Just For the Summer (9 page)

At the sailing club Liz settled herself with a crab sandwich and a dry sherry and looked around at the holiday women.

‘I do wish women wouldn't wear high heels with shorts,' she murmured to Clare. ‘It looks just too frightful.'

Clare nodded non-committally. Liz looked down at Clare's battered old tennis shoes and wished she hadn't said anything. Clare looked at Liz's Gucci pumps and wished the same.

Clare sat close to the balcony where she could keep an eye on Amy and Harriet. Somehow it was assumed that Liz didn't have to do the same for her twins, as if she knew that it wasn't really her job. Clare felt like an all-purpose mother, automatically taking over and checking now and then that the little Lynches hadn't wandered off the beach and into the waves, that a giant seagull hadn't plucked them from the shore and carried them, stork-like, to a cliff-top nest, all those things that proper mothers worry about. Mothering Liz's children, Clare felt she was mothering Liz and minded. It defined their roles: she, mature and responsible, Liz young, free and enviably frivolous. It was Eliot who took the
sausage rolls down to his children on the beach, and Clare's heart warmed menacingly, fired by that gentle gesture of a caring father. She looked down tenderly on Eliot sitting in the sand with his children and with her brain befuddled by love did not wonder once about the duality of her own standards: that her own husband should nurture his own children at a level equal to her own would never be a matter for congratulation in her family.

Jack was in the bar buying drinks. It was cool inside, sparsely furnished with dark wood and rather gloomy, the walls glinting with trophies and the gilt-engraved lists of past commodores and presidents. They mostly had letters after their names, a pompous inclusion Jack thought. It could hardly be relevant to their sailing ability or competence with the treasurer's records if they were MA (Cantab) as opposed to O-level (failed).

‘Don't forget your change, sir,' shouted the big Australian barmaid as Jack wandered absentmindedly back out towards the balcony.

‘Cracking Sheila behind the bar,' Eliot leered, coming up the beach steps to help Jack with the drinks. ‘Wouldn't mind having her down under.'

Jack smiled, the way he thought men were supposed to.

‘Hardly competition for Liz, I'd have thought,' he said, watching Liz unfold for the sun. Pitying her for her lecherous husband, Jack went to sit next to her, sidling
past Clare and hoping that she wouldn't notice he had chosen not to sit with her.

‘Thank you so much, Jack,' Liz purred, opening her blue eyes briefly to acknowledge her second sherry. Jack grinned, puppy-like, and wished he had thought to sit next to Clare after all, opposite Liz, where he could get a better view of her smooth body, as inviting to stroke as a rolled-out cat. Jack looked at her naked painted toes, inhaled her Poison and breathed in the good life at the same time.

‘Paid your subs, have you?' A shadow fell across the table. Jack looked up and there stood the sailing club commodore, clipboard in hand. For a dreadful second Jack had imagined that his thoughts were being read and here was the moment of disclosure, along with judgement and punishment.

‘Of course I've paid,' he said, more crossly than he knew he should. ‘Standing order, every May. It must be on your list. Miller.'

‘Sorry Mr Miller, mistook you for a Temporary.' The Commodore strode away, staring at his clipboard and caught sight of Eliot in the bar. He didn't like Eliot, not the kind they wanted at the club, no respecter of tradition. It wasn't right that scruffy, unkempt, mutinous individuals should chain-smoke their way round the estuary, winning races and wearing too-expensive docksiders. But Eliot was a life member, untouchable, contributing so much to the bar takings that it would
be foolhardy to blackball him for dressing to lower the tone.

Down below the clubhouse the tide was high. Jessica and Milo were preparing their dinghy for sailing. All their equipment lay piled in an expensive heap of neon-coloured wetsuits, life jackets, centre-boards and sailbags. Andrew and Miranda were skimming stones into the creek. Miranda tried to find the moment at which the tide would turn, doing ritual magic: if she got it right, she wouldn't be pregnant. That couldn't happen to her, surely? There were always girls at school, the ones who came in looking pale and worried, telling just their best friend, and then anyone else who'd listen that they thought they were pregnant. For a few days they enjoyed the brief glamour and the speculation, and then would come in, all smiles and saying it was OK after all, this time. Miranda had no time for them – they were, in her opinion, just showing off that they were getting sex. As Miranda threw her pebbles, she could see her mother up on the balcony, watching her fondly. Always watching her and waiting to be told things. Could Clare guess what Miranda was doing? All that freedom to talk about absolutely everything, so that feelings could be brought out and discussed and nothing hidden or glossed over in their household – Miranda felt great surges of anger that in all Clare's tales of Lone Motherhood, she had never mentioned this awful am I/aren't I dread and
terror that must have been there at the beginning of Clare's own pregnancy.

Miranda hadn't told Clare anything of real personal importance since the day she'd had her first period and Clare had celebrated this rite of passage with a special family dinner – lasagne, Miranda's favourite, though at the time the tomatoey sauce had only reminded her of the blood.

There had been roses in her bedroom, and Clare had slapped Miranda's face gently – telling her it was an old French tradition and was to bring her luck in sexual matters (doesn't work, thought Miranda now). Miranda had almost expected an announcement in
The Independent
personal column: Congratulations to Miranda Miller of Barnes, who Became a Woman Today!

Clare was also watching an excursion boat full of sunscorched holiday makers, the ones who didn't qualify for lunch at the sailing club. They were the people on days out from caravan sites, bed and breakfasters, campers.

They brought with them their dogs and grannies, towels with palm trees on them, inflatable crocodiles, lilos, frisbees, radios and windbreaks. There were buckets, spades, babies in sun-shaded buggies all crammed into the boat. People were fretful and hungry, there would be a long wait for pasty-in-a-basket at the pub and Beryl the barmaid would be pink with overwork and the strain
of being pleased to see everyone. How hard it can be to enjoy the ritual of being British on a seaside holiday. It was harder than work, and you had to be happy, you'd saved all year, you sent cheery postcards home.

‘How lucky we are,' Clare said, watching the awkward unloading of the boat. ‘Our own houses, own boats.'

‘Well at least they've all got cars,' said Jack, politically uncomfortable at being reminded of his own good fortune. ‘Years ago you went to the resort by train and that was where you stayed for the duration, unless you caught a bus.'

‘I've never seen a bus round here,' Liz commented, eyes still closed, face up to the sun. She sounded, Clare thought, as if she'd never seen a bus
anywhere
, but to do so once in a while might be rather amusing.

‘I remember those holidays when I was little,' Clare reminisced, ignoring Liz. ‘My father used to carry these two huge suitcases, wobbling from side to side like giant scales. My mother used to carry this little vanity case, like a big sugar cube with a handle. We went to Swanage every year.'

Liz hoped Eliot wouldn't start on his, ‘We were so poor that …' memories from his rural Ireland days. She'd had all that from his mother at their wedding and had refused to see the woman since.

She said to Clare, ‘My parents used to drive down to Avignon in the Bentley every August to see my aunt. My sister and I used to be sent on later by train, like parcels,
because we got so horribly car-sick. A Universal Aunt used to take us as far as the Gare de Lyon and put us on the train, and then we were on our own. It was such fun, the best part of the holidays.'

‘Weren't you sick on trains too?' Jack asked.

‘Of course not darling,' Liz drawled, smiled at Jack. Rich bitch, Eliot the self-made man thought with bad tempered scorn. He paced about restlessly on the balcony. Clare noticed that he never seemed to finish his drink, but then realized that he kept wandering back into the bar for a refill. He smiled a lot at the Australian girl, discovered she was a Sandra not a Sheila and cheered up when she offered him a windsurfing lesson. She and the Scotch would keep him warm in the water. He trailed after her as she collected glasses from the balcony tables.

‘He's such an old tart,' Liz said suddenly, watching Clare watching' Eliot. ‘If it moves, he's going for it.'

Down on the shingle Andrew wanted to get Jessica alone to invite her to his cottage. Celia had told him that morning that she and Archie had booked a four day trip to the Scilly Isles and that he could stay, trusted, by himself at home with Clare to keep an eye on him. Getting Jessica was now his greatest ambition, his only ambition and this was the perfect, probably the only, opportunity.

Jessica was so warm and friendly, she wouldn't be so hurtful as to refuse his invitation. He couldn't have asked
Miranda, for he loved her in a pure and abstract way. He could hardly bear it when she wore her tiny bikini, he didn't like to think of her as mortal with a prosaically ordinary body that functioned like anyone else's. Under the thin drifty silks that she liked to wear he could imagine that her body was all of a piece, joined up all the way round underneath like a doll's. But with Jessica he felt just plain randy, raunchy, for he had inherited some double-standards from his father and his school. Skimming stones next to Miranda, he kept looking at Jessica, close to ecstacy as he watched her glide her warm brown body into her blue and orange wetsuit. She chatted and giggled with Milo. The two of them never seemed to be apart, thought Andrew. Perhaps if he'd had a sister he'd know how to deal with girls. Milo never seemed to have any trouble, he just treated them like normal people and said just any old thing to them. There ought to be a GCSE course in it, Andrew decided.

Eliot couldn't relax. Life was passing and he was ageing and he was now drunk enough to be thinking about the work he should have done that morning. At five in the morning he had woken up with the birds and realized that in chapter two he had introduced a couple of shady characters that were crucial to the novel's outcome. Driven downstairs by curiosity as to what he'd done with them, he checked with his computer and found that they hadn't been mentioned since and here he was in the depths of chapter ten.

He looked down at the beach and wished that he too was a teenager, lithe and fit like his son. Then, full of paté and Scotch, belching, overweight and staggering slightly, he tottered down the steps and yelled to Jessica in the boat, ‘Wait for me! I'm coming with you!'

Liz sat up and looked out, disbelieving. Jack looked up from
The Independent
and gazed over the balcony. Eliot was lolloping down the shingle to the edge of the water, pulling off his Guernsey and revealing a faded grubby tee-shirt from a long-ago rock concert. He climbed heavily into the little dinghy and collapsed, exhausted from the effort.

‘He should at least have a life jacket if he's going out with those two,' Liz commented coolly. ‘They always fall in.'

‘Perhaps they'll sail extra gently for him,' Clare said.

‘When he's in that state,' Liz commented, ‘I honestly don't care if they take him out and drown him.'

She gave herself back to the sun as the overloaded dinghy sailed precariously out towards the estuary.

What an encumbrance he must be to her, Clare thought. Liz was so perfectly put together, he was like a clashing accessory, a bright pink plastic handbag, overfilled against an elegant Armani suit. But then what would Liz be like if it wasn't for Eliot's money? But then Clare thought, accurately, if it wasn't Eliot's money, it would be someone else's. Liz wasn't the type to go around being poor.

A lot later that afternoon, as tired children whined for ice-cream, Miranda read Colette and Clare read Fay Weldon on their terrace, and Andrew sat in his cherry tree with binoculars watching for Jessica's return, all these people witnessed a wet fat man being led gently home by his children. They took an arm each and hauled him out of the dinghy. Still in wetsuits and life jackets they pulled him carefully up the hill through the village like two young ponies pulling an overloaded cart. They handed him over to Liz like one of the smelly treasures the twins kept bringing in from the creek. Her reaction to Eliot was exactly the same:

‘Leave him on the terrace to dry,' she said crisply, ‘I'll deal with him later.'

‘SORRY,' SAID ELIOT
the next day.

‘You always are when your head hurts,' Liz snapped.

Eliot spent a long time in the shower, resolving to be kinder to Liz, less embarrassing to his family and more tolerant to humanity in general. The world couldn't help being composed entirely of fools after all. He decided to be less brutal to his body too, for it felt as if it needed some attention. He could feel it stewing in alcohol, full of air and cholesterol, full of the good things in life but in much too large a quantity. He ran the shower long and hard, wishing the hot water would melt away the excess flesh and restore him to the vigour of his youth. Eliot drank weak tea that morning, instead of strong coffee, and tried to like it. He sat with Liz on the terrace, still apologizing for his constant drunkenness.

Unmoved, she said, ‘It's nothing to do with me. It's Milo and Jessica you should be apologizing to.'

‘I don't suppose they mind too much,' he said, unwisely.

‘Well no-one could say they aren't used to it by now,' she retorted tartly.