Just For the Summer (4 page)

‘I've lit the barbecue,' Eliot told Liz. ‘And I saw Archie and Celia coming up the drive. They didn't seem to have Andrew with them.'

Celia, formal in Jaeger and Archie trying his best to be casual in cords and Argyle cashmere, arrived with champagne.

‘Hello all,' Archie greeted heartily, ‘I've brought champers to celebrate our fifth barbecue here. Five years is a nice round number to celebrate, I think.'

‘Oh goody Archie, how lovely,' Liz said, coy and giggly with the older man. Clare watched Eliot's lip curl with scorn as he turned away to the barbecue, and she
felt both interested and embarrassed to be witnessing private tensions. Briskly, expertly, Archie began to open the first bottle. It would be well chilled, the cork would come out quietly, with no undisciplined and extravagant spray of froth. Archie was known to be good with wine.

‘Where's Andrew?' Milo shouted from his deckchair.

‘He's on his way,' Celia said. ‘He's just finishing writing up some experiment for his holiday project.' To Liz and Clare she added, ‘He does seem to be working awfully hard. They really pushed him to retake last year's exams, but this time he should do all right so it's probably a good thing.'

‘Milo's mother thought he might have to go to a crammer for his A-levels,' Liz said. ‘But Eliot said he couldn't, because he'd forked out enough school fees already and he had to stay where he was. Apparently Milo is very bright, just terribly lazy.' Liz sounded, Clare thought, as if she was quoting from her stepson's school report.

‘New garden furniture, Liz?' Clare asked, feeling that they had, after all, six weeks in which to discuss the children's education, to show off politely and with pretended exasperation. It was also the second most popular dinner party subject in Barnes, one of those things Clare was glad, each summer, to get away from.

Liz had bought some teak steamer chairs, fatly cushioned and with matching low tables. For tonight
there were little arrangements of roses, and pink linen napkins. Anyone else would have made do with paper ones, especially in the garden, Clare thought rather nastily.

‘We had to hire a truck to get them here,' Liz was saying, ‘General Trading don't deliver this far.'

‘Cost a fucking fortune,' Eliot growled, grabbing a padded glove and attacking the barbecue coals. The glove was fish-shaped, and Clare thought again about Liz's brain. She wasn't that dim, she'd managed to hang on to Eliot for nearly eight years, which was more than anyone else had.

Archie cut in, changing the subject. ‘Seen the hippy out in the harbour? He or she is living on some kind of raft. Looks dreadfully unsafe to me. I suppose they're on the dole.'

‘So are a lot of people,' said Liz. ‘Poor thing, it must be dreadful when it rains.'

‘What, on the dole?' said Celia, confused.

‘No, the raft,' Liz said, giggling into her champagne.

‘It looks like a leaky old wigwam,' Eliot said.

‘Lucky sod, when he gets fed up he can just paddle away. Wish I could.'

‘I don't imagine he's being made too welcome here,' Celia said, sounding rather unwelcoming herself. ‘I don't mind,' she continued, ‘if there's just the one, but if hundreds turn up to join it will be frightful.'

Clare laughed. ‘It isn't very likely is it? There's not
going to be a peace convoy of raft-dwellers just waiting to moor up in our harbour is there? I was a hippy once,' she added, ‘though really only at weekends. I still care about personal freedom of course.' What an idiotic thing to say, she suddenly thought, after all who would ever admit to
not
caring?

Liz had organized different tables for the three different age groups. She fed the small ones first, indulging their preferences with a large tray of oven chips and beans to go with their steak. The children squabbled over which drinks to have, all wanting different ones and then changing their minds. Clare knew that Harriet as usual would hardly eat anything and that Amy would eat enough for two, still munching long after the others had finished. It seemed incredible to Clare that there wasn't an enormous difference in their sizes. Also, she wondered to Celia, what was it that made children from nouvelle-cuisine homes absolutely mad about fish fingers, sausages, and ketchup on everything? But this was holiday. Clare poured more champagne and decided not to care. Let them eat oven chips.

The older ones could not long endure another of their parents' ritual barbecues. As soon as Andrew arrived they grabbed pieces of raw meat, slippery from the marinade, poured some of the carefully arranged salad into a Tupperware box, and ran off to the beach.

‘You don't mind, do you Mum?' Miranda shouted, too far away to hear the reply.

‘Jessica has become a vegetarian,' said Liz. ‘I think most of her friends are. I can't tell whether it's all the food scares, peer group pressure or a concern for animal welfare. She doesn't show much interest in the dog, so it's probably not animals.'

‘I tried it once, in my teens,' Clare said. ‘My parents thought it was absolute nonsense, some kind of affectation and refused to take any notice. I suppose when you've had rationing it's unthinkable to turn your nose up at good food. Each meal I was given the usual meat and two veg. I tried for about a week, just leaving the meat, but in the end of course I gave in. I remember my mother looking enormously pleased with herself, it was so humiliating. She loved to be proved right, that I was just being “faddy”.'

‘We try to respect Jessica's views,' Liz said, ‘and I'm quite prepared to go along with it, but she makes such a big morality thing out of it. I can't bear the looks she gives me every time I carve a chicken or chew a chop bone. I've told her that if she wants me to put up with her views she's got to tolerate mine. She can't imagine how tedious it is never to cook a meal that everyone will eat.'

Archie said to Clare, ‘Miranda is looking paler and more fragile than ever. She's not got that anorexia thing has she? You read about it.'

‘I don't think that's very likely,' Clare said, ‘Any mention of diets bores her rigid, and that's how it usually starts,
isn't it? I think it's just a bit of post-exam stress, all that work.' Clare continued, ‘I brought her down here for a long weekend a few weeks ago. I thought she might be bored without anyone here, but she managed to have some fun I think, Steve was around.'

‘Is that Jeannie's boy?' Celia asked.

‘That's right,' Liz said, then giggled, ‘Lucky old Miranda, have you
seen
Steve lately, he's turned out to be rather gorgeous!'

‘Oh I don't think it was anything like that,' Clare said quickly, thinking two steps ahead of Liz, although, she thought, why on earth shouldn't it be ‘anything like that'? ‘After all they've known each other for years, just as friends …'

‘Don't take any notice of Liz,' Eliot said, kindly, for he saw the beginnings of concern in Clare's eyes. ‘She'll never grow out of looking at the boys, will you darling?' he said, giving his wife a cold look.

‘Only when you grow out of looking at the girls, my love. More drinks anyone?'

Along the edge of the river, round beyond the headland from the sailing club and boatyard, the trees grew thick and heavy, deep moist and velvety, right down to the water. Sailing in the early evenings was an unnerving experience, for at that time the water, the birds and the dark green bank side forest were all at their most eery stillness. At high tide there was no land to be
seen between the water and the foliage, at night it was all a valley of blackness. But at low tide there were rocks, slimy and pooled, and tiny beaches with fallen washed-white branches and boulders, gulls searching among the tourist picnic debris, children in the rock pools. At nights, such as this one, Milo, Andrew, Miranda and Jessica would climb round the rocks from the boatyard to the little hidden beach which they had claimed as their own five years ago, when they had first gone there as gangly pre-adolescents. Each of them had been secretly afraid of being cut off by the tide, but even more fearful of saying so. At high tide the beach was almost under water, and they each had a favourite rock on which to perch under the over-hanging branches. It was, they thought, their own beach, they had never seen a casual intrusive tourist picniking there, too much of a climb for the average wind-break and beach-bag carrier.

On this night, escaping their parents' barbecue, they clambered over the rocks, lit a driftwood fire on the shingle and wandered about, skimming stones, picking up shells and checking over the beach for tripper-invasion signs. A new sign had been put up, instructing visitors to clear up after their dogs.

Still town-smart, they looked an incongruous bunch perched like exotic gulls on the damp rocks and seaweed. Jessica wore an assortment of vests in shades of grey, and several belts. Her short hair was in stages of blonde with tinges of pink left over from experimental dyeing.
Miranda had piled her long hair under an old straw hat of her mother's. She'd recently discovered Clare's bin-liners filled with clothes from her antiques era and was wearing some fairly priceless 1920's pieces, carelessly tied together and about to be ruined, for one has little regard for the fragility of silk chiffon at sixteen.

Andrew felt conscious that his clothes were still bought by his mother, usually in his absence, and his jeans and trainers felt somehow that they had probably come from the wrong shop. His sweatshirt was very clean, and had creases down the sleeves from determined ironing. He still wasn't brave enough to arrange his hair as he had for the bathroom mirror, it felt unfashionably long and insistently curly. When he had had the brace taken off his teeth (‘fixed appliance' the dentist had called it, as if it was a washing machine), he had thought that he would be instantly not shy, would have no spots, have manageable hair and be totally confident. All that had happened was that he felt exactly the same, but had good teeth. Well, that was something he supposed, but wondered what it took to turn into the man he thought he was going to be from the boy he actually was.

Milo had never been gauche. He looked elegant even in his stained old cricket sweater and no shoes. He didn't dress for effect or for women, only for the weather and for sport and comfort. He sat on a rock and lit a
cigarette, holding it delicately in his long pale fingers. Miranda and his sister were really the only females he liked and as he'd known Miranda for five summers, you couldn't call them years, she was almost an extra sister. He was also uninterested in girls for sex, but at school there was a small boy called Oliver who for £1 would allow Milo to fondle his pale and naked body after games on Thursdays. Oliver was as smooth as a baby, blond and acquiescent and Milo loved him. Oliver had a lot of money too for Milo, who did not know this, was not his only customer.

‘God, those barbecues,' Milo was saying as they all skewered steak and bits of potato salad on to twigs, trying to roast them on the fire, before the whole lot caught alight. ‘They're always the same, and they're always dying for us to leave so they can get drunk and show off about us to each other.'

‘More likely complain about us,' Miranda said.

‘Yes, but in a showy-off way, you know, “I'm so sick of Jessica, she won't do any homework, she gets into so much trouble at school, I don't know how she passed all those exams,”' Jessica mocked Liz, accurately.

‘If you get them,' Milo interrupted.

‘I don't care either way. Anyway this isn't the place to drag over school to each other, let THEM do that.'

‘They drink a lot more when we're not there too,' Miranda said. ‘Mum will have a hangover tomorrow and
be horrible to Amy and Harriet for making too much noise, and she'll tell me her headache is because of the heat.'

‘Why is it,' asked Andrew pensively, ‘that men always cook the meat when it's a barbecue? I've never seen a man go near a cooker in a kitchen wearing an oven glove and an apron.'

‘You should live in our house,' said Miranda, ‘My father always cooks when it's an occasion, dinner parties and things and gets all the credit. Poor old Mum does all the everyday stuff and gets all the complaints from us. He just likes to show off how liberated he is, goes with the art teacher image.'

Jessica remembered being a vegetarian and swopped her meat for more salad.

‘Men barbecue,' she said, ‘because it's so macho. They feel like cavemen, wrestling with live coals and a dead animal. Have you noticed, they're always turning the meat over and prodding at it, they can't just leave it to cook. I sometimes think Dad would like to have to make a fire with a piece of flint and two boy scouts instead of those cute little barbecue fire lighters with their own special dayglo matchbox.'

Milo said, ‘I remember when we were little and he had that very basic barbecue and he used to pour gallons of meths on it, blowing on it till he felt he'd achieved a fire, not just lit one. Now Liz has got him one of those gas things, she's emasculated him. She'd rather
have a poolside microwave, clingfilm and everything clean.'

‘I sometimes think she'd like to wrap Dad in clingfilm to keep him more hygenic too,' Jessica giggled.

‘You should see the cooking at home when we're with Mum,' Jess told the others. ‘She just flings stuff in the Aga and hopes one of us will remember when to take it out. It's never dull, but you never really know if you'll get food.'

‘Probably one of the reasons Dad left,' Milo commented, ‘Liz's cordon bleu diploma.'

At the end of the evening the others left Miranda at her gate and she went into her garden, her feet feeling for the steps in the darkness. She was tired but didn't want to go into the cottage, the air in the night was stilI warm and in the house she felt she would be choked by dry air. Sitting on the low branch of the pear tree she heard Clare open the door.