Just For the Summer (25 page)

Back at the cottage Miranda sent Amy and Harriet to bed and felt the need for an early night. She brushed her hair and cleaned her teeth, wanting to be asleep well before her parents came crashing in from the restaurant.

It's really a mess in here, she thought, looking round the little bathroom. They were a terribly untidy family, Jeannie's cleaning couldn't keep up with them. No-one had even noticed the little glass phial from the pregnancy test kit still sitting on the window ledge. Miranda rinsed it out and put it back on the ledge while she put
moisturiser on her face. Poor Mum, Miranda thought, even when I leave clues like that sitting under her nose she doesn't manage to work out what's going on. Now she had neither a problem nor an embryo to carry around, Miranda rather looked forward to being nice to Clare again.

IN THE PARROT,
while her daughter conducted the burial at sea, Clare was happily eating things she couldn't organize at home, like a mushroom souffle for which she'd never have got everyone to sit at the table before it sank flat to irretrievable sogginess. Then she had rabbit, which would have had all the children saying, ‘ugh, yuck' and ‘How could you, the poor little bunny' and Amy would have been in tears. She munched away delightedly, hoping Jack would not mention the recent outbreak of myxamatosis in Richmond Park, and wishing she hadn't thought of it herself. Later, she planned to choose a raspberry concoction which would have taken her all day to assemble. This, she thought, was the entire point of going out to eat. How sad it must be to be so accustomed to waitress service that you could, like Liz, pick away at a warm duck salad like an anorexic eating under protest.

Liz was concentrating hard on her plate, trying to avoid having to watch all three of the men eating lobsters. She couldn't think why they were supposed to be an aphrodisiac when any potential partner watching could only be repelled by the messiness of the process, especially the way Eliot ate. The butter was floating down through his beard on to the napkin tucked into his neck. Liz found it most unerotic to watch him eat like a toddler and thought perhaps she should have had oysters so that their moods at bedtime had some small chance of coinciding.

Clare thought Eliot looked magnificent. Jack handled the unfamiliar creature with fastidious and irritating care, as if there was still a chance the claws might nip him, whereas Eliot attacked his with uninhibited and noisy enthusiasm, finally sucking at the claws greedily to lick out the last of the juice.

I could do with some of that kind of attention, Clare thought lasciviously.

Conversation was standard dinner party, covering such familiar items as builders and the difficulties therewith, bits of houses that cleaning ladies won't touch (Clare pink with embarrassment of knowing that Jeannie was just through the swing doors, washing up in the kitchen), the cost of pool heating, power steering versus manual.

Jack realized he hadn't read a newspaper for anything but the crossword for several weeks, and as they
hadn't a TV at the cottage either, he could not for once complain that no-one discussed current affairs. He'd never talked about politics in Cornwall, not with anyone, for everyone was too polite to get into that sort of discussion. There were too few people to be friends with to risk expressing radical views. You might find, in the pub or sailing club, that there were only half the usual number of people to talk to if you started claiming sympathy with the Monday Club, or asked people to concede that Tony Benn often had a point.

By the time the cheese arrived they were all inevitably on to education, that mainstay of suburban conversation. Liz had said, ‘It's beginning to feel like the end of the holidays. I've already sent a case full of clothes back to London with Eliot's secretary. I shan't be needing them again this year.'

Or next, probably, thought Clare, imagining Liz's one-season cast-offs being passed on to a poor relation, if she had any, and a new lot being bought by next May.

‘I'm quite looking forward to going back, seeing the garden again,' Celia said. ‘The exam results are due out about now, aren't they and I feel that will mark the end of our summer. If Andrew hasn't done well we shall have to think about our arrangements for the autumn.'

‘Why not just let him leave school?' asked Jack, provocatively.

‘And do what?' Archie asked. ‘He won't be qualified for anything, he'll need A-levels at least.'

‘I'm afraid that if he hasn't done well at GCSE level he probably won't do well at A-level either,' said Jack in his authoritarian teacher voice. ‘The level of work is much more intense, and needs a high degree of motivation.'

‘Oh well, it's a good school,' Celia said, sensing conflict on the way, ‘They'll be able to sort it out.'

Jack felt cross, these complacent people expecting schools to babysit their children till they were eighteen and not even consider the vocational courses on offer at more enlightened tertiary colleges.

‘Perhaps he could go to college and do a B. Tech,' suggested Clare gently.

‘Oh Clare, I don't think so,' Liz chipped in brightly. ‘He's surely too young to be taking a degree …'

‘It's not a degree …' Clare attempted to explain and then gave up, infuriated that Liz had charmed all three men into easy laughter by being so utterly thick. She looked at Jack's bewitched smile. If I'd said anything as dopey as that I'd be getting an earful of sarcasm, she thought. Clare wondered if Jack had had a lot to drink, there was no way of knowing for the waitresses had efficiently and discreetly removed the bottles from the table as soon as they became empty.

The educationally-deprived villagers in the kitchen were fully aware how much drink had been consumed and had no trouble at all, without so much as an O-level in maths between them, in calculating how much must get spent per week on booze if these people from
up-country drank like that all the time. The likely tips from that night were also calculated quite accurately to be roughly equivalent to a good fish supper for each of them in Truro.

Eliot, whose children had always been so clever that their education had never needed discussion, was falling asleep quite rudely.

Liz prodded him, not very gently.

‘You never get chairs this comfortable in London restaurants,' she said, making an excuse for him. Eliot's head drooped forward and a teddy-bear rumble sounded suspiciously like a snore.

‘They always want you out in time for the after theatre rush,' Liz went on, as if the others wouldn't know this. Celia turned away disapprovingly from Eliot, and found herself having to talk to Clare, of whom she was beginning to disapprove even more.

‘What are you going to do this autumn, Clare?' she asked politely, ‘Do you have any plans for Miranda after the exam results?'

‘Well, actually Miranda's already made her own plans,' Clare said carefully, ‘She's going to do A-levels staying at the same school.'

Jack saw the great moment for his plan, now, safely while he and Clare were not terrifyingly alone.

‘Of course, there's no real need for us to go back to London at all,' he said rather loudly, laughing a bit as if he'd only just thought of it. Clare stared at him, her
Bath Oliver and Stilton crumbling on to her plate. Eliot woke up and paid attention as Jack went on, giving his precious plans a tentative airing in the safety of company.

‘What I thought was, maybe we could sell the London house, live here while I paint. Invest the money while interest rates are so good.'

‘What about the children?' asked Liz.

‘Well they do have schools down here you know,' Jack said rather sharply, as if, Clare thought, he had anticipated that question from her and not from Liz. ‘Miranda could go to the sixth-form college or be a weekly boarder at Truro if she wanted.'

‘Actually,' Jack said, grinning and looking modestly down at his plate, ‘I've been doing rather well this summer. Up at the craft centre, I've sold a whopping great wall full of paintings.'

‘Would you live here all the time?' Liz said, incredulous, and insultingly ignoring his proud achievement. ‘You can't do that, nobody does!' Celia joined in. ‘Well of course they do,' Clare said, exasperated by their snobbery, though furious with Jack. ‘But I'm not sure I want to,' she said, firmly.

She made it sound non-negotiable, infuriating Jack: ‘Well what do you do in London that you'd be so sorry to miss? Aerobics in the church hall? Getting ripped off in those chic little food shops? Grumbling with the neighbours about number thirteen's attic conversion?' Jack
banged his glass impatiently on the table and leaned closer to Clare, looking menacingly across at her. He'd kept all this inside for far too long; ‘You're always saying we never do anything spontaneously any more. Here's your chance!' He waved his arm around dramatically, spilling wine.

‘You can do whatever you damned well like here! Be creative! Write something! Knit something! Make another bloody baby!'

‘Baby? What makes you think I want another baby?' Clare asked loudly. The others sat back, listening intently. The swing doors to the kitchen opened just a little further, as the staff sensed an interesting row.

‘Just a small suspicion, just the odd hint,' Jack said. ‘When we live down here you can have as many as you like, a whole tribe of them. But I can't face any more in London, that's the deal.'

He sat back in his chair and folded his arms defiantly. If he'd made his point, Clare wasn't quite sure what it was. Could he not face any more children in London, or simply life in London?

‘We'll talk about this at home,' she hissed. ‘You've obviously given a lot more thought to being “spontaneous” than I have.'

‘Could we have the bill please?' Archie's crisp voice cut through the silence. ‘I think it's time to go, don't you agree?'

In the kitchen the waitress told the rest of the staff that
some of those dreadful people from up-country might be descending on the village to live there full time. No-one was exactly thrilled, even by the prospect of one less empty cottage in winter. The village shop would be full of organic milk and mineral water. Full or part-time, these people changed everything they touched. They all wanted free-range eggs, as long as they didn't have bits of feather (or worse) stuck to them, and organic veg. But who had ever seen them buy any of the local apples in the shop that had even the tiniest bruise? Or mushrooms with real earth on them?

‘Do you think they really will come and live here?' Liz and Eliot later in their bedroom as she peeled off her stockings. Eliot looked at her and wondered when it was that she'd stopped leaving the taking-off of the stockings till last, as she had done when he had first met her and he had been committing delicious lunchtime adultery with her. Liz's mother had told her that tights were common and would give her nasty infections. It wasn't her fault that men always thought stockings were just for erotic impact.

‘I don't suppose so, people rarely do,' Eliot said, ‘But they'd fit in better than the rest of us, with all the other old hippies in the area. And Cornwall is full of artists, always has been.'

Liz said, ‘I think Clare would go completely crazy down here. She'd still have to do all those things that
she's always done with the children, dancing lessons, parties, concerts, school visits, all that, but everything would take twice as long to get to. You have to drive miles to anything round here. Though I suppose they could go to boarding school.'

‘Don't be silly,' said Eliot, who remembered harder times. ‘Think of the money. Anyway those children are Clare's career, if she sent them away what would she do?'

‘Well she can always have another,' Liz said, as if it was as easy as buying a kitten. ‘Like Jack said.' Liz and Eliot were circling each other, preparing for bed. How awfully clean she is, he thought. She'd put moisturiser on her face and neck, gel on her eyes, cream on her hands. It seemed to be a night when sex would be allowed, he noted with depression, for she'd sprayed the perfume that used to be his favourite down the front of her silk nightdress. Oh for the days when he had rolled in the back of a Ford Anglia with Brenda-the-bike from Dungannon, a woman who smelled of sweat and cigarettes and lust, not the entire sterile perfume counter at Harrods.

‘Well we could couldn't we?' Jack was saying, trying hard to revive the discussion of his precious plans for their future in the face of Clare's bewildered silence. ‘I mean it doesn't matter where we live, I can paint anywhere and you can have babies anywhere. Except in London.'

‘I'm not having a baby, Jack, I don't know where you
got that idea from. And how could you, springing all this on me in public. You're such a coward.'

They were outside the cottage now, both drunk enough not to care that their rising voices were causing windows to open (such a warm night) and curtains to twitch all over the village.

‘You are pregnant aren't you?' Jack shouted. ‘Why didn't you tell me? That's what I call cowardly, not to mention sneaky, I found that pregnancy test kit in the bin, don't tell me you didn't put it there.'

‘Yes I put it there. I found it in the road. God knows whose it is, could be anyone in the village. Good grief, Jack do you really think I need a chemical kit to tell me if I'm pregnant?'

Miranda, upstairs and listening, cowered under her duvet. If a non-existent baby could cause so much argument, how much more trouble would hers have caused?

IN THE MORNING
Clare and Jack were woken from their disgruntled sleep by a man from the village who wanted to attach one end of the regatta flags to their big cherry tree and string them across the creek. While Jack was dropping noisy Alka Selzer into two glasses of orange juice there was another head-shattering knock at the door and Miranda's exam results were delivered by the woman from the post office, all hostility to the family overcome shamelessly by curiosity. She hung around on the doorstep, commenting on the weather, hoping that Miranda would open the envelope there and then and make her visit worthwhile. But Miranda rushed off to her bedroom, only emerging when she knew that she was to be congratulated, not cross-examined. She had passed all nine, with grades A or B.