In A Summer Season by Elizabeth Taylor
published 1961
Blogfriend Christine recommended In A Summer Season, having
remembered not one but TWO choice moments from a jumble sale – a cardigan and a
pogo stick.
- jumble sales much discussed on the blog recently:
The Intricate World of Literary Jumble Sales
Graham Greene: The Man for a White Elephant Stall
The setting of this one is a small Home Counties village – near Windsor,
everyone keeps looking at the Castle – and the daughter of the house, 16 yo
Louisa, has a crush on the curate, Fr Blizzard, so gets roped in to the jumble
sale, despite her mother, Kate, never going to church. Louisa is not going to
get far with him, as he is on the way over to Rome, but their relationship is
very enjoyable.
We are all used to the mild trope of someone putting down
eg a jacket (their own, smart) at a sale or charity shop, and its being swept
up and sold. Here there is a nuanced variation:
She had only removed her
cardigan for a moment… turning to look for it a minute or two later, had found
it laid out on a stall, marked fourpence.
Highly insulting.
Then this happens when the curate tries to join in:
‘And what is this magnificent
object?’ he asked, with an attempt at joviality.
‘It is the pogo-stick my
brother and I played with when we were children,’ said Miss Buckley, who felt
that she had sacrificed it. Her
brother’s having been killed in the war, as everybody knew, made an added
embarrassment for Father Blizzard.
Which sent me off to find the history of pogo-sticks, as I
wrongly thought they arrived in, say, the 1950s; they didn't.
These are the kind of moments Taylor excels iin – small and
specific, but recognizable to us. This is not my favourite of her books, but it
is very intriguing.
Kate, widowed after a happy marriage, has married Dermot, a
younger man who is flighty and unreliable and who doesn’t seem able to work.
Luckily Kate is wealthy. It is made startlingly clear that they have an immense
sexual attraction to each other, which they do not resist. It is splendid to
see them enjoying themselves so much.
Kate has two children, Tom, 22 and trying to go into the
family business, and the schoolgirl Louisa.
Dermot’s mother is a tremendous ghoulish figure in London,
always trying to interfere in the family, and full of terrible ideas. Her
dialogue is wonderful. I loved that she says ‘Hello stranger’ when Dermot or
Kate visit or phone, and how dispiriting this is for them.
Kate used to be part of a pair of couples who were best
friends, saw each other all the time. Now her husband Alan is dead, and so is
her great friend Dorothea. The other member of the quartet, the widowed
Charles, is about to return to his house in the village, along with his
daughter Araminta, who has been away at school.
All will be disrupted, but in a gentle, Taylor-esque way –
at least to begin with. Araminta is minx-y and beautiful, so Tom falls in love
with her. Charles is meeting Dermot for the first time, and can’t help
contrasting him with the dead Alan, who was Charles’ friend from schooldays.
Also living in the lovely Home Counties house is an aged
Aunt Ethel who trundles round observing, then writes long indiscreet letters to
her old friend Gertrude: ‘we were in Holloway prison together years and years
ago’ – ie they were Suffragettes back in the day. These two unmarried women
freely discuss Kate’s sexlife – and there is plenty to talk about – in a modern
and psychological way. Then Ethel says ‘burn this’ in her letter, ‘as if any of
the people mentioned it might travel down to [Cornwall] to go through Gertrude’s
desk out of curiosity’.
There is a cook, Mrs Meacock, who is allowed status as a
full character, though I felt Taylor was paying lip service to this.
Mrs M cooks for a splendidly awful dinner-party with
expected and unexpected guests, and a dubious main course. And some terrible
conversations.
Tom has bought himself a TV, and I loved the description of
him and Dermot sneaking off to watch it. ‘Too good an evening to waste out of
doors’ Dermot would say as they drew the curtains against the sunlight. Ethel
pops in, and lingers, pretending she isn’t watching.
Tom and Dermot sat rigid and
in silence. From time to time, their hands groped on the floor for their
glasses of light ale, the cigarettes burnt to their fingers.
‘You’ve got to sleep in
here, Tom’ Kate said crossly, flapping at the smoke-haze..
I’ve been talking lately about authors who give all their
characters a fair chance, they don’t create horrible people in order to then
criticise them. Taylor is one of these good ones: although it is clear that Kate
is the heroine, everyone in the book gets a fair deal. And although you
wouldn’t be in much doubt that Taylor is one of those who disapprove of
television, she has Kate sternly telling Tom to read a book instead, ‘not
realising that she very seldom read herself these days and was just off for an
evening in the pub with Dermot.’
Araminta wears unusual and dicey clothes – a dress made
from a length of black silk draped round herself, and a cheongsam which splits
more every time she moves in it. The clothes are attention-grabbing, but very
temporary, slipping and falling. Nearly all men who meet her are entirely charmed by her.
It has to be said that the book has a most unexpected
ending, one that reviewers called brutal. It is also abrupt. I wanted to know
more about the future of the characters – sign of a very good book.
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