by Judy Astley
‘Just a quick reminder that he gets three weeks off a year and he’s giving up his time to help her out,’ Jack said laughing.
It was bad enough that she hadn’t been allowed to go off windsurfing with Jessica, without listening to all this, Miranda thought and said, ‘God, you’re so patronizing. How do you know what it’s like for them. Maybe she works as well, maybe he gets up every night for the baby, maybe he’s just nice and wants her to enjoy herself. You always think you know what everyone’s life is like.’
Clare didn’t want a fight in the restaurant, she was not yet that uninhibited. Miranda’s outburst had left her out of control of everyone’s lunch and she wanted to put it all back together again. She tried to be bright, to talk about what they would all do this summer, who they would sail with, picnics, coast walks, remote beaches. But no-one was joining in, she could feel Miranda’s flashy tension, Jack looked tired and the little ones had run off somewhere. The service was slow. It wasn’t much fun playing happy families. At the other table the babies had goo from jars spooned into them. They leaned forward eagerly, sucking the mess from the spoons, spitting and dribbling contentedly. The baby food Clare had taken out when hers were little had been home-prepared with elaborate care, ahead of her time with concern about salt and additives, all those ground-up carrots, cheese, yoghourty things. They had spat it out, crying and squirming out of reach of the spoon. Clare had longed for jars from Boots, but thought she should do it right.
The soup arrived and Clare enthused unconvincingly. It was beige, Miranda said it was inedible and went off to round up her little sisters.
‘What’s wrong with Miranda?’ Jack asked, as Clare hoped he would. He thought Miranda had been right about the soup, but didn’t dare say so, any comment could so easily sound like criticism that Clare would take personally. The vast window overlooking Falmouth Harbour trickled with grey rain, making him feel he was inside a great fish tank. He glanced at the next table, in time to see the little girl with the hair-slides trying surreptitiously to pick her teeth with her finger nail, and getting her hand slapped for it. He rephrased his question, ‘Has something upset Miranda?’
Clare waited, so unused to having problems concerning Miranda that she didn’t know how much she wanted to say.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I thought she would be happy to come out on a day like this. There’s not much else to do. I think she’d probably rather be with the others, or at least, with Steve.’
She’d said it. She put down her spoon and looked at Jack, trying to convey that here was a dramatic point being made. She gestured meaninglessly and rather lamely said, ‘I think they’re having a, well, a thing.’
‘A thing?’ Jack looked puzzled for a moment. He caught the eye of the woman on the next table, obviously listening intently. He looked at the neat silver-hair-slided daughter and thought smugly, ‘You’ve got all this to come.’
‘A romantic involvement, do you mean?’ he said to Clare.
‘Oh Jack, stop talking like a social worker. Yes of course that’s what I mean, though a “thing” is probably more accurate.’
Jack smiled cheerfully, ‘Oh well, I suppose that will give her something to think about this summer, though I expect we’ll get tears and tantrums when it’s all over. You’re surely not worried about her are you?’
He raised his voice for the benefit of the woman on the next table.
‘Do you think she’s sleeping with him?’ he asked.
‘Sleeping with.’ Clare considered the phrase, the euphemism. It suggested a calm sophistication that Miranda was too young for. Miranda laughing in the garden in the dark had been like a young, spontaneous animal, knowing by instinct things that her mother hadn’t taught her, like a creature gone back to the wild.
‘Do you mean do I think she’s getting laid, are they screwing?’ she said loudly, protesting jealously at the unwelcome thoughts Jack had put in her head.
‘Calm down Clare,’ Jack hissed, looking round for reactions, thankful that the occupants of the other tables appeared now to be too engrossed in the pudding menu to be paying attention to his domestic dramas. The one exception was the mother of the Neat Family, who had the grace to look away guiltily as Jack’s eyes challenged hers for judgement. She fussed with her daughter’s hair-slides, as if constant attention to presentation would ward off the traumas of the teenage years to come.
‘You’re over-reacting,’ Jack feebly attempted to pacify Clare. ‘I didn’t think you’d mind that sort of thing so much, you told me you were doing it by that age.’ Jack wanted to ask Clare if her period was due, but didn’t dare.
Clare started crying as the waiter took away the soup plates. A lot of soup had been left, but a lot of bread, he noticed had been crumbled on the table.
‘That was different, times were different, it was safer. I don’t want her exploited, she’s not like I was, she’s somehow much younger. And,’ Clare wailed, ‘and she hasn’t talked to me about it.’
This, Jack realized, was clearly the point, but it was more comfortable to ignore it for now.
‘Well if she’s doing it, I think we can take it that it’s because she wants to, not because she’s being used. Miranda likes herself, she doesn’t care what anyone else thinks. And anyway, as long as she’s careful, surely …’ he finished limply.
Jack didn’t know what he was supposed to say. He didn’t know what Clare wanted from him. He only knew, depressingly, that it wasn’t the moment to tell her that he never wanted to see another art student in his life.
Miranda, returning in time for the rather grey roast lamb, was surprised and scornful of Clare’s tears. Clare was eating steadily and sulkily like a child who had to eat up all her meat before she was allowed pudding. Her make-up was smudged and her hair wild. Tears from an adult, tears especially in public, seemed to Miranda an appalling weakness. They should keep them private, except perhaps just a small glistening round the eyes for funerals, smiling through tears at weddings, that kind of thing. They should have it all under control. Tears were the protests of a child. Miranda was hard on her mother, but unused to her emotion. Clare had always hidden her tears away in the bathroom, where she could be locked in to cry in peace, convinced from the start that Miranda had enough disadvantages being born to a teenage student (unmarried – in the days when these things mattered) without the burden of Clare’s occasional bouts of misery as well. Silently enduring the pudding, Clare wished she was upon the headland lying in the damp ferns, the reassuring hulk of Eliot next to her. If she’d been pathetic and cried with him he’d probably have spanked her. Instead, later she’d probably have to have sex with Jack and would then, irritatingly, find that it had been just what she needed.
While Clare loaded everyone into the Volvo and Jack waited for his receipt, the lady who had so shamelessly eavesdropped approached him. He smiled tentatively and she gathered up her handbag in front of her as if for protection.
‘If you don’t mind me saying,’ she began, in a way that made Jack feel he was about to mind a lot, ‘I think you were most unsympathetic to your wife. If a daughter of mine had been behaving like a little tramp I’d expect my husband to give her a good hiding, not make a lot of excuses. If the head of a household can’t make a stand what hope is there for Future Generations?’ She stared at Jack smugly as if daring him to disagree.
‘Quite right,’ came the voice of one of the listening legion of hotel residents, still cluttering up the hallway. Jack looked round, where was Clare when he needed her? Surely this would restore her sense of humour?
‘Lady,’ he said, ‘I am sure no-one would dare offer a daughter of yours the opportunity to behave like a tramp.’ The woman looked as if this might do by way of an apology, till he added, ‘which is unfortunate for her.’
‘Disgraceful,’ came another voice from the sofas.
I’m going, thought Jack, before it gets any worse. As he leapt for the door his too-hasty foot sent a pot full of geraniums crashing
from its pedestal. It was quite satisfying to see just how much carpet could be covered by one medium-sized pot of earth.
Well that was a good start to the holiday, Jack thought as he climbed into the driving seat of the Volvo. He wanted to tell Clare about the woman, but thought perhaps it would keep till bedtime, put her in a good mood. Humour was the only novel form of foreplay he had left after so many years.
The afternoon shone with fresh sunlight and in the back of the car the children were full and happy peering into the broken clouds for signs of rainbows.
Clare looked calmer now as the car delved into the deep maze of hedgerows, the rich greenness renewed by the rain. Miranda sat quietly in the corner of the back seat, her head resting against the window, not, as her mother imagined, thinking about Steve, for she rarely gave him a thought. For her, with a hardheartedness that would have shocked Clare, he was an experience and an incident, no longer a person at all.
Back at the house, Jack, solicitous, irritated Clare further by treating her like an invalid, tucking her into a deckchair with tea and the Sunday papers, the frivolous ones with all the scandals, the ones she would never let anyone in Barnes see her reading. She looked at the moist steamy earth in the beds of pinks and nasturtiums and read idly, gradually losing the suspicion that she had made rather a fool of herself. She just wished Miranda’s bursts of growing up would coincide with her own readiness for them.
Clare looked up at the window above from where she could hear Jack asking the smaller children to be quieter, please, Mummy’s resting. Just let him say, just once, ‘It’s probably your age.’ Just let him dare, that’s all, Clare fumed quietly.
Upstairs, Jack piled socks and teeshirts into the chest of drawers. He fished a lily of the valley scented sachet out from the back and dropped it among Clare’s underwear, not knowing that it would clash with a honeysuckle one that already nestled there. He looked out of the window at the busy creek, the gulls, the children, the overhanging thatch and felt that at last, he was home, something he felt nowhere else. All he had to do now was find a way of telling Clare.
SIX
IT TOOK ONLY a few hot days for it to become one of those summers where people keep telling each other how lucky they are with the weather.
Eliot, with typical hangover pessimism, complained to Jack that next year you wouldn’t be able to move in the village for all the blasted trippers, all those Costa Plenty tourists who were being told on their return, ‘I don’t know why you bother to go abroad, there’s nothing like England in a good year.’ They’d realize that a good tan wasn’t something you had to qualify for by spending eighteen hours being delayed at Gatwick. Jack and Clare, in their tiny cottage, stuffed their duvet into a dusty cupboard and stretched, hot, under sheets instead. The heat made them feel sexy, but their sweaty bodies glued together and made slapping noises like seals clapping. Worried that the children might hear, they pulled apart thankfully, rolling to cool islands on the far sides of the old brass bed. It was, Clare felt, weather for outdoor sex, which she knew, resignedly, that she was unlikely to get. On the one evening she had managed to lure Jack out alone for a walk in the bracken on the headland, he had complained that ferns were possibly carcinogenic and paid more attention to his sketchbook than to her. The only excitement he had expressed had been at the purity of the light.
In London, in the tubs and patios and the smart Versailles planters of the absent two-home families, petunias, lilies and fuschias wilted and died in the dust-dry heat, neglected by cleaning ladies or careless schoolgirls who had promised they wouldn’t forget. Only garish brazen geraniums flaunted themselves and blazed salmon pink and lobster red against the dust.
Down in Cornwall, Clare, Liz and Archie worried in the pub about a possible water shortage and the banning of hose pipes. On their terraces the tubs and pots and borders were full and thriving. Liz watered her lilies in the evenings when she could savour their delicious scent, but left the rest of the garden to the man whose job it was. Clare nurtured her cottage garden of lavender, larkspur and snapdragons. She watered them virtuously with water from the washing-up bowl, so the plants tended to be draped with limp spaghetti and bits of potato peel. She let the children plant their calendulas round the corner where they wouldn’t clash, and where they flourished wonderfully, watered by the potent, stinking liquid from the old rainwater butt.
The good weather meant that time spent crammed damply into the cottage was minimal. In search of some cool air, Jack and Clare wandered up to the local craft centre to look at the things real tourists looked at, but the second-homers usually avoided.
‘I’ve heard some of the stuff in here is really quite good,’ Jack said to Clare as they paid their 50p entrance fee. Clare was looking doubtful. She and Jack went to quite a lot of exhibitions in London, mostly private views of friends of Jack’s who were still bravely trying to make it in the art world. One of them, she recalled, was an advertising executive whose spare time was spent painting turgid seascapes (from memory – his house overlooked nothing more watery than a fishpond) and another was a children’s book illustrator with a passion for constructing vast papier-mache nudes. Clare didn’t know any artists who sold anything – but their private view invitations made a pretty display among the mismatched arty pots on her kitchen dresser in Barnes, and added to the feeling that she had a culturally acceptable social life.
The exhibition was what could only be described as ‘mixed’, both in standard and content. Jack tried to steer Clare towards the paintings, which he thought good, and which carried price tags high enough to help him win his ‘I-could-do-that’ argument. But Clare was not to be steered. She wandered around, an incredulous look on her face, occasionally turning over a jug to look at its price, or fingering a tapestry wall-hanging.
‘How can people turn out such ugly things, when they’ve clearly got so much skill?’ she said to Jack in a loud whisper. ‘Look at this,’ she demanded, pulling him away from a row of landscapes. ‘Just look at all the work in this.’ Clare indicated a huge patchwork quilt, exquisitely sewn and delicately quilted, but made up of pieces of dull greens and yellow ochres. ‘All that work for such an ugly result! Who’d want that in their bedroom? Whose decor will that match?’ Jack sighed, unable to do anything but agree silently. She didn’t seem in a mood for water colours, so he tried another tack.
‘Come and look at the knitwear,’ he said, pulling gently on her arm. ‘Some of it is rather good.’ Clare looked at the range of heathery-coloured sweaters and admired a couple of colour combinations which she resolved to use herself in London. ‘You could sell your stuff here, Clare,’ Jack said, persuasively. ‘It’s better than this.’
‘Not for the prices I get back home,’ Clare said. She picked up a khaki knitted bikini and giggled. ‘I wonder how many of these they’ve sold,’ she said. ‘It looks like it was made by someone who hasn’t been on a beach since 1926.’
Clare wandered out into the sunlight and Jack trailed behind, feeling the sad loss of an opportunity. He should have been more insistent, drawn Clare’s attention to all the red ‘sold’ dots fixed to the paintings. They might not do a roaring trade in baggy bikinis or gloomy patchwork, but the craft centre seemed to be a good outlet for pictures. He wondered why, and who was buying them. Presumably holiday makers, wanting an up-market reminder of a good time. They might not want to risk travelling hundreds of miles home with a delicate, newspaper-wrapped piece of pottery or glass, but could find a safe, flat stowing space behind a Passat’s passenger seat for a local painting. He’d have to show Clare what could be done, he resolved. Next time they visited the gallery it would have to be to look at his own work hanging there, and if the paintings didn’t have a convincing enough number of red stickers, he’d just have to buy a pack of them and apply them himself. He thought about telling Clare he intended to start painting seriously again, but at that moment she caught sight of Amy, Harriet and Miranda leaning over the sailing club balcony across the creek. Jack look
ed closely at Clare’s face, finding in it a mixture of expressions: a concern that the younger ones might fall over the edge, a delight at seeing Miranda and an indefinable something else which might just be an anticipation of lunch.
The second-home families separated themselves from the holiday makers for the day’s important rituals: lunch; pre-dinner drinks; their late-night corner of the pub. Liz liked to have lunch at the sailing club. If she had to spend summer out in the sticks, she certainly didn’t intend to use her time housekeeping for everyone, surely someone should be hired to do that?
‘You can’t honestly expect me to do cooking,’ she said. ‘You either all get your own lunch or we go out.’ Eliot was just as happy to drink in the club bar as he was at home, and there he could watch the summer women, talk comfortably to Clare and envy Jack his earth-mother wife, safe that she wasn’t his to live with and could therefore never bore him.
Eliot didn’t like anyone very much, not unreservedly, except his son Milo, who seemed to be growing up to be an all-round perfect man, with no spots, no awkwardness, totally at ease in the world. Eliot wished he was like that, aware that conversely, most men want their sons to be like themselves. Eliot particularly didn’t like Liz, whom he had married because she was so beautiful and efficient and because he thought she would be able to organize Jessica and Milo better than their own work-distracted mother did. Instead she had produced the twins as soon as she and Eliot were married and too late Eliot realized that family life is not to be run like boarding school; his own wife had not been incapable of efficiency, it was just that caring for small children is simply difficult by nature and ruinous to domestic bliss.
Now he didn’t really like Liz much. He never really had now he came to think about it. He thought back occasionally to their first sexual encounter, when after a languorous lunch they had wondered where to go to consummate their deliciously illicit affair. Eliot, waving impressive credit cards, had suggested the Ritz, but Liz, with what had seemed at the time sweet girlish daring, had insisted on Eliot’s own home, the sacred marital bed. After a bout of rather nervous (on Eliot’s part) sex, Liz had shamelessly made use of his wife’s bathrobe, played with her cosmetics and had a critical look-see through her wardrobe. What kind of a girl behaves like that, Eliot, years later, now thought. Eliot did not bother to consider what kind of man actually marries that kind of girl.