read for a while. On impulse, she flung back the bedclothes and swung her feet to the floor. The room was warm. There was no need to put on a robe to go to the window and stand looking out at the garden. Not that she would see it with the light on. She turned off the bedside lamp and immediately the warm light was replaced by the silver radiance of moonlight.

From her window, she could see the pool which, although not illuminated by underwater lights at this hour, was clearly visible under the full moon. But for the vapour rising from the surface of the water, it might have been a summer night. The sky was full of stars, and the garden was full of flowers—hibiscus, poinsettia, cassia, solandra, plumbago and a dozen others.

The motionless, vaporous surface of the pool had a fairy-tale air. It reminded her of the setting of a ballet which she and Emily had watched on television recently. She half expected to see a troop of sylphides emerge from the shadows of the Madagascar palms and begin to dance round the pool deck. It was that kind of magical night.

Suddenly she wanted to be out there, floating in the water, star-gazing.

Her bathing-suit was in the shower where she had hung it to dry after her final swim of the day. As she was about to put it on, she thought: Why do I need a bathing-suit? Nobody's going to see me. I can swim in my skin.

The house had more than one staircase. There were the main stairs which they had first used on the day of their arrival, and two other flights, one leading from the entrance hall to the master bedroom and her room, and a staircase, originally for servants' use, from the kitchen to Mrs Hardy's quarters.

She padded downstairs with bare feet and only slipped on her thongs when she reached the door to the patio. Although she was wrapped in her terry-cloth robe, the outside air made her shiver as she crossed the patio, passed through the shadowy loggia and followed the path to the pool.

Arriving at the shallow end, she noticed that, beyond and to one side of the deep end, the hot water in the jacuzzi was wreathed in denser clouds of vapour than the main pool. But as she tossed her robe over a sun-bed, she was in too much of a hurry to immerse herself to look closely in that direction.