by Judy Astley
He’d been in the post office that morning collecting his Independent when he’d heard one of the elderly bungalow-dwellers from up the hill whispering loudly to Jeannie that he couldn’t face the thought of sitting through three hours of Shakespeare on cold stone, because of his Little Problem. Not as fascinated as Clare would have been to find out whether the Problem was piles or prostate, Jack had nevertheless butted in shamelessly and offered to buy the tickets.
The play was The Tempest. Clare, padding around her bedroom and looking for something suitable to wear, was still, that evening, touched at how hesitant Jack had been about telling her which play it was. It was almost as if, she thought, he imagined she wouldn’t want to be reminded of that time, studying the play for A-level, when she had first been pregnant with Miranda.
‘If I hadn’t loved the play so much, I wouldn’t have called her Miranda!’ she said to him, laughing. ‘Of course I don’t mind seeing it. You rarely saw the plays back in those days, you just read them, it’ll be lovely.’
It would soon be time. Andrew stood in front of the bathroom mirror looking for new spots and wondering whether to risk aftershave. His father had left some in the bathroom cupboard, but when Andrew sniffed at it he was reminded of golf clubs and Sunday lunch, rather than the necessary macho sport and passion.
That afternoon he had had a ritual disposing of the stolen pair of knickers. They no longer held any tantalizing aroma of what he imagined was musky woman, but smelt of musty dried semen and grubby-handed boy. Appalled almost to impotence at the idea of them being in the house at the same time as Jessica and therefore with the potential for being found, he had kissed them goodbye, wrapped them reverentially in a freezer bag and hidden them deep in the dustbin under the Sunday papers.
He went downstairs and got some candles out of the kitchen drawer. This, he had decided was the way to solve the lighting problem, and he had taken four empty wine bottles from the bins behind the Parrot restaurant that afternoon, praying that no-one would see him. The candles were not impressive, just the dumpy household type of white ones that everyone in the village kept for power cuts. There should have been slender pink ones in silver holders, scented if possible. Another problem was when to light them. Before Jessica arrived? It would still be light. Perhaps later as it grew dark he could lean casually across her and light them in mid-sentence as if he did it every night. A Dunhill lighter would be more suitably colour-supplement, but he’d have to make do with a box of Swan Vestas from the barbecue kit under the sink. Andrew was just forcing the last candle into its bottle when Milo arrived.
’I thought I’d come early,’ he said, ‘and deliver this lot for you.’
Milo was piling six-packs of beer and wine-boxes on to the kitchen table. ‘Do you think there’s enough?’ he said. ‘I asked everyone to bring a bottle too.’
‘Enough?’ said Andrew, perplexed for a moment, but then the tangled rope of confusion inside his brain began to straighten into a realization that, well, surely he couldn’t have expected to be that lucky after all. He never was.
‘For the party,’ Milo was saying. ‘Oh and I wouldn’t light candles if I were you, they’re bound to get knocked over. I don’t suppose Celia would thank you for burning the house down.’
Taking over, Milo collected the candles and wine bottles and disposed of them in the kitchen. Andrew was still standing in the doorway slowly absorbing the fact that he was about to have a party that his parents would never forgive him for, that the house was to be taken over and probably destroyed by a large number of people that he didn’t really know, and that he was, saddest of all, not to have Jessica to himself for even an hour, not even to talk to. Also he must move all evidence of his experimental activities before a curious and drunken guest opened the box in his wardrobe and said ‘Hey everybody, look what I’ve found!’
Milo was rearranging furniture with the confidence of one who had done it many times before, saying, ‘I didn’t know how many people you’d invited, so we asked the boatyard lot and the people from the Mariners and Jessica saw most of the sailing club crowd this morning, so I suppose we’ve asked about sixty. What about you?’
Sixty! The house, the damage, his parents! But Andrew knew that he’d rather the house be burned to cinders than admit to Milo that there’d been a mistake. He tried to anticipate the social kudos of having had a memorable party to see if the thought could begin to compensate for the disappointment of not having had Jessica. Or even the opportunity to have had Jessica.
‘What about music?’ Milo was asking.
Andrew had thought quite a lot about music for his evening of lust with Jessica, and had chosen a few tapes of Chopin and Debussy. He said that he thought he’d better leave it to Milo and added: ‘I hope it will be warm enough for people to be in the garden. I mean, they will be careful, won’t they?’
Miranda didn’t feel like going to a party. She just felt sick. She never liked getting ready to go, or the anticipation, even when she’d been little and there’d been a going-home bag full of sweets and plastic toys to look forward to and sticky cake wrapped in a paper napkin. Her mother had always insisted, through tears and tantrums, saying ‘You’ll enjoy it when you get there, you’ll have a lovely time.’ If this hadn’t worked, Clare would use her second weapon, guilt, saying ‘You’ve said you’ll go and you couldn’t let people down, they’ll be so disappointed.’ So Miranda would go and would bring home her prizes for musical bumps and pass the parcel and Clare would always say, irritatingly, ‘You see, I told you you’d enjoy it’. Now that Miranda was old enough to choose to stay at home, she always chose to go out, to escape Clare’s anxious enquiries about why she didn’t want to go, ‘Don’t you feel well? Is there someone you’d rather not see?’ An invitation to confide. She too much wanted to be Miranda’s friend.
Miranda put on a floral crepe dress that had seen its best days before the Second World War. An afternoon dress, her grandmother had called it, and Miranda had imagined it on a slim young married lady who liked to tend her roses and embroider duchesse sets for her dressing table from transfer patterns in Woman’s Weekly.
Miranda smudged kohl pencil under her eyes and decided that Andrew’s party couldn’t possibly be as bad as the usual ones at home. This wasn’t the kind of place, or was it?, where public-school boys talked about nothing but their driving lessons and how they’d persuaded their fathers to buy old convertible VWs at great expense because they couldn’t bear to be seen out driving the family Mercedes Estate. Miranda recalled boys shoving their tongues inexpertly down her throat and losing their way in her clothes. Clare, who thought things must have changed since 1970’s feminism, had no idea that although the boys her daughter saw knew that girls now studied engineering and technology, they still rated them one to ten for sexual favours and sniggered about the size of their breasts.
‘So, what is Andrew having, a dinner party?’ Clare said, meeting Miranda outside the bathroom door. She made immediate plans to go round to Andrew first thing in the morning, to help him clear up and find out what had happened.
‘Dunno,’ Miranda mumbled. ‘I don’t much want to go.’
‘Well you can stay in and baby sit for Harriet and Amy if you like,’ Clare said. ‘I hated having to ask Liz if she would have them.’
Miranda giggled. ‘No thanks! Anything but that!’ ‘Anyway, it would be rude to cancel now,’ Clare conceded, ‘He’s probably got the numbers worked out. Are you going by yourself?’ she couldn’t resist asking. There was always an outside chance that Miranda, in a good mood, might loosed up and mention Steve.
‘Of course I am! It’s only next door!’ Miranda shouted mockingly as she ran down the stairs.
You know quite well that’s not what I meant, Clare thought despairingly as she went to find her gold scarf to tie up her hair.
The first breakage was a small Staffordshire dog, one of a pair, swished to the floor by Beryl’s sleeve as she waved a bottle of sweet sherry at Andrew and sho
uted ‘This is all I could steal, hope it’s all right.’ Andrew smiled bravely and poured his third glass of the wine he had been hoping to share with Jessica. He couldn’t blame Jessica, she’d obviously misunderstood his phone call. She probably wouldn’t have come anyway, he thought mournfully, not for an evening alone with him. He was trying not to feel sorry for himself and was determined at least to get drunk on the good stuff, not the plonk-in-a-box. So he finished the first bottle and decided he had better drink his father’s Chivas Regal before the uncivilized louts from the boatyard could get their unappreciative hands on it. He felt a numb kind of regret when Jessica arrived, tanned and vibrant in black and orange, so bright it hurt his eyes to look at her. She seemed to be all the time in front of him but beyond reach, chatting to him brightly like a cousin, someone too familiar for the pretence of flirtation.
She was talking to the boy from the boatyard, her head too close to his for Andrew’s peace of mind. Her hair was swishing across Paul’s face, clean hair, for touching. They laughed a lot, Andrew wished he could be that amusing, just once.
He had got drunk too quickly to have a good time. He cruised the rooms, unfamiliar as they were now full of strangers. He spoke occasionally to people, but mostly they had no idea who he was and he felt like a gatecrasher in his own home. He decided to go and sit quietly in his room to recover a little, but when he opened the door there was a scuffling from the direction of the bed and he was told rudely to go away and put the light out. So at least someone hadn’t been put off by the narrowness of the bed. There seemed to be quite a lot of people in his parents’ room too. They didn’t have the same scruples that he did about the parental shrine, but then the bed didn’t belong to their parents. It looked as if he was going to have to change the sheets after all. How long, he wondered, did the local laundry take, and how much did it cost?
Andrew wandered into the garden where the music seemed to be just as loud as in the house and where groups of people were abandoning drink cans among the carnations, discarding cigarette ends all over Archie’s immaculate lawn and generally trampling about in an unconcerned way. Andrew wished they’d all go.
Someone, at the window above him shouted, ‘Hey look at this!’ and Andrew froze. Oh God, he thought, someone’s unearthed the secret box. He lolled against the cherry tree, prepared to throw himself into the creek if a hand appeared at that window, encased in a string glove. Instead a balsa wood aeroplane whizzed down from the window and landed in splinters at the foot of the tree.
Andrew couldn’t see too well by now, so full was he of Scotch and wine, but across the creek there were dark silhouettes against lighted windows, the village being kept awake, watching. People started to say to Andrew, ‘Are you OK?’ as he lurched round, still clutching the Chivas Regal bottle, but he didn’t recall they’d said much else to him all evening. By this time tomorrow, he thought, it will all be normal again. He used to think that way about dentists. It can’t last for ever, he’d think on the way to a filling, two hours from now I’ll be on my way home again.
Jessica was coming over to him, too late to raise either hopes or excitement. She was very close, the orange and black shimmered in front of him, in and out of focus. Andrew lurched towards the rose bed and was suddenly and thoroughly sick over a fragrant floribunda called Pink Parfait. Last year it had won prizes for Archie.
Jessica fetched Milo and Miranda who guided Andrew carefully up the stairs, past the debris, past couples kissing, boys playing football with Celia’s embroidered cushions, and placed him on his rumpled bed. Andrew accepted their kindness like an over-tired toddler who has had a hard day out with too much ice-cream.
As Milo put out the light Andrew was aware of the disgusting taste of his own mouth, and suddenly wished his mother was there, just to remind him to clean his teeth.
The play ended. The open-air theatre, carved in rock on the cliff edge and lit by stars, was in soft warm darkness. Clare, walking with the rest of the audience up the steps to the car park, could hear the sea gently washing the rocks far below.
‘Look at that,’ Jack said, pointing upwards. ‘You can see the Milky Way, it’s so clear.’
‘Do you know,’ Clare said, following his gaze, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen stars like that in London. Too much pollution I suppose.’
‘Too little time, more likely. We just don’t have chance to look, there. We have no real connection with nature,’ Jack said, ‘The closest we get is the odd fox on the common and making sure we keep the children away from all the flashers in the park. It’s a better pace of life here.’ Jack put his arm around Clare and led her through the crowd to the Volvo.
‘We should do this sort of thing more often,’ Clare said, climbing into the car. ‘I did enjoy it so much.’
‘What, in spite of Ariel looking just like Rod Stewart?’ Jack asked, packing their blanket, cushion and flask into the back seat.
‘Even in spite of Prospero looking exactly like a gay biker! All that studded leather!’ Clare laughed.
As the trail of cars snaked slowly along the road towards Penzance, Clare thought about the last time she had seen The Tempest. The long coach trip with the sixth-form across London, when each mile had made her feel iller and she had pretended it was travel sickness. Only a few weeks pregnant, she had sat in the stuffy theatre, full of noisy uninterested school parties, quite sure already that her school skirt was tighter than the week before. She remembered having to give a girl called Elaine a bar of chocolate to swap places with her so that she could sit at the end of a row, for easy escape if she felt sick. It was while watching the play that she’d decided to call the baby Miranda if it was a girl, and therefore realized at the same time that she’d made, unconsciously, the decision not to choose either abortion or adoption.
The car sped through Penzance. In London, Clare was thinking, after a theatre visit, they would by now be either waving fruitlessly at packed taxis or pretending to ignore the beggars and junkies at Piccadilly Circus tube station. She would be tripping along in spike-heeled shoes and a too-thin dress and worrying about being late for the babysitter. How much cosier it was to go out to a play like this, dressed snugly in old jeans and thick socks and taking a blanket to wrap up in, a bag of sandwiches and a flask of tea.
‘You know, nights like this remind me how dreadful it will be going back to the Poly. The contrast, I mean,’ ventured Jack, bravely.
‘Nobody likes going back to routines, not after all this freedom,’ Clare sympathized. ‘I’m just glad you aren’t one of those poor men who only gets a couple of weeks a year for a break. Imagine, no time at all for the luxury of forgetting you actually had those routines.’
‘Well actually, I’ve been thinking,’ Jack said hesitantly. ‘I’ve been thinking quite deeply in fact …’ he added to show he was absolutely serious and needed to be listened to.
‘I think, in fact I’ve decided, there isn’t any real reason why I have to go back at all.’
Clare sat silently for a moment, trying to work out what he was really getting at.
‘Isn’t any reason? What about the thousands a year they pay you? Isn’t that a reason?’
‘We’ll manage,’ Jack said, rather limply.
‘Are you trying to tell me that they haven’t renewed your contract?’ Clare challenged him. ‘Have you been keeping it from me all this time like I was some feeble little woman who must be protected from reality?’
Jack increased his speed in an attempt to make himself feel more powerful.
‘No, it’s not that. They’ll renew it if I want them to. I just don’t want them to, that’s all,’ he said simply.
‘That’s all? What do you mean “that’s all”? What will we live on?’ Clare asked, incredulously. ‘I do my best but I don’t exactly earn a fortune knitting posh sweaters.’
‘I’ll paint,’ Jack said, as if that would solve everything.
‘Paint? You haven’t painted in years. We even had a girl in to stencil the kitch
en. All your oil paints dried out and went in the dustbin.’
‘I’ll get new ones. Anyway I rather fancy water colours.’
Clare felt bomb-shelled. She tried doing a few quick sums in her head: electricity bills; gas; water; two lots of council tax; the car and all its expenses. Jack earned some interest on inherited money, enough to be a comfortable supplement to their income, but not enough to replace it. The money from selling Clare’s dead mother’s flat a few years ago had gone on renovating the Barnes bathrooms and building a conservatory.
She supposed there must be self-employed artists ekeing out a living of some sort in south west London, but not, she thought, the kind of living she and Jack were used to.
Clare was just trying to work out how much they were likely to get from selling the Cornish cottage (the only way to survival, she thought), when the car turned down the lane into the village, where there was an atmosphere of unusual midnight liveliness.
‘What on earth is going on?’ Jack said, parking the Volvo. People were on the street, waving bottles as if it was carnival time. Every house in the village was lit, people were in their gardens, staring across the creek towards Clare and Jack. Clare’s insides sank with foreboding. The thud, thud of music could be felt inside the car even before she opened the door. Celia and Archie’s house when she dared to look, was alive at every window and their garden swarmed with shrieking strangers.
‘Oh God,’ Clare groaned. ‘I just know that somehow this is all going to be my fault.’
NINE
‘I’LL HAVE TO go round and help Andrew clear up the mess,’ Clare said, sliding out of bed. ‘There’s bound to BE a mess, I hardly dare look.’
She went over to the window and lifted a corner of the curtain carefully, unwilling to be confronted by Archie’s bottle-strewn garden.
Across the river, on the hillside an elderly man was standing on his lawn, arms folded aggressively, staring across to Archie and Celia’s house. He looked, Clare thought, as if he’d been there all night, waiting for someone to emerge so he could get his accusations about sleeplessness and mayhem in before anyone else did. Clare could also see Jeannie down below, crossing the footbridge on her way up to the Lynchs’ house. As Clare watched, Jeannie stopped and turned to look at Archie’s cottage. I bet she’d love to come and help clean it up, Clare thought, then she could tell all those in the village who don’t already know, just what a disaster area it is. Clare pulled on last night’s clothes and went along to Miranda’s room to start the inquisition.