by Judy Astley
‘No, no swimming. I’m not up to having my balls frozen off, even if it would be a fitting punishment.’ Lucy looked at him, wary. Clearly there was something on his mind that he might be about to offload on her. ‘Please don’t,’ she wanted to say. He was staring down the path at Theresa, who glared back then dived expertly into the pool. When she came up she didn’t gasp and splutter at the cold as others did, but simply pushed her hair out of her eyes and duck-dived neatly under the water again.
‘Nerveless, isn’t she?’ Lucy commented. Mark grunted. He was looking very boyish, she thought, sprawled on the bench in his linen shorts and baggy black T-shirt, and his mood seemed appropriately tetchy and teenage to match.
‘She might be nerveless,’ he said eventually, fidgeting with a fern leaf he’d picked out of the bank, ‘or she might not. I daren’t test.’
‘OK, I give up. What are you talking about?’ Lucy wasn’t sure if she wanted to know about some row they’d had, but it seemed, just now, polite at least to give him a chance to tell her to sod off and mind her own business.
Mark turned and studied her face. He looked as if he was working out the level of confidence he could trust her with, which rather made her want to get up, run down the remaining steps and hurl herself into the water with the others. Even Shirley was paddling about, carrying her Dr Scholls in one hand, holding her skirt out of the way with the other and enjoying the refreshing chill on her toes.
Then Mark was off again. ‘Have you ever done something bad, not that it would hurt anyone else, not really, so long as they didn’t know, and you were sure you’d got away with it, so truly no-one was hurt, and then found much later that you hadn’t been quite as lucky as you’d thought?’ Lucy considered. Well of course she had. Wasn’t that what being young and experimenting was all about? ‘Yeah, years ago,’ she laughed, hoping against instinct that she could keep this light. ‘I snogged my best friend’s bloke while she was on the school ski trip and then the stupid sod went and confessed all to her about three months later.’ Lucy chuckled. ‘He said he felt “guilty”. I reckoned at the time he was just showing off. Nobody came out of it too well. Sue and I were never the same after. Silence would have been better all round.’ Was that the kind of thing he meant?
‘Silence isn’t going to work with this.’ Mark himself went quiet for a long moment then added, ‘I’ve caught something.’ Looking down at the water, Lucy for a few seconds thought he was talking about fish. She pictured him with a smart whippy salmon rod, up to his thighs in green waders, a helpful Scottish ghillie standing by with a landing net and a congratulatory smile. Mark wasn’t smiling.
‘Caught what?’ she asked, thinking with dread: please don’t let it be AIDS.
‘A nasty, persistent little bug, non-specific urethritis to give it its proper title. NSU.’
‘Oh.’ Lucy nearly added ‘is that all?’ because compared with The Big One, surely it wasn’t that much of a problem. ‘Not from Theresa presumably.’
Mark let out a blast of laughter. ‘Theresa? God no! Can you imagine …?’
Lucy frowned and looked at him. ‘No, I can’t, but then she’d probably say the same about you. I bet it never crossed her mind that you’d have an affair, though only because she doesn’t have enough imagination. It crosses every other woman’s mind.’
‘I haven’t been having an affair. There’s no-one.’
‘Then how … Was it a woman?’ Well, you never knew, Mark might well have gone to that kind of school.
‘Yes of course it was a bloody woman! Some hooker, no-one I actually knew.’ Mark was running his hands through his thick fair hair. It was blonder now, after a few days in strong sun. He was looking perplexed, hot and pressured and scared and resentful, now that he’d weakened and told. Good, Lucy thought on behalf of her sister, let him sweat for more reason than just tropical heat.
‘So are you going to share this bad news with Theresa or are you going to do the grown-up thing – get yourself fixed and try and keep your dick in your pants from now on?’
Mark sighed and looked at the ground. His feet were now surrounded with shredded fern leaves. He scuffed them into the earth. ‘That’s the problem. I thought that’s what I’d done. Then normal relations, as they say, were resumed with Tess and this bloody sharp pain started up again. Apparently it’s not that easy to fix. I’m on the second round of treatment and I might have given it to her. I’ve got to tell her, otherwise we’ll be reinfecting each other for ever.’
‘Ah. Well, I guess you have to. Why though, Mark, are you telling me?’ Lucy was genuinely curious. She’d never been that close to her brother-in-law, or even to her sister come to that. If they weren’t related to her, this was a couple she wasn’t likely to have got to know at all, not even in her capacity as a decorator. When Theresa talked about having The Men In (and they frequently were in: laying a maple floor in Mark’s study, replacing a perfectly good pink bathroom suite with a plain white one simply because pink was so naff, measuring up for smart aquamarine decking where the paved kitchen terrace used to be), she meant men.
‘I think I’m using you for a practice run. I’m waiting for you to call me a lousy cheating heap of shit. I think I’m waiting for you to hit me and tell me to fuck off back to bloody Surrey.’
Lucy shrugged. ‘Sorry Mark, I can’t oblige, because whatever you’ve done it just doesn’t even begin to affect me, not really. I don’t think you’re any worse or better than I did before because I simply didn’t have any expectations about you. Though …’ and she swallowed to suppress a threatened giggle, ‘I am a bit surprised. I didn’t think you were that, well, adventurous, I suppose! Sadly for you, I can’t do the other thing you’re hoping for either and tell you that it’ll be OK, that if you just tell Theresa you love her and that you’re sorry it’ll all be all right.’
‘Yeah, I know. I’m on my own then.’
‘Aren’t we all though, Mark, aren’t we all?’ Whyever did he think it needed saying?
Ethan was on the beach in front of the hotel, stretched out under an almond tree. Becky could hear the wind chimes he was selling before she could see him. Then, as she approached, she could smell him, the rich tang of burning marijuana wafting towards her on the warm air.
‘Got some for me?’ She plonked herself down beside him, watching his eyes as they flickered at the view under her small skirt. He thought she’d simply sat down beside him and he’d sneaked a look. She knew better. Every move she made around him was calculated. She could have sat down smoothly and modestly, carefully folding her legs down beneath her, but it was more fun this way, teasing and tempting to play at being sexy, but pretend she wasn’t making any of the running. He handed her the joint and she inhaled, long and deep. The lady who always wore gold was on a nearby lounger, glaring at her. Becky grinned and waved cheekily.
‘She’ll tell your mom,’ Ethan warned.
‘Who cares?’ Becky lay down and leaned back with her head in his lap. ‘She’ll probably tell her this too.’ Ethan bent and kissed her, lightly on the edge of her mouth, too quickly for her to taste him properly. It left her sensing that the control point had shifted, that she was suddenly feeling a sheer want that she hadn’t quite bargained for. Oh God, she thought, almost squealing out loud, for fuck’s sake do that again.
Seven
IT WAS THE lazy centre of the afternoon. Holidaymakers exhausted from doing nothing lay snoozing on loungers like corpses stretched on slabs in a busy mortuary. Around each one was the debris of fervent relaxation: bottles of suntan lotion gritted with sand, dog-eared paperbacks, bleary snorkel masks, frisbees and tatty straw baskets bought in a last-minute rush at Britain’s regional airports, which now had their decorative plaited flowers fast unravelling. The only speedy activity was from the tame black birds that scurried around, close to the dozing holidaymakers, scrabbling noisily for bits of dropped chocolate or crisp crumbs.
The Putney mothers, exhausted from an energetic stint in the childre
n’s play area, watched their infants digging soggy sand in the shallows and wondered how on earth they were supposed to keep them from frazzling in the sun. The children threw their hats in the water, hauled off their T-shirts and wanted to roll naked in the sea. Little voices constantly shouting ‘Look, Mummy!’ were answered with increasingly lethargic ‘Yes, darling, lovely!’ as the women wondered why it was that men always seemed to need to spend hours making just that one call to the office, exactly at a time when they were most needed for family duty.
The gold lady lit her twenty-fourth cigarette of the day and felt glad, on the whole, Tom wasn’t still three years old. The disadvantage was that he tended to count her drinks every evening (and announce the running total rather too loudly) and that he’d noticed a nice young man called Steve was paying her quite a lot of very welcome attention. This had paid off well: Steve had allowed Tom to go with him and his colleagues on the Pirate Adventure cruise, which kept him safely away from that Luke boy who seemed to be an influence not entirely for the good.
Lucy and Shirley strolled along the beach in search of a new place to find a cooling drink. Half a dozen of the beige stray dogs that seemed to live on the shore ran around them, pushing to get close enough to nip at their ankles for attention, and Lucy shooed them away, shouting and clapping. Shirley took no notice but glided along elegantly beside her, turning now and then to watch the day’s cruise ships starting to head back out to sea for the overnight journey to another island. She was wearing a flowing loose flowery sleeveless dress and a straw hat with a silk scarf tied round the brim, reminding Lucy not so much of a casual holidaymaker as a lady in the English shires, in search of a genteel tearoom after an afternoon looking round a National Trust manor house and garden.
It seemed to suit Shirley, this heat. The humidity forced her to slow down, to temper the brisk pace at which Lucy remembered her always dashing through life. She’d been one of those speedy mothers who did everything so fast it was next to impossible for a small child to keep up and avoid being told off for dawdling. Shirley had had no truck with shoelaces that got themselves into knots, with shirt buttons that became mysteriously fastened in the wrong holes or with zips that somehow picked up a stray thread and got themselves stuck. Lucy remembered the curt ‘Tch, come on, let me!’ and the strong capable hands wrenching everything into its right place at double any speed Lucy could manage. She’d been a demon with a hairbrush too. Lucy remembered the daily agony of the morning brushing, attacking the stubborn knots in her long hair with swift impatience, as if going at it hard and fast was bound to get better results more efficiently than slow and careful disentangling would have done. ‘Quick, come on, we haven’t got all day,’ was a kind of maternal motto that all three of them remembered well. Sometimes, as at one Surrey Christmas when Mark had been a bit slow with the turkey-carving, one of them would say those magic words and reduce the others to a fit of juvenile giggles. Theresa had once said those words would be on Shirley’s tombstone.
‘I can get Coca-Cola at home,’ Shirley was complaining mildly, ‘I fancy something else. Not another fruit punch though, I find them a bit sickly.’
‘You could try a lemon and lime drink I read about somewhere. It’s called a Bentley.’ Lucy laughed, ‘Appropriate for a car dealer’s wife.’
‘Ex car dealer’s wife. Do you know, that land the last showroom was on was worth a mint. The developers wanted it for an Oddbins with a customer car park. I was glad to be rid of it. It’s about time, he’s supposed to have been been retired a good twelve years, but you know what he’s like, has to keep his hand in. Just as long as he’s not under my feet all day.’
So that was one of the things they were to be told. Lucy was hugely tempted to ask what else there was on the list. Simon would be hopping mad if she Knew All before he did, though with his reticence, full of certainty that any news could only be the dreaded worst, he was pretty sure never to get round to asking. ‘I can hear children. It sounds like playground noise,’ she said instead. They were well beyond the hotel boundaries now, and this area at the town end of the beach had only a few buildings, stalls selling the usual beaded jewellery and coconut-shell carvings, pottery and tie-dyed swimwear, the bar where she and Henry had found Becky and a restaurant with a sign that promised ‘Best fresh dolphin’. Shirley shuddered. ‘Don’t let Becky see that, she’ll go mad. Half the world is doing dolphin conservation and the other half is eating it.’
‘It isn’t that sort of dolphin, Ma,’ Lucy explained. ‘Not the smiley sort, just an ordinary fish. I think it’s called dorada.’
‘Well why don’t they write that on their blackboard then? Confusing people like that.’
Beneath the shade of the next clump of almond trees was a local family picnicking with a selection of cool boxes, crate of beers and pounding reggae music. Lucy recalled summer after-school picnics she and other mums had taken their children for in the local park. There’d been a park-keeper with a passion for peace and quiet, who’d shouted at any children who dared to indulge in noisy ball games on his precious flat-mown grass. Once, when someone had brought along a radio, he’d threatened them with severe repercussions from the bye-laws. She watched as a pair of schoolgirls, not much younger than Colette, joined the group. They were dressed in their school uniform: dark red pleated skirts, white shirts and socks and straw boaters just like the one she’d had to wear in the short summer terms at her own school.
‘If we’d had weather like this I wouldn’t have minded about my school hat,’ she commented to Shirley as they passed.
‘I remember you used to get detention for not wearing it on the bus,’ her mother laughed.
‘Well what was the point? There wasn’t exactly an overdose of Cheshire sun for it to protect me from, and half the time it rained anyway and ended up smelling of rotting hay. Colette’s school has the same kind of stupid hat, can you believe. I should have sent her to the comprehensive.’ The question of Colette’s education was one that she rarely felt comfortable about. Her father, when Colette had got to the age of eight, had cornered her at a weak moment and insisted that if she wouldn’t take money towards somewhere to live, then at least the best she could do for her daughter was to let him pay for her education. Lucy, typically, had refused and stuck with her decision for the next couple of years. But then, in the ludicrous unlucky dip that is secondary-school allocation, Colette had been refused a place at any of the local schools Lucy would have been happy to see her settling into for the next seven years. In a panic, she had accepted her father’s offer. Colette was therefore a pupil at a smart London day school, with a uniform that included a waxed jacket that could only be bought in Harrods but which, apart from its pink and grey lining, looked identical to any that could be found on countryside market stalls at a tenth of the price. Lucy, meeting other new mothers at the first parents’ evening the year before, had mentioned that it seemed a peculiar garment for London streets, something more suited to rambling across fields, and had been depressed to be met by blank incomprehension. It occurred to her then that Colette might well be the most impoverished pupil in the entire school, an opinion backed up by Colette coming home one day with a new friend called Isabelle, who nosed around opening every door including the one fronting the gas meter and commented that she lived in a building just like theirs, but in the whole house, not one that was divided into six cramped flats.
‘Oh look, how pretty, this must be the school for the little ones,’ Shirley said as they rounded a bend on the beach. Lucy stopped and gazed at the pale yellow wooden building, brightly painted with a circle of jolly dancing figures holding garlands of flowers. It was about the size of a big Portakabin, surrounded by a sky-blue picket fence. A woman in a green and white checked dress was collecting up infant-sized chairs and taking them inside for the night. Close by, beyond the fence, was a collection of larger wooden buildings, all with thatched verandahs and with doors painted with a single flower and the name of it printed beneath.
‘So you’ve found our school!’ Henry emerged from the shadow of a clump of trees, Oliver by his side.
‘I was just thinking how wonderfully different this is from schools back home,’ Lucy said with a sigh. ‘I mean, there’s no reason why we should have to put up with dull grey old bricks is there? We should paint things up a bit too, give the more boring buildings a bit of life.’
‘They do at some of the nursery schools in the town,’ Shirley protested. ‘It’s nice for the little ones but wouldn’t do for a great big comprehensive though, Lucy, be sensible.’
Lucy and Henry grinned at each other. ‘It would make sense to me,’ Lucy said.
‘You’d only get graffiti.’ Shirley frowned ‘Not just words and stuff. If you painted pictures of people, they’d only add rude bits on. You know what kids are like.’ Then she turned to Henry and said, ‘We’re just going for a cool drink, would you like to come with us?’ She looked at Oliver approvingly. Lucy could see her assessing how clean and neat his maroon trousers, white shirt and properly knotted tie looked. She was probably, Lucy guessed, contrasting him with the grubby fray-edged boys who fought and jostled at the bus stops close to her home. Shirley disapproved of scruffy loud schoolboys whose shirts hung out of their trousers, who slopped fizzy drinks and shards of chocolate bars down themselves as they swore and bickered in the bus queues.
‘Where do the big ones go to school?’ Lucy asked Henry as they set off back along the beach.
‘There’s a senior school in the town. Oliver starts there next year. But after that it isn’t like in England where so many folks get to go on to university. Here it’s a lot down to how much money you have, or who you know. Unless you’re a genius,’ he grinned. ‘That helps.’
‘Helps anywhere,’ Lucy agreed, thinking about Colette and her dogged acceptance of her long daily bus journey through traffic-stacked suburbs, a journey that in summer could be stifling with smoggy dust and in winter meant both leaving the house and returning to it in grim darkness. Then there were the hours of homework, pointless repetitive maths exercises and lists of French verbs to learn by heart as if nothing had progressed in the world of education since her own schooldays. There had to be a more interesting, more modern way of learning. The school liked to claim they were ‘maximizing each girl’s potential’ but on the days when Colette fell asleep with her head on a history book Lucy suspected it was more to do with the school maximizing its chances on the educational league table. She should move out to the country, she thought, to where at least in the spring and summer months they could appreciate the changing seasons, feel that nature had some kind of relevance to their lives.