Summer's Awakening (33 page)

As his niece flung her arms round his neck, Summer rose and went to the music centre to switch off the tape of the half-hour exercise programme they did together most evenings when in New York.

It was now more than a year since she had reached her permanent goal weight and, after eight weeks on Maintenance, achieved Lifetime Membership of Weight Watchers. As long as she stayed within two pounds of her goal weight, and attended one meeting a month, that meeting was free of charge.

But although she was now a slim girl with a small waist and slender legs, she was never quite convinced that this would always be her shape. The fear of regressing lurked at the back of her mind. She knew that many reformed fat people did revert. Their own cells conspired against them to replace the lost flesh.

Whenever James re-entered their lives the spectre of her obesity came with him. He remembered her as she had been and perhaps he always would.

Although since their first trip to New York they had made a number of journeys about the world with him, they hadn't seen anything like as much of him as she had once hoped. He was absent from their lives far more often than he was present. Long-distance telephone calls, amusing postcards and unexpected presents kept Emily happy when he was not there. But by checking through her pocket diary, Summer had once worked out that in the six months preceding the date of her check he had spent only sixteen days with them.

Although, inwardly, she was delighted to see him, her greeting was cooler than Emily's.

'Hello, James. How are you? she said politely, shaking hands with him.

His brown hand closed over hers and his tawny eyes made a comprehensive assessment of the figure inside the black leotard and black footless exercise tights.

The disappearance of her superfluous flesh had revealed an unexpectedly fine-boned and well-proportioned frame. As his swift up and down scrutiny included her small, round breasts clearly outlined by the clinging stretch-fabric of the leotard, and the contours of her hips and thighs, she felt her pulse quicken and found herself imagining what it would be like if he stretched out his hand and ran it slowly down her body from shoulder to hip. But her face revealed nothing of the sensual reactions he stirred in her.

'I'm well—and you are five pounds too thin,' he informed her.

'In your opinion,' she said equably.

'Why are you back a week sooner than you thought you would be, James?' Emily broke in.

For the past twelve months she had been growing her red hair which was now shoulder-length, although at the moment it was tied back with a ribbon in a curly pony-tail.

'Aren't you pleased to see me?' he asked teasingly.

Still standing close to him, she linked her arm with his and beamed lovingly up at him. 'Of course. Everything's twice as much fun when you're with us.'

'I was going to spend this week in San Francisco on my way back from Japan, but I changed my plans,' he explained, looking down at his niece with an expression reserved for her.

More than one person, observing the affection between them, had mistaken them for father and daughter. It was a bond strengthened by Emily's passionate interest in computers. When they were alone together, or with only Summer present, much of their conversation was in the esoteric jargon of computer buffs. Sometimes, at the end of a meal, they would apologise to her for spending the whole time engrossed in a discussion in which she couldn't take part. But they knew that she didn't mind being excluded from these conversations because she had an absorbing interest of her own. Often, thinking about it, she would become oblivious to her surroundings.

'Summer's in one of her trances,' Emily would say, passing a hand back and forth in front of her tutor's face to rouse her from her abstraction.

Wherever he travelled, James invariably returned with a present for his niece and something which Summer could use in what was at present a hobby but she hoped might become a profession.

'While I was in Japan I was given some beads. They're in my briefcase. Come and have a look at them,' he said to her.

They went with him down the hall to his bedroom where Victoria's husband, José, who combined the duties of butler and valet, was unpacking his employer's suitcase.

James unlocked his black leather briefcase and took out a box like a small-ish cigar box. He put it on top of a chest of drawers with a lamp on it, opened the hinged lid and removed a piece of protective wadding.

Arranged in rows on another piece of wadding—and clearly the box contained several similar layers under the top one—an array of small pearls gleamed in the light from the lamp. They were not ordinary pearls. All were irregular in shape, and their colours ranged from pale bronze to the iridescent grey of a pigeon's neck feathers.

'D'you think you can incorporate these in one of your designs?' he asked.

Before Summer could answer, Emily said, 'Why are they such funny shapes and colours? Are they rejects?'

'No, they're a special kind of pearl. They're called Biwa pearls after Lake Biwa which is where they were first made. They're cultured in mussels, not oysters, and at first they weren't popular because of their odd shapes.'

'But now they're in fashion,' said Summer, who had seen twisted skeins of the pearls in the windows of fashionable jewellers on Fifth Avenue. 'They're too valuable for me to use. Why don't you have them made into a necklace for Emily to wear when she's older?'

'She'll have all the Lancaster jewels. These were a gift which I have no use for. You're welcome to them. But you may not find them inspiring,' he said, closing the box and handing it to her.

'I'm sure I shall. They're beautiful. Thank you.'

'And a little something for you, Freckles,' he said, producing a much smaller box.

'Oh... what a darling little thing,' his niece exclaimed, when she found that his present for her was
a
tiny curly-tailed pug dog carved out of ivory. 'But why has he got this hole in him?'

'Because it's
a
netsuke
which, in the days before Japanese dress became Westernised, was a toggle which helped to secure an
inro
to the girdle of a kimono. A kimono has no pockets. Anything a Japanese wanted to carry about with him, such as tobacco or medicine, was kept in a pouch called an
inro.
I thought if you put a cord through that
netsuke
you could wear it as a pendant or a belt.'

'You find the most super presents. I love him. Thank you.' She reached up to kiss his lean cheek.

He said, 'I'm going to take a shower now. Are you both eating at home tonight?'

'Yes, and I've a splendid idea which I'm dying to discuss with you.'

'I'll be all ears, as soon as I've changed.' He glanced at Summer. 'No date tonight?'

'Not tonight.'

Once again he appraised her slim figure, reminding her of his arbitrary remark that she was now underweight.

Conscious that however long she worked for him, she would never be at ease with him, she returned to the hall.

Emily, following her, said, 'Hold my little dog in your hand. Doesn't he have a nice smooth feel?'

Summer turned the
netsuke
in her palm, deriving the same tactile pleasure from it which the younger girl had felt. Outside Emily's door she handed it back and went on to her own room.

As she put the box of pearls on her desk, she wondered why James had said he had no use for them. Did that mean that his long-running affair with Loretta Fox, a divorcee of his own age who ran a contemporary art gallery, had come to an end? Was he, for the time being, without a woman in his life? Or was it merely that Loretta wasn't the type to wear Biwa pearls?

Summer had never seen her, but she had been coming across allusions to their association in newspapers and magazines for the past eighteen months. Even Emily was aware of her existence, although James kept his domestic life and his amorous life in strictly separate compartments.

His relationship with Ms Fox, as she styled herself, was not unlike that of a nineteenth-century man and his mistress. Obviously he saw her frequently when he was in New York, but in his household her name was never mentioned; she might not have existed.

Summer felt that, had she been Ms Fox, she would have resented being treated like a courtesan; never invited to his apartment, never introduced to his niece. But although one columnist had referred to her as an ardent feminist, apparently she accepted her exclusion from the other side of James's private life. Perhaps she was in love with him and her principles weren't proof against her feelings for him.

Summer's own love-life was as negative as it had been two years earlier. She had dated a number of men but none of them had succeeded in kindling a response to compare with her feelings towards James.

Feeling sure those emotions would never be requited, she had done her best to succumb to other men's charm but so far without success. To some extent this was because of the interrupted nature of her friendships with the opposite sex. No sooner had they begun to flourish than she was whisked away to live somewhere else. Two or three months later she would return to find her date now involved with someone else.

In the course of these abortive relationships she had learnt how to handle men who tried to rush her into bed. Not all of them did. After two decades of increasing permissiveness, the 'Eighties were seeing a swing away from hedonistic attitudes.

Most of the men she had dated—intelligent men in their late twenties—were not solely bent on a roll in the hay. They would have liked to make love to her. However, if she were not willing they weren't going to drop her on that account. She had other things to offer her men-friends. She had always been capable of talking and listening intelligently. Now, after two years of dedicated self-improvement, she was a girl who turned heads wherever she went. Not only because of her shapely size eight figure, but because of the style she had acquired.

She dressed well, but without much regard for being in vogue unless she happened to like whatever was currently the mode. Inexpensive copies of fad fashions didn't appeal to her. She preferred one luxurious silk shirt to several polyester dresses. There were not many clothes in her wardrobe, but they were all carefully chosen and kept in meticulous order so that she was never panicked by James's sudden decisions to take them to Florence or Montreal.

As she peeled off her leotard and tights, she wondered how long he meant to remain with them this time.

Everything is twice as much fun when you're with us,
Emily had told him. Asked to second that opinion, Summer would have had to amend it. James's presence wasn't fun for her; it was a kind of blissful torment during which she felt twice as alive—and twice as vulnerable to pain.

Emily's splendid idea was for a computer programme and she and James spent much of dinner discussing it while Summer thought about the Biwa pearls and how she might use them.

After dinner she left the others talking and went to her room to work on her latest design. It was a needlepoint evening bag, a simple envelope style with the flap embellished with beads, shells and twists of ribbon secured by gold metal threads.

She had been bending over her embroidery frame for some time when there was a knock at the door which made her straighten.

'Come in.' She knew before the door opened who it would be.

'Am I disturbing you?' asked James, pausing on the threshold. 'Emily is watching television for half an hour, and I'd like to talk to you about her.'

Taking her assent for granted, he came in and closed the door.

Her bedroom had a sofa and a comfortable armchair, but at the moment she was seated on the dressing stool which allowed her to pull the frame close to her.

'Won't you sit down?' She indicated the sofa on the far side of the room.

As he did so it occurred to her that her puritanical aunt would have thought that he should have asked her to go to his study rather than coming to her bedroom. Victoria might think the same if she came in to draw the curtains and turn down the bed. Summer herself, although she saw nothing improper in his presence in her room, found herself peculiarly conscious that conversation would not usually be what James had in mind when he entered a woman's bedroom.

Her boxes of threads and trimmings were set out on the bed with their lids off. With them, in its own small box which she took everywhere with her, was the object she regarded as her talisman—a perfect lion's paw shell, bought from a shell dealer during her second winter in Sarasota. She felt now that seeing and wanting the lion's paw necklace in Burdines had woken the designer in her.

Hitch your wagon to a star,
had been the advice of her favourite philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The rare shell had been her star, guiding her to her
métier.

Before sitting down James noticed the boxes of bits and pieces on the bed and went to look at them. She had several old beaded evening bags, discovered in thrift shops, too dilapidated to be usable but yielding unusual metal sequins and glass bugle beads of a kind no longer to be had. Sometimes she bought junk jewellery from dime stores because it had beads or gilt spacers which she could take apart and re-use in a different way.