COVER PAGE

The Summer House: A Trilogy

TITLE PAGE

The Summer House: A Trilogy

Alice Thomas Ellis

Paul Dry Books
Philadelphia 2013

COPYRIGHT PAGE

First Paul Dry Books Edition, 2013

Paul Dry Books, Inc.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Copyright (c) Alice Thomas Ellis 1987, 1988, 1989

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ellis, Alice Thomas.

[Summerhouse trilogy]

The summer house : a trilogy / Alice Thomas Ellis. -- First Paul Dry Books edition.

pages cm

First published under the title: The summerhouse trilogy.

ISBN 978-1-58988-086-3 (alk. paper)

1. Man-woman relationships--Fiction. 2. Friendship--Fiction. 3. England--Fiction. I. Title.

PR6055.L4856S86 2013

823'.914--dc23

2013003226

ISBN: 978-1-58988-086-3 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-58988-291-1 (e-book)

Contents

The Clothes in the Wardrobe

The Skeleton in the Cupboard

The Fly in the Ointment

About the author

THE CLOTHES IN THE WARDROBE

I remembered her all my life. For years the image of her had hung in my mind like a portrait in a high room, seldom observed but unchanging. Sometimes, unawares, I would see her again suddenly revealed in the vaulting halls of my head. She was sitting on a grassy bank, leaning forward a little, a cigarette between her fingers, and she was speaking. I could not remember what she was saying, nor even if I had understood her, but I knew that what she was saying must be, in some sense, significant. She wore a cream-coloured cotton frock with large puffed sleeves, sprigged with tiny brown flowers; her stockings were cream-coloured too and on her feet were white, barred shoes. Her hair grew in dry red curls, dark red like rust or winter bracken. She was not at all beautiful, but even with her likeness before me I had always assumed that she must be, since she carried such conviction in her forgotten words and her enduring appearance. Her name was Lili.

‘Margaret,’ called my mother, and ‘Margaret’ again, her voice taking on the faint exasperation that had flavoured her tone as she used my name for many years now. I sometimes wondered whether she had been angry with the infant Margaret and whether I had feared her always.

‘The guest list,’ she said, standing in the hall before the looking-glass, removing her hat and jabbing stiff-fingered at her hair. ‘Have you thought about the guest list?’

I stood in the doorway of the sitting-room and said that I had.

‘Invitations,’ said my mother. ‘I must send out the invitations.’

She came into the sitting-room and sniffed. ‘I wish you’d eat in the kitchen or the dining-room,’ she complained

I had eaten an orange and thrown the peel on the fire just as I lit it, and the smell of orange zest and smoke embittered the air while the peel lay, mock flame, amid the cold coals.

‘If you’d chosen to be married in June,’ remarked my mother, doubtless moved by the aroma to an association of ideas, ‘the mock orange blossom would have been out.’