The Magnificent Spinster (2 page)

“Can we sit with you till they come?” Alix asked, standing behind her father's chair, her arms laced round his neck.

“Tell us about Vyvian,” Jane begged, sitting down next to her mother. And then before a word could be said she added, “Is he going to propose?”

Pappa laughed. “He's only just arrived … you're in a great rush, aren't you?”

“Viola is dying to get married. She told me so the other day.”

“I should think she'd enjoy having all those beaus and not making up her mind,” Alix said. “I'd like that.”

“I'd hate it,” Jane said passionately. “They suffer.”

“You make them sound like a school of porpoises,” her father teased.

“Vyvian is handsome,” Alix murmured.

“I'd call him pretty … he's not made anything of himself yet,” Jane said.

“Well, in that case, why are you so eager for him to propose to your sister?” Allegra Reid turned to her daughter with an amused, tender look.

“Oh, well …” Jane looked embarrassed. “It's just that I'm dying to hear someone propose … how it's done … does he go down on his knees?”

“Fat chance he'd do that with a little sister hovering around,” Alix giggled.

“I'm going to hide, that's my plan, in the cupboard where the newspapers are.”

“Jane!” Her father was serious. “You can't do that. Eavesdropping! We can't have that.”

“You'll have to wait till someone proposes to you, dearie,” her mother said gently.

“I'll never get married,” said Jane with complete conviction.

“Don't we set a good example, your mother and I?”

“That's it. That's the trouble,” Jane answered. “You and Mamma are a little too good to be true. I never see anyone anything like you, Pappa. They're all so dim.”

Fortunately perhaps, the conversation ended there as Martha came and sat down, and Jane went around the table to give her father a hug, and kissed him.

“What are the plans for today, Pappa?” Martha asked, pouring syrup on her pancakes.

“Well, I presume Vyvian and Lawrence will want to play tennis with the girls later on. And Mr. Perkins is coming at four. We might all be down at the dock to welcome him.”

“Can we go over with Captain Philbrook and fetch him at the town dock?” Alix asked.

“What do you think, Allegra?”

“I think Mr. Perkins would be gratified, especially if Jane puts on a clean skirt and ties a ribbon round her hair.”

“An excellent idea,” Viola was standing in the door with Vyvian at her side. “You look as though you had been climbing a tree!”

Jane flashed her sister an angry glance, then melted as she took Viola in, impeccably dressed in a striped blouse with starched white collar and cuffs and dark blue skirt.

“I fell,” Jane said. “We were racing, Alix and I!”

But, suddenly self-conscious, she then got up and went upstairs to Snooker, and lay down on the bed while Snooker rocked in her low rocking chair and mended the toe in Jane's stocking.

“I'll never never look like Viola,” she said crossly. “It's hopeless.”

“Well, she's an elegant young lady, there's no denying that, but you're yourself, Jane. And if you ask me, she'll never have your look.”

“What's my look? Oh, I wish I knew what it was!” she said passionately.

Snooker lifted her head and smiled, “And if I told you it might go to your head!”

“Viola and Edith treat me like nothing, as though I were a little girl. I'm fourteen, after all, it's an awful age.”

“It won't last long. Next year you'll be putting up your hair.”

“The trouble is, I don't want to. I don't want to grow up, Snooker.”

“Dearie, there's no way out of that.”

“I suppose not.” She got up then and took the mended stocking Snooker handed to her. “I don't know what I'd do without you, Snooker. Somehow you always make me feel better.”

The cuckoo clock announced the hour, ten “cuckoos.” Jane counted them and ran off down the stairs singing out “The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh, my ears and whiskers!”

Alix was dressing her large teddy bear down in Pappa's office. “Where is everybody?” Jane asked. “We'd better hurry.”

It was always like this on the island. The day began at a slow, casual pace and gathered momentum, and for Jane and Alix time began to leap and carry them away long before noon.

“Come on, Alix. They'll be playing by now with no one to chase balls—you're too old to be dressing bears.”

“Am I?” Alix looked startled. Then said firmly, “I intend to dress this bear until I die.”

“All right, you loon, but
please
come now. I'm bursting.”

Snooker went down to the kitchen for a cup of tea with Cook and Daisy, the waitress. They all three enjoyed a half-hour of peace and quiet with everyone launched on the day. The dishes were still piled up in the pantry, but they could wait, and soon someone must put more coal in the stove, but that could wait too.

“Mrs. Reid wants strawberry shortcake for dinner, but I'm not sure Captain Philbrook can find enough for eleven. Mr. Perkins will be here for tea, you know. And what will I do if there aren't strawberries? A lemon meringue pie … he's fond of that.”

“Is his beer on the ice?” Snooker asked.

“Naturally,” Cook answered as though she would forget!

“Does he have beer, now?” Daisy, new this summer, asked, astonished, for not a drop of wine or liquor had been served in the house so far.

“Mr. Perkins is privileged,” Cook said, smoothing down her starched white apron with an air of complicity.

“I've always wondered how he managed it about the drinking,” Snooker said, shaking her head.

“And who is Mr. Perkins?” Daisy asked. It seemed quite dramatic that he could come onto the island and expect such preferential treatment.

Cook glanced over at Snooker, who was the one who knew everything.

“He's an old bachelor, a cousin, I think, of some friends of Mr. Reid's in Minnesota. He's been coming for years. Always brings a huge box of Sherry's chocolates with little crystallized violets on the top. And that's all I can tell you about Mr. Perkins!”

“Oo, I've never tasted a violet!” Daisy said, her eyes sparkling.

And Snooker promised to steal one if she could.

“Time to get back to work,” said Cook. “There are vegetables to peel and cut up, Daisy, after you've done the dishes.”

Outdoors the tennis players were starting their second set. Viola and Vyvian had won the first one, six-four. Lawrence, a spectacled young man with a ruddy complexion and rather floppy chestnut hair, was an erratic player and kept the girls busy chasing his balls, and Edith, who hated losing to her older sister, couldn't help showing that she minded when his second serve was out again.

“I'm sorry, Edith,” he said, taking a big white handkerchief out to wipe his face. “I'm out of practice.”

“Practice will never make him perfect,” Alix whispered to Jane.

“Sh—sh …” Jane said fiercely, trying to control a fit of uncontrollable giggles.

Edith gave them a cold look. But it was no use. Alix gave Jane one look and they were suffused with giggles.

“Come on, Lawrence, they're only silly girls—let's play,” Viola commanded, and this time the nettled Lawrence's serve was hard and flat, and they ended by having quite a long rally.

“It's getting late,” Jane, who was getting restless, said to the world at large, “and Alix and I have to help Martha pick lettuce for supper and beans for lunch!”

“Run along, for heaven's sake!” Edith called after them.

“Little sisters should keep their place,” Jane said, winking at Alix. They walked along, then, at the bend in the road, turned to look back at the tennis court through the pine trees. “Poor Lawrence!”

They found Martha already picking in the vegetable garden, very glad to see them. “It's so hot,” she said. “Let's hurry so we can go for a swim.” In a short time they walked down together to the low, shingled bathhouse, a series of cubicles which opened into a roofless area so the temporary inhabitants could dress and undress in sunlight and open air. This summer there was a swallow's nest in Jane's and Alix's cubicle and they had sometimes been frightened by the mother swallow when the babies were small, as she dive-bombed the intruders. But it was worth it, Jane told her father, “because we have seen everything, Pappa.”

The big salt pool, a long rectangle, with a shallow, enclosed place at one end for the little children, was quite close to the shore. On very hot days Jane and Alix sometimes went in to the icy ocean itself, screaming when they finally brought themselves to take the plunge.

On this day Allegra and James Reid were sitting in the big wooden armchairs in their bathing suits when the girls came sauntering down through the field. Allegra had on an old, rather faded suit with a sailor collar and wide dark-blue bloomers, and, of course, stockings and flat black sneakers. She was wearing a white hat. Jane had never understood why women had to be smothered in clothing when going for a swim while Pappa looked so comfortable in his long blue shorts and vest.

“Do I have to wear stockings, Mamma?”

“Dearie, the young men will be here shortly, and I think perhaps you do have to.” Very occasionally when only the family was present this humiliation could be avoided.

“I'm only a child, after all,” said Jane, lifting her chin as she did, when she was feeling stubborn. Unfortunately, it gave her a rather grown-up air.

“You have such long legs, Jane,” her mother said gently.

“What difference does that make?”

But then they heard voices and Jane knew there was no hope, as the four tennis players came round the bathhouse. Lawrence gave a whoop of delight at the sight of the pool and ran out on the diving board as though he was about to dive in fully clothed. Jane watched him and suspected that this enthusiasm had to do with getting away from tennis and into a sport where he could excel. He had been on the swimming team at Exeter.

When Jane and Alix came out from their cubicles ready to swim, their mother and father were already in, Allegra doing her breast stroke up and down for a daily stint and James floating on his back. The girls ran to the beach to watch a yawl go sailing past and wave to it.

“It's the Emersons, Mamma. They've got
Alice
out!” At this four heads appeared over the cubicle walls, as Vyvian, Lawrence, Edith, and Viola stood on the benches to see. In August the harbor was full of boats of all kinds and the island was an excellent observation post, set at the harbor's mouth a quarter-of-a-mile from the mainland. Every Saturday they had grandstand seats for the races on the big porch.

“I'm too hot,” Alix announced. “I've got to swim.”

And in an instant she and Jane had plunged in from the deep end. “Whew! It's freezing, Mamma!” Jane called out, but within a moment she felt a kind of ecstasy at being in the water, the delicious shock of cold and something she enjoyed without defining it, her arms and legs as free and fluid as the element they swam in, for once not constricted by bodices and petticcats and skirts. Oh, to be a seal!

They were joined by the two young men, who showed off their dives, Lawrence managing a superb jackknife though the diving board was really not high enough. Vyvian threw the big red ball in, and by the time Edith and Viola emerged, Alix and Jane were screaming with joy as they threw the ball around. Allegra and James left them to it, after Allegra's head had been soaked with spray.

“Oh Mamma, I am sorry!” But Jane's eyes were sparkling with the joy of it all, and who cared about getting hair wet? Mamma certainly did not.

Nevertheless, when Edith and Vivyan joined in the game she and James went back to their chairs to watch and dry off in the hot sun.

Allegra drank the scene in, the activity in the pool, and then beyond it the long field, gold in August just before the haying, rippled in lovely waves by the breeze, and rolling right up to the farmhouse. Beyond it, sky, today a rather rare day, not a cloud in sight. She turned to her husband with one of those warm smiles that seemed to enfold him and the whole world around him in joyful appreciation and love. And he reached over and took her hand in his. They stayed on until Jane and Alix pulled themselves up the ladder and lay on the edge, panting.

“It's awful to feel so heavy again when you get back into the air,” Jane said, lying on her back, looking up at the sky.

“You'd better get dressed, dears. You've been in a long time.”

“Just one more swim, Mamma!”

“Very well, but someone might pick a bunch of flowers for Mr. Perkins' room … black-eyed Susans and Queen Anne's lace, on the way up to the house. I'll do a bunch for the table myself.”

“We'd better get started …” Alix murmured. “The suits have to be rinsed, and everything.”

Of course they were dressed and on their way up the winding path that meandered around the emerald golf greens long before their parents followed. They picked assiduously, though the black-eyed Susans were tough and sometimes a whole plant got tugged out. But it was necessary to stop quite often and look out over the harbor to see what sail was gliding past, and to take a deep breath of the Mount Desert mountains, dark blue in the distance, ancient and round like sleeping elephants, Jane thought. Or to look the other way at the forest edge, spreading out from the tall trees to a tapestry of blueberry and wild cranberry bushes.

“I wish there didn't have to be a golf course,” Jane said, “it spoils the wildness.”

“Well, yes,” Alix considered this. “But Pappa loves it.”

“Croquet's a much fiercer, better game,” Jane said. “And you don't need all those clubs and things.”

“Anyway,” said Alix, “it's just about a perfect place, you have to admit.”