Just For the Summer (20 page)

Miranda wished she hadn't told Jessica. While no-one had known it had been conveniently unreal. Even the word ‘pregnant' didn't convey any meaning to her, but when Miranda looked into her mirror and said to herself ‘I'm going to have a baby,' she could make herself scared. The more people who knew about it, the longer she left it, the nearer would be the time when she would have to do something about it. Even if it had been a romance, she couldn't imagine staying on in the village, an old-fashioned shotgun wedding and living in Jeannie's cottage with Steve. Yuck. She longed to be back home again, for things that were normal, even for school, the security of the daily bus journey, homework, babysitting. She stayed in out of the rain, glad of the excuse, and lay on her bed reading Jilly Cooper. Real-life sex now rather revolted her. All those hormones that had told her it was the right time the right place, were now keeping her celibate, too late. She felt sick, not sexy. She no longer wanted to spend any time outside communing with nature, even the fruit on the trees,
the flowers fattening their seed pods reminded her of fertility. She now preferred to stay close to home, playing Trivial Pursuit with the family, doing jigsaws with Amy, holding the ends of skipping ropes for Harriet. She'd tried being a grown-up, gone through the glass and wanted to come back again. She couldn't tell Clare, all that compassion and understanding that she knew Clare had been storing up for just this moment. And what would she advise her to do? Have an abortion? Clare herself could have got rid of the inconvenient Miranda, but had chosen not to. Would she expect Miranda to do the same?

Clare knew it wasn't a good day to be going into Truro. Everyone rushed to the nearest town when the rain came, trying to minimize the depressing effect of all that damp and dripping. No-one could go to the beach, walking the cliff path was likely to be too muddy for the average holidaymaker in sandals, so Penzance and Falmouth would be full of families drifting from shop to shop with children pleading for money for slot machines and amusement arcades … Bemused fathers would be trailing their wives round cosmetic counters, wishing they'd had the nerve to insist on staying behind to watch the highlights of yesterday's cricket on TV. Truro would be full of shoppers looking for crafts and gifts to take home, and there'd be nowhere to park. People like Clare shopped once a week just like at home, regardless of the
weather, and today was, like Jeannie with her floors, her day for it.

In spite of the traffic, it was still with a feeling of escape that Clare drove with Jack into Truro. She felt that following Eliot's performance from her garden the day before it might be wise to get away from the village. She wondered what on earth had happened to that feeling of getting away from it all, as the saying goes. She seemed to be bogged down in curiously suburban pursuits and concerns. She decided to treat herself to a trip round the estate agents while Jack was at the framers and see if they had cottages in the middle of nowhere, with land for growing vegetables, and no neighbours whatsoever. Dream on, she thought. She was tired of tourists photographing her house and hearing them say ‘Oh how sweet, it looks just like a tea-cosy'. They didn't have to think about the price of thatch, or the wind-rotted window frames. If only Miranda was not so moody, if Jack wasn't so uncommunicative, if Jeannie didn't keep following her round looking as if she was trying to say something that was obviously proving too difficult to express (like she's leaving, or wants a pay rise, Clare thought). If only, let's be honest, she thought as she negotiated a difficult double roundabout, Eliot showed some sign that he'd at least had a passing fancy for her, even if he'd thought better of it since.

Clare was driving badly. Every time they went round a corner Jack glanced back to see if any of his paintings
were falling off the seat. He could stretch an arm back and hold on to them, just to keep them in place, but that would draw attention to the fact that he not only thought Clare was driving too fast, but also that he hadn't the guts to say so. She looked so intent, obviously miles away in thought, he'd only get snapped at. What he really needed was a new portfolio to keep them safe, but Clare would only point out that he already had about six at home in perfectly good condition, why not get a friend to mail one down to them. She didn't understand the lure of art shops though.

He smiled at her and thought about cheering her up.

‘Isn't it nice to be on our own for a change?'

‘Well it's not dinner at the Ritz, we're only going shopping,' she snapped back, her thoughts disturbed. Then she added, ‘Couldn't we go away somewhere, to a hotel maybe, just for a couple of nights?'

‘I suppose so,' he said hesitating, ‘But what about the children, and surely it's a holiday being at the cottage?'

‘I feel I could do with being waited on a little sometimes. Here I still have to cook and clean and all that, it's just like home. I need to be somewhere where someone else changes the beds.'

‘You've never complained before,' Jack said.

‘I'm not complaining now. I just feel sort of stuck, unrested. And there're always so many people around, there's no peace.'

Aha, Jack thought, so it's sex.

‘It's not sex,' Clare said, guessing his thoughts.

‘We used to do it all the time in summer,' he said. ‘You couldn't wait to get to the country. Now you read feminist novels in bed and wear old tee-shirts. You've gone off it.'

‘I've got other things to think about,' Clare said, ‘And so have you it seems, you say nothing to me, hardly a word from one end of the day to the next, you go out drawing, visiting that old hippy on the raft, then you eat dinner in almost total silence, climb into bed and expect me to feel romantic. I don't have an “On” switch, I need warming up, like an old radio.'

‘Well perhaps we could go to Paris or Venice at half-term. Would you like that?'

‘I'd love it,' she said, turning to him with the first smile he'd seen from her that day. ‘But it doesn't make me feel any better now. Miranda and you hardly say a word, and living with her at the moment is like treading on eggs. One wrong word and she storms out to her room and stays there for hours.'

‘Why be so careful with her?' Jack asked. ‘Why not just ask her straight out what's bugging her and point out that she's upsetting you.'

‘If I start asking her then she'll never tell me, she never has told me what's been wrong with her before, I've always had to guess even when she's had things like tonsillitis. '

‘Well perhaps nothing much does go wrong for her.
You can't expect people to produce problems just so you can have the satisfaction of sorting them out.'

‘She's sixteen Jack, she must have some insecurities. I always thought we'd made it so easy for her to talk to us about anything at all, providing just the right atmosphere, not like our parents' generation.'

‘We've been too careful, that's the problem,' Jack murmured.

The traffic was slowing to a crawl, there'd be a queue for the Tesco's car park.

‘Perhaps she's unhappy about someone,' Clare mused.

‘Or maybe it's her exam results, they're due soon,' Jack countered.

‘Perhaps she's on the pill and it's making her feel ill.'

‘More likely she's just bored in the village.'

‘It's bound to be sex, it's her age.'

‘God, Clare, for someone who's gone off sex, you sure do sound obsessive. She's not telling you anything because there's nothing to tell. She doesn't need you, she's growing up. I'm sorry if it sounds cruel.'

Clare stopped the car in the traffic queue.

‘Suppose she's pregnant?' she persisted.

‘And now you're being ridiculous.'

Go on, say it, she thought, ‘They're not all like you were'.

An old lady backed her car very carefully out of a parking space and Clare pulled into it briskly. Jack
wrapped his paintings in polythene and cradled them protectively against the drizzle. As he stalked off to the framers Clare reflected that once again she was left with the domestic side of things to organize while he went off to play. She was being deliberately unfair, she knew, to make herself feel aggrieved. This was after all now his job. But when he did it on holiday too, it was hard not to think of the painting as a hobby. You had to make as much money as Eliot did, she thought, for something that most people do as a hobby to count as a proper job.

Clare put Jack completely out of her mind as she entered the fray at Tesco's. There was too much to think about buying. Shopping for Amy's birthday party, Clare was overtaken by a comfortable, doing-the right-thing sort of feeling. She started to feel quite good-motherish as she ignored the ready-made icing and instant cake mixes, choosing instead wholemeal flour, molasses, jelly to make into animal shapes, additive-free sausages to put on sticks. Her children didn't often get the chance to experience what she thought of as real children's parties, she thought. They were all too sophisticated, too young. Clare was going to give Amy a real party, with musical chairs, pass the parcel, hats and crackers, They could whine all they liked for a puppet show or a magic man, they could get all that at other peoples' parties back at home. Parents had started renting discos for eight-year-olds. Bit much, Clare thought, if you can't entertain a
few children for a couple of hours in your own home without resorting to outside help and an entertainment agency. To hell with the mess on the carpet. Children didn't need all that stuff, just good old-fashioned games and a well-filled going-home bag.

Clare was just reaching for a pack of balloons when she spotted Liz wheeling a trolley down the aisle towards her. Clare didn't like meeting people she knew in supermarkets. She didn't like the leaning on the trolleys, each eyeing what the other had bought, trying hard not to express surprise that someone like that would actually buy frozen oven chips, and in turn suppressing the urge to explain that the children just couldn't exist without tinned tomato soup, comfort food. And then there is the continuation of the trek around the store, you say goodbye and then keep meeting up again with nothing else to say except exchange little inane remarks about the price of cheese, and the awful furtive reaching up for the sliced white bread just as the wholemeal and lentils friend creeps up from behind the cat food.

But Liz had seen Clare, and Clare saw that her trolley was shamelessly stuffed with ready-made chilled food.

‘Are you still speaking to me after Eliot's dreadful exhibition?'

‘Yes of course. Anyway he was quite fun, livened the village up a bit. I suppose the rain is the reason this place is so crowded today. I'm just getting all the food for Amy's party. Your two are coming aren't they?'

‘Yes they're looking forward to it. After I've paid for this lot I'm going off to get her a present. You're so brave having a proper party. You've got tons of food in there,' Liz said, peering into Clare's trolley. ‘I hope the weather comes back for you,' she continued. ‘When the twins were six we just took a dozen of their friends to see
Cats
, and then the Hard Rock Café afterwards, it saved an awful lot of effort.'

Liz sailed off with her trolley full of expensive delicacies. Clare, quickly calculating the horrendous total cost of the Lynch twins' birthday treat, venomously wished a manky wheel on Liz's trolley, and pulled a can of coke from hers for an instant reviving drink.

Outside in the car park, Clare trundled her goods towards her car and saw a woman trying to hang a bulging carrier bag from the handlebars of an ancient bicycle. The woman looked about Clare's age, in jeans, her hair grown rather too long, making her thin face look longer than it had to. She wore a faded Fair Isle sweater. In her other hand she held a big silver helium-filled balloon which struggled to get away in the wind.

Dealing with the bike and the shopping was all too much and the balloon escaped. The woman stared at it for a moment, the long face drooping like a disappointed child's. How old do you have to be, Clare wondered, as she stacked the slippery bags of shopping into the back of the Volvo, before you were grown-up enough not to mind losing your balloon? She watched the woman to
see what she would do. She was too old, perhaps too busy, to go back into the store and ask for another one. Clare wanted to go and get one for her, to lie and say ‘it's for my daughter', but it was too late. Clare had finished loading the car and others were queueing for her space. The woman, who perhaps hadn't minded that much at all, climbed on to her bike and pedalled slowly away into the traffic.

MIRANDA STOOD IN
front of the mirror, a full-length one on the inside of her wardrobe door. She zipped herself into her jodhpurs and tried to work out whether they felt tight because she was a year older and bigger than the last time she had worn them or if she was already starting to expand with pregnancy. Beyond the mirror inside the wardrobe she could see all the clothes that she wouldn't be able to wear soon if ‘the situation' as she now called it in her head, continued. All those little thirties dresses with their neat waists, the skirts whose buttons she had had to move to stop them sliding down her narrow hips. She'd have to move them all back again. The riding boots still fitted, did that mean that her feet, and presumably the rest of her, had now stopped growing? Could God let you start growing. another person inside you before you'd stopped growing yourself? It didn't happen with plants, it didn't seem
natural. Miranda took off her riding gear and inspected her flat stomach. She was still so thin she could almost see right through to her insides. What was going on in there? She looked inside the wardrobe and chose a pale pink cotton dress, one of the smallest she had. Might as well wear it while she could.