Just For the Summer (7 page)

In such disgruntled and unsettled mood did Jack arrive at Truro in the drizzle to find Clare enthusiastic, (did she really call him ‘darling'?), Miranda petulant and the younger ones bored and squabbling.

Clare drove fast, talking about nothing, to Falmouth for a late Sunday lunch which she had booked to please Jack.

‘A proper Sunday lunch, we don't get many of those in summer do we?' she said, smiling round the car as if, Jack thought, they were all five years old.

Jack wasn't very hungry. He was full of British Rail's cheese and ham toasted special. The thought of roast anything made him feel rather queasy, especially at the speed the Volvo was weaving along the narrow lanes.

Clare waited patiently for Jack to relax, to be pleased to see her. She'd made this special effort for him. She felt responsible, holding the family together with her arrangements for them. She waited like a dog to be patted and praised and appreciated. It would, after all, have been much easier to have had a sandwich and Sunday papers lunch back at the cottage. This lunch, traditional Sunday symbol of family harmony, was important to her: she could, she thought, use the occasion to re-establish Miranda as her friend and confidante, Jack as the object of her affections,
rebalance the family. She would be motherly at the table, passing round potatoes, celebrating the Family Unit.

The hotel matched Jack's mood more than Clare's. It was dismal, typically 1930's seaside architecture painted in faded ice-cream colours, with some tacky plate-glass additions from the mid-fifties to accommodate games areas and a pool. It was crowded with bored and wandering residents who wondered what they were supposed to do in the rain. Everyone seemed to be waiting for something which gave the place an atmosphere as appealing as a chiropodist's waiting room. The staff looked fraught, expecting their guests to go out, not hang about and get in the way.

In every public space and lounge children sat wriggling, old people shifted their walking sticks and their arthritic feet, clutching handbags and macks, victims of the weather. They kept looking out of the window at the drizzle, the shades of grey of the sea, sky and cliffs. It didn't look like the postcards.

Clare couldn't wait any longer:

‘Well, aren't you pleased to see us?' she said to Jack as she marched her uneasy family through to the empty restaurant

Jack, wishing he could only doze on the squishy old sofa in front of a log fire, said, ‘Yes of course I am, but you didn't need to go to all this trouble.'

‘It's not trouble, it's a pleasure, isn't it everyone?'
Clare said brightly, refusing to take up the hint of apathy in Jack's voice. ‘After all, it's less effort than having to cook isn't it? I think we all forget sometimes that this is supposed to be a holiday.' Clare bit her lip and regretted her words. Both she and Jack knew from years of experience that there was no way ‘this is supposed to be a holiday' could be said without it's being an accusation, whoever said it just had to be having a subtle whinge. Still, better that Jack should think she was lusting after a different kind of holiday than lusting after a different man.

Clare settled herself in a seat by the window, overlooking the sodden crazy golf and the children's playground.

‘Where is everyone?' she said, looking round the empty room. ‘The hotel is full of people and hardly anyone is having lunch.'

‘Perhaps they know something about the food here that we have yet to find out,' said Jack pessimistically, looking round for a waiter and needing a drink. At a table near them sat a family of four neat holidaymakers. Jack looked at them and then at his own family, noting the contrast.

Amy had not brushed her hair, probably for several days and its fairness had a greeny tinge to it and a look of brittleness, like doll's hair, presumably from the chemicals in the Lynchs' pool. She was wearing green dungarees, rainbow wellington boots
and had spilled something down her front that wasn't breakfast. At least Jack couldn't think of anything red that she ate for breakfast, unless she'd taken to adding tomato ketchup to Shreddies. Miranda was in a tangle of old silk and ribbons, shivering in the unnecessary air conditioning. She looked beautiful but remote. Jack wondered what she was thinking about, probably, like him, about being absolutely anywhere but here.

The other family had neat, well brushed children and soberly dressed parents. Jack felt suddenly self-conscious, in his ancient jeans and a sweater that was a colourful and large version of the ones Clare had made for the children. He looked, he suspected, rather like a
Playschool
presenter. The little girl on the next table had shining plaits and silver hair-slides. How on earth, Jack thought, do people produce children who can find matching hair-slides in time for Sunday lunch when they're on holiday? They must bring a special pre-bagged selection of stuff labelled ‘clothes for special occasions, plus matching accessories'. The girl's little brother, only about nine-years-old, wore a proper suit and tie, a little version of his father, all pressed and polished.

Jack felt sudden affection at the contrast with his own children. He softened towards them, appreciating the signs of them taking their own chances, choosing their own personalities. He wished sometimes they were
a little less noisy and a little more considerate. Harriet was touring the many empty tables with Amy following her, rooting among the decorative china vases of flowers for a carnation with a stalk long enough to thread through her hair. Clare was watching them, defiantly withholding discipline under the disapproving gaze of the other family. When she had been their age she had gone into hotels only for weddings and special anniversaries, where she had sat quietly in her best frock among unfamiliar cousins, trying to Remember her Manners, as her mother had told her. She was proud now of her children's lack of reverence, that they didn't know what it was to feel intimidated. Only Miranda frowned at them, wondering how they were allowed to get away with making such a mess, she was sure she wouldn't have at their age. Disgruntled, she fiddled with her cutlery and kicked off her shoes under the table.

‘What are we doing here?' she said loudly in the direction of either parent. ‘We never go to places like this. If you wanted to go out we could've had lunch at the sailing club.'

‘We can have lunch there any time,' Clare muttered. ‘I thought this would make a change.'

‘It's a change all right.' Miranda scowled, glaring across at the neat family, who stared back, interested. And not one for the better.'

‘I expect you're hungry Miranda, you'll feel better when you've eaten.'

‘Not hungry,' Miranda mumbled crossly.

Across the restaurant another family was settling. There were two sets of parents, each with a small baby and an assortment of young children. It took several minutes just to seat them all, and the children fidgeted as soon as they were on their chairs, impatient for the end of this ritual meal when parents would be too mellow to notice how noisy they were all getting. The children eyed Amy and Harriet enviously, while the parents fussed over the babies, sorting their collections of equipment: buggies; bags; bottles; clip-on baby seats that fitted to the edge of the table suspending the baby in uncertain insecurity. So much paraphernalia for such small animals. One baby cried and the mother leaned across, concerned.

‘No you stay there, Jane,' said the relevant father. ‘You're on holiday.'

Clare and Jack, listening, smiled at each other.

‘Guaranteed to make the poor woman feel thoroughly guilty,' Clare said, pouring wine.

‘Just a quick reminder that he gets three weeks off a year and he's giving up his time to help her out,' Jack said laughing.

It was bad enough that she hadn't been allowed to go off windsurfing with Jessica, without listening to all this, Miranda thought and said, ‘God, you're so patronizing. How do you know what it's like for them. Maybe she works as well, maybe he gets up every night for
the baby, maybe he's just nice and wants her to enjoy herself. You always think you know what everyone's life is like.'

Clare didn't want a fight in the restaurant, she was not yet that uninhibited. Miranda's outburst had left her out of control of everyone's lunch and she wanted to put it all back together again. She tried to be bright, to talk about what they would all do this summer, who they would sail with, picnics, coast walks, remote beaches. But no-one was joining in, she could feel Miranda's flashy tension, Jack looked tired and the little ones had run off somewhere. The service was slow. It wasn't much fun playing happy families. At the other table the babies had goo from jars spooned into them. They leaned forward eagerly, sucking the mess from the spoons, spitting and dribbling contentedly. The baby food Clare had taken out when hers were little had been home-prepared with elaborate care, ahead of her time with concern about salt and additives, all those ground-up carrots, cheese, yoghourty things. They had spat it out, crying and squirming out of reach of the spoon. Clare had longed for jars from Boots, but thought she should do it right.

The soup arrived and Clare enthused unconvincingly. It was beige, Miranda said it was inedible and went off to round up her little sisters.

‘What's wrong with Miranda?' Jack asked, as Clare hoped he would. He thought Miranda had been right
about the soup, but didn't dare say so, any comment could so easily sound like criticism that Clare would take personally. The vast window overlooking Falmouth Harbour trickled with grey rain, making him feel he was inside a great fish tank. He glanced at the next table, in time to see the little girl with the hair-slides trying surreptitiously to pick her teeth with her finger nail, and getting her hand slapped for it. He rephrased his question, ‘Has something upset Miranda?'

Clare waited, so unused to having problems concerning Miranda that she didn't know how much she wanted to say.

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘I thought she would be happy to come out on a day like this. There's not much else to do. I think she'd probably rather be with the others, or at least, with Steve.'

She'd said it. She put down her spoon and looked at Jack, trying to convey that here was a dramatic point being made. She gestured meaninglessly and rather lamely said, ‘I think they're having a, well, a thing.'

‘A thing?' Jack looked puzzled for a moment. He caught the eye of the woman on the next table, obviously listening intently. He looked at the neat silver-hair-slided daughter and thought smugly, ‘You've got all this to come.'

‘A romantic involvement, do you mean?' he said to Clare.

‘Oh Jack, stop talking like a social worker. Yes of course that's what I mean, though a “thing” is probably more accurate.'

Jack smiled cheerfully, ‘Oh well, I suppose that will give her something to think about this summer, though I expect we'll get tears and tantrums when it's all over. You're surely not worried about her are you?'

He raised his voice for the benefit of the woman on the next table.

‘Do you think she's sleeping with him?' he asked.

‘Sleeping with.' Clare considered the phrase, the euphemism. It suggested a calm sophistication that Miranda was too young for. Miranda laughing in the garden in the dark had been like a young, spontaneous animal, knowing by instinct things that her mother hadn't taught her, like a creature gone back to the wild.

‘Do you mean do I think she's getting laid, are they screwing?' she said loudly, protesting jealously at the unwelcome thoughts Jack had put in her head.

‘Calm down Clare,' Jack hissed, looking round for reactions, thankful that the occupants of the other tables appeared now to be too engrossed in the pudding menu to be paying attention to his domestic dramas. The one exception was the mother of the Neat Family, who had the grace to look away guiltily as Jack's eyes challenged hers for judgement. She fussed with her daughter's hair-slides, as if constant attention to
presentation would ward off the traumas of the teenage years to come.

‘You're over-reacting,' Jack feebly attempted to pacify Clare. ‘I didn't think you'd mind that sort of thing so much, you told me you were doing it by that age.' Jack wanted to ask Clare if her period was due, but didn't dare.

Clare started crying as the waiter took away the soup plates. A lot of soup had been left, but a lot of bread, he noticed had been crumbled on the table.

‘That was different, times were different, it was safer. I don't want her exploited, she's not like I was, she's somehow much younger. And,' Clare wailed, ‘and she hasn't talked to me about it.'

This, Jack realized, was clearly the point, but it was more comfortable to ignore it for now.

‘Well if she's doing it, I think we can take it that it's because she wants to, not because she's being used. Miranda likes herself, she doesn't care what anyone else thinks. And anyway, as long as she's careful, surely …' he finished limply.

Jack didn't know what he was supposed to say. He didn't know what Clare wanted from him. He only knew, depressingly, that it wasn't the moment to tell her that he never wanted to see another art student in his life.

Miranda, returning in time for the rather grey roast lamb, was surprised and scornful of Clare's tears. Clare
was eating steadily and sulkily like a child who had to eat up all her meat before she was allowed pudding. Her make-up was smudged and her hair wild. Tears from an adult, tears especially in public, seemed to Miranda an appalling weakness. They should keep them private, except perhaps just a small glistening round the eyes for funerals, smiling through tears at weddings, that kind of thing. They should have it all under control. Tears were the protests of a child. Miranda was hard on her mother, but unused to her emotion. Clare had always hidden her tears away in the bathroom, where she could be locked in to cry in peace, convinced from the start that Miranda had enough disadvantages being born to a teenage student (unmarried – in the days when these things mattered) without the burden of Clare's occasional bouts of misery as well. Silently enduring the pudding, Clare wished she was upon the headland lying in the damp ferns, the reassuring hulk of Eliot next to her. If she'd been pathetic and cried with him he'd probably have spanked her. Instead, later she'd probably have to have sex with Jack and would then, irritatingly, find that it had been just what she needed.