A Dry Spell

by Clare Chambers

  Contents

  Dedication

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Part II

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Part III

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  About the Book

  In 1976 four students took a trip to the desert. Now the repercussions of that fateful summer are coming back to haunt them...

  And repercussions are just what Guy doesn't need: his wife, Jane, is moving swiftly from slightly eccentric to downright peculiar, their three-year-old daughter seems set on destroying Jane's sanity, and now even God's gone quiet on him.

  As for Nina, she's having enough trouble with her son, James. He's got exams looming, a new girlfriend with pneumatic breasts and now, it seems, he's on drugs. Nina certainly won't welcome any ghosts from the past.

  Life isn't going smoothly for anyone. But when Hugo, long-forgotten agent of misfortune, threatens to pay them all a visit, disaster seems unavoidable.

  About the Author

  Clare Chambers was born in Croydon in 1966 and read English at Oxford. She wrote her first novel, Uncertain Terms, during a year in New Zealand, after which she worked as an editor for a London publisher. She is also the author of Back Trouble, Learning to Swim and In a Good Light. She lives in Kent with her husband and three children.

  Praise for Clare Chambers

  ‘Exquisite: beautifully written, addictive reading’ Anna Maxted

  ‘Charming . . . A funny and moving story with a great deal of style’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘To those searching for intelligent, well written romantic comedy, Clare Chambers is a diamond in the dust’

  Independent on Sunday

  ‘A perfect novel’ Lisa Jewell

  ‘A funny book which slips in some acute and painful observations on the side’ The Times

  ‘Modern, intelligently observed and highly original’

  Daily Mail

  ‘An intelligent escapist read . . . well written and funny’

  Daily Express

  ‘Funny, poignant and beautifully written, this is an enchanting book’ Katie Fforde

  ‘To warm the heart and chill it is a rare ability’

  Evening Standard

  ‘An elegantly crafted, gently poignant coming-of-age love story that I couldn’t put down’ Melissa Nathan

  ‘A warm bath of a book – you slip in and just don’t want to get out’ Victoria Routledge

  By the same author

  UNCERTAIN TERMS

  BACK TROUBLE

  LEARNING TO SWIM

  IN A GOOD LIGHT

  A DRY SPELL

  Clare Chambers

  This ebook is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form (including any digital form) other than this in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Epub ISBN: 9781446457412

  Version 1.0

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  Published by Arrow Books in 2005

  3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4

  Copyright © Clare Chambers 2001

  Clare Chambers has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental

  First published in the United Kingdom by Arrow Books in 2001

  Arrow Books

  The Random House Group Limited

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA

  Random House Australia (Pty) Limited

  20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney

  New South Wales 2061, Australia

  Random House New Zealand Limited

  18 Poland Road, Glenfield

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Random House (Pty) Limited

  Endulini, 5a Jubilee Road, Parktown 2193, South Africa

  The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

  www.randomhouse.co.uk

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN 0 09 927764 6

  To Peter

  MEMO

  To: All committee members

  From: A.P. Thoday, Chairman, Royal Geographical Society Expeditions and Fieldwork Committee

  Date: 20th September 1976

  * * *

  Following the recent tragic events in Algeria involving a party led by one of our members, it has been suggested that aspects of the Society’s advice to travellers and expedition leaders be reviewed and updated. Possible areas for discussion at the next meeting (19th October 1976) include: general safety; co-operating with host nations; insurance; legal considerations; unofficial ‘blacklists’ of hostile nations/regions; consular responsibilities, etc. Revised agenda attached.

  I

  1

  As soon as her son, James, started driving lessons, some months before his eighteenth birthday, Nina Osland sold her car. She knew he would have to have one eventually – modern life without the car was no fun at all, as she was soon to discover – but she was damned if he was going to kill himself in hers.

  Unfortunately, the man who answered her advertisement in Loot, also a worrier, was buying a car for his seventeen-year-old daughter, reasoning that she would be safer behind a wheel after dark than walking the street – a statistical fallacy. He brought her along for the test drive. She was slim and blonde with a pierced navel displayed in defiance of February weather between the bottom half of a cropped T-shirt and jeans, and large, unnaturally high breasts jammed together by a cruelly wired bra.

  She can practically rest her chin on them, Nina thought, handing over the keys to the father, who had just emerged from a rust inspection of the car’s undercarriage.

  ‘Do you keep it in the garage?’ he asked, squeezing behind the steering wheel and ramming the front seat backwards with the screech of metal on metal.

  ‘Not often,’ said Nina, who had decided she wouldn’t volunteer prejudicial information – the dodgy catch on the rear seatbelt for example – unless she had to but neither would she lie. The careful deployment of truth and silence was something she had inherited, or perhaps learned, from her diplomat father, and, besides, James had appeared on the doorstep to eavesdrop. His hair was unbrushed and he held a dry Weetabix in one hand. He ate the wretched things on the hoof, leaving flakes like monster dandruff all over the house. She waved him back inside, unwilling to have her sales pitch overheard.


  ‘Do you want to take it for a drive?’

  The girl was in the passenger seat. Nina watched her surreptitiously checking her make-up in the mirror on the sun visor. She caught Nina’s eye and blushed through a mask of foundation.

  ‘Do you mind?’ said the man. ‘Just round the block. See how it runs?’

  ‘Go ahead.’ I wonder if she’s had implants, Nina wondered idly.

  ‘Don’t you want to come with me?’ the man asked, a little embarrassed. ‘I mean, in case I steal it.’

  ‘No, it’s okay.’ Nina smiled. ‘After all you might kidnap me.’

  ‘You think I look more like a kidnapper than a car thief,’ he said. ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘You don’t look much like either,’ Nina admitted, observing him properly for the first time. Before he had spoken she had written him off as beneath her interest, but now she bothered to look she could see a tall, balding man in his mid-forties, with tired eyes and a pleasant, decent face. A man who loved his daughter.

  ‘To be honest I’m more worried about getting lost,’ he said. ‘I might never find my way back.’

  ‘You can take James with you,’ said a voice which Nina recognized as hers but which seemed to have come direct from the devil himself. I have seen the future, she thought, as she watched James climb into the back seat behind the girl.

  An hour later she was three thousand pounds richer but could take no pleasure from the fact.

  It was two months before Nina saw the girl again, and this time she was wearing even less. Nina had already deduced that James had acquired a girlfriend, noticing, for instance, that he was more often out than upstairs playing on his computer, and that he had become much more punctilious about his appearance than his schoolwork. Her heart had heaved in her chest when she saw the tubes of face-wash and spot-cream in the bathroom and caught the aftershock of some new, peppery cologne in the back of her throat. James was also spending more time than ever loitering in the back garden talking on his mobile phone – a phenomenon baffling to Nina as whenever his friends came round they seemed to get along quite happily all evening without ever resorting to speech. Reception was apparently poor inside the house – which contained a normal phone to which he had unrestricted access – so James was obliged instead to pace up and down outside like a water diviner in search of a powerful signal. Sometimes, when it rained, Nina would see him duck into the callbox on the corner of the street for shelter, and emerge minutes later, still talking.

  The day Nina caught them in bed together started badly and went downhill. To begin with, a woman claiming to be a Bosnian war widow had knocked on the door asking for a donation of second-hand clothing. Nina had given her a cashmere jumper which had a small moth-hole in one sleeve but which she still occasionally wore. Later, when she went out, Nina found it stuffed in a hedge two gardens down. She took it back home again and restarted her journey with a heart hardened against humanity. She was on her way to perform the melancholy duty of clearing a dead woman’s flat so that the council could take possession. Irene Shorrocks, James’s grandmother and Nina’s comforter and friend, had lived most of her sixty-seven years in East Dulwich and had spent much of the brief interval between retirement and death attending car boot sales. The flat, which grew to resemble a series of walk-in cupboards, was crammed from floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes and black bags of unsorted ‘bargains’. Ever since she had named Nina as her executrix, Nina had sent up a nightly prayer for Irene’s health and longevity: Oh God, please let Irene outlive me.

  On this particular morning, as Nina waited for a bus at Crystal Palace, perched on one of the narrow pivoting seats which seemed to have been designed expressly to tip her off into the pile of broken glass at her feet, she felt moved to do a brave and foolish thing. The bus stop had been thoroughly trashed: every pane was broken and every surface sprayed with runic obscenities. The timetable had been ripped out to reveal a fixed notice of apology for its absence. Only a true misanthropist could have devised such a system, Nina was thinking, when she became aware of the sweet, sharp smell of vinegar penetrating the miasma of exhaust. The other person at the stop, a tall, round-shouldered girl in a denim skirt and white slingbacks, was eating chips from the paper, pulling each one into her mouth with plump, painted lips. Nina’s stomach gave a loud rumble, which she covered with a sudden burst of throat-clearing. The Bosnian refugee, on top of her other misdeeds, had interrupted Nina’s breakfast. In the distance a bus shimmered into view. The girl and Nina swayed forward with one movement to read the number and then back again, disappointed. The chips were as good as finished. The girl screwed up the wrapper, passing it from hand to hand to wipe her greasy fingers, and then, glancing first at Nina, and then at the waste bin not five paces away on the kerb, chucked the whole thing on the floor.

  Nina, who would chase a sweet wrapper across the street on a windy day if it fell out of her pocket, was appalled. All right, so there was a fair amount of debris on the pavement already, but really, there was no excuse for apathy on that scale. Images of similar civic outrages rose up before her and she felt her stomach begin to churn with indignation against this invisible army of litter-louts and queue-jumpers, smokers on the underground and defilers of public lavatories. Calm down, she told herself. Don’t get involved. But it was no use: various sarcastic turns of phrase were already suggesting themselves.

  ‘It’s a long walk to that bin, isn’t it?’ she said, anger making her voice sound treacherously upper class. The girl was only momentarily taken aback before she advanced on Nina, hissing like a swan, and gave her a terrific shove in the chest which sent her toppling backwards through the missing pane of the bus shelter into the crushed glass on the concrete below. ‘Slapper,’ was the girl’s parting shot as she walked off up the road on her peeling stilettos.

  ‘You want to get down the hospital, get yourself checked out,’ the house-clearance man advised, once Nina had explained the reason for her late arrival. He had been sitting in his van outside Irene’s eating a bacon roll when she arrived, flustered and sore. There had been no shortage of helpers after the event to pick her up and brush her off and call out the emergency services, but once she had established that her cuts and grazes were superficial she wanted nothing more than to be on her way. When the assembled bystanders realized she was uninjured and reluctant to call the police or exploit the dramatic potential of the incident they lost interest. Someone hailed her a taxi and she made her escape, vowing to resist all future impulses towards heroism.

  They were in the darkened sitting room watching a stand-up comedian on the television. There was an empty pizza box along with two bottles of Coke on the coffee table in front of them. James had his arm around her shoulders and they were both slumped well down on the couch, bent-necked, when Nina walked in. He gave the faintest twitch of unease, but otherwise didn’t move.

  ‘Oh, Mum, this is Kerry,’ he said.

  ‘Hello, Kerry,’ said Nina, itching to turn the overhead light on and get a proper look at her. In the bluish glow from the TV she looked more like a ghost than a girl, but she was recognizable as the person who had come to buy the car. Nina could see the studs in her nose and navel glinting.

  ‘Hello,’ said Kerry without taking her eyes off the screen.

  ‘She’s shy,’ James would say later, in her defence. This excuse, intended to mitigate a range of small discourtesies and anti-social habits, cut absolutely no ice with Nina.

  The comedian was telling an obscene joke, so Nina decided to stand her ground for a moment in case they thought she was embarrassed. ‘I’m not wanting to rush you off,’ she said from the doorway, ‘but how are you getting Kerry home?’ James and his male friends were accustomed to walking vast distances to each other’s houses or the pub at any hour of the night, and she didn’t want the poor girl with a bare tummy getting a chill or worse.

  ‘Cab,’ said James, patiently.

  ‘Well, goodnight then. Nice to have met you,’ Nina said to Kerry
, not without irony.

  I might as well go to bed, she thought. I’m not going to sit out in the kitchen like the family dog. Normally when James brought friends home they didn’t lay claim to the sitting room but skulked in his bedroom playing tapes. This departure struck Nina as significant.

  It must have been after one o’clock when something woke her. She had fallen asleep sitting up in bed over the Times crossword with the light on. Her pen had actually skated across the page leaving a broken line – something she thought only happened in cartoons. She jerked her head up sharply – guiltily even – like someone in a theatre caught napping by the applause.

  It must be Kerry leaving, she thought, waiting for the sound of the door, but the house was silent and dark. Then she heard it again: an unfamiliar, female cough. Nina crept on to the landing. James’s door was – unusually – closed, a thin blade of light visible along its lower edge. Nina crossed the floor in two strides, knocked once loudly, setting off a frantic scuffling from within the room, and walked in without waiting for a reply.

  The two of them were huddled, bare-shouldered under the duvet. Their clothes, which had obviously been shed in some haste, lay in mixed heaps on and around the bed. The only light was from the angle-poise desk lamp, which had been turned to face the wall. They looked so crestfallen that Nina almost felt sorry for them, but then her indignation returned, along with the sense that she’d been made a fool of.

  ‘Not in my house,’ she said, pointing at James, and then to Kerry, ‘Get dressed. I’ll call you a taxi.’ She had the grace to step outside while Kerry got out of bed and struggled into her bra and knickers. ‘Does your father know you’re here?’ she added over her shoulder.

  ‘I told him I was staying over with a friend,’ came the reply.

  ‘We weren’t doing anything, Mum,’ said James, in a tone that managed to combine supplication with reproach. ‘We were only having a cuddle.’