Just For the Summer

by Judy Astley

  ‘Did you know he was having a party?’ she demanded of Miranda’s still sleeping body.

  Miranda stirred lazily and made an attempt to open her eyes.

  ‘Miranda, wake up.’ Clare prodded her impatiently. ‘You said he was having a few people in. I thought that meant a dinner party or something.’

  ‘Oh Mum, it’s only people your age who have dinner parties. We go out for pasta or a burger. Except here you have to get someone to drive you a million miles for that.’ Miranda stretched languidly and sighed. ‘I didn’t know there’d be that many people. I don’t think Andrew did either.’

  Clare went down to the kitchen and Miranda, wearing one of Jack’s old tee-shirts as a nightdress, padded down the stairs after her.

  ‘Are you going to help clear up?’ Miranda asked, watching Clare delving under the sink for a bucket and a pack of J-cloths.

  ‘Yes, and you can come and help too.’

  ‘Er sorry, I promised to take her and Jessica into Truro this morning,’ Jack said, arriving in the kitchen behind Miranda.

  ‘And it was you who said you’d look after Andrew …’ Miranda added, ducking round Jack before the packet of J-cloths that Clare threw could hit her.

  Clare groaned quietly to herself and went back to searching under the sink. A pair of rubber gloves, she thought, because there might be all sorts of disgusting things to be handled. Used condoms, sick to be mopped up. If she went there expecting the worst, perhaps it wouldn’t really be that bad.

  Clare put all her cleaning equipment outside the door and then came back in to make some tea. I’ll give him an hour or two to make a start on it himself, she thought. It was, after all, more Andrew’s fault than hers. Why, she thought, shoving bread into the be-crumbed toaster, should I take this on entirely myself, just because I’m the nearest female of the right sort of age and I happen to be a parent?

  That morning Andrew tasted bad, smelt bad and felt dreadful. He lay in bed flinching away from the bright sunlight and thought childishly, it’s not my fault. At the same time he knew that this was no compensation, that of course he would get the blame, and that worst of all he would have to do the clearing up. Most of all though he blamed Clare and Liz and Eliot. They were, after all, Parents. And even though they weren’t his they should have been around to protect him from this sort of thing. The noise must have been tremendous, way beyond the level at which Archie and Celia would, in Surrey, have called the police. This was what happened when you got liberal parents in charge: no control, no sense of responsibility. Archie’s old school had done a good job on Andrew. Certain moral standards were being maintained by him at any rate, if not in the rest of this slack world. Andrew would never have gone to the home of a total stranger and stubbed out cigarettes on the floor, spilled beer all over the sofa or got into an unfamiliar bed with a girl he’d just met. Well maybe he’d do that, oh God just give him the chance. And who was it, his conscience reminded him, who was sick on the rose bed, and who drank all that Chivas Regal? Andrew wished he had the amnesia of the practised drunk. He wished and wished the whole thing had never happened. He never wanted to see Jessica again. He felt dreadful, still nauseous and his throat was sore too, like when he was about to get the flu. Perhaps he could just stay in his sordid bed for a few days and then his mother would feel sorry for him. But she’d be home in twenty-four hours and he hadn’t even inspected the damage in the cold revealing light of day. He bathed and tooth-brushed away the worst of the remaining taste of alcohol and went downstairs carefully, as if afraid he was about to see the remains of a massacre, not just the typical leftovers of a party. One brief glance round told him that there was not the slightest chance that he was going to get away with this. He would have to spend forever clearing up the mess. Thank goodness Celia didn’t have a cleaning lady who would come and report the damage around the village. There were probably things missing and broken, it was hard to tell until some sort of order was restored. Celia knew every tiny ornament in the cottage. Although she seemed a briskly practical woman she was also a great sentimentalist and every item she collected reminded her of some happy time or other. The smell was the worst thing. Almost gagging in the stale fumes, Andrew cleared a way through the discarded cans and glasses to the kitchen. He pulled out a bin liner from under the sink and started randomly collecting cigarette ends, bottles and cans from the table and floor. Must have been the boatyard lot, thought Andrew snobbishly, decent people wouldn’t make such a mess. And why was the fridge empty? And the bread bin? Even if he’d felt like breakfast they’d left him nothing to eat. He filled the plastic bag quickly and looked around. He’d made very little impact. Every surface he looked at seemed to have something sticky and spilled. And why was he having to do all this by himself? Couldn’t some of the girls come and give him a hand? But given the hypothetical choice between clearing up everything himself and having Jessica turn up to help he decided he’d rather be alone, even if he hoovered way beyond midnight. How could he ever have been so stupid? How could he ever have imagined that she would have so eagerly accepted an invitation to do rude things on his sofa with him? It really was, after all, entirely his own fault.

  Up the, hill at the Lynch household, Liz was cowering in the kitchen from the sounds of Eliot swearing at his word processor. She didn’t see why Eliot should bother to work at all. He certainly didn’t need to, especially not to the point of getting up before daylight and crashing round the bedroom looking for something to wear. If he retired, she thought, they could stop going to Cornwall summer after summer, because there would be no need for Eliot to take a rural break from all those so-called research trips he was always taking to exotic places during the rest of the year. Exotic places could then be for holidays. When Eliot got to Cornwall, all he did was go sailing, or get in the way, or get drunk, or complain that he couldn’t work, they all made too much noise.

  Over breakfast, Liz took out her frustrated rage on Jessica and Milo:

  ‘I hope you’re going round to help Andrew clear up after his party,’ she said to the two of them. ‘You must have been having a good time, you could be heard all over the village and probably right across the Lizard. It was just like being back in London.’ Liz wanted to go to a party too, she wanted to dress up in a sleek little Dolce y Gabbana number without fear of it being attacked by river mud or beach sand.

  ‘Wasn’t bad, actually,’ said Jessica, buttering toast.

  She smiled at Milo. ‘I don’t think Andrew had such a good time though.’

  ‘You could say he wasn’t too well when we left,’ Milo explained to Liz, ‘I don’t think he’s used to our kind of parties.’

  ‘Do you think Celia and Archie knew?’ Liz asked.

  ‘Hardly. Even Andrew seemed a little unprepared to say the least. You could say he got a bit tired and emotional.’

  They’re talking to me, Liz thought, like a friend, a family member, not a wicked stepmother.

  ‘Anyone nice there?’ she asked Jessica, risking rebuff.

  ‘Very nice,’ Jessica grinned. ‘Called Paul, he’s working at the boatyard for the summer and he’s doing Peace Studies at Bradford.’

  ‘I don’t think Andrew liked that either,’ Milo said, teasing her. ‘He was moping around all night after you Jess.’

  ‘You can’t be serious, that was just the baby-bird look men get when they’re drunk. Not that he’s yet what I’d call a man. God, I like him but he’s a bit of a double-bagger. And he’s too young. Milo, you’ve put me off my breakfast.’ But she was laughing too.

  ‘What on earth is a “double-bagger”?’ Liz asked.

  Jessica grinned at her. ‘It’s when you have to put a paper bag over your own head in case the one over his head breaks while you’re, you know, doing it.’

  They were all still laughing when Eliot came in, wanting breakfast. They were having fun and he wasn’t. His mood deepened.

  ‘So you are coming with me to clear up his house?’ Milo said to Jessica.


  ‘Not a chance,’ she said, sliding out of the kitchen door, ‘I’m off to Truro with Miranda and I’ll have to go now or they’ll have left without me. See you later, and Milo, please send Andrew my regards, but not, I’m afraid, my love.’

  The weather was cloudy, threatening much-needed rain. A good day for a hangover, Milo thought, thinking not of himself but of Andrew as he sauntered down the lane carrying a roll of extra-large dustbin liners and a powerful vacuum cleaner.

  ‘Well it could be a lot worse,’ he said cheerfully to Andrew as he strolled into the cottage and surveyed the damage. Worse? thought Andrew. What kind of social life did they have back in Hampstead?

  ‘Not much worse,’ he said to Milo. ‘The parents are home tomorrow and I’m in for a lot of trouble.’

  Milo suspected that Archie would be more angry about Trust being Abused than about any amount of breakage and felt it would not pay to continue the conversation on this subject.

  ‘It won’t take long,’ he said encouragingly, ‘This thing will sweep up anything.’

  Andrew was bound to be feeling morose, Milo thought, his head must hurt like hell. He looked droopy, wilting like Archie’s poor roses.

  ‘Why don’t we just do the worst of it for now and then have some coffee? You should have some aspirins too.’

  ‘Is Jessica coming too?’ Andrew found the courage to ask.

  ‘Er no,’ Milo turned away to hide a smile. He couldn’t help thinking of the term ‘double-bagger’. He fiddled with the plug of the cleaner. ‘She had to go to Truro with Miranda, long-standing arrangement or something.’

  Well this is funny, two men cleaning a house, Andrew thought. He wasn’t used to this kind of arrangement in Surrey. There were always the women. When Celia and Archie had a party (‘people in for drinks’) their Mrs Fletcher came in to do the handing round of sherry, and plates of canapes and she wore a neat frock and sparkly earrings for the occasion. In the morning she’d be back again in her familiar apron to do the cleaning up. Not that it was ever on this scale, just a little accidental ash, and the odd ring left by a careless glass, someone forgetting to use one of the little mats. Celia wouldn’t call them coasters.

  ‘Oh look,’ Milo said, looking through the kitchen door as Clare walked up the path, ‘the cavalry’s arrived.’

  ‘’Bout time,’ Andrew muttered, holding his head.

  Clare, clanking her bucket of cleaning stuff, stopped dead in the doorway.

  ‘What a dreadful smell!’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘The entire village must have come in here and smoked a pack of Silk Cut each! We’ll have to take the curtains down and hang them outside on the washing line. And hope it doesn’t rain. Fresh air will blow away the smell.’

  Clare glared at Andrew who didn’t appear to be able to move. He looked terrible, pasty and baggy-eyed. His shoulders drooped and his hair looked matted. Clare squashed a surge of sympathy and handed him a packet of Flash and the bucket.

  ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘you can make a start upstairs on the bathroom. I don’t have to go up and look, I can imagine what it’s like.’ Andrew slouched out of the room and trailed dejectedly up the stairs.

  ‘I’ll get the curtains down shall I?’ Milo said softly. ‘Don’t be too hard on him,’ he said, pushing his floppy blond hair out of his eyes and smiling at her. ‘It wasn’t entirely his fault. In fact it was probably entirely mine.’ Milo told her the truth with disarming honesty. His lazy blue eyes looked deep into Clare’s and she could see more than a trace of Eliot’s wicked Irish charm. If I were twenty years younger, she caught herself thinking.

  Soon, every curtain and rug in the house was hanging from the washing line and from branches of the cherry tree, like prayer mats for all the village to gaze at and comment on. Clare, scrubbing the kitchen and polishing tables, was past caring what anyone, except Celia and Archie, thought. Milo wielded his vacuum cleaner, with casual power, whistling cheerfully as he played with its various attachments, seeming to find a scientific satisfaction in discovering the right tool for getting cigarette ends out from down the sides of the sofa.

  Clare scrubbed, polished, wiped and scoured. Andrew, even paler after cleaning the bathroom, trailed round the house and garden filling bin liners with empties and wishing they wouldn’t clang so loudly. In case of stains, Andrew didn’t dare look at Clare as together they stripped the beds and shoved sheets into plastic bags.

  Clare, feeling that she’d done more than her best, took the sheets with her and drove off to Helston to the launderette. I’m in for a tedious evening of ironing, she thought, but at least it would give her chance, at last, to think over what she and Jack would do with the rest of their lives.

  Milo, feeling sorry for Andrew’s hangover, volunteered to make the coffee while Andrew hosed down the garden. He’d hoped it would rain in the night, good and heavy rain to eradicate any sign of where he’d disgraced himself in the rosebed. It hadn’t and Andrew avoided getting too near the area by hosing with his fingers over the end of the pipe to increase the pressure and drive away the disgusting evidence over the end of the lawn into the creek.

  They sat on the bench with their coffee. Andrew’s courage advanced as his headache receded. ‘Is Jessica going out with anyone?’ Andrew asked.

  ‘Funny, you’re the second person to ask me that. Paul from the boatyard asked me the same thing two days ago, or maybe it was yesterday. Recently anyway, why do you ask?’

  ‘Just wondered. She always seems to be with you, or girls down from London, or Miranda. She looks like, you know, like she’d be quite sort of interested in men.’

  ‘Do you mean she dresses like a slag?’ Milo said, laughing at Andrew and watching him getting confused. Andrew blushed helplessly, because of course that was exactly what he had meant.

  ‘No of course not,’ he, lied. ‘Anyway, does she like Paul?’

  ‘Don’t know. We don’t talk about that sort of thing much. We prefer windsurfing.’ Milo didn’t want another discussion about his best friend, his little sister. ‘Paul’s doing Peace Studies at university,’ Milo said mischievously, knowing that would get old Andrew going. His politics were as predictable as his father’s.

  ‘Peace Studies! Is he a communist?’

  ‘Is anyone these days? Anyway surely you don’t have to be a communist to study peace? Does that mean that if you’re right-wing you can only study war?’

  ‘Suppose not. I’ve never really thought about it.’

  Andrew’s head wasn’t yet straight enough for all this. There was an awful lot he’d never really thought about Perhaps he should take up more sport. Apart from sailing, which everyone here could do as far as Andrew could see, there was really only swimming or windsurfing or water-skiing. All those had far too much potential for making a fool of oneself. What he needed was a few head-clearing hours out on his Laser, practising for the regatta, then he’d show them.

  On the road halfway to Truro Miranda had to get out of the car to be sick.

  Jack, driving, said ‘You haven’t been car-sick since you were about three and we had a bouncy old Ford Anglia.’

  ‘Hangover. I expect, or something I ate,’ Miranda said.

  ‘Ate when? You didn’t have any breakfast.’

  ‘Oh well that’s it then, I should have.’

  Well he wasn’t going to win this one. Jack didn’t care. He felt quite happy. For the past couple of days he’d been staring into the hydrangeas still trying to capture the point at which they changed colour from pink to blue, purple to lilac. If they needed water colours he’d just have to go to the art shop and buy some. It was years since he’d bought any, he remembered all the hours he used to spend hanging around in Cornelissens, savouring the smells of oils, the jars of pigments. He’d just read a popular philosophy book and had learnt rather late in life that saying ‘I can’ is as much a matter of choice and as easy to say as ‘I can’t’. ‘I can’t’ was just a matter of laziness and fear of failing. Boy Scout stuff, Jack thought, but tr
ue nonetheless. He intended to find the book and give it to Clare before he rang up the estate agents and sent them round to value the house in London.

  Meanwhile there were art supplies to buy. He loved that feel of new sable brushes, the soft powdery colours of the pastels, the virgin wood of the palettes. He often thought he could spend his days working in such a shop, what an indulgence. Customers would wonder if he’d been just a little famous in his time. But it still was his time, he thought, he still had some painting to do. And there never would be any fame without any painting.

  Jessica and Miranda wandered round the shops together. Jessica, for clothes, was missing Sloane Street and the Fulham Road. Miranda missed jumble sales.

  ‘You can buy good beach stuff here, but not much else,’ Jessica said. ‘Let’s get some shoes, or some teeshirts at least.’

  Miranda was feeling queasy again but let Jessica drag her into a loud shop full of lurid lime and lemon coloured clothes. They chose a random pile and giggled in the communal changing room over the various permutations.

  ‘Your tits have grown Miranda, are you on the pill?’ Jessica said.

  ‘No, it must be puberty at last or something,’ Miranda said. ‘Perhaps I’m going to be a big girl after all.’

  ‘Not you, you’re as slim as a reed. Kate Moss eat your heart out! I’m going to be huge, I wonder if Paul likes big girls?’ Jessica turned sideways and eyed her reflection. ‘These clothes are disgusting. Let’s go and get some lunch,’ she said, peeling off the layers.