The End of Summer (2 page)

He said, "You've been sitting there all afternoon. When you weren't swimming." "I know."

"Why didn't you join us?"

"I haven't got a surfboard."

"You could get one."

"No money."

"Then borrow one."

"There's no one I know to borrow one from."

The young man frowned. "You're British, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"You visiting?"

"No, I live here."

"In Reef Point?"

"Yes." I jerked my head, indicating the line of faded clapboard cabins visible just over the curve of the sand dunes. "How d'you come to live here?"

„We rented the cabin.''

"Who's we?"

"My father and I."

"How long have you been here?"

"Since spring."

"But you're not staying over the winter."

It was a statement of fact more than a question. Nobody stayed in Reef Point over the winter. The houses weren't built to withstand the storms, the access road became impassable, the telephone lines blew down, the electricity failed.

"I think so. Unless we decide to move on."

He frowned. "Are you hippies, or something?"

Knowing how I looked at the time, I kindly did not blame him for asking this question.

"No. But my father writes film scripts and stuff for TV. But he hates Los Angeles so much he refuses to live there, so . . . we rented this cabin."

He seemed intrigued. "And what do you do?"

I took up a handful of sand, let it run away, coarse and grey through my fingers.

"Nothing much. Buy food and empty the garbage can and try to keep the sand swept out of the house."

"Is that your dog?"

"Yes."

"What's his name?" "Rusty."

"Rusty. Hey, Rusty, fella!" Rusty acknowledged his advances with a nod that would have done credit to Royalty and then continued to gaze out to sea. To make up for his lack of manners I said, "Are you from Santa Barbara?"

"Uh-huh." But the young man did not want to talk about himself. "How long have you lived in the States? You still have a terribly terribly British accent."

I smiled politely at a joke heard many times before. "Since I was fourteen. Seven years.''

"In California?"

"All over. New York. Chicago. San Francisco." "Is your father American?"

"No. He just likes it here. He came in the first place because he wrote a novel, and it was bought by a film company and he came to Hollywood to write the script."

"No kidding? Have I heard of him? What's his name?"

"Rufus Marsh."

"You mean,
Tall as the MorningT'
I nodded. "Boy, I read that cover to cover, when I was still in high school. I got all my sex education out of that book." He looked at me with new interest, and I thought that this was how it always was. They were friendly and quite kind, but never interested until I mentioned
Tall as the Morning.
I suppose it had something to do with the way I look, because my eyes are pale as sixpences, and my lashes are quite colourless, and my face doesn't go brown but gets splashed and splattered with hundreds of enormous freckles. Besides that, I am too tall for a girl, and the bones in my face all show. "He must be quite a guy."

A new expression had come into his face, puzzled, and crossed with questions that he was obviously going to be too polite to ask.

If you are Rufus Marsh's daughter, how come you 're sitting on this god-forsaken beach in the backwoods of California wearing patched jeans and a man's shirt that should have been relegated to the ragbag decades ago, and you haven't even got enough dollars raked together to buy yourself a surfboard?

He said, following with laughable predictability the line of my own reflections, "What kind of a man is he, anyway? I mean, apart from being a father."

"I don't know." I could never describe him, even to myself. I took another handful of sand, trickled it into a miniature mountain, stubbed my cigarette out on its apex, forming a little crater, a tiny volcano, with a cigarette stub as its smoking core. A man who must always be on the move. A man who makes friends easily and loses them the next day. A quarrelsome, argumentative man, talented to the point of genius, but utterly baffled by the small problems of day-to-day living. A man who can charm and infuriate. A paradox of a man.

I said again, "I don't know," and turned to look at the boy beside me. He was nice. "I'd ask you home for a beer, and then you could meet him and see for yourself. But he's in Los Angeles just now, won't be home until tomorrow morning."

He considered this, scratching thoughtfully at the back of his head and dislodging a small storm of sand.

"Tell you what," he said, "I'm coming back next weekend if the weather holds."

I smiled. "Are you?"

"I'll look out for you."

"All right."

"I'll bring a spare board. You can surf." I said, "You don't need to bribe me." He pretended to be offended. "Whaddya mean, bribe?" "I'll take you up to meet him next weekend. He likes new faces around the place."

"I wasn't bribing. Honest."

I relented. Besides, I wanted to surf. I said, "I know."

He grinned and stubbed out the cigarette. The sun, sinking towards the edge of the sea, was taking shape and colour - an orange pumpkin of a sun. He sat up, screwing his eyes against its glare, yawned slightly and stretched. He said, "I must go," and stood up and then hesitated for a moment, standing over me. His shadow seemed to stretch for ever. "Goodbye then."

" 'Bye."

"Next Sunday."

"OK."

"That's a date. Don't forget.'' "I won't."

He turned and moved off, stopping to collect the rest of his gear, and turning to sketch a final salute before walking away, the length of the beach, to where the old sand-buried cedars marked the track that led up to the road.

I watched him go, and realised that I didn't even know his name. And, worse, he hadn't bothered to ask mine. I was simply Rufus Marsh's daughter. But still, next Sunday, if the weather held, he would maybe be back. If the weather held. That was always something to look forward to.

It was because of Sam Carter that we were living at Reef Point. Sam was my father's agent in Los Angeles, and it was in sheer desperation that he eventually offered to find somewhere cheap for us to live, because Los Angeles and my father were so acutely antipathetic that not one sellable word was he able to write while we lived there, and Sam was in danger of losing both valuable clients and money.

"There's this place at Reef Point," Sam had said. "It's a one-horse set-up, but real peaceful . . . end of the world type peace," he added, conjuring up visions of a sort of Gauguin paradise.

And so we had taken a lease on the cabin, and packed all our worldly possessions, which were sadly small, into Father's old beat-up Dodge, and driven here, leaving the smog and ratrace of Los Angeles behind us, and excited as children by the first smell of the sea.

And at first, it had been exciting. After the city it was magic to wake to nothing but the sound of sea birds and the endless thunder of the surf. It was good, in the early mornings, to walk out on to sand, to watch the sun rise over the hills, to hang out a line of washing, and watch it billow and fill with the sea wind, white as new sails.

Our housekeeping was necessarily simple -1 have never been much of a housekeeper anyway, and at Reef Point there was only one small shop - a drugstore, but back in Scotland my grandmother would have called it a Jenny a' Thing, for it sold everything from gun licences to house frocks, from frozen foods to packets of Kleenex. It was run by Bill and Myrtle, in a halfhearted, time-consuming sort of way, for they always seemed to be clean out of fresh vegetables, fruit, chickens and eggs, which were the sort of things I wanted to buy. However, over the summer we became quite fond of tinned chilli con carne and frozen pizza pie, and all the various species of ice-cream that Myrtle obviously adored, for she was enormously fat, her great hips and thighs bulging in blue jeans, and her ham-like arms fully exposed by the girlish sleeveless blouses she chose to wear with them.

But now, after six months of Reef Point, I was getting restless. This fine Indian summer weather would last - how long? Another month, perhaps. And then the storms would start in earnest, the darkness fall earlier, the rains would come and the mud and the wind. The cabin had no sort of central heating, only the enormous fireplace in the draughty living-room, which burned driftwood at a terrifying pace. I thought of homely buckets of coal with longing, but there was no coal. Every time I came up off the beach, I lugged a spar or branch of driftwood with me, like some pioneer woman, and added it to the pile by the back porch. It was assuming vast dimensions, but I knew that once we started needing fires, it would take no time to get through the lot.

The cabin lay just back off the beach, a small rise of sand dune its only shelter from the sea winds. It was built of wood, faded to a silvery grey, and stood up on piers, so that a couple of steps led up to the front and back porches. Inside, there was a big living-room, with picture windows facing over the ocean; a tiny, narrow kitchen; a bathroom - with no bath, but a shower - and two bedrooms, one large "master" bedroom where my father slept, and a smaller one, with a bunk, perhaps intended for a small child or an unimportant elderly relative, which was mine. It was furnished in the faintly depressing manner of summer cabins, in that all the furniture had obviously been thrown out of other, and larger, houses. Father's bed was a vast brass monstrosity, missing knobs, and with a set of springs that squeaked every time he turned over. And in my room hung an ornate gilt mirror which looked as though it had started life in a Victorian bordello, and gave me back a reflection of a drowned woman covered with black spots.

The sitting-room was not much better - the old armchairs sagged, their worn patches disguised with crocheted Afghans, the hearthrug had a hole in it, and the other chairs were stuffed horsehair with the horsehair fighting a winning battle to get out. There was only one table, and Father had taken over one end of this as a desk, so that we were forced to take our meals, cramped and with elbows jammed in, at the other end. The best thing in the house was the window seat, which took up the whole width of the room, was padded with foam and warm rugs and cushions, and was inviting as an old nursery sofa, if you wanted to curl up and read, or watch the sunset, or simply think.

But it was a lonely place. At night the wind nudged and whined through the gaps around the window, and the rooms were filled with strange rustlings and creakings, for all the world like a ship at sea. When my father was there, none of this mattered, but when I was left alone, my imagination, inspired by the tales of everyday violence, culled from the columns of the local newspapers, really got to work. The cabin itself was a fragile thing, none of the locks on the doors or windows would have deterred a determined intruder, and now, with the summer over, and the occupants of the other cabins packed up and returned to their various homes, it was completely isolated. Even Myrtle and Bill were a good quarter of a mile away, and the telephone was a party line, and not always very efficient. One way and another, the possibilities didn't bear thinking about.

I never spoke to my father about these fears - he had, after all, a job of work to do, but he was essentially a perceptive man, and I am sure knew that I was capable of working myself up into a state of jitters, and this was one of the reasons that he let me keep Rusty.

That evening, after the day on the crowded beach, the cheerful sunshine, and my encounter with the young student from Santa Barbara, the cabin seemed doubly deserted.

The sun had slid down over the edge of the sea, an evening breeze was stirring, and soon it would be dark, so, for company, I lit a fire, recklessly piling on the driftwood; and, for comfort, took a hot shower, washed my hair, and then, wrapped in a towel, went into my room for a pair of clean jeans and an old white sweater which had belonged to my father until I mistakenly shrank it.

Underneath the bordello mirror was a varnished chest of drawers which had to do duty as a dressing-table. On it, for lack of anywhere else, I had put my photographs. There were a lot of them and they took up a lot of space, and most of the time I didn't even look at them very much, but this evening was different, and as I combed the snarls out of my long wet hair I studied them, one by one, as though they belonged to a person I scarcely knew, were of places that I had never seen.

There was my mother, a formal portrait, framed in silver. Mother with her shoulders bare and diamonds in her ears, and her hair newly done by Elizabeth Arden. I loved the picture, but it was not as I remembered her. This was better, an enlarged snapshot on a picnic, wearing her tartan skirt, and sitting waist deep in heather, and laughing as though something ridiculous were about to happen. And then there was the collection -more of a montage - with which I had filled both sides of a big leather folding frame. Elvie - the old white house, set against a fold of larch and pine, the hill rising behind it, the glimmer of the loch at the end of the lawn, the jetty, and the baulky old dinghy we had used when we fished for trout. And my grandmother, at the open french windows, the inevitable pair of secateurs ready in her hand. And a coloured postcard of Elvie Loch that I had bought in the Thrumbo post office. And another picnic, with my parents together, our old car in the background, and a fat liver-and-white spaniel sitting at my mother's feet.