In a Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor

Author:Elizabeth Taylor [TAYLOR, ELIZABETH]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780748131013
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2011-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

[5]

AT three o’clock in the afternoon, the damson-coloured sky looked solid above the frail trees. Kate, hurrying out into Dorothea’s garden—as she still thought of it—to fetch some dusters from the clothes-line, felt the air so heavy that she almost ducked her head; the sky seemed to come down to her eyebrows. ‘It looks like the end of the world,’ she thought—the menacing light over the lawn, the dusters hanging so still from the line. She was so much at one with the heavy atmosphere that she could almost fancy her own malaise having come first—creating the oppressive climate. She had been nervous all day, for reasons and in ways she had not been able to analyse. Her stomach twittered like a bird and there was a metallic taste on her tongue.

Just before the sky darkened, a little gale had sprung up and, seeing petals flying past the window, she had gone out quickly to pick some flowers for the drawing-room. Snatching up tulips, with her hair blown over her face, she had felt a sense of doom, as if, tugging unlovingly at the bulbs, she would cause the earth to open up and would be snatched down into the mouldy underworld, a dishevelled, middle-aged Persephone.

Indoors, windows rattled and doors slammed. The drawing-room looked like a stage-set in an empty theatre, threatening some dull suburban play which would never come to life, not even when, at last, the curtain rose and a cockney charwoman muttering comic deprecations came in to answer the telephone. After a time, the wind had dropped suddenly and, minute by minute, the darkening sky congealed.

She hurried indoors with the dusters. Charles and his daughter would arrive in the late afternoon and she intended to be out of the house by then. How he felt about returning to the house she could only guess, but he would want to do so alone with Araminta, she was sure. Apart from that, she was nervous of meeting him again and had decided to do so with her family round her—that evening, when they were to come for dinner and for their introduction to Dermot. Dermot was nervous, too, she knew.

The armchairs looked as if they were sitting up and begging. She took up the cushions and hurled them back into their places, for a less arranged and stagey effect. Then she lit the fire. Waiting for it to draw, she went to the window, and watched some white birds flying slowly past, above the changed landscape. The sky— just before the rain was tipped out of it—seemed to be as charged with anxiety as she was herself. At any moment she knew it must release its load; but her own immediate future was less certain.

A few drops hit the window, then the rain, slanting down faster, whitened, became hard. She could not walk home until it was over and to pass the time she went restlessly round the house, looked into all the rooms again, fidgeting with the furniture, straightening pictures and the towels on the rails.

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