Just For the Summer

by Judy Astley

  Milo said, ‘I remember when we were little and he had that very basic barbecue and he used to pour gallons of meths on it, blowing on it till he felt he’d achieved a fire, not just lit one. Now Liz has got him one of those gas things, she’s emasculated him. She’d rather have a poolside microwave, clingfilm and everything clean.’

  ‘I sometimes think she’d like to wrap Dad in clingfilm to keep him more hygenic too,’ Jessica giggled.

  ‘You should see the cooking at home when we’re with Mum,’ Jess told the others. ‘She just flings stuff in the Aga and hopes one of us will remember when to take it out. It’s never dull, but you never really know if you’ll get food.’

  ‘Probably one of the reasons Dad left,’ Milo commented, ‘Liz’s cordon bleu diploma.’

  At the end of the evening the others left Miranda at her gate and she went into her garden, her feet feeling for the steps in the darkness. She was tired but didn’t want to go into the cottage, the air in the night was stilI warm and in the house she felt she would be choked by dry air. Sitting on the low branch of the pear tree she heard Clare open the door.

  ‘Is that you Miranda?’

  ‘Of course it’s me,’ she replied rudely. ‘I’ll be in soon,’ she shouted, which would have to make do as a gesture of apology, but the door had been shut smartly and with obvious hurt.

  Inside the cottage Clare went upstairs, a little drunk and rather depressed from the champagne. She missed Jack, the little ones were asleep and now Miranda was leaving her out. When she was a teenager herself she and her friends squirmed away from the idea that one could be friends with one’s parents, they’d been horrified at the very idea, recoiling from the false matiness that some of their contemporaries had to put up with from their mothers. Parents had been old then. But Clare wasn’t ready to be old, she still felt it was other people, people like Archie and Celia who were grown-ups. She and Miranda had always been so close.

  Clare sat on the window seat in her room, not wanting to spy on Miranda, but not wanting to close the curtains against the warm night. Miranda was talking to someone in a rowing boat down by the creek. Clare, at her window, heard her laugh softly, and she could see the dim pale outline of a figure in the boat – undoubtedly a male figure but otherwise unidentifiable. Clare wondered if this was indeed Steve, for who else could it be? Which made Liz, irritatingly, right. Clare, the ardent feminist, believer in self-determination, couldn’t go out to the garden and demand that Miranda come into the house and retire to bed in celibacy. Nor could she demand that Miranda come and confide to her, woman to woman, all the secret things she did. Whatever she’s doing, Clare thought enviously, she might as well make the most of it this young. It goes all too soon.

  Steve sat in the boat, holding it steady by a rope threaded through a mooring ring on the creek wall. Right now he’d like to have pulled the rope, tightly, round the pale throat of Miranda, from which came such mocking, uninhibited laughter. It was no good her protesting, as she was, that she was not laughing at him, just at the idea. So far removed from the conventional boys of south-west London, she had thought she could rely on Steve to be beyond wanting the tedious boyfriend-girlfriend arrangement. Yet here he was, prowling the creek in his dinghy, one step away from serenading under her window.

  ‘But that was weeks ago, this is now,’ she protested, mid-giggle, at the point when he thought he was playing the unbeatable trump card, reminding her of what they had done, and wasn’t the first one at least supposed to be something special for a girl, to mean something? Her rejection angered him. He wanted to tell her, to impress upon her that there were girls by the dozen hanging around the harbour every day waiting for him to finish work, just about begging for it. The fact that Miranda was not to be impressed like that was what most attracted him. She just didn’t care. It was both appalling and compelling: both of them knew quite well that she was simply out of his class.

  FOUR

  CLARE FOUND IT frustratingly impossible to sleep late when she was in the village. It was either the sun blazing through the flimsy, unlined curtains (useless in winter), rain on the pear tree leaves, or the wind blowing its branches against the windows. At home in Barnes she used to think that on holiday one of the great pleasures would be staying in bed late in the mornings, but here she realized that it was only the term-time compulsion to get up that she hated so much back in London. She resented that frantic early (often still dark) time of racing round the house pushing everyone else to be ready for their various schools, getting lunch boxes prepared for the little ones, the finding of gym kits and recorders, remembering appointments, who was going where after school and with whom. There was the collecting and taking, the ballet classes, riding lessons, birthday teas, skating, swimming and tennis and none of it was her own. Clare just had to programme the organization of it all, even for Miranda who was too lazy and forgetful to remember boring things like lunch money and dentists. Everyone in Barnes and thereabouts did things so competitively too. Even the school run was done most efficiently by the affluent mothers in vast Space Wagons. It wasn’t enough, either to learn tennis at seven: you had to be in the right kit, in the right club, and win tournaments. And your tears had to be mopped if you didn’t win. Clare had never heard anyone say to their distraught, failed child, ‘It doesn’t matter, darling, it’s only a game,’ because it did matter. There are no good losers in London, only losers. Jack had started hinting lately that they could all drop out of the ratlet race if they lived in Cornwall, but Clare didn’t believe him: her children had already trotted many miles on the middle-class running track, so in the end it would simply mean doing the same things, but with much further to drive to get to them.

  Now in the moist morning air, Clare sat on a damp garden bench enjoying the early stillness, watching the tide flow into the creek and letting the others sleep as late as they wanted.

  If she chose, she could find small worries to play with, like wondering what Jack was up to in London, all alone. Was he having the same mid-life doubts that she was having? Did he lust after a slender young thing who sat giggling with her friends on the other side of the polytechnic canteen? Some eager young student with a body that was free of life’s battle-scars, someone in whom the habit of chewing on their split ends was still endearing, rather than horrendously irritating?

  Clare leaned forward to pick up her coffee cup and as she did so she felt the soft warm flesh of her stomach under her cotton kimono nestle on to the top of her legs. Surely, she thought, it hadn’t done that this time last year? She prodded her waist and gathered up a handful of loose flab: perhaps the day was fast approaching when she would be buying her underwear from the Firm Control rack in Marks and Spencer and Jack would be trading her in for a sleeker model. The thought brought her back to Eliot; wasn’t that exactly what he had done when he’d abandoned his first wife (a successful psychotherapist, slightly older than Eliot), and met the juvenile Liz? Clare leaned back on the bench and her stomach flattened out comfortingly. It was her own fault, she thought, for having chosen such a sedentary occupation. Clare’s gesture at remaining in the world of paid employment was to design and make knitwear for a shop where a £400 sweater could be cheerfully added to a customer’s credit card bill along with rather outrageous underwear and intimidating hats. Clare had lately thought she would like to expand into a wider range of designs, one can only do so much handknitting without getting wrist problems. Investment in machinery would be needed, perhaps a course at a college. It could easily become a Proper Job and might jolt Jack into being impressed.

  For now, Clare knitted her way through summer afternoons and winter evenings, and on her conscience was the knowledge that the clicking of the needles drove Jack absolutely crazy. The more she told him how complicated the patterns were, sneakily overemphasizing her skill, the more he was certain she couldn’t possibly be taking in a word he said while she was doing it. While he told her in detail and at length exactly what sort of day he’d had at the Poly,
intending her to pick up the undercurrent of miserable dissatisfaction with his job, and therefore show sympathy, she’d knit-one, pearl-one away with an expression of cheerful but absent absorption. If she had more equipment, outworkers, more structure to her life, Clare thought, perhaps he’d take her more seriously.

  For now, though, Clare’s fingers were involved in nothing more demanding than pulling a few dead flower heads from those plants which were within reach and watching the ritual unrolling of the awnings on the bungalows up on the hill, rather like the daily raising of colonial flags in the farthest reaches of the empire. Back home under the Heathrow flight path, with early commuter cars racing for parking space on the common near the station, and the lorries heading for London deliveries on the South circular, there was no such luxurious calm.

  Just along the creek, Clare could hear Celia briskly hoeing her garden, getting it done sensibly while the day was still cool and the dew-damp earth still pliable. Archie’s secateurs could be heard snip-snipping brightly at the fading rose blooms, ruthlessly cut off the moment they opened past neat perfection. Clare liked them to unfold as far as they could, their stamens exposed for the bees. She was not the kind of woman who rushed to sweep up the fallen, velvety petals.

  Through the superficial toying with shallow little worries, there was, at the bottom of Clare’s emotional pond, a murky and menacing reflection that kept catching her attention. It was a wavering image of Miranda with Steve: an invented picture, constructed from Liz’s idle remarks and the shadowy figure in the rowing boat. For all Clare really knew, it could have been Andrew or Milo in the rowing boat, but that wouldn’t match with Miranda’s soft laughter, laughter so much older and more knowing than Miranda herself. It was lovers’ laughter, not the sort that is shared with casual friends.

  Miranda didn’t seem very interested in boys at home. When Clare asked her about them, about the parties they all went to, Miranda usually just groaned and said they were all pathetic, stupid. Clare wondered if Miranda was organized enough to take the pill, and if she was doing anything that would even require it. Did she like sex? Or perhaps no-one did it any more. Invented in the 60s and discarded, for being too dangerous, in the 90s? Clare found it deeply painful that there might be something about Miranda’s personal life that she wasn’t being told. To displace the pain, she got up stiffly from the damp bench and went up to her bedroom to get dressed. As she pulled on her leggings she tried to remember back to her early twenties: when was it that she had last felt the thrill of a stranger exploring her body? Would it never happen again? Given the chance (perhaps the last chance) would she really do all that with Eliot? How many women out there of her age were leaping into beds other than their own just for the reassurance that they were stilI attractive, and then feeling bad because they knew, intellectually, that they shouldn’t need the brief sexual attention of a man to make them feel good about themselves?

  Perhaps, the night before when Liz had commented about Eliot looking at the girls, she had been reading Clare’s thoughts and been quietly warning her off. Jack would say that Liz would have trouble reading a cereal packet let alone thoughts, but women are never that dense when it comes to reading their husbands, whose wayward imaginings are as easy to read as those large-print books in the library.

  Below Clare, noises in the kitchen told her that the house was waking. Without looking, she could tell who was getting out the cereal packets, she could hear the milk being taken from the fridge and not being put back again, a drawer was opened and not shut. She sighed and went downstairs, to remind the children, incorrectly, that it was as easy to clear up a mess as it was to make one.

  Up at the Lynchs’ house on most mornings there was bad temper. Liz had given up employing live-in au-pairs because Eliot used to frighten them off, either leering at them drunkenly or being extremely rude about their cooking; which he did depended on the size of their tits. Liz was always having to ring up the agencies and explain that if was nothing personal but the girls would probably be happier with a different sort of family, less artistic perhaps. So here in Cornwall there was just Jeannie to clean the house and Liz thought that everyone should be up by nine so that Jeannie could get to their rooms. Milo lazed down under his duvet saying she could surely start with the twins’ room and why not do downstairs first if it came to that. Liz had been brought up to consider the servants and argued with Milo. Eliot had a hangover, as he had most mornings, and was slopping coffee clumsily into a mug. He paced the kitchen looking for sugar and took his cup outside on to the terrace, complaining that no-one in this place delivered a newspaper.

  Liz had wanted it all perfect and was disappointed. She liked the house, and was proud of the way she had blended the colours, organized the furniture from London, dealt with builders and designers. She sometimes caught herself wishing that one or other of the family would leave the room, when they did not match the decor, or Jessica’s hair colour clashed with the sofa as she lay stretched out watching TV, scuffing her dirty feet on the cushions and leaving coffee cups on the carpet to be tripped over. Liz had to remind herself that it was a place in which they were to live, (even if only for a few weeks per year), not to sit around posing for World of Interiors (a secret ambition of Liz’s). Relationships within the family were less harmonious than her colour schemes. Eliot’s moods were increasingly unpredictable, with gashes of anger slicing through the days without warning.

  Also, these annual six-week exposures to the clever children of Eliot’s first wife rather unnerved her. Milo and Jessica had so many private jokes between them they might as well be speaking another language. The night before they had been telling her about a film they’d seen, and Milo had said ‘But of course it’s allegorical.’ Liz had wanted to go and look up the word in a dictionary, but the only one in the house was hidden away in the depths of Eliot’s unfathomable computer. If she wanted to know what it meant she would have to write to her mother, secretly.

  Liz watched her little sons calmly eating their breakfast, wrapped up in their remote twin-world. Even they don’t need me for anything more than basic housekeeping services, she thought sulkily. And soon, in a year or so, they’d be going away to prep school and no-one would need her at all.

  Liz indulged in some panic and loneliness as she took her tea out on to the terrace. She sat next to Eliot who ignored her. They sat in silence surrounded by tubs of lilies and agapanthus and the scent of honeysuckle. Together they watched Jessica swim, counting with her the lengths of the pool and wondering, but not to each other, how long she would keep up this passion for fitness.

  Liz gazed out beyond the garden towards the village, where she could see Clare walking up towards the shop. I wouldn’t want to have her hips, her house or her husband, Liz thought, but apart from that I bet it’s a lot more fun being her at the moment than it is being me.

  Celia and Archie, in their fifties and very content, never wondered what Andrew listened to on his Walkman. In the little kitchen, clean, efficient and a place for everything, tuna salad sandwiches were being prepared. They assumed Andrew would not want to come sailing with them. They had bought him a boat of his own, but occasionally they made the gesture of asking him, quite safely, knowing that he would rather stay with his friends. The daily picnic went into the pink cool-box, always including a good dry white wine, and equipment for making Darjeeling tea. In matching Guernseys and very old sailing boots, the Osbournes would pack up their selection of novels and their picnic and set off early in the scarlet dinghy, needing no extra excitements, and with the enviable knowledge of how to achieve perfect relaxation.

  As they left the house, Andrew climbed out of bed and unlocked the box in his wardrobe. He always woke with a monumental erection and it seemed a shame to waste it. He could see that this was going to be the best time of the day for the experiment and this time it was going to be under control conditions, no props, just the fleeting thought of Jessica’s breasts, her nipples showing in outline under her yellow swims
uit, perhaps also the thought of a stray pubic hair coiled against her tanned thigh …

  It was still quite early when Clare walked through the village to the shop to collect the papers and see if there was any post. She didn’t recognize anyone: it was a place where the population was almost entirely different each time she visited and those she did know seemed to be keeping town-hours still, venturing out only after the sun was well up.

  Down below in the low-tide mud of the creek, her small daughters were picking their way over pebbles, barefoot with sticks, nets and buckets and slices of breakfast toast and marmalade. There were other assorted small children and even Miranda was out, helping the little ones to search for scuttling crabs, shells and mussels discarded by seagulls. The treasures would soon make up decomposing collections on terraces throughout the village.

  From the lane above, Jeannie, on her way to clean the Lynchs’ house, could see them all. Only ignorant tourists, she thought, would wallow about in that mud. What did they think happened when they flushed the loos at those creekside cottages? Where did they think a soakaway soaked away to? You couldn’t get an appointment with the local doctor in summer, not in under three days, for tourists needing something for an upset tummy and thinking that they’d over-done the sun. And for Miranda, she fervently wished a dose of dysentery at the very least, after the state in which her Steve had come home last night.

  Clare watched Miranda giggling with the young children, admiring their shells. She marvelled at the ease with which Miranda, her skirt tucked up in her knickers, could now be out in the creek being a child again, when just last night she had been definitely a woman. Clare took her shoes off and padded down the steps into the creek.

  ‘Show me what you’ve caught!’ she called cheerily to Harriet and Amy as she picked her way across the mud and stones.