Just For the Summer

by Judy Astley

  ‘Just a small suspicion, just the odd hint,’ Jack said. ‘When we live down here you can have as many as you like, a whole tribe of them. But I can’t face any more in London, that’s the deal.’

  He sat back in his chair and folded his arms defiantly. If he’d made his point, Clare wasn’t quite sure what it was. Could he not face any more children in London, or simply life in London?

  ‘We’ll talk about this at home,’ she hissed. ‘You’ve obviously given a lot more thought to being “spontaneous” than I have.’

  ‘Could we have the bill please?’ Archie’s crisp voice cut through the silence. ‘I think it’s time to go, don’t you agree?’

  In the kitchen the waitress told the rest of the staff that some of those dreadful people from up-country might be descending on the village to live there full time. No-one was exactly thrilled, even by the prospect of one less empty cottage in winter. The village shop would be full of organic milk and mineral water. Full or part-time, these people changed everything they touched. They all wanted free-range eggs, as long as they didn’t have bits of feather (or worse) stuck to them, and organic veg. But who had ever seen them buy any of the local apples in the shop that had even the tiniest bruise? Or mushrooms with real earth on them?

  ‘Do you think they really will come and live here?’ Liz and Eliot later in their bedroom as she peeled off her stockings. Eliot looked at her and wondered when it was that she’d stopped leaving the taking-off of the stockings till last, as she had done when he had first met her and he had been committing delicious lunchtime adultery with her. Liz’s mother had told her that tights were common and would give her nasty infections. It wasn’t her fault that men always thought stockings were just for erotic impact.

  ‘I don’t suppose so, people rarely do,’ Eliot said, ‘But they’d fit in better than the rest of us, with all the other old hippies in the area. And Cornwall is full of artists, always has been.’

  Liz said, ‘I think Clare would go completely crazy down here. She’d still have to do all those things that she’s always done with the children, dancing lessons, parties, concerts, school visits, all that, but everything would take twice as long to get to. You have to drive miles to anything round here. Though I suppose they could go to boarding school.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Eliot, who remembered harder times. ‘Think of the money. Anyway those children are Clare’s career, if she sent them away what would she do?’

  ‘Well she can always have another,’ Liz said, as if it was as easy as buying a kitten. ‘Like Jack said.’ Liz and Eliot were circling each other, preparing for bed. How awfully clean she is, he thought. She’d put moisturiser on her face and neck, gel on her eyes, cream on her hands. It seemed to be a night when sex would be allowed, he noted with depression, for she’d sprayed the perfume that used to be his favourite down the front of her silk nightdress. Oh for the days when he had rolled in the back of a Ford Anglia with Brenda-the-bike from Dungannon, a woman who smelled of sweat and cigarettes and lust, not the entire sterile perfume counter at Harrods.

  ‘Well we could couldn’t we?’ Jack was saying, trying hard to revive the discussion of his precious plans for their future in the face of Clare’s bewildered silence. ‘I mean it doesn’t matter where we live, I can paint anywhere and you can have babies anywhere. Except in London.’

  ‘I’m not having a baby, Jack, I don’t know where you got that idea from. And how could you, springing all this on me in public. You’re such a coward.’

  They were outside the cottage now, both drunk enough not to care that their rising voices were causing windows to open (such a warm night) and curtains to twitch all over the village.

  ‘You are pregnant aren’t you?’ Jack shouted. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? That’s what I call cowardly, not to mention sneaky, I found that pregnancy test kit in the bin, don’t tell me you didn’t put it there.’

  ‘Yes I put it there. I found it in the road. God knows whose it is, could be anyone in the village. Good grief, Jack do you really think I need a chemical kit to tell me if I’m pregnant?’

  Miranda, upstairs and listening, cowered under her duvet. If a non-existent baby could cause so much argument, how much more trouble would hers have caused?

  EIGHTEEN

  IN THE MORNING Clare and Jack were woken from their disgruntled sleep by a man from the village who wanted to attach one end of the regatta flags to their big cherry tree and string them across the creek. While Jack was dropping noisy Alka Selzer into two glasses of orange juice there was another head-shattering knock at the door and Miranda’s exam results were delivered by the woman from the post office, all hostility to the family overcome shamelessly by curiosity. She hung around on the doorstep, commenting on the weather, hoping that Miranda would open the envelope there and then and make her visit worthwhile. But Miranda rushed off to her bedroom, only emerging when she knew that she was to be congratulated, not cross-examined. She had passed all nine, with grades A or B.

  ‘Not that anyone fails anything, not any more, not like O-levels,’ Jack complained grumpily. Miranda didn’t care, she’d got good results, and everyone knew that they used your GCSE results as a basis for university offers. She’d done well, she wasn’t pregnant. It must be karma for all that worry. She felt that being rather spiritual might suit her.

  Miranda allowed her family to congratulate her and hoped she would be rewarded, perhaps financially for her hard work.

  ‘We knew you could do it,’ Clare said, thrilled. ‘You worked so hard.’

  ‘Well you gave me a lot of help, you did almost as much revision as me,‘ Miranda said laughing.

  ‘I got a bike for passing my 11-plus,’ Jack said, hugging her. ‘Perhaps we ought to get you something, for doing so well. What do you need?’

  ‘Well actually, I need a bike! I’d really love a mountain bike.’

  ‘Is that wise, in London?’ Clare asked, ‘You hardly need one for pottering about in Richmond Park, and bikes are always being stolen.’

  But Miranda had heard what she had heard from her window the night before, and said, ‘Yes but in the country there is further to cycle, and things don’t get stolen so much do they?’

  One vote for Jack, Clare thought, as Miranda tactfully went back upstairs to get dressed, smiling slyly back at her mother.

  Jessica’s results, all grade A, were faxed from Eliot’s secretary in London and Jessica was making a list over breakfast of expensive well-done presents she wanted Eliot to buy her.

  ‘I want to go back to London,’ she told Milo. ‘I need to go shopping.’

  ‘No-one needs to go shopping,’ Milo said. ‘But I know what you mean. Still there’s not much time to go now and you know you always cry when it actually comes to leaving.’

  ‘Not this time,’ Jessica said decisively. ‘I think I might have outgrown it. You know, been there, done that. One can only do so much water-skiing.’

  Andrew had been telephoned by both Miranda and Jessica and had done his bit with the congratulations. He had then rushed to the post office, but there was nothing there for him and he had to resort to telephoning the school and asking the secretary who was clearly sick and tired of having to give the good and bad news to pupils with unreliable postmen.

  Andrew thought he’d done rather better than expected, but Archie of course thought he’d done rather worse. Somehow the secretly-cherished plan of Andrew following him into the legal profession was beginning to make less than good sense.

  ‘Perhaps he could be an estate agent,’ Celia suggested. ‘That’s what thick boys of good family do these days isn’t it?’

  ‘He’s not thick,’ Archie protested, over coffee in the garden. ‘Just doesn’t apply himself.’

  ‘You used to say he was a late developer,’ she reminded him. ‘But then he didn’t develop. Now you’re saying he’s lazy. I think the time has come to admit that intellectually he’s willing but mediocre, and stop pushing him into something he can’t
do. Perhaps he could do something with his hands,’ she concluded, a little desperately.

  ‘He hasn’t done anything with his hands since he made those balsa wood aeroplanes when he was twelve,’ Archie said. ‘We should let him take a couple of A-levels and decide after that.’

  ‘He won’t pass those either,’ Celia said. ‘They’re much harder than GCSEs and you heard what Jack said last night. If he was a girl it would have to be a secretarial course.’

  ‘Well what’s the equivalent, for a boy?’ Archie asked. ‘Language courses, the city, selling upmarket cars in Kensington. I don’t know. I’m at a loss. Perhaps he could have just one more year at school and then we’ll see. I don’t know if they let them retake things they’ve retaken already.’

  Andrew, who had been in the bathroom, was now listening to his parents from the window above them. He didn’t feel ready yet to take a place in the grown-up working world, and decided it was now as important to impress his parents as it was to impress Jessica. He went into his bedroom to take another look at the regatta programme.

  The regatta traditionally marked the end of the tourist season in the village. Flags went up all over the village in a determined revival of the holiday spirit. After the August Bank Holiday, the little roads were less crowded, all the Dutch and French, who didn’t understand that you could only drive one car at a time down the hill, had gone home. You could drive as far as the shop without there being a line of cars backed into the creek out of the way. Most visitors with school-age children had gone home to re-equip them with winter shoes and new school uniforms. The second-homers rushed into Truro for shoes and phoned friends at home for new school blazers and sports kit, crossing their fingers that they would fit.

  In the village the hanging baskets were well past their best, bright blue lobelia still putting on a brave face but at the end of brown and shrivelled stems. Little heaps of dying flower heads dropped on to customers’ heads at the Mariners and into drinks along with the sleepy wasps. No-one was bothering any more to dead-head the geraniums. At the sailing club they had stopped serving lunches on the balcony, because the wind had gone round, and they were allowing the fishermen to drink in the bar again.

  The parched lawns of the bungalows on the hill showed the sad effects of the hose pipe ban. Just one lawn, a pristine billiard table green, invited accusations of cheating.

  ‘No-one could have carried that much bathwater, not at their age,’ Celia said. ‘They must have Watered in the Night.’

  Jack argued charitably that they’d probably siphoned it out of the window and wondered what odds anyone would give on the possibility of his being in the village in winter to hear the truth, for this was the real stuff of village feuds, especially if the owner of the perfect lawn also happened to have the best onions in the produce show.

  Eliot who had actually been sneaking out after dark to keep his swimming pool illicitly topped up, had now allowed the water to drop almost to the level of the filter, beyond which no more swimming would be allowed anyway. But as Liz pointed out, there was beginning to be a chill little wind in the late afternoon, just enough to stop you wanting to get in the pool in the first place, because when you came out again you’d shiver. How sultry it would be just now in the Caribbean, she hinted heavily.

  On the way to the regatta, Jack, emboldened by Miranda’s obvious ‘yes’ vote for leaving London, made Clare go with him for a triumphant viewing at the craft centre.

  ‘I just want you to see how much stuff I’ve sold,’ he said. ‘More than I ever did when I was doing that abstract stuff. Just come and look.’

  Clare went into the gallery, noticing first that the beige knitted bikini was still hanging where she had last seen it.

  Ahead of her was an entire wall of Jack’s water colours, his version of summer produce. He had painted fast and with a skilful flourish she had never seen in his work before. For water colours they looked strong, none of that insubstantial dithery wash that most painters of rural scenes seem to manage.

  ‘These are good, Jack,’ she said, admiring both the paintings and the ‘sold’ stickers. ‘I didn’t really get a good look at them when you were actually painting them.’

  ‘No, well, I wanted to get them hung and sold as fast as possible, I thought it would be the only way to impress you that I was really serious about moving out of town. I needed to show you I could do this.’

  ‘I never believed you couldn’t do it,’ Clare said, sighing. ‘What I can’t believe is that I can live here, permanently, full-time in this village. We just don’t fit.’

  Jack’s face looked sad, almost defeated, but he wanted one last shot.

  Well keep thinking about it Clare, I’m sure we could extend the cottage a bit, think hard and try to meet me at least halfway on this.’

  It always drizzled on the day of the regatta, as if to make sure that the participants got wet all over, not just feet and bottoms, from sitting in damp boats. Clare and Jack, in a state of pensive truce walked together from the Craft Centre down through the village, early enough to get seats outside the Mariners and also to be able to get to the bar for a drink. In the pecking order at the bar, second-home-owners like Jack and Archie were served last of all and their women hardly ever.

  Clare wanted to be in time to watch the children’s fancy dress because Amy and Harriet were in it. This year Jessica and Miranda had dressed them as Antony and Cleopatra, hastily cobbling together costumes from old sheets, cardboard and bin liners. They had spent the morning putting it all together in Miranda’s bedroom and Clare had heard them all shrieking with giggles at each other – a sound from Miranda that she’d been missing all summer, a sound that told her Miranda had nothing more sinister on her mind than where to find enough safety pins for Amy’s headdress.

  The two little girls looked, Clare thought, rather magnificent, considering the scarcity of good raw materials, although Harriet’s laurel wreath should perhaps not have been made with variegated leaves – she looked as a result, more Romford than Roman. There was a good turnout on the shore, perhaps fifteen children, mostly a drizzle-sodden mess of damp crepe paper as the fairies and pirates disintegrated in the drizzle. Clare had primed her children not to expect to win, not this year, or possibly any other year, memories being rather long in the village. Beryl from the pub was one of the judges and had been inclined to give them a prize, but she was overruled by the Commodore of the sailing club who felt that lack of virtue and moral fibre did not deserve reward and gave the prize to a smug little holiday-maker dressed rather disgustingly as Mae West.

  On the terrace outside the pub, Celia came to sit with Clare and Jack.

  ‘Your two looked lovely. I think they should have won.’

  ‘Not much chance this year,’ Jack said. ‘They are convicted thieves, or as good as, they might as well be branded.’

  ‘Letting them win would have been a sign they had been forgiven,’ Clare said. ‘And that won’t be for some time yet I fear.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Jack pointed out, ‘the little Mae West was a splendid effort.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Celia retorted. ‘The child looked like a tart. I do hope she won’t be allowed to walk around the village like that all afternoon. Goodness knows what could happen to her. Men in Cars, you know.’

  Archie came up with a couple of bottles of wine.

  ‘I got these from the pub, they had to search the cellars but it’s quite drinkable stuff. Didn’t want to have to keep popping back to the bar, never get served in that crush.’

  ‘Aren’t you racing?’ Clare asked him. ‘Don’t you need to conserve your strength or stay sober or something?’

  ‘It’s not like being a racing driver,’ Archie said. ‘A bit of lubrication might loosen the right muscles. Just a little something to keep warm out there.’

  Celia leaned across to Clare and whispered loudly, ‘He spent all last night polishing his cups. He has to hand them back to the regatta committee you know.’

  ‘Yes
I know,’ Clare said, ‘but he’ll win them all back to take home again tonight. He always does.’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Archie said, flattered at her confidence. ‘One isn’t getting any younger you know.’

  No he wasn’t, Clare thought. He could give Eliot twenty years but look at the difference in condition. Archie was still trim and firm-muscled, as well maintained as his house and garden. By all that was natural he should be the one Clare partnered in her fantasies, not Eliot. Liz arrived while Clare was thinking this.

  ‘Eliot is in the bar buying champagne, but I see we’re already well stocked up. Can I sit here?’ she asked Jack, wiping ineffectually at the damp bench with a paper tissue. She looked pink and windswept, but cosy in a cream cashmere sweater that must have arrived, Clare thought, via the same secretary who had conveniently taken away the case full of summer clothes.

  ‘Let me do that for you,’ Jack said, dabbing at the bench with the edge of Harriet’s discarded costume.

  ‘Oh thank you Jack darling, you’re so kind.’ Clare looked away as Liz sat down, queen-like, next to Jack and patted his leg in appreciation, much as one might pat a spaniel who had retrieved a ball.

  The children’s races were first, which Clare thought rather a mistake because it meant they spent the rest of the afternoon whining, demanding sweets and crisps and getting in the way in their little dinghies when the serious rowing and sailing took place. It was too long a gap with nothing for them to do but get into trouble and fall in the river. Someone always did and had to be hauled out like a puppy. Swimming races had been abandoned, through reasons which involved blue algae, pollution, jellyfish, or a shark once seen off the point, it depended who you spoke to. So children spent the afternoon rowing each other round the creek in hire boats and yacht tenders, straying on to the course and being shouted at by the Commodore on the committee boat.

  Eliot arrived with his champagne in time to see Harriet winning the under-tens rowing. He cheered loudly and shouted ‘That’s right, you show the bastards Harry!’