Just For the Summer (11 page)

In the garden Jack, who was supposed to be shopping for chicken wings and lamb for the kebabs, was trying to remember what artistic inspiration felt like as he sharpened his pencil and opened a new pad of cartridge paper. He hardly wanted to defile the clean white pages, afraid that he wouldn't be able to capture an impression of the hydrangea and make it acceptably recognizable. Flower paintings seemed to do well at the craft centre, along with local river views and boats at sunset. Jack had taught his pupils to look first at the overall shape of their subject, and at the shapes made between the parts of the subject.
He tried doing the same. The hydrangea had so many petals, such delicately shaded colouring, through pinks and lilacs to blue. It was a plant for watercolour, oil was too heavy, a human hand with a pencil was too heavy. Jack made some sketching gestures over the paper, not quite touching it He looked out towards the hippy raft across the creek and closed the pad. Another time. He couldn't concentrate. The noises of Clare in the kitchen fighting with the washing made him feel guilty that he wasn't in there helping. But if he went in now he would be cursed for being too late. When they moved down here properly, Clare would have all her usual gadgets with her then, that should help. He went towards the kitchen, if he didn't go there at all there'd be a resentful silence to live through later. ‘Shall I make you some coffee?' he asked Clare.

‘You can't fill the kettle, I'm using the taps,' she snapped at him.

He tried harder: ‘Next time I'll take it all to the launderette in Helston for you. You shouldn't have to do all this.'

‘I know that. You could do it, or Miranda could. Even Amy could. It isn't brain surgery, it's easy. But no-one else wants to because it's so bloody tedious.'

‘Helston then,' he said.

‘No not Helston. Not to the launderette anyway, if we go there at all we collect an automatic washing machine and a dryer too. This is not my idea of a holiday.'

It was on the tip of Jack's tongue to say that they wouldn't be needing any more gadgets, they would be able to move the ones they'd got when they sold the house in London, but yet again this wasn't the moment. When did all this become just my job? Clare wondered. Jeannie at least got paid for doing the ironing.

Later, Clare was at last relaxed on a sunbed under lines of drying sheets, with coffee and a novel. Jack was having his turn at being cross in the kitchen, marinading lamb in sticky yoghourty mixtures that the smaller children probably wouldn't like and wishing he'd thought of buying frozen hamburgers instead. He could see Clare having her time off under the billowing laundry and both of them saw Miranda walking slowly up the path to the Post Office across the creek. Jack went back to the marinade but Clare watched Miranda go into a phone box, and she wondered why. What could Miranda have to say to anyone that couldn't be said on the cottage phone? Someone in London, she thought, serious boyfriend gossip with a friend, secrets. Clare went back to her book and pushed from her mind a suddenly vivid memory of herself in her sixth-form uniform, running furtively from her house to the phone box round the corner with just enough money for a three-minute call to Cambridge. He had been out, and in a moment of resentment and panic Clare had said to his roommate, ‘Just tell him I called, and you can also tell him I'm pregnant.'

Clare's attempt to entertain Andrew that evening was not as successful as she had hoped. Clare had, after the struggles with the laundry, looked forward to an evening of teenage liveliness, relaxed and casual. She liked to feel she was the kind of parent that didn't inhibit a good time for her children. Miranda had always brought her friends round to the house and she had always enjoyed their careless and irreverent chat. She had never wondered if it was unwise of her to join in. With Miranda now so slippery and reclusive, she was missing out and hoped to restore the balance a bit over supper.

But when the Lynch twins arrived they wanted to play on the creek wall, a dangerous balancing game with the tide high beneath them. They would need, Clare realized, constant watching.

‘Just make them wear their life jackets,' Liz had instructed as she tottered off in high heels and a minimal slinky yard or two of clinging black jersey for a grown-up dinner with Eliot. Clare had felt instantly frumpish in her bunchy purple Monsoon frock and dirty pink espadrilles still soggy from the leaking washing machine. The twins ignored her and Clare chased after them to the wall.

‘You must keep your life jackets on if you want to play by the water,' Clare insisted as kindly as she could manage. How could she join in with the evening if she had to run up and down the garden grabbing hold of the
twins all the time? ‘If you fall in, you will drown. And that means you won't be around for any fun tomorrow, or the next day, or any other days after that.'

She was kneeling on the grass, at their six-year-old level. Their blank blue eyes looked back at her and the twins said nothing. Clare wasn't used to children like this – Barnes children listened and learned and understood when things were explained patiently to them. These two should be saying ‘yes Clare'and going off obediently to play on the swing. Instead they looked at each other and restarted the unzipping of the life jackets. Clare felt a strong urge to tie them firmly to a tree, the wrong reaction for a liberal parent.

‘Jess, keep an eye on your brothers please, while I help Jack,' she said, passing the buck.

‘Are they really that stupid or is it just a cleverly calculated method of getting their own way, do you think?' she asked Jack as she helped turn over a few kebabs.

‘Probably take after Eliot,' Jack said, watching the two little boys fighting to get away from Miranda and Jessica. ‘He's an awkward bugger to deal with as well.'

‘Oh I don't know,' Clare said, defensively, reaching in through the kitchen window for a bottle of wine on the draining board. ‘He's the intelligent one. And Liz is the one who knows how to get what she wants.'

Conversation did not sparkle over supper. Clare, thinking about Miranda's dash for the phone box, kept
having to stop herself asking if the bladder problem was getting any better today. Amy and Harriet bickered over the chicken wings, each claiming it wasn't fair, the other one had too many of them.

Andrew, Clare noticed with interest, pushed Milo quite roughly out of the way so that he could sit next to Jessica at the big round garden table. Taking plates into the kitchen later, Clare said to Jack: ‘Did you notice the way Andrew was looking at Jess? Obviously has quite a crush.'

‘I'm not surprised. If I was his age I probably would have too,' Jack said, opening a second bottle of Chardonnay.

‘I wonder if he wants to talk about it?' Clare mused as she scraped plates. ‘I don't suppose he would be able to confide in Celia.'

‘Shouldn't think so, Clare. Don't forget, boys of that age are horribly embarrassable, I should leave him alone with his thoughts.'

Clare felt she'd been warned off and went to sulk on the terrace with a glass of wine. I should be drinking mineral water, she thought, in case I have to jump in the creek after one of those boys. She went and looked down into the murky water, but the tide was going safely down and she wouldn't have to swim.

The teenagers disappeared in a rowing boat, leaving the younger children to play hide and seek in the garden. Clare peered with interest at the families she could see having a lateish supper in uncurtained rooms round the
village. It was Friday night, visitors had settled in and the second wave was arriving –the weekend commuters who arrived in dusty suits, taxied from the airport at Newquay for two days of a different kind of executive stress. Wives who had slopped around their holiday homes all week with no make-up and cheese sandwiches in bed with the children, suddenly had to iron a skirt and find a proper pair of shoes to compete with the smart city women their husbands had been sharing their weekdays with.

‘I'm glad we don't have to spend our summers like that,' Jack said, sliding on to the bench next to Clare and watching the lawyer across the creek pay off his taxi driver and haul his weekend case into his house. ‘There'll be tears by Sunday,' he went on.

Clare giggled. ‘That's because they have to fit a whole holiday into two days. Frantic rounds of beach picnics, French cricket with the kids, drinks with the neighbours, people round for supper. Poor sod probably wants to sleep and lie around reading the sort of book Eliot writes.'

‘Just shows how lucky we are,' Jack ventured, wondering, perhaps correctly for once if this was the moment he should suggest moving away from London. He took a deep breath. ‘You know Clare, I was thinking, what we could do is …'

It was really quite a dramatic splash. Jack was still halfway through his sentence as Clare stumbled down
the creek steps in the twilight and jumped into the water. It wasn't deep, but the thrashing child had gone right under and was ploughing about helplessly in the mud.

‘It's OK, I've got you,' Clare yelled, grabbing Amy by her dungarees.

‘It's their fault, they dared me!' roared Amy, howling muddy tears of fright and pointing at the satisfied faces of the Lynch twins peering down over the wall. ‘They said I had to walk along the wall with my eyes shut!'

‘You should have cheated,' Harriet, older and wiser said scornfully.

Eliot, arriving at that moment from his cool, brief dinner (so brief, due to the lack of stimulating conversation between himself and Liz, that he calculated he had spent money at the rate of £2 per minute), at the Parrot restaurant, thought he had never seen Clare looking so delectable. Her eyes were blazing with relief and anger, her hair was wild and matted and her soaking dress was caught up under the clutched child, showing a tempting lot of squeezable thigh. Liz stood coldly shimmering next to him, still as unruffled as when she had, earlier that evening, finally completed her hour-long stint at the bathroom mirror. Eliot wanted to roll on Clare and get mucky. Clare, for once, didn't even register his presence at all.

‘Is it one of mine?' Liz enquired without much
interest, and being careful not to rush closely to get a look, because of the mud.

‘No,' Clare said, ‘It's Amy, apparently because of a silly dare made by your two.'

‘Oh well, no harm done,' Liz said complacently, relieved that she would not be the one having to hose down the filthy child. Then she smiled benignly, ‘But you know, Clare, I'm really surprised you don't insist they wear life jackets near the water, like mine. They soon get used to it, don't you boys?'

‘
I'M A TERRIBLE
mother. The one thing I'm supposed to be good at and I'm terrible. Even Liz, who couldn't take proper care of a hamster, knows I'm useless.' Clare, straight from a bad night's sleep, was immediately into picking at the evening before.

Jack sighed and rolled over into a vague wakefulness.

‘No you're not,' he tried, on auto-pilot, to reassure her. 'It was just one of those accidents.'

‘There's no excuse Jack, she could have drowned.'

‘No she couldn't, we were there weren't we?'

Jack hadn't even opened his eyes yet. Clare had agonized all the same things the night before, going over a range of safety options from barbed wire fences to banning the children from the garden. But another one she came up with was selling the house. Jack could feel, through the sheet, the vibrations of her twitching fingers, picking tensely at the frayed edge of the tatty
patchwork quilt. He wanted to wake up enough to get out of bed and escape to make a reviving cup of tea before Clare's morose thoughts moved on, inevitably, to Miranda.

Clare was wide awake, staring critically round the bedroom for more signs of failure to blame on herself. Her big calico work-bag was on the window ledge, over-flowing with neglected knitting yarns, reproaching her for weeks of non-creativity. Threads were trailing, tangling on the moth-eaten rug. The brass on the bed was getting tarnished, and the soft butter-cream paint on the walls was flaking and had an age-acquired greeny-grey tinge to it.

I don't take care of this house properly, Clare lamented. Not like the other one. In Barnes she would have lovingly mended the rug, polished and sealed the brass and rag-rolled the walls with a carefully thought-out mix of unexpected colours. At home she had paint in her bedroom that had been expensively distressed – a similar effect here in Cornwall, worn by time and not by decorators, was merely paint that looked bloody miserable.

‘I think we should repaint this room,' Clare said to Jack as he tried to sneak out of bed.

‘Oh, yes, good idea. What colour do you fancy?' Jack asked, encouragingly. The more of herself Clare put into a house, the more reluctant she would be to part with it. Clare, who unknown to Jack was
starting to think of attracting potential purchasers, said, ‘Oh, something fairly inoffensive. Cream again, possibly, or pale green.' At home, she and everyone else she knew chose their paints from the limited sludgy range issued by the National Trust, or the Georgian Society, or from Coles. Expensive experts were hired to apply translucent layers of flat oil paint. Many a south west London front door was peeling because of householders' refusal to compromise their good taste and overcome a horror of hard-wearing gloss paint. Clare reached across to the calico bag and started pulling out skeins of silky yarn.

‘And the kitchen. I just hate the kitchen, all that grubby stained wood,' she said, rummaging through the wools and silks. ‘I'm going to paint those louvred doors. What do you think of these pinks, all together? I can do the louvre bits this pale shade, and the bits round the edge darker, and pick out the drawers in a third shade?' Clare shuffled the dusty pink shades on the bed. Jack was impressed, he made plans to take her out that night, take advantage of her enthusiasm and put his master-plan to her.