Summer's Awakening (56 page)

'That's what he said about you,' Summer told her. 'He gave me a beautiful miniature of an "unknown lady" in a blue silk dress for my last birthday. I asked then if he was still in touch with you. He said that, after a long interval, it was a mistake to go back to places or to seek out old friends. I—I think he was in love with you.'

The older woman smiled. 'Perhaps. It's a long time ago. I was not so much older than you are.'

Summer looked again at the portrait. The white open-necked shirt he was wearing emphasised the dark sheen of his hair and the burnished bronze of a naturally dark skin exposed to dazzling alpine sunlight. The portrait radiated health and strength, yet the eyes, when she studied them through the magnifying glass, held a curiously sombre expression as if, in spite of his looks and his privileged birth, he hadn't been a carefree young man.

'Let me look in my diary and see when I can fit you in,' said Miss Kendall. 'It shouldn't take more than two hours. Could you manage next Thursday morning, rather early... at a quarter to nine?'

When Summer had agreed and, reluctantly, given back the portrait—which she would have liked to study for much longer—she was shown some of the finest examples in the artist's collection.

James wasn't mentioned again, or only indirectly. But she went away feeling that perhaps, next time, she would learn something more; something which would help her understand the complex personality of the man she loved.

On Thursday Mrs Brown let her go up to the studio unescorted. As she mounted the upper flight she heard the sound of a typewriter and found that the typist was Miss Kendall, using two fingers but tapping away at great speed.

As Summer entered, she stopped. 'Heavens! Is it a quarter to nine already? Let me take your coat. Shall we use each other's first names today?'

Having directed Summer to a chair and hung up her raincoat in a corner concealed by a Chinese screen, she went on, I'm an early riser and between eight and nine I try to keep pace with my correspondence. At the moment I'm writing to one of my godchildren who is very unhappy because her parents are divorcing. Were Emily Lancaster's parents happily married?'

'I think they must have been reasonably content with each other. I was told that Lady Edgedale couldn't have any more children. In which case, if they hadn't been happy, I imagine her husband might have changed wives in order to secure the succession. Nobody seems to have expected James to reappear. But the reason why he left Cranmere is a mystery I've never fathomed.'

'You've been with him some time. Couldn't you have asked him?'

Summer shook her head. 'Even Emily, who's very close to him, has never raised that subject. Do you know the reason?'

'Yes, I do—but it was told to me in confidence.' The artist picked up her magnifying glass and came to where Summer was sitting. I'm going to study your eye in detail for a few minutes. Don't try not to blink. Look at the pictures on the wall behind my desk and try to ignore me.'

Knowing that she had been too precipitate in speaking about James's rift with his family, and had been deservedly snubbed for her inquisitiveness, Summer flushed.

'I wasn't sure what to do about eye make-up so I left it off,' she murmured.

'You don't really need it, except perhaps in the evening. You're lucky to have naturally dark eyelashes. I have mine dyed,' said Diana. 'Eye miniatures don't always include the eyebrow but I shall put yours in. They were sometimes framed with a lock of hair at the back. Do you want to have yours made up as a locket or a brooch? Or you could have it mounted to hang as a tiny picture. I'll send you to my favourite framer and let him show you the alternatives.'

While she was making one or two preliminary sketches of Summer's eye from different angles, Mrs Brown brought up two cups of coffee.

Putting aside her pencil to drop two minute white pellets into her cup, Diana said, 'The other day you suggested that I had been James's first love. Am I right in suspecting that you would like to be his last love?'

An even deeper flush suffused Summer's face. 'What makes you think that?'

'Something in your expression when you were looking at the portrait of him—and the fact that, unless he's changed a great deal, it would be difficult not to love him. She paused. 'I did. It began as a friendship, and ended as a love affair. Ending it, as I realised I must, was as painful, in a different way, as losing Ben, my first husband. I loved James with all my heart, but the age gap between us was too great. He was too young to be bound to anyone.'

She sipped her coffee, her hazel eyes kind and understanding as she looked at her sitter over the rim of her cup.

Summer said in a low voice, 'I don't aspire to be James's last love, but yes—I love him. It isn't just idle curiosity which makes me ask if you knew why he seems to have hated his father.'

'Lord Cranmere wasn't his father. James is the son of an American army officer, a hero of the Second World War who ended his career as a four-star General at the Pentagon and, as far as I know, is still alive.'

There was a long pause before Summer said, in a stunned tone, 'So that's why he looks so unlike the rest of the Lancaster's.'

'Yes, and it was because he took after his natural father that his legal father loathed him and made his early life hell for him. Even his mother was never nice to him. He adored her and couldn't understand why she was cold and unloving. In the end he found out—he was a living reminder of her lapse from grace... an affair with the commanding officer of a postwar American base not far from Cranmere.'

At last Summer understood why James had always referred to the Marquess as 'Emily's grandfather', never as 'my father'.

'I don't blame her for that,' Diana continued. 'In the different social climate of those times, she'd been pushed into marriage with a middle-aged man who preferred horses to women but needed an heir. She supplied him with one. Probably she would have had other legitimate children, but my guess is that heavy drinking had made Lord Cranmere impotent. Then, at a hunt ball, she met a dashing American who was everything her husband wasn't. Who can blame her for losing her head? Whether he, being unmarried, tried to persuade her to leave her husband, is something which will never be known. Perhaps he didn't. Being involved in the divorce of a member of the House of Lords, with all the attendant publicity, might not have improved his career prospects.'

'But if he had been a war hero, and he loved her, would he have cared about that?' Summer interjected.

Diana smiled. 'Most people aren't all of a piece. A man can be physically brave, but not have moral courage. Possibly the General didn't love her. Perhaps for both of them it was what the French call an
amourette...
an affair of the body rather than the heart. Anyway, although there appears to have been a lot of gossip at the time, nobody could have proved anything if James's splendid dark looks hadn't made him an obvious cuckoo in the nest.'

'How did he find out?'

'His brother—who was actually his half-brother—enlightened him. They'd had a quarrel about something and the older boy—was his name Gerald?—called James a rotten little bastard. In a flash, James realised it wasn't just an angry epithet. Somehow Gerald had found out something which explained why Lord Cranmere disliked him and his mother was never affectionate. He went to her and asked if it were true. She admitted that it was, and she made him feel it was his fault rather than hers.'

Summer remembered the night at her cottage in England when James had said:
No man with my income is ever avoided by women. If a man has power and money he can be the biggest bastard ever born; there'll always be plenty of women prepared to overlook his defects.

Her retort had been:
Are you a bastard, Mr Gardiner?

No wonder he had glared at her. Unwittingly she had touched him on a raw spot.

She said, 'Like you, I don't blame his mother for her affair with the General, but I find it hard to forgive her treatment of James.'

'She must have been a flawed personality to have made such a marriage in the first place. Her situation, following the birth of her second son, would have tested a strong, sound character,' Diana said thoughtfully. 'I've no doubt her husband gave her hell. He may not have minded her having affairs. He might even have accepted James, if he'd looked like her. But to have his wife's infidelity confirmed and advertised by the boy's resemblance to her lover must have galled him beyond endurance. What an atmosphere to grow up in!'

"Yes... terrible,' Summer agreed. 'It explains a great deal about him which I've never understood. May I ask you something very personal? How long did you know him?'

'For nearly three years. For a long time after that skiing holiday I saw him only spasmodically. I was still missing Ben and even though James was so tall I thought of him as a boy. It wasn't until he kissed me that I realised he wasn't; and that, if I didn't do something about it, our friendship would get out of hand. So I went to Greece, to the island of Patmos. Unwisely I wrote to him from there. Three weeks later he turned up.'

She paused to finish her coffee before going on, 'By that time he was almost of age... almost eighteen. I was renting a house built by a Patmian sea captain in the days when the island had a merchant fleet. I told James he could stay for two weeks... for a holiday. A year later, we'd been to most of the islands together. I didn't care if people thought me a cradle-snatcher. I was very happy. So was he, and for him that kind of happiness was a novel experience. The family who took him skiing had always been kind to him, but no one had loved him before. It was good for him... good for both of us.'

They were sitting almost knee to knee and now she rose from her stool to fetch a wheeled table of the type with a single leg so that it could be used in bed and for various other purposes. Reseating herself, Diana pulled it over her lap. On the table was an old-fashioned writing slope to which she had taped some white paper with a small oval piece of ivory gummed to it horizontally.

She said, 'One could live very cheaply in Greece then. James had a little money and sometimes earned a little more. He learned to speak Greek in no time. So he paid his way, or would have done if I hadn't sometimes insisted on paying for better accommodation than he could afford. But I knew that our wanderings couldn't go on indefinitely. As he was half-American I thought he should go to America where perhaps his real father could help him get a start. He refused to go without me and, because I couldn't bear to part from him, I agreed.'

As she talked she was using a fine sable brush dipped in Venetian Red to outline the shape of Summer's left eye and her eyebrow.

'We spent some time in New York and James made enquiries about his father. When he found out how important he was, and that he had a wife and children, he changed his mind about approaching him. He became determined to make good on his own. Somehow I felt sure he would, in spite of the difficulties. He had incredible energy. He could study until three in the morning and wake up at seven, ready to run in the park. After a while I knew he'd be better off without me. In the note I left for him, I said I wasn't coming back to England but I didn't say where I was going. I left him some money—as a loan—and I wrote that I'd be in New York in twelve months' time if he wanted to see me. Then I flew back to Europe and went to stay with some friends with a villa in Tuscany. It was there I met my husband—although at the time I was too unhappy over James to pay much attention to Alex.'

She fell silent, concentrating on her work, her glance flicking from her subject's face to the piece of ivory and back again as, with a larger brush, she washed in the local flesh tints.

'And did you meet him the next year?' Summer prompted.

'Yes, by that statue of the girl outside the Plaza Hotel—New York's equivalent of Eros in Piccadilly Circus. We had lunch together, and that was the last time I saw him. My feelings hadn't changed then, but his had. For him it was over. He was absorbed in his new life. Having repaid the loan, and given me a miniature by Richard Cosway which he'd discovered in Boston, he rushed off to catch the bus back there. I was sad for myself, but glad for him. And after a while I thought less about James and more about Alex until I was thinking about him most of the time.'

She began to mix another colour. 'Ivory isn't absorbent like paper. One can't take off superfluous colour. One has to work with a much dryer brush than when painting an ordinary water-colour.'

She tested the colour on the paper alongside the ivory before beginning to apply it.

'Don't be jealous of my little share of James's love. It was a long time ago and, for him, less important than for me.'

'I'm not jealous. I'm envious,' said Summer. 'I—I would give my soul for what you had. James hasn't changed physically since you knew him—or only for the better. He's still devastatingly attractive. But I think he must have changed inside. He's had three long-term affairs, all with clever, independent career-women. Some time ago he decided it was time to start his dynasty. Because I was conveniently to hand, as it were, he asked me to marry him.'

Diana looked up. 'And—loving him—you refused?' she exclaimed, with obvious perplexity.

'Wouldn't you have done the same?'

Instead of answering the question, Diana said, 'What reason did you give him?