Just For the Summer

by Judy Astley

  In the wine bar they both chose salads, drank wine and got giggly.

  ‘Have you ever done anything truly awful?’ Jessica said, ‘that you just couldn’t tell anyone?’

  How did she know, Miranda thought.

  ‘Well yes, have you?’

  ‘Well not really, but I think I might be going to. Let’s have another drink first.’

  Miranda got the drinks and quietly flipped a coin from the change. Heads tell Jess, tails don’t. Heads.

  ‘Go on then,’ said Miranda, ‘tell me.’

  ‘Well it concerns Andrew’s party in a way. I happen to know that he didn’t intend to have one. He rang me up and invited me round to the house for the evening and I invited everyone else.’

  ‘Did he really mean only you to come? Didn’t you realize?’

  ‘Not till I’d asked everyone, and seen how surprised he looked about the whole thing. I mean it never occurred to me that he’d want to see me alone. Milo says he’s lusting after me.’

  Miranda giggled and choked over her wine. ‘Wow lucky you, just think what you missed.’

  ‘I’m so horrible, that party was all my fault and I sent Milo round to clear up the mess.’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry about that,’ Miranda said, ‘I don’t suppose Andrew will want to see you for a while anyway.’

  They were both giggling and the barman watched, thinking that they looked quite seriously under-age. They were too pretty to throw out, and besides the other conversations were between rather boring business people, his more usual lunch-time trade.

  ‘Oh poor Andrew. You’ll have to make it up to him you know.’

  ‘I know, that’s what Milo said. He had a rather terrible idea last night after we got home. I hardly dare tell you though, promise you won’t be shocked?’

  ‘No of course I won’t be.’

  ‘Well Milo thinks I should go into one of those passport photo booths and take my clothes off and then send the photos to Andrew. I’d have to do it so he couldn’t see my face, and it would have to be all anonymous. A sort of strip photo of a strip-tease.’

  ‘God Jess, would you really dare?’

  The barman couldn’t resist a request for more drinks.

  ‘Milo did a dreadful thing once,’ Jessica was saying as the barman brought wine on a tray.

  ‘There was this boy who’d asked me out to dinner at a really smart fish restaurant, promised me lobster and champagne and all that. Anyway I got all dressed up and I waited and waited and he never turned up, didn’t phone or anything. The next day Milo bought an ungutted mackerel and a jiffy bag and posted it to the boy, second class. You can imagine what it smelt like when he got it. Milo sent this disgusting note with it that said, “There are only two things that smell of fish: This is a fish, you are the other thing.”’

  ‘What?’ Miranda said, not catching on.

  ‘He meant “cunt”!’ Jessica whispered loudly. Time for them to leave, the barman thought.

  ‘What have you done that’s terrible?’ Jessica asked. ‘It’s your turn.’

  Miranda was still laughing, but just managed to get the words out, ‘I think that what I’ve done is gone and got pregnant. ‘

  The barman went back to washing glasses.

  TEN

  THAT AFTERNOON, WITH nothing to do till the sheets were ready for collection in Helston, Clare sat in her garden, thinking that with Jack and all the children out the cottage felt just the right size for her. Tempting fate, she imagined herself widowed, divorced, the children away at school or college. Imagining, she arranged for herself just the necessities for a single life (with the addition of new bathroom, kitchen, central heating, just those things that the cottage needed right now, never mind waiting for the payout of life insurance policies). But deep down, she knew she wouldn’t make a cosy village widow. There was a goldfish bowl feeling about living alongside the creek, everyone knowing what everyone else was doing. She felt brave, that afternoon to be out at all – everyone seemed to know that she was the one who should have been in charge of Andrew and his social life the night before. She hadn’t dared, alone, go to the village shop for the newspaper, but had cravenly sent Harriet instead. Harriet had reported back that the man in the shop had said, ‘I bet your Mum’s in for a busy day.’

  If it was this bad in summer, when the village population was so diluted by trippers, imagine, she thought, what it must be like in winter, nothing but gossip. Strange how much more private one could be, living in over-populated suburbia. If Jack really didn’t go back to the Poly and they sold the Cornish house, the only thing she’d miss about summers would be Eliot and the opportunity for a good deal of lustful fantasy. Guiltily, she abandoned the idea of being alone with the cottage, and offered up a quick prayer for the safe return of Jack and Miranda from Truro.

  Clare sat under the pear tree, with her back to the creek and the rest of the village so she couldn’t see if she was being stared at. Virtuously, she knitted multicoloured bobbles to sew on a sweater, trying to keep her fingers in the shade as she worked, so they wouldn’t get sticky and hot and ruin the silk. She felt she ought to give some serious thought to Jack and his work problems, rather than to thinking how good an opportunity it would be for Eliot to be making an inpromptu visit. Today she didn’t want him, her hands still reeked of disinfectant (as did Celia’s entire house), and she didn’t feel that Eau de Domestos was at all a seductive scent.

  Clare knew quite well that Jack also knew quite well that selling the cottage would not generate anywhere near enough money for them to live on. She would have to get a job, though what as she couldn’t imagine. Expanding the knitwear business would take investment and a college course, neither of which they would now be able to afford. It rather looked as if, in order for Jack to give up working at a job that no longer interested him, Clare would have to start working at one which did not particularly interest her. She thought about all the job ads that she read so casually over late breakfasts after the school runs. She felt she was too old now to go out as a perky temporary typist. She would no longer be able to understand the jargon. Clare had learned, at evening classes, secretarial skills in the days when an IBM Golfball was the last word in typewriter technology, and when a man would come round to the office to show the secretaries how to do photo-copier maintenance. Now the ads were all about WordPerfect and Windows and spreadsheets and databases. If Clare had to absorb a mass of unfamiliar technology (and why not? She could programme the washing machine), she would rather it was connected with the problems of wool tension and machine intarsia.

  In truth, the working-world out there frightened Clare. She was terrified of hyper-efficient women in expensive suits and no-nonsense shoes. She didn’t want to be something in ‘recruitment’, which she always associated with joining the Brownies, running the world’s industries in lycra tights and high heels. She didn’t see there could possibly be anything more desirable in business travel and expense account lunches than in driving her own children and their friends to the park for a sandwich, a can of coke and an afternoon of playing on the swings.

  Clare knew she was an anachronism. She enjoyed and valued the job she had, a home-maker, a mother. She didn’t really care whether it was fashionable or not, what she wanted most of all was not to have to give it up. If Jack was at home painting all day, he would soon get to the point of saying,. ‘I’ll be able to do all those boring domestic things in the house, then you’ll be free to go out to work’, as if it was what she had been waiting for all those years.

  Running alongside her other middle-aged, middle-class problem of fancying someone else’s husband and wishing she was up to what she imagined her daughter was up to was a problem that Clare had thought only affected other people. She’d had friends with School Gate Syndrome. She’d seen that look of sorrowful loss on the day the last small child in a family runs for the first time through the gate of the local primary school. She’d seen redundant mothers, devastated by the newly-silent and e
mpty house, immediately planning another accidental pregnancy. Clare now knew how they felt.

  Jack had said firmly that mothers like that were lazy sods who just didn’t want to rejoin the workforce, thereby at a stroke cancelling out all his dinner-party lip-service to feminism, where he supported the view that bringing up a family was as hard work as being a nurse on a double shift. Clare thought such opinions in the company of pretty women were Jack’s version of flirtation. She took his private opinion to mean that definitely he didn’t want her to have another baby, and just now sitting knitting in the sun Clare thought that the odds against her getting away with pretending her coil had dropped out unnoticed were pretty bad. Perhaps if Miranda had a child, she thought, as if such a thing could not really happen, how else could she contemplate the idea, she could look after it for her. She put the appalling notion firmly out of her mind and touched wood quickly for Miranda. What a thing to wish on anyone, especially her own daughter, on the verge of A-levels and UCCA forms.

  Down in the creek below the garden, Amy and Harriet were grubbing about among the pebbles and rock pools, showing off to the current collection of visiting children. They’d need a good hosing down when they got back, Clare thought, to hell with any hose pipe ban, surely it doesn’t apply to the cleaning of children, any more than it had that morning applied to the essential cleaning of the Osbourne’s garden.

  Amy had said that morning that the river smelt of poo, and Clare hoped that what they were so covered in was really all mud. If it wasn’t, that would be another reason for selling the cottage. One way or another, it looked rather as if this was going to be their last summer in the village.

  There were about ten children playing together. Clare’s two bossed the others around, glorying in their superior status as residents, the fastest and most skilful catchers of the crabs and prawns. Hers were also the scruffiest, their hair bleached fair by the sun and overlaid with a greeny-blonde colouring from the chemicals in the Lynchs’ pool. What must it be doing to their insides, Clare thought, perhaps they were all greeny-yellow and pickled too. All the local children, according to Jeannie, had gone off to Greece or Spain with their families. Anywhere, presumably to get away from this influx of tourists in the village. Those who weren’t making money out of trippers did all they could to avoid them, leaving children like Amy and Harriet lording it over the village. They could now run around barefoot like the real locals, without wincing over the stones. Every week brought a new set of children in pastel-coloured jelly shoes to be sneered at.

  Eliot, in his smoke-filled study, sat in front of his word processor with nothing but good intentions inside his head. When he was younger and keener he had got up at 5.30 every morning and written a thousand words before breakfast. Now he was lucky to write ten. He challenged the complex equipment in front of him: if you’re so clever why can’t you write the damned book for me? He had to think harder about using the technology than he had ever before had to think about writing his books. If he hadn’t spent all that money on the thing, he’d happily have gone back to the old Olivetti portable he had used before fame and fortune had complicated his life. He didn’t trust the glow from the machine either. He kept wondering if it was sending out a malevolent dose of cancerous radiation to him as he tried to work. Perhaps the faster he wrote the book, the less radiation he would get. He’d live longer. His main problem, right now though, was lack of inspiration, lack of interest and worst of all, lack of time.

  Eliot was getting too old to write about these fast fit young people. He had to invent such daring and unlikely things for them to do. They were so glamorous, powerful, slim and athletic. They were confident, capable. They were not like him. It was harder and harder even to pretend to identify with the heroes he created. Younger authors now wrote more knowledgeably about intrigue and espionage than he ever had. If he had trouble with a simple word processor, how could be be expected to keep up with the technology of the undercover spy world? And who was there to spy against any more with the cold war over? Eliot always got stomach trouble in the Middle East. And the punters weren’t slow to tell you if you’d got things wrong. His plots were getting as tired as he was. He’d lost the spark, and was exhausted by the competition. Every time be heard a book programme on the radio, or switched on a TV chat show there was some clever-clever little sod saying ‘Oh the book was easy, it just wrote itself. I sat down and finished it in less than a fortnight.’ Didn’t they have the same rewriting to do, the lunchtime battles with editors, the printing problems? Eliot’s only advantage was his track record. His fame guaranteed that his books went straight from publication to massive displays on every airport bookstall, every station, every newsagent with even the smallest bookrack, never mind the critics. And not many got sent back unsold. They’d take anything, Eliot thought with ungrateful disgust. He could have written his name 90,000 times on a length of lavatory paper and there would still be a queue for the film rights.

  But Eliot still had a nagging artistic pride that had not yet burned itself out. That was why he agonized over the word processor rather than triumphed over his royalty cheques. He considered changing his pseudonym, just to see if he was still really publishable, but he remembered acutely the pain of his first ten rejection slips and didn’t dare.

  Eliot pressed all the right buttons to save the few words he had written and then turned off the machine. One day he would probably lose the lot in the depths of a floppy disc or two, so he stopped work while he was still sober enough to remember what to do.

  He felt like some fresh air and decided it was a good moment perhaps to go and call on Clare. She was a warm, sympathetic type, the sort that people trusted with their pets and children and problems. He knew she was alone because Jessica had gone to Truro with Jack and Miranda and somehow, in Eliot’s mind, he kept seeing a tempting picture of Clare, mud-covered from rescuing Amy the other night, all rumpled frock and mud-splashed hair. There had been a furious passion in her eyes too, a hint of hidden depths which it might be fun to plumb. Eliot whistled an Irish tune as he wandered into the kitchen and took a bottle of champagne from the fridge. Liz, coming into the kitchen, caught Eliot, bottle in hand, practising what he thought was a seductive smile and which she interpreted as a lecherous leer, and fled, slamming the door and stalking off down the path to the village.

  Eliot, humming ‘Froggy went a-courting’, set off down the same path, cheerfully waving the champagne bottle to a state of undrinkable fizz.

  Clare did not see either Liz or Eliot walking down the hill. The effort of keeping the silk from getting sticky in the heat was proving too much, so Clare went back into the cool of the kitchen to make a cup of tea. While she was filling the kettle it occurred to her that with the house empty she had the perfect opportunity to do something that she thought she would never stoop to doing. Back in Barnes, a friend who had been worried about her own daughter’s behaviour had once told Clare that she intended to read the girl’s diary. Clare, at the time, had been shocked. What an unforgiveable invasion of privacy, she had thought, how completely despicable. It was something she would never, herself, consider doing.

  But that was then, when if she wanted to find out what Miranda was up to she only had to ask, and Miranda would hang around the kitchen telling her who fancied whom, who had got drunk, who had been caught smoking on the school bus and what they all got up to at weekends on Richmond Green. Now Miranda hardly spoke at all, rowed round the harbour by herself for hours on end and generally seemed to have something untellable on her mind.

  Clare tip-toed up the stairs towards Miranda’s room, avoiding the steps that creaked as if there was someone in the house to catch her out. She stopped at the top of the stairs, nervously picking flaking paint off the newel post, hovering outside Miranda’s door. It was all very well to read Miranda’s diary, but then she would be stuck with whatever awfulness she managed to discover. Suppose Miranda was using drugs? Suppose she was sleeping with six different boys in rotation? How c
ould she say anything to Miranda without betraying how she had found out the truth?

  She pushed the door open and breathed in the soft perfume of Miranda’s belongings, the mixture of Body Shop potions, roses from the garden. Clothes and books were scattered around and Miranda hadn’t made her bed. The diary was sticking out from under the pillow, and Clare hardly dared touch it. Suppose Miranda had left it at a particular angle and would know if anyone touched it? The diary, a girlish, too young Flower Fairy one, was tied up with pink ribbon. Clare looked behind her and then quickly untied it. She didn’t want to read anything irrelevant to what was making Miranda so moody, but didn’t know where to start. Her hands shook as she flicked through the pages, which were covered with Miranda’s bold handwriting. Clare didn’t read, exactly, but absorbed an impression of lots of capital letters and exclamation marks. She found out nothing because she couldn’t bring herself to stop and concentrate on anyone of the pages, until the end of June – here the pages for the last week of June were missing, and nothing had been written in since. She’s torn the pages, out, Clare thought, she doesn’t trust me!

  ‘Anyone home?’ Clare, fingers fumbling, retied the diary and shoved it back at the remembered angle under Miranda’s pillow. Liz was down by the back door, her voice trilling up the stairs. ‘Are you, there, Clare? I’ve come to see you!’ she called, as if she had brought herself as a gift.

  Clare almost fell down the stairs in her haste to get away from the scene of her guilt.

  ‘Your kettle’s boiling,’ Liz said, ‘So I knew you must be here. Eliot is in a peculiar mood so I thought I’d escape for a while. The twins are down in the creek playing with your two.’

  ‘What’s wrong with Eliot?’ Clare asked, trying not to show an undue interest.

  ‘Well this morning he complained about writer’s block, or whatever it is. Anyway he said he couldn’t write, it was too hot. But when I went and asked him if he wanted to come out for a walk, take that disgusting dog somewhere, he told me to sod off and not interrupt. Just now I saw him getting a bottle of plonk out of the fridge so I decided to get out of his way.’