Work Text:
August 29th
Dearest,
I was enamoured by the description in your last of the cricket match in which you recently excelled—please recount it for me again, in detail, when we next meet so I can cheer your victory in person and provide a suitable prize for your efforts. I hope the weather there is still favourable—the sort of August depicted in storybooks and paintings of the banks of the river Seine. I find myself longing for the bracing wind of the moors and a hedgerow ripe with the first blackberries of the season, even if plucking them necessitates running the gauntlet of thorns.
You kindly enquired about my wellbeing and…
Do you ever feel that summer is an illusion? That if you look too deeply at it or ponder upon it for too long, it will disappear like the whisper of a dream? How else is one to make sense of the wafting grass and the swaying daisies or the bees that hum a cadence only they know to accompany their dance through the air?
No matter how many of them I see, I am prevented from truly believing in the reality of the summertime. I pass through as if summer is a memory of something which didn’t quite materialise, as if each is no more than a wish, a suggestion of something that should happen but hasn’t found a way to quite yet.
The air in the palace is stifling today. Centuries of history and duty leer down from the walls and the dust—with which we are in constant, apparently unwinnable battle—sparkles when the sunlight catches it on its way through the room. There is a plan to rearrange the great paintings which consumes most of the household—the debate about what should be where and the muttering about how much work will be entailed before everyone snaps to attention and boasts about how they, above all others, will make sure the task is attended to properly—and much has been made of the impending visit of the ambassador, which I mentioned to you last time. There is still no date for when we can expect to return the favour so little progress has been made on precisely which items to prepare, or for when.
I will confess, however, that I am distracted from my work and idle gossip with my fellows by the heat; it seems to have me in its grasp this year, as if there is no escaping it. It stalks me through the corridors and lurks in wait for me in my room at the end of the day, keeps me tossing and turning all night even with the window open to let in the freshness and the noise of the traffic, which always comes along for a ride.
Every time I venture outside in search of reprieve, I am reminded of all the more pleasant ways I could be spending my days. I pass by the park and think of trailing my fingers through the cascading branches of the willows, which gives way to the idea of dangling them from the side of a boat into the coolness of a river. The water laps at the sides; you—for you are there, of course—dig the oars in with good-natured complaint about doing all the work while I lie back and shield my eyes from the sun with my sleeve.
Perhaps we stop for a picnic on the riverbank, unroll a blanket and place a basket on it, unpacking sandwiches and ginger beer in a glass bottle, the stopper threatening to depart every time it is jostled. From a distance, we look like one of those paintings—mottled by the shadows of leaves as we lounge side-by-side underneath a willow tree, unworried by the daily trifles of life. The grass would tickle as we divested ourselves of shoes and socks, rolled up our trouser legs, and dipped our toes in the flowing water.
Maybe there are meadows in the surrounding area to be explored. Wild flowers make lazy patterns as they move with the soft breeze and our hands brush as we steal through them, picking at stray ears of corn that have drifted from the nearby fields and taken root. We stroll without a care, commenting on the dryness of the soil as if either of us knows anything about the agricultural calendar, while the sun keeps a tender watch over us, and the farmer is kept at bay by the birds needing to be scared off on the hillside.
Or perhaps it’s not the countryside that has called to us; it’s sand dunes, rising up in drifts capped off with bushels of grass which look thoroughly unkempt, like the worst sort of morning hair, but we forgive them because they conceal us from prying eyes. There is salt on our lips. We shed our jackets and squash our toes into the damp sand, while the sea speaks a promise of changing tides we hope that she will keep.
I could believe in a summer that tasted like salt and strawberries and sun-warmed ginger beer, one that felt like a soft blanket, stretched out on undulating ground. I could sleep, no matter the heat, if I knew there was a promise of a pair of chairs stretched out on the lawn of a quaint house bedecked in charming lilac roses, where no one would bother us as our ankles touched. I could understand the joy of days off and cloudless skies, were there someone—you, of course you—to settle into them with.
Lately I have been thinking very often of all these summer pursuits we could partake of, in another life, another time. Perhaps if I spent it with you, summer would finally feel like something I have lived through, rather than merely endured as a prelude to the falling of the leaves and the changing of the seasons.
Write soon, and tell me: does summer make you think of these things too?
Your darling,
R