Just For the Summer (16 page)

Amy had said that morning that the river smelt of poo, and Clare hoped that what they were so covered in was really all mud. If it wasn't, that would be another reason for selling the cottage. One way or another, it looked rather as if this was going to be their last summer in the village.

There were about ten children playing together. Clare's two bossed the others around, glorying in their superior status as residents, the fastest and most skilful catchers of the crabs and prawns. Hers were also the scruffiest, their hair bleached fair by the sun and overlaid with a greeny-blonde colouring from the chemicals in the Lynchs' pool. What must it be doing to their insides, Clare thought, perhaps they were all greeny-yellow and pickled too. All the local children, according to Jeannie, had gone off to Greece or Spain with their families. Anywhere, presumably to get away from this influx of tourists in the village. Those who weren't making money out of trippers did all they could to avoid them, leaving children like Amy and Harriet lording it over the village. They could now run around barefoot like the real locals, without wincing over the stones. Every week brought a new set of children in pastel-coloured jelly shoes to be sneered at.

Eliot, in his smoke-filled study, sat in front of his word processor with nothing but good intentions inside his head. When he was younger and keener he had
got up at 5.30 every morning and written a thousand words before breakfast. Now he was lucky to write ten. He challenged the complex equipment in front of him: if you're so clever why can't you write the damned book for me? He had to think harder about using the technology than he had ever before had to think about writing his books. If he hadn't spent all that money on the thing, he'd happily have gone back to the old Olivetti portable he had used before fame and fortune had complicated his life. He didn't trust the glow from the machine either. He kept wondering if it was sending out a malevolent dose of cancerous radiation to him as he tried to work. Perhaps the faster he wrote the book, the less radiation he would get. He'd live longer. His main problem, right now though, was lack of inspiration, lack of interest and worst of all, lack of time.

Eliot was getting too old to write about these fast fit young people. He had to invent such daring and unlikely things for them to do. They were so glamorous, powerful, slim and athletic. They were confident, capable. They were not like him. It was harder and harder even to pretend to identify with the heroes he created. Younger authors now wrote more knowledgeably about intrigue and espionage than he ever had. If he had trouble with a simple word processor, how could be be expected to keep up with the technology of the undercover spy world? And who was there to spy
against any more with the cold war over? Eliot always got stomach trouble in the Middle East. And the punters weren't slow to tell you if you'd got things wrong. His plots were getting as tired as he was. He'd lost the spark, and was exhausted by the competition. Every time be heard a book programme on the radio, or switched on a TV chat show there was some clever-clever little sod saying ‘Oh the book was easy, it just wrote itself. I sat down and finished it in less than a fortnight.' Didn't they have the same rewriting to do, the lunchtime battles with editors, the printing problems? Eliot's only advantage was his track record. His fame guaranteed that his books went straight from publication to massive displays on every airport bookstall, every station, every newsagent with even the smallest bookrack, never mind the critics. And not many got sent back unsold. They'd take anything, Eliot thought with ungrateful disgust. He could have written his name 90,000 times on a length of lavatory paper and there would still be a queue for the film rights.

But Eliot still had a nagging artistic pride that had not yet burned itself out. That was why he agonized over the word processor rather than triumphed over his royalty cheques. He considered changing his pseudonym, just to see if he was still really publishable, but he remembered acutely the pain of his first ten rejection slips and didn't dare.

Eliot pressed all the right buttons to save the few
words he had written and then turned off the machine. One day he would probably lose the lot in the depths of a floppy disc or two, so he stopped work while he was still sober enough to remember what to do.

He felt like some fresh air and decided it was a good moment perhaps to go and call on Clare. She was a warm, sympathetic type, the sort that people trusted with their pets and children and problems. He knew she was alone because Jessica had gone to Truro with Jack and Miranda and somehow, in Eliot's mind, he kept seeing a tempting picture of Clare, mud-covered from rescuing Amy the other night, all rumpled frock and mud-splashed hair. There had been a furious passion in her eyes too, a hint of hidden depths which it might be fun to plumb. Eliot whistled an Irish tune as he wandered into the kitchen and took a bottle of champagne from the fridge. Liz, coming into the kitchen, caught Eliot, bottle in hand, practising what he thought was a seductive smile and which she interpreted as a lecherous leer, and fled, slamming the door and stalking off down the path to the village.

Eliot, humming ‘Froggy went a-courting', set off down the same path, cheerfully waving the champagne bottle to a state of undrinkable fizz.

Clare did not see either Liz or Eliot walking down the hill. The effort of keeping the silk from getting sticky in the heat was proving too much, so Clare went back into the cool of the kitchen to make a cup of tea. While
she was filling the kettle it occurred to her that with the house empty she had the perfect opportunity to do something that she thought she would never stoop to doing. Back in Barnes, a friend who had been worried about her own daughter's behaviour had once told Clare that she intended to read the girl's diary. Clare, at the time, had been shocked. What an unforgiveable invasion of privacy, she had thought, how completely despicable. It was something she would never, herself, consider doing.

But that was then, when if she wanted to find out what Miranda was up to she only had to ask, and Miranda would hang around the kitchen telling her who fancied whom, who had got drunk, who had been caught smoking on the school bus and what they all got up to at weekends on Richmond Green. Now Miranda hardly spoke at all, rowed round the harbour by herself for hours on end and generally seemed to have something untellable on her mind.

Clare tip-toed up the stairs towards Miranda's room, avoiding the steps that creaked as if there was someone in the house to catch her out. She stopped at the top of the stairs, nervously picking flaking paint off the newel post, hovering outside Miranda's door. It was all very well to read Miranda's diary, but then she would be stuck with whatever awfulness she managed to discover. Suppose Miranda was using drugs? Suppose she was sleeping with six different boys in rotation? How could
she say anything to Miranda without betraying how she had found out the truth?

She pushed the door open and breathed in the soft perfume of Miranda's belongings, the mixture of Body Shop potions, roses from the garden. Clothes and books were scattered around and Miranda hadn't made her bed. The diary was sticking out from under the pillow, and Clare hardly dared touch it. Suppose Miranda had left it at a particular angle and would know if anyone touched it? The diary, a girlish, too young Flower Fairy one, was tied up with pink ribbon. Clare looked behind her and then quickly untied it. She didn't want to read anything irrelevant to what was making Miranda so moody, but didn't know where to start. Her hands shook as she flicked through the pages, which were covered with Miranda's bold handwriting. Clare didn't read, exactly, but absorbed an impression of lots of capital letters and exclamation marks. She found out nothing because she couldn't bring herself to stop and concentrate on anyone of the pages, until the end of June – here the pages for the last week of June were missing, and nothing had been written in since. She's torn the pages, out, Clare thought, she doesn't trust me!

‘Anyone home?' Clare, fingers fumbling, retied the diary and shoved it back at the remembered angle under Miranda's pillow. Liz was down by the back door, her voice trilling up the stairs. ‘Are you, there, Clare? I've
come to see you!' she called, as if she had brought herself as a gift.

Clare almost fell down the stairs in her haste to get away from the scene of her guilt.

‘Your kettle's boiling,' Liz said, ‘So I knew you must be here. Eliot is in a peculiar mood so I thought I'd escape for a while. The twins are down in the creek playing with your two.'

‘What's wrong with Eliot?' Clare asked, trying not to show an undue interest.

‘Well this morning he complained about writer's block, or whatever it is. Anyway he said he couldn't write, it was too hot. But when I went and asked him if he wanted to come out for a walk, take that disgusting dog somewhere, he told me to sod off and not interrupt. Just now I saw him getting a bottle of plonk out of the fridge so I decided to get out of his way.'

Through the kitchen doorway, behind Liz, Clare could just see Eliot, leaning on the wooden footbridge. He and his dog were looking down into the shallow water as the tide started to make its slow way up the channel. Just then he looked up and saw her, and started waving the bottle of ‘plonk' (which was actually Bollinger), at her. Clare bit her lip to stop herself from giggling, as Eliot danced up and down and made faces at the back of Liz. He pointed to the bottle, made a disappointed face at Clare and shrugged, then whistled to his dog and strolled back the way he had come. Another time, make
it another time, Clare wanted to shout after him. Liz went and sat on the grass under the pear tree and irritatedly pulled at the daisies.

‘He's always complaining that just because he works from home no-one takes him seriously and we want him to keep joining in with things,' Liz grumbled. ‘It's supposed to be his idea of a holiday, coming here. It certainly isn't mine.'

Liz was looking sulky and very young. Her immaculate white linen shorts were about to be covered in grass stains and her silk blouse was going to get snagged on the pear tree bark. Clare felt rather sorry for her, she was as out of place in a country village as a camellia in a cornfield.

‘I remember when Jack used to work from home,' Clare said. ‘It was difficult for any of us to treat it as work, especially, and I don't mean to be disloyal, as he wasn't selling very much of it. Everyone used to visit and stay for coffee or assume that if he was at home he could go out and play tennis, or golf or look after everyone else's children. He had friends who'd want him to go out and get drunk at lunch time and he'd be unable to pick up a brush for the rest of the day.'

Clare was only depressing herself. Was this what she had to come again, second time round, with bigger, more expensive children to support? Was this what he would be doing while she was out temping with twenty-year-olds?

‘It's horrid here,' Liz said, in a little-girl voice. ‘There's nowhere to get my hair done. I like to have it cut and all that at least once a fortnight.'

Clare watched Liz run her fingers through her shoulder-length streaked hair. The roots were showing through a rather dull mouse-brown, and Clare guessed Liz would never allow herself to be seen like that in public in London.

‘You could always find somewhere in Truro,' Clare suggested.

‘Heavens no, I couldn't. I have to have Alphonse,' Liz said, shocked. ‘I miss so many things here. I miss the club, it's got proper toning tables. For the thighs, you know,' she said, stretching out a slender limb for Clare to admire. ‘I go there every day and have lunch with my friends. Or Harvey Nichols. I saw Celia there once.'

Clare imagined Liz in an Armani suit and velvet headband, squealing over bagfuls of Sloane Street booty with a gaggle of girlfriends.

‘And though the garden here is much better than ‘London, I haven't got Conchita to do the flowers.' Liz was almost whining now.

‘Isn't that the sort of thing you were taught at finishing school?' Clare asked Liz briskly.

‘Oh no, we did Art Appreciation. Lots of time in the Louvre. Oh and cooking.'

Liz trailed dejectedly after Clare back to the kitchen when Clare took the cups back inside. Clare left them
in the sink and watched Liz staring round the room. I know what she's thinking, Clare thought. She's wondering how a family of five exist with such a small space. Clare followed Liz's gaze round the room – everything was hanging on the wall: pans; plate rack; children's drawings; notice board covered with years of holiday photos; dried herbs; even the cutlery hung from hooks. The entire ground floor of this cottage would fit into Liz and Eliot's kitchen. Clare's kitchen was about the size of the Lynch laundry room. Clare felt a sudden longing for the space and freedom of the Barnes house. Just a couple more weeks, she thought.

‘That party of Andrew's,' Clare said, breaking into Liz's thoughts. ‘He's going to get hell from Archie and Celia when they get back from the Scillies. I wouldn't mind being a fly on their wall. I'm sure they'll blame me as much as him, I said I'd keep an eye on him. But you don't expect a boy of that age to need a babysitter do you? I wouldn't have imagined Andrew could get up to anything like that.'

Liz grinned, ‘I don't think Andrew quite imagined it either according to Jessica.'

‘No,' Clare said, rinsing the cups and peering round to the Aga for a tea towel. Liz obviously wasn't intending to dry anything. ‘Andrew seems too innocent for that kind of planning, so old fashioned, and “good”.'

Clare felt slightly confused about whether to side with Celia and Archie when they got back, be all grown-up
and say ‘oh dear, how dreadful' or be ready to make excuses for Andrew.

‘I hope he gets away with it,' she said, ‘I don't suppose he gets much fun. Anyway, let's just go next door and see if he's feeling any better, he looked dreadful this morning.'