The Summer Wives: Epic page-turning romance perfect for the beach

14.

WHEN IT COMES to bridge, the punishment for ignorance is apparently banishment, which suited me well enough. For a short while, I hung around the well-appointed drawing room, holding my iced tea, watching the rain shatter violently against the French windows while the Monks, unconcerned, set up the bridge table. Lucky for them—or again, maybe by design—there were two other guests, a mother and daughter, who made up the other sides. They were the Huxleys, Mrs. Huxley and her daughter, Livy, and Isobel explained that it was Dr. Huxley, husband and father of same, who had come to Popeye’s rescue in the Fisher kitchen yesterday. We exchanged the usual bland pleasantries. Livy and her mother were perfectly nice, perfectly pretty, like two round, full scoops of vanilla ice cream, the younger one wearing a dress like a lemon meringue. I remember thinking, at the time, how utterly harmless they seemed, how absent of tooth and claw. Clay had disappeared somewhere with his father. Isobel had mixed herself a drink from the liquor cabinet and now sat in her bridge chair, next to Mrs. Monk, wearing an expression of sharklike intensity.

When the rain died away to a drizzle, I called over my shoulder that I was going for a walk to see the cliffs and I slipped through one of the French doors to the bluestone terrace and the lawn beyond. The wet grass soaked my shoes and stockings. When I reached the cliff’s edge, I took them off and laid the stockings to dry across a large, white rock, and then I sat down on a neighboring rock and watched the clouds storm angrily away to the northeast. The cliffs weren’t especially high, maybe forty or fifty feet, but they were steep and rugged, and the path snaked carefully down the least forbidding side to end in a pale beach. Out to sea, a lone sailboat picked its way along the coast, about a hundred yards from shore.

Now that the sun shone unobstructed, the heat built once more, sinking into my skin and bones and the rough surface of the rock beneath me. I removed my jacket—I’d left my hat and gloves indoors—and thought I should really find some shade, before I burned. But I didn’t want to move. There was just enough breeze to make it bearable. The air was rich and damp with the smell of the sea, and there was something hypnotic about the movements of that lone, brave sailboat, something graceful and eternal. I could just make out the man who sat in the stern, next to the tiller. He had dark hair that flashed from time to time against the white of the triangular sail, and at some point, as I watched, I began to realize that the sailor was Joseph. Or maybe I was only hoping it was Joseph? Maybe it was just longing.

I straightened and squinted, and as if he felt my scrutiny, the sailor turned his head toward shore.

Joseph.

I raised my hand and waved, even though he couldn’t possibly recognize me from there, not sitting as I was on the opposite corner of the Island from the house where I was supposed to be sitting. Up went Joseph’s arm, returning the wave, and then he rose from his seat at the tiller and reached for a rope. A sheet—wasn’t that what they called ropes on boats? Sort of confusing, if you asked me, because something you called a sheet ought logically to be a sail. Whatever it was, Joseph did something to it, adjusting its pitch against the wind. When he turned back, his arm lifted again, in such a way that he seemed to be beckoning me toward the water.

I stood and glanced at my shoes and stockings, drying on the nearby rock. I glanced at the path, snaking its way to the beach below. My skin was flushed and damp, my skirt creased, my blouse stained with perspiration. The salt breeze tumbled my hair.

“Miranda. There you are.”

I pitched forward. Clayton’s arm shot out to catch me.

“Careful!” he said.

“Sorry! I didn’t hear you come up.”

“No need to apologize. Shouldn’t have snuck up like that. Gosh, who’s that crazy fellow out there?”

“Just some sailboat,” I said.

“He’s not afraid of a little squall, I guess.” Clay stuck his hands in his trouser pockets. He’d taken off his jacket and stood there in his shirtsleeves, rolled halfway up his forearms. A considerable concession to the heat, for a man like him. He rolled onto his toes and back down again. “Say. Do you have a moment, Miranda?” he asked.

“Sure I do.”

“Can we sit?”

I took the larger rock, next to my shoes and stockings, while Clay propped himself on the smaller one and crossed his legs at the ankles. His feet looked hot and uncomfortable, encased in brown argyle socks and leather shoes. I tucked my bare white toes against the rock and said, “Anything in particular?”

“Actually,” he said, as if the idea had just occurred to him, “I wanted to ask you about Izzy.”

“What about Izzy?”

He uncrossed his ankles and crossed them again, putting the other foot on top. His hands twiddled together against his thighs. “That was some party, yesterday, wasn’t it? A big day for you both. A happy day. We’re all—well, we couldn’t be happier for Mr. Fisher. Your mother’s everything we might have hoped for in a—a new mother for Izzy.”

“She’s already got a mother, hasn’t she?”

“Well, of course that depends on whom you ask. I don’t like to speak ill of people. You haven’t met her, have you? The ex Mrs. Fisher?”

“No.”

“I don’t suppose there’s any reason you should. She lives in … is it Nice? Somewhere in the south of France, I understand. She remarried a few years ago, some old French aristocrat she met during the war. Lost all his dough, I guess, and wanted hers. They say he’s a—well …”

“A what?”

“Nothing. Nothing you need to know about. Let’s just say they both go their own ways, the two of them. That’s what I hear, anyway.”

“Then why did they marry?”

“People marry for all kinds of reasons, Miranda. I don’t know, maybe she wanted the title. She’s a funny old bird. Always was. Restless, you know, wanted to go abroad all the time, spend her time with that international set—you know who I mean—instead of summering on the Island.”

At the time, I didn’t know whom he meant. Clay pronounced the words international set with distaste, as if it were some disease that had no cure, but to me it sounded exotic and wonderful. So I said innocently, “What’s wrong with that? I’d like to go abroad.”

“I mean make a habit of it. Socialize with those people, artists and aristocrats and hangers-on, new money, all the time having affairs and divorcing and God knows what else. Anyway, she’s never shown much interest in poor Izzy, even when she was a baby. So I think we were all hoping—when we heard the news—and then we met you and your mother—”

“Maybe she’d be an improvement?”

He nodded vigorously. “Oh, she is. I mean, you’ve got to be careful what you say, because Mrs. Fisher—the former Mrs. Fisher, I mean, the Countess whatever she is now—her family still summers here. The Dumonts?” The end of the sentence turned up inquisitively, as if there were some kind of chance I knew the Dumonts personally.

“I’ve heard about them,” I said. Before us, the sailboat had started another tack. The sun caught the brilliant white of the canvas, so sharp against the dark blue sea that I had to look away.

“Anyway, that’s all behind us now,” said Clay. “What’s important is that Izzy has someone to look out for her now.”

“You’re her fiancé. Aren’t you supposed to be doing that?”

“But we won’t be married until next June.” He sprang from the rock and stepped forward, right to the edge of the cliff. He had a nice trim backside, a narrow waist. A pair of old-fashioned braces held up his trousers. “Last night …,” he said.

I waited a moment and said, “What about last night?”

“I don’t know what happened with you two. Maybe I don’t want to know. She had a little too much to drink, didn’t she? She gets carried away, you see.”

He seemed to be starting another sentence, which he bit off. I had the feeling he was struggling with something, groping, juggling words in his head. He fiddled with his sleeves, took out his handkerchief, wiped away the perspiration on his temples.

“For what it’s worth, I like that about her,” I said. “I like her high spirits.”

“Yes. Of course. Look. I don’t know—I don’t usually—Miranda—you don’t mind me calling you that?”

“Of course not.”

“Do you mind if I tell you something private? Just between you and me, Miranda, because I can tell you aren’t the gossiping type.”

“You can tell me whatever you like, Mr. Monk.”

“Clay. Look. The truth is, the night before last, the night before the wedding, we’d had a bit of a—a—I don’t know what to call it …”

“Clay, you don’t—”

“—a lovers’ quarrel.”

The words burst out almost in a shout—lovers’ quarrel!—followed by a delicate silence, expecting my reply. When I didn’t say anything, Clay looked down and toed the dirt.

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I haven’t told anyone, not even Mother.”

“You’ve got to talk to someone, don’t you? You can’t keep everything bottled inside.”

Clay made a dry noise. “Can’t I? That’s what we do, Miranda. Keep it all bottled. Don’t burden anybody with your private troubles. We don’t talk, certainly not to strangers. I sometimes wish …”

He let the sentence dangle, the wish unexpressed. I tucked my legs against my chest and wrapped my arms around them. A few feet away, Clayton shifted his feet and noticed the handkerchief in his hand. He shoved it back in his pocket.

I said, “If there’s anything I can do to help—”

It was as if I’d pulled the cork from his mouth. Clayton started to burble. “She’s a terrific girl, Izzy. She’s the one, I mean there’s never been anyone else. But she’s got a restless streak, always has, all this bottled-up energy like some kind of Fourth of July firework. Don’t get me wrong, it’s one of the things I love about her. Maybe she gets it from her mother, I don’t know. You just can’t take your eyes off her, wondering what crazy, wonderful thing she’s going to do next.”

I pressed my thumbs together. I think I was trying not to say something rash, trying to hold back this immense surge of pity I felt for Clayton Monk in that moment. He leaned down and picked up a rock from the dirt near his feet. Turned that rock around again and again between his fingers, examining every last ridge, every facet, each tiny grain that made up the whole.

He went on in a quiet voice, talking not to me, but to the rock in his hand. “The trouble is, she gets temperamental, she gets in these moods sometimes, and I just can’t—I can’t—I don’t know what to do. Honestly, I don’t know what I said the other night, I mean I don’t have the slightest clue what upset her so much.”

Clay dropped the rock suddenly and put his hand to the back of his neck. His fingers were long, his nails well-trimmed, his forearm dusted with light hair. His other hand sat on his hip. I looked past him toward the sea, but his body now blocked my view of Joseph in his sailboat, and I didn’t want to rise and startle him, so close as he stood to the edge of the cliff.

I said, “It was probably just the excitement of the day. She loves you very much.”

“Does she? Did she say that?”

“Well … not in so many words.”

He made a mournful laugh. “Thanks for the honesty.”

I didn’t know what to say. I hardly knew him at all, him or Isobel. I had the feeling I’d walked onto the stage of a play, sometime in the middle of the second act, and assumed a leading role. And I had no script, no story. I didn’t even know the name of this play. Was probably wearing the wrong costume. I leaned back on my hands and stared at the long, vertical creases down the back of Clay’s shirt. The sun burned the top of my head, my hands, the back of my neck. A gull screamed from the rocks down below.

“Vargas!” Clay exclaimed.

I startled up. “What? Where?”

“The lighthouse keeper’s son. Fellow who was with you last night. Don’t deny it. Vargas?”

“Joseph. Yes.”

“I think he’s in love with her.”

The sentence struck in the middle of my chest. I stepped to one side, in order to find Joseph’s sailboat on the stretch of empty sea before us. For a second or two, I thought he’d been swallowed by the water, but when I shielded my eyes and looked farther, I saw he had only angled around the eastern tip of the Island to tack down the other side. The boat was smaller now. You couldn’t make out Joseph himself, just the white, triangular sail against the navy water, as it began to disappear behind the land’s edge. I caught my breath again and said, “How do you know?”

“Oh, he’s always been crazy about her. Used to hang around the house when they were small. Take the dinghy back and forth. They had some kind of signal they used to send each other, through the windows.”

“But she doesn’t feel the same way. She’s engaged to you, not to him.”

“Another man’s ring isn’t going to stop a fellow like that.”

“I don’t think—” I checked myself.

“Don’t think what?”

“I just think he’s more honorable than that.”

“Do you? Well, I’ve known him all my life, and I wouldn’t put it past him. Not the way he’s been pining for her all these years. Sitting there in his lighthouse, watching her from the window, beckoning her over to see him.”

The tip of the sail winked out past the edge of the cliff.

“Then Isobel should put a stop to it,” I said. “Especially if it hurts you.”

“Oh, it doesn’t hurt me. Not a bit. A fellow like that …” Clay turned to face me, and his expression was so haggard, the lines so deep and painful in his fresh, young face, I forgot my anger. He took my shoulder under his hand. “It’s Izzy I’m worried about. She’s impulsive, she’s—she trusts him, God knows why. It’s because he’s not one of us. He’s—well, she knows she can’t marry him, and you know how it is with girls—” He broke off and—perhaps realizing how tightly he was gripping my shoulder—let his hand drop to his side, where he shoved it into his pocket. “And he loves her. He’s crazy about her. Last night. I should’ve—man, I should’ve gone over there myself, I should’ve socked him. If I’d known, I would have.”

“I’m glad you didn’t. Nothing happened, Clay, nothing at all. She was—we were both a little tipsy, from the champagne and all, and he was worried about us and rowed us back home. That’s all. Joseph did a good thing.”

“He could have telephoned me. I would’ve fetched her back.”

“Do they have a telephone out there?”

“Sure they do. Underground cable.”

“I didn’t realize.”

“There’s a lot you don’t realize.” He swiveled back to the sea. Ran a hand through his hair and shoved it in his pocket, like the other hand, good and deep. “Mr. Fisher—God bless him—he’s indulged her all these years. I don’t blame him. She’s had it tough, with that mother of hers, and—well and everything else. But he’s not here to protect her just now, and I hope—I don’t mean to ask you to sneak around for me, nothing like that, but I just—If you could let me know if she’s in trouble, that’s all. If she’s about to do something stupid.”

I pictured that engagement ring, three or four carats dangling above the sapphire water. “She’s not going to do anything stupid,” I said. “And if she is, I don’t think I could stop her.”

“I could. I could stop her. If you just let me know how she’s doing, what she’s doing.” He pulled his left hand out of the pocket and checked his watch. “I’ve got to be back at the firm tomorrow, but I’ll be back up here as often as I can, believe me. I’ll give you my number in the city. Call me at any time. Collect, if you need to.”

“I’m sure that won’t be necessary.”

Clay reached out and took my hand, very gently, the way he’d been taught.

“I’m just grateful you’re here, Miranda. I’m just grateful Izzy’s got someone like you around at last, a proper female influence, someone steady and sensible.”

“Thank you,” I said dryly.

Clay leaned forward and pressed my hand hard and kissed my cheek, cutting me off. He smelled of sunshine and perspiration, and his cheek, brushing mine, was hot and damp.

“Just keep her busy, all right?” he said. “For God’s sake, just keep her away from that Vargas.”

15.

ISOBEL DROVE HOME from the Monks’ house at a crawl, because she’d drunk so much gin and tonic over bridge, and the road, I think, was playing tricks on her. Overhead, the sky was gray and troubled, and a few fat drops of rain smacked against the windshield. Isobel switched the wipers on and off and peered up to check the state of the clouds.

“Peaches, darling,” she said. “Do you know what I hate most about the Island and everybody in it? Except you, I suppose.”

“What’s that?”

“Nobody ever says what they really mean. There is this vast fabric of tender little lies, and all the important things are unspoken. Boiling there underneath. We only bother telling the truth when it’s too small to count.”

“I don’t think that’s true at all.”

“You haven’t been here long enough. It’s like a sport, it’s the only real sport they know, and because I love sports I play them at their game, but I hate it. If I had my horses, now …”

“Why don’t you?”

“There isn’t room. Poor dears, they’re on Long Island, getting fat.” She paused to negotiate a sharp curve, surging and slowing the Plymouth as if she couldn’t decide her approach. She was a wholly different driver when drunk, I thought, and as I watched the bony grip of her hands on the wheel, fighting the turn, I wondered if I should offer to take over. Before I could work up the nerve, she straightened out the car and said, “Don’t you ever miss Foxcroft?”

I turned my head to stare out the window at the meadow passing by, the occasional driveway marked by stone pillars. The air was growing purple with some impending downpour, and I felt its approach in my gut. “I haven’t been gone long enough.”

“I do. When I was there, I couldn’t wait to leave. All those books and rules and studying. But now I think, at least there was something new every day. Here, everything’s the same. The same damned summer, over and over, the same day, the same people, the same small talk, the same small sports and parlor games and lies, of course. There’s no escape.”

“It’s only a few months. Sometimes it’s nice to spend a few months doing nothing.”

“But then in September we go back to the city and do nothing there. What hope is there? Tell me, Miranda. I really want to know.”

I turned to stare at her sharp profile, and for the first time I noticed a tiny bump along the bridge of her nose, as if she’d broken it some time ago. “You might have gone to college,” I said.

“That’s just putting off the inevitable. Beside, I’m not like you. Books bore me. All your Shakespeare and Dickens and old men like that. Marriage is going to bore me even more.” She opened the window a few inches and tossed her spent cigarette into the draft. “My God, I should’ve been born ten years earlier.”

“Why?”

“Why, because of the war. I’d have trained as a nurse or a Resistance agent, I’d have been splendid at that. I’d have made some use of myself, some purpose. It would have transformed me. I’d never have been the same, I would have had no tolerance at all for this.” She waved her hand at the Island. “I don’t understand how everybody could come back from the war and just sit there with a gin and tonic and play bridge. God, what a drag. It’s like they’ve all gone to sleep.”

“Because it wasn’t an adventure, Isobel. It was hell. People died.”

“Oh, that’s right. I’m sorry. Your father.” She paused respectfully. We had reached the Greyfriars drive, and she began to slow in preparation for the turn. Another handful of raindrops smacked the windshield. The drive was bordered with giant, mature rhododendrons, transported at great cost from the mainland—Isobel had told me how much as we drove away this morning—so that you couldn’t see the house until you rounded the last curve, so that you found yourself straining and straining as you approached your destination. Now Isobel drove even more slowly, a walking pace, while I checked the sky and the windshield and clenched the muscles of my abdomen.

Isobel waited until she began the last turn before she continued. “Still. You’d think they couldn’t stand all this shallow hypocrisy, after what they’d been through. And yet they embrace it. They want it to stretch on into infinity, never changing, never deviating one square inch from the old, dull, habitual ways. Marrying suitable boys you don’t really love, having children you don’t really want. I tell you, I can’t stand it any longer. I’m about to explode, Miranda, but nobody knows it yet. Nobody but you. Just watch. I’m going to …”

Her sentence drifted off, as if she’d lost her train of thought. I looked up and followed her gaze, and at first I saw nothing amiss, nothing out of order. Greyfriars rambled before us in its immaculate, elegant way, not a window out of place, gray shingle meeting white trim and green lawn. The grass, the young trees, the rosebushes, the neatly fenced kitchen garden, the tall boxwoods guarding the swimming pool—all these features as tidy as money could make them. Only the gathering rhythm of the rain disturbed the expensive Fisher tranquillity.

Then I noticed the front door, which was open, and the person leaning against the doorway, smoking a cigarette attached to a long black holder. A woman wearing a magenta dress, a towering hairdo, and a large white flower pinned above her right ear.

“My God. Who’s that?” I asked.

Isobel switched off the ignition and rested her arms on the top of the steering wheel. A prolonged rumble of thunder shook the windows. The woman straightened from the doorway and beckoned us with her cigarette in its holder.

In a voice of wonder, Isobel said, “It’s my mother.”

16.

“CALL ME ABIGAIL,” the Countess said, as I stumbled over her foreign title, which I couldn’t quite remember. “Everybody else does. Even my children.”

“Do they really?”

“Just watch.” She turned to Isobel, who had hung behind me as we raced across the gravel and ascended the steps in the gathering deluge, and now rolled her eyes as her mother embraced her dripping body. “Hello, darling. You look as beautiful as ever, of course. Except you really must eat more. People who don’t eat are simply boring, and it’s far better to be fat than boring, believe me.”

“Hello, Abigail,” Isobel said. “What a delightful surprise.”

Up close, the Countess was even more extraordinary than from across the driveway. There was nothing dainty about her. She was tall and broad-shouldered, and her dress of magenta silk billowed down her heavy bones to sweep the ground, interrupted only by a sash at her waist, which—somewhat contradicting her earlier injunction—was not fat but certainly sturdy. She wore several glittering necklaces and her hair, swept up in a pompadour, had already turned silver, though her face was still smooth. I think it hardly needs saying that her lipstick was the same color as her dress, and that a glass of gin and tonic rested in her other hand—the one not occupied with cigarettes—bearing a neat half-crescent of said lipstick on its rim. When she turned, as she did now, leading us from the foyer and down the hall, she revealed a narrow, gathered cape of magenta silk that drifted from the swooping neck of her gown to form a train behind her.

“I’ve taken the liberty of reserving a table at the Club for dinner,” she said, over her shoulder, “but that’s not for ages, so I’ve ordered tea on the terrace.”

“I expected nothing less.”