by Judy Astley
Archie and Celia were going to ‘do’ the gardens on Tresco. Gardening was their great passion. At home in Surrey their herbaceous borders would have rivalled those of Gertrude Jekyll (whose name they always pronounced correctly to rhyme with treacle), and after reading Christopher Lloyd there was an area of meadow, full of carefully naturalized wild flowers. A visit to Sissinghurst had also resulted in their front garden being given over entirely to white flowers, all neatly bordered with box hedges that had to be trimmed arduously with dressmaking shears. The postman, feeling their garden lacked colour, frequently brought round his left-over home-grown marigold seedlings, which Celia gave to her cleaning lady. In Cornwall each year, she and Archie made visits to gardens at Glen Durgan, Trelissick, Trengwainton and Trebar, all with the same enthusiasm as if it were their first visit. Their shrubs were tagged with permanently legible labels, they knew Latin names. They were life members of the National Trust and bought each other hardback gardening manuals for birthdays.
‘Now you’ll be all right won’t you Andrew?’ Celia fussed. ‘There’s plenty of food and Clare will be checking up on you to make sure you’re surviving. She says to go round for supper and for anything you might need.’
Celia had doubts about the supper, as she had about Clare’s supervision of Andrew’s hair brushing. Clare and Jack seemed to barbecue everything, and Celia had a deep distrust of burned food.
‘Don’t worry,’ Andrew said impatiently, longing for privacy, making plans of his own. ‘I’ll be all right, send me a postcard.’
Andrew watched them drive away in the Rover and then wandered round the house looking for something that he could not normally do. He didn’t count his experiment, he just had to do that whether anyone was around or not. In fact it was more exciting with someone on the other side of the bathroom wall. Making love to himself was unsatisfying though, even with the string glove and Andrew was longing for the real thing, for Jessica’s warm body, soft and thrilling against his. He had started having to make excuses not to swim in the Lynchs’ pool, terrified that his lust for Jessica would show, that his uncontrollable penis would swell to overwhelming size, bursting out and taking over the garden. He imagined them all talking, laughing, then the rising feeling, and all of them gradually stopping to stare, horrified. It would writhe out towards Jessica, a pinky-purple serpent and everyone would see.
In truth Andrew had few illusions that Jessica would be overcome with passion for him, and the offending item had yet to be measured at larger than five inches, but it rose with shameful ease, encouraged by Andrew’s habit of idly fingering it from inside the pocket of his shorts. Milo never gave any indication that he had the same problem, in fact Milo never seemed to be interested in anybody in that way, just water skiing and wind surfing. A wetsuit, Andrew thought, now surely that would keep the beast in place.
Andrew wandered aimlessly round his parents’ bedroom, picking things up, putting them down. He looked through the pile of books beside the bed, nothing rude enough for him among the collection of detective stories and classic novels. He opened and closed drawers at random, not prying, but looking for clues to his parents. The contents of the drawers were ordinary clean sensible clothes, with which to deal with the weather, with walking, sailing and the sun. His parents had no secrets. Did they still do it? Andrew wondered. He thought probably not, not at their age.
As Celia and Archie drove towards Penzance, changes were taking place in the village. It was Friday, which the residents liked for this was changeover day. By 6.30 a.m. sleepy children were being fastened into backs of cars, dogs were being walked to their last tree this side of the Tamar. Overflowing rubbish sacks were already splitting open next to overloaded dustbins. The children of the second-homers had done their goodbye crying the night before, bereft of their new friends, sure they would never, at least till the next afternoon when the new lot came, meet anyone like Alex or Emily ever again.
Clare tended her garden, watching the renters struggle to be out of the cottages and flats by 10 a.m. Some were gone much earlier – there was the Tamar bridge to be queued for, or roadworks at Okehampton and a lot of motorway to be covered before the midday heat set in. Or there was simply the urge to get home in time to watch Neighbours or catch the supermarket before it shut. New clients weren’t allowed in till after 3 p.m. and those who arrived too early hung around the village trying to get a restorative drink at the Mariners, or shopping for toilet rolls (there were never any in the cottages, Jeannie and her friends had any spares stuffed into their shopping trolleys). Cars were still full of luggage and babies, bikes and surfboards on the roofracks.
But between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. the residents mostly had the place to themselves. This was the tranquillity for which they had bought their cottages. There was a suburban Sunday atmosphere as they strolled smugly round the village, congratulating each other on how quiet it was, doing things to their boats. Some even washed their cars, mowed the lawns. Their children ran round the village collecting up abandoned buckets and spades and fishing nets. Later they hung round throwing stones into the creek, slyly appraising the children of the new arrivals, who stared back at them, pale and shy. By 4 p.m. the shop would be full of customers, for the brigade of cleaning ladies would have done their fruitful tour of larder and kitchen cupboard, to make up for having their busiest day of the week while everyone else seemed to be resting. Jeannie would have cleaned out at least three of the properties, somehow finding time in each to have a quiet smoke, (someone always left a cigarette or two in packets under the beds), while watching a bit of daytime TV.
That evening Clare and Jack did their duty by having Andrew round to supper.
‘You’ll stay in for it, won’t you Miranda?’ Clare had hardly dared ask, ‘And if there’s anyone else you want to invite …’ she had then ventured.
‘Milo and Jess?’ Miranda had answered promptly.
‘Sure, and I’ll ask the Lynch twins as well for Amy and Harriet,’ Clare had said, planning an al fresco supper, a noisy, relaxed barbecue for all the children.
‘Can’t we have some more adults too?’ Jack had asked nervously, fearing an evening of over-excited children all too close to the creek at high tide, and with no alternative fathers to help take charge.
‘Don’t be silly. What can go wrong?’ Clare said. ‘And if you want someone to talk to, you can talk to me can’t you?’ she added sweetly, kissing him fondly on the cheek as she walked past on her way to the kitchen.
‘If you’d only keep still long enough, I would …’ Jack called after her, but his words faded at the doorway and Clare did not turn back.
For the few months of the year that Miranda spent living in the cottage she tried hard to make her surroundings compatible with her current choice of personality. Miranda believed that you were what you read. Depending on her mood she spent a lot of her Cornwall time drifting about in a fantasy. She was Claudine, Juliet, Tess. Inside her head was a nonsensical porridge of daydreams, dramas in which she played the starring role. It was easier, more private living in her head like this and it was the only way in which to co-exist with Clare who tried too hard to get close. Clare’s insistence that Miranda was so special for Clare had always made it difficult for Miranda to think of Jack as a father. The moment had long passed when she could have pointed this out, now it would be too hurtful. Miranda and Clare were no longer a lonely and crusading unit battling through Clare’s degree, sleeping in the same narrow bed, sharing tins of beans. When Clare still told people about how Miranda used to play with Lego during lectures, or talked about hitching to rock festivals, Miranda felt embarrassed, and alienated from Jack, who Clare at that time had not yet met. Miranda had been Clare’s biggest drama in life, and it was now too far in the past.
Miranda escaped into the contradictions of her bedroom which was full of what she thought of as false starts. There was all the stuff from her riding phase, not that long ago, when she had galloped a local fat pony along the beach, pretendin
g to be Rebecca. She piled up the old Ruby Ferguson books with the too-small riding boots ready to pass on to Harriet. There was a pile of opera CDs from her infatuation with Puccini. The CDs were hardly played, arriving on a birthday too near the end of the phase as she turned from Mimi to Madonna, filling the house with loud tarty music and wearing loud tarty clothes. Right now, prowling round the unusually tidy room she found it impossible to escape being simply Miranda. Hardy’s heroines had never had to deal with the instructions on how to use a pregnancy test kit. Miranda wandered back to the bathroom and sat on the edge of the bath, watching the solution of urine and chemicals. She wrapped her jumble sale robe round her thin self and stared at the tiny test tube. If she kept watching it perhaps it wouldn’t change colour, she wouldn’t be pregnant. She ran water into the bath, watching it creep up over the stains on the old enamel, which got worse every year.
She pulled back the curtain, the fabric so old it was almost fashionable again, and looked out through the honeysuckle to the river. Steve would be out there putting petrol into the hire boats, bringing them to the pontoon now that the tide was high, ready for the day’s customers. Already the holiday-makers were out, swarming round the village, diligently entertaining their children, taking them fishing.
Miranda looked back at the test-tube. The girl in the magazine advert for the kit had been photographed sitting on the edge of her bath, in a warm-looking room lush with thick carpet and cosmetics, ornaments, plants, pretty things. She looked like the career type, young, married, plenty of money. She was only an adman’s fantasy. Miranda was the real customer. A girl with bitten nails, unable to wait the extra days for hospital bureaucracy, the family doctor with his kind but disappointed concern, or worst of all her mother knowing before she did. This was a sordid way to find out if you were growing a human. Collecting early morning pee and shaving your legs in the bath, perfecting the skin care while you kept watch on a phial of liquid, daring it to change colour. But when Miranda got out of the bath, the liquid was pink. It must run in the family, Miranda thought, so this must have been how Clare felt when she realized I was on the way.
Clare was in the kitchen, envying Jack. He’d taken on the cooking of the barbecue that evening and therefore had earned himself an afternoon off in which to gather his strength. Clare, therefore was left with whatever domestic duties had to be done that day, and resented it.
‘I’m supposed to be having a holiday,’ she fumed to the washing machine. Other people on holiday get room service: I AM room service.
At home in Barnes at least she could fling the laundry in and out of its gadgets as and when she thought of it. Here, in time-bomb mood, she had to stand over an ancient twin-tub washing machine that must have been the last word of luxury in its day. Now it seemed to plead to go away and be left to retire in the recycling plant. Water slopped on to the kitchen floor, all over Clare’s espadrilles, the soles of which were soaking up the dampness like blotting paper. The machine could do nothing without intervention. It was helpless and unwilling, slow and stubborn. Like an old lady crossing a busy road, it could not be rushed but had to be encouraged gently along in case of disaster. Clare cursed and pushed her collapsing hair out of her face as she dragged hot and heavy sheets from one half of the machine to the other. The spinner made the whole thing dance madly across the floor, skittering sideways trying to pull the hoses from the taps at the same time. Clare kicked it back towards the sink. She might as well, she thought, take the sheets down to the creek, bash them with stones and gossip with the villagers. But the real villagers all had state-of-the-art automatics. One day, she thought, one day I’ll persuade Jack to sell this bloody inefficient house and we’ll take real holidays like everyone else, in real family hotels where real chambermaids take away the used bedlinen and I never have to see it again.
In the garden Jack, who was supposed to be shopping for chicken wings and lamb for the kebabs, was trying to remember what artistic inspiration felt like as he sharpened his pencil and opened a new pad of cartridge paper. He hardly wanted to defile the clean white pages, afraid that he wouldn’t be able to capture an impression of the hydrangea and make it acceptably recognizable. Flower paintings seemed to do well at the craft centre, along with local river views and boats at sunset. Jack had taught his pupils to look first at the overall shape of their subject, and at the shapes made between the parts of the subject. He tried doing the same. The hydrangea had so many petals, such delicately shaded colouring, through pinks and lilacs to blue. It was a plant for watercolour, oil was too heavy, a human hand with a pencil was too heavy. Jack made some sketching gestures over the paper, not quite touching it He looked out towards the hippy raft across the creek and closed the pad. Another time. He couldn’t concentrate. The noises of Clare in the kitchen fighting with the washing made him feel guilty that he wasn’t in there helping. But if he went in now he would be cursed for being too late. When they moved down here properly, Clare would have all her usual gadgets with her then, that should help. He went towards the kitchen, if he didn’t go there at all there’d be a resentful silence to live through later. ‘Shall I make you some coffee?’ he asked Clare.
‘You can’t fill the kettle, I’m using the taps,’ she snapped at him.
He tried harder: ‘Next time I’ll take it all to the launderette in Helston for you. You shouldn’t have to do all this.’
‘I know that. You could do it, or Miranda could. Even Amy could. It isn’t brain surgery, it’s easy. But no-one else wants to because it’s so bloody tedious.’
‘Helston then,’ he said.
‘No not Helston. Not to the launderette anyway, if we go there at all we collect an automatic washing machine and a dryer too. This is not my idea of a holiday.’
It was on the tip of Jack’s tongue to say that they wouldn’t be needing any more gadgets, they would be able to move the ones they’d got when they sold the house in London, but yet again this wasn’t the moment. When did all this become just my job? Clare wondered. Jeannie at least got paid for doing the ironing.
Later, Clare was at last relaxed on a sunbed under lines of drying sheets, with coffee and a novel. Jack was having his turn at being cross in the kitchen, marinading lamb in sticky yoghourty mixtures that the smaller children probably wouldn’t like and wishing he’d thought of buying frozen hamburgers instead. He could see Clare having her time off under the billowing laundry and both of them saw Miranda walking slowly up the path to the Post Office across the creek. Jack went back to the marinade but Clare watched Miranda go into a phone box, and she wondered why. What could Miranda have to say to anyone that couldn’t be said on the cottage phone? Someone in London, she thought, serious boyfriend gossip with a friend, secrets. Clare went back to her book and pushed from her mind a suddenly vivid memory of herself in her sixth-form uniform, running furtively from her house to the phone box round the corner with just enough money for a three-minute call to Cambridge. He had been out, and in a moment of resentment and panic Clare had said to his roommate, ‘Just tell him I called, and you can also tell him I’m pregnant.’
Clare’s attempt to entertain Andrew that evening was not as successful as she had hoped. Clare had, after the struggles with the laundry, looked forward to an evening of teenage liveliness, relaxed and casual. She liked to feel she was the kind of parent that didn’t inhibit a good time for her children. Miranda had always brought her friends round to the house and she had always enjoyed their careless and irreverent chat. She had never wondered if it was unwise of her to join in. With Miranda now so slippery and reclusive, she was missing out and hoped to restore the balance a bit over supper.
But when the Lynch twins arrived they wanted to play on the creek wall, a dangerous balancing game with the tide high beneath them. They would need, Clare realized, constant watching.
‘Just make them wear their life jackets,’ Liz had instructed as she tottered off in high heels and a minimal slinky yard or two of clinging black jersey for a grown-up di
nner with Eliot. Clare had felt instantly frumpish in her bunchy purple Monsoon frock and dirty pink espadrilles still soggy from the leaking washing machine. The twins ignored her and Clare chased after them to the wall.
‘You must keep your life jackets on if you want to play by the water,’ Clare insisted as kindly as she could manage. How could she join in with the evening if she had to run up and down the garden grabbing hold of the twins all the time? ‘If you fall in, you will drown. And that means you won’t be around for any fun tomorrow, or the next day, or any other days after that.’
She was kneeling on the grass, at their six-year-old level. Their blank blue eyes looked back at her and the twins said nothing. Clare wasn’t used to children like this – Barnes children listened and learned and understood when things were explained patiently to them. These two should be saying ‘yes Clare’and going off obediently to play on the swing. Instead they looked at each other and restarted the unzipping of the life jackets. Clare felt a strong urge to tie them firmly to a tree, the wrong reaction for a liberal parent.