Just For the Summer (6 page)

Liz gazed out beyond the garden towards the village, where she could see Clare walking up towards the shop. I wouldn't want to have her hips, her house or her husband, Liz thought, but apart from that I bet it's a lot more fun being her at the moment than it is being me.

Celia and Archie, in their fifties and very content, never wondered what Andrew listened to on his Walkman. In the little kitchen, clean, efficient and a place for everything, tuna salad sandwiches were being prepared. They assumed Andrew would not want to come sailing with them. They had bought him a boat of his own, but occasionally they made the gesture of asking him,
quite safely, knowing that he would rather stay with his friends. The daily picnic went into the pink cool-box, always including a good dry white wine, and equipment for making Darjeeling tea. In matching Guernseys and very old sailing boots, the Osbournes would pack up their selection of novels and their picnic and set off early in the scarlet dinghy, needing no extra excitements, and with the enviable knowledge of how to achieve perfect relaxation.

As they left the house, Andrew climbed out of bed and unlocked the box in his wardrobe. He always woke with a monumental erection and it seemed a shame to waste it. He could see that this was going to be the best time of the day for the experiment and this time it was going to be under control conditions, no props, just the fleeting thought of Jessica's breasts, her nipples showing in outline under her yellow swimsuit, perhaps also the thought of a stray pubic hair coiled against her tanned thigh …

It was still quite early when Clare walked through the village to the shop to collect the papers and see if there was any post. She didn't recognize anyone: it was a place where the population was almost entirely different each time she visited and those she did know seemed to be keeping town-hours still, venturing out only after the sun was well up.

Down below in the low-tide mud of the creek, her
small daughters were picking their way over pebbles, barefoot with sticks, nets and buckets and slices of breakfast toast and marmalade. There were other assorted small children and even Miranda was out, helping the little ones to search for scuttling crabs, shells and mussels discarded by seagulls. The treasures would soon make up decomposing collections on terraces throughout the village.

From the lane above, Jeannie, on her way to clean the Lynchs' house, could see them all. Only ignorant tourists, she thought, would wallow about in that mud. What did they think happened when they flushed the loos at those creekside cottages? Where did they think a soakaway soaked away to? You couldn't get an appointment with the local doctor in summer, not in under three days, for tourists needing something for an upset tummy and thinking that they'd over-done the sun. And for Miranda, she fervently wished a dose of dysentery at the very least, after the state in which her Steve had come home last night.

Clare watched Miranda giggling with the young children, admiring their shells. She marvelled at the ease with which Miranda, her skirt tucked up in her knickers, could now be out in the creek being a child again, when just last night she had been definitely a woman. Clare took her shoes off and padded down the steps into the creek.

‘Show me what you've caught!' she called cheerily to
Harriet and Amy as she picked her way across the mud and stones.

‘Hermit crabs,' Amy said, shoving a bucket at her that seemed to contain nothing but sticky stones. ‘You can't see them though, because they hide under things and don't want to be seen.'

‘Like real hermits, Clare said.

‘What
is
a hermit?' Amy asked, puzzled.

‘A person who likes to hide away from the world and live all alone, very privately,' Clare explained, pushing aside the stones in the bucket with her finger to try and see the crabs.

‘Don't prod them then,' Amy said suddenly. ‘Not if they won't like you looking at them.'

Miranda looked up suddenly and grinned at Clare.

‘Yeah, Mum, don't invade their space,' she said, and Clare was left wondering if she had imagined the hint of a challenge in Miranda's voice.

In the post office Clare collected milk, eggs, a packet of Special K for the diet and a WI cake in case someone called in for tea. She pretended she herself wouldn't eat it. In the shop there were sunburnt families choosing postcards, small children clutching their mothers' skirts and wailing for ice-creams. A rental family were trying to order
The Guardian
. ‘It just doesn't seem to get this far, it isn't worth us ordering it. We can get you
The Times
,
Telegraph
or
Independent
. Usually.' The customer, with two children and a spaniel all clamouring
to get to the beach, said yes all right,
The Times
, but his wife wouldn't like it. Clare smiled at him in apparent sympathy, but inside she thought, who needs news in summer? Why not take a holiday from all the little routines, all the world's problems. But perhaps they were addicted to the crossword. Perhaps it was the only time they got to do it.

As Clare walked she watched the bright umbrellas going up over the terrace tables outside the bungalows. Clare had not, yet, at the summer drinks parties, met any of the retired couples who lived on the hill, but she assumed they were the ones who drank late at the sailing club in the afternoons, and who kept the golf club and the village shop just about functioning in winter. Celia had told her once that she had visited in November. ‘The place was closed,' she had said, as if she was talking about Harrods on a Sunday.

Clare walked further on through to the edge of the village, quickly passing through the little streets and heading out towards the cliff. Out at the harbour entrance Clare could see the makeshift raft that Eliot had been talking about. It wasn't at all pretty, or idyllic or romantic as she had imagined, more like something from
Huckleberry Finn
, precarious, rickety and incongruous in the elegant harbour. A squatter among the clean smart sailing boats and business-like fishing boats. It looked like a giant duck's nest that had gone adrift. The raft seemed to be planks, poles and oil cans
held together with frayed ropes and with a grubby teepee perched on top making the whole structure look terrifyingly top-heavy. Clare wondered what would happen in bad weather, where it had come from (and how) and who lived on it. They didn't seem to have a dinghy, unless someone was already out in it, so how did they shop?

‘The man across the creek from us has lost his cat,' Archie,
Daily Telegraph
in hand, stopped next to Clare, on his way to the pontoon.

Clare followed Archie's gaze out towards the raft. ‘You have to butter a cat's paws,' Clare told him, ‘then they don't leave home.'

‘Bloke out there has probably buttered its paws, and its legs and its body,' Archie said, still looking suspiciously at the raft. ‘Cut off its head, could easily taste like rabbit. Bit of garlic, and some thyme …'

Clare turned and stared at him. ‘Archie, you don't think it's been eaten, do you, not seriously?'

Is this what growing older really means, she thought, lining up with the old guard and acquiring ludicrous prejudices?

‘Well you hear such stories, you never really know, do you?' he said, grinning at her.

‘Archie, you're sending me up!' Clare said, laughing, ‘You are, aren't you?' she suddenly added, just to check.

Archie gave her a cheerful wave, and went out to join
Celia in their boat. Clare continued her walk, down past the Mariners pub and towards the boatyard.

She could see the boys down there, hanging around the pontoon and pretending they were working. They showed off to a couple of holiday-making girls with loud Midlands accents, heading for a hire-boat and dressed in identical turquoise shorts, cut high to show as much leg as possible. They giggled and wobbled their chubby thighs along the walkway, tripping on their too-high heels and staggering, shrieking, into the boat.

They looked back at the boys and grinned, posing, but the boys had lost interest and were looking for more entertainment, someone else to show off to. It was Steve who steered the hire boat out of the little marina.

He saw Clare and waved. Clare waved back, relieved that she would not have to talk to him. She saw too, the girls in the boat, whispering together and looking speculatively at Steve. Anyone would, really, Clare thought.

It must be the hot weather, and missing Jack that was making her feel like this. The boys on the pontoon weren't going to look twice at her: Clare couldn't remember the last time someone had even whistled at her. Probably when they did she'd been angry, wishing she had a piece of politically-charged wit ready for a stinging reply, seeing it all as part of Women's Oppression. But
feelings like that were for London, where the sweet seductive scent of mown grass has the suspicion of dog shit about it, and only the most determined insomniac is awake at the time when the pure glory of birdsong is untainted by traffic noise.

Here in the fresh, rich air, Clare felt as if she'd been turned inside out, all her senses on the outside, exposed and alert, too easily responsive and too easily bruised.

JACK WAS A
teacher of art and he was tired. He felt that art, more perhaps than any other subject, represented the old saying, ‘Those who can't, teach.' Students applying for his course, coming to interviews, had become less cowed by the grandeur of the building, the once-famous names of their interviewers and had started asking why they couldn't see examples of Jack's work so that they could understand the viewpoint from which he was inspecting theirs. He hadn't got any creative work left to show them, hadn't for years, for his job was to channel their creativity and in doing so had contrived to frustrate his own. It was possible he thought, relaxing with his feet on the seat on the earliest possible train out of Paddington, that the only reason he would ever pick up a paintbrush again was to slap another coat of Dulux on the sitting room ceiling. Hardly the Sistine chapel. Jack had listened wearily as one after another the tedious
candidates, eager and hopelessly unoriginal had talked about the implications of one-sided judgement, the politics of landscape and such, straight from the sixth-form common-room culture magazines. Jack was greying, into his mid-years, an ageing hippy who now worried that his contributions might not add up to a decent pension. He had got old enough to be content in a secure and proper job, which his late mother-in-law would have loved, but deep inside there was a growing urge to get back to what he had always thought he wanted to be: a fine artist.

Summers in Cornwall were like a relic of a freer past when he had hitch-hiked with most of suburban youth to be thrown out of St Ives and sleep in the fields. Then he had pretended to be an artist, now he pretended he had been one. Inheriting money and a second house had been a blow to his politics, but the increasingly comfortable life-style had eased him from angry young communist to a casual liberal, surprising himself with occasional intolerant leanings towards the right. He had credit cards, practically a full set, a Volvo, he thought about private education with a growing amount of approval.

After each frustrating year of trying to organize the chaotic creativity of his students, each batch of which turned out to be as tediously conventional in their gestures of rebellion as he had been in his time, Jack was ready for nothing more energetic than to sleep in
a deckchair, an emotionless snooze with only the rhythms of the home, the tides, opening hours and the weather to disturb him. He didn't want to think any more about whether or not he should be dissuading the students from spending an entire term on an art installation project that involved taking radiators off the corridor walls and lying them in a straight line. He was unfashionably unconvinced by that kind of art, but had quirks of conscience that he might be wrong, depriving the world of a great thinker. Problem was, he knew and they didn't, that every year some kid straight off a foundation course had exactly the same idea.

Jack was looking forward to doing nothing in the sun, he liked watching Clare and Miranda changing colour, bronzing in the sun like cakes through a glass oven door. He watched his little daughters growing, playing and fighting. He liked to watch Liz Lynch with her tight slim body and he wondered why she bothered to keep it all so well organized for the drunken and unappreciative Eliot. She was like a meticulous herbaceous border for him to crash through. Women in shorts, swimsuits, the heat, all gave Jack a comfortable summer randiness that he could normally use to advantage, keeping Clare happy, and if Clare was happy the family was happy. Summers were so easy.

Travelling from Paddington however, earlier in the day than was bearable, this year Jack was a dissatisfied
man. This year he had to find the moment to tell Clare that he wanted to change all their lives, give up teaching, take his last chance at doing what he should be doing: painting. He had spent an uncomfortable week alone at home, with only his brooding thoughts for company. There had been no secretive dinners in unfamiliar restaurants with a willing and attractive colleague, no adulterous deeds in the sacred marital bed, and no guilt to nurture and feel smug about. There had only been the usual staff-room bickering, the unexceptional interviews and lonely pizza suppers watching depressing TV repeats of twenty-year-old comedy shows. None of his colleagues was particularly attractive, and they were very unlikely to be willing, but Jack was a man whose capacity for fantasy was still as intact as a fourteen-year-old's, and he had felt like an excited teenager wanting to issue whispered invitations to a secret party: parents away, house empty.

But it hadn't even felt like his own home. Clare's preparations for going away had taken no account of his being left behind. Miranda had turned off the Aga on her way out, leaving behind only an electric kettle, plugless microwave and the rusting barbecue. Someone had let themselves into the house as Jack was dressing one morning, to feed the fish. It was as if he wasn't expected to function as a human being in his own home. On the phone, Clare hadn't said, ‘Dying
to see you tomorrow.' Instead she had said, ‘Don't forget to put the cleaning stuff down the loo.'