Love and Summer Read Online Free PDF Page B

on dingy window-panes cast shadows where the party people had danced, even in the afternoon. Music came from a big brash radiogram and they danced all over the house, in all the downstairs rooms, on the landing, in the hall. They had sat about on the stairs.
    In the bedroom that had always been his he pulled the crumpled bedclothes up and covered the untidiness with a bedspread. It was a treachery, of course, his selling the house; he knew it was. A few days before his death, his father had reiterated what so often he had said before: that if desperate measures were called for a few of Shelhanagh’s eighteen rooms could be let, and something made of the attractions of the lake and the surrounding tranquillity; that no matter how Florian wished to live, Shelhanagh would always at least be a roof above his head. ‘Never betray your gift, beau,’ his mother, ignoring practicalities, had earlier advised. For being the child of gifted parents - both of them watercolourists of exceptional skill - it was assumed that he would inherit, in some manner, to some degree, their talent.
    Art had been their passion. Their easels and their brushes, their repeated views of the lake, their birds and flowers and city streets, their still-life compositions, ruled their lives and were the heart of Shelhanagh while they lived, and of themselves, and somehow of their marriage. The parties they gave had all to do with this, their guests mostly painters also or in some other way involved in the world of art, the sale of a picture often the reason for celebration.
    That Florian would one day have a place in this world was cherished as an expectation. Presumed with unquestioned certainty that its realization would come about, the prediction influenced his childhood, as his parents’ love of one another did, and their kindness. But while accepting good intentions’ generosity, he had his private doubts, his first experience of this occurring on the morning of his fifth birthday.
    Receiving the flat, black tin box he’d been given, he had imagined it contained sweets until he folded back the hinged lid and saw the colours. His mother read out the names: chrome yellow and Prussian blue, madder and crimson lake, cobalt and emerald. He got them muddled; they said that didn’t matter. ‘Oh, you can, of course you can,’ they said when they dipped the brush in the water and gave it to him. They showed him how; he splashed and made a mess. ‘Of course you can,’ they said again. He knew he couldn’t.
    This morning, going from one half-empty room to another, he found himself, without resentment, reflecting for longer than usual on such moments of spent time, and more reluctant than usual to accept the end that every day pressed closer. He stood in the doorway of the bedroom where his father had died while dressing himself and where - three years before that - his mother hadn’t woken up on her sixty-first birthday. Now, only the wardrobe and the bed remained. ‘Later on we’ll see to the clothes,’ his father had said, gathering together dresses and coats on their hangers, to be given to a charity he never made contact with, unable to bring himself to do it. His own clothes hung beside them now.
    They couldn’t help it, thinking the world of him. Florian knew that. Even then he almost had. Other forms of art had been suggested, and still - in spite of each negative outcome - the promise apparently remained, while he himself was aware only of failure. He minded at first, later much less. The house was full of books; he read a lot.
    He didn’t mind at all when the fees at his Dublin boarding-school were difficult to find and he had to leave it. An elderly tutor, a Mr Blades, arrived from Castledrummond on a motorcycle every day for a while, until the same difficulty arose again and education ended. Then, or later, Florian might have left Shelhanagh, but he remained.
    We do not press him to stay here with us , his father’s untidy handwriting had