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.
Cardigan from Free Vintage Knitting Patterns.