Summertime (7 page)

It is delivered on an unnecessarily large lorry, while I am trapped on the telephone, unable to suggest a fitting place for it to be dumped. The driver heads unerringly across the lawn, the only part of the garden looking remotely nice, and dumps the pump in a bush as far away from the flood as it is possible to be in this garden. He then reverses back to the gate, not covering his tracks, and drives off, leaving the lawn decorated with four bolts of herringbone-tweed indentation. Giles and I, assisted by The Beauty in her red mackintosh and bare feet, very excited because she thought the pump was the Teletubbies' Noo Noo, manage to work out how to turn the thing on, and wrestle with its stinking tubes, dragging them to reach a corner of the flooded knot garden. Flick the switch to start the suction programme and am suddenly in a mudbath.

Jump about shrieking.

‘Oh, my God. Oh, damn. Giles, quick, it's the wrong way, it's pumping out, not in! Buggering hell, I'm filthy.' Am indeed coated with darkest gunge, but find it strangely liberating, so stop whingeing and get on with trying to angle the pump correctly. The Beauty capers about falling into mud and laughing while trilling her new set of swear words, ‘Damn, damn and bugger, bugger. Oh my God.'

‘Oh my
word,'
I correct her, automatically. She shoots
me a filth-coated look and repeats, ‘OHMIGOD' in a football chant over and over again. Giles is writhing about with the pipe, like Hercules with the Hydra, or was it Pericles? Just cannot remember anything any more. Never mind, it is something to ask Hedley Sale when we next bump into him.

Wonderful gurgling and squelching sounds indicate that Giles has vanquished the wrong flow, and the knot garden lake begins to subside. Giles and I, both resembling Fungus the Bogeyman in skin colour and scent, stand over the pump, fascinated, as it vacuums up the water.

‘Is this what it would be like to work in a sewage plant?' asks Giles, and I nod.

‘Yes, I suppose so, but without the smell.'

‘Cool,' he says, and I wonder whether I should be encouraging him in a more white-collar direction.

Later

Felix zooms up to the window of my study where I have just written the first sentence of the day, extolling the joys and virtues of shopping malls.

‘Mummy, quick, the pump is thirsty, it's run out of water. I think it's going to be sick.'

Jump up, delighted to have a valid reason to escape.

‘Gosh, well done for noticing, Felix, I'd forgotten all about it. Let's go and have a look.' Follow him round
to the knot garden, where a high-pitched whining accompanies a lot of smoke rising from the pump. Just as we reach the machine, the whining falters and drops rapidly in pitch to nought. An ominous silence ensues, broken by the bustling arrival of The Beauty and her pram.

‘Look, Mummy, it's broken.' She points at the back of the pump, and a crack from which a treacle-dark ooze of water bleeds.

April 13th

Driving to the dentist on a glittering spring morning, we woosh through the puddles making the car even more disgustingly filthy than it already is, but delighting The Beauty, who drums her feet against my seat back and shrieks, ‘Faster in the river, Mummy, faster right now.' We do ‘faster right now' with disastrous consequences. The car splutters and dies in the middle of a dark and deep-looking puddle.

‘You've flooded it, Mum,' says Giles, availing himself of the opportunity to sigh heavily and roll his eyes.

‘We'll just have to wait until it dries out.' I am serene. The nine o'clock news has not yet come on to the radio, so we are in good time and can afford
to loll around in puddles looking at the geese flocked in the wheat field next to us. The young corn shoots are vibrant green in the sun's path, but fade to grey where the cloud casts a deep shadow, causing some of the geese to appear celestial and the others to seem drab. Recall reading that it was ancient country practice for goose girls to take flocks behind the threshing machines and to steer them about through the harvested fields of yore, and would rather like to put myself forward for such a picturesque career now. The Beauty and I could work in tandem. Perhaps Simon will employ us this autumn? Musings brought to an untimely halt by horrible roaring in the back. Felix is writhing in agony, his hair twisted around The Beauty's fists and his chest drummed by her little feet.

‘Ssshh. Let's see if we can will the car to start,' I say, in the manner of a playgroup leader. Giles glances witheringly at me, but Felix is silenced, and praise the Lord, the car coughs then hums into action, just as the news pips sound from the radio.

April 14th

Have still not found the opportunity to tell David
that the wedding is to be held here. All our recent communications have been about communication, as I attempt to lose my email virginity by sending him a message. There are many bad things about trying to get online, but the worst is that as soon as you sit down with the computer, you know that hours and hours of precious time are about to be wasted, mostly on the telephone to the helpline. Have a phobia about reading instruction manuals which makes it impossible for me to understand anything written in them, so am very dependent on computer-literate friends (seem to have none) and the sodding helpline. David is now hardly reachable, as he is at last on set in the rainforest, and I have had email for days now without managing to send or receive anything at all except bad vibes.

David has become very important, no longer merely a carpenter as he was here and in Bermuda, but a big cheese with hundreds of telephone numbers, none of which have him on the end of them. Most just ring and ring. One or two have David's voice jumping down the line, impossibly near, but so far away, droning the usual voice-mail apologies. Finally find a number that is answered by a human, but still not David.

‘Hi, this is David Lanyon's line. May I help you?' answers a purring Californian voice, belonging to a
female, almost certainly with big lips and skin like cream.

‘Ummmm, yes. I'd like to speak to David, umm, please,' I stutter, getting off to a feeble start against his Rottweiler secretary.

‘He's busy, honey, call again sometime,' she says huskily. I cannot bear to tell her who I am, in case David has not mentioned us at all, and do not wish to reveal to her my email problems. Suddenly wish I had chosen a more appropriate email address than ‘heavenlybody'. Perhaps ‘harassedmother' or ‘norfolkharridan' might have been better.

Manage, with great cunning, to get through to David himself by persuading Felix to ring for me. He has no truck with Big Lips, and tells her firmly, ‘David always wants to speak to me. Why can't you take the phone to where he is? I want to ask him about the jungle and stuff, anyway.'

There is a silky silence, which I can hear as I have my head rammed against the receiver next to Felix's ear, and then Felix grins as David comes on to the line. Felix lounges in the swivel chair by my desk, gazing unseeing at the dancing cobwebs on the ceiling, which I too prefer not to notice, and laughs at something David has said, before barraging him with questions.

‘Have you met Tarzan yet? Are there any monkeys in this film? How big are they? What are their
names? Do they sleep in the caravans with all the crew? Has Tarzan got a bow and arrow? How many snakes have you seen? Can you send us something dangerous, like a scorpion or some snake's spit or something?'

Even though it is ten o'clock at night and Felix should be in bed, I let him talk on, trying not to think about the telephone bill, but about Felix, and how he misses David. This leads to a brief soul-search and the conclusion that I have got it all wrong, and should never have got involved with anyone, no matter how melting his voice or smiling his eyes, unless he could guarantee lifelong commitment to the whole family. Felix passes the telephone, saying, ‘Mum, please can you try to sort out the email so I can send messages and stuff to David? It's really important. I need to show him the Necromancer stuff on the internet, and I want to download it on to an email. Isn't it time I was in bed, anyway?'

Am constantly bemused by the weird ways of children, and suddenly long for a cosy chat with David about all their activities today instead of the stilted conversation which follows.

I begin: ‘How are you?'

‘I'm fine, thanks, what have you been up to today?'

‘Oh, nothing really, just getting on. What about you?'

‘Well we're on set, and I've been trying to work out a way to get the bridge connected to the tree house, and none of the carpenters speak English. There was a huge storm here last night, and the electrics have been off all morning. They've only just got them back on. But I want to know about home.' He sighs, and pauses, then says, ‘I miss you all so badly. Tell me what everyone's doing. Is Giles playing any cricket before he goes back to school? How's the flooded garden? How are the dogs? Have you set up your email yet?'

I begin to relax, and I stop hunching at my desk and move over to sit by the fire, thawed now into talking to him again.

‘Not exactly, but everyone's fine, and missing you. The Beauty told her nursery school teacher that—' There is a click, and the line dies.

‘Hello, hello. David, can you hear me?' I slam the receiver down. ‘Bloody, sodding bastard phone. It does this every time I speak to him. God, it's primitive.'

Redouble attempts with the computer and the helpline, and am rewarded at midnight, with the ping of an email arriving for me. So thrilling. Excitement is undiminished by it being from Angel.com to welcome me as a new member, and not something more glamorous. After gazing at their message, and
committing it to memory, I decide it is best to stop until tomorrow. Can scarcely summon the energy to crawl up to bed after this computer marathon, and cannot face getting it wrong again.

April 16th

Constant rain for the past week means that I need never have bothered pumping out the knot garden. It is back to its incarnation as a lake, and even has frogspawn lying like a pillow of tiny glass beads at one end. Should I keep trying to dry it out, or should I accept defeat and make it into a proper lake, or rather pond, and become a water gardener? Am gazing into the murky swamp, pondering this issue before collecting The Beauty from a morning with my mother, when Desmond and his marquee people arrive to check the space. I had been expecting a team of efficient country types with measuring tapes and theodolites and so forth, but instead Bass (as in bass guitar, he informs me) and his girlfriend Siren surge up the drive in an orange camper van with purple curtains and flames painted behind all four wheels. Despite the inclement weather, which has caused me to put on an old boiler suit of David's and two waterproof jackets in
order to survey my flood, Bass, who has long ringlets like Charles II and a bulbous nose, is wearing just a waistcoat over his bare chest and a pair of tight and dirty jeans. Siren, clad more as the tooth fairy than an ancient Greek doom-seeker, alights from her side of the vehicle and pauses for a moment, blinking as if she has been asleep, brushing the creases from her short frill of a skirt with a tin whistle she holds in one hand like a wand. Music swells and rattles in the car and the windscreen wipers keep time. Siren shivers and reaches back into the cab for a bolt of gauzy paper which she wraps around her shoulders, pulling it without looking, so the other end falls off and tips on to the muddy gravel. Even though I am wearing a boiler suit, I feel as bourgeoise as a Tupperware picnic box.

‘Man, this is a neat pad,' says Bass, moving over to me and standing too close, wafting the smell of beer and patchouli oil towards me. Siren homes in from the other side, tiptoeing in her Stars and Stripes platform shoes, and smiling to reveal a front tooth studded with a green stone which from any distance looks like stuck spinach.

‘Your ducks are doing my head in,' she giggles. ‘I'm mad about the one with the backcombed hair.' She points at Pom-pom, the smaller of our ducks, as he glides across the garden towards the pond.

Desmond extracts himself from the wriggling welcome of all the dogs and comes over. ‘These guys have got the most fantastic tent,' he says, clapping Bass on the back with a firm hand. ‘It's big enough for four hundred people, so we'll easily get everything in.'

I look round doubtfully. ‘But my garden is very small. I don't think you could fit four hundred people in it anyway, even without the tent, and there's nowhere flat enough to put a structure that big.'

Bass walks over to the garden wall, and looks out across the water meadows.

‘Hey man, let's just put the tent in this field. It's much better, and you can get all the parking on there as well.' Siren frisks over to look with him, flapping long, hennaed hair, and Desmond and I join them as a thin mist of rain begins to fall, clouding Siren's hair and blurring the view. Desmond also likes the field idea, and I can hardly bear to interrupt their excited discussions about generators, to say, ‘But this field doesn't belong to me, it's farmland, wet farmland at that, and it belongs to the new man who lives at Crumbly.'

‘Well it isn't any wetter than your garden,' Desmond points out. ‘Let's find out if we can rent it.'

Siren and Bass, oblivious to the rain, have drifted off to the swing, where he pushes her and she skims to and fro, trilling with laughter, in between murmured
sentences about amplifiers and sound systems. Start to envisage the wedding as a mini Glastonbury, and begin to feel very nervous indeed.

April 17th

Catch the train to London by running, bags flapping, down the platform shouting ‘No, no,' in the manner of a spoof Anna Karenina. Really awful mistiming caused by the station having been entirely rebuilt since I last went to London, and this adds to my sensation of being an utter rustic, with hay almost sprouting from my ears. Am on my way to Minna's hen night, and will have time beforehand to go shopping for the children's wedding clothes and also to attend an exhibition. Realise just how long it is since I have been here when walking down the King's Road. The thronging, weaving people on the pavement and the jerking traffic move fast and purposefully; my pace and my intent are hesitant, and I am bumped and jostled until I alter my stride and move swiftly, like them. Legs begin to ache and I veer over into the slow lane, right next to the shop windows, where I and other pedestrian out-of-towners meander, gasping to catch our breath and staring
blankly at windows bursting with colour – neon-blue dresses with pink roses sprigged across the skirt, lilac cardigans with sea-green beading, all the same and all trumpeting their individuality. Every shopfront has three or four mannequins in uniform of slithery dress, cardigan and tiny handbag, and every shop window has a flutter of words daubed above or beneath the clothes, a marketing message to the subconscious, a version of
Stand out in a crowd, be yourself
.