Just For the Summer (15 page)

They sat on the bench with their coffee. Andrew's courage advanced as his headache receded. ‘Is Jessica going out with anyone?' Andrew asked.

‘Funny, you're the second person to ask me that. Paul from the boatyard asked me the same thing two days ago, or maybe it was yesterday. Recently anyway, why do you ask?'

‘Just wondered. She always seems to be with you, or girls down from London, or Miranda. She looks like, you know, like she'd be quite sort of interested in men.'

‘Do you mean she dresses like a slag?' Milo said, laughing at Andrew and watching him getting confused. Andrew blushed helplessly, because of course that was exactly what he had meant.

‘No of course not,' he, lied. ‘Anyway, does she like Paul?'

‘Don't know. We don't talk about that sort of thing much. We prefer windsurfing.' Milo didn't want another discussion about his best friend, his little sister. ‘Paul's doing Peace Studies at university,' Milo said mischievously, knowing that would get old Andrew going. His politics were as predictable as his father's.

‘Peace Studies! Is he a communist?'

‘Is anyone these days? Anyway surely you don't have to be a communist to study peace? Does that mean that if you're right-wing you can only study war?'

‘Suppose not. I've never really thought about it.'

Andrew's head wasn't yet straight enough for all this. There was an awful lot he'd never really thought about Perhaps he should take up more sport. Apart from sailing, which everyone here could do as far as Andrew could see, there was really only swimming or windsurfing or water-skiing. All those had far too much potential for making a fool of oneself. What he needed was a few
head-clearing hours out on his Laser, practising for the regatta, then he'd show them.

On the road halfway to Truro Miranda had to get out of the car to be sick.

Jack, driving, said ‘You haven't been car-sick since you were about three and we had a bouncy old Ford Anglia.'

‘Hangover. I expect, or something I ate,' Miranda said.

‘Ate when? You didn't have any breakfast.'

‘Oh well that's it then, I should have.'

Well he wasn't going to win this one. Jack didn't care. He felt quite happy. For the past couple of days he'd been staring into the hydrangeas still trying to capture the point at which they changed colour from pink to blue, purple to lilac. If they needed water colours he'd just have to go to the art shop and buy some. It was years since he'd bought any, he remembered all the hours he used to spend hanging around in Cornelissens, savouring the smells of oils, the jars of pigments. He'd just read a popular philosophy book and had learnt rather late in life that saying ‘I can' is as much a matter of choice and as easy to say as ‘I can't'. ‘I can't' was just a matter of laziness and fear of failing. Boy Scout stuff, Jack thought, but true nonetheless. He intended to find the book and give it to Clare before he rang up the estate agents and sent them round to value the house in London.

Meanwhile there were art supplies to buy. He loved that feel of new sable brushes, the soft powdery colours of the pastels, the virgin wood of the palettes. He often thought he could spend his days working in such a shop, what an indulgence. Customers would wonder if he'd been just a little famous in his time. But it still was his time, he thought, he still had some painting to do. And there never would be any fame without any painting.

Jessica and Miranda wandered round the shops together. Jessica, for clothes, was missing Sloane Street and the Fulham Road. Miranda missed jumble sales.

‘You can buy good beach stuff here, but not much else,' Jessica said. ‘Let's get some shoes, or some teeshirts at least.'

Miranda was feeling queasy again but let Jessica drag her into a loud shop full of lurid lime and lemon coloured clothes. They chose a random pile and giggled in the communal changing room over the various permutations.

‘Your tits have grown Miranda, are you on the pill?' Jessica said.

‘No, it must be puberty at last or something,' Miranda said. ‘Perhaps I'm going to be a big girl after all.'

‘Not you, you're as slim as a reed. Kate Moss eat your heart out! I'm going to be huge, I wonder if Paul likes big girls?' Jessica turned sideways and eyed her reflection.
‘These clothes are disgusting. Let's go and get some lunch,' she said, peeling off the layers.

In the wine bar they both chose salads, drank wine and got giggly.

‘Have you ever done anything truly awful?' Jessica said, ‘that you just couldn't tell anyone?'

How did she know, Miranda thought.

‘Well yes, have you?'

‘Well not really, but I think I might be going to. Let's have another drink first.'

Miranda got the drinks and quietly flipped a coin from the change. Heads tell Jess, tails don't. Heads.

‘Go on then,' said Miranda, ‘tell me.'

‘Well it concerns Andrew's party in a way. I happen to know that he didn't intend to have one. He rang me up and invited me round to the house for the evening and I invited everyone else.'

‘Did he really mean only you to come? Didn't you realize?'

‘Not till I'd asked everyone, and seen how surprised he looked about the whole thing. I mean it never occurred to me that he'd want to see me alone. Milo says he's lusting after me.'

Miranda giggled and choked over her wine. ‘Wow lucky you, just think what you missed.'

‘I'm so horrible, that party was all my fault and I sent Milo round to clear up the mess.'

‘I shouldn't worry about that,' Miranda said, ‘I don't suppose Andrew will want to see you for a while anyway.'

They were both giggling and the barman watched, thinking that they looked quite seriously under-age. They were too pretty to throw out, and besides the other conversations were between rather boring business people, his more usual lunch-time trade.

‘Oh poor Andrew. You'll have to make it up to him you know.'

‘I know, that's what Milo said. He had a rather terrible idea last night after we got home. I hardly dare tell you though, promise you won't be shocked?'

‘No of course I won't be.'

‘Well Milo thinks I should go into one of those passport photo booths and take my clothes off and then send the photos to Andrew. I'd have to do it so he couldn't see my face, and it would have to be all anonymous. A sort of strip photo of a strip-tease.'

‘God Jess, would you really dare?'

The barman couldn't resist a request for more drinks.

‘Milo did a dreadful thing once,' Jessica was saying as the barman brought wine on a tray.

‘There was this boy who'd asked me out to dinner at a really smart fish restaurant, promised me lobster and champagne and all that. Anyway I got all dressed up and I waited and waited and he never turned up, didn't phone or anything. The next day Milo bought an
ungutted mackerel and a jiffy bag and posted it to the boy, second class. You can imagine what it smelt like when he got it. Milo sent this disgusting note with it that said, “There are only two things that smell of fish: This is a fish, you are the other thing.”'

‘What?' Miranda said, not catching on.

‘He meant “cunt”!' Jessica whispered loudly. Time for them to leave, the barman thought.

‘What have you done that's terrible?' Jessica asked. ‘It's your turn.'

Miranda was still laughing, but just managed to get the words out, ‘I think that what I've done is gone and got pregnant. ‘

The barman went back to washing glasses.

THAT AFTERNOON, WITH
nothing to do till the sheets were ready for collection in Helston, Clare sat in her garden, thinking that with Jack and all the children out the cottage felt just the right size for her. Tempting fate, she imagined herself widowed, divorced, the children away at school or college. Imagining, she arranged for herself just the necessities for a single life (with the addition of new bathroom, kitchen, central heating, just those things that the cottage needed right now, never mind waiting for the payout of life insurance policies). But deep down, she knew she wouldn't make a cosy village widow. There was a goldfish bowl feeling about living alongside the creek, everyone knowing what everyone else was doing. She felt brave, that afternoon to be out at all – everyone seemed to know that she was the one who should have been in charge of Andrew and his social life the night before. She
hadn't dared, alone, go to the village shop for the newspaper, but had cravenly sent Harriet instead. Harriet had reported back that the man in the shop had said, ‘I bet your Mum's in for a busy day.'

If it was this bad in summer, when the village population was so diluted by trippers, imagine, she thought, what it must be like in winter, nothing but gossip. Strange how much more private one could be, living in over-populated suburbia. If Jack really didn't go back to the Poly and they sold the Cornish house, the only thing she'd miss about summers would be Eliot and the opportunity for a good deal of lustful fantasy. Guiltily, she abandoned the idea of being alone with the cottage, and offered up a quick prayer for the safe return of Jack and Miranda from Truro.

Clare sat under the pear tree, with her back to the creek and the rest of the village so she couldn't see if she was being stared at. Virtuously, she knitted multicoloured bobbles to sew on a sweater, trying to keep her fingers in the shade as she worked, so they wouldn't get sticky and hot and ruin the silk. She felt she ought to give some serious thought to Jack and his work problems, rather than to thinking how good an opportunity it would be for Eliot to be making an inpromptu visit. Today she didn't want him, her hands still reeked of disinfectant (as did Celia's entire house), and she didn't feel that Eau de Domestos was at all a seductive scent.

Clare knew quite well that Jack also knew quite well that selling the cottage would not generate anywhere near enough money for them to live on. She would have to get a job, though what as she couldn't imagine. Expanding the knitwear business would take investment and a college course, neither of which they would now be able to afford. It rather looked as if, in order for Jack to give up working at a job that no longer interested him, Clare would have to start working at one which did not particularly interest her. She thought about all the job ads that she read so casually over late breakfasts after the school runs. She felt she was too old now to go out as a perky temporary typist. She would no longer be able to understand the jargon. Clare had learned, at evening classes, secretarial skills in the days when an IBM Golfball was the last word in typewriter technology, and when a man would come round to the office to show the secretaries how to do photo-copier maintenance. Now the ads were all about WordPerfect and Windows and spreadsheets and databases. If Clare had to absorb a mass of unfamiliar technology (and why not? She could programme the washing machine), she would rather it was connected with the problems of wool tension and machine intarsia.

In truth, the working-world out there frightened Clare. She was terrified of hyper-efficient women in expensive suits and no-nonsense shoes. She didn't want to be
something in ‘recruitment', which she always associated with joining the Brownies, running the world's industries in lycra tights and high heels. She didn't see there could possibly be anything more desirable in business travel and expense account lunches than in driving her own children and their friends to the park for a sandwich, a can of coke and an afternoon of playing on the swings.

Clare knew she was an anachronism. She enjoyed and valued the job she had, a home-maker, a mother. She didn't really care whether it was fashionable or not, what she wanted most of all was not to have to give it up. If Jack was at home painting all day, he would soon get to the point of saying,. ‘I'll be able to do all those boring domestic things in the house, then you'll be free to go out to work', as if it was what she had been waiting for all those years.

Running alongside her other middle-aged, middle-class problem of fancying someone else's husband and wishing she was up to what she imagined her daughter was up to was a problem that Clare had thought only affected other people. She'd had friends with School Gate Syndrome. She'd seen that look of sorrowful loss on the day the last small child in a family runs for the first time through the gate of the local primary school. She'd seen redundant mothers, devastated by the newly-silent and empty house, immediately planning another accidental pregnancy. Clare now knew how they felt.

Jack had said firmly that mothers like that were lazy sods who just didn't want to rejoin the workforce, thereby at a stroke cancelling out all his dinner-party lip-service to feminism, where he supported the view that bringing up a family was as hard work as being a nurse on a double shift. Clare thought such opinions in the company of pretty women were Jack's version of flirtation. She took his private opinion to mean that definitely he didn't want her to have another baby, and just now sitting knitting in the sun Clare thought that the odds against her getting away with pretending her coil had dropped out unnoticed were pretty bad. Perhaps if Miranda had a child, she thought, as if such a thing could not really happen, how else could she contemplate the idea, she could look after it for her. She put the appalling notion firmly out of her mind and touched wood quickly for Miranda. What a thing to wish on anyone, especially her own daughter, on the verge of A-levels and UCCA forms.

Down in the creek below the garden, Amy and Harriet were grubbing about among the pebbles and rock pools, showing off to the current collection of visiting children. They'd need a good hosing down when they got back, Clare thought, to hell with any hose pipe ban, surely it doesn't apply to the cleaning of children, any more than it had that morning applied to the essential cleaning of the Osbourne's garden.