The Summer House by Alice Thomas Ellis

Author:Alice Thomas Ellis [Alice Thomas Ellis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Paul Dry Books
Published: 2013-04-23T00:00:00+00:00

THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT

My coffee had gone cold. It looked, I thought, as though it had died, since it had a grey, inert appearance and only something dead could possibly go cold in such heat. I might have been thinking like this because I was reading the obituary column in an old copy of The Times in order to discourage other club members from coming to talk to me, and I was not yet old enough to be cheered by the deaths of strangers. Somebody stood up at a neighbouring table so I read the list of forthcoming marriages with an assumed intense interest, reflecting that strangers who were engaged to each other were even more boring than strangers who had died. Then I saw two names I recognized and immediately I looked up and around to see if there was anyone present who would remember Monica—someone who would appreciate how very peculiar, and indeed amusing, this announcement was. It was quite pointless. Nobody here had met Syl. Nobody here knew the circumstances of our past. Nobody here would be diverted to learn that Syl was going to marry Monica’s daughter unless I acquainted them with the facts and I couldn’t very well do that. I was already regarded as not quite. That was how the women put it: ‘Well, darling—Lili is very good company and all that, but she isn’t quite...’ And most of them wouldn’t trust their husbands alone with me. Nor could I tell my own husband the details of my last days in England. He was a tolerant man, but there are limits.

I saw him coming towards me across the terrace and stood up waving the newspaper. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘look—Monica’s daughter’s going to marry Syl.’ ‘Who?’ said Robert. It was an unsatisfactory morning. I poured the dead coffee on to the bank of the Nile and called for a gin.

***

‘So,’ I said, ‘I’ve decided. I’m coming with you to England.’ Clever Robert painted pictures. He was having an exhibition in Soho. I had arranged with God to go regularly to Mass if we could sell a lot of these pictures. Robert said it was too short notice and we couldn’t afford it. I said, ‘I will sell some jewellery.’ Robert said I hadn’t got any left. I had. I had some new golden things that my aunt had given me only a short while before. They were an investment. My father, as was the Egyptian custom, had kept all the women of his family, continuing to feel responsible for even the sisters who had married. As a result, whenever my aunts made money—as they frequently did by buying and selling—they thought of it as family money and gave me some. They always wanted to invest it for me, to buy a little villa in Portugal, or a share in a little ship, but I would tell them I’d invest it myself in something English and they never felt they could argue with me for my mother had been the Anglaise and that made me a little different, not quite like them.

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